This short practice is a powerful, life-enhancing tool for finding love. It liberates waves of buried passion, and then uses that passion to change the course of your intimacy life. There’s no rigid recipe to follow. All you need is your longing for love, and 5-10 minutes a day. You can learn it in this episode.

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Episode Table of Contents

• The Meditator Medicator
• The Powerful and Exquisite Beauty of Longing
• Initiating the Process
• The Search for the Magic Bullet
• The Stirring Within

A Practice That Can Lead You to Love

Five to ten minutes a day to make you a deeper, wiser person, to widen and expand your heart, and to call deeper love into your life. This ancient practice is short, contemplative, and one of the fiercest agents of change that I know, and you can learn it right now on the Deeper Dating podcast. So, stay tuned. Hello, and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page, and today I’m going to share one of the ancient practices that is the absolute closest to my heart for helping people truly transform and rewire their entire approach to intimacy and love. Every week, I’m going to bring you access to the greatest insights and the most powerful ancient practices I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life.

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By the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful thank you if you left a review on iTunes. And thank you to all the people who’ve left amazing reviews for me. I truly appreciate it. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical, psychiatric, or psychological advice or treatment. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please seek professional help. Before we jump in, if you’re interested in learning more about this work and taking it and applying it to your intimacy journey, please go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and join my mailing list, and you’ll get tons of free resources and lots of information, as well as weekly getting my new podcast episode. Okay, so let’s jump in.

The Meditator Medicator

This short, practice is a powerful life-enhancing tool for finding love. It liberates waves of buried passion, and then it uses that passion to change the course of your intimacy life. There’s no rigid recipe to follow. All you need is your longing for love and 5 to 10 minutes a day. Even if your focus is terrible, like mine, it still works if you put your heart into it. You can also use this practice to support you in achieving any heartfelt life goal at all. It’s a spiritual practice, but I’ll say more about that. The first thing I want to say is I’ve heard so many people say to me that they’re too restless to meditate, and I completely relate. I have been a serious meditator medicator. I completely relate, and I have been a serious meditator for about 50 years, but my mind wanders constantly. I spent a ton of my time making lists, solving problems, and rehashing grievances, and issues, and concerns. But still, my meditation life is filled with more peace, and joy, and insight than I could even imagine. And why? Because I have been meditating terribly for so many years. Spiritual practice does not need to be anywhere near pristine in order to work. It could be messy. It could be sloppy. As long as there are moments where you put your heart into it and you keep doing it, you’re going to get the results.

The Powerful and Exquisite Beauty of Longing

I want to talk now a bit about why this ancient practice works. I’m going to talk about the power of longing. Longing has been given a terrible, terrible rap. I talk about this a lot more in my book Deeper Dating and in other podcasts. We’ve been told that longing is unhealthy, unattractive, and that we should just be fine on our own before we can find love, and I don’t buy it. I have found longing to be perhaps our greatest ally in finding and keeping love. There is no question that longing hurts, and longing for someone who’s unavailable is not a place we want to be. But, longing is a central part of our human experience. And the closer we get to our deepest feelings, the more we’re going to feel the pain of love’s absence. That’s true even if we’re married, even if we’re in relationships, even if we have kids. That experience of the pain of life’s absence is what purifies, and transforms us, and makes us choose love and choose actions that lead to greater love even when they go against our habits and our patterns. It’s that longing that’s the rocket fuel to get us out of the gravity zone of our self-centered patterns. When love is missing, our loneliness and our longing tells us it’s missing. When our life is empty, our longing tells us it’s empty. And when we learn to treasure our longing, it deepens us immensely. Our longing has the power to make us fight for what we want, including fighting against our own habits of isolation.

Revealing the Formula

In general, there’s a formula, and the formula is the depth of our longing as well as the presence of support will determine the leverage we have in changing the patterns that block us from love. When longing burns inside us, we change because we have to. To paraphrase Kafka,

“Longing is the ax that breaks the frozen sea within us.”

So before I teach you this practice, I want to say a lot of listeners may not believe in a higher power, and maybe you cringe at the thought of a spiritual practice. If you fall into that camp, I encourage you to honor your beliefs, but still make this practice your own, and you can. Instead of asking God or a higher power for help, ask for the support of your vast untapped potential.

The Art of Tapping Into Your Inner Self

None of us don’t think that there’s vast untapped potential in us, I believe. Or think about what makes you feel hopeful, strong, and loving, and use that for your inspiration. Or as in the inner mentor process, imagine the you that you are meant to be, the you that you dream of becoming, the you on the other side of all your internal glass ceilings, and focus on that as the presence that you’re asking help of. Put your heart into this process, and you will move closer to love with or without believing in any kind of deity. For those of you who do believe in a higher power or think you might believe, I encourage you to bring your most private heart to this process. If you feel that your higher power is the primal love, the source of love, then this is just the place to share your longing for partnership. You’re going to be asking for help, and asking for help is scary. It brings us to our most vulnerable place. But that’s the very place where love grows most, grows most freely, and most lushly. Let yourself enjoy the deep intimacy of asking and practicing trust.

Initiating the Process

Now I’m going to teach you this process, 5 minutes or 10 minutes towardS intimacy. Here’s how to do it. And try this. I think you’ll love it. It’s intense. It is intense, but its intensity is a measure of its power to really catalyze change. Start out by finding a place in your home where you feel safe and peaceful. Sit down in that spot with a paper and pen. Now, if you’re driving or you’re walking and you can’t do that, don’t worry about it. You could do it right here as you listened to this podcast. What I want you to do is to craft an ask that speaks of your desire for love. Maybe it would be a prayer. Maybe it wouldn’t be an ask, maybe it would be an affirmation. But what I want you to do is be really, really brave with your words, and I want you to craft an ask that really touches your heart. Find the words that could even bring a hint of tears to your eyes. Find the words that burn. Find the words that have the most truth, whatever they are. And you’re not stuck with those words forever. They could change many times, even they could change in the course of a five-minute practice, so don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about sounding wise. Don’t worry about sounding spiritual. Don’t worry about sounding polished. Even just the word help is enough.

The Universe Listens to the Words You Tell Yourself

And if there’s a prayer or an affirmation that you’ve read or heard that speaks to you, use that one. For me, the prayer that I used in this … In retrospect, thinking back, the two things that I feel help me the most to be able to find wonderful, healthy, good love and transform some really crappy patterns of dating that I had were this practice and the support of other people. Those are the two things. My prayer that I used was a prayer from Paramahansa Yogananda, who has been my spiritual teacher since I was a kid, and it goes like this. It says,

“Dear God, bless me that I choose my life companion based on your ways of perfect soul unity.”

I love that because my ways were not about perfect soul unity. They were about somebody who was hot, and also exciting, and also really interested in me. That was my way, and it didn’t work too good. Not that I didn’t want somebody who was hot, and that was hard for me because I thought, “If I go with that prayer, am I going to give up someone I’m sexually attracted to?” And absolutely not. I just chose to lead with the things that would touch me and move me the most, which were a person’s goodness and solidity, which is the whole basis now of what I teach.

You Can Summon the Love That You Long For

Here’s another story. I know somebody who went into her yard every night before bed and she looked at the sky, and she just thought about the reality that there was someone out there for her looking for someone like her. They just hadn’t met yet. I call that a reality because that is a reality. There are people out there right now who you would love and would love you, and you just haven’t found each other yet. That’s a kind of mysterious, amazing, look-at-the-stars kind of truth. Anyway, she would sing “Goodnight, My Someone” from The Music Man. She would ask this person into her life. This person is happy. She’s happily partnered now, and she really feels like that process made a difference. I have another friend. His prayer was,

“Beloved, I open my heart to you.”

That was his … And he would just picture the person waiting for him.

The Search for the Magic Bullet

If you want to use an affirmation, that’s perfect, too. Just create a sentence that feels hopeful, and believable, and moving. The way you know a prayer’s right, the way you know an affirmation is right is only one way. Well, two ways, how true it rings and how much it moves you. You got to find one that rings true and touches your heart. When you have that, you have a tool that is so powerful. You have a magic bullet. This practice might sound really simple, but just wait. Wait til you do it. Because when we ask for what we most want and we use the personal language of our yearning, we generate heat, and we generate emotion, and we generate longing, and hard things might happen. You may start to dread that you’ll never find love. That’s a normal, normal thing. Or you might start feeling like you don’t deserve your heart’s desire. Or you might just be feeling like the pain of your unmet needs for partnership, for family, and those are hard things to tolerate, and they all come up when we do this work.

The Process That Works

So why do something that hurts and is hard, even for 5 or 10 minutes? Here’s why it works. It changes our characters. It changes our behaviors. It sets forces in motion that are below your conscious mind. It will burn away your protective layers of numbness, and distractedness, and fixation on all the minor concerns that just could fill up the page for us. And it reminds you of what you care about the most. When you do this practice passionately and regularly, your whole life will shift on its axis. When you first try it, expect to do it really badly. Actually, let me give you the … Let me stop and give you the way that you do this. There’s a process, and this process comes from the ancient contemplative process of prayer that has been used forever and forever in every religion. It’s a contemplative, rich, beautiful practice. It’s simple as hell, but it’s amazing. Here’s what it is. You say the prayer, and then you just wait. Maybe you were thinking about your shopping list, so then you say the prayer again. Maybe you feel numb. You say the prayer again. You each time you try to bring your heart into it. Then, you say the prayer again, and this time you feel moved. You feel touched. You feel something stirring inside.

The Stirring Within

When that happens, you ride that wave. You let that happen as long as it happens. You let that wave pass, that wave of emotion, of feeling, of something stirring inside you. Because in those moments, a download is going into you, some kind of amazing download that is going to change your circuitry, so just let the download complete when you have those moments of being touched and moved in some way, even if you can’t put words on it. Then, just feel the ripples afterwards. Give yourself space for that. Then, say the words again. Maybe this time you’ll be thinking about someone who just annoyed you. It’s okay. Say the words again. This time, you won’t focus at all. You won’t even say the words. You’ll be like gone for three minutes. That’s fine. Come back to the words. Say them again. When you have those moments, when you have those moments of passion, when your heart takes you on a ride of something, yearning, longing, a deep stirring inside, just ride that wave and give your heart to it because it’s changing you. It’s downloading something inside of you, and those are gold. You might want to flee from this. You might check the clock every 30 seconds. Don’t worry. It’s okay. If you have, like in those 5 to 10 minutes, if you have two moments of really being connected to your heart, you’ve got gold and your world’s going to begin to change. That is the gold.

How Do You Recognize the Right Prayer

Just let this practice take on a life of its own, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, the words of your heart. Don’t do some dry prayer that you think is really nice that someone said if it doesn’t ring, like ring. And if it doesn’t touch your heart and move you, it’s not the right prayer for the moment, so you find the one that is. It’ll blow you away. This process will blow you away. You will unequivocally be connected to your deepest humanity, to your heart, to your soul. Sometimes it’s going to feel dry. Sometimes it’s going to feel forced. Expect that. But, sometimes it’s going to touch you and your longing is going to be ignited. Or maybe you’ll feel a sense of peace or hope, and just know that in those moments something truly amazing is happening that’s changing your world and is going to change your future. Then, again, when the wave passes, just go back to repeating your words and just enjoy every time your practice takes wing. Don’t worry about all the gazillion times that it won’t. This is what I want to say. I celebrate sloppy, spiritual practice. I am 1000% in favor of sloppy spiritual practice because I have been practicing my spiritual practices sloppily and badly for about half a century, and they’re glorious, and they have changed my world. Don’t worry about being pristine. Don’t worry about being anywhere near pristine. Doing this process, doing this process pretty much every day will change your world, and you’ll notice it.

Who Can You Share the Momentous Event

You will notice shifts in your being. And when you do, write to me. Go to deeperdatingpodcasts.com, and go to Ask Ken. Use the microphone, and report in what’s going on or just leave a comment somewhere describing on one of the many places where this podcast lives just describing what happens for you. This process burns, but it burns new space. And what fires together, wires together. You will be wiring a new circuitry of depth, and power, and intimacy, and humanity that’s going to change the course of your life. This is one of the sweetest but also fiercest practices I know, and you can use it for anything that matters to you. You just find the place of the deep ask, and then you craft this process and allow yourself to sit in the presence of it. Thank you all for listening. Give this a shot. Let me know how it goes, and have a wonderful week. I’ll see you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating podcast.