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Buried underneath all the nagging “shoulds” of your search for love lie your Guiding Insights: messages from your deepest self that have the power to change your life and lead you to healthy love. How can you find these amazing insights? And what do you do with them when they come? Join us to find out.

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Discover Personal Guiding Insights: Rocket Fuel For Your Search For Love

Single on Valentine's Day

Did you ever get an insight that was positive and important, and you didn’t even know where it came from, but it guided your life and it opened a door for you? These are guiding insights and they are our personal GPS to a life full of love and meaning. Stay tuned to this episode to learn how to cultivate these insights and what to do when you get them.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a Psychotherapist, the author of the best-selling book, Deeper Dating®, and the co-founder of deeperdating.com®, an online environment where single people can meet in ways that are inspiring, safe, warm and kind. Today, I’m going to be speaking about how to discover your guiding insights, one of the most beautiful keys possible in this wiser search for love, and in every episode of the podcast, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the skills of love, the greatest skills of all for a happy life.

If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating® path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and if you sign up for my mailing list, you will get free gifts, and you will learn so much more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. Also, everything that I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Those reviews are gold. They mean the world to me. They help other people get introduced to the show, so that’s something I would really appreciate and let’s jump in.

This episode is a part two, and you don’t have to have listened to the first episode to enjoy this one, but if you do, it will be a much richer experience. In the last episode, I taught you three different practices that bring wisdom and meaning, and joy and fun, and the deepest skills of intimacy to your search for love. In this episode, I’m going to talk about what happens after you do those practices in some kind of a regular way. You are going to get whispers of wisdom that I call guiding insights, and those are going to be your kind of personalized GPS and instructions to the love that you’re looking for and the life that you’re looking for.

DDP 128 | Personal Guiding Insights

Personal Guiding Insights: Buried in all of the nagging “shoulds” of self-improvement land lie your guiding insights. They are messages from your deepest self that have the power to change your life.

 

They are your wisdom lessons, and so today in this episode, I’m going to talk about what to do with those kinds of whispers of insight that you get through doing practices like the ones I described in the last episode, or through just living consciously, or just through being open to growing and learning. This is one that is really, really close to my heart, and guiding insights have changed my life. They have led me to my husband. They led me to the relationship that I was in before that, and they’ve led me to lots of different places. I think that they’re like a bit of magic and a bit of wisdom that really turn our lives and our intimacy journeys into a kind of very amazing adventure.

I know this all sounds so positive, but it is. This part really, really is. I’m going to talk about the guiding insights that come in the three practices, by the way, that I talked about in the last episode, where one, asking your higher power or the universe for help, wisdom and guidance. The other practice was kind of calling out, like the fact that somewhere your partner is right now, and is looking for someone like you, and at this kind of spiritual practice of like kind of calling them, which is very, very evocative and moving and poignant and I think powerful.

The third is kind of this like universal medium practice, which is the inner mentor practice, where you kind of tune into the person you’re meant to be and you get guidance. It’s a really fabulous process. I speak about that a lot in episode 3 of the podcast, but go back to the last episode if you like and listen to it to learn these practices, but again, you can listen to this one first and then come back to it.

What are these guiding insights? They are like marching orders from our deepest self. Click To Tweet

What Are Guiding Insights?

Buried in all of the nagging shoulds of self-improvement land lie your guiding insights, the messages from your deepest self that actually have the power to change your life. What are these guiding insights? They’re like marching orders from our deepest self. You know you’re getting a guiding insight because it just has a feeling of truth. It compels you.

Maybe it calls you when your guard is down like waking up at 3:00 in the morning to some kind of stark insight about your life, or listening to a piece of music, or feeling a rush of love or some kind of really intense sense of connection to someone really important in your life, or maybe subtler whispers that send you in a particular direction, or show you something new and open a door, open a Vista, open your heart.

As you do these practices and as you spend more time learning to date from your heart and your soul, and looking for soul mates in that process, you can expect to be visited by these kind of amazing allies, so guiding insights hit you where you live. Do you remember having kind of insights like that that hit you with a bang and led you in a direction that was positive, that had a quality of positive revelation even if it was hard?

Vito Russo said this great, great line. He said, “The truth will set you free but first, it can make you miserable,” and those could be guiding insights too. They challenge you or they soothe you, but they touch your heart and you know they matter, and they may make your heartache, and that ache is a sign of a guiding insight often. They may feel like liberation or like a comforting caress, or they may scare the hell out of you, but if they don’t have a really deep sense of resonance for you, they are not guiding insights, no matter how practical they are.

DDP 128 | Personal Guiding Insights

Personal Guiding Insights: Just love the message even if you can’t do it, even if you’re too blocked, clumsy, unskilled, or not ready. The act of loving the message subtly transforms us.

 

Something that I wrote in my book, I wrote, “Guiding insights won’t tell you your future mate’s home address unless you’re super, super lucky or psychic, and they may even feel unrelated to your dating life, but they mysteriously lead you toward love, and your job is to invite them and welcome them when they arrive and respect them by acting on, or if not acting on, at least loving the messages that they send you.”

The way I think of the kind of the wiser search for love is more like a treasure hunt, like you don’t end up getting told exactly where the treasure is, you get told that you have to walk three blocks down and look under a mailbox, and then you like pull out that note and it tells you something else. I think the search for love and these guiding insights are like that. You get glimpses of a possibility or maybe you feel like a sense of love or your heart softening, or there’s a new understanding of something you did that you were pushing love away and you didn’t even know it, or that there’s someone really special who you were kind of not thinking about or not noticing, that they’re so personal and they’re so individual, but you follow that glimpse, and that glimpse leads you somewhere better, and that leads you to the next glimpse.

How Guiding Insights Manifest

That is how your search for love becomes a wisdom journey where you’re like entering new lands, which are dimensions of greater insight about your intimate life. Sometimes these insights feel like somebody grabbing you by the shirt and pulling you, and sometimes they feel like very quiet whispers. Sometimes they feel like getting smacked upside the head. Sometimes they feel like an incredible invitation, but I would like you to just take a moment now and think, have there been times in your relationship history where a door to your heart opened up, a door to greater wisdom opened up? Take a minute and think about that.

The guiding insights are often like whispers, and we have to listen and learn to honor them. Click To Tweet

I will just share from my own personal life and example of like kind of more of a whisper guiding insight, and one that was more like kind of being grabbed and pulled. The whisper one happened at a time in my life where there was someone I loved a lot who was going through really, really hard times with addiction, and I was doing lots of different things to try to help and to support and to guide, and to encourage and to control, and to manipulate all these different things. I went to many twelve-step meetings, but one guiding insight that I remember was hearing something where they said, “We’ve realized that the way that we can really help someone we love who’s struggling like that is not through what we’re doing, but who we’re being.”

That was a guiding insight for me. That hit me with a bang. That opened a space where I was hitting up against a wall again and again, and that shifted to an open space in my heart. That’s a kind of guiding insight experience. Does anything come to mind for you that was like a guiding insight whisper? You could pause and take a minute to think about this. Here’s one that I have told before, but it was how I finally hooked my husband, and I’m kind of joking when I say that and kind of not. I was at the Provincetown Gay Family week, and the very first day, I met Greg and I instantly was attracted to him. He was a dad too.

He seemed like a very wonderful kind guy, and so I was really, really, really interested, but he was very focused on his kids and helping his kids because he had just come out, and he had been in a marriage for many years, so it was very complicated for the kids and this was a very important time for him to kind of like introduce his kids to this new world, so he was like not focused on me and not looking for a relationship at all, and I was. I definitely was.

I tried to make a date with him. We had a wonderful conversation and he blew me off, and he didn’t blow me off because he’s a blow-off kind of person, but he was really focused on his kids, and then that happened a second time. At that point, you know, I was just being very mature and wise, and I said, “Okay, he’s not interested. If he was interested, then I would have gotten some kind of response back.”

DDP 128 | Personal Guiding Insights

Personal Guiding Insights: The issue isn’t that we’re not being called; it’s that we prefer to ignore the call.

 

I went to sleep that night and I woke up, bolt upright at about 3:00 in the morning with this guiding insight that hit me and it was, “If you don’t really work at this, you are going to lose him and you’re going to lose this opportunity.” It was like bang. It literally woke me up. Now that is a very rare kind of guiding insight, but I will tell you one thing, as you do practices like these, and as you tune yourself to look for guiding insights, you will find them more and more and every now and then, they will be powerful, powerful, powerful. This is really what makes your search for love yours, is these guiding insights because they have your fingerprint. They have your heart print. They have your blueprint. They have your life story embedded in them and they’re gold, and these practices allow you to get these guiding insights.

Really, the more you do them, the more you’d get attuned to them. The more you respect them when they come and listen to them and go, “This is kind of the next step in my treasure hunt. I’m going to do it.” The more you do that, the more they pay you back, so I listened to that guiding insight and I woke up the next morning and created this entire ruse where my son and I happened to be sitting on the steps of where Greg and his girls arrived, and I kind of set that up like it looked like an accident and it still didn’t work.

Cultivating Your Guiding Insights

The next day he called me up and he said, “I got a break. I got a break. You want to go to the beach?” That was the beginning, so the preciousness of that guiding insight, I mean, changed the entire course of my life. I’d like you to take a minute now. Did you ever get a big bang guiding insight? Don’t worry if you haven’t but if you have, take a minute to think about that. You cultivate your guiding insights. You treasure your guiding insights. They’re your guiding insights, and you act on those guiding insights.

What do you do when you kind of can’t act on a guiding insight either because it’s too big or it’s too scary, or it envisions a you that you don’t feel ready for or worthy of or whatever? Whatever the different reasons that you don’t quite feel up to it. What do you do with that guiding insight? A few things. One, you try anyway. Two, and this is huge, huge, huge, you tell a friend or a learning partner so that they can remember it as your historian and remind you when there’s an opportunity to live that, that that was a guiding insight of yours. Three, you just love the message even if you can’t do it. Even if you’re kind of too blocked or clumsy or unskilled or not ready, love the message.

The more you follow your guiding insights, the more attractive you'll become to the kind of person you're really looking for. Click To Tweet

The act of loving the message subtly transforms us. It’s almost as if something happens where the essence of the message enters into us even though we don’t have the tools to live that yet. Remember though that guiding insights are often like whispers, and we have to listen for the whispers and learn to honor them. That’s a really beautiful skill, so when you feel a calling to having a wider heart or being more brave and it doesn’t feel like a should, it feels like a pull, that’s a guiding insight. Treasure it because it’s pulling you toward where you possibly can go. It’s pulling you toward who you’re meant to be.

In closing, I’m just going to read a little piece about guiding insights from the book Deeper Dating®, “As you follow your guiding insights, your life will unfold in surprising ways. If you act on these insights, you will become more creative. You will have less tolerance for relationships of deprivation, and you will become more attracted to relationships of inspiration. You will become a better friend to yourself and your loved ones. These are not empty promises and this is no secret formula. Our hearts are whispering to us, sometimes shouting to us all the time. The issue isn’t that we’re not being called. It’s that we prefer to ignore the call.”

Here’s an amazing bonus. The more you follow your guiding insights, the more attractive you will become to the kind of person you’re really looking for. The more you follow the calls of your heart, the more you will find that the kind of person you date will actually begin to change, so good luck on your wonderful adventure of your practices and following your guiding insights, and I look forward to connecting with you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.

 

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