Today I take you on a guided journey through the four stages of Deeper Dating® and I share a process to make each of the four stages real for you. This episode is about the deeper physics of dating. In this episode, I offer up a proverbial toolbox with the most beautiful diamonds in it. You can use these jewels of wisdom along your journey to discovering your Core Gifts.

Listen in to learn the four stages of the Deeper Dating® journey, how Ken developed them, and how we can use them to discover our Core Gifts. 

If you love the Show, please Subscribe, Rate, Review and Share on Apple Podcasts, or your favorite Podcast Platform!

Show Notes:

• What are the four stages of the Deeper Dating® journey
• How did Ken develop the four stages
• Why do we sabotage ourselves in love
• How to discover your Core Gifts
• Why do we hide our Core Gifts
• What is the secret to intimacy
• How to discover your attraction patterns

The 4 Stages of Deeper Dating®:

1. Honor your Core Gifts
2. Understand your Core Gifts in a deeper, richer way
3. Getting out there
4. Rewiring your circuitry

Important Links:

• Get a copy of Deeper Dating by Ken Page
• Join the Coaching and Mentorship Intensive with Ken Page
• Connect with us on Instagram

 

 

 

I’m going to take you on a journey through the four stages of Deeper Dating®, and I’m going to give you a process for each of the stages to make it real for you. And I think that by the end of this episode, you will have experienced some real transformation in your own intimacy journey. So stay tuned to this episode of The Deeper Dating® Podcast.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page, your host, and I am a psychotherapist, a coach, the author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating, the creator of The Deeper Dating® Intensive, and somebody with a pretty sore throat. So I waited and waited to do this recording and finally decided that my dear folks are going to have to bear with me. Forgive me for the quality of my voice. It’s kind of the best it gets now, and it was really time to record. So here we are, and thank you for your patience.

 

We begin in our own way to set the world on fire when we become who we are meant to be, what the blueprint of us is, which is the living of our Core Gifts. And it's the secret you could see to so much, but it's the secret to intimacy.… Click To Tweet

 

Today, I am going to teach you the four stages of the Deeper Dating® journey, and I’m going to personally guide you through them. So you’re going to be doing exercises that will take you through each one of the steps so that you can experience the power and also the possibility inherent in this more conscious approach to your precious and important search for lasting love.

So I just want to say that if you want to learn more about this approach, you can just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. And there you can find transcripts of this and every episode. And if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll also get some very lovely free gifts and you’ll get to hear about all the different resources that I offer and that I believe in, and that I share from other people who I respect. So thank you, and let’s jump right in.

 

 

This work, these four stages of this journey, are stages that I developed when I wrote my book, Deeper Dating, wow, almost 10 years ago now. And since then, I’ve taught them to many, many, many thousands of people and they’ve been read by millions of people and listened to, and I’ve done 18 six-month intensives, taking people through these steps.

So along the way, I have learned so much about what works, about the long and the short patterns of consciously looking for love. And these four steps each have so much richness in them, so much life-changing richness, that I’m just super excited to get to share them with you.

And we’re going to go on a journey together. I’m going to take you through each one of them. So in a small way, you’ll get to experience what each of them offers to you.

 

Discovering your Core Gifts:

 

Okay, so we’re going to start at the beginning, and this is the concept of discovering your Core Gifts, which you’ve probably heard a bunch about unless you’re new to this podcast and new to my work. But even so, it’s a journey that always changes and always develops, and it’s based upon this incredible insight, which is that the parts of ourselves that we often feel the most ashamed of, the most scared to show, the least skillful in our ability to express, are actually our deepest and most profound gifts.

And the degree to which we learn to cherish and name and champion them is the degree to which we are that much more likely to find healthy, lasting love as well as self-love, as well live a lot more moments of magic and humanity in our lives.

Conversely, the degree to which we separate from these parts, we live in shame of these parts, we don’t champion their unique diverse genius, to that degree we sabotage ourselves, and we sabotage ourselves in love as well.

So that is this, what I call the deeper physics of dating, this framework that is so rich and it speaks to a hero’s journey because what it means is that we have to reclaim the most precious parts of ourselves that often the world told us wasn’t deserving, or the dating world told us wasn’t sexy and wasn’t attractive, or the creative world told us wasn’t interesting enough, or whatever it is, or these parts of us were taken advantage of or were traumatized.

 

The parts of ourselves that we often feel the most ashamed of, the most scared to show, the least skillful in our ability to express, are actually our deepest and most profound gifts, and the degree to which we learn to cherish and… Click To Tweet

 

So this is the image that I have of this, the image is, if you just picture … And actually, I’m going to back up for a second. I’m going to help you think of a Core Gift of yours right now, so you can take that image and make it real for you.

So I’d like you to take a minute and think about a part of yourself that somewhere inside you have known to be precious and vulnerable and true and authentic, that the world has not understood or has shamed or has humiliated or told you it’s embarrassing or it’s stupid or it’s too earnest or it’s too fierce.

Think of one part of you that feels like a really deep, true, inmost part of you, that the world has taught you that you probably should be a little bit ashamed of this quality, or at least not show it.

 

 

Take a minute and think about that. That part of you is one of your Core Gifts, and that is a part to be reclaimed and honored. And here’s the amazing thing, that in any aspect of your life, and particularly in this arena of intimacy that we’re talking about, the degree to which you start lifting that part of you up, de-orphaning it, treasuring it and honoring it, to that degree, your field will shift, your attractions will shift.

The people you notice will shift and the people who are attracted to you will shift. This is a miracle, and it’s a miracle that’s a hard work miracle, but it’s a true one. So I’d like you to think about what that quality is. Take a minute, you can pause the recording if you like.

 

Steps along the hero’s journey:

 

And here’s a story that I’m going to share that is a story that is a universal hero’s journey story about your Core Gift and about all of our Core Gifts. So there’s this part of us, there are probably a number of parts of us, but especially if we’re sensitive, creative, heartfelt human beings, which if you are listening to this, you probably are.

So this part of you that was a true part of you, that somehow the world taught you that you need to hide, cover, or even be ashamed of, think about what that part is. So the image is that that’s this very vulnerable part of you, vulnerable because it’s so truly you. Even if it’s fierce, it’s vulnerable because it’s so truly you. So of course you could be more hurt there by the world.

Okay, so there’s this quality and we learn that this quality is going to get us in trouble or it’s going to be misunderstood. So we build a life that in our younger minds, we think is going to work.

And it’s a life that leaves that part of us behind. Because we think, “if I’m ever going to succeed, if I’m ever going to make it in this world, that is not the path to my success, is to be living that part of me because I’ve gotten in enough trouble about it already.”

 

We cannot force our attraction patterns to change. We can't be with somebody we're not attracted to. We can't, we don't want to do that, but we can actually educate our attractions. Click To Tweet

 

So it’s like we take this precious part of ourselves and we leave it behind and we enter into the world. And we have varying degrees of success. And in fact, we do experience more success in some ways, when we dissociate from those tender and wounded parts of ourselves.

But it’s like there’s a rope that can never be broken, like a bungee cord attaching us to those parts of ourselves. We can’t sever them because they’re us. The harder we try, the more we hurt, the more empty we become. So we come to a certain point where the damn bungee cord stops stretching.

And maybe we’re successful at work, but we’re just not successful in love. Maybe we’re successful at work and we have a good relationship, but we feel really empty inside. We get stuck. The rope has stopped stretching, it’s not going to work anymore.

And then our hero’s journey, our treasured, hard, scary, glorious, glorious hero’s journey begins, and we need to go back to that part of us that we left behind, claim it, get down on our knees, and put our arms around it and say, “Baby, I’m going to listen to you. I’m finally going to listen to you. I’m going to know who you are.” When we do that, we start building a life where we become organized around the honoring and signifying, and championing of these qualities.

 

 

And if we don’t take that scary ass journey, then we never get to be whole in this way. We never get to create in the world what we want so much to be able to create in the world, including love. So this journey, this process of reclaiming this part of ourselves, means first naming it like I asked you to do a few minutes ago.

What if this part of you is one of your greatest treasures? What if it’s your genius? What if, and I believe this to be true, until you claim it, embrace it, champion it, cherish it, understand it, play with it, enjoy it, and help it build mastery in the world, until you do that, you will sabotage yourself and you will sabotage yourself in love and you will not make good choices in almost all cases.

So in our six-month intensive, we spend three months naming these parts of ourselves, learning to honor them. And as we do that, and as you do that with this part of you, you will become more and more allergic to people who step on it, miss it, don’t get it, don’t know how to honor it, and that is a fabulous thing.

And you will become more fierce about living this part of you, and you will be able to hold yourself with a great deal more tenderness, but it’s going to be this very, you know when you have two different ingredients that you get them just right in a recipe, and there’s this ah, feeling because they reach some kind of synergy.

Well, when you can do that, this deep tenderness and also this strength and this groundedness join, and you feel them both, and oh my God, is that a good, good, good feeling and a foundational feeling in your entire search for love.

So that’s the first stage. And in any of my work, from my book to my online course to my intensives, anywhere, you can learn and get exercises and processes to guide you through that. But we just did a simple one and it was great. I’m glad that we did that.

And I would encourage you to think of that part of you as your genius and imagine living a life where you are fierce about that. St. Catherine of Sienna, who was I think one of the founders of the Dominican Order, and she was a wild, wild being. She was an ecstatic, ecstatic mystic. She was a serious scholar. She was one of the highest-level diplomats of the Middle Ages all at once, and this ecstatic illumined saint. And she said, “Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.” And she set the world on fire.

And we begin in our own way to set the world on fire when we become who we are meant to be, what the blueprint of us is, which is the living of our Core Gifts. And it’s the secret you could see to so much, but it’s the secret to intimacy. It is the secret to finding healthy love, and it’s a secret to finding self-love. Okay, that is the fabulous, beautiful, beautiful stage one.

Stage two – Stage two is about attraction. And this is like a study. It’s a study. We get taught that the big thing that we have to do to find love is make ourselves more attractive. Three cheers for making ourselves more attractive. That is fun and beautiful and great and fabulous, but there’s something here that’s even deeper, which is understanding our attractions.

And we cannot force our attraction patterns to change. We can’t be with somebody we’re not attracted to. We can’t, we don’t want to do that. But we can actually educate our attractions.

And as you learn to honor your Core Gifts, watch, you will start becoming sexually and romantically attracted to people who are better for you. Of course you will, because your goal will be less and less to prove your worth and more and more to live the worth of your life, and your love and your heart.

So we become organized differently, but there’s work to be done here, and that work is to really learn what our attraction patterns are. This is something I teach in the book, and I’m going to give you an exercise right now that you can do on your own time, and we spend lots and lots of time on the intensive in this.

 

Get out there and re-wire your circuitry:

 

And here’s what it is. It’s that you make a list of all of the relationships that were what I call Attractions of Deprivation, relationships that ultimately ended up hurting you. And in this exercise, for this exercise, I would want you to fully externalize responsibility. And what I mean by that is don’t be blaming yourself.

Don’t think, well, this was me too, so I’m not going to write it down. Of course it was you too. For this exercise, you just want to write the qualities, you want to ignore the part that’s yours. Don’t worry, we will get to it. But for now, you just want to note the qualities that disappointed you and hurt you, and you list all the people who had qualities that really disappointed you and hurt you, and then you make a circle around, you start counting the similar qualities, and you look for the quality that appeared the most often, and you make a circle around every place, every person, that quality appeared around, and then you look. That is your key. That’s one of your primary patterns.

And then if you want to go ahead, you could find the second most frequent negative quality, put a triangle around that. If you want to go further, you could take the quality that was the most devastating for you, and that has appeared in a number of places. And put rays around that, like sun rays around that, so that you know that as well.

These then become gold. When we know our patterns, we’ve got gold for three reasons: one, because we can watch out for this. We can actually watch out the next time we date someone because we will find these people sexy. We will find these qualities sexy, even though they’re so toxic for many different reasons, which we won’t go into in this particular episode, but they’ll be sexy and you want to watch out for them. Okay. So that’s one reason.

The second reason is because you want to look for people with opposite qualities. This is a way that you can discover your Core Gifts, is by thinking how, maybe how do I have similar qualities, but also what parts of me are so different than those qualities? That’s another way to begin to understand our Core Gifts. So the second thing is that we begin to understand our Core Gifts in a deeper, richer way.

And the third thing is we look for people with opposite qualities, what I call attractions of inspiration. And now you can do the same exercise if you really want to get into it, where you list all of the people who had wonderful inspiring qualities, even if it didn’t work out, and you do the same thing.

You make a circle around the most frequent qualities. You could make a triangle around the second most frequent, and then definitely make the rays around the qualities that were the most inspiring, touching, and beautiful to you.

You want to look for those qualities, but combined with sobriety, stability and a general sense of consistency. No matter how beautiful those qualities are, if the person has an active addiction, if they have an unstabilized, significant psychiatric disorder, many of us have psychiatric disorders and many of us have worked hard to stabilize them. I’m talking about unstabilized, significant serious psychiatric disorders, it won’t work until those things are addressed.

The addiction, the psychiatric disorders, it almost definitely won’t work. Those things need to be addressed. But you look for these qualities of inspiration and then you actually, we have a whole episode on this, you kind of make a pledge to yourself. You are only going to pursue your Attractions of Inspiration and you will shut the bustling door to your attractions of deprivation. No matter how hard they knock, no matter how sexy they are, you’re going to say no because you’ve got a life to live and you’ve got a future of love to build in this world.

The third stage of this amazing, amazing journey is the stage of getting out there. But now, when you’ve done these first two stages, your field will have shifted and you’re going to get out there with bravery because you got to have bravery. We got to get out there. We do, we do, we do. It’s hard, it’s annoying, it’s challenging, but we have to get out there.

And it is best to also get out there in environments that are actually real time with people who share your values. The more deeply held your values shared are at these events, the more likelihood you’ll have of more quickly finding a partner. It really speeds things up. So the third stage is the getting out there, but now getting out there leading with your Core Gifts and looking for those people with whom your soul feels safe, and that then becomes your defining question, which changes everything.

I mean, think about this. Think if your primary question, it wasn’t like, which mine was for so long, is he hot? And then, God willing, he’s a good person and likes me. Chances are very unlikely, but God willing. Okay, that’s what I did for a long time and it didn’t work.

When your question first becomes, does my soul feel safe with this person, your future shifts. I can’t tell you what a gift it is to yourself and to your precious future and to the family in your future and to the world in your future, when you make that your question. I feel like I’m offering you a jewel box with the most beautiful diamond in it by telling you this, and I encourage you to take it, to actually make that your question, does my soul feel safe with that being?

And that’s going to … Yes, you have to be attracted. Yes, there have to be logistical things that work, but let that become your question and watch how your world shifts. And write to me and tell me. I want to hear stories. I gather these stories of people’s transformations.

And the fourth stage is the stage of rewiring your circuitry, especially if you’re someone like I was, who was sexually and romantically attracted to people who weren’t good for me. And I had to do this work. And then when I met my wonderful, wonderful, wonderful husband, I had a lot of fear and I had a lot of resistance, and I had to learn so much, and I still learn every day so much. And hopefully he learns too, as we all do.

But there’s a rewiring that has to happen if you’re not used to availability. You get scared, you get bored, you get judgmental. Also, in a relationship like that, the risk is a different risk. In an Attraction of Deprivation, the sexy, sexy risk is, is this person going to keep loving me? In an Attraction of Inspiration in a healthy relationship, the risk is how much can I show of who I truly am? How much can I give for my most tender parts? How much can I show how much I love? How much can I share who I really, really am and make the asks that are hardest and scariest to ask?

Those are the gloriously scary, risky questions that we want to be able to ask, because those are scary and the way that we are built is that fear increases the erotic. It increases Eros because it’s adventure, because it’s existential, for so many different reasons, it does. But when your scariness becomes, oh, can I get more real? Oh, can I show this part of myself? Oh, can I ask for this? Can I show this sexual part of my being? Can I show this spiritual part of my being? And when you’re with someone with whom you can, maybe you have to warn them.

My husband is like, he’s a money and IT guy, he doesn’t think the way I do, although God knows he knows me pretty well by now, but I have to ask him, “I need space. I got to tell you something really vulnerable that happened today. And so I just need us to maybe hold hands for a bit, and I need all of you.”

And he wonderfully does that. But if I didn’t say it, he just doesn’t think that way. So these are asks that in the past I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I would’ve been brittle and defensive or hidden. So these are kind of like the lovely, lovely recircuit things that we need to do in an Attraction of Inspiration.

I think that you can see how epic this journey is, how epic and beautiful and healing and treasured this journey is. And amazingly, it’s the journey that I believe it’s the process that leads to healthy love in the quickest possible way. Will it be immediate? Probably not. But everything is circuitous and each one of our journeys is different, but this speeds the path to love in the most profound ways.

I thank you for listening. I’m excited that you get to have your adventures with this. I want to ask you, too, if you like what I’m saying here, to leave a review, to subscribe, and to join my mailing list at deeperdatingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening, and have a great day.

 

Watch the episode here:

 

Love the show?

Subscribe, rate, review, and share the show on Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform!

Click here to learn how!!