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Yes, the dating path is strewn with countless “fresh hells.” But your search for love can also bring you real joy, and heal your life. The key? Learn how to tune in to your own inner guidance-whispers. Face the ways you push love away and learn your intimacy lessons right now. In this episode, I’ll teach you three processes with the power to open those very doors. This is life-changing stuff folks; don’t miss it!

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Table of Contents

• Craft Words That Touch Your Heart
• Say The Words And Feel The Effect
• Inner Mentor Process

How To Turn Your Dating Life Into A Spiritual Adventure

Part 1: Three Amazing Practices To Speed And Deepen Your Path To Love

Yes, the dating path is strewn with countless fresh hells, but your search for love can also bring you real joy and heal your life. The key is learning how to tune into your own inner guidance whispers. In this episode, I’ll teach you three processes to help you do exactly that. They will speed, ease and deepen your path to finding healthy love, so stay tuned.

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating®, and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com®, a new site where people can meet each other in an online environment that’s inspiring, safe and positive. Today and in the next episode, I’m going to talk about how to make your search for love into a true adventure of growth and yes, even a joyful experience at times.

In this episode and in every episode, I 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 nothing more than the skills of love. Those are the greatest skills of all for a happy and meaningful life. If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating® path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com.

If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get lots of free information, some free gifts, and you’ll learn much more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. You’ll also find complete transcripts of this and every other episode. I also just want to say that everything I share on this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you hear here, I would love it if you could subscribe on iTunes or elsewhere and even leave me a review. People have left the most beautiful reviews, and it means the world to me. Thank you so much for that. Let’s jump in.

Searching for love can actually be one of the greatest spiritual adventures of your entire life. Click To Tweet

As I say in the intro, the world of dating is strewn with endless fresh hells. I know that. I have lived that, but it’s also true that your search for love can bring you joy and meaning and growth in many different ways. It actually can be one of the greatest spiritual adventures of your entire life, and it should be. You should be growing and healing as you’re looking for love because if not, you’re missing the fun. You are missing the adventure. You are missing the growth, and you’re missing a whole amazing set of skills of intimacy that you’re going to need not just to find a relationship, but to keep your future relationship alive and fresh.

You may be thinking that I’m out of my mind using words like joy and adventure and fun. Trust me, I have spent decades dating and I know the pain. I know the loneliness. I know the headbanging frustration. I know all of that so well, but when we listen to our inner guidance and we learn our lessons about intimacy as we date, there really is beauty and joy that starts to happen. We feel stronger, we feel clearer, we make different choices, and we see different things happening. Really, truly, those are great joys.

This episode, what I’m going to encourage you to do is going to be, at times, fun, joyful and exciting because I know that dating is hard, but when you have moments where there’s an illumination and you go, “Oh, I didn’t know that about myself,” or “Wow, I was shutting the door when I thought I was just doing the right thing,” or “This is the next loving act,” or twenty million other possible revelations.

When there are those kinds of epiphanies, when there’s a sense of growth and inner healing, it just makes the slog so much more bearable. Truly, truly, truly, it opens your life in profound ways, which is why I consider this like a sacred journey. Clearly, it’s one of the most important missions of our entire adult lives.

Because of that, on some level, we’re equipped with an incredibly refined set of tools and skills, and capacities. A lot of which are kind of underground and hidden that help us and support us in our journey or hinder us but still, in any case, even if there are protective mechanisms that hinder us, they are still built with incredible refinement.

 

Some examples of this, and this is in the animal kingdom, but it just kind of captures the sensitivity of that kind of equipment for this meeting process that we are gifted with. The silkworm moth can actually smell, can scent out one silkworm moth a mile away of the opposite sex for mating. A mile away, one silkworm, that’s kind of the exquisite wild level of mating capacity ability to find someone or to find another moth that they have. An example in the human species is finding the same type of pattern person again and again and again. That’s not a happy thing necessarily, but it’s not nothing. It’s because how we are wired ends up affecting who we attract and who we are attracted to, in ways that are kind of way beyond the mind.

Another thing which I have seen happen so many times, maybe you’ve experienced this too in your own life. I know that as a coach and a psychotherapist, and in my own personal life, I’ve seen this, and it’s kind of amazing to me. You have a breakthrough. Something opens up. You admit something. You deal with something. When you make that shift, new things start to happen. For example, in your dating life, you start drinking less or not at all. You find that your behavior shifts, and the kinds of people you’re meeting shift.

In the work that I do and the work that I teach, as people discover their Core Gifts, their deepest qualities of vulnerability and passion, which often we think we need to push aside, and they learn to embrace those qualities, the kind of people they’re attracted to and the kind of people that they attract change in positive ways. This is kind of miraculous, but it’s another example of a kind of like almost mystical level of effect as we grow that leads to growth and change in our dating life, and the converse as well. When we push back growth or deny growth or avoid intimacy, we repeat the same painful patterns again and again.

This episode is going to be about how you can tap into that magic, and turn your dating life and your search for love into something that truly feels like an adventure of growth, a spiritual adventure, with real moments of joy and gratification, not just when you meet that special someone, but when you realize that you are really growing in positive ways.

Your search for love can bring you joy, meaning, and growth in many different ways. Click To Tweet

Before I share, what I’m going to do, is in this episode, I’m going to share three different practices. Each of those practices is a revelatory experience. Each of those practices will help you discover your intimacy lessons, learn those lessons, make shifts in your life, and deepen and enrich who you are, the way you live, your spiritual journey, and your personal growth journey, really, really, truly. And of course, change the way that you date, change your dating experience, create healing, and most important of all is lead you quicker and easier and more directly to the wonderful relationship that you’re looking for.

I’m going to share these three processes in this episode, and in the next episode, we’re going to talk about guiding insights, what to do with the whispers of wisdom that you will get from doing these practices, how to hold them, and how to work with them. We’ll talk about that in part two of this two-part series, because that’s what’s going to happen when you do these practices. You’re going to start getting whispers of your own personal distilled wisdom, and that is fun. Before diving in and teaching you these three practices, which you can even pause and do as we go along. You can do all three. They’re really pretty quick processes, but I just want to give a caveat first. It’s almost impossible to change deeply ingrained habits. I think something like 5% of people who try to change a deeply ingrained and important habit are able to do that for the long haul.

The key ingredients, and this is something I talk about a lot, that determine those 5% that are able to hold and create real change are this, essentially that they have a template that makes sense to them that they can follow, that maybe makes more sense than their own kind of fitful and defense-based efforts that they’ve created. One is to find a template that really has wisdom for you in your search for love. The other is to have a person or a community with whom you can fail and rewire, and get up again, and try and experiment, and explore again and again and again.

This is one of the most few missions of your life will affect the rest of your life more than this one. It’s worth that time and that space. That is why in my book, in my online course, in my Deeper Dating® Intensive, which if you’re interested in is a six-month deep journey. The next one is going to be led by me. The next one is going to begin in the summer, but I’ll be interviewing starting in a few months. For that, you can just go to DeeperDatingIntensive.com to set up a free time to speak with me. Anyway, all of that is because I believe and I teach again and again, get a learning partner. Don’t do it alone. Find a community, find a group because otherwise, our ingrained patterns lead us back to the same places.

 

I know that was a heck of a preamble, so now I’m going to teach you these three beautiful processes. The first one is a process of asking for guidance. Maybe you will like one of these, maybe you will like two, maybe you will like all three. Maybe you won’t like any of them, but that’s okay because you’ll get ideas to create your own kind of practice just by listening.

Go with the ideas that really instinctively feel worthwhile, juicy and valuable to you. Don’t do any others. People spend way too much time doing spiritual practices that are like boring for extended periods of time. I know boring is part of a spiritual practice, but it should not be all of it. There should be fun and joy, and meaning, and inspiration, and periods of illumination. Otherwise, probably, you got the wrong practice.

The first practice that I’m going to teach is one of asking. If you believe in a higher power, or if you think that there’s like some kind of mystery in the universe that you can tap into, or maybe you believe that you have like an innate lot of powers, maybe it’s just the universe itself. If there is kind of an object that you can ask for help from, that you can ask to tap into the resources of that. For me, it’s my higher power. I use the word God too, or goddess. That may work for you. It may not work for you. Stick with me, stick with me, stick with me. If there’s something that you can kind of feel that you can tap into in that way, what you do is you craft an ask.

You find words asking for help in your search for love, but they’re not flat words. They’re not typical words. They’re not formulaic words. They’re words that come out of your own heart or touch your own heart, words that really speak your language. It can just be the words, “Help me,” or “Help me find love,” or “Help me learn my lessons of love.”

I have a spiritual teacher ever since I was a teenager whose name is Paramahansa Yogananda. He wrote a book called Autobiography of a Yogi. He had a prayer, and I use this prayer every day. The prayer was this, “God, bless me that I choose my life companion based on your ways of perfect soul unity.” That was really helpful to me because I thought, “Wait, that’s not how you choose a partner. You choose a partner because you’re really attracted to them, and they’re really attracted to you, and then that soul unity stuff comes later.” I learned from that beautiful prayer that I would say again and again that, in fact, it works the opposite way.

Craft Words That Touch Your Heart

Of course, you have to be mutually attracted, but when you start with looking for qualities of soul unity, your entire search changes. Why does nobody teach us this? Why do so few people teach us this? It’s a precious, precious lesson. That was one that I used. The first step is to craft words that really touch your heart, that speak to you, that move you, that inspire you. Maybe they cause an ache and a longing, but that’s a sacred ache and longing.

It's almost impossible to change deeply ingrained habits. Click To Tweet

That longing for a relationship is not something that needs to be suppressed. It’s the fire of that longing. It’s a treasure. It’s the rocket fuel that gets you out of the gravity zone of self-involvement, and moves you toward being able to find and be in a relationship. Words that evoke longing, words that evoke hope, words that are just a deep kind of wrenching ask. Craft the words that speak to you, and then this is my suggestion, that you use a kind of very ancient contemplative prayer practice which is very, very simple, very beautiful. You might even want to pause the recording right now and just craft a sentence or a phrase or an ask of some sort.

Say The Words And Feel The Effect

Once you have those words, here’s what you do next. You say the words, you feel their effect, and it’s like a wave. You might have a wave of emotion, a wave of longing, a wave of sadness, a wave of joy, a wave of hope. You ride that full-wave until it finishes, and then you say it again. If you’re anything like me, trust me, you are going to be thinking about your to-do list, and annoying things you still have to do, and whatever. Your mind will go. There will be times that you’re really focused on other things. Don’t worry about it. Just let that pass and come back to it, even if only a small portion of this practice, and I recommend five minutes, and then if you can, working your way up to ten minutes a day, you will see profound change. You really, really will.

In that time, if there are just some short periods where your heart is deeply engaged in this process, you are doing great, and you will experience change. That’s one practice. It’s this practice of asking. Now, maybe for you, asking is not going to be what you want to do, like maybe you want to say an affirmation, and that’s fine too. As long as it’s not one that you force, as long as it’s one that moves you, touches your heart, quickens your heart, and feels like it has authenticity and truth to you, then you can do the same thing with an affirmation.

 

Here’s another process. It’s the process of calling out, because if you think about it, your partner or potential partners exist in this world on this planet, and they’re looking for someone like you. They’re looking for a home with someone like you. You have not met yet, or maybe if you’ve met, you weren’t in the right places, but it’s kind of an awesome thing to think about like, “They’re there. They’re there.” Somewhere they’re there. You haven’t found them yet. You haven’t met them yet, but they’re there, and they’re looking for someone like you. That’s just an amazing thing to think about.

A friend of mine had a prayer that he did, which helped him find a relationship. The prayer was he would just picture this person, and he would say the words, “My beloved, I open my heart to you,” and he would picture them. He would maybe say like, “I’m here. I’m waiting to find you. I’m looking for you. I’m opening my heart to you.” It’s a kind of calling out, a very emotional and beautiful process. I think it really like generates something very powerful.

You might want to pause the recording and just do that now for a few minutes. Again, five minutes a day, working up to ten minutes a day if you can, because the thing about these practices are they’re not flat. They have heat. They even burn a little. They make you feel things. Yes, sometimes they’re boring, but sometimes they’re really not, and they’re fierce. They’re powerful. They tap right into the longing place. The heat that’s generated is not always easy, but it’s really worth it because that heat is changing your field.

Inner Mentor Process

The third practice is one that is incredibly precious to me. I’ve done it for many years. I do it pretty much every day. I have friends that do it too, and we share our experiences with it on a regular basis. I can’t tell you how much I love this process. I teach it everywhere. It’s not in my book because I hadn’t learned it yet or created it yet at that point, but it’s everywhere else, and if you like it and you’d like to do it in a deeper, richer way, just go to Episode 3, because I spend the entire episode on teaching the Inner Mentor Process.

You choose a partner because you're really attracted to them, and they're really attracted to you. Click To Tweet

I’m going to guide you through it right now, and it’s going to be a shortened version. If you can, close your eyes. If you can’t, you don’t need to, but this will take your focus, so be very careful of your driving. You might want to wait. I want you to remember a time that you felt full of an innate sense of love. Not a time that when you think about it, it makes you sad now to think about. A time that you can still feel good when you think about it, but a time that you felt filled with love. There was just a lot of love in your heart. It doesn’t have to be romantic. It could be anything. It could be with a pet. It could be in nature, anywhere.

Just remember that you, and just hold that memory in a gentle way, and then see if you can remember a time that you learned something about love. You learned something that made you be a little kinder, a little wiser, open your heart a little bit more, or maybe even just like someone who inspired you because of how they love, and how that person changed you, and touched you, and affected you. Just remember that.

Now, I’d like you to imagine a you that has that love, has that like wisdom about intimacy but full-on like wings unfolded, like the you that you are meant to be, a you beyond fear with the courage to live from this loving place. It’s just an imagination exercise. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to get there. Just imagine that you, what your face looks like, what your eyes look like, what it’s like to be that you.

Just imagine that you and now, I’d like you to imagine stepping into that you. Again, it’s fantasy. You don’t have to earn this. You don’t have to be there, but in a way, you know this you because it’s you. Just imagine walking into, stepping into this you who is like essence of unfolded you. Now you’re behind the eyes of that you. You’re inside the body of that you. You’re feeling in the heart of that you, and look at the you of today listening to this episode.

 

If you want to take a minute and pause, and call out guidance to that you to help that you that you have today move closer to this place, the place where you, the inner mentor, live. See what guidance comes out. Don’t think about it. It’s not going to be shoulds. From this beautiful place of love, just call out whatever advice or guidance comes out. Do that right now and feel free to pause the recording.

Whatever that advice was that you got, my suggestion to you for your practice is to just love it. Just love the advice. You don’t have to fight too hard to remember it or do it. Just hold the advice to your heart. Now what’s going to happen if you do this exercise regularly is you’re going to get tons of wise guidance from a very wonderful source.

Second, you bypass your inner critic, usually, when you do this, so that’s an amazing kind of empowerment thing right there. For me, bypassing my inner critic is a big deal. The third thing that happens is the more you do this, the more you become more like that inner mentor, and that’s kind of the most fabulous thing of all. These are three practices, five minutes a day, work up to ten if you want. If you can’t, stay with five. Watch what happens. Please comment and let me know.

There will be shifts, and you are going to begin to get bits of distilled personal essence wisdom for your journey, and that’s going to make this into truly an unbelievably precious and valuable, and even memorable adventure. In our next episode, we’ll talk about what to do with that wisdom, these guiding insights as they come up. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Please feel free to go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and sign up for my mailing list if you like. Thank you.

Watch the episode here:

Important Links:

• Deeper Dating®
• DeeperDating.com®
• DeeperDatingPodcast.com
• iTunes – Deeper Dating® Podcast
• DeeperDatingIntensive.com
• Paramahansa Yogananda
• Autobiography of a Yogi
• The Greatest Practice To Speed Up Your Path to Love – Episode 3

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