The search for love is hard. How scary is the idea that we have to go out into the world and find a stranger that will become our home? Today, I talk about how to tap the power of your own intimacy and wisdom on your path to transform your love life. There are microbursts of intimacy-wisdom all around us — both from within us and from those around us. In this episode, I explain how to invite these micro doses into your life and use them to transform your search for deeper love. Listen to this episode to learn how to recognize and invite guiding insights into your life as you search for love.

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Show Notes:

• How to regain your faith in dating
• Are you pushing love away
• Ways to identify micro doses of dating wisdom
• Tips for looking inwards for dating guidance
• What does inner wisdom feel like
• How to invite guiding insights
• Talking points for discussing dating in therapy
• Ways to soften your heart
• How to recognize your guiding insights

Important Links:

• Listen to The Deeper Dating® Podcast Episode 3: The Greatest Practice To Speed Your Path to Love
• Listen to The Deeper Dating® Podcast Episode 113: Create Your Personal Love-Wisdom Practice
• Listen to The Deeper Dating® Podcast Episode 127: How To Turn Your Dating Life Into A Spiritual Adventure
• Get a copy of Deeper Dating® by Ken Page
• Join the Coaching and Mentorship Intensive with Ken Page
• Connect with us on Instagram

Every time you have a flash of new intimacy wisdom, every time you listen to that wisdom and act on it you literally change your future. You speed your path to love, and you make your life richer. In this episode we’re going to talk about these micro doses of intimacy wisdom, how you can invite them and then use them to change your search for love, and your whole life. So, stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating®, and your host for this podcast. Today, I’m going to be talking about finding your own intimacy wisdom and using it to change your life and your search for love. And in this and every episode, my commitment is to share the greatest tools and insights 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 intimacy, and those are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. And 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 from me, free resources, and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. And you’ll find complete transcripts of every episode. And if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a tremendous thank you if you subscribed and left me a review. So thank you so much for that as well. Let’s jump in. The light comes from sparks of insight that really feel like wisdom. Click To Tweet I want to start by saying this search for love is hard. It’s hard. Even if you have an approach that’s wise and makes sense and that you believe in, it’s hard. There’s pain, there’s frustration, there’s an accumulation of bad advice, wounds to our being, trauma, the flatness and superficiality of dating apps, and a dating environment that is filled with unkindness. Not to mention just how hard and scary it is to go out there, look for a stranger who is going to finally become your home in the world. I get it. And I know that when we think of it this way, it’s just so daunting. But there really is another layer, a deeper blueprint for how this works that I have seen happen again and again and again, that this is not just a numbers game, it’s not a gimmick game. When we shift our field, when we learn our deep intimacy lessons and then apply them in real nitty gritty ways, our search for love is sped and healed and changed. And I can’t tell you how many people write to me and share with me how that has happened for them. So what do you do when you’re in the middle of the tunnel and there’s no light? That light that you felt when you got so excited about a new approach or a new app, that’s been left behind you and you haven’t yet seen the light of this wonderful person who could be it for you at the end of the tunnel. So how do you find the light in the middle of the tunnel? In my experience, that slogging stage, the light comes from sparks of insight that really feel like wisdom, insights that teach you something new, that humble you, that make you realize and face the ways you might have been unconsciously or consciously pushing love away even while you’ve been looking for it.

Looking inwards for dating guidance:

And these experiences, you can feel that they really feel like wisdom. They really feel like a micro dose of wisdom inside you. They feel it in your body when you get an insight that opens you up like that. And those are our gold in the middle of the path. Those are our way stations, our refreshment stations, our guideposts. So often, those insights actually come from other people. And sometimes, they come from within ourselves. And I’m going to give you examples throughout this episode and I’m going to ask you to remember some of yours, because these micro doses of wisdom, we often ignore because they come from us and because they’re just part of our day-to-day life. But they’re treasures and they’re from our wisdom, and they have a challenge embedded in them that if we take, we change our future. Please don’t assume that all of these wisdom insights need to be really big. Click To Tweet So I’m just going to share one little story of mine. So this was many, many years ago. And I was dating someone who I thought was really attractive but who couldn’t really listen to me. And communication’s really important to me. So he was not at all good at listening. And I was talking to Michael about how I needed to end it with him because of this. And Michael said, because Michael had met this guy, and he said, “You know, the feeling I get is he really wants to be a good boyfriend. He wants that. So why don’t you tell him what you need?” Those words that pointing out to me that this human being actually had this quality where he wanted to be a good boyfriend changed everything. I had not thought of that. I hadn’t seen that goodness. So Michael opened up, it was a micro dose, a Michael dose, of wisdom. And so I did that with this guy and I, in a kind way, told him what was missing and what I needed. And he got it. He felt really bad. And well, maybe not really bad, but he felt bad and he committed to changing and tried for a moment or two and it didn’t end up working. But I got a gift that is with me to this day. So another kind of insight is… and I’m going to ask you soon for yours, but another kind of insight is an insight that comes from meditation or from your dreams or from your inner life or your work on yourself. And I’m just going to give one example. And it’s a big example, so it’s kind of “lightning bolty”. So please don’t assume that all of these wisdom insights need to be really big because they don’t. But this one was about my husband Greg.

How to invite guiding insights:

So I was in Provincetown and we had been speaking to each other, but he was just not available because he was dealing with his kids and it was a complex time for him. So anyway, I kind of gave up. And one night, at about 3:00 in the morning, I was startled awake. I sat bolt upright, and it’s not like I heard a voice, but I got this message, and the message was, “If you don’t do something about this, you’re going to lose that opportunity.” It was quite amazing and wonderful. It was a very rare experience that I’ve had anything like that ever happen to me. But I listened and I formulated a very convoluted but ultimately effective plan to meet him. And it worked. So that’s an example of inner for me and one that came from someone else. And I would like you now to take a minute and think about a time where from your own inner wisdom, your meditation, your dreams, your journaling, your therapy work, anything like that, you had a revelation or an insight or a micro dose of wisdom of something you should soften, something you should strengthen, someone you hadn’t noticed that was there and interested. Just take a minute to remember a moment when you felt some dose of wisdom; small, large, anything. You can pause to think of that. So what did that wisdom feel like for you? For me, it has a quality of ease and relaxation. Even if it’s difficult, there’s an easing of some kind of tension, maybe a sense of truth or a sense of compassion. Those are some of the hallmarks for me. And how about a time that a friend of yours or someone you loved or someone you were talking to gave you an insight about you that changed the way you dated? Take a minute, pause and think about that and how that felt and what that was. These are our gold on the journey. I was just running a workshop and somebody said something so wonderful. He said, he believes that compassion is what leads to love, and that vulnerability is what leads to compassion. Maybe that connects you to some memories of your own around compassion or vulnerability or maybe your wisdom insights have been around saying no, around discrimination. So anyway, take a minute and just think about that time, a time that it came from deep inside of you, and then a time that it came from someone else. And through this episode, I’ll be telling some more stories. And anytime you remember a new one of yours, pause the recording and take a minute to drink it in. Because if you look at your guiding insights together, all of these little micro doses of wisdom, they connect like a connect the dots picture. And there are going to be some big themes that emerge. For me, two themes that are like central features in my insights are softening my heart, because I can harden my heart in many ways, and softening my judgment because I’m a Virgo, I can be really judgmental. Those have been two really big ones. Obviously, it’s not just from my being a Virgo, it’s from a lot of different things. But both of those are places where I shut love out, where I get crusty or hardened or rejecting of the beauty and tenderness of love. I have to work on that stuff all the time. Another one for me has been a huge one. And it’s the experience of how the fog lifts when I can, as Harville Hendricks says, turn my anger into an ask, when I can actually identify and honor what my deep need is, not shame myself for it and make room for it in the world, in the atmosphere, in the relationship. These are huge, vast lessons that have let me personally be able to love, and that have turned my walls which were once impenetrable in me, or felt that way, into doors that I could choose to open or allow a special connection to open. If you look at your guiding insights together, they connect like a connect the dots picture, and there are going to be some big themes that emerge. Click To Tweet So how do you invite these guiding insights? Mostly in two ways. You invite them by surrounding yourself with people who hold you with deep care. I think that’s the most effective way of all, and people who have wisdom, and with whom you can talk about these countless mini crossroads that come up in your journey for love and in your intimacy life again and again. Those people are gold. And I just want to say that the meat and the potatoes of the intimacy journey, forgive me vegans and vegetarians, is this experience of being baffled and bewildered and then finding touches of wisdom. It’s like working with a knot, like this big annoying knot, but you notice, “Oh, this piece will open, this one will soften.” And you don’t undo the entire knot. But that process of noticing these micro doses of wisdom and then working with them, that’s the intimacy journey. For me, as I’ve mentioned before, I once started a support group for chronically single psychotherapists that made such a difference to me. We would come in with our stuck places, and this was a wise group of people, and the other people would just hold them with insight, spaciousness, and maybe a little bit of advice or suggestion or possibility, and worlds opened up in our hearts. But I want to say too, that a lot of these micro doses of wisdom that sustain us and guide us are little or very specific about maybe not having been as kind as we could have been or as generous or sharing our feelings as much as we could. Could be a little thing. And I just want to share that I was speaking with someone today who met a guy that she really, really liked. And she was fine and she was connected and she was warm and all of that. But when it came time to talk about possibilities, she protected herself and gave thoughtful answers, but didn’t share her enthusiasm or excitement or desire for this to continue. And we talked about it and she realized that she was hiding her most tender parts, and that she could do that differently and that she was going to go back and do that differently. So things like that are so big and they’re really life changing. We remember moments like that. So these are also guiding insights or lessons that happen in smaller things in our dating life. They do not have to be big to be important. And another place that you can have these insights is in therapy. So if you’re in therapy, talk about this stuff. Ask these questions. Talk about intimacy crossroads where you’re not sure. Talk about messages of wisdom that you’re wanting to receive or you are receiving, or how you can bring more wisdom into your dating life and your therapist can help you with that. And if you have a therapist that you can’t say that to, then either that’s shame inside of you to be worked on and gotten past, or they’re probably not the right therapist for you. So the other way is to invite these micro doses of beautiful personal wisdom is through your own inner work. And I talk a lot about practices that you could do. One practice is tapping or EFT, I do that every day. It’s clinically proven to reduce the cortisol levels in your brain and hence allow you to relax and connect more with your feelings, sense of safety, sense of resilience. I adore it. Another is meditating, and that one’s really important to me and one that I’ve been doing for a long time. Or studying or reading works that really feel like they have wisdom and depth and inspiration for you. So in episodes 113 and 127, I talk about how you can build different inner practices. And in episode three and all over the place of my work, I talk about the Inner Mentor process, which is a fabulous synthesis of your own inner work and communication with someone, because you picture the you that you dream of becoming and you dialogue with that you, and then you imagine being that you and calling out guidance to yourself. And that guidance is going to be filled with wisdom and love and it’s a powerful, powerful technique. Another technique that I love that a friend of mine taught me was that any time he went on a date or any environment where he could meet somebody, he set an intention. Maybe about being open, maybe being about discriminating, whatever it was, he would set an intention. And then his definition of success for that dating experience or potential dating experience was how much he lived his intention. Not did he find the one, but how well he did with his intention. Affirmations is another example, or prayer, or just walking and thinking, or journaling. There’s so many methods, but anything that softens your heart, that experience of softening your heart, or opening up to deeper levels of compassion and vulnerability, those are the babies, those are the ones, those are the things that you want to do. And how do you recognize that you’re getting these doses of wisdom, personalized wisdom?

How to recognize your guiding insights:

How do you recognize these guiding insights? Well, they feel like they have a ring of something to them. Like they have a ring of extra truth or a sense of gravity or a sense of depth, or they give you the feeling of softening or expansion or insight into yourself, or hope or maybe awareness that is difficult to have, like that wonderful saying by Vito Russo, “The truth will set you free. But first, it can make you miserable.” Recognizing a way that maybe you’ve been pushing love away or that someone maybe isn’t so right for you. But those feelings of extra truth, of extra gravity, of extra softness, of extra depth, when you sense those things, those are guiding insights. Maybe it’s a tuning into your own longing for deeper connectedness or safety. Maybe it’s a deep shifting in your priorities where you really remember what matters to you. Maybe it’s a sense of opening. Maybe it’s a sense of getting somewhat freer from old shame or guilt or encumbrance. Or maybe it’s like extra bravery, that you get called to extra bravery and you feel quickened and empowered and you do this scary thing. All of these, they’re doses of personal wisdom. So what does that for you? What invites these deeper levels of insight, understanding, freedom, opening? Take a minute to think about that. So often, we do these practices and we don’t feel anything. We get up, we go back to our day-to-day life, we’re not feeling anything. But the thing that we need to do when we’re doing these practices to open us, or even if we’re not talking to other people, you’re listening to this podcast, that’s an opening experience. So when you’re doing the work, however you’re doing it, of growth, start listening for whispers, a sense of being pulled, a sense of guidance, a sense of insight and awareness, or just whispers to do things somewhat differently. Listen for those whispers because if you’re doing this work, they’ll come. And then what do you do when they come? So this is really important. When they come, what’s really important is to relish them. Because these experiences, these micro doses of your intimacy wisdom, they’re everything. They’re everything. They deepen you, they expand you, they bring you to your potential, they bring you to your heart, to your compassion, to your vulnerability, maybe to your bravery, to your fierceness and your creativity, they bring you to who you’re meant to be. Yes, drop by tiny homeopathic drop. But these drops make it worth it. And these drops are what give us a light in the middle of the tunnel and give us hope. So the next time you have this moment where you’re experiencing any of this, instead of just moving on, breathe into it. Just feel the widening, feel the deepening. No pressure, just feel it. Feel the softening. Feel whatever is happening in that experience where you’re getting this dose of a tiny drop or a bigger drop of new wisdom. Because in those moments, a download is happening inside of you that is shifting your circuitry. It’s like an upgrade to your intimacy system. And by relishing it and allowing it to ripple inside of you and giving it the time and the space to move through you and shift you and feeling some delight in it, that is how we reinforce it, that’s how we live it, that’s how we become that much closer to the person we’re aching to become, the person who loves more freely. So thanks so much for listening, and I look forward to seeing you, connecting with you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.

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