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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
Looking inwards for dating guidance: The light comes from sparks of insight that really feel like wisdom.
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?”How to invite guiding insights: Please don’t assume that all of these wisdom insights need to be really big.
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.How to recognize your guiding insights: 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.