Calling in the One 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life

Week One Preparing For Love "Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." --Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Too often, we believe our private agonies are ours alone to bear, forgetting that we are part of a vast collective where the majority of our concerns are shared in one form or another by many other people. This week: *We will explore the impact that the culture around us is having on our collective ability to create loving and meaningful relationships *We will prepare ourselves for love by opening our hearts to those in our lives at a whole new level, exploring and expanding our capacity for healthy interdependence *We will cultivate a vision of love fulfilled to begin anchoring and designing our lives around the realization of love *We will begin taking specific actions that are consistent with, and supportive of, a future of love fulfilled LESSON 1 Expanding Our Capacity to Love and Be Loved "If you want to learn to love, then you must start the process of finding out what it is, what qualities make up a loving person and how these are developed. Each person has the potential for love. But potential is never realized without work." --Leo Buscaglia, Love One reason that so many of us do not have the love we are longing for is that we have not yet become the people we will need to be in order to attract and sustain that kind of love. Most of us have dramatically elevated our standards of what we want from a partner far beyond what our parents expected from romantic union. Yet we may not have evolved our level of maturity to the point where we can manifest and maintain the love that we are hoping to create. Romantic relationship today is a tentative and uncertain thing. No longer is getting married the safe and secure way to go. Whereas once upon a time people coupled up out of economic and social necessity, we now seek to form such unions in an attempt to create soulful and meaningful lives. Yet, much of the time, falling in love means that we end up standing by helplessly as we watch it all slip through our fingers. Why can't we seem to hold on to the glorious transcendence of love? Why can't we seem to harness passion, root it down, and make a home of it? Some would say that romantic love is an illusion. A trick of nature meant to entice us into procreation. In the aftermath of a devastating breakup, we find ourselves asking, was he or was he not my soul mate? Was it or was it not real love? The most beautiful moments of our lives become reduced to their lowest common denominator: hormones, lust, and those most dreaded of words--"It was just infatuation." Yet many understand, if only intuitively, that romantic love holds a promise that we have yet to fully comprehend. Instinctively, we know it holds a key to our expansion. Because romantic love has such a profound capacity to bring out the best--and the worst--in us, we are beginning to see it as our newest frontier for spiritual growth and development. Rather than calling us into seclusion, the spiritual path now beckons us deeper into the quality of our relationships. This premise is the very crux of the new term "spiritual partnership," which has recently emerged to describe the modern-day paradigm of marriage. What exactly is this new paradigm of marriage that everyone is speaking of? Well, if the concerns of the old paradigm were economic stability and morally sanctified sex, then the concerns of the new paradigm have to do with fulfilling our soul's destiny and actualizing our full potential. Spiritual partnership implies a goal of encouraging and supporting the unfolding of each other's soul's reasons for being here in the first place. [read more]