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Soulmate #3: A Lioness Wants A Lion

By the way–some of ya’ll ain’t gonna like what I say today. Others are thinking I’m giving some formula for picking up girls. Think deeper, people, please.

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So. Where were we? Yes, I remember. I had used the Beauty/Power axis idea to help me define my own pathway–that is, I defined the girl of my dreams, with the assumption that whatever I most deeply aspired to have in my life as a female companion was a mirror to my own idealized self. A theory worth testing! I found a lady. Call her Hazel. Hazel was the most devastatingly sexy woman I had ever known, and also smart and sweet and spiritual and financially stable.

1) She said she wanted a man who had lower BODY FAT than I had at the time. That’s fine–there is probably nothing that says more about you IMMEDIATELY than your body. It speaks of discipline, health, value hierarchies, the way you spend your time and energy, etc. It speaks of self-love, and emotional health. Let alone basic connection to our animal selves: could we hunt, gather, and either evade or defeat predators? It is also immediately a turn on or off to the hind brain.

2) She also wanted someone with deeper spiritual commitments. During the last months trying to work things out with my wife, I had tried to hard to please her (or so I thought) that I had lost sight of myself. Always a mistake. I’d stopped meditating, connecting myself to the divine.

So I started running again, watched my DIET a bit more (a sign of self-respect) and meditated more. Hazel and I started seeing each other–I’d fly out to Arizona to see her. But there was a problem: the sweeter to her I was,the faster she backed away, until finally she broke things off. (more…)

Soulmate #2: It’s not about someone else

So. When last we met, I was an emotional wreck after the dissolution of my first marriage. I realized my marriage was doomed. I’d decided to make a list of everything I wanted in a woman, then to find the woman who came the closest to what I had on that list–whether she was married or not, sit her down, and ask her what she wanted in a man.

Fortunately, I knew a woman who fit the bill. She was sexy, smart, spiritual, kind, sweet, incredibly beautiful, financially successful, and…did I say sexy? Truth be told, she was arguably the purely sexiest woman I had ever met. She lived in Arizona, and I was heading out that way to do some research on my upcoming novel “Charisma.” So, on New Years Day, 1996, I sat her down in a restaurant and said: “I think you are spectacular, and I would really like to know what kind of man you want in your life.” As it happened, my timing was GREAT–she was just coming to the end of a relationship. So over the next few months we saw each other, and I was able to extract from her the list of what she was looking for. To my shock, there wasn’t a huge gap between what she was looking for, and what I was. Two things stuck out:

1) She wanted a man with more of a spiritual base. I thought about that…then realized that life had been so stressful I had stopped meditating.

2) She wanted a man with a harder, more defined body. Believe me, her own body was (and is to this day) spectacular. She had every right to demand quality. I realized that I had stopped running since moving to the Northwest.

 

What this meant is that I had defined a direction for re-claiming myself.

Remember: the point of the exercise was NOT to get a woman. And certainly not to fall in love with miss X (although I did love her, and had great fun while we were dating–but more on that later).

The point was to get clear on where I had failed myself, stepped off my path. The theory is that if I got back on my path, everything else would clear up.

 

Well, weirdness ensued. I noticed that the more open and honest and caring and sharing with her I was, the more distant she got. It was bizarre: I had never dealt with anything quite like it before. Finally, during a trip to Los Angeles in March to celebrate my birthday, she broke things off with me. I was devastated. Where had I gone wrong? I brooded about that, and a few weeks later had another break-through…

More later.

Article Series

The Soulmate Process Part One

 NOTE: THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT.  I am in the process of creating my life story, and the first step is porting over articles I’ve created in the last 15 years on various blogs.   I will be cross-posting to Facebook from the new blog.  Please excuse!

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This is an intensely PERSONAL story–it could hardly get more personal, actually. Because of that, I am going to take the liberty to change some names and obscure some information: while I feel perfectly comfortable telling stories on myself, I have no right to broach the privacy of others.

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In about 1998, my marriage to my first wife, Toni, Nicki’s mom, hit a wall. We’d both made mistakes, we each paid for them in different ways. They added up to an untenable situation. For almost two years I tried to make things work, and finally ran out of gas. I mean, I completely crashed and burned.For the first time in memory, I didn’t even know who I was any more. Or what I wanted. Or what to do. I was utterly numb.

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The wall had been hit between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the anniversary of my mother’s death, and always a tough period for me. This just made things a lot worse. But I decided to give myself a week to come up with an answer, to decide what direction to move in. Many of you might have noticed how much easier it is to solve other people’s problems, so I used that approach: What would I say if one of my students came to me with this problem?

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A theory   called “The Beauty-Power Axis” clearly states that our relationships are mirrors. Hmmm. I had said for years that our relationships say a lot about us. Hmmm. So I thought one of the smartest things, perhaps THE single smartest thing I ever thought: “I don’t know who I am right now. But I know what I am attracted to. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to make a list of everything I’m attracted to. I am going to describe the perfect woman, without any compromises. Her beauty, intelligence, sensuality, warmth, emotional health, spiritual centeredness…everything. EVERYTHING my deepest heart desires. Then, I am going to go out and find the woman who comes the closest to what I’ve described–whether she’s married or not (!), sit her down, and ask her what she wants in a man. If I’ve made my description carefully enough, and chosen carefully enough, whatever she describes is what I want to be–because, in my heart of hearts, what I want is to be a man who  can have a woman like THAT. And we can have anything that we mirror.”

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Needless to say, one of the most frightening things I’ve ever done, as well. What if she just wanted a billionaire? Well, then, she doesn’t really match what I had on the list, now would she? A woman attracted to a man with ambition, intelligence and success is onething. But to put a dollar amount on it was another. So I quieted my fears and put my plan into action…

 

More later.

Article Series