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

by Katherine Woodward Thomas

What I do hope to inspire you to do, however, is to release all that is not love in your lives so that the bright and beautiful sun that you already are can come out from behind the clouds.

Love is letting go of fear. —Gerald Jampolsky

Often, when we want to create something that we do not yet possess, we stand inside of fear, rather than come from a place of possibility. Instead of owning our own readiness to expand into love, we are contracted and anxious. Even the idea of moving into a consciousness of possibility can feel scary. We don’t want to be disappointed. We’re afraid that if we ask for what we want, we may be denied and then we’ll feel even more deprived. We’re terrified that we’ll find out that our worst fear is true—that we really are unworthy of love.

Having fear as the foundation of our work just sets us up for failure because we tend to create that which we focus on.

So, it’s important that we don’t allow fear to dominate our search for love. It’s much more effective to say, “I am ready and available for love”

A good indication that your foundation is fear is the feeling of desperation. If you are feeling desperate, you can be sure that you’re rooted in fear.

This or something better now manifests for me in totally satisfying and harmonious ways, for the highest good of all concerned. —Shakti Gawain

Make room for love and it always comes. Make a nest for love and it always settles. Make a home for the beloved and he will find his way there. —Marianne Williamson, A Woman’s Worth

“The One” hadn’t shown up in his life until he’d given up the attachment of what he thought she should look like. The real work, he confided, was that he needed to open himself to love and be loved. When I asked him how he did this, he smiled sheepishly and leaned in to tell me his secret. “I cleaned out my closets,” he confessed. “I literally created a space in my bedroom closet and cleared out a drawer so that when she showed up, she’d have a place to put her things.”

If you want a great love to come to you, you must make sure that your environment is an open and welcoming space for that person to show up in. Even if your home is too small for two people and you are certain that you will move when you find him or her, it is important to have room for this person where you are right now, if even symbolically. There’s a lot of wisdom in the age-old advice: If you want a relationship, go out and buy a double bed.

If a home doesn’t make sense, nothing does. —Henrietta Ripperger

In feng shui, using pairs of items accentuates the possibility of romantic union. Pairs of pillows, pairs of pictures, pairs of candlesticks all bring forth the feeling of a harmonious relationship and evoke a feeling of intimacy. When calling in romantic partnership, feng shui also encourages one to reflect both the male and the female aspects of a relationship in the environment.

We all must master the ability to release who we are for the possibility of who we might become. As the saying goes, “In order to fly, you have to give up the ground you are standing on.”

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. —A Course in Miracles

To give oneself over to love and marriage is to say yes to death. —Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

Philosopher Alan Watts said, “Good without evil is like up without down, and . . . to make an ideal of pursuing the good is like trying to get rid of the left by turning constantly to the right.”

The truth is, each gain in life represents the loss of something else. We simply never move forward in life without losing something. No wonder most of us are resistant to change, even when those changes promise to be positive. Surrendering to change means letting go of being in control.

When we refuse to move forward, it becomes clear within a relatively short period of time that, in fact, we’ve begun to move backwards. Refusing to risk the next step, we discover a loss of vitality. We become uninspired, depressed, and resigned. Not the best states of mind to attract in love, although it might make the longing for love even more acute, since life is so devoid of its spark.

The ancient Sufi poet Rumi, says it best

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, Some momentary awareness comes As an unexpected visitor. Welcome and attend them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, Who violently sweep your house Empty of its furniture. Still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

Our lives are always in motion. As such, we will continually be asked to give up the life we have for the life we are creating. For those of us who’ve suffered traumatic losses, particularly ones that occurred in early childhood, the feelings that we associate with loss, such as sorrow, fear, and frustration, can be unsettling and frightening. However, it’s important to learn how to feel these feelings without needing to numb out or act in ways that are hurtful and destructive. He who loses his life shall find it. —Jesus

When you decide to improve your life, the first thing you will experience is loss. I see it all the time. You begin therapy or join a spiritual group because you see a possibility for yourself that you want to realize. You think that, because you’ve taken positive action, things should start to look up. Instead, very often, something strange happens. Things actually begin to get worse. That is because you have made a decision to grow yourself into a wiser, more-loving version of yourself. And that means that the “old” you has to die so that the “new” you can be born. The first act of creation is always destruction.

We must learn to move forward even when we are afraid, embracing the very losses that we have been trying to avoid.

For that is how we will transform our disappointments, our defeats, and our sad tales into something valuable—a deepening of the soul, a growing in compassion, a leveling of false pride. These are the experiences that have the capacity to help us expand our ability to give and receive love.

There is a Chinese proverb that I find very beautiful. My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon. Loss is like that. Our job is to simply surrender those things that block the experience of love, trusting the promise of the Psalmist that “weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning.” If there is one thing to bear in mind until the truth of its words eases the heart tr...

What necessary losses and/or potential disappointments have I been trying to avoid?

Pause at the word: “for - give.” “For - to - give.” Forgiveness is such a gift that “give” lives in the word. Christian tradition has tried to make it a meek and passive word; turn the other cheek. But the word contains the active word “give,” which reveals its truth. —Michael Ventura, Meeting the Shadow

What! Must I hold a candle to my shames? —William Shakespeare

I had what might be called an epiphany or a spiritually transcendent experience. I was standing outside on a bluff, looking up at a large, bright, and perfectly round moon as it shone through the bare branches of an old gnarly tree. Suddenly, the moon became illuminated and I was transported into another realm of awareness. I sensed the presence of a multitude of ethereal beings who spoke to me, not as an external voice but as an internal knowing, saying, “We understand your suffering and know well of your loss. You are right that you are owed a great debt. However, we have now incurred that debt and are the ones holding it. We will make sure that all that is due you will be paid above and beyond that which you can even imagine. But in order for us to do this, you must first release him, for your attachment to getting restitution from him is preventing us from being able to give you your due.” In that moment, I let go of my resentment toward him completely, never again to be plagued by feelings of bitterness or rage. In place of hostility, I suddenly found compassion, acceptance, and understanding.

In this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be . . . the courage to let go of the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning,” and its gifts: to die to the world and come to birth from within. —Joseph Campbell

Because of that relationship, I came to understand that there are certain lines you don’t cross when you are building a trusting, loving connection with another person.

If you are in full possession of your personal power, you can afford to be generous when someone else is behaving poorly. It’s only when you don’t own your power fully that it shows up as resentment.

Soon after that night when I’d had the transcendent experience looking up at the moon, blessing upon blessing began coming into my life— meeting Mark, effortlessly getting pregnant with my daughter at the age of forty-two, coming into a large sum of money, moving into a home that I had wanted to live in for years, etc. When I forgave my ex by taking responsibility for my actions, I opened up a space for love and abundance to come toward me, and come it did.

The antidote to resentment is acceptance.

You’ll know that you have really completed your relationship with someone when you don’t have a lot of energy in it anymore—when

When it comes to creating more love in our lives, we stand ready, like samurai warriors, to release all that is not love from our hearts.

All relationships are an energy exchange. Each connection either feeds us power or sucks it away, i.e., “draining” our energy. If we saw all of our relationships from this perspective, we would see that “toxic ties” are those attachments that cause us to lose personal power.

The associations we form have the capacity to nurture and inspire our growth, catapulting us into being the best that we can possibly be. However, the flip side is also true. Sometimes, we form attachments that can, and do, block the experience and expression of love in our lives.

The most obvious example of this is, of course, a romantic attachment to a person who, for whatever reason, is...

When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion. —George Etherege

In fact, Paul can see that he has actually succeeded in getting Susan to reject him in exactly the same way that he rejects himself.

Even the most sagacious of us may be tempted to behave destructively in an effort to avoid facing the disappointment of unrequited love.

However, try as we might, the truth is, we have absolutely no power to sway another person when they have dec...

It is one of life’s great paradoxes that, though we are the authors of our own experience, we have no ability to superimpose our will onto another person. An unwillingness to ac...

For even if we are successful at maneuvering ourselves into a “significantother” position, the relationship itself will most likely be characterized by resentment, excessive dependency, disappointmen...

The best advice for people who can’t seem to end an unsatisfying relationship might be to stop waiting for something from the other person. Probably what it is will never come. —Thomas Moore

Susan Forward, author of Emotional Blackmail, talks about the “blinding FOG—Fear, Obligation, and Guilt”—that characterizes most “toxic tie” relationships. Unbridled fears that we are unlovable, that we will never find anyone to really love us, or that we will be abandoned, and therefore annihilated, by someone we desperately need, top the list of anxieties that can entice us into giving away more and more of our personal power. Often, due to an undeveloped ability to set healthy emotional boundaries, we will feel overly responsible for another’s feelings, and allow an inappropriate sense of obligation to dominate how we make choices regarding the relationship. Or we’ll feel consumed by feelings of guilt and shame, as though we owe another our very life force for things we have allegedly done to them in the past.

Real love will never use fear, obligation, or guilt to influence you.

Until you clear your life of these “untrue” loves, you will block “true” love from being able to come to you, and you will always know, in your heart of hearts, that you are settling.

There are always risks in freedom. The only risk in bondage is that of brea...