“Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places” – Johnny Lee

If you’re reading this in order then you’ll know that I have made a whole bunch of unconventional choices around the men in my life, and let’s be clear, they were choices. I made all these choices looking at love from the wrong direction, and that was the direction of “What I didn’t Want”

Even getting to the stage of saying to hell with appearances, was only the first step. When you have read through the articles in this series you will see that when you connect all the experiences together, everything impacts on everything, and no one experience is exclusive to one realm of your life, everything spills over.

Time to thrive

I wanted to know more about me, my likes and wants. I knew all about my “dislikes” and my “don’t wants”, I could make pages of lists about those but I really didn’t know much about my desires. Most of my decisions around every realm of my life were reactionary, fight or flight reactions to situations. Survival not Thrival!

It took me a few months and a separation agreement to get rid of Mr Keeping up Appearances and it dragged out to just before Christmas. I cashed in some airplane tickets for a trip to Scotland we would have been taking and book a holiday to Mauritius for me, my youngest son and my daughter instead. 2008 started with a great holiday and the loss of my beloved Granny, bitter sweet and I was inspired to start getting my head together. Introspection is a very personal and painful process to begin and there were times I didn’t want to go there at all. I decided not to get into a relationship for a year, form the September I called it quits with Mr Keeping up Appearances, and I was going to stick with it.

Filling a temporary void

The tough part of this though is even when looking for solutions, you fill the temporary void with something else and in my case I was a bit of a young man’s fool. Even though it was not a physical relationship, as that was how I was defining the term relationship then, based on sex, it was an intense emotional relationship for me. A speak to a lot of women who find it very difficult to not have a channel for their emotional needs, and I can fully relate. This stems from not knowing yourself, not loving and liking yourself, we are conditioned from birth to be the primary care giver, it’s how are bricks are put together and when we don’t have someone to do this for we feel that we are unable to function adequately. So, how about we start becoming the primary care givers for ourselves first? If you haven’t realised this yet, don’t beat yourself up about it, it took me another seven years to work that out.

Therapy wasn’t for me

I tried some therapy for a few months thinking that maybe it would help me muddle through, it wasn’t for me. I don’t knock it, I know many people who have had great results with therapy, but it wasn’t for me. Going over the past wasn’t what I needed, I needed to work on how it was making me feel. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to go about this, but I started to make lists of everything I wanted in life, in all the realms of my life. I started to look at myself, what did I like about me, I already knew what I didn’t like. This was the beginning of understanding who the little girl was I sometimes saw staring back at me in the mirror. I had been something and someone to somebody else since the age of 8, now I needed to find out who that someone was, that I was to myself?

As the year of relationship isolation on the physical and sexual plane ended I was certainly in a better space to start a relationship. I wasn’t focussing on the negative aspects of what I didn’t want in my next relationship, I was focussing on what I did want. It is important to understand that every person has every character trait within them, all the good ones and all the bad. No person is all good, and if you think you have met the one, and they are just perfect, you are wrong. You are just infatuated at this time, all their flaws are there to see right from the beginning and the sooner you embrace and acknowledge the flaws you can begin to build a solid relationship with your chosen one. Another very important lesson I learned to was that it is essential that your partner has other values to yours, I am not talking about morals, I am talking about the values that drive you to get up in the morning and do the things you do. Dr John Demartini told me once in an interview, that if two of you have the same values, one of you is irrelevant!

Personal growth and development is a lifelong commitment to your own success. I had started a process that was just the tip of the iceberg. I could already see the change but I had no idea how far I still had to go. Our conditioning dictates our behaviour, and within our behaviours belies our addictions. Not necessarily the easily defined addictions of substance abuses, but the addiction to partners who are abusive, the need for sex as an indication of love, our addiction to weak and needy men who need saving, our cravings for acceptance and love from parents, children, family, friends and our peers. All of these are as real as addictions to alcohol and narcotics, only often they are harder to identify.

The hard work isn’t identifying the behaviours, the hard work is in working to change them, and keeping the change. I thought I had cracked it, I had identified most of my behaviours during this year, I knew the markers, I thought I could see all the signs. I thought I was ready for my Mr Right.

In Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places, the message I want you to connect with is, after life has taken a huge bite out of us, we invariably know what we don’t want but do we really know what we do want? And, if we do, are we focusing on thoughts, feelings and actions which will attract this to us or are we merely hoping and wishing that this new life, this picture-perfect nirvana, will miraculously appear out of thin air? Know this – you are either the architect of your destiny or the victim of your history – either way, life will happen, so best your life happen by intentioned, well-thought through, deliberate design, as opposed to “How on earth did I manage to have that happen to me all over again?”

Question:

Do you know exactly what you want and do you know how to apply your powerful mind to get this?

Exercise:

1. Do you know exactly what you want? If your answer is no, then it’s high time you get clear on what you want as life is slipping you by and right now you’re both adrift and rudderless.
2. Get yourself a piece of paper and start writing. Ensure that everything you put down is written in the positive sense (e.g. “I don’t want a player, a man who cheats” [negative sense] becomes “I want a loving, loyal man” …. Start this exercise with “What I want is…………………..” and do not stop until how you want your life to be, is clear, crystal clear. During this critical design stage, do not settle for anything less than what you absolutely want!
3. If your answer to 2 was yes, and if you’re done with 3 above, do you have a clear picture of what this desire / these desires look like?
4. You think in pictures so if there’s no clear picture of what you want, then how can your mind be unleashed to shift that image in to its physical state, the result you want?
5. I don’t care how long this takes you, do not rest until you have an HDD picture of your desire; this picture must move something inside you – you must have a powerful connection with it and you must want it with everything inside you.
6. Now you need to download Bob Proctor’s book You Were Born Rich as this will clarify for you how the creative process of your mind works and you need to listen to this talk radio teaching podcast on Imagination and how to use this powerful creative force to accelerate what you want toward you.

My profound lesson:

As I discovered what I wanted everything became so clear. With each revelation I felt my level of enthusiasm for life escalate. Yes there were moments when I just couldn’t connect with what I wanted in a specific area of my life and when these moments presented themselves, instead of panicking, I just relaxed totally and allowed the image of what I desired deep down, to effortlessly develop itself on the screen of my mind. Through all this, I realised that my highest value was to SERVE, to be of service to others. That’s why I now do what I do and I love it. However, being of service to others doesn’t mean you’re a penniless doormat – oh no – I’m a powerful woman making a huge difference and being magnificently reward for this! As the mists of my mind cleared so everything made perfect sense and as I deliberately and intentionally designed my life the way I wanted it to be, I realised that by focussing on this, I’d keep myself in the very vibration which resonated with all this goodness and therefore, through the Law of Attraction, and with persistence and patience, I’d attract all this to me. Realising that my vibration was no longer in harmony with what I didn’t want gave me such a sense of inner peace. I was now unleashing my power within.

To your success, with love

Suzanne.