How To Find Your Soul Mate
by Lisa Oliver
Copyright 2012 Lisa Oliver
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Chapter One – Letting Go and Moving on
Chapter Two: Working out what you really want in a Soul Mate and your Life
Chapter Three – Meeting Mr. Right
Chapter Four – Maintaining the Relationships You Have Found
Chapter Five – Some final words for YOU
Useful Resources and Further Reading
Other Books About Relationships by Lisa Oliver
Dedicated to my soul mate, Paul, who kept the household going while I sat at the computer, and to the children who kept their needs to a minimum until I had finished the final page.
It isn’t until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are – not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within – that you can begin to take control
Oprah Winfrey
Introduction:
Finding your Soul Mate, fact or fiction? For many of us trapped in a thankless relationship or sitting alone on a Saturday night it seems like a long forgotten fairy tale, the stuff of dreams, not real. After all true love is just found in the movies isn’t it?
Wrong. YOU can find a Soul Mate. Any of you reading this book can find that special someone who understands you, appreciates you and truly fits into your lifestyle. YOU can share a future with your soul mate. Any one can. “But…” I hear you say, “but” nothing. Take this one fact on board. There is not a global conspiracy that says you have to be unhappy, the world is not conspiring to say you have to live alone, or be lonely, there is a special someone for anybody ‘out there;’ there are no “buts”. You can find a soul mate, but you have to be one first. And this is where this book comes in.
Many of the reasons women are unhappy in their relationships is because they attract the wrong sort of person. The relationship ends, and they attract another mate of the same caliber. Same old, same old cycle. You have the power to break that cycle.
The first thing we will be dealing with in this book is how to recognize and move on from your past troubles and relationships so you can start attracting the right person. Next we will look at who would truly be your type of soul mate. Then we can help you get over insecurities and fears that may hold you back from meeting him.
A huge complaint from women is that men just don’t want to commit. This is a mythical statement made by lonely women. Your soul mate will want to commit to you because you will be able to commit to him. Learn to recognize the signs of a real relationship. A real relationship that is based on a genuine sense of sharing between two people who care about each other. If your partner is commitment phobic, then he is not your soul mate. Go back to chapter one and learn to move on.
Finally, you have found your partner, but how can you tell if he is the ‘right’ one? How can you tell if the relationship is going to last? What if you are wrong? What if he is the wrong one? How can you turn the glow that hits us all in the first three months of a relationship into a long lasting flame? It can happen, it does happen, and it can happen for you. This book will tell you how.
I lost my first true love at 21 years of age. The fact that he was constantly unfaithful to me should have been a huge indication that he was not THE ONE. But love can be blind and it wasn’t until I met my soul mate at 37, after two disastrous marriages that I came to realize that true love could happen to anybody. True love is not about changing you it is about being you. True love is not about changing your partner; it is about loving him as he is, without compromising you. I am a walking example to the fact that anybody can find her soul mate, and I wrote this book so it can happen for you.
Chapter One – Letting Go and Moving on
When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) Roman Emperor and philosopher
Why do we as women attract the type of men that we do? Why do we stay with the men that upset or even hurt us? Why do we turn a blind eye to their faults and try to be the person our partner wants us to be, when it is just not us? All women do it at some stage in their life, and then they wonder why they can’t find their soul mate. Time for a change don’t you think? Lets begin with the ‘EX-List’.
For this exercise you are going to need some paper and a pen, and a bit of privacy. What I want you to think about is characteristics of men you have been out with before, and why the relationship broke down. Draw your page up in columns if it makes it easier and have a column each for his first name, your age when you dated him, how long in weeks, months or years the relationship lasted and why you think the relationship ended. For example part of my list would look like this:
Ross - 16 - 8 mnths - left me for a blond.
Mike - 18 - 5 mnths - drank too much
Bill - 20 - 14 mnths - mummy’s boy
Kevin - 21 - 3 years - unfaithful
Bert - 24 - 18 mnths - I got pregnant
As you can see I don’t want you to go into to much detail, I just want you to set up a sort of table that will help trigger other memories. When you are thinking about why your relationship broke up, just write the first thing that comes into your head, whether it be ‘he was an unfaithful slob’, or ‘he got fat’, or even ‘he thought I got fat’. Just be honest with yourself, nobody else is going to see this but you do need to get these facts down on paper. Don’t worry about listing people you may have had flings with, just those you thought you were in a relationship with.
Now either on another column or on another page, write the same names and put down the first thing that comes into your head as to why you first went out with him. Again be brutally honest with yourself. My partial list would look something like this:
Ross - short, cute, blond, had a motorbike
Mike - taller than me, cute smile, V8 car
Bill - geek, settled lifestyle, good job
Kevin - in a suit with tattoos, bad boy with a decent job
Bert - Musician, older, well traveled, knew a lot of people, fun
And next, just when you thought you were doing more writing than reading, jot down what you didn’t like about each person and why you stayed with each of these people for as long as you did. Bear in mind that any time spent with someone who is not ‘THE ONE’ is a waste of time unless you are learning something from the experience.
Ross - Drank when he was on the bike - knew my friends
Mike - Only cared about his car - it was a cool car
Bill - lived behind mother’s house - wanted to be part of family
Kevin - telling me about his flings - he was my best friend
Bert - he was irresponsible - I thought I could be too.
Last but not least write down the one word that you felt about him when you were with him, and the one word you think about him now.
Ross - Love - nothing
Mike - Love - nothing
Bill - Love - nothing
Kevin - Love - loss of the friendship
Bert - Love - nothing
Okay, I cheated with Kevin. I only stayed with him as long as I did because he was such a good friend. But he was not my soul mate. Can you see a trend here? Most women when they in a relationship are either convinced, or at least tell everyone else, that they are in love. Its what we do, we like being in love, we want to be in love, but most times we don’t even know what love is. When the relationship is over we initially feel hurt and upset (pride usually), but a couple of years down the track, we generally feel nothing at all. Believe it or not, that is a good thing.
The first step to finding your soul mate is to totally let go of the past.
Some of you will have put hate, loathe, despise or similar words in your column that describes how you feel about an old relationship now. You may think that hating a person proves you are ‘over’ a person and that you are ready to move on. In fact hating a person can be as powerful an emotion as loving someone. Hate, as an emotion in the long term gives you nothing positive in your life to work on. It just drains you. Worse still it ties you in an emotional way to that person well after they have left your life.
Now some of you may feel you have good reason to hate somebody. Men can be abusive, uncaring and really hurt you and that should not be trivialized in any way. After a bad relationship healthy anger against a person is a natural part of the grieving process that we all go through.
We grieve for lost opportunities, for crushed dreams, particularly when our ex had been a part of our lives for some time and then hurt us in some major way.
You can’t keep living with that anger or hate. Some women have been so bitter after a break up they have remained single and lonely for years. That hatred seeps into all potential new relationships, into their friendships and severely affects the way they react to the opposite sex. While you hate an ex you cannot find your soul mate, you cannot sustain a decent relationship and the only person you are hurting is yourself. Chances are your ex has already moved on to a new life, he may have a new partner, he will have definitely moved on from his relationship with you. By hanging on to the past, you are only denying yourself a future. The good news is there is a cure and its simple and immediate.
Take your pen and cross out the word ‘hate’ on your list. Now write the word ‘indifferent’ in its place. Isn’t that a great word – say it to your self in a sentence, ‘I am indifferent to him’. Use different tones, really ham it up, and say it over and over. Now you know why I said you needed a bit of privacy. As you repeat this you will start to feel liberated. By empowering your indifference, you are allowing your body to let go of the hate, and move to where you need to be – empowered. Hate chains you to your past; you have to let it go. If you are struggling with this remind yourself that while your hate for your ex continues to affect your life, he is winning. And his prize is ruining your life.
All of us, as women, react differently to relationship breakdowns. Some of us spend our time boring our friends with tales of what a ‘jerk’ he had been. Others just shut off completely and bury their pain in work or excesses (getting drunk and acting out). A few of us shut out the world completely or run away and hide. Those behaviors are all quite normal, and quite acceptable ways of dealing with the demise of a relationship. But the death of a relationship should go through a normal grieving pattern, as you would when a loved one has died. You will have difficulty believing it is over, you will feel sad, and then it is quite probable you will get angry, but the phase after that is acceptance, and for some of us that is the hardest step of all. But you have to achieve acceptance to fully let go and move on. So for those of you who snorted and claimed just writing a word indifference on a piece of paper wasn’t going to change the way you feel about an ex you need to
Get rid of the baggage.
Quite honestly changing your life is as quick and simple as changing your mind. There are no formal techniques to go through, or time spans you need to live through to suddenly come out the other end baggage free and ready to meet a new person. Time, as often quoted, is a great healer, but for some of us the baggage that we carry subconsciously affects our choices of a new mate, which is where a pattern of behavior develops. As this can sometimes stem from childhood, it makes the pattern harder to acknowledge and difficult to change.
Childhood sets the stage for the life we live. We can accept that life, rebel against it, or totally change it as an adult, but we are shaped by it. The very first inkling we get about relationships come from our parents, our first real relationship with a male, from our father. If your father was a stern disciplinarian you may trade sex for love in a misguided attempt at filling the void left by your father. If you father was loving and affectionate, you will subconsciously look for a man just like him, and sabotage numerous relationships that fall short of that expectation. How your father treated your mother will also play a huge factor in your relationships. If your mother and father had a good loving relationship, that is the ideal you will crave. But if, as is often the case, your father has left your mother for a younger woman, or been uncaring in the home, you will make an unconscious decision to have what your mother didn’t have, and set unrealistic expectations on how a relationship should be.
If you were not raised with a father at all, your ideals will be clouded with unrealistic expectations yet again. Your first basis of a relationship will be based on rejection. All children blame themselves for their father’s absence, even though their existence had nothing to do with the dynamics of an adult relationship at all. But until the age of 7 – 8 a child is the center of their own universe, and their formative years become clouded with the fact that somehow they alone are to blame for having no father. A child with this foundation on relationships will often sabotage a decent relationship, fueled by an undying belief that they as a person would never be good enough to be with forever. When the relationship inevitably does fail that failure serves as a justification for the original belief and the pattern in behavior becomes firmly entrenched.