Serene Makeover Inner Edition: Feng Shui Your Life from the Inside Out. Ariel Joseph Towne

      Become Whole

      We all want to be loved, and many of us will do just about anything to feel connected to love in some way. Some of these ways feel good and some of them leave us feeling dissatisfied. If a dynamic is imbalanced, we eventually move on until we find some new external source of our inspiration or happiness. If we seek for this source outside of ourselves, we continue a paradigm within which we are like love vampires, eternally destined to find our next fix—anyone to put out the inner burning of loneliness for awhile.

      I used to be a love vampire. Having divorced parents led me to constantly seek attention. The attention felt really good, but it was never enough to truly satisfy my need, and as a result, I had many unrequited relationships. Eventually I realized it was a cycle that I needed to break. It was a children’s book that finally helped me realize the importance of becoming whole myself before I got into a relationship. The book—Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece—was written for kids, but is actually a perfect metaphor for relationships. In it, a circle with a missing piece is looking for someone or something to fill its hole, and is seeking something outside of itself to fill it. My interpretation: in life, most of us look outside of ourselves for missing pieces to fill our holes.

      Take a look around your life

      Are there any areas of shame surrounding your physical appearance, self-esteem, health or finances? If so, this shame might spill over into the relationship you are seeking. They are never going to be perfect, but if you can start tackling the work of rebalancing these parts of your life, you will feel better and that good feeling will carry over into your love relationships. Many of my friends have told me how attracted they are to people they see owning and working on their “stuff.” Our baggage comes to light sooner or later, so why not start now?

      It’s as if each of us wanders the earth with a glass of precious water. We come across someone who is thirsty and pour some of our water into their glass. It satisfies them, for a while. Or we are walking around empty, thirsty, and we do whatever it takes to get someone to pour some of their water into our glass. When we fall in love, we might pour the entire contents of our glass into our lover’s glass in an effort to demonstrate our love. Sensing that our glass is empty, they might pour the entire contents back into our glass. And back and forth we pour and sip and spill from each other’s glasses until we run out.

      If we would simply stop for a moment and turn around, there is an infinite, energetic source available to us at any time. It’s like a waterfall: abundant, ever flowing and infinite. All we need to do is draw inside and we can fill our own glass at will. If everyone became aware of their own inner source of infinite supply, it might completely transform the paradigm of relationships and their purpose in our lives.

      As Steven Covey describes in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, we all move through different stages of dependence. When we’re born, we’re dependent on our parents. After the dependency stage, we are invited to become completely independent. From independence, we can move into a state of interdependence (when two whole people come together.) If we never become a whole person during the independence stage, when we connect with others, it creates a form of co-dependence where we look to the other person to complete us in some way. Whatever is unresolved in our past relationships becomes the baggage we bring with us from relationship to relationship.

      This isn’t to say we have to wait until we are in some idealized state of perfection before we can be with someone. Just like we don’t throw away every item we own before we move (we don’t completely start anew), the invitation is to only bring with us what is most important to us. This period of self-discovery before we call another person into our lives can help us to avoid bringing extra “stuff” to the table. We will always have lessons in life, but the more freedom we bring to the relationship, the more open we are to co-creating a beautiful life.

      Break Bad Patterns

      I’ve had clients complain to me that in relationships, they keep meeting the same person over and over again. If that’s true for you, it might be time to do an inner feng shui cleanse. The common denominator in all of these relationships is you; perhaps you’re putting something out there that keeps attracting the same situation. Do you have recurring thoughts about yourself that might be influencing the people you are attracting? For example, a woman in Karen Rauch Carter’s book Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life kept saying she wanted a husband, over and over again. “I want to meet a husband.” All she kept meeting were married men.

      The first step is to recognize that you have a pattern. You may have no idea how you got there, but you know you don’t like it and you want a way out. You may crawl around in the dark, but eventually you do what it takes and you will find a way out. The next time may be different.

      As soon as you become aware of a pattern, see if you can watch the whole process like an outside observer. It’s only by becoming aware of what we’re doing that we can make a change. Once we have mastery at changing a pattern that is no longer serving us, we can avoid that pattern altogether.

      There's a Hole in My Sidewalk

      Autobiography in Five Short Chapters

      By Portia Nelson