Attracting The Love You Crave

Finding the perfect mate is not easy, as most people know, and times like these make people want meaningful relationships even more.

According to Kathy Freston, author of "Expect A Miracle - 7 Spiritual Steps To Finding The Right Relationship," it can be as easy as consciously opening yourself up to allow that perfect person into your life.

For anyone who feels like a lasting, loving relationship is simply not going to happen for them, Freston has this message: You don't have to change yourself, play by "the rules" or sell yourself short to find a great relationship.

Freston says she had to learn the hard way to make a stable relationship work.

"I was in a series of bad relationships," she says. "It doesn't matter, really, how you look or what line you're delivering, or you know, what your whole strategy is. If you're not magnetic from the inside out, you're not going to meet the person who's going to make you feel happy. So it's really about changing yourself."

In "Expect A Miracle," she guides readers through practices like visualization, meditation, and breathing exercises to help them relax, slow down, clear the mind, and bring the relationship they really want into being.

Some of her suggestions to help find the right relationship are:

Be Still: Instead of going out and actively searching for the relationship, try to let it come to you, says Freston. So be quiet. Be still. Listen to our own intuition. And be guided by that.

Invite Grace Into Your Life: There's a higher force in ourselves, according to Freston. So if we open ourselves up to this higher power, something much better can happen for us than we could possibly do for ourselves.

Clear the Way: Clear the way of your old thought patterns and behavioral issues, says Freston. She explains that it's sort of a detoxification. Freston encourages people to face their old demons because it clears the way for new behaviors to happen.

Source the Miracle: Now that you've cleared the way and you've got this new space for it, Freston says you want to create new thought patterns and new behavioral programs. You want to come from this new place so you really have to put in all these new impulses and instincts so that you're coming from a new design. And that attracts different people into your life.

Meditate: Freston also encourages meditation. She says it doesn't have to be a large production, but it can be simply being quiet and connecting to your inner self.

"It's just being quiet, listening and when you're quiet, things just sort of click," explains Freston. "You know, you meditate for a little bit and your day sort of unfolds naturally. The elevator door opens, the light turns green, you have the idea, you meet the right person. So it's really about becoming attuned to your higher self."

To help some meditate, Freston developed a series of five CDs that help people follow her seven-step process.

Use Mantras: She also encourages using mantras.
"It's reminding us where our thoughts should be, where our energy should be," says Freston. "So we can use these mantras to, you know, program ourselves. We can put them on the mirror, hang them on our computers, whatever, just to remind ourselves of our new state of being.

In the end, Freston says, she met her husband after following her steps for 30 days.

Read an excerpt from the Introduction:

"When I was a child I always dreamed of meeting my Prince
Charming. As a girl raised in this culture I was conditioned to
believe that this fantasy man would come in and save me from my
lackluster life. He would see me from across the room, we would
lock eyes, and that would be it. "Happy Ever After." So as I came
of age I tried ever so hard to find that fantasy man. Many times I
even thought I'd found him, my heart swelling with joy, my
adrenaline pumping, visions of the future appearing in my mind's
eye. But then, invariably, my beloved of-the-moment would
somehow begin to let me down. The relationship would end and I'd
be out looking again.

Not only did I date men who were completely wrong for me,
but I also tended to go out with guys who somehow drained my
energy. Some were just boring, a couple were alcoholic, and one
was downright abusive. I kept wanting to see something that just
wasn't there and I would try desperately to make right what was
wrong. Looking back, I see how empty I felt and how I scrambled to fill
my heart with the illusion of
love. Like so many women, I was attracted to the idea that I could
fix someone and make him see that I was good. Because if
someone else saw my worth, most of all Prince Charming, then I
surely must be okay.

But no matter how I tried to do whatever it took to find my guy,
it always turned out to be a major disappointment. Wasn't there
someone out there for me who would make me feel good, I
wondered?

I went on blind dates and couldn't believe who my friends thought
I might like. I tried following The Rules (which, by, the way,
were recommended to me by my mother long before they were
turned into a bestselling book), never accepting a
Saturday date after Wednesday and not giving it up till the twenty-
fifth date, and I did get the guy. But the relationship had no honesty
or spiritual depth.

I tried going out more, forcing myself to meet "new types," but
I always came home at the end of the night grateful for my flannel
pajamas and the fact that I hadn't married any one of these guys. I
even lowered my standards, thinking I'd become too finicky. Still,
the results were the same: trying to fit a square peg into a round
hole just wasn't working.

Eventually I had to ask myself. Why did I always seem to hook
up with men who took me for a ride and left me exhausted? Well, I
searched and searched for a reason, a common thread, and what I
came up with, ultimately, was me. I realized that I was the one
allowing these men into my life. I was the common denominator in
all these relationships. I was the one who somehow found myself
with men who couldn't or wouldn't love me the way I wanted to be
loved. There wasn't anything I could do to change the men (God knows I tried),so the only thing left was to change me.

I realized that I had to understand my contribution in these
failed and unfulfilling relationships, and figure out what I could do
to change the dynamic, so that I might finally meet the right guy
for me. And so I took the plunge into deep waters and started
working on myself.

I started therapy, joined a Twelve-Step program, and found a
spiritual teacher. I began to piece together wisdom from a variety
of sources-- A Course in Miracles, published by the Foundation
for Inner Peace, which teaches through lessons and meditations
about living in the constant unfoldment of miracles; visualization;
meditation; prayer; basic psychotherapy -- and then created some
new techniques of my own. Eventually these would become my
Seven Steps for Transformation.

But first I committed myself to doing personal growth
exercises for just twenty minutes, twice a day, and after about
twenty days something magnificent happened. I didn't feel
desperate anymore, I didn't feel hopeless. In fact, I had an
overwhelming sense that something great was on its way. And, lo
and behold, guess what happened? I started to attract different
kinds of people into my life. Kind. Spiritual. Brilliant. Creative
people. And I got more comfortable with the idea that these were
the sorts of people I could be with. And that, ultimately, I could
actually be married to someone who embodied all that and more.

When I met my husband, it felt like a quiet recognition of
something that had just been waiting to happen. There was not the
loud boom of fireworks and trumpets, but instead long
conversations, laughter, and doing fun things together. Without my
making anything happen, my heart had finally opened, and in walked
Mr. Right. Instead of feeling all twisted up and excited inside, I felt
comfortable and enlivened. Instead of concentrating on what
needed to be fixed in him, I admired him for exactly who he was,
and he seemed to bring out my most creative and productive
energy. And, finally, instead of always picking at what was wrong,
we celebrated this incredible relationship that seemed like a miracle
to both of us....