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Soulful Love
June 2001

by Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway


Every month, our Soulful Singles "Romance Reverend" shares her sage insights on relationships and getting ready for soulful love!  Send your questions to RomanceRev@SoulfulLiving.com.


Tips for Preparing for Summer Love


A Fun Visual of Your Perfect Romance

I read that in order to achieve something we must first visualize it. I am having a hard time visualizing my perfect love. Will that prevent me from finding my soul mate? ~Alyssa from Venice, California.

I don’t believe anything will prevent you from finding your soul mate – when you are ready and when he is ready and when you time comes… but there are some visual cues that can help you in the process of getting ready for love. It could be that you are more of an "auditory" or "kinesthetic" person, meaning your relate more, primarily, by hearing things or through your feelings about things. Although you don’t have to visualize – i.e. see pictures or movies in your head – it can’t hurt to surround yourself with visual images that support your journey toward that perfect love.

I suggest you create a "Soul Mate Treasure Map." Treasure mapping supports visualization by placing images that represent our goals, dreams and hopes right in front of our faces! It stimulates conscious awareness and conscious creation of our goals, and it acts as a visual message board for the brain. In a gentle and quite way it feeds images of our desires and romantic goals to our subconscious minds in a way that draws us closer to our dreams. Creating a Soul Mate Treasure Map can be a great way to nurture us, and our relationships-to-be, in a way that is light-hearted and fun!

Begin by cutting out photos, pictures, headlines, sayings from magazines and other sources that represent the images you associate with your soul mate, and the relationship of your dreams. Include images that reflect the way you want to look, feel, be, behave, travel and live. Include couples that are happy and loving, in the way you want to be with your beloved. Include images of life experiences you would choose as part of your life together with your soul mate. Buy a nice big piece of oak tag poster board and grab some scissors and some glue. Then just sit down on a floor with all your pictures and have a blast creating your personalized collage. Just the act of looking for the pictures you want to place on the treasure map will heighten your visualization skills – and begin to stimulate images of the love you choose in your mind. As you mount them into a collage, begin to imagine – and sense – that you are literally constructing a blue print for your life. Make sure the images you choose truly represent what you want – from couples dancing romantically, to a happy couple cooking in the kitchen, to a bride and groom at the altar (if that’s what you want!) Then you can keep this visual reminder of the love and love relationship you choose in your bedroom, or any place you can gaze at it regularly. If you are an extremely private person, or if you have roommate, this can be done in a low-key way and kept in a closet, or, it can be done on a smaller scale, on a journal book or a loose-leaf notebook. This is relationship arts and crafts! Be creative and have fun.

Try on the "State" of Summer Love… Just For Fun!

A warm, insidious ache blossomed slowly inside her.
She heard herself moan with soft pleasure and delight,
as Blake’s Hand gently stroked her flesh.
Beneath his palms she felt herself fill with desire.

~From Runaway Love

I remember when I first read that passage from a romance novel, I wondered: Who is this Blake character and is he available for a summer share (of my body) for July and August? The year was 1984, and I had penciled in only one appointment for two hot and breezy months… Summer Love.

Some seventeen years later, I am thinkin’ … that’s what is missing from the lives of us soulful, adult women. We take love so seriously… we work so hard to get it right. What would happen if we could get into that old summer love consciousness and toss our cares, old broken hearts and most of our relationship expectations to the wind? We’d be liberated … and free to love without attachment or expectation.

The idea is Summer Love, in its truest essence, is a very Buddhist thing – no attachments, and full acceptance that it will end, sometime. Along the way we make it point to have as much fun, excitement, new experiences, passion and joy we can. We don’t worry about the consequences and we have no expectations of the outcome. Traditionally, with Summer Love we are not imagining who we’ll invite to the wedding by the third date – unlike, admit it, the non-summer soul mate season when a third date inspires thoughts of "this could be it!"

For all you girls at heart, I suggest a break from seriousness, and a fling with lighthearted love. When you take the charge off finding the perfect love, and are willing to indulge in a little carefree romance, you will be surprised how much easier it may be to see love and relationships in a new light that supports your long term goals.

I asked some friends to remember Summer Love. Most of them remembered it as being that magical summer fling in camp, in a resort community, or during the last vacation they took with their parents. Back then, daring was French kissing beneath the moonlight, and staying out past midnight without permission. But there is no law that says we responsible, grown up soulful females can’t have our own adult version of summer love.

Just consider it Advanced Summer Love, and consider yourself duly entitled to as much passion, romance and fun as you can muster. "The whole point is to be caught up in the romance and the heat of the moment, and to be spontaneous," recalls my friend Charlotte, for whom Summer Love was a prerequisite to college. "There are a lot of spur of the moment adventures. You don’t mind if he shows up unexpectedly at midnight – you love it. At any other time, if a guy shows up without calling, you break up with him for being invasive! In fact, you don’t mind anything he does. Time is short and nit-picking and trying to transform him into the perfect man is just not an issue."

Imagine what could happen to our love lives if we approached them from this Summer Love perspective: We’d be in a state of surrender, which would make it a little easier for True Love to find us. In winter, our potential soul mates have to battle the winter bulge of the armor covering our hearts, and slay the dragon of our mindsets that says perfect love must look, behave and feel a certain way. In the state of Summer Love, we are lighter and airier!

Here are some guidelines for Advanced Summer Love

1. Pencil in ROMANCE in big red letters across your calendar for July and August. This will be your first symbolic gesture to the universe that "yes, I am getting that loving feeling and I am opening to my Summer Love."

2. Get into "summer love consciousness" and include it as part of your spiritual practice. Meditate, pray, visualize, and daydream about hot and passionate summer days with an oh-so-special Summer Lover.

3. Be spontaneous and gain some mastery over your issues about control and surrender. Learn to go with the flow.

4. Use this list of the qualities of your ideal summer love and read it every day for the next thirty days; add in your own. By the time July rolls around, true summer love will be getting closer!

Be sure to include on your list these essential summer love qualities. (I’ve used the pronoun "He," but feel free to adapt to your needs). Your Summer Love:

  • Glances at you in a way that makes you feel you are the only two human beings on the planet.
  • Communicates passion and appreciation with stunning force.
  • Can dissolve all your concerns and worries, as well as inspire the ole’ "insidious ache" with just one kiss.
  • Is a breath-taking hunk of handsomeness and sexiness in your eyes, with a body and manner that makes you want to surrender to love.
  • Has a master’s degree in sexual healing, Tantra and the art of love.
  • Is so passionate, romantic and alluring that even if your favorite movie star called for a date, you wouldn’t leave your Summer Love?
  • For an entire summer he is yours – body, mind and spirit – and your are his, and you revel in your own vulnerability and willingness.
  • You have frequent out of body experiences in his presence.
  • You really like him a lot
  • He will say, more than once, "You are the most beautiful (sexy, gorgeous, etc.) woman I have ever seen," "I love the your spirit (soul, who you are, etc.)," "Let’s do it somewhere different tonight!"

Remember, it may seem like a summer fling, but Summer Love Consciousness is actually an educational experience. True, you many learn new things about the human anatomy – on beaches and in beautiful natural areas – but you will also learn how to lighten up about love and expectations. Summer Love Consciousness is a state of mind you can enter any time… your soul mate will ultimately be ever so happy to meet you there, in the land of carefree abandon, where love can speak for itself and have a chance to grow.

Everyone has a favorite summer love story. what is yours?

Everyone has a favorite summer love story. What is yours?


© Copyright 2001 Reverend Laurie Sue Brockway  All Rights Reserved. 

 

Read Reverend Laurie Sue's Current Column


Read Reverend Laurie Sue's Past Columns:

May 2001 - "Someday Your Mystical Soul Mate Will Come"

April 2001 - "Enjoy the Merriment and Fun of An Ancient Love Holiday"

March 2001 - "Nourish Yourself On a Date for One"

February 2001 - "Get Ready for Soulful Love"

 

Reverend Laurie Sue Brockway is an author, teacher and contemporary clergy person who specializes in matters of the heart and soul. As an ordained interfaith minister and non-denominational wedding officiant, it is her honor to regularly marry couples in love. Prior to becoming a minister she enjoyed a successful and colorful 20 years in media as a widely published journalist, editor and author of eight books on relationships and romance—as well as being a noted spokesperson on those topics. She was editor-in-chief of two national magazines and several regional publications, and her articles have been published around the world and in many newspapers and national magazines, such as the NY Daily News, The Washington Post, Women’s News, New Woman, Ladies’ Home Journal and Child. She evolved years of specialized reporting in the field of male-female relationship dynamics into a more spiritual pursuit that led her to train to be an interfaith minister, and then establish her wedding ministry along with her popular relationship enhancement programs.

She continues to write on weddings, soul mates and enhancing relationships, as well as teach on those topics. She's on the faculty of The Seminar Center and MyPotential.com. and trains other ministers through World Light Fellowship. She is a graduate of the New Seminary and a member of The Association of Interfaith Ministers. Her wedding ministry is based in New York.

 

Visit Reverend Laurie Sue at:
www.weddinggoddess.com


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