How do you align with your vision for love and call it into your life? What’s holding you back from experiencing what you want? Whether you’re single and looking, or in a relationship and wondering what’s keeping you from making it even better, today’s episode is for you. Our guest is my friend, colleague, and mentor Katherine Woodward Thomas, bestselling author of Calling in The One and the New York Times bestseller Conscious Uncoupling. In this conversation, Katherine and I will take you on an inner journey, so that you can uncover your unconscious blocks to love and magnetize yourself for attracting exactly what you want in your relationship. She’s also about to launch a new training for Calling in The One coaches, which we’ll talk about towards the end of our conversation. Katherine Woodward Thomas’s work is profoundly transformative - something that I’ve experienced personally, and I’m delighted to be able to share it with you so you can experience it for yourself.
And, as always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you.
Join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it!
Resources:
Check out Katherine Woodward Thomas's website
Read Katherine Woodward Thomas’s Books - Calling in The One and Conscious Uncoupling
FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide
Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE)
http://www.neilsattin.com/kwt4 Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Katherine Woodward Thomas
Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out
Transcript:
Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. Today, we're going to have another very special visit from someone who's a friend, a colleague, a mentor, and an amazing teacher in the world around love.
Neil Sattin: She's been on the show three times before to talk about making space in your life for love, overcoming your barriers for love, how to get over heartbreak, and pain, and how to transform some of the beliefs at the core of who we are, the negative beliefs that get in the way of us, experiencing love and relationship the way we want to. Her name is Katherine Woodward Thomas. If you're interested in hearing any of her other episodes with me, you can visit NeilSattin.com/KWT. That's for Katherine Woodward Thomas, and you can do KWT, KWT2, and KWT3. That will take you to all of her episodes with me.
Neil Sattin: Today, we are going to hone in on her work around 'Calling in "The One". How do you find love within yourself and in the world around you? Now, this work is especially important if you're single and looking for a relationship, and wondering how to find someone who aligns with you, aligns with your values, and also aligns with having a conscious relationship. At the same time, this work ... I work a lot with couples. In fact, mostly with couples, and I'm always recommending Katherine's books to them because there's so much in Katherine's work that transforms who you are and what you're able to bring to a relationship, so even if you're in relationship, this will help maybe right the course if things aren't quite right or if things are getting stagnant, this will help inject some new life into it.
Neil Sattin: This conversation is also for you. Everything we talk about will help you breathe more energy into your connections, and figure out what within you is potentially contributing to whatever it is that's going on. I think that might be enough from me. We're going to have a detailed transcript of today's episode, and to download it, all you have to do is visit NeilSattin.com/KWT4. Just keeping with the theme there, or you can always text the word 'Passion' to the number 33444, and follow the instructions.
Neil Sattin: Best-selling author of 'Calling in "The One"', New York Times best-selling author of 'Conscious Uncoupling', Katherine Woodward Thomas, it's so great to have you here again on Relationship Alive.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: It is a delight to be here with you again, Neil. Thank you so much for inviting me back.
Neil Sattin: Always a pleasure. Great to talk to you. I wanted to start with a quote of yours actually. This is something from 'Calling in "The One"', and it's toward the end of the book, so apologies. Spoiler alert.
Neil Sattin: This is what you had to say, "We have it backwards. We want to have love so that we can do loving things so that we can be loving, but the opposite is true. We need to activate an experience of expanding our hearts to feel love", in other words, being, "And then behave in loving ways, doing, so that we might draw toward us those things that create more love and fulfillment, having. Rather than have, do, be, which is how most of us are trying to create our lives, it's actually be, do, and then have." We got it reversed, and of course, that's what brings so many people into relationships that ultimately need help, right?
Katherine Woodward Thomas: For sure, that we're looking outside of ourselves for that other person to make us happy. They need to change for us to be okay, absolutely. It's so automatic to who we all are that we go outside of ourselves first, and I think the radical nature of 'Calling in "The One"' is that it is from the inside out, and we are always looking to align our consciousness with that which we are wanting to create, and so we do things like take radical personal responsibility for how we're the source of our experience. We also look to clear away anything that's inconsistent within us that would get in the way of being able to have what it is that we're wanting to manifest. I mean, they're really truthfully basic laws of manifestation.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I've had a lot of people do the 'Calling in "The One"' work, and then apply it to many different areas of their lives in order to manifest what it is they're really desiring in their heart to create, and haven't been able to up until now.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. That reminds me of a passage. I think it's somewhere in the middle of the book where you're talking about a relationship that you had that went wrong, and where you went away on retreat, and on retreat, had this epiphany that I think you were like hanging on for, hoping for some sort of retribution around a hurt heart. I think you had a business together with this person, and you had this vision of like, "If you're able to let go of this, then you're going to get all that's coming to you."
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Actually, what I heard in that moment ... If I told you guys the story of what he did that had me so backed up and unable to forgive him in that moment, I get everybody all riled up and they wouldn't like him too because we all have our stories, and people actually do behave badly, and they do things that end up hurting us both consciously and unconsciously.
Neil Sattin: Right.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: What happened in that moment is that when I declared that I ... This is back in the 'Calling in "The One"' beginnings where before 'Calling in "The One"' existed as a book or a thing because it was my own process, and I had made this deep commitment to be engaged by my 42nd birthday. I was 41 at the time, and I had no prospects for a husband, but I began to ... It was only eight months away, but I began to live into that future, really into the question like, "Who would I need to be being in order for that to happen?" It wasn't so much about going out to find love. It was about going within to release any obstacles, any barriers that I had built against it, and building up certain skills and capacities that I might have been missing my whole life based on things that I never learned when I was young that most people who are in happy, healthy, secure relationships do automatically.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I was in this ... My whole focus was on my own growth and development, and one of the things I was struggling with is that I had this resentment towards a man. He was my business partner, but also, I was involved with him romantically off and on throughout the five years that we worked together, and we were both very love avoidant, and we had a lot of push/pull, and it was very dramatic, and it was very painful, and then we would always have to come to work together the next day because we had this business together. It was torture. In the end, it ended up kind of just blowing up, and I couldn't get over what he had done and some of the things that I had lost and what it had cost me. I'm on this meditation retreat with Michael Beckwith, who some people know.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: He's a very well-known teacher of metaphysics, and we're in silence, and I was wrestling with the resentment because I knew that I did not want to bring that resentment into the next relationship that I created. I didn't want to punish the next person. I didn't want to be defended against the next person because of what had happened. I wanted to complete it, and so what I was wrestling with was, "How can I complete it when it devastated me so much, and it cost me, and it's so unfair?", and I heard this voice within me. We all have these images. It was my little burning bush experience.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: It was like I had this image of a host of angels around me that I felt kind of transported, but I think we all have our own spiritual perspectives and how messages come to us, but I heard loud and clear inside of me that as long as I was holding on to him for restitution of the debt that was due me, then nothing could ever happen, because he wasn't about to restore that debt to me. He wasn't capable of it, and what I heard was is that it's actually blocking the Universe from giving me what my due is, and that framing, where like, "Oh yes, there is a debt due me", but he's not holding that debt anymore. The Universe itself is holding that debt, and that gave me the opportunity to let it go. The interesting thing about that, Neil is that it wasn't until I was willing to just let it go and to not have him holding his feet to the fire like he needed to be accountable, and I just had more faith in the overall goodness of life, that everything you put out that's good will come back to you tenfold just as a principle. It wasn't until I let go of him that I couldn't see my part in it clearly until I did that, and then suddenly, I started to see all sorts of ways that I had given my power away to him.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: It became very clear to me why it ended up going the way that it did, that right from the very beginning, that there were ways that I was giving away my power, I didn't believe in myself, I didn't set up proper structures to take care of myself, and that was a huge lesson to me, to not give my power away to anyone ever again like that. That changed me, because with that understanding, I had access to then doing things differently in the future. Now, I wish I could say I did it perfectly and I never ever, ever gave my power away to anyone ever again, but at least I knew that how I had co-created it and that this is actually my thing to deal with, and that the amends that needed to happen was the amends I needed to make to myself, and I think that we're all a little bit like that. I think that we're so busy pointing the finger at other people that it's very hard for us to see our part, but without seeing our part, we don't know how to grow and to change in the ways that we would need to in order to have great happiness and love.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. You mentioned in the book ... In fact, David Burns, and then I think you read something that he had written that, "The number one determining factor of happy, satisfied couples versus dissatisfied couples was in the dissatisfied couples, they blamed each other, and in the satisfied couples, they were focused on taking responsibility for themselves."
Katherine Woodward Thomas: This is why a lot of people who were even in relationship and married, even though the 'Calling in "The One"' work is specifically for people who want to call in a great love, if they want to renew their relationship, they'll come do the work because these are very core foundational teachings about how to have our relationships flourish and thrive.
Neil Sattin: I want to just mention quickly the book, 'Calling in "The One"'. The subtitle is, '7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life'. One thing that I think is so great about the book is that it is broken down into seven weeks with a lesson per day, where you read a little bit, you do a little work. It's not like this monumental thing that you have to take on. You can just one chunk at a time work your way through, and in the process, discover all these things about yourself, transform all these aspects of yourself, and it's all work that you're doing within by just going through the book, so I just appreciate how well you lay that out and made your work very accessible for people going through it.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Thank you, Neil. I mean, I'd really like to backtrack and even share about how that got created if you don't mind.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. Sure, and then I have a good juicy question for you, but go ahead.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Okay. Would you want to give me the juicy question and I'll leave in the answer?
Neil Sattin: Okay, juicy question. You were talking about the ways that we contribute to the situations that we're in, the ways that we give away our power, and yet, it can be so hard to see ourselves to really get an objective view of how we're doing those things, so I'm wondering if you have some insight on how to get that perspective on the things that we do that are the way that we're contributing to how our life unfolds in ways we might not want.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I think that's a fabulous question. You're right. It's very juicy. The short answer, and then it does kind of lead into my story here, but the short answer is that I think the way that we're trying to figure out how we're giving away our power contributing is by analyzing ourselves.
Neil Sattin: Great.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: We're going back into the past, and we're ruminating over what happened and what the story of that missing development is, and we're getting a little stuck in the quicksand of understanding and insight, and we're too far away from having a breakthrough or an actual shift in a relationship - that happens when you really do understand yourself as the source of something. First of all, it begins with the willingness to just say, "Okay. How am I contributing to this dynamic? What are the ways that I'm showing up that are giving someone permission to treat me badly? Is there a way I'm treating myself badly? Am I enrolling them into an old story covertly outside of my own conscious awareness?"
Katherine Woodward Thomas: "Who am I being in relationship with this person?", so the willingness to just even explore and begin to ask that question is what I think is a radical practice. I say radical practice because we are so programmed to project blame onto the externals, and we so think that other people are just the way they are. They're just fixed and they're never changing, and there are subtle ways that we are contributing to every single dynamic that's troublesome for us. It can be as simple as we pull our energy in, and we start to hide, we disappear ourselves when somebody disappoints us, or we don't ask the questions that would lead to clarity or set our boundaries. We fail to set boundaries because we're lacking the courage to disappoint someone or risk having someone be angry with us. We have to look at those and confront those ways of being straight on, and ask ourselves of course, "What's motivating that behavior?"
Katherine Woodward Thomas: This whole approach from the inside out ... Excuse me. I have a little tickle in my throat here, but this whole approach to the inside out is actually the core of the 'Calling in "The One"' work, and I love to share the story about how it all began because I was always a person who struggled tremendously in relationship. I had a pattern of unavailable people. I would always get involved in triangles, like people had other people in their lives, they were married, they had some incomplete relationship somewhere where they were tied up somewhere else, or it could have been workaholism or alcoholism, or just one impossible love after another was what made up the bulk of my love life for most of my 20's and 30's, and there was consequently either a lot of drama, a lot of pain, and a lot of resignation and disappointment for me. I felt confused about that.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I'm a very spiritual person. I had done years of inner work on myself. I was in therapy by the time I was in my mid-20's, and then I was in 12-step programs for years, and then I did all sorts of transformational work, and eventually, I became a therapist, and I still was helping people to have great love lives and had learned a lot of things intellectually, but I was still struggling. I would come home every night to an empty apartment with my little kitty cat, Clover, and I was just kind of heartbroken about it actually because I always wanted to have a family. It wasn't until I was in my early 40's that I started to learn about the power of setting intentions, and I began to learn about the metaphysics of generating a future that's unpredictable or unprecedented, which means that you're able to break lifelong patterns and lean into a particular possibility that was never going to happen unless you began to declare that future as your own and lean into that future and claim that future, and then, live backwards from that future.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: What I mean by that is you begin to ask yourself the question, like, "Who would I need to be?", "What would I need to let go of?", "What would I need to begin to cultivate?", "How might I prepare myself?", so you become very interested in the inner transformation. I think Dr. Joe Dispenza has a quote, which I'm probably going to butcher right now just off the top of my head, but he says ... I think it's something like, "You can't create a new future with the feelings of the past", and most of us are walking around filled with the emotional set-point of the past. We have tendencies towards depression, or our bodies are a little hiked up from the traumas we suffered long ago, so we go easily into a certain anxiety state or really, the kind of residue from the core consciousness that we formed in response to the wounds of the past, "My father left", or, "My mother worked full-time and neglected me", or whatever that situation, or, "My big sister picked on me", or, "My big brother abused me", or, "I was always left out. I was the one ..."
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I mean, we all have these variations of the theme, but there's a core consciousness that was formed in response to what happened, and it was a story that we crafted about ourselves, and that story has an emotional center, "I am alone", "I am not wanted", "I am unsafe", and that tends to be our default center when we get disappointed, or frightened, or overwhelmed, we'll wake up to it in the morning. It becomes kind of that unwanted companion in our bodies that resonates in our body. That's what Joe is talking about when he says, "You can't create a new future with the feelings of the past", so when I talk about creating the future, you declare. You make a declaration like I did, "I'm going to be engaged by my 42nd birthday", and then, I needed to become the self of my future, and that was a very full process. "Who would I be being?"
Katherine Woodward Thomas: "How would I be showing up? How would I be feeling?" It goes back to the quote you were saying before. "What does it feel like to have love that is sane, that is stable, that is kind, that is secure, that is inspiring?" Like, "Who am I in that love, and what is inconsistent in my life right now that I need to release that doesn't match that version of me?", so is this process of transforming from the inside out.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I set this intention. I was scared to do it. I had a bunch of friends who were setting intentions for themselves too and we were tapping into the collective field, which is really now being documented by Lynne McTaggart. She came out with a book recently, 'The Power Of 8'. 'The Power Of 8' is all about this collective field that when we share our intentions with each other, we hold those intentions.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: We hold each other accountable even to living inside of those intentions, that it expedites the process of transformation and manifestation. I didn't know that at the time. I didn't know the science, but I did have a group of friends, and we were doing it together, and I began my day, every morning with just asking, "What would I need to give up. Who would I need to be being?", and feeling into that, and imagining that future as though it were happening right now. This is the other answer to your juicy question.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: When you ask life these questions, like, "What would I need to give up?", or, "What would I need to grow within me in order to have the fulfillment of my desires?", my experience is, is that you get pretty hit over the head with the answer, that you will suddenly start to see things or hear things, or people will say things, or chance meetings. You will just get all the information that you need, and so I started to follow the gum drops in the forest, and I saw a ton of things that I needed to let go of. Rather than run out to try and find love, I actually went within to look at all of the barriers that I built against it and to also begin to lean into that future on an emotional level, and to become the person that I would need to be. That was where my focus was. I barely had time to date actually, which is really funny because I was pretty consumed.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I don't mean to keep talking. I have so much to say. Sometimes I'm like you wind me up. I want to get to the story, but I just want to take a breath to see if there's anything you want to say.
Neil Sattin: Wow. Thanks, and I've been enjoying. You're on fire, so that's great. One question that popped into my head, just something that I love as an addendum to the questions you were mentioning is, "What would I need to be willing to experience if I were going to live into that future?", so as a way of uncovering maybe those blocks of, "Oh, right. I'd have to be willing to, let's say confront my fear that someone won't actually love me the way I am", or any number of things like that.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I think there is. There's a turning toward the obstacle. There is an engagement, like an inner dialogue. An example of that is that once I ask these questions, I started to get answers, and one of the things that I saw when I said, "Okay. It feels like it's just happening to me, all these unavailable people." Consciously, I really want relationship.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: "How might I be the source of my experience that all these unavailable people keep showing up?", and of course, leading them to the question, "How am I unavailable outside of conscious awareness?" One of the things that I remembered when I was sitting there on this, almost like, not like a mental memory, but a somatic memory when we get flooded with a certain emotion, and I remembered being 10 when my father, who I loved with all my heart, he'd been divorced from my mother for many years, and they've had a lot of tension, so there was like a background to why he chose to do this, but he basically gave up parental rights to my mother without saying goodbye, and I just found out because my mother reported it to me, and then left the room.
Neil Sattin: Wow.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: It was so devastating. It was such a defining moment for me, and I think outside of conscious awareness in that moment, I made a decision that no one was ever going to hurt me like that again, and so what I realized in that moment is that for all these years, what I had been doing is creating drama and substituting it for love, just so that I could be saved, and then I wouldn't really have to surrender to someone. When I understood that it was kind of a very primitive way of trying to protect myself, I remember that I'm an adult now, and that I have other tools to protect myself, but I got to ask myself the question, "Katherine, sweetheart, is it really worth love to you to keep this wall up?" Of course, the answer was no, and so I was able to have a dialogue with myself where I said, "You know, I think that there is a risk to loving someone, even if you love the safest person. They could pass away."
Katherine Woodward Thomas: We don't get that kind of guarantee in this lifetime, and I think that we're strong enough, and wise enough, and we have enough resources that we could handle that, and so I was able to renegotiate that within myself where I became consistently, all parts of me became available to love. This was the kind of thing I discovered like the resentments thing that I shared about my former business partner, clearing that, or the agreements that we've made with ourselves. That was really an agreement I've made with myself. Sometimes we make agreements with God. One woman I know was keeping her marital vows because she got married in a Catholic church, and she was Catholic.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: She'd been divorced for 10 years. Her former husband was already married with children from within another relationship, and she hadn't had a date in 10 years, and she couldn't figure out why, and we were able to track it back to - She made this promise to God that she would only love this one man, so when you make these things conscious, then you get to say, "Oh, wow. That makes so much sense. Can I talk to God and see if I can renegotiate that agreement?"
Katherine Woodward Thomas: "God, can you come over for tea? I need to tell you something."
Neil Sattin: Right. Right, because it's not a matter of just realizing those things, and then just abruptly being like, "That's silly. I'm not going to do that." I don't think it works that way, that there is this process of allowing you to shift, but also to maintain your integrity. That's so important.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: It's so true what you're saying, Neil, and I think we have to take the time once we name something to renegotiate it and rethink it, and not just leave those tender parts of us behind, because the part of her that made that vow was so sincere, and so trusting, and so believed in that promise. The part of me when I was 10, I was so tender and so vulnerable, so it's not like we just dismiss it as stupid. We want to go back and pick those parts of us up, and say, "Sweetheart, I understand why you did that, but it's not really kind anymore, and it's not really appropriate, and this is what we're going to do now instead, but I've got you. I'm holding you, and I've got you." There were other things ...
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Also, another thing ... Gosh, there's all sorts of things I discovered on that meditation cushion too, Neil. I've discovered another thing that I call 'Toxic tie beliefs', when you're in relationship with people that is kind of based on a dynamic of you giving your power away in order for you to stay bonded to that person. A lot of us have these kind of toxic relational dynamics with people who matter to us - it's our father, or our mother, or our sister, or our boss, or somebody that we can't just discard, or even a friend that we've had for decades, so it's the ability to take back your power and be more authentic in the connection. There are a lot of examples of that, but just a simple one that shows us how much we can all do this is the woman who realized that she was very close to her mother and her grandmother, but the kind of the glue that held them all together was their disdain for men, and they'd always ... Her mother and her grandmother had married alcoholic, weaker men, and so they have this kind of matriarchal club.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Of course, she was in the club, but when she was doing 'Calling in "The One"', she realized, "Wow. I can't be in that dynamic anymore. I have to shift that. That's really toxic because if I'm in that club, and that's my way of belonging to my mother and my grandmother, then what does that say about the men that I'm going to be able to call in?"
Neil Sattin: Right. That would be the calling in the wrong one, of course.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Yeah. Exactly, which we've all done too many times.
Neil Sattin: Right.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Yeah. Go ahead.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. I'm curious because a thread that seems to bind a lot of these things together is something you said early on, this faith in the goodness of life, and it's something that I see a lot that holds people back from taking risks that you might need to take, whether it's going out on a Friday night or whether it's leaving a relationship that should have been left a long time ago, or there are any number of ways that we avoid taking risks because maybe we're not anchored in the faith of the goodness of life, of things turning out well. If you're looking with a negative filter, I think that's something that David Burns talks about. It's like if you look through a negative filter, then you can find all kinds of reasons why it's not true, but I'm wondering if you can talk about the process of someone finding that within themselves to anchor themselves in that place of, "You know what? I can take this risk."
Neil Sattin: "This is going to work out one way or another. I have faith that it will."
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I think we have to expand our perspective on what it is to work out. I love David Burns, and I think that that quote that you're talking about, if you're looking through a negative filter really is important, and I have something to add to it, which is that it's not just the negative filter.
Neil Sattin: Great.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: It's missing development. We're actually ... The simplest way to say it is to say, "is it safe to cross the street?" If you don't know how to look left or right, no, it's not safe to cross the street, but if you know how to look left and right, then yes, it's safe to cross the street, so the same for relationship. If you don't know how to say no, if you don't know how to repair breakdowns, repair rifts and breakdowns, if you don't know how to hold on to your autonomy, if you don't know how to self-sooth, if you don't know how to take personal responsibility, if you don't know how to generate intimacy, all of these things, then is it safe to be in relationship?
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Maybe not. That's where we get into a lot of pain - full of toxic patterns. One of the things that I was doing also was I was looking at, "What didn't I learn when I was young that I would now need to learn in order to have successful, healthy relationships?" It really goes hand in hand. We're not just clearing away the old baggage, but we're also needing to begin to develop certain things, skills and capacities that we didn't develop maybe because it wasn't taught to us or modeled for us in our home, but also, I think that when we came to certain conclusions when we were quite young, for example, the conclusion, "I will always be alone, and no one will ever be there for me", so from that place, we might not really have learned the skills of collaboration or the skills of conflict resolution because maybe we just assume that once there's a conflict, that's kind of the beginning of the end, and at that point, you just start to withdraw your energies, a self-protective move so that you can minimize the hurt that you might feel if someone rejects you.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: There's the limitations of that missing development - what's really creating a feeling that we can't trust life. When you say, "I have faith in the overall goodness of life, and I'm going to go out on a Friday night", basically, there's the faith that, "Wow. Something really lovely could happen. I could make a really nice connection, and if not, I'm going to trust that even if I don't make a nice connection or I have an interaction that doesn't tend to be fulfilling for me, then that's going to be an opportunity for me to learn something about myself that's inside of this journey of 'Calling in "The One"'." I mean, basically, what we're doing with 'Calling in "The One"' and when we talk about living from the future backwards is we're inviting all of us to begin to organize everything, every choice, every action, every interpretation we make of what's going on according to that future, so that there's no mistakes that can be made, and you can pretty much count on that you're going to get disappointed, because in fact, Joseph Campbell said, "Destruction before creation."
Katherine Woodward Thomas: If you actually set an intention to create something that you've never been able to manifest before, what is probably likely is the destruction of what currently exists, so you will have lessons, and you will have some losses, but they're not necessarily a bad thing. Some people come in and do the 'Calling in "The One"' process, and suddenly, within a matter of a week or two, they're at odds with people that they've been in relationship with for years because they suddenly see, "Oh, that the terms of this dynamic is that I have to keep giving my power away, or that it's all about the other person, or that I have to be a doormat, and that doesn't work for me anymore", so everything starts to get repositioned in your life.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of those patterns are so entrenched, and until you fully transcend that dynamic, nothing changes, and then once you transcend, I think everything can change like dramatically sometimes. Yeah.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Yeah.
Neil Sattin: I'm wondering, yeah, if we can ... I want to ask you just like kind of a silly question, and this is actually ... I mean, it's really not all that silly, but one of the questions I get asked the most by people who are single is, "Where do I meet people, or how do I find the person?" What are your thoughts on that question of like literally where? Do you think it matters whether someone's doing online dating versus going out into the world and doing things that align with their values as far as like how they actually meet people, and what do you think about that dynamic of seeking versus calling someone in?
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I think again ... Gosh, you just ask the best questions. I love being interviewed by you. Okay. Let me answer. There's two ways to answer that.
Neil Sattin: Great.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I'm sure there's probably 28 ways to answer it, but I can think of two. I want to answer from a 'Calling in "The One"' perspective, and then I'll add to it. What happened for me was as I was doing this, within a matter of weeks, a friend invited me to, or who was encouraging me, told me to get on a dating site. Now, that sounds normal to us, but this is 18 years ago, so there were no dating sites back then, but there was ... There was one.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: It was I think one of the first ones. It doesn't exist anymore. I was a little horrified at the idea because I thought it was so pathetic to have to not just be meeting someone in a supermarket down the aisle while picking out your cantaloupes, but I did it because I was coachable, and there were a quarter of a million people on the site, and I figured out the technology of how to put in all my stats and stuff, and it narrowed it down to I think from like 80 people, which is funny. It tells you how old it was because that was L.A., like 80 people meet my demographics in L.A., but I think there were other things too like my age group, or not smoker or whatever I'd put in there.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I'm reading through these profiles. No pictures. No pictures. No pictures because we didn't have the technology back then, believe it or not, so no pictures and just these handles like "two hearts beating as one" love handles and such, and one person just leaped off the page to me, and I just wrote a short, little email to him, said why I liked his profile, and then my computer froze, so I couldn't look at anybody else and I turned it off. I went to bed, and the next day when I woke up, I went to check my emails.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Back then, the technology was that if they want to write you back, it went right into your email, like it was you went email to email immediately, and so when I got his email, and his name was in parenthesis because that was another quirky, technical thing there back then, is that it actually had his name in parenthesis next to his email address, and it was a man that I had dated six years earlier who I had for years thought of as the one that got away, and that we went out and we ended up being engaged two months later, which was before my 42nd birthday, and we were married the next year, and then had our daughter.
Neil Sattin: Funny.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: To me, that was a miracle. That was the Red Sea parting really. I would have believed the Red Sea could part sooner than I would believe that I could find that wonderful man. That was actually why I created the 'Calling in "The One"' process because I thought, "Wow. What did I just do that created such magic?"
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I do think that when ... The first part answer to your question like, "Where do we go to meet somebody?", is I think that when you're ready, that the Red Sea will part. When you're really ready and you're standing in that magnetic energy, the Red Sea will part, and if you're not ready, you can go to all the right places, and it might not work out, or if it does, it will just do it for a short period of time because you'll end up sabotaging it. The focus of 'Calling in "The One"' of course is on the consciousness of that, however, I also as a person, have ideas about where to go to meet just because we live in such a global community, and I think more than ever, we have the opportunity to go to join communities and to attend events that really are reflective of our true core values. I think all the dating stuff is good.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I'm ambivalent about it like everybody else because of the fraud issues, and also because the manners of people seem to be really missing, and it seems to be that people have really largely ... We are culturally objectifying each other as opposed to relating to each other, so it's painful and it's wounding, but if you can not take it personally and you can understand that you're walking into a bit of a hornet's nest, there is definitely gold in there because there are people who are genuinely looking for connection and commitment, so I'm not going to pooh-pooh it, but I know that it's not for the faint of heart, and my number ... I was going to say my number one rule is don't take it personally, but my number two rule is be kind, please to people and don't take advantage of people, and try and be respectful and thoughtful, and remember that these are real human beings when you're on there, but I do think that it's about getting involved in things that you most deeply care about. I think that's the best bet truthfully is, because when we're looking at what really ... We've gone from role mate relationship to soulmate relationship.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: When we are looking at what it is that we are looking for in a soulmate, we're looking for someone whose mission is aligned with our own, and who sees the world in a similar way, a similar enough way that we can get up underneath them and trust their support of us, and then also be challenged by them because maybe they see things a little bit differently and challenge us to grow, but the fundamental core values and what you're called to in life are similar enough that you can join forces. That's going to be a more specialized community, and there's a lot of things virtually where people are doing things virtually and creating virtual communities, but there's also a lot of conferences or a lot of events that are happening with people who share our similar interest, and I think that those are the best bets for meeting people.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. In general, I think if you are literally in-person with someone, there's just so much more information available to you about how you connect with that person, that you're not going to get any other way when it really comes down to it.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I don't remember how you met Chloe. How did you meet Chloe?
Neil Sattin: Chloe and I met in a dance class that I had been going to for maybe about six months, and she had just moved to Maine from the West Coast, and she showed up to ... It was like maybe her first week even in Portland where we were at the time. She walked into this class, and we were paired together for an exercise. Totally out of our own control, and then from there, yeah, we just connected, and that led to everything that happened after, which listeners and you as well, Katherine have heard a lot about.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Wow.
Neil Sattin: Yeah, but it was being out there doing what we love.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly what I was saying. It doesn't have to be like you're going to travel to another city to do a conference. You just start taking dance in your community.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Get out to a class and do what you love. That's great.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. For some reason, this word popped into my head. I'm not sure exactly what the question is here, but the word is 'Settled'. Something like, is that a lot of people like they're out, and they have like this clear vision of who they want or what kind of relationship they want, and maybe they've even done some of the work from 'Calling in "The One""', and then there's this like, "This person seems so great, and yet, blah, blah, blah." They have their hesitations, and then there's this question of, "Do I settle for this or do I keep going? Do I keep looking?"
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Yeah. It's more and more an issue in our online dating culture because there's so many choices, and I think ... I'm trying to remember the guy's last name who wrote the 'Modern Romance' book, and this is what's his main point was, where he was ... He did this kind of ... I don't think it was a scientific experiment, but he started interviewing people in retirement homes about they met their mate, and they basically, most of them said, "Oh, she lived next door", or, "She lived down the street." They basically had four people to choose from in their community, and they were happy.
Neil Sattin: Yeah.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: That was what life gave them, and they made it work, and they were happy, and so we live in a really different world. I think the more that we understand ourselves, and the more that we know what's really most important to us, the more that we will be able to choose wisely and recognize the things that matter most when we meet someone. I think that few of us like the word 'Settled' or few of us like the word 'Compromise', but I think that there is the reality that we're all a little quirky, and we're all a little imperfect and a little crazy, and in our own beautiful ways, and even not so beautiful ways, but if you know yourself, you're not looking for perfection from someone else because you know you're not perfect, and we're looking for a certain quality to the connection. The more we can prepare for that internally and start to ask ourselves questions ... Like one of the questions in the meditations that I offer people are ...
Katherine Woodward Thomas: It's a desiring meditation. It's just asking yourself, "What do I want to be experiencing in this connection?", so we're getting away from that checklist like needs a college degree, or needs to earn this much money, or needs to be working out three days a week. We've got this checklist, but you can have somebody who matches all this checklist and have a miserable connection with that person.
Neil Sattin: Yeah.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I like to start with, "What are you experiencing?" "I feel at home with this person, and I feel really heard, and I feel safe, and I feel inspired, and I feel like I can trust them, and I feel like just this deep sense of happiness, and I feel held, and I feel like someone has my back." You want to start with that, like, "What are the emotional components? What are you actually experiencing?" Then, when you find somebody who makes you feel that way, you already have been cultivating that within yourself so you know that more.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I think we have to drop out of our minds a little bit. I think our minds are a little bit too busy with our checklists, and what we think we want to be happy, but I think it's more about being in our bodies and recognizing that what we're looking for really is a certain quality to the field of the connection, and in order to keep that quality healthy, it requires us to grow in certain ways so that we can weed our gardens on a pretty regular basis, which I think you're helping people do a lot too, Neil.
Neil Sattin: That's definitely a huge part of it, and I'm glad you used that word 'Growth'. It made me wonder about how you identify in another person whether they are along for the ride with you in terms of that capacity to grow and shift, and knowing that that's just going to be required when you're in relationship.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I have learned over the years that people do not accurately self-report.
Neil Sattin: Present company excluded, right?
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Present, yes. You and I are completely not in that category, that people will describe themselves as this and that, this and that, so you don't actually ... No. Do not take people at face value. I don't think that most of us are meaning to deceive other people about who we are.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I think it's a lack of self-understanding, so what I'm looking for is kind of early on in the relationship to see how somebody is able to reflect on why their past relationships have been troubled in some way. What happened in that dynamic and how they themselves were responsible? If you have somebody who's only blaming the other person, and when you ask them what was going on for them, if they tell you things that are, "I was going through a tough time at work", that are just kind of circumstantial or situational, or, "I just believe in the best in people, so I just thought it would work out", but it doesn't have a lot of depth to it, it doesn't really bode for deep self-reflection, then you can better assess where this person is on their journey and adjust your expectations and investment accordingly.
Neil Sattin: Yeah.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Yeah, but that said, then the later stages ... I mean, you have to just see what people do and how they solve their own problems, and if they're growth-oriented and they're thinking, if they take personal responsibility for things. I think there is a process of getting to know people that's really important, but sometimes, we want to know the one in the first date or two, but I'm kind of a little old-fashioned in my own sensibilities about it. I think it's better to not sleep together quickly. I mean, you definitely want to know if there's sexual compatibility and chemistry, but it also begins to cloud your perception, so I'm along the lines of get more information before you introduce sexuality into the equation.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, once the dopamine and oxytocin are flowing, your judgment is totally impaired. Yeah.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: All bets are off. Yeah.
Neil Sattin: Katherine, we could talk for hours obviously, and I want to ensure because this work that you're doing, you also train people to help others call in the one. You train people as Calling in "The One" coaches, and I think you have another training that's coming up really soon, so I wanted to give you a chance to talk about what that process is like if someone's interested in going through something like that to help other people find love.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Yes. It's actually one of my favorite things to do, is to train and certify relationship coaches, and whether or not people have been therapists. We have therapists, we have psychologists, we have social workers, but we also have what I call 'Lay people', people who come from other professions who've always just been that person that others feel comfortable telling their troubles to. The Calling in "The One" Coach Training was born really because the book came out in 2004. It's growing.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: We're just launching it now in China. There's a whole group of folks in U.K.. There's a growing group of coaches in Australia, and it continues to be a demand in United States and Canada, but also some other countries. I think Mexico, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is part of America, but ...
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Anyway, but the work is growing leaps and bounds. Finland, and ... Where is it? Also Estonia. We have a coach in Estonia now.
Neil Sattin: Wow.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: People are bringing the work to different parts of the world, and I do that because I see people as my partners in sharing this work with other people. The 'Calling in "The One"' work is life-saving for many people. It will melt away decades of painful patterns and help them to create a miracle in their love lives that they never thought would be possible for them. I have seen countless stories of people who felt hopeless be able to really awaken to their power to create this miracle of love. I train people to have professional careers as a Calling in "The One" coach, and there's a lot of things that people do with it.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: One person has a radio show now, one of my coaches. People write blogs and get articles written about them. They do their own interviews on podcasts, and they do groups in their communities, and of course, they do the one-on-one coaching, so it's pretty special. I only do a training every two years, and it's very hands-on. I am there with people.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: My senior mentor coaches are there with people. We really take them to the process. It's a really joyful training. Actually, it lasts about six months, and then in six months, people can start earning their living as a coach. People can find out about that and read more about it if they just go to my website, Neil, and I have information there for them.
Neil Sattin: Great. Your website of course is Katherinewoodwardthomas.com, and we will have a link to that in the show notes in the transcript. If you go there and you're not interested in the coach training, you can also sign up for ... Basically, Katherine has been sending out daily inspirations with ... As you can tell, she's got a lot to offer, so it's a great way for you to keep in touch with her, and her teachings, and other courses that she has that are coming out.
Neil Sattin: Before we drop the topic of the coach training entirely, I just want a chance to say some of you know that I've been through Katherine's Conscious Uncoupling Coach Training, and my experience of you, Katherine as a teacher was that you're just so present, so giving, and you have such integrity in what you offer and how you train people. I mean, that's why it's a six-month-long course that you're talking about. It's because you have just such a high commitment to the people that you're training, and my experience of that, it was so powerful. There are very few teachers I've worked with that have that level of dedication to the process of training others. On top of that, the work is so profoundly transformative for ...
Neil Sattin: It was for me as a coach, and I think that's another huge benefit of working with you, going through these trainings is that you get the personal experience of going through this process and having Katherine and her other amazing coaches. She has really great people gathered around her who are also helping you get the benefit of their experience to guide you through the process not of just becoming a coach, but going through the work yourself.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Yeah. That's right. Thank you. We have weekly support calls for people who are processing the material on a personal level. Thank you for that reminder.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Thank you for what you said. That really touches my heart.
Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the most powerful experiences I've gone through, was to go through that Conscious Uncoupling training programs.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Wow.
Neil Sattin: Yeah.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Thanks, Neil. That's great to hear.
Neil Sattin: Katherine, it is always a pleasure to have you here. I hope we can have another conversation for the podcast someday soon. In the meantime, you know that if you want to find out more about Katherine's work, visit Katherinewoodwardthomas.com. We'll have a transcript available for you to download if you go to Neilsattin.com/KWT4 or text the word 'Passion' to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. Katherine, I'm wondering if there's anything in closing that you, like if you just drop in for everyone listening, is there anything that comes up for you like, "Oh, this is the thing that needs to be said in this moment"?
Katherine Woodward Thomas: I think we've had such a rich conversation, and I just want to leave people with a sense of possibility, that this has been an area that you have struggled in, and if there's any way that you kind of dim down your hopes or just given up even entirely on the possibility of love for you, I would hope with all my heart that you come and find us because we can tell you countless miracles of deep happiness and love after painful patterns in the past, and you can really graduate from them. Your past does not determine your future in happiness and love. You do in this very moment.
Neil Sattin: I love that. Yeah. Just like past results in the stock market are not indicative of future earnings, past results in your relationships are not. You really do have that potential to grow, and change, and graduate to a new level of relationship. Katherine, thank you so much for joining us today. It's always great to have you here.
Katherine Woodward Thomas: Thank you, Neil. It's a joy to be with you.
Resources:
Check out Katherine Woodward Thomas's website
Read Katherine Woodward Thomas’s Books - Calling in The One and Conscious Uncoupling
FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide
Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE)
http://www.neilsattin.com/kwt4 Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Katherine Woodward Thomas
Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out
