Can you decide to attract love into your life or is it just one big game of chance? Yasmin Boland investigates.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a young girl went to a shop in Chinatown in Sydney and bought the biggest, baddest red paper lantern she could get her hands on. She went back to her apartment in Bondi, opened it up and hung it off the balcony, leaving it to be whipped by the ocean's breezes. She'd been told that doing so would bring love into her life. So she sat, she watched and she waited, as winds and rain slowly but surely ripped the lantern to shreds. And nothing happened.
That girl was me. I was in my early 30s and ready for love — or so I thought. In a book about how to feng shui your house for love, I had read that hanging a red paper lantern in the 'love corner' of my home (your 'southwest corner', if you're using easy feng shui) would bring love into my life. It didn't (but it entertained my neighbours).
So why didn't it? Because I was not yet in the right head space to find love. How do I know that? Because the next fellow I dated was a charming rogue who had serious issues with alcohol and fidelity. Anyone ready for a real relationship would not have chosen him!
So should you hang a red lantern in the southwest part of your house if you're sexy but single and looking for love? By all means, if you think it's going to work and if you're really ready for love. But if not, don't waste your time or cash.
Falling in love is about being in the right head space. I'm not talking about falling into a toxic entanglement. I'm talking about love — real grown-up, healthy love.
There are countless methods we can use to help get into the right head space. One of them is called therapy, aka dealing with all our issues, so that we can enter a healthy relationship with another healthy human being, regardless of what's gone on in our past. (Hey, we all have baggage.) Or we can use supernatural, New Age methods.
For example, if you know you're still hung up, or cut up about your ex, then you need to break with the past. Here's an exercise from my new book, Cosmic Love (Hay House, $14.95), specifically designed to help readers do just that.
The premise is that we can't expect to attract new love if we're still focused on the old. Even if you know almost nothing about the Law of Attraction, you probably understand that where we put our focus is what we get.
So every time you affirm that you loved and lost, you feel less loved and more lost — in other words you feel damaged. And relationships with damaged people are rarely healthy or sustainable.
An easy exercise to break with the past
1. Close your eyes and imagine your ex (or the guy you've been lusting after for too long) standing opposite you. Perhaps he's wearing the clothes that you adore him in most. He almost certainly looks as handsome as he ever did when you were together.
2. Imagine him beaming at you with a great big smile on his face.
3. Smile right back at him, no matter how much pain or hurt there's been. You're not here to fight with his image but to make your peace.
4. Now try to visualise a number of cords running between the two of you, keeping you tied to one another. These are known as etheric cords and are built up through the days, weeks and months, or even years of interaction with each other, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. We have them with everyone that we have a relationship with, but if you've given him more thought than is strictly healthy, you'll have a tangle of them. Every time you think about him now — or vice versa — you run another cord to each other. So, you know the old saying: "If you love someone, set them free"? This applies here and now. You are about to cut those cords. If he's meant to be yours, he'll come back to you.
5. Smile at him again, see him smile back, and now start to cut the cords.
6. You can visualise using your bare hands or a pair of golden scissors to do this. You can use an imaginary laser beam. Use a chainsaw if you need to.
7. Notice how easy or difficult it is to do this.
8. Notice how much you both know it needs to be done.
9. When you've cut the cords, smile one last time at your friend and allow him to float away from you, on to the next stage of his life, just as you'll now be embarking on yours.
10. Smile and quietly wish him well as you wave him off. Be happy that you've done this.
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