In Search of the Holy Grail

On Co-creating Love with the Universe

The Holy Grail. Amelia Earhart. Bigfoot.

What do those three have in common with Love?

They all seem impossible to find.

The quest for Love is as universal and ancient as humans themselves. At the risk of overgeneralizing, most humans crave and seek out Love to varying degrees of success in their lives. I find this desire to live in the hearts of many of my clients, and just as they desire a healthy love connection, so do most of them carry the baggage and trauma that come from failed relationships in their past. 

This leads me to my inspiration today. I recently sat with a client, and after I sent her the recording from our session together, she replied to my email, asking if I knew how to find love, like the love her parents shared together. 

What a tricky question, and what a slippery slope! While the answer is anything but simple, I didn’t want to leave her hanging. I also wanted to capitalize on the moment with her, finding the chance to write this blog, as I know many people are in her position. I have been. I’ve yearned for human connection and love like anyone else, and I can speak from experience as to how to find it and maintain it. 

What follows are some techniques and concepts I’ve known to work, as given to me by Spirit. As with any gift, I want to pass them along here to others who may benefit from them. Before I get into the specifics of how this all works, I should share some background and context about myself and my own journey of love.

I came out of the closet in 2006 after playing the straight role the world told me I should. After coming out, I had a couple of years of rough relationships, with the most significant one being with a man who suffered from severe narcissistic personality disorder. I consider this the most abusive relationship I’ve ever been in, and when I was on the other side of it, I threw up my hands concerning love. I didn’t believe a healthy relationship with a healthy person was possible, so I committed myself to the single life. 

I remember this time of my life clearly. I was riddled with trauma, all that I’d picked up over the course of my life as a closeted gay man, and then with the added trauma my abuser heaped upon me. I suppose I felt as broken and unlovable as much as I felt a healthy relationship was unreachable. As anyone who’s been with a narcissist can tell you, a person can lose their whole sense of self.

So I didn’t want a relationship and swore off them, not thinking they were possible. I would commit to leading my life and caring for my son (the one I had while playing straight) without any concern for dating. I didn’t want to be hurt again, understandably. 

Yet, under all that trauma and pain was the desire to be loved and to love. During that summer of 2008, I can remember praying for perhaps the first time in my life. It wasn’t anything formal, more like a mental toss to the creating force of the Universe. I remember exactly how I put it: “God/Universe/Source, whatever you are, if you want me to be happy, could you send me a grease monkey? Could you send me someone who doesn’t mind getting dirty? Could you send me a farmer?”

How outlandish, right? In rural northern New England, what were the chances I would find a mechanic or a farmer that was gay? I’d asked for someone who liked to get dirty, as this was my way of telling the Universe I didn’t want anyone superficial or shallow like the last few people I’d dated. I wanted someone I could have adventures with and someone who wasn’t caught up in cosmetic pursuits of perfection. 

Finding someone like that, where I lived and worked, seemed impossible, like finding a unicorn…or the Holy Grail. That’s why I prayed, even informally: asking for something impossible from a force I didn’t really believe in couldn’t hurt, right? It wasn’t like anything was going to happen.

Two weeks later, I met my future husband at the farmers market. 

Finding the courage to ask him out was one of the scariest leaps of faith I’d ever taken, but one that worked out for me. After our first date, we’ve been attached at the hip, and this year, we are celebrating 16 years together and 14 years of marriage. I carried a lot of pain from my past relationship into that one, and only through the grace of my husband, who would love me through my healing, are we together. 

I bring that story up for a reason, and I hope you’ll find it useful if you’re searching for the Holy Grail that is love. With the context of our story provided, I want to lay out some useful and practical ways you can bring love into your life.

1. Confront your Beliefs

This may be the most difficult part of the process you’ll move through, and this is especially true if you have been traumatized by relationships in the past. 

First, we all have to be mindful of the stories we tell ourselves about love and how those ideas can be informed by what our parents and society teach us, along with the stories that society tells us collectively. We really have to take a deep, hard look at our views of love, what we believe to be possible, and what we believe we deserve. 

Our belief systems, more than anything else, will dictate our reality.

For instance, take the psychological and emotional belief I suffered at the hands of that narcissist I mentioned above. Not only did I believe I wasn’t worthy of love, I believed that a healthy, loving relationship wasn’t possible. I held these beliefs because of what my society taught me (being gay is an abomination, for instance), as well as what my past relationships taught me.

The Universe can throw person after person across your path, all ideally suited to you. Still, if you don’t believe that you’re worthy of that relationship or love in general, you stand a good chance of creating patterns in your life that reinforce those beliefs. If this happens, you may never see those ideal partners as they cross your path.

How do we rewrite our beliefs, though? Essentially, through fair and impartial examination, as well as repetition. First, it’s always helpful to unpack relationship trauma with a trained professional so you can understand it better. Second, it’s useful to rewire our brains about love. I also encourage everyone to tap into the part of themselves that would believe love to be something their loved ones deserve. If you don’t believe yourself to be worthy of love but believe that about others you care for, you can tap into that part of yourself, however small, that knows everyone deserves love. 

The part of ourselves that repeats unhealthy beliefs to us is the mind, and I firmly believe that our mind is a very useful tool. If not used correctly, the mind can very easily become a weapon. While I might be oversimplifying, the part of our mind that repeats back unhealthy and self-limiting beliefs is the same part of our mind that learned the ABCs and the English language. We can retrain the brain and its perspectives around love like we can learn a new language: with repetition.

That’s why I’m a firm believer in the use of mantras, affirmations, and repetitions. Repeating phrases to ourselves, over and over again, can be very effective in retraining the brain. This can include something simple like repeating, “I am worthy of love, every day of my life.” Coming up with a phrase specific to your own story and energies can be the key to retraining the brain around self-limiting beliefs. Repeat that mantra twenty times when you wake up and then again twenty times before you go to bed, and you’ll be amazed at how your brain shifts.

2. Envision your Ideal Partner

We’re all familiar with “red flags,” right? We can see warning signs in others that might indicate a lack of compatibility, and as we do, we identify them as “red flags.” How do we know what “red flags” are? Unfortunately (or fortunately!), the only way we can accrue wisdom is through experience; often, we can only identify red flags because we’ve witnessed them.

Knowing what we don’t want in a partner can help us discover what we do. 

If you’re someone who is searching for love, visualize what your ideal partner is like. This includes physical attributes as well as their personality. Do you want someone tall? Someone broad or slender? Do you want them to be funny, or passive? What kind of person would fit well with you and your life? 

Envision this person and what life would be like with this person. You may even want to pick up the magical practice of journaling from the future! This is a practice of using a journal to write out random dates in the future, describing the life you’d like to have in detail. Include random and insignificant dates and major holidays to detail what your life-in-love would look like. You can use this practice for any goal, not just romantic ones.

3. Pray

This part of the process is perhaps the most esoteric, and as I detail it here, please know this technique came from Spirit. I’m not sure why it works, but I can tell you that it does based on what I’ve seen in practice. Once you’ve confronted your beliefs about love and envisioned your ideal partner, you’ll take this next step.

Every morning, fill a glass with water. Find the window in your home that most faces East. For some reason, catching the morning sunlight is vital to this process. Also, ensure your glass is made of glass, not some other material.

Take your full glass of water and set it in the sill of that eastern-facing window. As you set the glass down, say a prayer for your ideal partner. It doesn’t have to be a lengthy prayer; it could be something as simple as “Source/God/Universe/Higher Powers, please open my roads so that I may meet my ideal partner. Thank you.” 

Keep it simple, keep it heartfelt, and keep it consistent. 

The next day replace the glass of water and do the same, after watering your plants or dumping yesterday’s water down the drain. I don’t know why this works, but it does. I’ve seen it work so well, and while I can’t guarantee results with this process, I’ve had multiple people tell me this works. So well, someone once frantically asked me what to do, as it had worked, and they wanted to keep the mojo rolling. I told them it would be appropriate for them to continue with the glass of water in the morning while asking to keep that relationship fresh and healthy.

I also believe that heartfelt prayer is another form of repetition that can help us confront our own blind spots and remind ourselves how much we’re deserving of love. It doesn’t require hours of prayer, but a simple, heartfelt prayer for love works wonders, especially once you believe you deserve it.

4.  Participate in the Quest

And now for the scariest part of your quest - the seeking.

Confronting our beliefs about love will require us to confront the stories and programs we’ve been conditioned with. These include what fairy tales and rom-coms teach us. 

Namely, we can’t wait for love to fall into our laps. We’re raised often believing that love will find us, if we’re “worthy.” Think of Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother or any other magical twist of fate in any story centering around love. If we believe in fairy tales, we’ll wait a long, long time for love.

Once you’ve 1) confronted your beliefs about love, 2) envisioned your ideal person, and 3) have a steady prayer practice going on, you’ll have to 4) participate in the quest!

What does this mean?

This means that you’ll co-create with the Universe. 

If your routine consists of going to work and going home, you'll find yourself waiting forever. It's even worse for those who work from home! If your routine is just work-to-home and back again, you’ll find the Universe doesn’t have many opportunities to place that new variable in your equation.

As we are all complicated equations, made up of random parts and pieces, so isn’t our life. Despite what life may have taught you, the Universe wants the best and most for you. When you’re fulfilled, balanced, and nourished on all levels - physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually - you become the best version of yourself, and that’s the version the Universe gets.

When you become the greatest version of yourself, that’s the version the Universe gets, and by extension, the Universe becomes a better place. Of course, the Universe wants the best for you. Most often, though, you’ll have to co-create with the Universe.

This process will definitely challenge the introverts among us. We have to participate in life, allowing the Universe to cross our paths with that ideal partner, especially if we want love in our lives. We have to happen to life, instead of waiting for life to happen to us, and when it does, when a potential partner crosses our path, we have to take the leap of faith and actually interact with that person.

We have to find our courage.

The Universe coughed up my ideal partner, and I found him at the farmers market in 2008. Once the Universe did that, though, I had to participate in that great equation of love by finding the courage to actually speak to him. If it wasn’t for the insistent encouragement of a co-worker, I may never have found the courage to ask him out. Fortune favors the bold, as it’s been said.

The Universe put the ball in my court, but I had to pick up the ball and dribble. I’m so glad I did because it led me to one of the greatest victories of my life.

And I’m still winning to this day.