Personal Growth

I remember hearing the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” by Bobby McFerrin and feeling instantly elated. The lyrics and melody were simple but made a lot of sense to me.

Dear Arielle & Brian,

I keep visualizing my soulmate and feel really open to him, and nothing is happening. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for your help,
Isabel

Dear Isabel,

Why would you assume you are doing something wrong? Opening your heart and life to manifesting a soulmate requires patience because when your will and God’s will align, that is what we call Divine Timing.

If you want to increase the amount of joy in your life, it has to begin with the way you love, treat and honor yourself. If you are reaching outside of yourself for people, things, food, drugs, alcohol or jobs to be your source of joy, you will be at the mercy of circumstance. Real power comes when you realize you can feel joy for no reason at all.

If you could attend a workshop with Gandhi, the Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King, Jr., you’d sign up just as fast as you could, wouldn’t you? I felt just as excited when I heard that Thich Nhat Hanh — a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, master meditation teacher and renowned advocate for peace — was offering a day of mindfulness near my home. The day-long program was put on by the Omega Institute at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, meaning all this Brooklynite mom had to do was arrange for childcare and get on the subway. Done.

The fall season is generally a time for harvesting crops. It is the time of year for seeing what has grown from the seeds that have been planted and then moving the harvest into storage for the winter. I was thinking about what I am harvesting at this time in my life, and what came is that I am harvesting a myriad of blessings.

Part of creating prosperity in your life is learning how to ask the right questions. Our early life experiences often lead us to focus on limited questions like these:

• How can I survive?
• How can I get even?
• How can I get by?
• How can I hide so nobody sees me?
• How can I get people to love me?

Perhaps stillness comes naturally to some people. I, however, am not one.

Dear Arielle & Brian,

I am reading The Soulmate Secret and doing the exercises you suggest. Now I am wondering, how many soulmates can we have in this life because I am feeling a connection and seeing more than one person as a potential soulmate? The bottom line here is: How am I going to know who is the one? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

There’s a lot of information about conscious manifestation, but hardly anybody ever talks about how unconscious manifestation works. Here’s the way it looks to me. Without realizing it, we draw experiences and people to us unconsciously and interact with them in programmed ways.

When my children were small, I would give them “time outs” to contemplate their behavior after a challenging experience. The intention was to support them in having time to gain clarity on the consequences of their actions. It didn’t always work, but it did support all of us in stopping for a short time to gain composure.