In Love: Become Love, and Love Comes

By Michelle Rose

Do you wonder if you will ever have love?

Do you attract the wrong partners?

Are you scared to open up?

Love is not just for lucky people, and meeting your ultimate partner is no accident. The real rule to love is simple: love is drawn to love. Finding love isn’t a matter of looking outside of yourself, but rather discove

• Language: English
• Publisher: MIchelle Rose Glacken
• Release date: Jul 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925471229

Book preview

Foreword

by Robert Kirby, Founder of Heartfelt Relationships

As Michelle’s mentor and business coach, I have come to know her well and can see that she brings light, love and innocence to everything she does. She lives life with incredible passion, even in the face of the many obstacles she’s had to rise above to live her dreams and achieve her goals.

Through our professional relationship I have learnt many details about her family life, physical health, and history with men. Only a woman of tremendous purpose and vigour could have overcome what Michelle has had to, and I commend her perseverance and dedication to healing. She is deeply committed to live her life in love.

It makes perfect sense to me that only she could write this book. Her relationship with her partner is a testimony to her wisdom and a living expression of her aforementioned passion and purpose. I have met him, and like her he is kind, respectful, strong and heart-centred. Because she walks her talk and vibrates love, of course she has attracted a partner who does the same.

There are three insights in this book that have really stood out to me. The first being that if you want a beautiful relationship with another, or to attract the partner of your dreams, you must first clean up your own camp. You must learn to find love with yourself first.

The second was that our core relationship issues begin in early life. This is nothing new, however Michelle explains this with a fresh approach and through her personal experiences, which is a wonderful gift to the reader.

The third insight was very clear. Compromise in searching for a partner is suicide. I, too, know this to be true from my personal experiences. It is better to be alone, working on your relationship with yourself, than to be with the wrong partner. Michelle is very clear that relationship compromise is akin to selling yourself short or undervaluing what you have to offer. It will never work.

I feel privileged to have been able to work with Michelle and write this foreword for her book, In Love. Michelle possesses the vulnerability to reveal her deepest feelings, the humility to constantly search for deeper truth, and the personal integrity to patiently wait for the right partner in love. All of these things make her book a wonderful resource for anyone searching for a partner to meet them in their place of truth or wanting to reinvigorate the passion in an existing relationship.

I know you will love this little book of relationship gems as much as I have. It is a gift to the world, and so is the author.

INTRODUCTION

Will I Ever Have Love?

From 2007 – 2011, I was living in London and had been fighting an internal battle for years that was running my life. I was fully aware of, but unable to control, my destructive behaviours. I felt possessed. All I could do was witness my behaviour and shake my head as I sabotaged my happiness and success over and over again. An eating disorder, drinking problem, and addiction to work were not only ruining my quality of life, but also triggering embarrassing skin breakouts and causing my weight to fluctuate constantly. I should also mention that I was exceptionally generous to the point that I had nothing left for myself. Anything I brought in, I couldn’t give away fast enough. I tried to fight it, but each week felt like one step forward and two steps back.

My tipping point came in 2010 after leaving a tumultuous relationship with a man who was jealous, possessive, and physically violent. Heartbroken again at the age of thirty-four, I wondered if this had been my last chance at love.

As destructive and out of control as my behaviours had become, it was the deep fear that I would miss out on love that led me to finally seek out a mentor. I just couldn’t go through another heartbreak. I was done.

I knew myself, and I knew it wouldn’t be too long before I dated again. I was terrified that I would attract another man who would start out affectionate and devoted and end up dangerous and unpredictable. I became determined to make sure that never happened again, probably because I was equally determined not to stay single forever. I desperately wanted peaceful and fulfilling love. I wanted safety and vulnerability. I wanted someone who could support me and be the steady ground underneath my feet as I walked through life.

Cue my first mentor. With her guidance, I started to understand how any confusion or judgement I was storing from my past was still living inside of me and rearing its ugly head in my adult relationships. It was like a broken record that kept replaying whenever I fell in love, a little bit louder every time. This would happen until I went back to the original painful or confusing memory, and quite simply, understood it from all angles, rather than mine alone.

Love is a balance of light and dark, positive and negative. Yin and yang, if you will. When your subconscious mind is full of past pain and confusion you’re going to feel a little off balance, and so will be your experience of romantic love. The stuff you experienced as a child doesn’t just go away with time. It shows up in your body, behaviours, and relationships when you become an adult, so you can recognise it and heal it. When you do this healing work, you return to an internal state of balance, so you can open your heart without the expectation of being hurt. Then you allow your barriers to love to dissolve, so it can be drawn to you.

Interestingly, I was experiencing the same mistreatment from my ex that I was receiving from myself. It was like an extreme reflection of my internal state. Of all my lessons, I’ve found this one to be the most fascinating and also the most helpful. I use it to this day, almost every day. Here it is: whatever I didn’t like about my partners in love was a mirror of what I didn’t like about myself, of what I had to change in me. With this knowledge, I started to see my last relationship not as a disaster but as a goldmine of opportunities for healing. All I had to do was write a list of all the ways he used to hurt and frustrate me, and all of the judgements I had about him, and bingo! There was my list of all the stuff I was doing that was keeping me from love. Easy? No. Confronting? You bet. But I wanted love more than I wanted this list, so I got to work.

My mentor encouraged me to take up daily yoga as a moving meditation. Yoga started to bring me out of my head and into my heart. The work was happening, and my questions about life and love were slowly being answered. Light started to shine on my dark stuff, and like magic a new life path started to appear for me. There were gifts hidden in all of my big challenges, and I was finally starting to receive them. I was hooked! I became a student of my mentor, devouring every teaching she was willing to give me. The teachings were largely based on the spiritual psychotherapy text, A Course in Miracles, and that’s also a pretty accurate description of what my life started to feel like.

Totally inspired, I completed her coaching apprenticeship to guide others who were dealing with inner turmoil. My life began to rapidly change, and I experienced lots of mini miracles. My clients started to turn up without me even having to advertise. It was like I was supposed to be doing this work, and the universe was sending them right to me.

Since leaving London and returning home to Australia, my thirst for knowledge hasn’t been quenched. I’ve worked with four other mentors and coaches, and whatever I managed to embody, I now teach. In essence, I have created a five-step system for attracting and keeping your ultimate partner in love.

You’ll find each step explained upside down and inside out throughout these pages.

This book answers all of the questions that have kept my clients and myself up at night:

Will I ever have real love with an equal?

Is love even possible for me?

Why do I always have problems and pain in love?

Is there something wrong with me?

The tools I teach will uncover and dissolve whatever keeps you from having love. Through my work, I’m now certain that when we become love, love comes. I’m pleased to be able to share this pathway to love with you and to answer the question that used to keep me up at night: will I ever have love?

Spoiler alert: the answer is, yes.

CHAPTER 1

Quest For Love

I first fell in love when I was five years old. His name was Justin, and I’d chase after him desperately during Catch and Kiss. I don’t recall ever actually catching him, but I do remember the thrill of the chase and the excitement at the possibility of landing a kiss on him. It must have been so obvious when it was my turn and I would home in on him, not bothering to go after any other boy.

I was completely infatuated with Justin. Then one day his mother came to school to help us read, and me being dyslexic and shy, my worst fear was that she would be assigned to me, and I’d mess up my words and feel stupid. Of course, she was. The word because was my undoing. I was sure I’d never seen that word before in my life. I could hardly read another word and I froze. But she was kind.

I never did catch Justin’s heart, let alone a kiss. I eventually got over him but hadn’t yet learned my lesson that chasing love pushes it away, and putting someone on a pedestal makes it impossible for me to relax and be myself around them (or their mother). Until I learnt these lessons, the expectation of falling in love would forever mean excitement, hope, fear, embarrassment, and disappointment. Those exact feelings, in that exact order, would show up again and again every time I fell in love for the next thirty years. Confusing and frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it.

My next love interest was eight-year-old Toby. He was the new kid in school, and he had a single mum. I can still vividly remember the pinstriped suit and spiky hair combo he wore to the school dance. I danced so hard to get his attention, but he didn’t seem to notice. I went from being full of excitement to full of disappointment.

Then there was Aaron. We actually dated. Briefly. One day we were dared to kiss on the school playground. I was eleven or twelve at the time, and I’d never had an open mouthed kiss before. I’d only seen it on TV. Needless to say, it didn’t go so well. Aaron and I didn’t last, but like most young girls, my fascination with boys did, as well as my behaviour of chasing love outside of myself and it running away from me. The usual rollercoaster of emotions, of course, always seemed to come with it. Throughout my teens I rode this particular rollercoaster a fair few times, and it didn’t get any less scary.

Next up, Andy. At age twenty-three, he was my first real boyfriend. This was the first time I noticed that I became a different person when I fell in love. I just couldn’t relax and be myself. I didn’t know how and was sure it meant certain death (or rejection, which at the time was kind of the same thing). With my friends I was playful and confident, but when a man came along, that cool girl dissolved into a people-pleasing, timid semblance of me. In love I was outwardly confident yet inwardly terrified. I was always putting on a front and so scared of being found out. I oozed uncertainty, and whether or not he picked up on it I don’t know, but eventually he cheated on me, and I left heartbroken.

CHAPTER 2

Man From My List

Being down gives you a reason to come up again. You hit rock bottom and feel worse than you think is possible, but then suddenly you find the inner strength to shoot up again with full force and in full colour. This is (sort of) what happened to me while sitting in a café in Shoreditch London in early 2008, just before my thirty-second birthday. I was pulling back to process my life and feeling incredibly lonely, when suddenly my heart spoke. And it spoke loud and clear. It told me to write a list of all the qualities my dream man would possess. To get really clear on who this man I so desperately wanted to be with, actually was. So I wrote. I wrote that he would be powerful, devoted, handsome, fit, affectionate, decisive, and of course, taller than me.

Maybe it was my list, maybe it was my prayers, or maybe it was just fate. But in any case, he turned up in just two weeks.

I’d been living with four girls, which I knew wasn’t helping me find a man, so I started looking for a new place. Michał was from Poland, and he’d been living in London for four