Articles
What Falling in Love with Yourself Means…Really
The Scene: A dimly-lit psychotherapist’s office in the West Village of Manhattan.
Here I am, on my first steps along the journey to become a licensed psychotherapist myself, engaging the role of client to “walk my talk.” The theme of this session is love, romantic love. I’m tearfully telling my therapist how excruciating I find duty-dating. I am so confused and heart-broken, really, that despite doing everything “right” my soul-mate is elusive. I sense this potential for so much more and bet (if you really ask her) Carrie Bradshaw does too. My therapist leans back in her chair and, then, thoughtfully forward. “Before you fall in love with another, Melissa, you must fall in love with yourself.” I nod in agreement and, with that, the session is over. I disappear into the city’s streets armed with insight yet no clue what “falling in love with myself” really means. The treasure is within, yes, but who’s discovered the map?
Today, as a Certified Calling in “The One” Transformative Coach, I’ve discovered that falling in love with yourself really is an exciting journey and, yes, it is a relationship. Let me explain.
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissaerinmonahan/what-falling-in-love-with-yourself-means-really
Portrait of a 21st Century Feminine Co-Creator
It was the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 and the elevator door is closing. The man beside me inquires, “Where are you going all dressed up?” Actually, I’m on my way to Starbucks and then a memorial service followed by a professional training around Feminine Power.
“Feminine Power,” the guy repeats with just enough frat-boy condescension to make my insides contract. “You mean chick power?”
With that, the elevator door arrives on the ground floor. My companion’s attention is already disengaged from (what would have been) my answer:
Feminine Power is the power of relatedness.
And it’s exciting how the term, as pioneered by my trail-blazing teachers Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas, is emerging as part of the lexicon. For so many of us, there’s a feeling of such relief and recognition in the naming of Feminine Power which, as you will see, is not for nut-cracking “chicks” in competition with men.
Feminine Power is being heralded as the answer to “the problem that has no name.” So what is this problem?
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissaerinmonahan/portrait-of-a-21st-century-feminine-co-creator
What is Conscious Uncoupling?
For a few months now, he’s been acting distant. The harder you try to draw him close, the more he pulls away. Last night, he came home and asked for a divorce. He loves you but, you know, he’s not in love with you. You could smell it on him. You just knew something was off. However, the to-do list of life has kept you busy enough to stave off this moment. What about the children? “Don’t worry,” he says. “They’ll learn to accept it.” The fact is: He’s fallen in love with someone new—someone else. Actually, he wants the kids to meet her. Disbelief, anger, fear, helplessness and, worst of all, validation of your worst fears seem to be staring you down, waiting for you to blink. How can this be happening to me? I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have been so loving—I have given so much.
For the quietly heart-broken and stoically walking-wounded, there’s an answer to whispered prayer and a sacred prelude to Calling in “The One.”
It’s called Conscious Uncoupling.
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissa-erin-monahan/what-is-conscious-unc...
When the Lover is Ready the Beloved Will Appear
Don’t pray to meet “The One.” 
Pray for the consciousness to recognize him (and he you) and to welcome him (and he you) and, then, navigate the relationship to its potential together.
The truth is most of us aren’t interested in calling in someone. Those attracted to the Calling in “The One” eight-step transformative process are serious about a holistic path of growth and development as the foundation for the greatest possibility of love and partnership in this lifetime.
We desire our very best life with our very best love.
The reasons for coupling in the 21st Century are evolving. The motivation for relationship is aligning with the deeper purpose of our lives. We sense the potential for something extraordinary: A life organized around each other’s spiritual becoming.
And then we experience the gap, sometimes a chasm, between our present self and who we’d need to be being inside a highest love-fulfilled future. So what are these gaps, exactly?
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissaerinmonahan/when-the-lover-is-ready-the-beloved-will-appear
Time to Woman-Up in Our Co-Creative Relationship with God
The year is 1986 and Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” is the number one song.
I’m in the fourth grade at Saint Mary’s, a Catholic grammar school, located just outside New York City. Planning the music for the upcoming school liturgy is on the agenda and the teacher asks: “What shall we sing?”
The consensus is clear: “’The Greatest Love of All!’”
The lyrics of the song are presented, illuminating with spine-tingling truth how we, the children, are the future and that learning to love ourselves is the greatest love of all.
The teacher green-lights the song but insists we change the lyrics to proclaim the greatest love of all is not, in fact, self-love but drum roll: God’s love for me.
I’ve reflected on this over the years while experiencing a gamut of emotions. It’s really no wonder that women, especially and collectively, believe a rescuer is coming to save them within an ultimately disempowering story. Resolutely, I’ve maintained the real God would have sung it Whitney’s way. Weirdly, though, this look-at-me throwing off the dogmatic shackles stance left me feeling, well, victimized and reactionary (like a little girl) by a culture that traditionally relegates females to the best-supporting roles on the divine stage.
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The Shift that Shifts Everything in Love and Relationship
It’s one of the biggest a-ha moments for my clients.
It’s the shift that shifts everything in love and relationship.
And it’s this: Men (others) do not love us in the way we’re loving them.
They love us in a way that mirrors the way we’re loving ourselves.
So let’s be real.
At first this can seem like a spiritual riddle—and easier peasier said than lived. After all, the lived experience is often one of deep confusion. We’re taught that it’s good and spiritual to be unconditionally loving. Nevertheless unconditional love and, say, the misguided absence of truth-telling and healthy boundary-setting are not the same. In the name of being loving, we may even find ourselves excusing away the poor behavior of others which translates into—not love—but self-abandonment in its many (Hey, I thought this was me being loving) disguises.
However, causing this shift that shifts everything is possible when we make the conscious choice to never, ever, love anyone more than we’re loving ourselves.
To read the full article, please follow this link:
Authentic Confidence is Divine
Are you familiar with the musical Les Miserables?
Growing up just outside New York City, I must have seen it on-stage at least a dozen times. As a teenager, the character I most identified with was Eponine whose identity of deep aloneness was captured in her soul-wrenching solo “On My Own.”
For kicks, I sometimes fantasize about coaching various famously tortured women inside of Feminine Power. The essence of this character called Eponine makes the list. For she would see (as we all must) that the source of authentic confidence is never about getting another to love us. Rather, it’s embodied the moment we make loving contact with our own divinely feminine self.
As Debbie Ford says, “The only time I felt secure and truly confident was when I was present to being one with God.
“I knew I was part of something so much bigger—me as a partner of that divine one.”
There’s absolutely no faking it. And the reason is simple: Authentic confidence is an expression of who we really are—rather than a reaction to who we’re not.
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissa-erin-monahan/authentic-confidence-...
The Four Keys to Self-Love Mastery
Understanding our deepest needs and taking responsibility for becoming the source of their fulfillment creates a relational field that is, simply, magnetic to great love.
Mastering self-love enables us to become a co-creative woman capable of true partnership rather than an insatiable little girl looking for love in---literally---all the wrong places. Self-love, at its very essence, means relating to ourselves in ways that reflect the deepest truth of who we are. And, as we awaken, we realize the foundational root of our suffering has to do with this lack of quality presence in our own inner world.
Key One: The first key to self-love mastery begins with creating a separation between our adult self and younger---or less developed---self that lives in our body. The adult self is the one who knows, without even thinking, how to be powerfully present with a lost child. The younger somatic self experiences life emotionally and often from a place of stunted meaning-making. Very often, these two selves have been collapsed.
Key Two: Secondly, we must bring these two parts of ourselves into meaningful, beautiful and corrective relationship. This involves the adult self turning her full attention toward the younger somatic self as a path of practice. This means consciously becoming that depth of presence the younger self has been missing.
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissaerinmonahan/the-four-keys-to-self-love-mastery
High Magic: How to Live (and Love) From the Future Backward
One of the most powerful and, yes, magical things we can do is live fr
om the future backward.
Despite our psychotherapeutically savvy culture (where session after session we, perhaps, feel like a perpetual caterpillar trying to wear a fabulous butterfly costume) the deeper truth has been there all along: Realizing our destiny is a developmental game.
And all the insight in the world (i.e. Ohhhhhhhhh I’m a caterpillar because this did or did not happen in my past) is never going to actually provide access to what we’re all yearning for on the deepest level of identity: divine transformation.
Sourcing our sense of self from the past (and even the present) is where we’ve all been getting stopped when it comes to birthing these potentials we feel ten months pregnant with. Much like an English garden, our potentials must be tended to, nurtured, watered and cultivated to truly flourish and thrive.
Still, the collective trance has been inside this somehow, out there, some way I’ll begin walking my destiny path. Later, uh, soon I’ll create an authentic (rather than the expected status quo) life. Yet the fulfillment of our potentials—our destiny—just doesn’t (poof) happen while waiting for outer circumstances to line-up.
Bummer, right?
Actually, no, our destiny (the life we were born to live) will never be found in accomplishments but, rather, in experiences that need to be generated through our own consciousness.
The good news: We are the co-creative source. And our consciousness is, in fact, the bridge between the un-manifest and manifest worlds. The essence of magic means to harness the forces of energy in such a way we are related to the unseen reality of life. And the key to unlocking a highly magical process, designed exclusively for planting us on our destiny path, is available to everyone, right here, right now. It begins with sourcing our sense of self from the future we are committed to co-creating and identifying with the unseen potentials of life. After all, it’s key that our consciousness is congruent with this future we are actually co-creating.
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissaerinmonahan/high-magic-how-to-live-...
Being “The One” in a Post-Carrie Bradshaw World
Are we faking entire relationships? Is it better to fake it than be alone?
It’s exciting how the motivation for love and relationship is evolving quickly as the archetypal Carrie Bradshaw, last decade’s quintessential cosmopolitan woman, can type those questions across her computer screen. In fact, a participant in my recent New York City-based workshop described her Calling in “The One” experience like this: “A modern-day Sex and the City with the idea to achieve and find the love of your life, but finding and loving yourself first…”
Our collective focus is shifting from finding “The One” to being “The One” as the foundation for not simply marriage (or even landing Mr. Big) but for a life where both partners flourish and thrive. Our role models for this kind of evolutionary soul-mate partnership are only just emerging. In the mean time, we are being called to develop ourselves like never before. What’s more, we are called to value being as the foundation for doing and therefore having (instead of the other way around.)
Imagine this: It’s your wedding day (or the day of your commitment ceremony, etc.) and your soul-mate is here, now. Without attaching to a particular way they look or sound, listen deeply to the vows your soul-mate is speaking to you. Hear them articulate the depth of their love, commitment and devotion to you. Really feel in your body the force of their presence and love…listen.
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissaerinmonahan/being-the-one-in-a-post-carrie-bradshaw-world
The Difference between a Want and Desire That Will Change Your Life
Nice girls don’t have big appetites.
Sound familiar?
You are not alone, for most girls hear some form of that message early on. We are literally being trained (and even shamed) out of our deepest desires from the very beginning. We make meaning that being “acceptable” somehow involves the strategic strangulation of the very life force called desire. Valiantly, we’ll try hard to be full on crumbs when it comes to our bodies, our relationships, our careers…when it comes to, well, our lives. And it’s costing us our unique expression and flourishing. It’s costing us the embodiment of our authentic selves. It’s costing us the realization of our highest potentials and, therefore, contribution.
Bottom-line: It’s costing us too much.
We are hungry. We are hungry for love. We are hungry for authentic relationships. We are hungry for creativity and expression. We are hungry for flourishing and belonging and community. And these hungers, these desires, are nothing to be tamed because they are right and holy and good.
Here is the difference between a want and desire that will change your life:
A want is an attempt to “fill” or “fix” a (falsely perceived) place of emptiness or lack within yourself while a desire is your deeper, divine, potential yearning to be expressed through you, as you, with you and for you.
Consider the difference:
I want to make a lot of money vs. I desire a flourishing exchange of abundance and quality of life for my gifts and talents.
I want to live there vs. I desire a home and community that nourishes as well as inspires me.
I want to get married vs. I desire a deeply committed and loving partner to share my life with.
Can you feel the difference?
There is one main key to becoming magnetic to our deepest desires: We must grow up. We must become radically self-responsible to develop ourselves and be the co-creative partner of The Divine (aka God, Life, Universe, etc.) instead of a child. That’s right, The Divine is yearning to partner with us rather than parent us. And we are not alone for our deeper desires—these feelings of being 10-months pregnant with extraordinary possibility— are actually the deeper potentials of The Divine seeking to be expressed through us, as us, with us and for us. The Divine actually needs us to feel into the desires of our soul. For when we turn toward these yearnings we catalyze that co-creative partnership in a very powerful way. And something miraculous is revealed: We realize, no, The Divine ultimately doesn’t support our futile attempts to fix the false identities (because nothing is actually broken) through the insatiable acquisition of this or that. Yet, when it comes to these soulful desires and potentials, The Divine is always, always, partnering with us in a very real way. Our lives are no longer about competitive survival but, rather, a creative flourishing that is naturally inclusive as well as expansive. We recognize the face behind every mask as one hungry to love, and be loved, for who they really are.
To read the full article, please follow this link:
http://www.consciousdivas.com/melissaerinmonahan/the-difference-between-...