How it Began – 2019 is my YEAR for LOVE! 

Let me take you back to December 31, 2018.  It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m thinking about the year I just had.  

In 2018, I scaled my soul-coaching and e-learning business, left law after 6 years of practice, and had leapt into the great unknown, and great freedom, that came with finally being able to just focus on my coaching work and travel whenever I wanted.

2018 was a year I had to put dating on the back-burner.  It wasn’t that my romantic life was rendered obsolete, but I just truly didn’t have time for anything serious. 

Always matching what I was putting out, the universe matched me time and time again in 2018 with guys who were a lot of fun, but definitely also weren’t looking for commitment, or definitely hadn’t quite figured out who they were and what they wanted in life.

I finished 2018 thinking “okay, even though I couldn’t see it at the time, I totally didn’t have space in my life for a relationship until now. But NOW… I feel like I’m living my true purpose, have a ton of time and space to focus on dating, and can begin to open my heart to someone.”

As per usual, I wrote out what I was looking for, and moved forward feeling assured that the universe would deliver. 

Prior to this, the universe DID always deliver.  Every time I wrote out who I wanted to date, the romances I wanted to have while I traveled, the type of dates I wanted to go to, or the relationships I was looking for… the universe delivered.

I see how the guys that I manifested previously who matched what I “thought” I wanted and didn’t work out were all a lesson in me learning to get even clearer on what I wanted, learn to use my own discernment more, and….just were not at the right time. 

I assumed it would be as easy as it had been before when it came to manifesting my big love.

But then, the universe, right on schedule, decided to take me on a wild-ass 4 month journey to show me all the crevices in my heart that still needed to be opened, the limiting beliefs and blocks around that I was still holding, and to embody all of the lessons I had learned about love since I had been single. 

If you don’t yet know the story of “Chris” and how I found out that my soulmate’s name was Chris years before we met, and what that taught me about surrender, trust, and having no expectations… read here. 

The No Stone Left Unturned Tour

Soon after I said I was ready for an amazing partner to enter my life, the Universe thought it would be cute for me to meet back up with every guy who I had ever had some type of “what if…” longing or curiosity about. 

In the span of a few weeks, I was faced with exes, connections that never turned into anything romantic, or friends that I wondered it could become more with. 

In all of these cases, I need to “turn the stone over” just to confirm to myself that no… they were not for me.

I was excited! I thought that this meant that I was going to meet my person right after this.  I assumed this was the “final test.”  I was wrong.

Lesson 1: You’ll be asked to go through and review old connections, past loves, and do a deep dive review to make sure you’re not holding onto to anyone or anything. 

The Final Frontier – One Final Vacation Romance

I then left to go on a vacation with my family that I booked as a big celebration for having finally left law and created a real, live business. I would click drinks with my parents at dinner saying to them “soak in this vacation, because it’ll probably be the last one we do just the three of us.  I’m meeting my soulmate this year…”

My parents rolled their eyes because at that point I had been single for seven years, but I stood firm. 

Knowing this, I wrote out in my journal the type of romance I might want to have on vacation (who doesn’t love a vacation rohhh-mahhhce?!), or to meet my Big Love there.  The universe did, in fact, send me the person I wrote out who would be the best vacation romance. 

While he actually lived in Toronto and was just visiting too, he was a great person to hang out with on a boat trip with my parents, but a terrible person for me even think about dating back home. 

He told me that he had garnered the nick-name Good Luck Chuck because every single girlfriend he ever had immediately got married after him.  I told him “that’s great because I’m going to meet my soulmate this year…”

I hopped on a plane and got back home, feeling grateful for a little vacation romance and also feeling like my time being single really was coming to an end. 

Lesson 2: Your family and friends might think you are nuts when you insist that you are calling in your one, and you just need to be okay with their doubt and stay true to you. 

Lesson 3: You’ll start to feel, deep within you, that your time being single is coming to an end, or might get signs about it. 

New York City Calls to Me

After reviewing every single guy I had dated in Toronto, and then been confronted with every one that I had ever wondered if I should date, and confirmed that I should not, and coming back from a trip were I had what would be my very final vacation romance… I started to get this call to go to NYC. 

At that point, I knew to just blindly follow my intuition, so I booked a flight and left that weekend.  I had no plans, other than to be curious about why the universe had led me there. 

Lesson 4: You might be led to new places and spaces because there’s someone or something there for you.  Trust the callings. 

What I did know was that in recent years I had often hit it off with guys from NYC.  There were a lot of very ambitious, very fun, very adventurous hunks there, so I figured in the least maybe I would meet someone interesting. 

Speaking of hunks… in the 24 hours before my flight I started to think non-stop about this guy who I met five years prior. 

This seemed odd to me because… um… we met five years prior, in NYC, at a bar, and had barely spoken since. 

I had actually been dating a different NYC guy at the time (see a theme here?), but he turned out to be not that nice, and so that same weekend I went to visit him and it became clear we had no future, I pivoted my plans, went out with girlfriends and met this other guy. 

You know when you just have a really strong immediate chemistry with someone? This was past-life type stuff – just a knowing that I just KNEW him.  From a practical perspective, he also was just really interesting and I remember we got into the best conversation, which his frat-bro friend filmed and later sent to us (being like “why are you two so weird and obsessed with each other talking in this small corner all night?”). 

I left the bar that night and assured him – because I’ve always been the same spirit girl – that “if we were meant to reconnect we would, at the perfect time.  The universe would bring us back together.”

Over the course of 5 years, he and I DID try and meet up every time I was in NYC or work took him to Toronto… but it never aligned. 

He would happen to be away the one weekend I was there or his work meeting would run late and we couldn’t meet up. 

So the timeline is: we met 5 years ago, tried to reconnect for 3 years on and off, and then for 2 years hadn’t spoken at all. 

But then… on that flight to NYC I couldn’t stop him from pinging around in my head. “Should I look him up on Facebook…? How would I even reach out to him?”

I get to NYC and arrive at my hotel.  I have an intuition to open Linkedin (because – why not?) and see I have a message

The message is from the guy. 

“Hey – I know this may seem strange… but I’ve been thinking about you.  I see that you’ve made a change in career.  Congrats! I’m hoping to make one soon too.”

I proceed to mildly freak-out. 

“OMG BUT I WAS TOTALLY THINKING OF YOU IS THIS MAGIC OR WHAT!?!??!” is what I wanted to write. 

Instead, I wrote something way more normal that was along the lines of “great to hear from you! As chance would have it, I just touched down in NYC.  Any chance you’re around and we can finally catch up in person?”

As it turned out, yes he was.

As it turned out, he lived just down the street from where I was staying. 

I at that point, spiral down a sweet web of magic.

I am like – THIS IS IT. 

I let myself be blinded to the fact that I do not, in fact, know this person, and instead… get consumed by the magic of it all.

Plus, his name is Chris, he lives in NYC (where I had decided my soulmate lived), and he checks every other box on my love list. 

Lesson 5: The universe will give you versions that are SO close or exact to what you said you wanted to manifest in order to test you and let you learn lessons like letting go and how to practice discernment.  Just because someone matches your list doesn’t mean they are your person.  This was the fifth time the universe made me learn this lesson… I had trouble with this one.   This is also the lesson of trusting that the universe always trades up and that someone even better for you is around the corner. 

Chris and I meet up after work the next day and it’s the best.  We get into great life chats, stay for hours, and it’s weirdly like we’ve known each other forever, despite the truth which was that we had met once… at a bar… 5 years prior. 

I’ll not get into the details of what ended up making this whole fairytale come crumbling down… but it did. For those of you who are into astrology, you’ll be happy to note that this all happened over a very potent full moon eclipse. 

Exactly 48 hours later I would find myself once again seated across from NYC Chris 1.0, while he told me how he was conflicted and blah blah blah… and I decided that I needed to walk away, with grace.

There are words that guided me at that time by Nayyirah Waheed that go: “Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”

I verbatim told him that I was ON THE BRIDGE, and ready and open to explore a relationship with him, but if he wasn’t in that place and didn’t want to come and meet me at the bridge… that I would walk away and not hold it against him.

I also did tell him that I felt intuitively like this was the last opportunity he and I would have to explore our connection, as I felt like, if not him… that I was going to be meeting someone else really soon.

He let me walk….and I walked.

But honestly, I just felt so proud of myself.  I felt proud for being an adult, and like an adult, expressing from a really grounded place what I was looking for, the type of partnership I wanted, and that if he wasn’t in that place then I wished him all the best. 

The next day I was walking down 5th Avenue when I saw a new hunk and smiled at him.  He came up to me and we started chatting and then went on a date.  The date was boring.  I wish he was NYC Chris 1.0.

I flew out the next day.   My heart hurt. 

Lesson 6: True love is not for the faint of heart.  You have to be willing to be in the ring of love, dating, showing your heart, being fully vulnerable, fully open….and sometimes you’re going to be knocked down. Learn to let others go with grace if they can’t meet you where you are.  

Heart Clearing

The universe thought it would be fun that since my heart was already bruised by NYC Chris 1.0 that it should probably just be fully excavated while I was there. 

At the time, I was learning about openness, grace, and resiliency. 

I had a healer reach out to me and decided to do a session with her.  In that session, I asked to see what my blocks to love were.  I had already done a LOT of work on blocks to love several years prior, and so I was a bit stuck on what else, possibly, could be happening in my heart that I was missing. 

In that session, she guided me through a modality where we use the body to unlock and understand subconscious blocks.

The image that arose was from when I was sixteen.  I’m in the kitchen of my then-boyfriend’s family’s house.  We are packing up the tin-foil wrapped bagels that his mom made us for breakfast before we leave to go to school.

“Interesting….” I thought. That relationship had been so sweet.  When I was 16, I loved with my whole heart, and then was absolutely earth-shatteringly devastated when we suddenly broke up just before graduation. 

I had healed from that break-up, I thought.  I had obviously moved on and dated 4985 other people.  I had been in a serious, far more impactful relationship in my 20s.  

And yet, that healing session showed me there was still something about that 16 year old relationship and break-up that was holding me back. 

Lesson 7: There are many healing modalities and many ways we can unlock our subconscious.  Looking at somatic healing can be very, very powerful. 

Lesson 8: Sometimes we think we are SO over something, but there’s something about it that we need to uncover in a deeper way.  I didn’t think my 16 year old break-up was even a blip on my radar, but when I did the deep reflection work it made so much sense. 

Shifting the Blocks

I then spent about a month deep into a healing journey all about shifting this big final block to love. 

Basically, I loved my 16 year old boyfriend with my whole heart, and when we broke up… a part of my heart closed permanently.  

From the time that I was 16 onward, I would let others in… but not fully.  I was scared that I would be devastated in the same way I was then, so I always maintained a level of control by not fully opening. 

Even in my relationship in my 20s, there was still a part of me that I held back, which stopped me from being 100% myself in that relationship, which is ultimately one of the biggest reasons I ended up having to end that one. 

A lot of my healing process once I consciously figured this out was to go back to 16 year old me, talk to her, ask her what she needed, and to nurture her and that in the present. 

I also had to face the fear head on of letting myself be fully seen and loved my another, which felt scary. 

Lesson 9: You will be asked to go deep into the corners of your heart and your most tender parts to face your fears and let go of past hurts you didn’t know were still lingering. 

As that process happened, I had an insane amount of physical discomfort in my heart.  This was good though, because I know that our bodies shift our energy up and out, and there can be some physical discomfort in that process.

During that time, I went to yoga all the time… doing a lot of heart opening movements to help me relief the physical sensations.  It totally worked.  At first I would get relief every time after I did it, and then eventually the sensations stopped all together once they had lifted. 

Lesson 10: There’s often a physical component of spiritual healing, and so yoga and movement are incredibly powerful tools in helping you to shift that stagnant energy. 

Being the Queen

The next month, my heart is finally feeling open and my energy is feeling higher than it has ever felt before.  Business is going great, life is good, and I’m feeling really open.  

I am going on a family trip to Florida.  My brother, his partner, my parents and I were all going to be sharing a tiny condo… and so I had the choice to sleep on the sofa or… get a hotel.

I decided to be a Queen and instead just get a hotel for myself. 

And actually… if I was going to get a hotel, why not treat myself?

When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with the Don Cesar hotel near where we stayed because it is a bright pink castle.  I mean… you can’t get any better.

I dreamed when I was a little girl of staying there, but we, of course, never did.  Instead, it was reserved for walking past and occasionally getting ice cream at. 

I splurged and paid for myself to get a room at the Don Cesar hotel.  I decided to celebrate the little me who wanted that dream to come true.  She would’ve been so happy. 

I was proud of myself for being a single woman who could make her own GD dreams come true, and had the financial ability to support herself.  I felt really empowered. 

Know what happened? The universe rewarded me.  It saw me owning my power and making my own dreams come true… and it upgraded me to the Presidential Suite. 

I am not kidding you. It was me staying by myself… and then this casual Penthouse that I got upgraded into for no reason. 

And you know the number one thought I had when that happened (besides thank you Universe for the upgrade)?

It was: “I am so grateful that this happened just for me.  I’m so grateful that I created this experience just for myself.  I am so grateful that I’ve created a life for myself that I am so in love with, that fills me up so much… that with or without a partner… I am abundantly grateful.”

It was seriously just a magical time of celebrating the journey I had been on up until then. 

Lesson 11: You’ll be asked to be in a place in your life where you are so full and fulfilled so that true love can enter as an addition, not as a supplement. 

Many, Many Women

I come back from that trip and I’m back in Toronto and things are pretty normal.  My business continues to grow, I feel super rooted in my routines, and generally am just feeling really happy. 

After the darkness of all the clearing and releasing work from earlier that year, and March is feeling fun. 

It’s international women’s day and I’ve been asked to lead workshops during a big skin-care brand’s product launch.  It is SUCH a cool event and I can’t believe I am partnering with this incredible brand, and they are having me just lead circles and talk to women about how to “glow from the inside out.”

That day though, in celebrating women, chatting with women, and spending my day with women…

I realize that I literally only have women around me 99% of the time.  My business centers around serving women, I coach and speak with exclusively women all day every day, almost all of my friends are women and everything that I do is within the container of teaching about the feminine energy. 

I now see that I needed to be DEEP into my feminine energy, which is what I needed especially after leaving law, and was also needed in order to be the right balance to a partner who was deep in their masculine.  Attraction is based on polarity… but it was time to shift.  

Lesson 12: Understanding masculine and feminine energies and how they play out when it comes to attraction is really important.  For many of us, our energies are out of balance, which is why we aren’t feeling attracted to others, passion wanes, or we aren’t attracting in the types of partners we want. 

I had gone a bit too far down the rabbit hole and now had ZERO masculine energy around me.

That day, I set a new intention to be open to new male connections coming into my life. 

Where the Men At?

A couple of weeks after that realization, and my intention to welcome all masculine energy into my life, one best friends flies home and suggests that I download Hinge.  I had been really against dating apps before that point mainly because I met everyone organically really easily (because it was my mindset that meeting people in my day to day was easy), and I personally found they sucked up a lot of time and energy.

However, I was open.  Plus I had just said I needed to have more men in my life, so in the very least, I could just talk with a bunch of men at once to get that going.  While getting our nails done together, I passed her over my phone so she could re-order and curate my profile for me. 

Lesson 13: The universe will come up with creative solutions to your problems, and will bring you romantic interests in all different types of ways, from dating apps to meeting others on the street. You will be guided to where you need to go.

Then we began swiping…

I was actually instantly impressed that the guys that were popping up seemed so interesting! I hadn’t been on dating apps this whole time, and maybe I had been missing out! It felt so fun to go through their profiles and see who they were. 

The whole process felt really fun! I set up a bunch of dates (because who doesn’t love a dating app binge?) and went out a ton of dates back to back.  I am kind of prone to extremes, and so once I decided to date on an app, and also that I needed masculine energy in my life, I was like… GIVE ME ALL OF IT. 

I had no expectations, and instead just truly enjoyed getting to know all these awesome guys.  Some of them I never saw after one date, but we were able to communicate openly and honestly and wish each other the best.  Others, I saw for a few dates.  Some became really good friends, and some become people I collaborated with in business.

Either way, it was just really fun to meet so many interesting guys and hear about their lives. 

Lesson 14: Dating can feel so joyful and fun.  It can bring you connections you are destined to meet, but for reasons you wouldn’t have guessed.  You can learn to date without expectations.  If it isn’t, there are shifts you can make in your perspective to make it feel that way. 

NYC Calls Again

But then… I had this trip booked to NYC. 

Back in February when I was doing all this physical clearing in my body I deepened into my fascination with the Class by Taryn Toomey.  I had booked a flight to go down to the city to take class with her every day and learn. 

So I’m going on a bunch of dates and put it all on pause while I go on this random NYC trip. 

My first night before dinner I’m thinking…. “why don’t I just see who’s on this app in NYC?”

I change my settings to show I’m in the city, and begin swiping.  Five swipes in I see Chris, who would later become my very true big love of today.  I get immediate full body shivers when I see him.  Another form of recognition.  I KNOW this person. But I didn’t obviously.

I swipe a big fat YES, and then turn my phone off and take myself out for dinner. 

Lesson 15: The Universe loves when you are so comfortable with yourself and have learned to challenge the fear of being alone.  

Lesson 16: The Universe also loves when we treat ourselves like how we want others to treat us.  Date yourself.  Cherish yourself.  Be your own biggest cheerleader.

At dinner, I end up meeting some randoms at the restaurant who I end up hanging out with. 

When I get home later, I see that the CHRIS from HINGE has MESSAGED ME.

I am so excited! 

My crush! 

As it turns out, Chris is in Belize scuba diving (ugh – so cool), but was flying back Saturday.  Would I be around?

The answer was “NO.”

I was in fact flying out the same time, out of the same airport, that he was flying back home from. 

The story continues…