The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible (14 page)

              This passage from Williamson's
A Woman's Worth
summarizes a lot of the points we just discussed about fashion, pop culture and the media:

"The monster's third head is the pop culture we collectively spend billions of dollars supporting each year.  It does not support us in return.  Most movies do not love us, most advertising does not love us, most of the fashion industry does not love us... Like many embittered wives, we look endlessly for love in places with no capacity to love us back."

Mirrors.
 
Let me tell you a little story.  One of the things I really like about yoga is how it can take you into a deep meditative state through movement.  During class, everything that used to be on your mind is gone, replaced with a focus on the here and now – your breathing, your balance, your full presence.  A good yoga session takes you out of your head into a zone of no-self. 

              Well, imagine my surprise when I entered a yoga class one day to find it festooned with mirrors.  I had never seen mirrors in a yoga class before, and their presence was positively jarring.  Not only did I often find myself focusing on my own image in the mirror, trying to figure out whether I was doing a pose ‘right’, but I also found myself distracted by the images of other people and comparing myself to them.  This defeated the purpose of the class.

              Needless to say, I never went back to that class, but it made me realize the power of mirrors to put you into a state of self-judgment.  When you have a bunch of mirrors around the house, you have no choice but to look at them.  And what do you do when you look at them?  You
evaluate
yourself.  How do I look?  How’s my makeup, hair, dress? Is my butt too big? Even if you have only three mirrors in your home and you walk by them ten times a day, that’s
thirty times
you’re assessing that butt in a day. 

              The practice of embodying the goddess is about allowing your inner beauty to shine.  Evaluating your outer appearances hinders that process.  So consciously decide to have few mirrors in your household.  The one in the bathroom plus another full-length one in a discreet location – preferably also in the bathroom – are plenty.                 

Bathroom scales.
  The surface mind is fascinated by measurement.  It constantly wants to size a thing up, quantify it, put a number on it, as if by doing so it can understand it.  It’s interesting that the Buddhist term for illusion –
maya
– comes from the Sanskrit root
matr
, meaning measurement, from which we get words like
meter
and
measure
.

In fact, measurement is an act of illusion. Try this: convert your weight to metric if you use pounds (divide by 2.2) or to pounds if you use metric (multiply by 2.2).  So if you’re 60kg, now you’re 132lb, and vice versa.  Notice how you now have no idea whether this is a lot or a little – the number has now become meaningless to you.

Allow me to suggest that the number was meaningless all along and that you’re much better off not knowing it at all.  Does it really matter to you how much the gravitational field of Planet Earth pulls on your body?

Once again, we have an instrument of judgment.  Unless you’re a wrestler, boxer or rower and need to make weight for competition, the only reason to weigh yourself is to judge yourself.  And stepping on the scale every day is just a crazy-making practice that detracts from your peace, so toss that thing out the window already. 

The simple truth is this: when you feel good, you look good.  If you don’t feel good, you won’t look good, regardless of how much you weigh.  A little machine that makes you feel bad is clearly not going to help the situation, so you’re better off not having one in the household and not stepping on one at the gym, even out of curiosity.

When you feel good, you look good. 

Take control of your beliefs

Beliefs are completely hidden from view but determine your behavior.  Useful, effective beliefs cost the same as bad ones, so why not use the ones that serve you best?  Since no one has access to your beliefs but yourself, feel free to play with them.  Pick outrageous, ostentatious, grandiose ones, even if they initially don't seem to resonate with your personality.  Think of them as a strategy.  If they give you good results, keep them.  If not, try new ones until you get the results you want. 

Beliefs determine the range of your existence and the limits of your performance.  Before you can accomplish something, you must believe that it can be done.  Most beliefs that we have regarding our world and our abilities are products of accident or childhood indoctrination by parents or peers.  Some of these beliefs still serve us well.  But, as almost all of them were patterns laid down accidentally (as opposed to deliberately), many do not.                In this chapter, we invite you to take control of your own beliefs and deliberately instill ones that serve you in your goals in the most effective manner possible.  Feel free to expand on the ones presented here, or to come up with brand new ones that suit you even better.  As for the old beliefs – do not give them too much heed any more.  The more energy you focus on the new, more effective, more fun beliefs, the more the brain will automatically allow the tired old beliefs to wither on their own. 

              This chapter has two parts to it:
content
and
process
.  First, we will make suggestions for new beliefs to make you more powerful and effective.  Then we will give you methods for instilling those beliefs so that they become a part of your everyday mental makeup. 

Exercise 8. Experience how beliefs set the limits of your behavior

Stand up and hold your arms out horizontally.  Now twist around in a counterclockwise direction until you can’t twist any further.  Note exactly how far you have twisted by remembering where your right middle finger is pointing. 

              Now untwist your body, stand straight, close your eyes and take a deep breath.  In your mind’s eye, imagine yourself twisting again with your arms outstretched, only this time imagine that you continue to twist, all the way around, 360 degrees, and then one more time, as if your waist was a swivel and you could keep on doing this for three, four full turns. 

              Now open your eyes again and hold your arms out, and twist again until you can twist no further.  Notice how far you have turned.  Is it further than before or less?  By how much?  What is different this time?

Global beliefs

              These are global beliefs about how the world works.  They are the underpinning of the Taoist way of thinking.  Take these to heart, and everything else in the course will follow and flow effortlessly.

1. I believe in the abundance of the universe.
Look around you.  There is matter, substance, stuff.  It is everywhere.  There is no vacuum, no void, no antimatter, no non-being – only being.  There are over 6.2 billion people on earth, half of whom are of the opposite sex, a good number of whom would make a suitable companion – millions upon millions of possibilities.  Even if you eliminate all of those who are of an unsuitable age, station or language such that only one hundredth of one percent of them remain, there are 30,000 left – more men than you could date in a thousand lifetimes. 

              So relax.  Expand your mind to wealth-consciousness and the abundance of possibility, and notice how that brings a calmer, more joyous and more powerful demeanor to you.  If you know that the store will always have an unlimited supply of cereal for you, would you ever get anxious about running out?  Become aware of your prior patterns of poverty-consciousness, and deliberately replace them with wealth-consciousness.  Poverty-consciousness leads to a perception of lack of choice, which leads to being desperate or stuck: “I’ll never find another one like him again.”  Consciously choose wealth-consciousness, and know in your heart of hearts that whatever it was, there’s more where that came from.  Do that
especially
when all signs seem to point to the contrary.  Abundance is simply the way of the universe.  If this is the only thing you take away from this course, this book will have been a success.

2. The world is a reflection of me.
 
If you encounter the world with the attitude of ‘Give me’, then the world will respond in kind: ‘Give me.’  If you meet the world with the attitude ‘How can I serve,’ then the world will respond likewise: ‘How can I serve?’ 

              Through this subtle but powerful mental shift, you have in effect turned the world into your most reliable partner. The Hindus call it
karma
: in essence, you get back out of the world what you put into it.  Put in positivity and abundance, and that’s what you get back.  Put in neediness and negativity, and that’s exactly what you get back, too.  A simple way of thinking about this is that you can’t give what you don’t have.  So if you’re giving away friendship, love, and positivity, that means you must have a lot more of it in store. 

              Since the choice is yours, may I suggest that you believe that the world truly reflects you and bring an attitude of serving and sharing to whatever you do, and watch the miracles that follow. 

3. The world is complete exactly as it is, and I am grateful for it.
 
My definition of pain is ‘wishing the world to be different than it is.’  In metaphysical terms, asking the world to be different (e.g. asking for something in your life) does not serve you because it affirms to the world the lack of that something in your life.  If the world is a reflection of you, then it’s going to come right back to you and say, “You’re absolutely right; that’s lacking from your life.”  So affirming the lack of something has the effect of driving it further away. 

              But if we still want such things as companionship, intimacy, and sex, how do we approach them if not with desire?  The solution is to replace desire with
gratitude
– and, by extension, hope with
positive expectation
.  Hope is needy; positive expectation is affirming.  When you have gratitude for something, you are accepting its presence in your life and affirming it to the world.  In return, the world will do the same and manifest that object in your life. 

              So you say, “Thank you, world, for bringing so many strong, handsome, intelligent, caring men into my life” – even if you're on the island of the Amazons with no man in sight for hundreds of miles and you haven’t had a date for months.  And the world will say, “Why yes, you’re quite welcome,” and good things will happen. 

Personal Beliefs

1. Upholding my own importance is a waste of energy.
 
People expend most of their energy to prove to others that they are important, cool and therefore worthy of love and admiration.  Since this feeding of the ego rarely enhances any kind of real connection or love, the energy is wholly wasted.  Relinquishing the need to uphold your own importance frees up an enormous amount of energy towards useful action, harnessing your personal power and catching a glimpse of the true majesty of the universe.  All that freed-up energy can now serve you to observe and act more effectively.

Most of our energy goes into upholding our own importance ...If we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy of trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two, we would provide ourselves with enough energy to ... catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.
              – Carlos Castañeda,
The Art of Dreaming

Perhaps now is a good time to do Exercise 9, the Ultimate Freedom Exercise, so you can really feel this concept in your bones:

Exercise 9. The Ultimate Freedom Exercise

Think of your day yesterday, and remember the instances in which you did something to uphold your own importance.  Did you belittle someone to prop yourself up?  Did you get angry at someone or something?  Did you brag, complain, or defend yourself?  Become more and more aware of these behaviors on a daily basis, and recognize their folly.  And when you recognize their folly, smile and find something to be grateful about – for example, the ability to smile and laugh at yourself.  With conscious practice, these behaviors will fall away like dead leaves, leaving you more empowered and free.

2. I am complete and beautiful exactly as I am.
  This belief is corollary to the one mentioned previously about accepting the world (since you are, after all, part of the world).  But it deserves special emphasis, because it would seem that fully accepting yourself is not consistent with reading a self-improvement book. 

This is not necessarily the case.  What this belief emphasizes is that, at any point in your life, you are fully accepting of who you are
right at that moment
.  It’s not as if right now you’re not okay, and there is some point at which you will be okay.  You are okay at every point in the process, because you are a creature of never-ending growth and improvement.  There is no endpoint, because the only endpoint is now, and there is no time when it is not now. 

              So be comfortable in your skin
always
; it is the most fundamental aspect of attractiveness.  And although you may just be the seedling for a great redwood now, you are still that big tree in essence, at every point along the way.  It’s just that you keep on growing.  And just as the redwood needs water and nutrients to grow, so do you – and you’re doing that right now, feeding yourself with the mental nutrients of this book.