EP 20: How can you find true love with Eleanor McDonald?

Eleanor is an Intuitive Love Coach. Eleanor was raised by two parents who were spiritual seekers who became Buddhists in their 20s and her parents talked about things other parents did not talk about, such as past lives, enlightenment, meditation, compassion and all of those topics. But because there was a disconnect and her childhood household environment was volatile, she moved away from Buddhism and into New Age practices such as the use of tarot cards, crystals and other modalities. This led her to becoming a reiki teacher and a registered holistic nutritionist. As she built her practice, though, the women who came to her with a health problem, invariably would end up talking about their intimate relationships. Either because they did not seem to be able to find love or they had all these issues in their romantic relationships. However, she resisted embracing this line of work until she felt she had sorted her own unhealthy patterns in relationships, which took her until 2018. Part of the work is to find your true self, which ironically ties into Eleanor's childhood of observing her parents being disconnected and this led her to call her business Truly Eleanor. This is the starting point of the work she does with her clients, because as long as we are people pleasing, and we tend to do a lot of that in the courtship phase of dating, then we can't really meet the person that will be the right person for us. Eleanor and I picked up the topic of twin flames, especially the Netflix documentary that I mentioned in Episode 10, and how disturbing this is because it rests on the false premise that your romantic partner is here to complete you, and even fix you, and that you are not complete on your own. But the concept of Twin Flames goes further than that. It rests on the premise that you must be pure to find your twin flame and that it is a privilege that only a few chosen people will experience. It brings in it the notion of elite, which actually speaks to the ego, which is ironically, is the opposite of what being spiritual is. But what Eleanor warns us against, especially two weeks from Valentine's Day, is that this concept will lure you away from yourself in a sort of chase for the gold, like a love olympics of some sort, and then paradoxically, it will bring you down and make you feel worthless. You end up losing yourself in that process. You also start believing in a kind of fairy tale kind of love, that is supposed to be this exalted spiritual experience, but in reality, it does not exist. And it is easy to get manipulated into this movement because it is incredibly seductive. They are making you feel that you are superior to others. Who doesn't like that? Especially if you have a fractured sense of self, or you lack confidence. To find true love, you need to be true to yourself and dig deeper into what you truly want. It's never going to be perfect, because perfection does not exist. The ego is welcome to come along for the ride, but it is not in the driving seat. Asking yourself, how do I want to live my life and how do I want to feel with another person. It's a self discovery process and it's also a trial and error process. The clearer you will be on what you want, the more magnetic you will become. In order to stay authentic in the dating process, Eleanor recommends that instead of focusing on the person that you meet, you take your awareness back to you and ask yourself "How do I feel in the presence of that person?" Eleanor and I talked about so much more though. I asked her questions about how do we know if we are ready to date again after a relationship breakup but also the top three red flags to pay attention to. To listen to the full interview, click here. You can find Eleanor on her website, on Facebook and Insight Timer.