What is aloneness?
Aloneness- being fully present, joyous and content being on your own and not needing someone else to make you feel complete.
I am here to talk to you about love dating and relationships in a different way. The way you've been told so far sucks and is in fact built to please men or keep men and disempower you. So it's my mission in life to show you there is a completely different way you can approach this and if you approach it differently, you're going to see drastically different results. So if you've been having Groundhog Day in your love life, if you're fed up of meeting all the wrong men, if it keeps ending in complete disaster beyond disaster, I'm here and we're going to get you on the right track.
The Interview
It is my absolute pleasure to welcome to the show today, Harriet Whaley-Cohen, a health and well-being coach. She specialises in making women feel fabulous inside and out. I also know her as a personal friend. And as a woman, I really admire her in terms of what she's done with her life and the message she communicates to women out there. So thank you very much for coming along Harriet!
Harriet
You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. You know, I love to hear your mission just then because my mission is to inspire contagious belief in the possibility of life-changing transformations. So our missions rock.
Hayley
And you know what, I also think it has a mission statement. You have had one of those life stories where you have created a huge, 180-degree shift. To a greater or lesser extent, I was on a massively the wrong path. I was the last base, I was in Antarctica of life. And I had a vague sense at the time, I was on the wrong track but didn't recognise all the destructive behaviours I was doing and how much I was hurting myself by how I was approaching, not just at love, but life generally. And I know that you've come from a similar position, right?
Harriet
Yeah, I have. I got into really dodgy relationship situations in my early 20s. And I was pretty unhappy and turned to some destructive coping mechanisms, and ended up with bad addictions. By the time I turned 26, I had hit a massive rock bottom and turned my life around. I'm approaching 40 this summer. And I'm over 13 and a half years in recovery, which is amazing. Beyond that, I've been through several other big life transformations as well. I left an unhappy and some would say, unhealthy marriage four years ago, and have gone on to create a new business and a really happy, thriving life. I left a working life in the city in the banking world. And now I'm a coach and a speaker.
Hayley
And you're glowing, by the way. Your happiness genuinely radiates out of you. And I can see it!
Harriet
I am super happy these days. And that's what it's all about. Life's too short to be miserable or destructive towards ourselves or to be in stuck in crappy patterns. We are often stuck in them because they used to work for us by a coping strategy. And then, for one of a better expression, they bite us on the ass until we're in so much pain that we're forced to do things another way.
[...]
Hayley
I'm you know, I'm a huge fan of aloneness. I really am because I think we have been conditioned to love the security of a relationship. So because we hold on to the wrong relationship. We see it as superior to no relationship at all.
I see people doing it all the time, you'll either stick in the wrong relationship because you perceive that as being better than being by yourself. And instead of letting go and healing and recovering and learning who you are, you jump ship to another one. And because you've jumped ship with no self-discovery, it's always the wrong ship, you're getting on to.
Harriet
The empty palm phase is where the magic happens. It's the place where you get to know yourself, you can reflect on what didn't work out. What you really want. You can set a beautiful intention.
I set the most amazing, very detailed intention about the kind of person I want to be with how I want to feel with them. The things we'll do- things like we love when we meditate together. We'll bring each other cups of tea. Also much bigger things about how we feel together. And one of the things that happened as a result of doing that, in the empty palm phase, is that when I have been on first dates with people I know, immediately, if they're a million miles away from that thing, I've set out that detailed intention, but it's not a checklist at all. It's just an intention. And then when the right person came along, it was like, Oh, my God, here is this person that is everything. And I feel all the ways I want to feel. If I hadn't gone through empty palm phase I could have settled for something way less when I got to know myself or not really reflected and got the learnings and the growth from that.
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