LM4C Archives - Life Mapping with Monika & Everett

Feb 14 2018

Part 2: Love & Relationships

In this blog, I want to share my own relationship journey. I hope you will be encouraged and inspired to know you can attract someone who is perfectly compatible with you.

As a spiritual and intuitive person, I spent a lot of my life checking out each person who came across my path for their purpose and to get the lesson and blessing from that relationship or interaction. So in my youth, I fell in love easily and frequently. Sometimes I knew it was a passing fling. Other times I wasn’t sure. And there my mother was to support my thinking that relationship no matter how long or short, served a purpose in our lives and when that purpose was accomplished you should release that person with love for all that you gained, learned, and experienced and move to the next lesson.

As we age, we learn. So after my divorce and some fun and not so fun dating experiences, I moved to a place of surrender about my next life partner. I decided not to worry about it but to have fun. I changed my prayer/mantra from a detailed list of qualities I wanted in all my relationships both business and personal to “I don’t know what I need, so please send me a man who is perfectly compatible with me”. And I just decided to have fun with my male friends. My self-love journey supported me from settling for any relationship and moved to me accept that I was not going to be in a romantic relationship until it was time. And I had plenty of love in my life. I worked on continuing to open my heart, accept myself, and enjoy life and be happy

with my current reality. All things I had worked on for years, I put my renewed attention there again.

Then I met Everett one winter night in my neighborhood bar after hanging out with one of my best

friends. It was a group of strangers who introduced us and pulled us into conversation about dancing

and where the best places to find social dancing were in Cleveland. They were trying to convince this guy, Everett, that Cleveland was a good place to live and that he just needed to find the right people. That’s how I got roped into the conversation. We laughed, we danced, we

exchanged information and promised to keep in touch. We had a lot of fun that night.

I was friendly and we started hanging out as friends and I showed him some fun places around town as he was new and on and on… And I noticed who he was as a person, his values and character. We had fun together. And in different moments, I felt challenged as my heart opened to meet his. It was surprising, and a little scary too. I thought after all this time… OMG! And I took it slow and worked to keep my eyes open and move in the best and most authentic way possible. For what seemed like the first time in my life, I consciously waited for him to set the tone and the boundaries and for him to make the first move, and the second, and the third. I didn’t put up walls. I didn’t make up a story – good or bad about where this was going. I stayed in the moment with what was real. I patiently waited to see what and how things would unfold. For my women readers, this was really critical in allowing him to choose me and pursue me and for me to see what kind of man he was vs the man I wanted him to be. This was in extreme contrast to my old habit of trying to MAKE things happen. I’m just saying. And at each step of the way, he proved to be a person who was sincere, capable, a man of great integrity, with values that aligned with my values, lifestyle and spiritual beliefs. Over time, we began to talk about what kind of relationship we wanted to have. He was very clear, “Clear your dance card. I know you have men that take you places and do things for you. Give me a chance and I can do all of those things and more.” Mind you, we had not had sexual relations yet. This was also a change for me, that he initiated. We talked night after night over coffee. We got to know each other. One night he asked me to write down my deal breakers. The things that if he did them, would end or do irreparable damage to the relationship. He moved closer. We started falling in love. The intimacy and sex was great! He began to introduce to me his world and family and the people who were most important in his life. Eventually we committed to each other and later he asked me to marry him.

So I want you to think about the questions below and check in on where you are with yourself, your current life partner or any potential life partners.

Are our values aligned, not just in words but in actions?
Do our goals align in ways that create synergy?
What am I bringing to the table that will support our partnership?
What are they bringing to the table that will support our partnership?
Do we each have the capacity to work together?
Will it be fun? Enjoyable?
Is there alignment in our values, lifestyle, and perspectives? Are we compatible in how we think about and use ourselves, our resources or create new resources to get what we want? Are our material wants, desires and approaches compatible?

These are important questions. They need to be answered based on us observing each other’s actions, not what we think or aspire to do and be, not what we say we are about, but what we really do based on our actions. I say we because this is true for you and the prospective life partner.

No judgement but a true discernment about “what is” right now. I spent years in a relationship based on potential. I thought my first husband and I were working our plan only to find out he was just dreaming. His words said he wanted to build an empire. His actions said he wanted to go to work, come home, drink a beer, relax and watch the game. This was a huge mismatch to my own ambition and an anchor. My current husband, is adjusting to the fact that he is only working one job for the first time in his adult life and has joined me to work to take our plan to the next level. Our life together is easy. We work things out and come to agreement quickly. There is harmony and peace and joy. He is perfectly compatible with me and we are creating a life together that we both love. There is alignment in our values, vision, lifestyle, and commitments. We have both done our inner work and were moved to a place of surrender just as the Universe brought us together on that fateful night. And we were both open to the exploration.

Feb 13 2018

Part 1: Self Love

Its Valentine’s Day this week and there is so much to say about LOVE that this will be a week-long blog fest.

First, LOVE of self. My dad used to always tell me as a young woman, you can’t love anyone until you love yourself. I didn’t get it. I was looking for love to “complete me”.

So what does it mean to love you? How do you know you love yourself? What should you be paying attention to?

When you love yourself, you move away from self-judgement. You lovingly look at who you are, your attributes and your challenges, places where you are hurt and places where you have joy, you get “real” with yourself in a most loving way. And then you accept where you and who you are and your journey up until this moment. It is only then can you begin to discern any parts of your spirit that you want to heal. With acceptance, you can begin to discern what attributes you want to keep and grow with and what things about yourself you want to change. When you look at what you want in life and your goals, you can see what is helping to create the life you want and what gets in your way. And you lovingly begin to move into action to become the amazing human being you were always meant to be.

I remember creating a mantra about the kind of relationship I wanted to attract. I was healing from a dysfunctional one and putting the power of thought and language and vision into action. I remember standing in the bathroom every morning and every night after I brushed my teeth and saying: “Monika, I love you just the way you are. “ Then crying. I’d then say: “I am in mutually beneficial relationships that are respectful, loving, sensuous, sexual, caring, gentle, joyful, ….” And I had a long list. And I would cry. I said this every day until I began to cry less. I said thie every day until one day, I said it without crying and began to embody the words. I said it until I began to see the changes in me and in my relationships in business and friendships. I kept saying this mantra for years, until I noticed how happy I had become with myself and who I had become. I worked through the heartache and let it go. I worked through the disappointments and let them go. I worked through so many things that needed to be healed so I would be healthy enough to be in a healthy relationship. I “cleaned my plate” as my husband calls it and got ready for the kind of intimate relationship, the kind of life partner I truly wanted. But first I had to become a person who embodied the attributes that I was looking for in order to attract that kind of person. I had to change. I noticed, I had a more positive attitude. I noticed less judgement in my words and thoughts and I developed the ability to catch myself. I noticed I was settling less. I noticed a change in approach to how I allowed others to treat me. I just didn’t accept anything less than. But it wasn’t with anger or any frenetic energy in my spirit or words, it was just as matter of fact as me saying the sky was blue. I’d say “This isn’t going to work for me. Can we do X? This will allow me to Y and you to still get what you want or need.” I learned to love myself. And I was happy, truly happy.

What is your self-love process? How are you healing and finding your way back to your true self?

Sep 30 2016

Removing Blocks to Your Vision

About fifteen years ago, my first husband and I found ourselves in a period where we were constantly facing financial challenges, sometimes barely able to pay the bills.

We were making every effort to remedy the situation, doing without things that we needed and wanted in order to make ends meet or at least have the ends see each other. We spent a lot of effort negotiating and renegotiating who would be responsible for which bills, yet someone was always coming up short.

And any time there was an emergency—say, a car in need of repair or the washing machine breaking— we found ourselves depleting the savings we had managed to put aside. Needless to say, we argued about money a lot.

I thought he should work more, get that second job that he was always talking about, be more frugal and cut back on his leisure spending.

I am sure he had a list of things he thought I ought to be doing differently, too. But we couldn’t hear each other, and the situation was not getting any better.

Then one day, I was lamenting to my best friend that I was concerned about being able to partner with my husband to increase our income. She said in a very matter-of-fact way, “Monika, you have the ability to make more money. What are you waiting for? Just do it. Then you can just pay the bills and let him do what he does.”

It was such a simple statement, yet I had a lot of but’s: But the man ‘should’.… But a couple ‘should’….

As open-minded and enlightened as I thought was, I was caught between at least two outdated partnership paradigms from different decades—and neither one was working for me. I had been told all of my life that the man should provide for the family, whatever it took.

My own father took various jobs— on the railroad, at a nonprofit, as a community action agency executive, as a municipal employee—to provide for us. But having grown up in the 70s, I also had strong ideas about being independent, taking care of myself, not needing anyone.

My mother always told me to have my own money and never be dependent on a man. And then I had an image of marriage created in the movie studios. For the most part, I knew that wasn’t real because I didn’t know anyone that lived that way, yet I still wanted a version of the ideal married life created by Hollywood.

I wasn’t alone. Most women and many men are caught up in the messages they learned from movies, the media, parents, books, church doctrine, political doctrine, etc. which portrays images of how life ‘should’ be that often have nothing to do with our own reality or our own relationships.

Meanwhile the world—economics, gender roles, marriage patterns— have changed dramatically and neither the kind of life my mother and father had, nor do the TV-manufactured marriages the likes of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore exist anymore.

I continued to blame my husband while I considered, reluctantly, resentfully, this idea that I was going to have to save the day by creating the resources we needed. And we all know that if you keep doing what you always do, you will keep getting what you always got. I wasn’t going to get anywhere thinking the way I’d always thought.

That’s what happens sometimes to our dreams and visions—they’re blocked by our own limited thinking. We see things one way, which means we can’t envision all the other possible ways things could be.

Oh, we can see that other people can enjoy success in life, career, vocation, relationship or whatever, but we tell ourselves that that’s not an option for us. We think that person is succeeding by some special luck, talent or miracle of birth that we weren’t blessed with.

In order to manifest a vision, a dream, a goal, we have to be able to remove the mental and emotional blocks to that vision.

Now, I define blocks differently than obstacles. Obstacles are external barriers or impediments, often things we have no control over. Blocks, as I define them, are primarily internal challenges—something that’s going on inside yourself that’s hindering your own progress. Your blocks may come from your belief systems or attachments you’ve formed. They may be rooted in words you repeat to yourself, deep-seated beliefs, values, emotional hurts, and the way you make meaning of or interpret your experiences.

Whatever the source, blocks are forms of stagnation impeding your progress toward your vision.

This is an important step because, in order to make a Life Map—much less travel any road on that map—you have to be able to envision a way to cross the rivers, traverse the mountains, and navigate the valleys.

You have to see beyond the things that seem to be blocking you. With the Life Mapping, there are some exercises and ways to think about blocks that can support you moving through them to the other side. Check out some of my past blogs on fear, and other blocks. Check out the book for more information.

Apr 25 2016

The Deal Breaker List

So, when we decided to be a couple, Everett said, we need to make a deal breaker list.

What is a deal breaking list you might ask yourself? It is the list of things that your partner might do that would end the relationship as you know it.

Even if you stay together, your relationship would be forever changed. So we each searched our souls and seriously thought through our values. We separately wrote down our lists of actions that would spiritually, emotionally or morally would negatively impact the current relationship. Then we gave each other the list.

We discussed the story behind each item on our list. Then we agreed to honor each other’s list holding these items sacred and vowing never to cross these boundaries.

Everett’s List

Trust
Lies
Cheating
Unwillingness to accept family

Monika’s List

Trust
Honesty
Violence

What we learned was that our lists were compatible and so it was easy to agree that we would not violate each other’s list. The beauty is that unless we do something that violates this list we are safe in the belief that the relationship will continue in a good way.

It’s made all the difference in creating safety and trust between us. So what is on your deal breaker list? Tell us in the comment section below!

Apr 25 2016

Introduction to Life Mapping For Couples

We want to open the Life Mapping for Couples portion of this website with a piece from both of us.

A Word From Monika

I have been practicing life mapping since the 80’s working my vision and dealing with my internal blocks and the mindset issues that were getting in my way of creating a life and business that was perfectly suited for me. I was excited that things were moving in a good way and success seemed right in my grasp.

And at the same time I was longing for that life partner that would complete the picture I had been holding. I hadn’t given up but I had decided to focus on having fun and doing things I enjoyed with whomever was around vs getting hung up on searching for my dream relationship.

I had learned many times that everything comes in its time and pushing didn’t make it come any faster. And I was still doing my affirmation about the kinds of relationships I wanted to be in and I was seeing a change in business, friendships, and my own thoughts. “Just be patient,” I told myself.

So when I met Everett, it wasn’t too long before I realized he was a real prospect. And about that time, he was asking me for a serious conversation about relationships. So, I said, “if you want to know about me, read my book.”

He did.

A Few Words From Everett

After reading the book, it was clear to me that if I wanted to get with this woman I simply had to hold her to the principles of her book and let that be the focal point of our relationship. The process was sound and fit into what I was doing to improve myself.

So once we agreed to commit ourselves to a relationship, we agreed to use the very same process (Life Mapping) as our method for dealing within the relationship itself.
It was the best decision we made together, and the most amazing way of understanding each other, resolving differences, providing direction, and creating a future for ourselves I have ever experienced.

With that in mind, we quickly came to understand how the Life Mapping process would enrich the relationship of others and we began to allow the process to evolve from our own experience. We have committed to sharing this process to help couples. This blog is dedicate to that work and that learning process.

We sincerely hope that not only will you join us in that journey, you will contribute to the development of the work.