Your Guiding Insights are like marching orders from your soul, showing you a wiser, quicker path to love. They turn your search for love into an adventure of healing and growth. Learn how to discover your own Guiding Insights in this episode.

Episode Table of Contents

• Underneath Your Nagging Shoulds Are Your Guiding Insights
• Our Job is Two-Fold
• Your Guiding Insights Are Often Not Clear
• Inviting Your Guiding Insights
• Just Love the Insight

Episode Introduction: Guiding Insights

Guiding insights are like marching orders from our deepest self. They turn our search for love and our whole intimacy journey into an adventure of growth. Find out how you can discover your guiding insights on this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. Tonight, we’re going to be talking about guiding insights. One of the most powerful and exciting ways to turn your search for love into a true adventure of growth.

I’m Ken Page, and every week, I’ll bring you access to the greatest insights and the most powerful practices I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. The skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a rich and happy life. You can find the whole transcript of this episode on deeperdatingpodcast.com.

Subscribe to iTunes and Leave Ken a Review

By the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it will be a tremendous thank you if you subscribed on iTUnes and left me a review. The reviews I’m getting are so beautiful, and I’m moved and appreciative of that, and I’d love yours on there too.

I also want to say that everything I share on this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment for any condition. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. Before we jump in, I just want to say that if you go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and sign up for my mailing list, you will get a free gift of my writing and work, and you can learn lots more about my courses and classes and resources that I really believe in to help you in your intimacy journey.

Underneath Your Nagging Shoulds Are Your Guiding Insights

Buried in all the nagging shoulds of your self-improvement goals lie your guiding insights, so buried underneath all of the nagging shoulds of self-improvement lie our guiding insights. Guiding insights are messages from our deeper self that have the power to change and redirect our lives. Discovering them moves us, changes us, quickens our spirit, gives us hope, gives us a sense of faith and gives us directions.

Guiding insights compel us. They’re like marching orders from our deepest self, and when we say yes to those marching orders, amazing things happen. Your guiding insights call to you when your guard is down.

For example, did you ever wake up at 3:00 in the morning to some moment of stark insight or listen to a piece of music and felt a rush of love or an intense sense of connection to somebody important to you, or think of someone out of the blue and think, “I really need to contact that person,” or stop and say, “Oh my God, I missed such an important cue from that person I love,” or “I need to travel to this place,” or anything like that?

It’s a sense of intense connection to your intuition, and it’s essential in the wiser search for love to listen to these messages.

It brings joy. It brings warmth. It brings humanity. It brings adventure, and it leads you both to your own wisdom and to love.

How to Recognize You’re Guiding Insights

Today, I’m going to help you understand what your guiding insights are. I’m going to teach you a practice that will help you call your guiding insights, and I’m going to talk about what to do when you get guiding insights and share some stories as well at the same time.

How do you recognize when you’re having a guiding insight? It’s going to be a moment where you feel touched by something. It’s going to be an insight that hits you where you live, and you’ll know it because you will feel a reverberation like a gong inside. There will be a reverberation. There will be ripples from inside.

Now, when you get guiding insights, awarenesses about your life that have a deeper quality of richness or wisdom, and all of us, all of us, all of us get them, especially, like I said, when our guard is down. When you get them, you might find that they challenge you or soothe you or scare you, but they will touch your heart. You will know that they matter because you will feel that they matter. They may make your heart ache, and that very ache is actually often a sign of a guiding insight. They may feel like liberation or a comforting caress, or they may scare the hell out of you or all of those at once.

They may feel undefined and embryonic, inchoate, forming even while you’re feeling your way into them, but if they don’t have a deep sense of resonance for you, they’re not your guiding insights no matter how practical they are. They still might be very worthy, but your guiding insights have a deep sense of resonance. When you start looking for them, your life will become richer.

Our Job is Two-Fold

Somehow, your guiding insights around intimacy will lead you to a life of deeper love, and your job is two-fold. Our job is two-fold. It’s to invite our guiding insights in, and it’s to learn to listen for them and then welcome them when they arrive. Then, try to act on the messages they send you. If you can’t act on the messages that they send you because they just feel like too steep a climb, just love the messages that they send you. In time, hopefully, you’ll be ready to take that ascent.

You know, I think that we get taught that the search for love is like this thing that you do. Then, you’ve succeeded when you’ve found your mate. That’s true, but it’s a dangerous way to understand this because it is too much of a quality of goal and product and ignores the reality and the importance of process.

The way I think of the wiser search for love is almost like a treasure hunt. That means that you don’t just find out where your beloved is. You get a message from your guiding insights, and your guiding insights might say, “I need to be around nature more,” or, “Why don’t I join a hiking group,” or “I had a date with that guy, and it was really nice. Why did I not call him back,” or whatever it is, but you get some kind of a message, and maybe the message comes from someone else, but the resonance is so rich that you go, “Yeah. That’s a guiding insight.”

Honor Your Guiding Insights

It doesn’t have to come from inside of you. It can come from someone else, but if it has that resonance, if it has that ring of truth, then it really matters. Your job is to honor it.

You get this message. You get this guiding insight. You go, “Oh, this is kind of a guiding insight. I like this. This is deep. This is rich. This touches me with a deeper resonance,” and you know enough to say yes. Okay. Okay, good. Then, you do that, and it’s like a treasure hunt. You get a message, and the message doesn’t tell you where the treasure is. It tells you, “Go a couple blocks down and look underneath the mailbox. There’s going to be a note pasted under there.” Then, you go, and you find that note.

Then, you have to deal with what that next note says, and it’s going to lead you somewhere else. Then, the next note will lead you somewhere else. That’s what the search for love is like with your guiding insights being like stepping stones that you jump from one to the other.

You get that resonance insight, and then, you follow it, and it brings you somewhere. It may bring you somewhere quite unexpected, and often, there’s going to be a little bit of magic kind of thing happening there in terms of what happens when we do that. It leads you to your next stage, whatever that is.

Your Guiding Insights Are Often Not Clear

Then, there will be another moment like that, and a rich, rich way to live is giving time and giving space for your guiding insights. I do this everyday. I do the inner mentor process, which you can learn in episode three, which is the most lovely and rich and powerful way that I know for myself to find my guiding insights. Every time I do it, I write down that guiding insight for the day, and that becomes my daily meditation.

The thing about guiding insights is often, they’re not clear. They don’t come as clear as a note in a treasure hunt. They come in whispers often. A moment when your life priorities really clear, a feeling and attraction of inspiration towards someone that you hadn’t really noticed before.

And someone just said to me recently that she was dating somebody who was in love with her. She didn’t know if she loved him. Then, by learning this work, she realized this guy is an attraction of inspiration. She felt the love start to come through her because she hadn’t recognized it before. She hadn’t recognized his goodness, his availability, his decency, his presentness. When she did, that was the guiding insight because the feelings of love started coming to her at that moment.

Whispers Are Personal Invitations

An insight that saves you from a really painful predicament, a fresh sense of treasuring something or someone that you love. These whispers are personal invitations to intimacy from your inner self. When you hear them, honor them. It makes life fun, and it makes life rich. Write them down, and every now and then, ask to be shown your guiding insights. When you start this process and you do it, you will find that new insights arise more frequently in unexpected moments of your daily life. If you let them, and if you intend to do this, they’ll guide your intimacy journey more and more.

In time, this guiding insight forms into a connect the dots picture of your own path to love and growth. If you’re willing to honor your guiding insights, your dating life will change, and you’ll feel a kind of sense of comfort and connection. Somehow existentially, you will feel less alone in your search for love, in this weird, weird world of dating than you ever might have imagined because there’s a sense of benevolence, a sense of guidance, a sense of a flashlight in the dark.

I’m going to teach you a practice right now, and it’s a practice for inviting your guiding insights. It’s one of many possible practices. Your Inner Mentor Practice, episode three, is a glorious way to do it, and I’ve actually told it in other episodes as well, but now, I’m going to teach you a very, very simple process.

Inviting Your Guiding Insights

I want you to just get comfortable, just relax. If you’re driving, do not close your eyes. If you’re not driving, close your eyes. If you’re walking, don’t close your eyes. You don’t need to close your eyes although it’s a nice way to internalize when you do close your eyes, but what I want you to do is ask yourself this question. The question is this. I just want you to reflect on it, and I’m actually going to ask it of you a series of times. Each time, just answer whatever comes up for you.

Right now in your life, how is love calling you? Whatever comes up. I’m going to ask it again and answer it again. Each time, newly and from a raw place, whatever comes. Right now in your life, how is love calling you?

I’m going to ask you again. Right now in your life, in what ways is love calling you? Just think about your answers. Now, you may not have had this giant aha with this, but if your answers had a ring of rightness for you, and I imagine that at least one of them did, if not all, let yourself claim it. Just because it came from you, it’s no less valuable than if it came from anyone else. It’s more valuable, so whatever you said to yourself in response was probably heartfelt and smart.

The task is to dignify it and honor it, and think about it.

Okay, so if that was a guiding insight, even if it was a subtle guiding insight, not a huge aha one, how might you act on it?

Learning a New Language of Intuition

If it scares, you, don’t worry, say it anyway and just take another moment to rest with what you came up with, the smartness of it, the clarity of it and the call of intimacy in it. If nothing came up for you, don’t worry about it. Just keep trying it, and I can pretty much promise you that things will come up.

Now, this practice is also really helpful during a conflict because it creates a reset. It moves you into and closer to the beating heart of your humanity, and it’s in the beating heart of your humanity that magic happens, that love is found, that love is cultivated, love is nourished. Risks and vulnerability come to life, and you step into a world that’s just a lot more authentic. Do that process as many times as you wish, and try not to second guess yourself because you’re learning a new language of intuition. I do have to say that it’s exciting to do this even though maybe scary, and I’ll share a story with you.

I met my husband in Province Town at Gay Family Week, and I was pushed into going by the guiding insights of two people I love very much, my mom and my dear friend Aileen, both of whom accosted me and told me that I had to do this. I knew it was a guiding insight because they meant it so much, and they love me and know me. Thank God, I listened.

The Day When Ken Listened to His Guiding Insight

Okay, so there I am. I’m in Province Town. I meet Greg. I liked him right away. I was attracted to him, but he was there. I was there with my son. He was there with his two daughters, and they needed a lot of attention because they had never done anything like this before. He’s really, really focused on them, and so we talked about meeting, didn’t happen. We talked about meeting again, it didn’t happen, and so I figured, “Okay, so he’s not interested.” I’m sad, I’m disappointed. That’s fine. It’s life.

so, a few nights later, I was in bed, and I was awakened bolt upright. It was one of those 3:00 in the morning moments, and I got this really clear message. The message was this. It was like, “If you mean it and you want to meet this guy, you got to get to work because you’re going to lose this opportunity if you don’t. You’re going to have to rev up your engines and get creative and get inventive. You’re going to have to really do a little uphill climb here, but if you don’t, you’re going to lose this opportunity.”

Now, I have not gotten messages that clear very often in my life, but I got it then, and so the next morning, I said to my son, I said, “Let’s get breakfast and go sit on the stairs of the school when everybody, all the parents are coming in with their kids and just say hi to everybody and just hang out and watch the people come in.” He was like, “Sure, dad.” He was little then, and said yes to everything pretty much. Well, that’s not true, but anyway, so he said yes.

There Is No Secret Formula

We got our breakfast. We sat on the steps, and of course, Greg came up, and I acted happy to see him. We chatted, and we chatted and made a date. He couldn’t keep the date again, but he called me up, and he said, “Hey, I’m free,” whatever day it was, “afternoon if you want to get together.” That was our first date, and everything proceeded from there. If I didn’t get woken up that night and if I didn’t listen and do this, kind of, pain in the ass scary thing of having to really rally, I would have lost that opportunity, so that’s just a very rich example of one guiding insight.

If you listen to your guiding insights, some of will be quiet. Some will be louder, but again and again, there will be a repetition of insight that’s really important for you. It will teach you. It will groom you for being more masterful in intimacy. It will repeat in different ways with your different guiding insights. If you act on your guiding insights, you will become more creative. You will have less tolerance for relationships of deprivation, and you’ll be more attracted to relationships of inspiration. You become a better friend to yourself and your loved ones, and these are not empty promises.

This is no secret formula. Our hearts are whispering to us, sometimes shouting to us all the time.

Just Love the Insight

The issue is not that we’re not getting messages. It’s that we tend to prefer to ignore them, and here’s an amazing bonus. The more you follow your core gifts, the more attractive you’ll become to the kind of person you’re looking for. The more you follow the calls of your heart, the more you’ll find that the person, the people you date will actually begin to shift and be closer to someone who really matches your nature.

One last thing I want to say is, what do we do when we get a guiding insight that’s just too scary for us? When we’re not ready to act on a guiding insight, a wise thing to do is just love the insight even knowing we can’t act on it yet.

Little by little, that love will make it more digestible, less scary, closer to us, more familiar. Little by little, the proximity to that lessen creates a friction inside us, a discomfort that slowly will transform us, so just loving a guiding insight that you’re not ready to follow will change you and move you closer to the day that you can act on it.

For your toolkit of wiser, more adventurous, more life-changing dating, trust your guiding insights. Invite our guiding insights. Listen to your guiding insights, and you’ll get this really wonderful solid feeling that you do kind of know what you’re doing, that there is wisdom, rich wisdom inside of you, and that that wisdom is guiding you.

Share Your Experiences with Ken

Try this, and let me know how it works at deeperdatingpodcast.com. There’s a microphone where you ask Ken, and you can just share your experiences with guiding insights or past stories of guiding insights. We’d love to hear them. Thank you so much, and I’ll see you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.