A Personal Note From Orion

Welcome, Stellar Life listeners! In this episode, my guest, Katherine Woodward Thomas, discusses the empowering ways to find “the one” and discover the possibilities of conscious uncoupling. It was through Katherine Woodward Thomas’ phenomenal book, Calling in The One, that I first discovered the path to attracting the love of my life, and I’m honored to gain further insights on love and relationships from Katherine.

Katherine Woodward Thomas is a New York Times bestselling author, licensed marriage and family psychotherapist, and she advocates for conscious, intentional, loving relationships. Over the past two decades, Katherine has guided hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to create the kind of deep, fulfilling connections they desire. 

Her expertise extends to her virtual learning communities, which include the transformative Conscious Uncoupling and Calling in “The One” Quests with Mindvalley. Katherine also plays a pivotal role in training and certifying Calling in “The One” coaches and Conscious Uncoupling coaches. She passionately offers constant support and growth opportunities to a thriving global coaching community.

Get ready to be inspired and gain valuable insights that can truly change the course of your relationships and your life. Keep your light brightly shining!

 

 

In This Episode

• [03:54] – Katherine shares her background and what she teaches, including her motivation to write her book Calling In “The One.”
• [08:04] – What three questions must you ask yourself to create a relationship?
• [15:58] – How can we release ourselves from the victimized perspective?
• [18:30] – Katherine explains sending love to our trauma and finding a relationship with our younger self.
• [22:00] – Katherine discusses life as a pattern and how we can interrupt the negative ones.
• [26:36] – What is meant by conscious uncoupling, and how to avoid creating emotionally homeless children?
• [30:53] – The five steps to conscious uncoupling.
• [34:02] – Katherine talks about soul-to-soul meditation. She also explains how important it is to make ourselves available to be used by the light.
• [47:21] – Katherine’s top three tips for living a stellar life.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hey, Katherine. Welcome to Stellar Life podcast. It’s a joy to have you here. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be with you.

I’m so grateful that you’re here. Your first book influenced my life when I was looking for the love of my life. I’m grateful for you more than you know. Before we begin, can you share your origin story? How did you start to change people’s lives and help them with their love lives?

That wasn’t predictable early on that I could do that. I had a lot of upheavals in my early life. My mother was in and out of several marriages before I was an adult, while my father gave up parental rights when I was ten and married someone who did not want me in their home. There was a lot of drama relationally.

Consequently, that did play out in predictable patterns when I reached adulthood, getting involved in impossible love situations, married men, alcoholic men, commitment-phobic men, and all kinds of toxic drama traumas. 

That led to a chronically broken heart because I always wanted to find the right person and have a child of my own. Not having a happy childhood, I wanted to create a happy family in adulthood. It felt pretty sad.

But I have always been working on myself. I have been studying spiritual texts since I was a teenager. I did twelve-step programs all through my 20s. I did many years of psychotherapy. Finally, I got to a point where I understood my issues. I knew I was the way I was, but I couldn’t change it.

What made the biggest difference for me only happened in my 40s. At that point, I had been studying metaphysics—the science of mind. I was also studying transformational technologies, which have a lot of metaphysical principles woven in, particularly the Landmark Education or the Werner Erhard work.

The biggest thing that shifted everything and changed the game for me was the idea that we want to declare an unreasonable future and begin living there, particularly the question: Who would I need to be for that future to manifest and sustain itself?

I essentially went from this endless process of trying to heal past trauma, which is worthy and necessary work. Still, it’s a different type of work than declaring you’re going to transform your life, start growing yourself deliberately in the direction of that dream, and organize around who you imagine you would be in that future fulfilled. That catapulted my development—how I was relating to myself, others, and life.

I did that by declaring a future that I’d be engaged by my 42nd birthday. It was a crazy thing to say because I’d been looking for that person for two decades. But by shifting how I worked with myself and holding myself accountable to stretch and co-create that possibility with the universe instead of praying or hoping it to happen, I started showing up differently and taking risks in that direction.

It just began a cascade of miracles and transformations. Finally, I married a wonderful man and had my first baby when I was 43. That inspired me to write Calling In “The One,” which launched my career as a teacher in the world.

Shift how you work with yourself and hold yourself accountable to stretch and co-create greater possibilities with the universe.

Yes, and it helped probably millions around the globe. What do you think it is? You said you stepped into that version that you need to become. Is this about exchanging versions, or is it like stepping into a different timeline?

It’s great. When Michelangelo created David, he had this orientation to that big block of marble that David was already in there. He just had to chip away till he found David when he talked about it. Calling in “The One” is really like that.

You’re declaring a future that you’ve never had. You must use your imagination to ask yourself, “Who am I in this future?” You almost bring the future into the present. You begin by trying to imagine what it’s like to be living in that future. You might say, “What does it look like? What does it feel like?” You might feel someone with a loving touch on your back. “What does it smell like?” It might smell like his freshly shampooed hair. “What does it sound like?” It might sound like him laughing in the next room on the telephone. You start to bring it into all of your senses, and then you ask yourself a series of three questions. These questions were originally based on Michael Beckwith’s work, his visioning practice.

You ask, “What would I have to give up to allow this future to come to me?” That’s a very deep question. It’s very different from “Why am I the way I am?” I’m the way I am because of my mother, father, and brother.

We always get answers to that question.

If you sit with that question, you start to allow your intuitive knowing to take front and center in your consciousness. You say, “Well, at a practical level, I could give up some of the clutter in my apartment so that there’d be room for another person to come into my home. I would give up smoking because smoking is a mask that keeps other people at bay. It’s a form of self-hatred. I don’t want a relationship that will be based on a bit of hatred in the relationship. I want love, so how about I start with loving myself?”

You might get, “I have to give up my resentment towards my ex-boyfriend because I’m not looking at my part. I’m just blaming him, which means I’m not growing. I’m unable to trust myself moving forward because I haven’t seen my part clearly, how I gave my power away, and how I over gave to try and prove my value.”

Distinguish between your true and traumatized self. This awakens the truth of who you are at your deepest, inner level. When we live as our traumatized selves, it impacts our bodies and our perceptions. Click To Tweet

I was giving an audition to be chosen for wife, which wasn’t genuine. All the ways that we know that we’re out of integrity, you are confronted with all that when you ask that simple question. Here we are, we’re in meditation. We’re trying on what it feels like to have love in our lives, the experience of being chosen by the one you would choose.

The next question you ask is, “What would I need to let go,” or “What would I need to begin to embrace? How can I grow to become the person I would need to be for this to go well?” Then, it unleashes a whole other spectrum of wisdom: “I’d need to get better at managing myself when I get triggered so that I don’t blow up relationships to create healthy relationships.”

That’s a big thing. Many people focus on getting into a relationship, but what happens when you are there? Who are you going to be when you are there? You can’t play the same old game and step into a new version. That change must be applied on many levels because it is a new version of yourself.

Now you’re getting into how I am the source of my experience, another major core tenet of calling in. Most of us are victimized by the dating culture and our ex-partners, who we’ve labeled as narcissistic, love-avoidant, or co-dependent, whatever our labels are, but we’re prone to blaming others. Or we’re going to blame our parents, circumstances, or culture, but we all have reasons for this not going well.

In Calling In “The One,” there’s an orientation or a commitment right from the get-go to look and see how I am the source of my experience. Inside of that, “How would I need to grow? I need to become better at managing myself when I get triggered so I don’t go right into threatening the relationship. I’m going to leave if you don’t do that.”

When you see yourself as the source, you get that you will destabilize all your relationships if you act out of that younger, impulsive, reactive part of you. You’ll bring out the worst in other people. You can label them all you want, but you have to get your part in that to trust yourself that it will go differently this time.

We’re looking at how you’re relating to yourself and others. You may be overgiving because you’re more comfortable in the giver position, which is the power position. Or maybe you disappear yourself and put all of your focus on the other person, and you don’t share your feelings and needs because you’re overgiving to prove your value, or you’re creating what we call pseudo-safety. There are all sorts of ways that we need to grow ourselves healthier to have healthy, happy love on the other side of this.

The last question in that process is to ask yourself, “What is my next step?” Again, you’re really just listening. You’re in the stillness. If you ask the universe that question, you will get answers. You’ll get a response like, “Why don’t you clean out your drawers today and make space for another person to put their things?” Or you’ll get an answer that says, “Why don’t you call your sister, just get off it with her, try seeing what happened from her perspective, and apologize for your part?”

You’re going to say, “What’s my next step? I’m going to take all of the gifts that my former partner gave me. I’m going to put them away in a nice box. I will put them in the garage in a storage area so my space is clean from that relationship.”

There’s this proactive. I am the co-creator of that future fulfilled. It’s not just insight or understanding into why I am the way I am. “Who will I need to become, how do I actively grow myself in that direction, and what can I do today to co-create the manifestation of that miracle?”

A friend called me today. I do love coaching myself. But for friends, I’m just a friend, and I’m not their coach. I don’t think it’s healthy to do. She’s 42. She had really short and not very good relationships.

She called me, and she was in this state of despair. I think that people in such a deep state of despair can listen to what you’re saying. Still, there is almost a wall because they are so deep in suffering that it’s hard for them to go into meditation, clear the drawer, listen in, and take ownership. Not to judge, they are so deep in depression and victimhood that they cannot see the light.

I tried everything, and it doesn’t work. A female that is 42 and is longing for a relationship is a very difficult place to be. She feels very alone. There is a lot of suffering that is related to that. How would you coach her to get out of that state so she can take all the beautiful, incredible steps you discussed?

I think when people are in a state where they’re very emotionally centered in the victimized perspective, it’s important that we, as coaches, validate that experience because it is very painful, which I hear you did. I’m saying for the other coaches in the audience, too.

I know you were very empathetic and caring about her because it is so painful. It’s why I wrote Calling In “The One.” I always knew that I would write a book. I thought I was going to write a spiritual book. 

I became a relationship expert because I knew your friend’s suffering is so much that once I figured out how to transcend it and create a life outside that story, I wanted to share it with others. I thought I would do that, and then I’d go on and write my real book. It’s funny because I held it like that for years until I recognized after thousands of copies sold that maybe this is the work I’m supposed to be doing.

When people are in a state where they’re emotionally centered in the victimized perspective, it’s important that we, as coaches, validate that experience.

The first question for your friend is, “Can you articulate what you’re assuming is true about yourself and your relationships with others?” And see if she can name it as ‘I’m alone, and no one will ever be there for me.’

I’m saddened to hear that. It’s so painful.

It’s very painful because that’s the haunting splinter in her soul she’s centered in, running from, and trying to do wrong. No matter what she does, it comes back to that story. That’s like the default story.

When we find ourselves in this place, we want to see if we can take a deep breath and send love to the part of ourselves suffering with the weight of that story. Not just what happened to us when we were four or seven; it’s been happening repeatedly. We don’t see how we are the source of it. It feels like something is just sitting on our stars. I might tell her, “How old is the part of you that first recognized that you would always be alone in this way?”

That makes me sad, but it’s beautiful. It’s so deep.

It’s very deep. She’s going to say, “As long as I remember.” Or she will say, “When I was five, my father left,” or “My mother sunk into a depression for two years.” It’s either a developmental or acute trauma, but relational trauma lodged in her as a self-sense and her fate for the rest of her life. She’s doomed to live this story.

In Calling In “The One,” I help people wake up to the deeper truth of who we are on the deepest level of our being. We distinguish between the true self and the traumatized self because the traumatized self is a belief we hold in our bodies. Beliefs are not in our brains. They’re not thoughts. I know a lot of people change their thoughts and life. But how that lives for us is in our body.

It’s an energetic field. If you walk into a party, you can glance around the party. You can tell the people who live in a friendly universe versus those who don’t. It’s like an energy that people wear. “I’m not safe here. I need to protect myself,” or “I’m lovable. Everybody wants to hear what I have to say.” Tell me who you are, and I’ll tell you who I am.

Energetically, we are anchored and centered in our stories, almost like our own personal. My friend Polly Young-Eisendrath calls it a snow globe—our own snow globe.

Energetically, we are anchored and centered in our stories—our own snow globe.

I like to go in and identify exactly the story of the traumatized self. How old is that self? Where is he or she in your body? Then I like to also wake that person up to a larger perspective. There’s a part of all of us that’s outside that story. It might even be the part of her that knows that something different is supposed to be happening here. That’s why she’s so upset because she intuitively knows she didn’t come here to be alone, and yet it keeps happening like that.

I’m interested in the part of her that knows that something is not kosher here, that she’s born for love and meant for love. “It is my destiny to find love.” That’s the part I want to articulate. That’s the part I want to bring into a relationship with that younger self and say, “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry you had that trauma. But let me tell you the deeper truth, you are not born to be alone. You came here to love and be loved. You have the power to learn how to cultivate rich, loving relationships. It is your destiny to find great love in this lifetime because that’s what we’ll call your power center, the true self, and that’s self that can find your way to that future.” For those stuck and have no possibility, it’s generally because we are confused. We are overly identified with the traumatized self we created when we were too young to know any better.

That’s amazing. Why do you locate it in her body? What’s the meaning of finding that younger traumatized self in the body? And how do you release it from the body?

It’s more getting related to it and getting deeper, wider. These beliefs are conclusions we came to in response to relational trauma. Trauma does lodge in the body. You can do many of the trauma studies that are coming out now with Bessel van der Kolt. The Body Keeps the Score shows the science behind all of that.

You can feel it. Unless somebody is dissociated from their body, which does happen because people have trauma in their bodies—sexual traumas and death—and then you have to try and help them just to be more somatically oriented. Most people who don’t have that kind of dissociative problem are overcoming or challenging to overcome can go very quickly. “It’s right in my heart. I feel the heaviness in my heart, like a sickness in my belly, the tension in the back of my shoulders, or my whole neck is closing up right now.” That’s where trauma lives.

Affirmations can be limited because affirmations tend to be things that we decide with our minds that we’re going to say. But wherever we’re centered is where we generate our stories and lives. We’re going to be showing up inside of that.

If you’re gripped by an ‘I am alone,’ you will do all the generative things of that story outside of conscious awareness. Once you recognize that self and you name that self, you need to start to look at how I have been the source of my own aloneness because ‘I had aloneness’ is a pattern.

Beliefs are conclusions we come to in response to relational trauma. Trauma does lodge in the body.

For me, one of my patterns was with unavailable men. Married men somehow always find their way while available, single men almost didn’t recognize me. Any room I walked into was a magnet for married men. It looked like it was just happening to me. I didn’t know anything about what I was doing in particular. I do think that there’s a way that life runs in patterns. Until you interrupt the pattern consciously, it will continue to default that way.

A lot of what we need to learn is how to interrupt the pattern and become conscious of it in that direction. The source of my own aloneness is that nobody had ever really been there for me as a child. I had no healthy expectations going into a relationship that should be my criteria.

That’s amazing.

Here I am. I have a master’s degree. I’m studying to become a psychotherapist. I’ve run a nonprofit organization that a thousand people participated in for five years — I’m a very accomplished person. I think we’re all idiot savants in some way.

When it comes to these core wounds, just not even in my brain, one of the top criteria should be, “Is he available to love me? Will he be there for me when I need him?” But we are more caught by easy charisma, “Do we have chemistry? What is he up to in life? Oh, that’s compatible. It just wasn’t even on my radar.”

Do you feel like you’re a psychic?

I think that when we tune into other people and hone that craft, we become more and more that way. So, yes.

Life runs in patterns. We have to consciously interrupt our negative patterns in order to break free of them. Click To Tweet

I know. Some of the things you said resonated on many levels, especially with that friend. This is amazing.

I’m writing a book called True You Awakening—the core work we’re doing in our community and the secret sauce to Calling in “The One” and Conscious Uncoupling. It’s all about the traumatized self versus the true self and being able to access the true self. The truth is that about 21 core beliefs have very predictable patterns. That’s what I’m making available to people now.

I can’t wait to get it and read it.

I’ll have to return when the book comes out and share more.

Yes, please. You come back anytime. This is fascinating. Let’s move to your second book.

Yes. After I had thousands of students and was married for a decade, trying to announce when I was getting divorced was quite traumatic. It was not something that I saw coming early on in our relationship. Most of us who get married never anticipate that that could happen to us. It did happen to me.

Fortunately, my ex-husband and I did it beautifully and elegantly. It’s never going to be easy to separate from someone you love. But if separation is necessary, there is a way to do it that is kind, nonreactive, and generative of a healthy relationship on the other side.

Especially if you have kids.

If you have kids, you can co-parent well so they don’t become emotionally homeless. They are still part of a family that’s changing its form.

That’s a very strong phrase, emotionally homeless. This is the first I’ve heard of that.

It’s what happens to children very often in divorce.

Our brains and bodies are programmed to go to war when we end a relationship.

That’s terrible.

Even adult children. Some do bird nesting. I admire people willing to sacrifice like that for their children. For those who don’t know, birds nesting is when the parents keep the children in the main family home, and then the parents rotate one week in and one week out so that the children don’t have to leave their home, nor are they schlepping from house to house. Sometimes people share one apartment and sometimes get two separate places to live. I like it, but the house is not the home. It’s the relationship. The dynamics in the family is the home.

Mic drop.

If you’re going to bird nest, you still have to work this out as an adult with your former partner so that you’re doing the work and the children don’t get the eye-rolling, the caressed arms, the icy stare, or whatever it is that indicates the incompletion because even that will put children in the middle. They have to give their loyalty to one parent over the other.

When children are going back and forth from one home to the other, if the parents have not recreated or are happy, even after the family post-divorce, the children are always on some level of little emotionally homeless because they’re with dad, but they’re missing mom, or vice versa. We don’t want to do that to our kids.

We want it more like in the old days when you’d get a cluster of aunts, cousins, and grandmothers all living on one block in the neighborhood. You could go to your aunt’s house, spend the night at your cousin’s house, or go down the street to grandma’s and you’re still one family. You’re not all living together, but you’re still one family. That’s the idea for children.

A stellar life is living in service to a higher purpose and using your gifts to bless other people. Click To Tweet

That’s a lot of processing work that most people need to be equipped to do. Everybody would aspire to an amicable divorce, particularly if you have children. But most of us are ill-equipped to manage the big emotions that come up and all the flooding of hormones, even at the end of love. Our brains and bodies are programmed to go to war when we end a relationship, just biologically.

That’s the soulmate-to-soul-hate phenomenon, where you start hating the person you once loved. It’s a trick of nature to keep us bonded because hatred is just as strong.

I had a friend coming over today. She told me that it took six years to divorce her husband. Her husband cheated on her, but she said, “I didn’t want to traumatize my children. It took six years to make the divorce as calm as possible, and we’re still good friends.” Does it have to take that long?

She definitely took the slow and steady route. I don’t think that’s going to be possible for most people. That’s admirable that she was so committed. Everybody’s going to have their own story. Sometimes people don’t have a choice. The other person says they’re leaving, and that’s it.

There’s a difference between somebody being left and someone leaving. The person being left is traumatized, while the person leaving has a long time to build a life outside the relationship.

There’s a difference between somebody who’s being left and someone who’s leaving because the person who’s being left is generally quite traumatized. The person leaving has had a long time to think and build a life and identity outside the relationship.

It occurs as very unfair to the person being left because the person who leaves very often has already done their grieving work. By the time they go, they’re finished and will start dating immediately. That adds to the devastation of someone who’s left.

We aspire to live consistently with our value systems most of the time, and breakups are the hardest time to do that. There is a litmus test for the character because even the nicest and the most ethical of us will have an impulse to hurt the person hurting us. We will have an impulse towards getting back at that person.

We’re hardwired for fairness. If it doesn’t seem fair, we want restitution. We can get very stuck on resentment and go over every little detail about what they did that they shouldn’t have done or what they didn’t do that they should have done. It’s easy to get stuck, particularly to interpret the breakup as evidence for the false traumatized story. “See, I will always be alone again.”

Prolonged grief is different from a normal course of grieving. A normal grieving course will always be present when you lose an important relationship. You will go through all of those stages to some degree, but it will resolve itself and get to acceptance within just a few months.

If you’re suffering for longer than that, which many do, and the aftermath of a really important relationship, it’s likely, because you came to conclusions that are re-wounding in some way that goes back to validate that old story. In Conscious Uncoupling, I call it your source fracture wound, the original break in your heart.

I did a brain scan with Dr. Amen long ago, and my brain runs really hot. He talks about diamond patterns, where you’re just going in a loop with some thoughts. You look again, and again, and again.

What can one do to break those loops? You said two months is a good enough time to start your healing journey and for people stuck with it. Some people get stuck with it for the rest of their lives.

They do. That’s the danger. I always say breakups are at a crossroads, and many go on to live a lesser life after having their heart broken. Conscious Uncoupling is five steps, and the first three deal with ourselves. We’re not even dealing with the other person.

I know Gwyneth Paltrow kicked it into the lexicon and made it look like it’s just how the two of you are working together. But there’s a lot of work for most of us to do to get to where we can be fair-minded, generous, keep the peace, and build a new life together with goodwill.

The first step is dealing with our overwhelming emotions because we have to start where we are. I call it finding emotional freedom, which is we are anything but emotionally free. It’s looking at how we can transform those negative emotions into the fuel we need for positive change.

Breakups are at a crossroads, and many live a lesser life after having their heart broken.

For example, what’s good about that is that if you feel rage, it’s likely because you must step up and reclaim the right to be treated respectfully. Rage is a normal reaction to having your rights violated, to be treated with dignity, to be told the truth, and all of those things. You want to transform that into an intention that you set to graduate from this pattern. Never again will this happen.

Step two is reclaiming your power and life: “How can I see myself as the source when someone wrongs me?” Someone did cheat, lie, and steal. We get very captivated by that.

I tell people that even if it’s 97% the other person’s fault, you want to be interested in your 3%. Very often, it’s subtle. I ignored my intuitive knowing. I minimized the red flags. I didn’t ask the right questions. “How was I lying to myself if someone was lying to me?”

You must know that because otherwise, you’ll never trust yourself to go into a situation where you could be hurt again unless you graduate from that 3% pattern.

In step three, we get to make an empowered meaning of the breakup. It might be getting into a relationship with the younger self. “Sweetheart, how old are you? What’s the meaning I’m making? I’m invisible, I’m not worthy, or I’m always going to be alone.” You have to name that. And then you want to learn how to mentor that part of you to more true meaning.

Eventually, where you need to get to is, “Even when someone I love is not loving me or is incapable or unwilling to love me, I am still a lovable person. Even when someone is being disrespectful, I am still a person who is worthy of respect. Just because someone is shaming and blaming me does not mean I’ve done anything wrong.” You have to claim the deeper truth and stand there.

There’s this piece in step three, where I help people to be responsible for how they may have been showing up in the relationship that was a leftover way of relating from that source fracture wound that enrolled their partner into playing that out with them. 

In step three, people often don’t want to be connected to that person, or they’re not. It’s not safe to be connected to that person. We do a soul-to-soul meditation, where you call that person into your meditation. You stand in the deeper truth of who you are and correct their perception of you in your mind.

Wow, that’s so powerful.

Yeah, it’s very powerful to shift in that way. It liberates people from prolonged grief because it is stuck in an old story about yourself.

Yes, because everyone is our reflection. They are mirrors of what we project. When you show that person, this is the truth of who I am. It’s almost like a domino chain of so many healings, of so many times where you projected yourself in that way in different relationships, maybe not even love relationships. It’s very healing. It’s incredible.

Yes. This gets into the metaphysical quantum physics land of nonlocality, which quantum physics does show quite a bit of evidence for. When you’ve been connected with someone at that level as a lover, that connection doesn’t end because you’ve returned the keys to the condo. The connection is alive.

If that person has a story about you that you’re bad or wrong, you’re not worth it, whatever their story is, you’ll feel it in the field. It will be like there’s a curse on your life in some way. It’s very powerful to go in and say, “I understand why you might think that of me, but I need to tell you who I am.”

You imagine that person with respect in their eyes that they get it, and then you make a request. “Please hold me only in this light, that you speak well of me.” There’s a lot that can shift. The other person might go to the soulmate to soul-hate as an easy way to separate. You can’t control that. But you would have the upper hand if you saw it through that lens.

How do you come up with these types of meditations that are so powerful? Do you get yourself in meditation and then the insight? It’s very deep, very beautiful, and very profound. I’m just hearing one profound thing after another. How do you connect to the source to get this information yourself? Do you feel like it’s coming from you, or is it being channeled through you?

Rage is a normal reaction to having your rights violated.

Yeah, I’m channeling it. When I was 19, I always loved God, even though I wasn’t raised in a home that talked about God. When I was even 14, I started reading religious texts. I almost had to hide it from my parents.

I went off to Bible school when I was 19. I joke and say, “I’m a Bible school dropout,” because I didn’t finish it, but I spent a long time in the chapel every day asking God to use my life for good. I had a fantasy that meant that I would go off and start speaking or ministering to people.

Of course, what ended up happening is my boyfriend married someone else. My best friend turned against me. My parents wanted nothing to do with me and threw me out of their home. I gained fifty pounds. I got isolated. I had an anxiety disorder. My whole life went into the toilet. I thought that God had abandoned me.

What ended up happening is I did crawl myself out of the ditch after several years. It took twelve years of 12-step programs, therapy, transformational seminars, and many others. But when I was in my 30s, I had healed from the eating disorder. I didn’t have it as an active problem anymore. I said to life, “How can I thank you for saving my life?”

When you’ve been connected with someone on a level as a lover, the connection doesn’t end easily after separating.

I went down and got this idea about going down to Skid Row. I was a singer-songwriter at the time. I had never done any healing work with anybody. But I went down to Skid Row and started running creative writing workshops so people could write songs with professional songwriters because I was in LA. There were so many professional songwriters there.

I was in this group weekly, just making things up, wanting to contribute to people and people’s lives. About eighteen men and women were in the group, and their lives were changing rapidly and radically.

I was sitting in that group one day, and I realized that all those years that was the answer to my prayer because I now knew how to transform from the inside out. I almost had a transmission about it. All of my work is co-created in that space of deep listening, where I’m bringing it forward.

Have you heard of Theo? Have you heard of Abraham-Hicks? Esther Hicks went to a seminar by Theo. Sheila Gillette is channeling Theo. She was asking the same question, where she had some trauma, she needed to survive. 

She said, “God, use me, I’ll be the tool, just use me,” then she started channeling Theo. They were a guest on the show, and we know them personally. They’re amazing. This may be a key question for people to allow the source to flow through them to manifest their destiny.

Absolutely. I love that you’re even mentioning that. That’s beautiful. It begins with making ourselves available to be used by the light.

Yes. It’s so beautiful. All the techniques you mentioned in your first or second book can be translated to so many other things in our lives, all of them. It all stems from the same core wounds, all our problems. All our negative manifestations stem from that core wound or from not owning our life and our relationships, from not owning our dreams or believing in our dreams.

That’s the book I’m working on right now. I have people do Calling in “The One” with other things they’re committed to manifesting. It’s used in a Science of Mind church. Training all their practitioners requires them to go through the Calling in “The One” process because it’s about calling in yourself, your highest and best self, and manifesting your life from there.

It’s so beautiful. Another beautiful thing I want to mention, which we spoke about before the interview, is that when people go through your Conscious Uncoupling, it’s not that they go through it to break up properly. Often, when people go through that process, you told me they come together because they have done some healing work that will allow them to stay with the love of their lives and not break their relationships.

Conscious Uncoupling is a process that teaches people some core skills that might have prevented a breakup if they had had those skills in their relationship.

Yeah. I could promise people they will have greater love on the other side of Conscious Uncoupling because the process teaches people some core skills that might have prevented a breakup if they had had those skills in their relationship. Many people read Conscious Uncoupling and say, “Gosh, I wish I’d read this when I was still married because we would never have broken up.”

We make room for couples to do it. We do say, “Look, whether you’re in the midst of a breakup, you’re anticipating a possible breakup, or considering a possible breakup, you can do the course anyway because it’s going to help you to end the old dynamics between you, and to grow the relationship healthier. You can rebirth the relationship.”

Some people come in and take it. They haven’t recovered even after a long time. They still suffer from not trusting love, not dating anyone, festering resentments, and difficulties with an ex-partner they’re co-raising children with. They’ll come in and do it to help them then too.

That’s beautiful. I want to be respectful of your time. Before we say goodbye, I have two questions for you. What are your three top tips for living a stellar life? Where can people find you?

Thank you. You made it visible. My definition of a stellar life is to have your life be used in something in service to something greater than yourself. Asking life, “What can I do for you? How can I be of service? How can I use my gifts to bless other people?”

I am a psychotherapist, so I’m well-researched here. We’re doing much of our healing or personal development work by just going back into the past. Healing and transformation are two different domains. Taking a stand for an unreasonable, unpredictable future is very important. This future will not happen unless you stand for it and begin moving in the direction of your dreams and being developmental, not just analytical, but also developing the things you didn’t learn when you were young.

You need to listen to your intuition and higher power. This helps you transform from the inside out and positively impact the world. Click To Tweet

What can I say that is unique? It’s very important to develop a deep awareness of where we’re centered at the level of beliefs at any given moment. Become conscious of that, and always course correct, not by again trying to understand why we feel that way, but to wake ourselves up from the trance by reminding ourselves who we are and what it is that we’re here to contribute, to create, and to live life from that center.

Awakening yourself from the trance because this world is an illusion and a dream we are creating every day and every moment. I resonate with that. Katherine, where can people find you and get all those amazing books?

Katherinewoodwardthomas.com. I do have an upcoming Conscious Uncoupling course. You can find out about that at consciousuncoupling.com. We’re pretty accessible. We have a lot of free offerings on our site. We love to help people evolve their capacity to love and be loved.

Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This was wonderful.

Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Thank you, listeners. Remember to be in service for something greater than you are. Take a stand for an unreasonable future, develop a deep awareness of your beliefs, wake up from this dream and have a stellar life. This is Orion, till next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓}Invest in your personal growth by focusing on your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being. Take the initiative to transform your life and align yourself with your dreams.

{✓}Take charge of your own experiences.  Show compassion to the parts of yourself that are hurting. Break free from negative patterns and illuminate your path.

{✓}Foster a kind, non-reactive, and nurturing relationship with your partner, even if separation becomes necessary. If you have children, co-parent effectively to ensure they don’t become emotionally homeless.

{✓}Channel negative emotions into fuel for positive change, aiming for emotional freedom. Strive to break free from emotional imprisonment.

{✓}Reclaim your power and take ownership of your emotions. Remember that even if another is to blame, it’s crucial to pay attention to your intuition and take responsibility for your reactions.

{✓}Connect with your younger self to embrace deeper truths. Take responsibility for how you show up in your relationships with yourself and others.

{✓}Ask yourself empowering questions that align your focus with personal growth. For example, “How can I continue to evolve?” 

{✓}Confidently seek guidance from the universe to discover the next step in your journey. Patiently await its response. 

{✓}Assess and understand your beliefs and how they evolve. Remind yourself of your identity, purpose, and the contributions you have to offer the world.

{✓}Explore Katherine Woodward Thomas’ website for valuable resources to enhance your capacity to love and be loved. Discover her upcoming Conscious Coupling course at consciouscoupling.com.

Links and Resources

About Katherine Woodward Thomas

Katherine Woodward Thomas is the New York Times bestselling author of Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After and Calling in “The One”: 7 Weeks to Attracting the Love of Your Life, as well as an award-winning licensed marriage and family psychotherapist.

Over the past two decades, Katherine has taught hundreds of thousands of people from all corners of the globe to create conscious, loving relationships. Katherine’s virtual learning communities include the Conscious Uncoupling & Calling in “The One” Quests with Mindvalley. She also trains and certifies Calling in “The One” Coaches and Conscious Uncoupling Coaches and provides ongoing supervision and development to a vibrant community of coaches from around the world.

Katherine is a Billboard charting, #1 iTunes jazz artist with her CD, Lucky in Love, co-written and co-produced with The Brothers Koren.

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