How We Come Together

Let Love Find You: Seven Steps to Open Your Heart to Love
by John Selby

You are looking for love, but never seem to meet the person of your dreams. Where are you going wrong? How can you invite true love and sexual satisfaction into your life? John Selby has the answers to these and any other questions you may have about improving your love life and creating relationships that work. With tried-and-tested techniques, expert guidance and inspiring examples, he explains how you can overcome the barriers that lie between you and the love of your life.

You will discover how to heal past hurts; boost your sex appeal; give out all the right signals; make the most of each encounter and find the partner who is right for you. Your perfect lover is out there, somewhere - Let Love Find You will show you how to bring that special person into your life.

Two solitary people find themselves standing side by side at the grocery-store checkout stand. Both live alone and yearn for sexual intimacy and a long-term love partner. And indeed, from a wise matchmaker's perspective, these two people might be quite compatible - but unfortunately they stand next to each other, but fail to really tune into each other's presence. The woman has an ideal lover in mind who doesn't at all match this fellow's physical appearance, and besides she's feeling depressed and hardly noticing people around her at all. Meanwhile the man is tense and worrying about a meeting coming up next day at work - he's right then entirely out of touch with his heart and its deeper yearnings.

And so, these two lonely and highly compatible people fail to perceive the other person as a possible intimate companion. Instead of love-at-first-sight ringing bells in their hearts and provoking a bashful but eager conversation, they turn and go their separate solitary ways, chronically yearning for their ideal life partner - while missing one chance after another to fulfil that basic romantic yearning.

This unfortunate scenario happens over and over in the lives of millions of single people. Golden opportunities open up for romantic encounter - but the people involved aren't quite prepared inside their own hearts and minds to perceive the opportunity and act on it.

A few months ago while travelling on a seminar tour, I gave an evening lecture in Zurich and noticed that the majority of people in the audience were young - and most of them had come to the lecture alone. My organizer informed me of a recent lifestyle study showing that 37 per cent of the Zurich population between the ages of 20 and 45 currently live alone as singles, even though most of them feel frustrated and hunger for romantic involvement. As I journeyed to other cities in Europe and the States, I came upon the same situation - a chronic crisis of young (and also not so young) people unable to find sexual fulfilment and lasting relationships.

What is causing this general mating difficulty, and what can be done about it? Relationship experts offer numerous explanations for this epidemic of frustrated singles. They note that traditionally, arranged marriages helped resolve the mating game, with romantic love held secondary to the pragmatics of an economically successful union. But long ago this tradition faded away - leaving young folk (and divorced or widowed older folk as well) to struggle blindly on their own to find a compatible mate.

Many experts blame the media for presenting stereotyped portrayals of idealized romance that programme people's minds with images and expectations that simply don't match everyday lives and possibilities. Single people do all too often hunger for an idealized physical mate, and thus fail to recognize compatible partners because they don't quite match flashy media notions of sexual perfection.

The fear of sexually communicated diseases, combined with anxieties of possible sexual assault and so forth, also tend to keep lonely people at home at night - where there's virtually no hope of romantic encounter. And at work, many people are so consumed in their careers that they're afraid to get caught in a romantic buzz. Even when willing people seeking heart-to-heart contact go out regularly to the night spots that cater to singles, all too often the experience proves discouraging if not downright embarrassing and insulting. Most people in such situations close down their more sensitive presence, armour their hearts and adopt a phoney social image that might lead to casual sex, but doesn't lead any further into serious romance.

And so, after too many heartless sex adventures that led to empty feelings of hopelessness and despair, literally millions of solitary people sit at home at night, watching television or reading books or surfing the internet - doing their best to make it through another lonely evening but all the while yearning for something magical to happen to sweep them off into an idealized romantic encounter.

The Cause of Loneliness - And The Solution

Blaming various external conditions as the cause of our singles crisis might be popular in the press, but ultimately such excuses don't do anything to resolve the dilemma. And the truth is, until just recently we simply didn't have enough scientific and psychological evidence in hand to help us clearly identify the more subtle 'romance variables' that determine if we're actually in optimum position to discover meaningful love. There has also been a dearth of pragmatic programmes teaching how to manage our own minds and emotions, so that we can take control of those variables, and purposefully advance towards deep heart encounter.

A primary purpose of this book is to present, for the first time, newly emerging professional insights into why some people manage to find true love, while so many others continue to live alone and lonely. Most importantly, this text offers readers specific psychological techniques for identifying and then actively resolving each of the 'romance variables' that stands between them and true love.

© 2006 by John Selby.

About the Author

John Selby is a psychologist, writer, therapist and teacher who has studied meditation with some of the world's greatest teachers, including Krishnamurti. He has also researched psychology at Princeton and UC Berkeley and carried out fieldwork with the Hopi Indians and tribes in Guatemala. He maintains his therapy and training centres in California and Europe, and is the author of over two dozen highly successful books, including Seven Masters One Path and Quiet Your Mind.