Your Body Blueprint

"Your relationship with yourself is the central template from which all others are formed. Loving yourself is a prerequisite to creating a successful and authentic union with another."Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott

One of the tools that was pivotal in helping me manifest and manage all my relationships since 1998 was Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott's book, If Love is a Game, These are the Rules. It was the first time I really understood the concept that how others treated me was a direct result of how I treated myself. When I could stand back and be objective about my behavior toward myself and what messages that sent out to others, I realized that the relationship I had to focus on most to get what I wanted was with myself. If I was not willing to treat myself like a queen, then how could I expect someone else to?

Your turn.

How do you treat yourself? When you wake up in the morning, what do you say to yourself? Do you compliment or criticize your body? Do you try on clothes, pinpointing all of the negative things you can, secretly wishing you could have someone else's body?

If you do, you are not alone. This common practice of most women is the exact behavior that drives the fitness and weight loss industry—and I hate it. We focus on perfect bodies and how can I spot reduce this area so I will like myself, or so someone else will find me attractive and valuable? The underlying emotion here is fear. Many spiritual teachers of mine over the years have all agreed that our actions are motivated consciously or subconsciously by either love or fear.

Fear is defined as a feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by present or imminent danger and a feeling of disquiet or apprehension. Fear can be a good tool when you think your life is in danger, but most people live in this emotion all day long with no such threat. Fear is uncomfortable to be in and around. Fear can also be defined as lack of trust.

Love is defined as a deep, tender feeling of affection and care toward a person, such as that arising from kinship or a sense of oneness, and a person who is the object of deep or intense affection or attraction. Love feels good, and we seek it all the time. We hold others as objects of our attention to give love to, and we want to receive love from others.

Which of these is activated more in your life when you deal with your body? Is it mostly love or fear?

How many times in your relationship life do you attract people who do the same thing or change the way they treat you as the relationship progresses? They start off complimentary and wonderful in the first two or three months, then the compliments stop coming because you either did not receive them or you argued about them.

You trained them how to treat you.

How often do you deflect a compliment? Someone tells you that you look pretty, and you say, "Oh no, I just rolled out of bed, and I am having a bad hair day." This blocks a compliment.

Many women do it because they have a hard time receiving. You are not allowing yourself to receive the gift because your inner critic does not believe what the other person says. You want to feel attractive, then someone gives you a compliment, and you reject it. Can you see what message you are sending to that person? Why would anyone compliment you again?

Take out a sheet of paper and answer these questions to see what your body blueprint says about you based on every area of fitness and self-care, including exercise, diet, rest, play, and self-talk. We will then work on creating a new body blueprint that can yield more desirable responses.

1. List all the thoughts you can remember you had today, from the time you woke up to now, about how you look or any judgments on your character. For example, if you made a mistake, did you quickly internalize with a thought like "I am so stupid," or did you think "Oh well, glad I learned that now?" List all of your thoughts in a single column.

2. Underneath the last thought, write a list all the actions you did today, from taking a shower to eating breakfast. Also include things you would have like to have done or should have done and didn't. For example, you did not take your supplements today.

You should have one long vertical row that contains all the thoughts you were aware of today and all the actions you have accomplished so far. Now make another column to the right of the first one and answer these questions.

1. Next to the thoughts you had, write down if they were positive comments or negative. If you criticized yourself, that is negative. If you brushed your teeth, that is positive.

2. Next to the actions, write down a brief reason for doing that action and whether it came from love or fear. For example, if you wrote down `had a cup of coffee, went to work and skipped breakfast,' do you think skipping breakfast was an act of love or disregard? You know the body needs fuel, so if the reason you skipped breakfast was because you were too busy, you put work before yourself, which sends the message that you are not as important as your work. Keep going through your list and be honest with yourself about the messages you are sending.

What Does Your Body Blueprint Say?

Answer the questions below and identify the message you are sending with each of your answers.

1. Exercise: How do you take care of your body? Do you exercise regularly? What kind of exercises do you do and why?

2. Diet: What foods do you consume on a regular basis? Are they high energy, clean foods that provide vitamins and nutrients for your body? Are they processed, chemically created foods that contain large amounts of fat and sugar with no nutritional value? Do you consume the amount of water your body needs to function optimally every day? Do you ingest toxins and drugs?

3. Rest: Do you sleep at least seven to eight hours a day? Do you unwind before going to bed? Do you take breaks during the day to relax and recharge your mind and body?

4. Play: Do you have fun on a weekly basis? Do you laugh often? Do you feel joy and do things you love every week?

5. Self-talk: How do you treat yourself with the words you use in your mind? If you talked to someone else the way you talk to yourself, how would they respond?

The thoughts you are aware of and your actions are part of your consciousness. You can change those behaviors starting now. But before we start to focus on the steps of changing your body blueprint to build the kind of relationships you want in your life, let's acknowledge how some of these habits got there in the first place. Why is it this way? Where did these patterns of thought come from?

Your Subconscious Mind

Your subconscious mind was formulated from the time you were born up until about eight years old. Often referred to as the basement of your mind, those beliefs were put there whether you were aware of it or not. They have been stored in the basement of your mind your entire life and drive all the thoughts and feelings that you have now—this is the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind makes up 88% of your thoughts and beliefs, whereas the conscious mind is only 12%. As you can deduce, the subconscious mind is running your life. I collaborated on a course called the 6 Week Body Program, where we help you reprogram your subconscious mind easily and effortlessly through the use of creative visualization and hypnosis. It's easy, painless, and starts to clean out that basement in your mind. Working with hypnosis in general can help uncover subconscious beliefs and patterns and help you to easily replace any old negative beliefs with new and more supportive ones. When wanting to deal with your subconscious, you will need assistance of some kind.

Attending to your conscious mind is something you can start doing immediately. I would not recommend trying to adjust everything on the list at the same time. Pick one of the five areas listed above and number them in the order that would be the best place for you to start.

Changing Your Body Blueprint

Here are some suggestions of tools you can use for each of the self care categories.

1. Exercise: Get a buddy. Schedule exercise into your week. Hire a fitness coach or personal trainer. Join a gym. Start an exercise group in your area to hold yourself accountable while socializing with some friends and neighbors. Take some time to find out why you don't exercise and find something you will do that might look like exercise. You can exercise in many different ways, and a gym is not necessary. Keep a self-care journal and write down the physical activity you do each day.

2. Diet: Clean out your refrigerator and pantry. Buy a healthy cookbook. Schedule and plan your meals. Hire a chef. Take a cooking class. Swap fast food for healthy alternatives at the grocery store. Pack your lunch and snacks. Keep a food log to see what you are choosing to eat. Do a detoxification. Find a local farmer's market.

Order home-delivered fresh produce from a farm. Spend the money on home-delivered fresh meals daily to help with portion control, calories, and nutrients. Plan to eliminate one toxic thing from your diet each week. Carry healthy snacks so you can always maintain your blood sugar and energy. Try a new vegetable every week. Eat protein at every meal.

3. Rest: Sleep at least seven hours every night, and create a ritual to transition from living your day to resting your body. Take a bath before bed. Drink some herbal tea. Write in a journal and offload any lingering ideas or thoughts to clear your mind. Use a self massager to relax your muscles and wind your body down. Turn off all electronics and be still in the quiet for few minutes before falling asleep. Use your mind to relax every part of your body from your feet to your head. Listen to hypnosis while you wind down to help change the subconscious mind and relax your body into sleep.

4. Play: Schedule a play date at least two or three times a week with family or friends. Pick things you want to do that get you excited, just like when you were a child. Make a list of all the fun things you would love to do without reasoning money or time. Research events in your area that might be free or low cost. Create a savings account or piggy bank for your adventures or travel. Pin up a map on the wall and mark all the places you want to go or make a list of things you want to see. Create a play vision board with pictures from magazines, and then number them in the order you want to accomplish them. Make a plan to do each one. Laugh every day.

5. Self-talk: Use a daily journal to make a list of positive aspects about yourself every day. List your accomplishments, as well as positive character traits you displayed each day. Use affirmations. Ask your friends and family what they love about you and read one response to yourself every day. Listen to inspiring messages from teachers or spiritual leaders you trust. Get a therapist or coach. Use hypnosis or the 6 Week Beach Body Program.

You will see the transformation of many of the people I interviewed for Fit 2 Love. When they changed their body blueprint, they attracted the love into their life that they had always wanted. Some of that love came from another, but the love that mattered most was the one that came first from themselves.

Over the course of my life thus far, I have had to learn how to quiet my inner critic, replace those thoughts with more supportive and loving behavior, and practice putting myself first as often as possible. With or without a partner, you are the only person who has to live with yourself for the rest of your life. My desire was to be as happy as I could with me, myself, and I. When I got there, I attracted my perfect mate because I had already found the love of my life within myself.

Manifesting My Husband in 3 Weeks

"Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers."Veronica A. Shoffstall

My dating history is pretty standard, with many short relationships and a few long-term relationships, which lasted from one to four years. I was a "one man" kind of woman for most of my life. Each time the relationship came to an end, I trusted that I was supposed to learn something from it about myself or change in some way to better prepare for the one.

You have two options when a relationship ends. The negative, self-destructive option would be to feel helpless, victimized, and as if the world is going to end. Why did this happen to me? What am I going to do now?

This option is easier in many ways because it puts blame on someone or something else, and that is highly acceptable in our culture. You can conveniently make it not about you to avoid looking in the mirror and owning where you are and what you have attracted into your life. The problem becomes when you keep attracting the same kind of relationship over and over again and keep thinking it's always the other person's fault.

The road less traveled is to practice having trust in a bigger plan and divine timing. Each relationship serves you in some way; you attract it based on where you are. Learn from it, grow more into who you really are, and then move on.

The only thing you are in control of is you.

You get to decide how to look at things, how you react, and what you do about it. It's not always easy to look inside and question. It takes love and trust.

Being the analyst that I am, I would often want to identify my lessons from the relationship as soon as possible after it ended. This way, I could justify my invested years with each partner in order to feel a sense of accomplishment, instead of failure. I wanted to be able to appreciate the time I spent, the lesson learned, and have no negative energy around it so I could move on with love and gratitude.

Failure is not an option in my world; evolution is. Sometimes you have to breakdown in order to breakthrough.

On February 5, 2006, I met my husband. The background story is that I was already in a relationship, as well as secretly still in love with my ex-boyfriend. My plate was full, and I was not actively looking for another man. As the old adage says, it happens when you least expect it.

It was a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon at a party in Tustin, California, where the guest list consisted of mostly Pittsburgh Steelers Fans gathering to watch the Super Bowl. The hosts were former clients of mine that I had not seen in many months. I was looking forward to visiting with them. Once settled in at the party, I engaged in girl talk until the door opened downstairs and this wave of energy walked into the room.

I sensed it before I saw him—it was very strange and the first time I had ever experienced something like that.

Taken by this energy, I turned around to see who it was, and there was this handsome, clean cut, yet slightly edgy guy carrying some snacks up the stairs.

The first thing I noticed is that he was attractive.

He was carrying a bag of chips in one hand and a Pyrex dish in the other. The tightly and almost perfectly Saran-wrapped Pyrex dish had salsa inside with six perfectly-cubed pieces of Velveeta cheese evenly spaced in three rows of two.

This guy is organized and precise.

He was wearing khaki's, a button-down shirt, and a baseball cap—very jock-like, until I noticed the silver jewelry. He had one silver ring on each hand and a silver bracelet around his right wrist.