[EP 13] Transformation thru Love: A Soulful Journey with Arielle Ford & Jack Canfield

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Hello, and welcome back to the Jack Canfield Podcast. I am Jack Canfield, and my guest today is Ariel Ford, who's a longtime friend and a luminary in the area of love, romance, and relationships. And she's on a mission to help us all find love, keep love, and be loved. And as part of that mission, she's the author of the international bestseller the Soulmate Secretary. Manifest the love of your life with the Law of Attraction, as well as the books Turn youn Mate into youo Soulmate, A Practical Guide to Happily Ever after and Wabi Sabi Love, the Ancient Art of Finding Perfect Love in Imperfect Relationships. Now, having been called the cupid of consciousness and the fairy godmother of love, Ariel has now ventured into fiction with her debut novel, the Love Thief, which is captivating readers everywhere, including my wife, who's in the middle of the book and loving it. Right now. Arielle lives in La Jolla, California, with her husband and soulmate, Brian Hilliard, and their feline friends, which I can relate to. We have two cats that we're madly in love with as well. So welcome, Arielle.

Thank you, Jack. It's so fun to be with you. It's been years.

It really has. I mean, I think we met 30 years ago and, you know, you were our public relations expert for many years. I always tell people were looking for someone who we knew had great pr and everywhere we looked, we found Deepak Chopra. He was on the COVID of the. Was it the India Tire Dealers Magazine? And I went, holy mackerel. Who's that PR agent? It was you. And you got us into People magazine and the Forbes, and you helped to sell tens of millions of copies of that book, for which we're grateful. And then you left that world and started writing about love and about romance and soulmates. What made you. You'd make that shift when you go back to that time when you went from pr.

I don't know if you remember this. You are the reason I'm a published author. And here's what happened. You and Mark got on the phone with me one day and said, you should write a book with us. And I was like, well, what kind of book? And they said, no, you figure it out. Anyway, sometime later, I submitted a book that I called Chicken Soup for the mystical soul. 101 True Stories of Angels, Miracles and Healings. And you and Mark got on the phone with me and basically told me I had to take out my 10 favorite stories out of the book. And at the time, I didn't really understand why, but you were my favorite clients. There was no way I was going to do anything to upset you. So I said, okay, let's just not do a book together. Let's just keep things status quo. And then there was an agent in New York that I knew who asked me what happened to the book. And I said, oh, you know, Mark and Jack didn't like 10 of my stories and whatever. And she said, well, send me the manuscript. So this is back in the paper days. This was 1997. I mailed her the manuscript and 10 days later she called me up and she said, I just got you a six figure advance for your book and it's now called Hot Chocolate for the Mystical Soul. And I said, no, no, no, no, you can't sell it. This is Mark and Jack's format. I have to ask permission. And so I, I said, stop everything because I didn't know she was going to try and sell it. And I caught you and Mark on the phone and I told you both what happened. And I said, listen, if you don't want me to do this, I understand this is your format. I don't, you know, I don't want to upset you guys and Jack Canfield, you said to me, I couldn't be happier for you. I'll write the forward to your book. And Mark said, yeah, we're thrilled. I'll write the afterword to your book and we're going to help you sell it. And that book turned into a six book series. So I am a published author today because of you.

Wow. I do kind of remember that. I had forgotten all of that. I remembered there was a Mystical Soul book. I don't know that we wanted you to take those. I think it was our publisher that was concerned about it. But nevertheless, you did great. And then you started writing books about relationships. What shifted from the mystical soul to relationships?

I, at the age of 44, woke up one morning and basically went, oh my God, I forgot to get married. And I started thinking about how did I get to be 44 and not married? And I had this hugely successful career in Beverly Hills and I had a sports car and a condo and a great life, but I didn't have a husband. And so I sat down and I made a list of every manifestation thing I'd ever done to be a success in business. And then I applied all of it to my love life. And then a year later, I manifested my husband, who, by the way, we just celebrated our 25th anniversary. And so I thought I was Done right, goal accomplished, had the wedding. You were at my wedding? As were some 16 other chicken soup co authors. And about a year after that, my sister Debbie had me on a cruise with 200 of her coaches. And she said, arielle, get up here. Come up on stage. Tell everybody how you manifested your soulmate. So I stood up and I gave this 45 minute impromptu talk. And when I was done, 200 people rushed the stage and said, I need that book. I want to find a husband. How do I do it? Sure enough, the book came out and. And it was a best seller before publication date. Now, I didn't even know that was possible. But what happened was they took it to one of the book fairs, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and they sold the rights to my book to 40 countries before publication date. So I earned out my six figure advance before the book ever came out. And then suddenly I'm an author and I'm still trying to run a PR firm and, you know, Esalen's calling and Omega Institute's calling, and all these people want me to be a teacher. I don't know how to be a teacher. I was the behind the scenes person, but God had other plans for me. And I morphed into this whole new life of teaching people how to find love and keep love. And it turns out that I really enjoy it. So that's kind of the short version.

Well, I've loved all your books. I just think they're fabulous. And now you've written the novel the Love Thief. I'm going to hold up the COVID of it here so everyone can see it. It's just I love the COVID as well as the book. And what made you go, I know we were talking before we came on air here. You said it took you four years to write this book. You're not sure you do it again. But what was the transitional thing thinking that got you to go from being a nonfiction writer to writing a novel?

Well, I never had writing a novel on my to do list. I never ever had the conscious thought I should try my hand at fiction. But what happened was my husband came into my office one day and he said to me, you should write a book about me. And the book should be called I Married an Alien. And I said, that's a stupid title. And why would I write a book like that? Get out of here. I don't want to do it. But then I started to think that was an unusual request from Brian. He normally wouldn't say anything like that. And I started to think, well, if I were going to write a book about Brian. What kind of book would it be? And I realized that he would be the hero of a story because he's the hero in my life. Brian's on a mission. And Brian's mission is to make sure that everybody he comes in contact with has the experience of being loved. So I knew that if I were writing a book about him, that would be the personality of the hero of the book. And then I stopped thinking about it. Well, the next day the title for the book came to me and I was like, oh my God, love that title. And then this movie started to unfold in my head, this storyline. And I could see that it wasn't a self help nonfiction book, it was a novel. And I was like, go away, go away. I didn't want to do it. And then I got an email from masterclass.com and it was promoting a course with Dan Brown from the Da Vinci Code. And it was how to write a thriller with Dan Brown. And I'm a fan girl, so I thought, I'm going to sign up for this course. I had the year long pass because I just want to hang out with Dan Brown. So I start taking his course. In the meantime, the movie in my head is unfolding and I can see that this novel that I'm never going to write takes place in Rishikesh, India. And then I get to chapter three of the masterclass course and Dan Brown's talking about location as a character in the book, just as Florence Italy was a character in DaVinci Code. And this light bulb went off and I thought, oh, well, in my book, Rishikesh is a character in my book. But no, no, no, I'm never going to write it. But it didn't stop every single day, even in my dreams, the stories unfolding. And finally I sat down one morning and I said, listen, God, we need to talk. I said, I don't want to write this book. But however, if I meant to write this book, I need to manifest a business class ticket to India to go to Rishikesh to do some research. And then I felt this astounding relief. I was like, yeah, somebody's going to give me a $7,000 business class ticket. Never going to happen. Two days later, I ran into a former business partner of mine and he was like, arielle, hey, what's up? What are you doing? And I said, oh, nothing much. I'm trying to manifest a trip to India. And he said, well, when do you want to go? And I Gave him some dates, and he looked at his phone and he said, I'll take you. And just like that, I had the ticket to India. So I got to India, my feet hit the ground, I start walking around. And all the scenes I saw in the movie in my head, I tripped over, like, magic and mystical craziness started to happen. So I came home from India, I sat down, and I started to write. And then I turned into a total insecure, nervous Nelly, because I knew I was a good nonfiction writer. I can write nonfiction all day long. I can write a whole book in six months. But I never went to college to get an MFA in writing. I didn't know how to write a novel. So I started writing. And then I would send a few pages here and a few pages there, and the people I sent pages to were writing back. When can I see more? This is really great. I love it. So I kept writing and rewriting, and then my agent made me rewrite it a million times. And then I went to two book doctors. And my favorite thing to say about it now is the longest chapter in the Love Thief is the acknowledgments. Because I had so much health.

You know, it's interesting, I was talking with someone earlier today, and the guy. I'm not remembering his name right now, but he was. He wrote the ER and he wrote Jurassic park and so forth. And he said, books aren't written, they're rewritten. And he. He rewrote one of those books, I think nine times, Know, just constantly re. Editing and editing, you know. And it's interesting, too, that this was coming to you in your dreams and downloads, probably meditation and so forth. And I just recently talking with a retired doctor who decided she didn't know what she wanted to do. And she started getting these downloads for a movie about a doctor who could perform heart surgery on infants. And she saw Matthew McConaughey playing this guy. And every night she'd get new scenes, and she took a master class with some movie producer guy. Screenwriter, I don't forget. It was. And all of a sudden, she's got this movie script that she's written. And I think it's fascinating that there's these messages coming through if we're open to listening to them. I met a woman who literally writes these thousand page novels about China and Japan, and she said, I just take dictation. I went, oh, I wish that was what I could do. But I think we all have these intuitive aspects of ourselves that somehow we develop over time if we're willing to pursue them. So you. The tagline for your book, it says, he broke her heart, crushed her dreams, until karma intervened. So let's talk a little bit about your book. You know, you got this sense of what inspired you and going off to Rishikesh. Maybe you need to write a book called the Business Class Secret. Just like the Soulmate Secret, you manifested that one. But talk about the book like there's a. There's a, there's a theme. There's an arched arc. There's a message you have in there. Give us a little bit of an overview of the book.

Well, it's a. It's a romantic, spiritual thriller with a very juicy revenge subplot and a surprise happy ending. So it's the story of a young woman who's about to turn 38, whose lifelong dream is to have the white picket fence, the husband, the two kids, the golden retriever. But here she is, almost 38, and it hasn't been happening. And she ends up, she's a chef. She ends up catering a very fancy schmancy gala in Rancho Santa Fe. And the woman whose home it is, she meets her son. And he literally is Prince Charming. He doesn't have the white horse, but he is tall, dark, handsome, charismatic, charming. And their relationship takes off in a flash. And suddenly she believes her whole life is coming true. Everything she ever wanted. Until she finds out that he's a toxic narcissist sociopath with a criminal past. And so he does. They fall in love. He proposes on the pitcher's mound at Petco park after a Padres game. It's all over tv. Until he has an affair with her best friend and business partner. And then she's crushed. Not only is her heart broken, she's now lost her business and she gets in a car accident and nearly dies. So on every single level, her life is over. And while she's recovering, she has an auntie who was raised in India but is a U.S. attorney, says to her, I was going to give you $10,000 as a wedding gift, but I'm going to give it to you now as a recreate your life gift. And why don't you go to my cousin's cooking school in Rishikesh, India, and get a little distracted and heal your heart. So off she goes to India. And I need to just say one thing. This girl was a non believer, a non seeker. She was the only child of a new age baby boomer mother who used to hang dream catchers over her crib. So she was not into anything we would be into. And yet she ends up in India, and experience after experience begins to happen to her, and she ends up spending her mornings at a spiritual bookstore where the owner of the bookstore is a gay Hendrix type, a retired professor of counseling psychology who explains to her what love really is and what love isn't and what happened to her and how she can recover from it. So it's just this beautiful story of love and redemption and healing and revenge because she gets the opportunity to get back at the guy who. Who did her wrong, and she gets to do it without actually killing him. So that's sort of a nutshell of what the Love thief is about.

I'm curious. This. This. This charismatic, sociopathic, narcissistic guy doesn't come off as a very lovely person. How did you create this character? Did you. Was it a composite? Was there someone you knew like that? Just curious.

Well, in the front of the book, it says, this book is a work of fiction inspired by actual events. Names and circumstances have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent. So let me start there. But they also say, you write what you know. And unfortunately, the experience my heroine Holly has is not uncommon. I have known very, very many sociopathic, toxic narcissist men that were doing damage to my girlfriends and to people close to me. So I had a lot to work with, and I actually didn't even use everything that I had. But, yeah, people say to me, I hated Barry from page one. You know, he's very easy to hate. He's a nasty, nasty guy.

How many people like that do you think are out there?

Well, I'll give you some numbers. When I wrote the book, I didn't really have an idea of how many women were going to respond to it the way that they did. I started to get emails and calls from women who would say to me, you know, you wrote that book for me. And I'd say to them, what's your name again? I don't even know you. I did not write this book for you. But really, hundreds of women have told me they think I wrote the book for them because I so captured their experience. So I think it's more common than we would expect. And. And the reason we don't hear about it is because these type of men target smart, successful women with money. And when these women get taken, and between you and I, we know three women like that, I'm not going to out them. They're all household names. But there's so much shame involved that they Fell for this kind of a man that nobody talks about it. So I decided to do a free two hour heal your heart and soul from betrayal clinic a few weeks ago. And I had our friend Saadviji as one of the experts how to heal spiritually. And then I had another friend of mine who's a PhD, psychotherapist, specialist in betrayal, how to do the actual emotional healing of betrayal. And just with a couple of emails, I had almost 900 women register for the free two hour Zoom.

Wow.

And now on my YouTube channel, I don't know how many thousands have watched it, so it only shows me that this is a very common experience. And throughout the book, you know, Holly's constantly trying to understand how did I miss the red flags, what happened to me? And what happens is these type of men do they love bomb women. And love bombing is when somebody shows up and moves at the speed of light. Oh, where have you been all my life? I can't believe I finally found you. How is it you're still single? I can't wait to marry you. We're going to have a beautiful life and beautiful children and, you know, in 36 hours you're convinced you found the love of your life. And they whine and dine you and romance you and have sex with you until you're a junkie. They get you hooked on the oxytocin and on the fantasy of happily ever after, and then they go after your money. You know, there's a, there's a Hollywood producer who has fallen in love with the book and is going to turn it into a limited streaming series. And she describes my book this way. She says the love thief is Eat Pray love meets Dirty John. And that is exactly what it is. So, you know, anybody who is interested in love and light and consciousness and spirituality and law of attraction and, you know, success principles, they tend to really like that subject matter until they trip over the kinds of men that prey. They literally prey on women like this. And it's sad, but you can recover.

Yeah, I've seen some documentaries on, you know, some of the streaming channels about stories about like this. It's amazing. So let's shift a little bit. You, you, you get this ticket to India, you go to Rishikesh, and you said you started to trip over things that you were seeing before. What, what happened on that research trip?

Well, I knew from the movie in my head that a lot of the action would take place in a spiritual bookstore. And I could literally see, see it in my mind. And the first day I was in Rishikesh, I saw a sign, you know, and it's a spiritual bookstore. And I walked up the stairs and I opened the door, and it was the exact bookstore I had been seeing. And the man behind the counter looked exactly like the character in my book. And then, you know, I was walking through the little downtown part of Rishikesh called Top of on, and I had this thought, oh, you know, I'd really like to get a blessing from a holy man. You know, I saw everybody running around with a red string around their wrist. It's like, I would like one of those. And I feel a tap on my shoulder, and I turn around and it's a man painted as Hanuman, the Hindu monkey God. And he says to me, madam, may I give you a blessing? I mean, that was the kind of stuff that was happening, you know, four times a day while I was on my research trip.

And did you incorporate those kind of things into the. The storyline?

It's all in there. It's all in there. There's pretty much everything that happens in that book, either I've personally experienced or my friends have experienced or I have witnessed. There's. There's one. The one thing that I radically changed is the. The villain of the book, who's a very bad guy, the type of fraud that he perpetrated in real life is very different from what's in the book. So that's different, but okay. But I just used everything that I knew. You know, I've. I. Over the course of the last decade, I've interviewed 200 of the world's top love, relationship, and marriage experts for this thing I used to do called the Art of. The Art of Love series. So I have gathered a lot of information and I used all that. It all came out of one person's mouth. But this man who becomes the love walla or the healer of my heroine, you know, he's a very wise man and. And his. His wisdom is a mashup of all of our friends.

Now, I know that, you know, we've all had our heart broken. I know I did. And most people that you talk to will claim that somebody cheated on him at some point in their relationship. And, you know, you got this book. Is that this message in there? What do you hope the readers will take away from the book?

A couple of things. The first one to know is that betrayal is the hardest negative emotion to overcome. And the reason for that is because when somebody betrays us, it's like ripping our heart out because we thought they loved us. We thought we loved them. And now they've done this unthinkable, unspeakable thing, and they've broken our heart into tiny little pieces, and we're not sure we're ever going to survive. So really, what I want people to understand is that, a, it's not your fault. There's nothing you could have done differently, that they betrayed you. Two, you will survive it. And three, there will come a day when you thank God that it happened, when you realized you wouldn't be who you are today. You wouldn't have the life that you have today had Person X not ripped your heart out. You know, like, there's a saying that rejection is protection. And there's a lot of levels on which that's true. You know, imagine, you know, if Holly had married her fiance, she would have eventually found out what a sleaze bag douchebag is, but she might have had children with him by then. So rejection is protection. So those are some of the major messages I hope people get. And it's a very funny book. There's a lot of. With all the sadness and anger and trauma and rage that Holly goes through and depression. I mean, this is a girl who measures the days that she's really having a bad day. She has a measurement for it, but she's also very funny and snarky. So there's a lot of that in there, too.

Now, you. I didn't know you'd interviewed so many relationship experts, but obviously making you want in the process. Why do you see so many women falling for narcissists? You talked about the love bombing. Why do you think women are so susceptible to that? And what are the red flags People.

Should look for the fact that they're moving really fast, and you feel like this is the person who hears and sees you more than anybody else ever has in the first 12 hours, that's a red flag. The other thing that happens is that, unfortunately, most people think love is a feeling. And love, while there are nice feelings to love, love is essentially a behavior, and it's a choice, and it's a decision, and it's an action, and it's a way of being. And if you're choosing to take sacred vows with somebody simply based on feelings, it's sort of a whole setup for disaster. It's like I always say the Beatles song, all you need is love is a big fat lie. And anybody who's been married to a soulmate life partner knows that you can be happily married to your partner. And there will be days when you hate them. And it doesn't mean that you don't love them. So to be constantly judging whether or not you're going to choose somebody based on your feelings is not the way to go. Because as our friend John Gray always teaches, and I quote John on this all the time, there are five factors to determining if you're going to have a long term, happy, healthy relationship. And they're connection, compatibility. Communication, which, thank God, can be learned. Chemistry, which strangely enough, is not the most important. And the single most important factor is a shared vision for the future. You want the same basic things. We both want to live in Santa Barbara in a big house and be surrounded with lots of kids and cats. Or we don't even want to live together. We want to live separately and see each other three times a week. It doesn't matter what that shared vision is, just that you have this essential agreement on the shared vision for the future.

That all makes sense. I've heard that phrase from my wife numerous times. I don't like you today. I love you, but I really don't like you.

Yes. No.

And it's really as we sometimes do.

Things, you know, that's why I wrote my book Wabi Sabi Love. It's really hard to live with another human being. Human beings are totally annoying and difficult and demanding and hard to understand and changeable. And so it takes this huge commitment to every day, sometimes every hour, I'm gonna choose to love you. Why? I took sacred vows with you. I don't like what you're doing. I don't like who you are in this moment. But I'm gonna love you. I'm gonna be your safe place to land. I'm gonna be the person that you can feel totally emotionally and physically safe with. And there are days when I want to kill you. And that's normal.

True. You know, it's interesting, when they created this sacred vows way back, God knows when, the average life expectancy was about 35 years old. So, you know, you marry now, you marry someone now when you're 20 and it's not 15 years, it's like 50 years you're going to spend together as you evolve and grow through different stages of your life. Sometimes people grow apart from each other. They go come back together again, etc. It's a challenging but valuable journey. I always tell people, if you want a fast track to spiritual growth, get married, have children, start a business, because you're going to get feedback in all three of those areas that you'd never get if you didn't do that, that are going to help you grow, not always comfortably, but it's, it's, it's a, that commitment makes a lot of.

Well, you know, Carvel Hendricks says that the purpose of taking sacred vows with another is so that you can create a safe container for all of your childhood wounds to arise and be healed. So it's actually marriage is a spiritual path. And having not had, and now having had it, I can honestly say it's been such a spiritual awakening for me, you know, because prior to that I was pretty selfish, self centered person with no partnership skills. But I didn't know that till I got married and I discovered that the, the, that I not only did I not have partnership skills, the thing that I excelled at, being the boss, doesn't work with an alpha male, you know, so that's why I had to actually commit myself to being a student of love, because I was clueless.

Well, I took a workshop with Harvo Hendricks and yeah, what, what I learned from him was similar to what you said. But he said we will marry someone like one of our parents so that we'll get that wound re stimulated and then we can heal it. And you know, I look at who, who the different. I. This is my third marriage. We've been married 25 years now and my last marriage and. But the first two wives were parts of me that I never owned that I needed to look at and heal with my mother and with my father and the wounds that I got from them. And I think the commitment you make is that you don't run away from that. Because if I make a marriage vow forever, which I didn't keep, but as one of my marriage was 20 years, we both agreed it was time to split. But the point being that, that, that commitment of being a safe space, of staying here no matter what, we're going to work through the difficult things unless we both agree. As one person said, sometimes you both agree the mountain's too hard to climb. So you get off it. You know, like I think about climbing Mount Everest and the winds are coming.

You know what? It doesn't, I was just gonna say it doesn't mean that they're not your soulmate. You know, some soulmate relationships come with an expiration date and it doesn't mean you have to stop loving them. Right? And it doesn't, it doesn't mean that it didn't work. It just meant that you got to the end of the line. Maybe you were just supposed to have kids with them. Maybe you were only supposed to do 20 years with them. But so many people leave a marriage with, you know, who did what to whom, what went wrong, as opposed to it's just over, you know, and you could still be friends or not. It doesn't matter. You can still love them or not, but there are choices that society doesn't present to us.

I'm just curious. You know, we talk about women and narcissists, men. Have you seen any examples of where the narcissist, sociopath, toxic person is a woman and the man is the person being victimized by that?

I had a friend who went through that, and it was very. All of us were so afraid for him because we knew how crazy this woman was. But she was stunning and seductive and who knows what went on behind closed doors. But he was. He was hooked. And somehow he finally got away from her. But that. I've only seen it once, and it was. It was terrifying because she was a man eater.

Oh, I just watched the TV show. That was the theme. He's a man eater. And it was about that kind of a thing. So fascinating. Now, great part of the story takes place in India. I know you love India, so I'm curious. When and how did you fall in love with India?

I went there in 1997. Deepak Chopra was a client of mine, and his daughter was getting married in New Delhi. And he said to me, you have to come. He wrote a very big check and handed it to me and said, come to the wedding. And I had the best time ever. I mean, Indian weddings are great. It was seven days long, thousands of people. They set up all kinds of tours for us. And from the moment I got there, I felt like I was home. Now, I was raised in a Jewish home that was basically a matriarchy. But that's how it is in India, too. The women run the show. The values are the same. It's all about family and education and doing well and community and religion. So even though they dress differently and they look different, I really felt like these were my people. So I'm sure that I must have had past lives in India, because whenever I'm there, I can breathe deeper, I'm more relaxed, and everything feels and smells and tastes familiar.

You know, you've experienced some amazing things on your trips to India, some of which you include in the book. One of the things is this thing called a naughty reading, which is something Deepak Chopra introduced me to. One night when we were talking at Esalen Institute and Big Sur, we were both part of this big fundraiser, and he started talking about. I was absolutely blown away by it. And can you explain to people what that is and share with people what a naughty reading is?

Yeah, yeah. Deepak took me to my first naughty reading in South India in Tamil Nadu. So essentially, what they do is they take your thumbprint, left thumbprint for women, right thumbprint for man, and then they send your thumbprint off with these Tamil priests, and they go in search of what they call a bundle. A bundle is a bunch of palm leaves with ancient Tamil writing on them. And when they find the bundle that they think is yours, and then you sit down with a priest who can read the leaves and an interpreter, and they start going through them. And it's quite a process. Usually takes about 45 minutes to find the leaf that they believe is yours. And I actually videotaped my first reading. Do you ever want to see it? But basically, 45 minutes in, the priest is now talking in ancient Tamil to the interpreter. He. His name was Babu. He's talking to me. And this is what they say to me. Your mother's name is Sheila. Your father's name is Harvey. Your father had two wives. Your mother was the first wife. Your name is Arielle. You have a brother and a sister. You went to college. You work in the field that you studied. You were born on an early Monday morning. Like, they rattle off all this data about you based on a thumbprint because you're sitting in a room, in a concrete block room. At least I was in, you know, 2001, with a bare light bulb outhouse. There's no WI fi. There's. And there wasn't really even Google back then. There's no fax machine. And they tell you year by year everything that's happened in your life up until the fact that they say, and it is predicted on this day, at this time, you would sit here for this reading. Would you like to know your future? And then they go year by year by year into the future, which was also very fascinating. And at one point, I can see that my interpreter and the priest are having this disagreement. And I have this feeling there's something they don't want to tell me. And finally I said, listen, guys, I'm a big girl. Just spit it out, whatever it is you need to tell me. And Babu, the interpreter, looks down at his feet and he whispers. And he says, madam, I am so sorry to inform you, you will never have children in this lifetime. And I start laughing. I was like, yes, of course I know that. I never wanted to have kids. Now Babu is trying to explain this to the priest whose head is spinning. They can't understand a woman who doesn't want to have children. Like, they. They just can't fathom it. And for me, I never wanted kids. And so then Babu says to me, madam, would you like to know why you will not be having children in this lifetime? I said, well, sure, of course. Whatever you want to tell me. And they then tell me this story that in my last past life, I lived in Tamil Nadu. My name was Aarti Nataraj. I was the only daughter of good parents, and I grew up to be a healer. And I performed many illegal abortions, which is why I would not be having children in this lifetime. So this is going on in my room, right? Brian's in the next room having his own reading. And they're giving him the message, sir, you will never have children in this lifetime. And he's thinking, yeah, that's the agreement we got. Would you like to know why? And they start to tell him. The shortest version is basically in Brian's last life when he lived in India, he was a sleaze, he was a slut. He was sleeping with all these other married women. Therefore, karmically, he would not get the honor of having children in this lifetime. So that's what a naughty reading is.

I remember when Deepak was describing his to me, two things. He said, they ask you if you want to know when you're going to die, you get to decide if you want to know or not. He decided he wanted to know. And. And you. You can say yes or no to that. But the other thing he said, they started to read it and they said, your mother's name was this. And he said, no, it's not my mother's name. And he said, well, then, this is not your leaf. It's not your naughty leaf. And he said, well, everything else you told me up till now was. Was accurate. So it had no everything would be accurate or it's not your leaf. So he goes outside on his cell phone, he calls his mother, and he says, mother, were you ever called so and so? And she says, yeah, how did you know? Why did you change your name? Well, one of my uncles sought the name. It meant, like, sad one or something, you know, in Hindi or whatever. And so they changed my name. So he goes back in and says, yeah, that is my mother's name. And they continued on. But accuracy of this stuff just blows me away. It's so, so interesting.

It's so crazy, you know, it's unexplained, it's inexplicable how accurate it was. Like I remember at part of that reading is I took a lot of notes and I videotaped it. And they said to me something like, you know, at age 56, you will have some abdominal issues for which you will need surgery, but you will recover. Now, my goal in life at that time when I was getting the reading, was to never ever spend one night in a hospital. So I let that out of my mind instantly. I forgot about it until I Woke up at 6 o' clock in the morning. Once with extreme pain, Brian took me to the emergency room. I had an emergency appendectomy. And then I remembered, oh, didn't the naughty readers tell me this? I went out, I got out my notebook, sure enough, I was 56 when I had the emergency appendectomy. It was all right there, it was all accurate.

And these things were written thousand year ago or longer before that. I mean, it's just, it's amazing. 5,000 years ago. Yeah. So it always won consciousness in time. A couple last questions for you. You talked about, you know, love is the answer and the Beatles and all that and why we don't agree with that. You also say that happiness is the wrong goal for us to have. Why do you say that?

Happiness is. Is dependent on people, places and experiences which can come and go, oh, I want the new BMW. I got the new BMW. I'm happy, I've got the BMW. Just crashed and wrecked the BMW. Not so happy anymore. And what I discovered is there's a Sanskrit word called santosha and santosha means utter contentment. When you're utterly content, it doesn't matter what comes and what goes, because everything comes and goes anyway. Life is just uncertain. So I decided at that point that I really wanted to be rooted and grounded in Santosha and not necessarily happiness, which comes and goes. So. And I even have a little rock right here that says Santosha, utter contentment. So it reminds me every single day to be with what is.

You write about love, you write about soulmates. So what's your definition of love? You talked about it being a behavior, not just an emotion. Maybe expand on that a little bit. And then how do you define soulmate? What is your, what are your thoughts about the concept of soulmate?

This is going to sound really crazy, but remember there was that Supreme Court justice who said, how do you know what pornography is? And he said, when you see it, you'll know it loves. Kind of the opposite for me. How do you know it's love when you know it? When you see it, you'll know it. So, you know, love is many things, you know, and it's many things for different people. Yes, there are some feelings to love, but you don't always need the feelings to know that it's love. But mostly these days, I think love is just a conscious choice. Love is about seva giving to others, about living a life on purpose, about being able to appreciate this magnificent blue planet that we live on, you know, so it's. I think it's lots of different things. And I think it's sad that in the English language, we only have one word for love. You know, it's like in. What is it? In Greek, there's 522 words for love. But here in America, we only have one word. So, Jack, maybe you need to make up some new words for love. Now, as for a soulmate, I believe a soulmate is first and foremost somebody you can completely be yourself with. Somebody with whom you share unconditional love. And when you look into their eyes, you have the experience of being home. And if you accept that definition, then we all have dozens of soulmates. It's not just a romantic partner. You know, it can be your cats. It can be your. Your kids, your parents, your siblings, your neighbors, your coworkers, co workers, you know, the person who makes your coffee every morning. There are lots and lots and lots of ways of. To have soulmates in your life, because all you need to do is be with somebody that you can completely be yourself with, that you share unconditional love. And when you look into their eyes, you have the experience of being home.

That's beautiful. You know, I remember reading recently about this concept called the One. It's a kind of a conservative Christian concept, and that there's one person that you're meant to marry or be with, and it's. Some people spend their whole life looking for the one and constantly being convinced this person's not the one, and they end up never being with anyone as a result. And that, again, that concept is so limiting in some way that it can restrict you. But I like this idea of many people and even animals potentially being your soulmates. I know a lot of people where their dog or their cat is their soulmate. I'm clear about that. And I just. You mentioned about looking into the eyes of that person. I have a friend who she and her cat can spend as much Time looking at each other's eyes as two people in a romantic movie. And it's just amazing to watch that love go back and forth. That's way cool.

So Eckhart Tolle has this great line, and he says, during the course of my life, I have met many enlightened masters, all of them cats.

Having two cats who fill that bowl, one of them's named Krishna, and the other one's named Pookie, but they're very much that way. That's so cool. I love it. Oh, my gosh. All right, so I know you've recently created what you're calling your Heart Healing yoga video series. You want to talk about that and how people can get ahold of that if they'd like to?

Yeah. So it's a free bonus for people who like the book and read the book. And it's@thelovethief.com thelovethief.com and what I did was I asked eight of the world's top yoga instructors to create a video based on one negative emotion. So people like Sean Korn made videos for me. So the emotions that they are giving yoga philosophy and yoga poses for is heartbreak, betrayal, anger, forgiveness, uncertainty. So you can just. Each one's pretty short. You know, if you wake up and you're feeling really heartbroken that day, you know, just go back to it and download the video, and you'll get the little yoga lesson, and you'll get the yoga poses, and you can heal your heart of all the difficulties, difficulties we humans have.

That is such a cool idea. I love it. It's very cool. I'll ask you one last thing, since we have a little bit of time left. Obviously you're working on promoting your book. Anything else on the horizon for you that you want to tell us about?

In May of 2024, I'm doing a woman's retreat in Italy. So it'll be five nights at a villa in Tuscany and a couple of nights at a hotel on the Grand Canal in Venice. And we'll be looking at how to manifest the love of your life and how to keep the love of your life, all within the context of using Italy as a template, because in Italy, they have a way of being that they call la bella figura, how to lead a beautiful lifestyle. So it's also going to incorporate elements on how to have a beautiful life with your beautiful beloved.

That's great. I. My wife and I, Inga, we. We honeymooned in Tuscany, which was fabulous. And then Patty and I have run about five retreats in different villas around Florence. And so amazing. I always say the difference between Americans and Italians can be summed up in this. We say, thank you. The Italians go mota grazzi. You know, it's like, it's so much more aliveness and generative energy and passion that comes out from just, you know, everyday conversation and being. I told my wife, I just curious if you've thought about this. I said, knowing Ariel, sometime in the next two years, she's going to lead a love thief journey to India where you'll go and visit these different places you talk about in the book. Have you thought about that?

Yes, actually. My friend Jay, who's always organized Deepak's trips to India and my trips, when I took trips to India, announced to me that we're doing it February 2025. So we haven't actually, you know, put the whole thing together yet, but we will. And also because Saadviji wants to throw a book party for me at the ashram in Rishikesh. But first I need to get a publisher in India. So there's lots of reasons to go to India, and such a wonderful, magical place that I want to be able to show everybody, you know, just the beauty and the wonder and the mysticism that's just everywhere. I'll just give you this one classic Deepak line. We were in, in Ramana Maharshi's ashram many years ago on a special night when a half million people were going to circumambulate Mount Aruntula under the full moon of Pangal. It was this, like, super holy night. And we're standing there in these massive crowds and we're about to start walking barefoot under the full moon. And he says to me, spirit is not difficult to find in India. It's impossible to avoid. And that is just so true.

That's great. That's a great line. All right, well, I love it and thank you so much for sharing this time with us. Thank you for writing this book. And I wish that it gets out to a lot of people. A lot of important messages and inspiration in there, and I'm excited to rekindle our relationship a little bit. We haven't seen each other for a long time. A lot of the book takes place in San Diego and La Jolla, and my wife grew up there, so she was loving all that part of the book as well. And she has a total crush on your husband. So it's. It's a. Sure we'll see each other again. Very good to hear that now. Brian's a real cool guy. I love it. You scored on that one. All right, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Ariel. And thank you, everyone, for watching today as well. Make sure again, thelovethief.com you can go there and find out more and get the download of the the Yoga Healing Heart Healing Yoga video as well. Make sure to read this book. There's a lot of it's just uplifting. It's also, as Ariel said, there's a lot of humor in it as well, a lot of a lot of lessons embedded, if you will, and a lot of awakenings that can occur just from reading the book. So thanks for watching today. Make sure you watch for our next podcast, we'll be talking about that consciousness leader about love, joy, happiness, success and so forth. Until then, be love.