Finding love or improving your existing love life means first asking the “oy” question, said Laura Day, author of “Practical Intuition in Love: How to Let Your Intuition Guide You to the Love of Your Life.”
“If every morning you wake up and you’re upset because you’re not in love, your oy question is how can I find the love of my life? Whatever’s torturing you, obsessing you, you turn that concern into a question,” said Day in a phone interview from her New York home.
Once you pose a question, she said, you can awaken your intuition.
“You are getting intuitive information all the time, but if you don’t have the questions it’s very hard. If you don’t know what your intuition is trying to answer, you have no idea what all the information is telling you,” said Day, who will speak at a tea Sunday, March 7 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. She will speak on “Following Your Instincts in Love and Friendship” at the event, which is sponsored by Women’s American ORT Bay Area Young Leadership.
Once you awaken your intuition, Day said, you can alter behavioral patterns that aren’t working. “By making conscious goals and creating new rituals to break old patterns, you can very quickly create for yourself a new way of relating.
“My ritual, when I met someone I liked, used to be to walk to the other side of the room,” she said. “That was obviously not a productive ritual. I made a new ritual. When I liked someone I asked one question that I was interested in the answer to. I found that that always led to more.”
Intuition can also nurture existing relationships, she said. “Instead of getting upset and angry, find out what those needs are. We often don’t ask for what we need and when we get to the point of asking we often ask very aggressively.”
Day, who has been teaching seminars throughout the country and writing books on practical intuition for more than 10 years, numbers actors Demi Moore and Brad Pitt, noted author Deepak Chopra and Nobel Laureate James Watson among her clientele. An earlier book, “Practical Intuition: How to Harness the Power of Your Instinct and Make It Work for You,” has an introduction by Moore.
While other self-help books focus on self-improvement, Day begins with the pleasure principle, learning to enjoy oneself.
“Working hard on yourself when you’re already out of energy for life, which we often are when we’re lonely, is very hard. Start from a point of pleasure,” she said.
Knowing “what gives you pleasure is the first step to attracting love or reigniting love in an old relationship. Most people, when they fall in love, are aware that all of a sudden everyone wants to be with them, and when they’re lonely, people tend to stay away. When you’re in love, you’re sending out a clear message, I’m lovable and there’s something to be shared here.”
Day, 39, was raised in a secular Jewish home in New York City but is now exploring the spiritual dimensions of Judaism, something she would like to give to her 7-year-old son.
“Culturally, I certainly consider myself a Jew,” she said. But while growing up, “we really didn’t have very much religious background. My sisters and I are rediscovering that, in our desire to give that to our children. We love the values because they [mesh] with our own values of community, of responsibility, of scholarship and of celebrating the miracles that make us who we are and make it a blessing to be alive.”
Day sees her intuitive philosophy as embedded in Judaism.
“I think that many of the traditions of Judaism are also traditions of intuition,” she said. “Intuition is a tradition of self-respect and self-reliance. What intuition tells us is that if we wish to, we know quite a bit and therefore we are responsible for finding our own answers, our own actions and our own community.”