An Empowered Woman’s Second Sunday Brunch Series in February: The Look of Love
By C. Elizabeth Peters
With St. Valentine’s Day smack in the middle of the month, February is the time when many of our thoughts turn to love. Those of us who are single secretly wish we had someone to share the day with (even if we won’t admit it), and those of us who are attached fuss over how to make the celebration special. With that in mind, this month, at the An Empowered Woman Second Sunday Brunch Series, we celebrated “The Look of Love!”
Desiree Doubrox, the founder of An Empowered Woman, explained that the look of love was the ability to look at yourself with love, because in order to draw love into your life, you must first be able to fully love yourself. With that, Desiree introduced the afternoon’s guest speaker, Dr. Pat Allen.
Dr. Allen is a marriage and family counselor who does countless workshops, seminars, and retreats. She has authored the books “Getting to ‘I Do’” and “Staying Married and Loving it.” She recently helped Tiffany choose her mate on VH1's "I Love New York 2," and was a guest on the Fox News program "Midday Sunday." She has received praise from Reverend Michael Beckwith and Bob Proctor, both featured in The Secret.An Empowered Woman is a forum designed for women to empower each other by sharing their personal stories, challenges, and victories, and that was the spirit of Dr. Allen’s speech. She was there to share what she had learned from three marriages and seventy-three years of life so that the empowered women in the audience didn’t have to make the same mistakes. Dr. Allen was funny, spunky, and got right to the point. Her speech was peppered with bold statements like, “A good prostitute wouldn’t give it up for just a dinner.” She laid out four key aspects of communicating with a man: Stop asking them how they feel and instead ask them what they think and what to do about it, make an appointment, start each fight by making him right for what he did, and clueing into his body language to see when he might be upset.
She made both the (few) men in the room and the women put their hands over their hearts and pledge to use these communication tools. Dr. Pat Allen is heavily influenced by the ideas of Carl Jung, who believed that everything is energy. More specifically, everything is yang (male) and yin (female) energy. A successful union of the yang and yin energies happens when the female is cherished and protected and the male is respected. If both people are yang, they are in a business relationship; if both people are yin, they are in a friendship. True intimacy is created when there is a balance of both. Dr. Allen ended her speech with a simple, “Grandma has spoken.”
While we were still digesting Dr. Pat Allen’s soundbites of wisdom, a panel of five men took the stage. Some of them were recently divorced after about thirty years of marriage, while others had just entered relationships recently. The panel, facilitated by conscious relationship coach Melvin Allen (http://www.melvinandsherrie.com/), was there to answer our questions about love; just in case we didn’t take what Dr. Allen had to say seriously, we could hear it from the source. The men agreed that the first thing that they find attractive about a woman is her smile and the way she carries herself, and they preferred women their own age to younger women. The men also felt that communication was the key to a lasting relationship. However, while some men said that a woman could say what was on her mind at any time, other men agreed with Dr. Allen’s suggestion that a woman “make an appointment” when she wanted to discuss something with him.
When asked why their past relationships didn’t work out, some men pointed to flawed communication and the ability for the relationship to adapt to changing circumstances. One man said that he found love once he became clear on what he actually wanted. However, all of them agreed that the most important thing in finding successful love was to first love yourself. Hmm…didn’t a very smart, empowered woman say something about that earlier?
Each Second Sunday brunch includes a tasty lunch and time to network and shop, and this month was no exception. In the shopping corner was an abundance of beautiful, high quality jewelry, clothing, and women offering more information on career counseling -- all items to help a woman love herself even more!
Join us next month on March 9, 2008, as we celebrate Health & Wellness, Inside & Out!
