How I Manifested My Soulmate (And What the Journey Really Required of Me)

I am going to tell you something that took me a long time to truly understand — and even longer to actually live.

The love you are calling in is not being kept from you by bad luck, bad timing, or a shortage of good men. It is being shaped, right now, by what you believe about yourself and what you believe you deserve.

I know that might land with a little sting. It did for me too, the first time I really got it.

But stay with me — because this realization, as uncomfortable as it was at first, is also the most liberating thing I have ever discovered about love. Because it means the power to change your love life has always been in your hands. It just starts somewhere most people never think to look.

It starts inside.

Relationships Are Mirrors

One of the most profound realizations on my own healing journey was understanding how much each of our relationships reflects back to us the mixture of conscious and unconscious beliefs we carry about ourselves and what we deserve.

When I first understood this I had a big internal "yikes" moment — especially looking back at relationships that hadn't gone the way I wanted them to.

But as I sat with it and dug deeper, this realization gave me back my power. Because it meant that the patterns I kept experiencing in love weren't random. They were pointing me toward something inside myself that was ready to be seen, healed, and transformed.

And here's what's really important to understand: this does not mean we are responsible for or somehow causing unfair, unkind, or hurtful behavior from other people. It simply means that there is something alive in our energy that on some level expects or tolerates experiences we don't truly want — or wounds that are quietly asking to be healed so we can grow into more love.

When I finally understood that, everything changed.

The Inner Work That Changed Everything

Before I met my husband Ryan, my relationship with love was complicated. Not because I didn't want it — I wanted it deeply. But on some level I didn't fully believe I deserved it. Not the real kind. Not the steady, deep, cherishing kind I actually craved on a soul level.

So I did what a lot of us do. I put other people's needs above my own. I swallowed my truth to keep the peace. I showed up as a safer, smaller version of myself — less vulnerable, less exposed, less likely to get hurt.

And my relationships reflected all of that back to me. Every single time.

So I committed to doing the inner work. And here is what that actually looked like for me:

Learning my own worth. This was foundational. Until I genuinely believed I was worthy of deep, consistent, soul-aligned love, I kept accepting less than I deserved. Working on this shifted everything — the boundaries I set, the behavior I tolerated, the way I showed up in relationships.

Putting my own needs first. I had a deeply ingrained pattern of prioritizing everyone else's comfort over my own truth. Learning to honor my own needs — and trust that doing so wouldn't make me unlovable — was one of the most transformative shifts I made.

Falling in love with myself. Not in a performative way. In a genuine, quiet, this-is-who-I-am-and-she-is-enough way. When I stopped waiting for someone else to make me feel worthy and started truly cherishing myself, everything in my energy shifted.

Being willing to be vulnerable and authentic. This was perhaps the scariest one. Letting myself be truly seen — communicating honestly, expressing my real feelings, showing up as my actual self rather than whoever I thought someone wanted me to be — was terrifying. And it was also the thing that finally made real intimacy possible.

As I did this work, my whole experience of love and dating transformed:

I more easily knew my own worth and set boundaries that reflected it. I stopped tolerating inconsistency, unclear communication, and feeling like I had to earn my place. I said no to feeling taken for granted and yes to being truly cherished. I became open, vulnerable, and authentically myself — and started receiving that same energy back. And I stopped chasing love and let it find me.

The Moment Everything Shifted

The real turning point in my manifestation journey wasn't a single dramatic breakthrough. It was a quiet thought that arrived one ordinary day in the middle of all that inner work:

I would love to find my person. And I am also completely okay if my life stays exactly as it is.

That was it. Not a grand revelation — just a simple, genuine, grounded feeling of being so fully at home in myself that love stopped feeling like something I needed and started feeling like something I was simply open to receiving.

That feeling of wholeness — of being complete on my own — was the energetic shift that made space for everything to change.

It was just a few months after that thought that Ryan came into my life.

How the Universe Conspired

In November 2019 I relocated from Los Angeles to Kansas City to be near my new niece. My cousin helped me find an apartment — and unbeknownst to me, Ryan lived in the building next door. His balcony faced my front door and he had noticed me. He was waiting for the right moment.

That moment came on a Saturday morning in late May 2020. I was making yet another trip to the complex dumpster (I can never seem to remember trash day!) when he spotted me from his window. He dashed out of his apartment, pretended he was going for a jog, and timed it perfectly to run into me on my way back.

Numbers were exchanged. A week later — Covid had closed the coffee shops so we walked the trails behind the complex instead — we had our first date. After that walk I thought he was smart, funny, reflective, and handsome. He thought I was fun, sweet, beautiful, and insightful.

That was the first of many long walks and deep talks over which we fell in love.

As Paulo Coelho wrote in The Alchemist: "The universe conspired to help me find you." Looking back, I truly believe that. Every synchronicity, every perfectly timed moment, every step of the inner work that brought me to that morning by the dumpster — all of it was part of a plan far more beautiful than anything I could have orchestrated on my own.

Elizabeth Ladean Photography

What This Means for You

If you are reading this and love is something you are actively calling in — or healing around — I want you to hear this:

It is possible for you. Deeply, genuinely, soul-alignedly possible.

But it begins inside. It begins with doing the inner work to clear the beliefs, patterns, and wounds that are quietly shaping your experience of love. It begins with learning to be so whole, so full, so genuinely at home in yourself that love stops feeling like the missing piece and starts feeling like a natural extension of who you already are.

That is the journey. And in my experience, it is the most rewarding one you will ever take.

If this resonated with you and you are ready to do the inner work to clear your love blocks and magnetize a soul-aligned relationship into your life, I created Magnetize Love for exactly this journey.

It is a six-module self-study course where we work through clearing the unconscious beliefs, energetic blocks, and patterns that are keeping love at arm's length — so you can show up in your life and relationships in a way that naturally magnetizes the right energy, experiences, and people back to you.

I poured everything I learned on my own journey into this course. Every tool, every practice, every shift that moved me from where I was to where I am now.

If your heart is being called toward this work, I would love to be your guide.

👉 Learn more about Magnetize Love here