Jessica Shepherd - A Love Alchemists Notebook: Magical Secrets for Drawing Your True Love Into Your Life

About the Author

Jessica Shepherd is a counselor, astrologer, and teacher living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes for print and online publications and publishes her own astrology website, Moonkissd.com, where she animates the stars and planets through personal experiences and stories. She has studied and practiced modern astrology for eighteen years and has a private astrology practice specializing in individual and couples counseling. Clients praise her astro-magical style of delineating the ancient art and nudges to live more fully and passionately. Jessica holds a BA in art and business and certificates in Evolutionary Astrology and Mechanics of Vision (clairvoyance and vision). Jessica shares a funky pink cottage with her husband, three stepdaughters, and five chickens. Her other writing credits include Venus & Beyond, an Astrology.com column; Sex & Soul Mates, a Constellation magazine column; and contributions to Pregnancy & Newborn magazine, Sasstrology.com, Saptarishis Astrology, and astrocenter.com/MSN.

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

A Love Alchemists Notebook: Magical Secrets for Drawing Your True Love into Your Life 2010 by Jessica Shepherd.

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First e-book edition 2010

E-book ISBN: 9780738722955

Cover design by Ellen Dahl

Cover image IZA Stock/PunchStock

Editing by Nicole Edman

Interior lips illustrations by Llewellyn art department

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Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dedicated to my Sun, my Soul Mate, proof that magic does exist.

Moon

Contents

A Divine

My gracious acknowledgments and gratitude to: Erin Reese, soul sister, for her advisement and friendship; Paul Bogle, for handholding, cheerleading, and daring; Holiday Mathis, for inspiration and mutual appreciation; Grant Jeffers, for presence of mind; wise sorcerer Steven Forrest, for magic, wisdom, and compassion; the Artists GroupTodd Donahue, Jessica Rice, and Yasmine BarDor; Kim Patron, Emily Steele, Kelli McGowan, Irina Bilenkaya, Minouche Graglia, and Fern Feto Spring, for conversations that went from ear to page; and those who have sought my love advice and stretched my heart to answer. Thanks to Nicole Edman and Llewellyn Publications, for polishing up and beautifying this creative gem and offering it to a larger audience. Finally, thanks to the men who were in my life before I met my soul matetheir combined contribution to this book has been delightfully alchemical.

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called Mystery.

Paulo Coelho

I begin writing A Love Alchemists Notebook in the majestically romantic city of Vienna, Austria, where Ill be living for the next seven weeks. I am here because I conjured up my soul mate, John, now my husband of two years.

This is our third trip to Vienna; our very first trip here was our honeymoon. Before that, Id never been out of the continental United States. Were it not for a serious magical stretch of the imagination, I wouldnt have met John, and I wouldnt be here in Vienna. Thanks to the secrets Im revealing to you in this book, I am having the experience of a lifetime, one of many begun by the adventures of relationships. So many things have opened up in my life since I first began using these soul mate secrets, and my world has been unequivocally blown open by love.

There are no coincidences, especially when it comes to soul mate love. Vienna captured my heart and imagination long before I came here on my honeymoon, as a city romantically immortalized in the popular movie Before Sunrise, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In this story of soul mate love, two passing strangers meet on a train and fall under a spell. Jesse (Hawke) spontaneously suggests that they hop off the train in Vienna, and Celine (Delpy) agrees. Over the next twenty-four hours, the two wander through the city, deep in conversation, exploring each other and the possibility and plausibility of their connection. Real time seems to suspend itself in collusion with their destined meeting, and magical time begins.

At one point in the film, a poet disguised as a beggar appears, offering to write the pair a poem using a word of their choice. The beggar is the archetypal Cupid, making his appearance in Jesse and Celines love play. Eventually, Jesse and Celine must part to return to their native lands, and fans had to wait nine whole years for their reunion in Before Sunset. Oh, curses!

While I now know that timelessness, synchronicity, and the appearance of a Cupid-like stranger (the poet-beggar) are magical collusions, and that all do show up in real-life soul mate meetings, back when I first saw Before Sunrise, I only saw the tragedy of endless romantic longing and a reunion destined to never happen. The on-screen relationship was a closed book, I thought, and when the movie ended and the couple parted, I left it at that. But that book wasnt destined to remain closed.

What I didnt know then, I know now: where we feel the hole in our lifewhere something is missing, injured, or misunderstoodthat is exactly where we need to put our focus and do our lifes work. I personally needed to have my faith in love restored. When I first watched Before Sunrise, I understood that the soul mate would always lead us home, but I had no idea where to begin to find mine. Now I know that soul mates will find us! Even when were impatient, when we lose phone numbers, lose touch, lose our confidence and our faith, they will eventually find us. Simply by using the techniques in this book, we become open to love and ready for our soul mate meeting.