For nearly 30 years, Dr. Christiane Northrup, worked as an obstetrician gynecologist, helping women to conceive, deliver and maintain their reproductive health. Then, she made a switch.

“Having been board-certified in everything that can go wrong with the female body, I decided to spend the rest of my life teaching women everything that can go right,” Christiane told me.

Christiane Northrup has written 8 books on everything from embracing menopause to discovering your inner radiance. Her breakout bestseller Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, empowered women to take charge of their health through enhancing the mind, body and spirit. But in spite of all this success and people like me as adoring fans, Christiane felt there was something missing in her love life.

“I’ve never had a truly conscious, equal partnership,”Christiane said. “I was divorced after 24 years of marriage. Then I had a love affair with a man who could never quite commit because his business, his mother, or his daughter always came first.”

“I would say to you, my entire life, ‘Work is easy. Writing books is easy. Where the hard work has been is being one on one in a relationship,” she explained. “To be consciously met in relationship has been my driving force. It’s been the source of the deepest longing, grief, and yearning in my entire life. It was just like, ‘Oh my god, when is this going to happen?’”

I know for a lot of women, this is sounding familiar. Because you can work on building up your career and you can even work on yourself, but when it comes to love, it doesn’t work the same way. Christiane had done eHarmony, she dated, and she even learned argentine tango.

“I did everything one does,” she told me.

“After my divorce, my intent was to become the kind of woman that the man I was seeking would be attracted to. And that’s typical, old soul empath behavior. Thinking that we’re inferior and always have to work on ourselves.”

Before Crystal Muse was released, the publisher sent Christiane a copy of the manuscript, since she has also published with them.

“When I received the pages of your book from Hay House [Publishing], I saw the love ritual in there, and it spoke to me,” Christiane told me. “It spoke to me, not because I thought it would make anything happen, I just thought it would make something welcome.”

She started it in the new moon of cancer on June 23. She didn’t have everything that she needed on hand, but, as she told me, “I have a will of iron!”

“I got everything to together,” she said. “I did my detox bath with the coffee, I had my pink candles, and since I was traveling a lot during this time, I even had a little travel kit, with the rose essential oil, my pink candles and healing crystals.”

I admit, one of my favorite things to hear about are all the creative ways people figure out to make the ritual work with their hectic lives.

“One time, I did the ritual in the tailgate of my car as I was leaving my friend’s home,” Christiane said laughing. “It was like burning through every bit of resistance.”

But it was on a visit to her hometown that the real healing began. Going back to her childhood home during the ritual helped Christiane to see what had created the patterns within her.

“I am the black sheep on steroids in my family,” she explained. “If you were not an Olympic athlete, you were nothing. Playing the harp, getting straight A’s, going to medical school, all that counted for nothing.”

She realized that always trying to be good enough for her family had created a negative self-worth pattern in her love life.

“I have been like a moth to the flame of fixer-uppers that I couldn’t save for my whole life,” she said.

By confronting those patterns, she was able to begin reworking them into patterns that better served her.

“I finished the 40 days, and it was as if layers and layers and layers of stuff went away,” Christiane said. “I just loved doing it, but I still never really expected anything to happen.”

Two months after the ritual, Christiane received a message from a man who she had previously dated and loved, but who the timing was never quite right with. They started talking, then dating, and have been happily in love ever since!

“Now, was that because of the ritual? We will never know!” Christiane said, laughing. “But when you asked me to discuss this, the joy that I felt while doing the ritual…the whole thing was such a container for me. It was a container that forced me to focus on love everyday, for 40 days.”

“I’ve always known that I would be partnered, somehow. But I knew it would only happen—this is the way the world works—once I didn’t need it,” Christiane told me. “I think the ritual was 40 days of concentrating on the moment. The end was a marker of: I no longer require anything outside myself to make this happen.”

I wanted to share Christiane’s story because, as women, what really talks to our souls is when other women are honest, vulnerable and willing to share the good as well as the trials. We’re all here to learn. Hearing stories like this helps us to recognize that we’re not alone in our challenges. I love hearing Christiane be authentic about trying so many different things to grow, because I’m the same!

And you know what? I love a good success story.