Christina Toimela is looking forward to Valentine’s Day and learns about love
Valentine’s Day makes me think of love and happiness. I tend to think that the happiest people are either in love, born happy (like my mother), or they have won a serious battle in their life in order to appreciate it as much as they do.
The first time I met Jo Rose was at Sussex Winning Women launch at Stanmer House. She radiated love, happiness and had a motherly warmth about her. I found out that she indeed had to battle to find her inspiration for life and love. I went to her Foundations For Life workshop to support her by giving feedback, and to hear how she turned her darkest days around:
“In 2011 I reached the point where I thought that the only way to stop the pain was to end my life, I was tired of keeping everything going after my divorce and a failed operation that left me hurt and unable to control my bowels. I looked through websites on how to end it… I wondered what if I fail to do it properly and just disable myself even more? I discovered a website for people who wanted to commit suicide and I realised that all these people really wanted was to be heard.”
“By loving yourself, you can choose your ideal partner because you know what you want”
Jo said that she needed to understand why her marriage failed. She realised it was because she didn’t know what it was she wanted. When she first met her ex she did not want to have children. She wanted to be a career woman and she wanted to live a life of luxury holidays and sports cars. After their first split and getting back together she had a vision that she wanted to become a mother. They married and it took Jo four years to get pregnant. They now have three children.
Jo chose life because she felt that karma would have meant repeating her pain all over again in another life, and she wanted to be able to help others. To people in the position Jo herself was once in, she asks them to consider this:“What if I was your fairy godmother and could help you live your life within your own power. What would you wish?”
She addresses that you can’t ask people to love you if you don’t love yourself. This is why she created Foundations For Life. She wants to help and inspire people.
The first course in Foundations For Life is about how to love yourself. She urges people to think about what they want and to become their own best friend: “From loving yourself, you can choose your ideal partner because you know what you want. You can make him/her your priority as that person will send the love back twofold. When a child is born he or she is normally surrounded with love. As we become teenagers we get rebellious. The majority of us start to think that love comes from an outside source and not from within. That’s why people feel rejected.”
Jo believes that by valuing yourself first you pick relationships that work. However, if you don’t love people their way they don’t feel loved.
Jo explains that there are five ways people feel loved: quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service and physical touch. The way to find out how to make your partner feel loved is to ask them. “Do you think I love you? How do you know?” Jo did the test with her three children.
The eldest boy who likes gifts answered: “You always bring me something and you organised a party for me.” The daughter who likes acts of service answered: “You collect things for my crafts, you drop me to my friends and you both wash and turn round my clothes when I need them.” The youngest boy who loves quality time answered: “You paint and watch movies with me and then we chat.”
Jo’s message this Valentine’s Day is: “If you can understand basic foundations in every single area of life from the joy of expression, finance to humanity, your life will be so much easier and you will be able to give and receive unconditional love.
Jo Rose can be emailed on: indigojo101@gmail.com
Do you know any people who have really inspired you in Brighton?
We’re not looking for celebrities.
Not ordinary, but extraordinary.
Contact Christina: christina.toimela@gmail.com
