Consider this real-life scenario. At a workshop on ecstatic intimacy held in Seattle by David Deida, a participant asked how he could take some of the spiritual instructor’s principles into the world of dating.

In response, the bearded, lanky love guru (not to be confused with Mike Myers’ character in the film The Love Guru), dressed in loose-fitting black, called five men from the audience onto the stage and asked the women to vote on whom they thought the most trustworthy.

They chose a bald, stocky fellow with a certain unmistakable solidity. Deida, author of a book called The Way of the Superior Man, then instructed the dejected others, with minor adjustments to their posture, stance and head position, on how to hold themselves in a way that would earn the trust of the audience, both men and women.

A crucial factor was how much each man felt, and therefore communicated to the group, that he has a mission in life.

Satyen Raja, Langley, BC based author of the book Living Ecstasy and trainer of the Sex Passion and Enlightenment and Illumination Intensive programs, says “Women are getting sick and tired of the false promises of the guy with the money and the looks.”

“Spirituality in the modern world has to do with men having more presence, meaning that they’re living more of an authentic life deeply aligned with their purpose in life. That becomes a huge turn-on. It means he’s more there, he’s filling the room with who he is, and he’s connected to his passion, and that spills over into his relationships.”

Why Women Date Men with Self Purpose

In dating, communicating some connection to a larger purpose or deeper meaning can be very appealing.

“It’s very important to me the man I date have some sort of sense of purpose,” says Julia Saunders, a Vancouver sex educator who attended the Deida workshop. “Or at least that I feel I’m not his only purpose.”

“I’ve been experimenting over the years by dating men I would call ‘non-spiritual,’” Shannon Patterson, a Seattle yoga instructor who also attended the workshop, writes in an email.

“And it’s become one of my ‘must-haves.’ In my last serious relationship… I felt like there was a big part of me that my man didn’t see or appreciate because he wasn’t on a spiritual path. I would say he thought about things a lot but a spiritual path is more than that. A spiritual path implies practice and evolution to me.”

Shared spiritual beliefs can be one of the first signs of compatibility. They might not arise over the initial cup of coffee but there’s a good chance that someone will broach the subject by the second bottle of wine.

Fortunately, becoming spiritual, or cultivating a more spiritual presence, has never been easier.

Even belief in a Supreme Being is no longer a requirement. “To me, spirituality means getting in touch with your deepest purpose of living,” says Raja. “What do you have to do in your life so that, God forbid, if you died, you’d die complete. You’d feel like you’d lived an accomplished life.

“What a guy can do is learn to cultivate what his deepest purpose is by asking himself ‘what can I do today to know that, if I passed on, that I would’ve lived a full life, and given everything I have without waiting for someone or something to fulfill me?’”

Now, the rather vague “higher power” — which can mean anything from a Universal Intelligence to Mother Nature to the Force in Star Wars — is the New Age’s one-size-fits-all answer to Everything.

Bookstores and bestseller lists are rife with tracts espousing some form of New Thought (the movement’s new name) philosophy, whether by authors like Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle or the above-mentioned Deida. Striking up a chat with a young woman at a cafe is as simple as showing up with a copy of Paulo Coelho’s spiritual quest novel The Alchemist.

Women Look for a Higher Attraction

But while superficial knowledge is at your fingertips, dig a little deeper and you might find some things that are helpful in your dating quest. “Singles come to our workshops to learn how to attract a partner that meets the depth of their heart’s yearning,” says Raja. “And not just the superficial part of their mind or their ego.”

Meditation, extolled by everyone from Tolle and Chopra to filmmaker David Lynch, is beneficial to clearing the mind, easing stress, and being present — always a pleasing quality in a date.

Tanja Diamond, a tantric sex teacher based in Seattle, extols practices like breathing exercises for starting down the path to incredible mind-blowing sex.

“Most people have pro-creational sex, and they don’t even realize it,” she says. “But that’s not making love. That’s not connecting with all aspects of your being with another person. If you want to include spirituality in that, you start to connect with someone else’s heart and yours. You take all that capacity for pleasure and you can expand it. Right now most people are having sex at a two out of a thousand range.”

She also recommends getting off the porn. “I get phone calls every single day from young men saying, ‘Can you help me overcome this, because I feel like I can’t connect with women the way I’d like to.’ Just for the basics of spirituality, men need to be open and curious as to why women think and feel the way they do.”

Wherever your spiritual path leads you, remember to mark the way with crackers or breadcrumbs. Don’t get lost along the way. Avoid cults and floss your teeth every night.

And, oh yeah — never, ever volunteer to get up onstage in front of 70 spiritually conscious women to be judged on your trustworthiness. Unless you’re feeling pretty damn connected to your sense of purpose.

By Shawn Conner