Freston, Kathy

PERSONAL:

Married; husband's name Tom.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY, and Los Angeles, CA.

CAREER:

Writer, life coach, consultant, model, relationship expert, and spiritual counselor. Worked as a professional catalog model. Guest on television programs, including Good Morning America, CBS Early Show, and other talk shows.

WRITINGS:

Expect a Miracle: Seven Spiritual Steps to Finding the Right Relationship, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2003.

The One: Finding Soul Mate Love and Making It Last, Miramax (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Prevention, Vanity Fair, Self, Mode, and Harper's Bazaar.

SIDELIGHTS:

Kathy Freston is a relationship expert and consultant whose books and professional services focus on issues related to finding, developing, nurturing, and sustaining healthy, stable, monogamous relationships. Freston is a former model whose own history consists of some bad choices about relationships. Among her suggestions for breaking old bad habits and installing new positive ones is the consistent daily practice of meditation. Using a spiritual practice that she calls transformational meditation, Fresan encourages practitioners to meditate for twenty minutes each day in order to "create the space in your life you need to truly listen to your heart, to fulfill its strongest desires, and to transform your life," she stated to interviewer Megan Othersen Gorman on Prevention.com. "My work in meditation, both as a counselor and a practitioner, is rooted in the belief that we create our own reality, that healthy relationships can occur only when we are healthy inside," Freston told Gorman.

In The One: Finding Soul Mate Love and Making It Last, Freston explores the methods that one can use to find and create those types of healthy relationships. For Freston, soul mate love involves the creation of both a "psychological and a mystical partnership" between both participants in a relationship, noted a reviewer in California Bookwatch. Such a profound type of relationship has physical and emotional aspects, but is also strongly influenced by its spiritual aspect, as well. Freston helps readers recognize pat- terns of thoughts and behaviors that will sabotage one's efforts to find happiness and soul mate love. She carefully points out how past wounds can significantly influence one's current behaviors, and she provides guidance on how to move past the restrictions, diversions, fears, and insecurities that those previous injuries tend to instill in a person. She explains that success in love is not characterized merely by finding a lifetime partner, but by sharing experiences with each other, by growing closer and learning together from those experiences. "Freston points out that the spiritual task underlying romantic partnership is to close the gap between our humanity and divinity," observed a reviewer in Awareness Magazine.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

California Bookwatch, July, 2006, review of The One: Finding Soul Mate Love and Making It Last.

Hollywood Reporter, May 5, 2006, "Kathy Freston Was Feted April 28 during a Party Celebrating Her Book, The One: Finding Soul Mate Love and Making It Last, p. 47.

Library Journal, May 15, 2003, Douglas C. Lord, review of Expect a Miracle: Seven Spiritual Steps to Finding the Right Relationship, p. 109.

New Yorker, May 15, 2006, Rebecca Mead, "The One and Only," review of The One, p. 32.

Town & Country, June, 2006, Nina J. Judar, "Kathy Freston's Natural Beauty," profile of Kathy Freston, p. 108.

ONLINE

Awareness Magazine,http://www.awarenessmag.com/ (June, 2006), Sonia von Matt Stoddard, review of The One.

Kathy Freston Home Page,http://www.kathyfreston.com (December 20, 2006).

Ladies Who Launch Web site,http://www.ladieswholaunch.com/ (December 20, 2006), profile of Kathy Freston.

Prevention.com,http://www.prevention.com/ (December 20, 2006), Megan Othersen Gorman, "Therapy Not Working? Use Meditation to Break Negative Patterns in Your Life," profile of Kathy Freston.