By Mandy Catoe
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
Ollie Alexander has a soothing, calming presence. She seems full of wisdom and humility. She draws you to her, like a warm fire on a winter’s night.
Alexander, 68, moves gracefully and quietly through a room. She appears much younger than her age. She commands the language and expresses herself with ease and graceful gestures. She believes she has a God-given purpose and wants to help others discover theirs.
“I look inside people and help them discover their authentic self,” Alexander said. “Our purpose is to fulfill the mandate on our life from God.”
From that positive perspective, Alexander just wrote a book, “Are You In Love or Lust?” She offers insight to help couples avoid unnecessary challenges and get through issues that may be holding them back from harmony and blissful love.
“There is nothing so bad in life, that can’t be changed,” she said.
She talked a bit last month about her life and how it led to her writing the book, which deals with loving and living by God’s design. The book has a refreshing emphasis on self-love rather than self-denial.
“You cannot love until you love God, and you can’t love God until you love yourself,” Alexander said. “You can only love another if you love yourself.”
The book teaches that sex in a relationship between a couple is good. It’s an expression of love and intimacy that can take the two people to a higher dimension. Outside of a loving and ordained relationship, she writes, sex can be harmful and lead to pain.
Five phases
Alexander breaks romantic love into five phases: romantic or erotic, power struggle, stability, commitment and, finally, harmony and blissful love.
The first phase is physical and visual. Hormones will rule, if not kept in check.
Couples who have sex in the lustful phase before they know each other will not likely advance past the second stage, she writes.
“Too often people make commitments and lifetime decisions in the romantic phase, which is an ever-changing emotional state like the wind,” Alexander said. “Then you come down off cloud nine and you’re married.”
The power struggle begins then. Each person wants to be right and can’t see past their own needs. It’s about ego. Each has a need to be seen and heard by the other, who is caught up in his or her own incompleteness.
Those who survive this struggle phase enter the stability phase with a better understanding of love. The couple realizes that what unifies them is God, Alexander writes. Ego melts away and each begins to care more about the other. There is humility and teamwork.
The commitment phase is about accepting each other and themselves as flawed. They know they can be better and want to help each other grow.
“This is when couples should consider marriage,” Alexander said.
Finally, harmony and blissful love emerges.
“We are here and we know what real love is and passion,” Alexander said. “Before this phase, each person holds a little piece of themselves back.”
The two become one now, she said. “When you are one, you influence and impact your home, your world.”
As long as two people remain two, they are divided, and too many marriages remain here.
“God brings you together through the phases,” she said.
In essence, she believes, love is not blind, but lust is. Her advice is, if you want real, be real. If you want kind, be kind.
“Like attracts like,” she said.
Finding purpose
In addition to helping couples reach the harmonious phase of love, Alexander wants to help people discover their purpose, especially young people.
“I want everybody to do what God created them to do, but a lot of people don’t know what that purpose is or their destiny, but everybody wants to do something wonderful and great and be recognized,” she said.
She said sometimes she gets so excited when she sees a person’s greatness before they do.
“I just want to pull it out of them so they can see it and begin to evolve and become it,” she said. “My gift is I see their greatness.”
When working with young people who seem lost in violence or drugs, she said, she does not criticize them.
“I tell them, ‘I understand where you are, but you have a purpose and you have a destiny and you are meant to be great. You are an original – one of a kind. No one is like you. And you have a mandate to fulfill your greatness.”
She said she encourages them to love themselves and accept God’s love.
Most of all, she tells them to enjoy the journey and reminds them they are great right now, regardless of their circumstances.
“To discover yourself is the greatest discovery you will ever make, because when you discover yourself you discover more of God – who God really is,” she said.
Early life
Alexander’s life began on a farm near Heath Springs, the middle child of nine children born to Christian parents. She learned how to listen, negotiate and see things from different perspectives sandwiched between four older and four younger siblings.
Alexander is not preachy. She offers gifts from a life of lessons.
She was married for 15 years, a commitment she entered too young and way before the harmony and bliss phase. They had two sons who she says have grown into wonderful men. Both are married, and they’ve given her five grandchildren.
She worries that her sons may have been short-changed by being raised by parents who were still trying to find their way and direction.
“We drifted apart in the power-struggle phase,” she said. “We never got past that because we started a family well before we knew who we were as individuals.”
Alexander’s compassion and mission to help people find their purpose began when she was a little girl with a dream.
“I wanted to be a ballerina,” she said. “A friend of the family told me that I was too big-boned to be a ballerina.”
Alexander said something shifted inside her in that moment.
“I didn’t pursue that publicly, but privately, in my room, I danced,” she said.
Now when people see her dancing, they ask where she learned to move with such ease and grace.
“It was one of my purposes,” she said with a smile. “I learned to dance quietly at home. I did it for me.”
So now she works at helping children and adults discover and bring forth what is deep inside them.
“Use the hurt and the pain of experience,” Alexander said. “It wasn’t a waste. It was a school of learning.”
After debuting her book locally last month, Alexander is beginning a 10-city national book tour including Columbia, Charlotte, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Washington, DC.
To buy a copy of Ollie Alexander’s new book, find a signing event or learn more about the author, find her online at “Book signing – Ollie Alexander.”
Follow reporter Mandy Catoe on Twitter @MandyCatoeTLN or contact her at 803-283-1152.
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