With Love and Face Wash (A Blog About Maintaining Happiness)

Once you learn a lesson, your work is not over. I have found this pattern in my life: I will take the advice of a previous blog of mine: I’ll understand and enact a belief in my life, and thus, cure the problem, so that’s good..but then after that transaction takes place, a whole new issue seems to occur: after the problem ceases to exist, I’ll go back to the way I was living before as if my work was done. The problem here is that in doing so, I totally neglect to continue to enact the positive changes I’d made to make the problem go away.

Here’s a practical application: I have found in my life that if I lay down to sleep before I wash my face, with the intention of just resting and eventually getting up, that 9/10 times I do not, in fact, get up, but rather, sleep like a small babe through the night. Whenever this happens, I wake up from this grody occasion and vow to myself to never lie down before my face washing duties are completed. This usually lasts about a week or two until I get home late at night, decide I just need a small rest to complete the arduous duty of personal hygiene, and, again, fall asleep and make the same vow the next day. 

Now the sad part about this is that it’s not as if it’s a hard vow to keep. I learned my lesson from it, so what is so difficult about retaining that knowledge and using it to make a better life? Yes, a clean face makes a better life, it’s true. Of course, this goes beyond skincare--although, that is one of the more important places where this pattern rears its ugly head.

Shockingly, this negligence in regard to completely ignoring pertinent knowledge can wreak havoc in much more detrimental ways than a lack of exfoliation. The more serious example lies in the case of choosing to ignore spiritual knowledge one has gained. When this happens, the situation can get a little bit more disastrous.

For example: In my life, I can always tell when I am falling out of touch with my spirituality. I start to wonder why I am feeling directionless, detached, unhappy and unfulfilled, when I have the realization that I am feeling disconnected from others and my source (GOD-The Universe-Whatever you want to call it, it’s the same thing).

These moments of disconnect are the moments when I am least myself-when I am in no way the positive person I came to this earth to be.  When I find myself in these times I know exactly what I need to do to get reconnected- Meditate, pray, write, play music, spend time in nature, send others positive energy and love, go to church, watch How I Met Your Mother(JK sort of), etc. When I do these things, I almost instantly feel better.

When I start to engage in the aforementioned activities, I reach the high level of energy that I thrive on and start to feel awesome. In these moments I feel indescribably positive: I feel an extreme level of optimism, so much so that it almost feels like no negativity can touch me. This is where the clever ego gets involved—she storms in and rips away my sensibility.

On some subconscious level I start to really believe that nothing can touch me. I let my ego take over and believe that I, as a body, am invincible, when in actuality what was bringing forth this feeling of bliss was a conscious effort to increase my awareness and energy level. Yet, it every time I fall into one of these low energy valleys and climb the spiritual mountain, it’s like it’s a new discovery.* And somehow I always allow myself to slip back out of that wonderful place of enlightenment because I am naïve enough to think that happiness doesn’t take work. And so I let these great life-boosting patterns that I integrated into my daily routine slowly slip away. As I let them slip away, feeling like I don’t need them anymore, I slowly loose all of the amazing energy that I had produced in maintaining a spiritual regimen.

Just the same as when I added the spirituality into my life, it made me feel better, when I took it away, it made me feel worse. Rendering this cycle ridiculous and for lack of a better word, plain stupid.

Your spiritual self is NEVER done growing. To think that you learned your lesson just because you know the information is foolish. You must continue to engage in patterns that yield positive results. You must hold yourself to this standard. You must constantly be employing your knowledge and learning more deeply in order to increase your consciousness and happiness.

Now that doesn’t mean this knowledge is the same for everyone. I define spirituality as whatever way we human beings make sense of the world and become our best self.  I mean, how do we expect to maintain any semblance of happiness when we let the parts of our lives that make us happy fall away because we are too busy, too bored, or too egotistical to realize that maintaining bliss takes work?

I for one, am vowing here and now to put in the effort to remember what it is that makes me happy and take time each day to perform the actions and engage in the processes that bring forth my best self. Also, I promise to exfoliate more often and stop lying in bed before I wash my face. It’s truly unacceptable.

With love and face wash,

Lauren Lo


*I apologize for the hippie speak there, but I couldn’t resist!