Give Me Authenticity Or Give Me Death

Betrayal of oneself is possibly the most egregious spiritual crime. If you are willing to forsake your own soul for the sake of any seeming reward, then you have no chance whatsoever of being true to someone else. You cannot possibly see the road to happiness and fulfillment when you are focused on other's opinions and how to make your outward self more appealing. This need for outward validation is why we generally betray ourselves, right? We think: "I don't really want to do this", our intuition says, "this isn't right", but we go forth anyway, because we are worried about other's opinions and how we might look.

Why do we do this? In my own life, I have often betrayed my soul because I thought, "What will people say if I don't do this?" "Won't I be ashamed?", "Will I feel like a failure if I don't have monetary success?". The preceding questions exemplify the ego at its worst and most perilous state.

I have come to realize something: There is no greater shame than lacking the courage to follow your heart. Nothing is beneath me except being false to myself. That is far beneath me. And I hope it is beneath you too. There is no way we can possibly, respect, support, trust and love each other if we cannot do that for ourselves. All we leave this world with are our connections to each other: how we made each other feel and how well we loved. That is the only damn thing in this whole world that remains. Why take away this great spiritual gift?

I think about this in particular in regard to the feeling of shame society can bestow upon us for not having a high profile job. I really wish money didn't exist. I wish we could all be a bunch of hippies running around bartering, and focusing on following our souls. However, since it does, and since we live in a capitalistic culture we need to find a way to be validated by spiritual wealth instead of the fleeting physical wealth. 

I know that if I had taken the "Natural Track" I could have a really nice, high-paying job, sitting in an office somewhere while my soul slowly withered alway along with my self-respect and passion for life. I would rather scrape around the world for years, going from vagabond job to vagabond job that surrender my soul to an institution I don't believe in. I know I will have success in the arts I am pursuing because I am doing it with absolute integrity and soul. Passion does not even begin to describe the way I feel about the messages I put forth through singing, writing, acting and teaching. Even if I end up in a place that's different from what I envisioned, I am one hundred percent sure that if I go forth with an open, honest heart, and with respect and honor for my deepest self, I will prevail.

Give me Authenticity or give me death! Really, if you aren't real with yourself, your happiness, light and love die. So while it sounds like an extreme statement, it's actually quite true. The only way we will find our path to enlightenment and love, lies within ourselves, not in anything physical we can conceive. So I challenge you all, as I challenge myself to focus on what's within: Nourish your inner self. Respect the being you came here to be. And for God's sake, be authentic. Everyone can smell a phony coming from a mile away and it's not too attractive. I really believe all the world's deepest issues start in self betrayal, so starting today, I ask you to be faithful to your soul. I can't wait to see the positive influence your honest and trustworthy self will have on the world!

Love,

Lo :)

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!