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! 

Sense Memory Of The Soul

Do our souls have a memory? Are there some scars that we can never truly recover from? Do some people and events leave imprints too deep to heal? These are my questions this evening.

Here’s what spurned me on to speak about this particular issue: I was driving down South San Fernando Boulevard in Glendale on my way back from a friend’s house this weekend when a song came on the radio and hit me like a ton of bricks. Not only did I remember every feeling I’ve ever had in regard to that song, but I felt it deeply. It went beyond thinking, “Oh when this song was on my top 25 Itunes playlist, I was sad”…It was more like every physical, guttural, sensation I had ever had in regard to the particular pain that had accompanied that song was hitting me again just as strongly as before. It went far beyond my brain and into my gut and chest-two places that I firmly believe have their own intellect and emotional recall. I felt as if every aspect of my humanity that held the reigns to my emotion was remembering the pain.

This made me think of singing. You may be wondering: “Why, Lauren, Why?” So glad you asked: in singing there’s something we talk about called sense memory. For example: when you sing in a particular style a good deal, employing a specific technique, it becomes second nature and you don’t even have to think about it anymore because it is in your, “sense memory.”

So back to my question: Is there some pain that permeates our soul so deeply that it creates a sense memory? This confuses me because I have felt for a while now that our intellect can trump our emotion. But now I’m wondering what if that’s actually not true? What if our heart is the ultimate intelligence? What if when it has been wounded deeply and without warning, it doesn’t know how to start anew and protects you on instinct? You can know in your intellect that something is over and you have moved on, but what happens when the imprint of that feeling is stamped into you so deeply that even though your brain knows the moment over, the initial pain feels real and raw?

It could be an evolutionary thing. Our first pain is like a vaccination for all future pain to come. It infects us so that when we encounter the really jarring heartbreak we’re armed with the emotional antibodies to know how to fight it off. The first cut is the deepest, and I know that, thanks to a cover Sheryl Crow did, and my life. But after that first cut, perhaps, we are able to get stitches and learn that if you touch sharp things, you’re going to get a boo boo. So don’t do it, or at least do it with care, for heavens sake! Blunt the edges! Real Life Application: Don’t date the same bad guy with a different face. Don’t make friends with a pathological liar more than a few times. Don’t expect your Mom to bake you cookies from scratch, though she may promise she will. IT NEVER HAPPENS. ETC.

I guess what I conclude with is this: Your brain can know you’ve moved on or gotten closure from a certain situation in your life, but as I learned in Interpersonal communication class: Grief never truly disappears, it simply gets further away. There are certain triggers that can make it seem as raw and real as the first time. So for us deep feelers, we need to be careful. To remember that it is okay to feel deeply again, even though some part of us warns us not to because we might get hurt. In that case I think it’s our intellect working in conjunction with our sense memory, but either way, we must learn to quiet them both down, sing them a lullaby, and tell them it’s going to be okay. As human beings we are made to feel. It’s healthy and necessary. Though some of those feelings may be painful, all feelings we experience give us the opportunity to advance our souls, if we choose to learn from them. Choose to learn: let love in. You can be aware of your sense memory, but don’t let it keep you from exploring something great just to save yourself from pain.

The Mind-Heart connection is alive in well within our species and they can be a great collabo if we let them strive for a healthy balance. Find the love, find the positive thoughts, learn from the past and find a way to move on to new experiences.

Xoxo

Lolo

The difference between Having Love for your soul and EGO

So I decided to make the short side note I had posted to the end of the previous blog a separate entity. It is a worthy subject and I feared that some may pass it over because their eyes grew tiresome after reading my main blog entry. So here it is:

Remember loving and honoring who you are is different than ego. My favorite spiritual guide, Dr. Wayne Dyer always says, “E.G.O, that’s edging God Out,” To speak in terms that I used earlier, it is not honoring your light. It is putting a falsified, glitzed up version of your innerself on spotlight (think Toddlers and Tiaras of the soul), and screaming from the rooftops, “here I am, LOVE ME, because I DO!” The problem is, that when you’re listening to your ego, you are not loving yourself, because you are inhibiting creation and embellishing your truth. The ego is the little voice inside our head that tells us we are what we have and what we do: It’s the voice that tells us we are what others think of us. It’s anything that denies our divine nature and disables us to love on a profound level. 


When we are deeply intertwined with our ego we are too wrapped up in the image we’re creating to be interested in limitless good will--we’re too busy thinking of ways to make ourselves look better. There’s a distinct difference between ego and loving your soul, that cannot be overlooked. So do not for a moment think that to love yourself means you’re being egotistical. Again, there’s a difference between supporting your essence and supporting your image.


Love the soul, not the possessions of the soul.


xoxo Lossip girl.