Blogging In Paradise

Recently I had the good fortune of spending some time on the beautiful Island of Kauai in Hawaii with my awesome parents. This trip was phenomenal not only because I was able to reconnect with my family, whom I miss so much, but also, because I was able to reconnect with nature, which, always brings about some revelations.

This morning before I left that Mecca of nature to return to the city of angels, I was taking a final dip in the saltwater lagoon. While I was swimming around I heard a small child say to his mother who was sitting outside of the water in the shade, “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, you should be enjoying yourself in the water” And she said back, halfheartedly, and with a defensive overtone, “I am enjoying myself.” To me, this was a very telling metaphor.

 Now perhaps I am about to read far too deeply into this. Maybe the lady truly didn’t like getting wet and preferred to sidestep paradise in order to sit off in the shade. But my first thought was: isn’t this, sadly, how many of us lead our lives?

The beauty and the opportunity is right in front of us, waiting for us to dive, or at least dip our toes, in and we sit off to the side, lying to ourselves, saying we’re content. This is something we don’t do as children. Somehow we grow up and we decide that our lives are better off led by fear and hesitation than faith and inspiration.

Most of the time the road to our most fulfilled self isn’t that far off, but we’re simply unwilling to brave another element other than the ones we’re comfortable with. The transition, and, more deeply, the thought of the transition, from air to water is the hardest part. Once we’re submerged, we rarely want to look back to the false sense of contentment of our past.

Now Here is my challenge to you all, as well as to myself: let us skip the painful build up, and fear of transition, and commit to taking the action to be our best, most joyful selves.

Most of the time the path is much less hazy and rocky than we imagine, and it is extraordinarily freeing to release yourself of a need to feign happiness. Let us strive toward unadulterated bliss, and accept whatever lessons come our way in the meantime. And for God’s sake, if you’re in one of the most beautiful places on earth and you have the opportunity to go swimming in a magical saltwater lagoon, take it. It’s refreshing, and it might just bring about enough inspiration to change your way of living…Or at least to write a nice blog about it, or hopefully, both! ;-)

Positive thoughts and the healing power of love your way,

Lo

Nature vs. Nurture When it Comes to Reality

Sometimes I wonder: What would I think of love if no one had ever told me what love is supposed to look like? Now that is a hell of a question and one that I'm not sure I am even ready/know how to answer, at this point; nonetheless, the musing was important, as it spurned me on to think up many questions of a similar nature.

 For instance: what would I think of the capabilities of my life, had no one ever tried to disarm my innate power? Would I have any limitations had no one ever tried to convince me otherwise? Or are these limitations merely self-imposed, unaffected by outside influence?

I know I am not really breaking new ground here: the old "nature" vs. "nurture" battle has been around as long as the "chicken" or the "egg",  but still, I think it's a worthy question pattern to engage in. The reason being, is that this force of society vs. individual shows up in every area of our lives, whether we can plainly see it or not.

To understand this, we must understand the way we come to know "reality". The outside world (including society at large, friends, family, acquaintances)'s opinions and viewpoints are what create reality for us. This may sound incredibly strange at first; I know it did to me when I originally learned the concept. I first heard of this in a sociology class I took my sophomore year of college  taught by a paunchy, brilliant, old professor by the name of Jon D. Miller . He taught from a book titled, The Social Construction of Reality by  Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann.

Though the books' concepts were fascinating, it was a bit of a slow read, so I'll save you the trouble and sum it up here: Reality does not truly exist, it is created. We all have a group of  "significant others"- Friends, family, teachers, etc., who create reality for us. As this group of significant others expands, so does our concept of reality or life. Every person you meet alters and expands your view of reality, conversely, the less people you meet, the more consistent and small your understanding of reality is.

Now, the depths of positive influence understanding this idea can breed, are limitless; but to name a few: more tolerance, love, and most importantly, self empowerment, can be fostered by understanding and controlling your view of what is real.

Oddly enough, the example that Professor Miller gave to explain this concept had to do with cutlery. The idea was that your parents could have feasibly told you your whole life that a spoon was called a fork, and a fork, a spoon. Then, when you entered elementary school for the first time, you would ask the hot lunch lady for a fork, when, in reality, you wanted a spoon. Upon receiving this, you would become confused and angry, wondering why this incompetent B with the hairnet gave you a "spoon" (fork) to consume your tomato soup with. Now, Jon D. Miller may have used slightly different terminology, being a distinguished, tenured professor, but it was something like that. Something so simple, yet, so mind blowing.

Anyway,...Long story short, this concept we have of reality is only something that we have been told and consented to believe is true. Over the years we have allowed people to tell us what life really is and what is practical and impractical. This includes everything. Including the limitations we have set on our own life path. In fact, I believe, most, if not all, of our limitations are merely opinions someone told us that, that we've taken to be an absolute truth.

Now here's the challenge/True question: what if we could eschew the reality forced upon us by our well meaning, but limiting, significant others, and open our lives up to all possibilities? Most of us have, or have had dreams that some would put on the scale of grandeur. Let us no longer view them as grandeur, but instead, look at them as our reality. If someone tells you otherwise, that's their understanding of reality, not yours.

 Since reality is socially constructed, anyway, who is anyone to say you can't go ahead and construct the reality you desire? It is my thought, that if we do this, we are making a verbal and visual contract with the Universe and God to help us achieve our dreams. People and opportunities will appear in your life to help you achieve your reality, because the universe desires to be in harmony with your thought pattern and will even create miracles to make it happen.

Believe your desired reality with an absolute persistence and tunnel vision--go toward it confidently until you reach it. Remember that there are no mistakes, for as the great Napoleon Hill of, Think and Grow Rich said, "Every failure brings with it the seeds of success." How true this is. If you believe and have undying persistence it's only a matter of time until you knock down all roadblocks and break through to your ideal destiny. In the meantime, you must believe it and desire it as if it were already the life you are living. Go for it, baby!

<3  Lo

In This Lonely City, A Poem

I wrote a poem about this city of Angels I’ve been living in for the past few months of my life. While I have found there to be an abundance of beautiful things and people here in LALA Land, there are definitely times when this city’s lack of a collective voice can get to me. What I realized, though, is that if you can be yourself regardless of where you are or who you are with, then you will always find bliss. It is up to us to disconnect from the junk around us and realize our complete and utter control to only accept positive aspects of the world as our truth. Though a bulk of this poem depicts the quirks of Hollywood, the moral of the story is that if you’re lonely, or unhappy, it isn’t your location’s fault. It’s up to you to see beauty in everything and everyone you meet, and to see the connections and love, even in a seemingly lonely city.

The Lonely City

Millions of people

Worlds away

Disconnected purposefully

“Creating" themselves.

In this lonely city.

Trapped behind their shades

In the darkness of the sun

Content in false happiness

Everything is distorted.

In this lonely city.

Climbing the invisible ladder

Scavenging for scraps

Sticking their toes in ice cold water

Faking it until they find out they didn’t want to make it

In this lonely city

Let’s do lunch

I forgot

Cancel last minute

Something just came up

In this lonely city.

I got cast!

I got used!

I got Tan!

Well, spray tanned.

In this lonely city

On the stage

Behind the screen

Under the lights

Anyone can seem a star

In this lonely city.

I am hurt

I am Lost

I am just one

In this lonely city

I am true

I fall hard

I live deep

In this lonely city

How does one find art?

How does one find home?

How does one find peace?

In this lonely city

Remember where you came from

Find the connections

And let your soul roam free
It’s up to you

Even in this lonely city.

ExtraTerrestrial Adventures and Outside Blogging Projects

I am writing a blog for the amazingly talented Author, Craig Campobasso, and therefore, I thought I’d also share the blog on my personal blog, as it goes right along with all the life questions I attempt to debunk in The Wobbly Times.

Here’s what I wrote for the, http://iamthyron.blogspot.com/ <--Check it out, please!! Craig’s book, The Autobiography of an ExtraTerrestrial Saga: I AM Thyron, really is one of the most fantastic novels I’ve ever had the privilege of reading! 

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I am currently reading a book called, The Autobiography of an ExtraTerrestrial Saga: I AM Thyron by Craig Campobasso. This book is the story of an ExtraTerrestrial name Thyron, who is an highly evolved soul suffering from a duality disorder. According to Campobasso, it’s a struggle in our daily lives to “let go of control,” and allow love to guide, not fear, for the betterment of all involved. In other words: allowing God to flow within us without judgment towards others. It is the fight within mortal man between our light and our dark. It is the struggle to react in a loving, constructive way, verses a spiteful, destructive way. Most of all it is giving into our deepest fears; allowing fear, rather than love, to control our lives.

When we allow our dark to be in control, is when we feel pain. Negativity drowns you, and takes others down with you. When our light flows, we flourish. There are no obstacles, only clear pathways that lead to happiness and fulfillment.

These, of course, are all the extreme differences between dark and light. But with the exception of the few great spiritual leaders this world has ever known, every person who has ever walked this Earth has experience with duality.

Imagine how much harder it is for Thyron, The ExtraTerrestrial, to live on a spiritual plane where almost everyone has learned to merge their light and dark. If you’ve ever known a child who was smart, but less so, in comparison to his/her Ivy League brothers and sisters, it’s a lot like that. Unfortunately for Thyron, it’s even more difficult as we’re talking about issues as deep as the intelligence of the soul. He, though advanced in many ways, is still struggling with how to become his most evolved self.

While almost everyone else has achieved Christ Consciousness, Thyron is still in a strange sort of limbo, teaching at the advanced college level at the Universe’s Spiritual University Melchizedek, while still learning, feeling inadequate for having duality control his thoughts. On one of the first pages of the book Thyron describes his duality disorder to his students, “And you wonder how I got this job? I wonder myself why Father Melchizedek chose me? Someday I hope to learn the answer.”

This line really struck a chord for me. Don’t many of us wonder this? I know I’ve asked in desperation many times, “God, why have you put such unpaved desires in my heart? Why couldn’t I just want to do something normal, with a clear path?” Anyone who has ever wanted something out of the “ordinary” has most likely dealt with these uncertainties. We ask why we have been given our life path, feeling we’re unequipped or unqualified to walk it.

The key is we always are, even if we don’t know how to do it, or why we’re there, there is a reason, there is a lesson, there is an answer. There is a purpose and a moral to every struggle we face. Campobasso gives us another way of looking at this through his lead character Thyron, revealing “that we write the blueprint to our lives before we incarnate, and that we discover our own answers during that lifetime.” Souls can quicken their evolvement this way. They are armed to deal with any problems, even the most dire of situations. All that needs to happen is to just stay calm and be patient and open enough to learn.

Another great quote that goes along with Campobasso’s teaching is one that Orison Swett Marden once said, “The Creator has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do.” I think Orison had it right, specifically for this situation. I would take it even further, as Campobasso says in the book, to say, that our Creator God put the longing in our heart because we have an ability to complete it. Through the acquisition of our deepest dreams and the conquering of our greatest struggles, we can increase global consciousness, by raising our Light, one by one.

This duality disorder, which plagues the book’s protagonist, is undoubtedly the main focus, and biggest lesson of the book. Thyron even meets his own Shadow in The Shadow Chamber, learning why the shadow shadows each and every sentient being for soul advancement. It is also our biggest lesson on this Earth. I challenge you as, as I challenge myself, to join Thyron on his mission to merge our dualities and become a single being of God and Love. To become a Conscious One.

Thyron states at the beginning of the book, “Diversity is a spiritual tool designed to perfect humans for the Kingdom of the Christ Kings. The people of the Earth are student Gods in training.”

Yes, Earth is a grammar school, and the Heavens are the eternal college worlds. We have so much to be grateful for, and to look forward to: an eternity of learning is just waiting to be experienced.

So will Thyron overcome his duality? Will he say goodbye to his fear, attain Christ Consciousness, and allow unconditional love into his heart and grant it to others? You’ll just have to read the book, and find out!

You can buy The Autobiography of an Extraterrestrial Saga: I AM Thyron with FOREWORD by SYLVIA BROWNE, New York Times best-selling author and psychic on Amazon or Barnes and Noble online. But I suggest that you visit the books website to purchase an autographed copy: www.AutobiographyOfAnET.com

You can watch the Book Trailer there as well. 

*Blog Written by Lauren LoGrasso 

Human Pain and The Hope It Produces

Nobody ever said it doesn’t hurt to be human, but too few people say how beautiful our existence is or how filled each of our days can be with hope, if we let love in. As I grow older and feel my youth (and my youthful thinking) gently slipping away from me, I realize I’ve acquired a type of wisdom, that I always feared I’d gain. Deep down I always knew this inescapable knowledge would come my way, but I pushed it off. This is the kind of awareness that understands what a soul feels like when it aches, the kind that knows what it means when you’re just on the edge of a dream and you don’t know if you should follow it through, or say goodbye forever, the kind that wonders if true, lasting, romantic love is a real thing or just something someone told us to believe in...but even with this unbearable knowledge, and these unceasing questions, comes hope.

For every question we ask that has a possibly heartbreaking answer, there is the other side. Your answer could be positive, or it could be that the answer you thought to be negative, was a blessing disguising itself as a tragedy.The truth is, we just don’t know until we’ve gone through life. Just know this: The Universe, God and your intuition always know better than your fear.  And if we’re open to it, the readily available hope allows us to see that this world is intricately connected, that there are miracles waiting for us at every given moment and most importantly, that every person we know can have a positive impact on our lives, if we let them: if we let ourselves learn from them and love them.

So what do you choose to focus on? The potentially crippling knowledge that your soul has learned, or the peace and gratitude for having a soul that is able to learn and grow? I guess the choice is up to you. But I sure wouldn’t waste my existence on the physical plane complaining over how much I’ve learned, especially since that is our mission while here. To love and to learn, that’s it. It’s pretty simple, right? Let’s not over complicate it.

With ample love and on-going knowledge acquisition,

Lolo

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