In life, we tend to swing on an emotional pendulum between two states — love and fear. Emotions like joy, compassion, and forgiveness are rooted in love, while anger, resentment, and jealousy are rooted in fear. All other emotions lie somewhere in between.

These emotions all carry with them a different charge, or frequency, that we experience in our bodies. On one end, emotions rooted in love have a high vibrational frequency. When we experience them, we feel good, energized, and alive. Our hearts feel open, we feel expansive and we tend to move as if we are floating. In this state, we are “in flow” with the Universe. However, on the other end of the pendulum, when we experience emotions rooted in fear, we close our hearts to love. This is when we experience emotions like resentment, hatred and jealousy. These fear-based emotions have a lower vibrational frequency, which we can feel in our bodies. We feel as if we’re heavier, emotionally drained, closed off and restricted.

Before I speak more to the importance of opening our hearts to love, I do want to take a moment to acknowledge that no emotions are “bad”. All serve a purpose as they are guides to help us navigate the world and live our best, most aligned life. But what I do also know to be true through personal experience is that because of negativity bias, when left unchecked we can sometimes allow ourselves to sit in negative emotions for far longer than we should. Instead of experiencing these low energy emotions because of interactions with the world around us, we experience them because of stories that replay in our own minds.

The good thing is that we do have control. With thoughtful practice and repetition, we can train ourselves to be inclined to a more joyful state. By opening our hearts to love, and by being intentional to sit in the energy of love, we familiarize ourselves with this state. Just like exercising a muscle in the body, we are exercising the muscle of love within our hearts. The more we exercise it, the stronger it becomes. The stronger it becomes, the happier and more full of love we will be. As we continue to practice opening our hearts, it will start to become a habit. Living with an open heart, full of love will shift from a conscious effort to a naturally occurring state of being.

So the daily practice is about cultivating more love and joy in your own heart. It’s about realizing that you have the power to build a joyful life, but it starts with the conscious decision to LOVE. It’s about choosing to love even when it feels hard, staying open even when you want to close up, and finding joy in the little things, rather than focusing on the negatives. The best part about this practice is that you begin to see and feel that having more joy and love in your life is entirely dependent on you and your internal landscape. By focusing on the love within you, you are also able to amplify the love around you. The more you practice opening your heart, the more you spread love, and more love seems to flow into your life.

Actionable ways to open your heart to love:

• Open your heart to love daily meditation.
• Every morning and every night write down 3 things that you love and are grateful for.
• Every hour wish genuine love and happiness upon someone.
• Call to mind someone or something that you love and focus your attention on this love. Feel tingles of warmth and joy in your heart as it begins to open up. Take some deep breaths while focusing on this love. With each breath, notice how the love expands.
• Place both hands on your heart and tell yourself, “I love you”. As you say this to yourself, really mean it and feel the love in return.

I am absolutely hooked.

If you haven’t immersed yourself in the world of breathwork yet, I’m telling you right now, you are missing out. Breathwork is the shit.

In no other type of meditation — at least that I’ve experienced — will you find yourself in class working your ass off, while the teacher is bumping jams and yelling, “THIS IS WHERE YOU FINISH! GIVE IT ALL YOU GOT!” The energy in the room is palpable. It’s the type of electric energy you feel during a Soul Cycle class. The collective energy where everyone is working alongside you towards the same goal. Pushing themselves past their edge and releasing what no longer serves them. Breathwork is no different. Both have the potential to bring out the very best in people. The difference is that while in a Soul Cycle class you are working towards optimal physical health, in breathwork you are working towards optimal emotional health. You are working your ass off towards your mental wellbeing. It takes work, and it’s not always easy, but the results are SO WORTH IT. When you leave a breathwork session, you have this euphoric floating feeling. For the runners out there, it’s kind of like a runner’s high but elevated.

So what is breathwork?

It is a simple yet powerful breathing technique used to release energetic blocks and negative emotions that we are holding onto in our bodies. Breathwork allows us to let go of our minds and feel into our bodies so that we can process our emotions, let them move through us and release. This allows us to come back to our true essence. Whatever is meant to come up during the session will. Anger, tears, laughter, joy — you name it, I’ve felt it. Whatever comes up is released, and I leave feeling completely at peace with myself.

The Process

The classes all have the same general format. Everyone in the class lies on their backs in a comfortable position with an eye mask over their eyes and blanket draped over their bodies. The instructor plays fun, up-beat music and together, the class begins to breathe. With an open mouth, we breathe into the belly, then up into the chest, and out through the mouth. This three part breath is repeated over and over. They are fast, deep breaths meant to flood the body with oxygen. Usually we will go for about ten minutes of active breathing followed by an emotional release through vocal toning. Vocal toning is a fancier way of saying “Yelling at the top of your lungs”. It is common during the vocal toning for the instructor to say something along the lines of, “Alright, let your emotions out. Let me hear you scream!” And with that, the entire class will yell out loud, “AHHHHHHHH!!” Sometimes people begin to laugh or cry. Some people’s yells sound like a rollercoaster of octaves while others are straight and steady. Either way, it’s an amazing feeling. Have you ever gone into the middle of the woods and screamed at the top of your lungs? Yeah, me neither. But I imagine it would feel pretty similar to this. We do about three rounds of the breathing and releasing and end in a juicy, meditative savasana. During the breathing, the instructor lets us know that it is common to feel resistance or tension throughout the body. It is important that we move through this resistance and breathe into the tension to let it go. It is also common to have lightheadedness, tingling, and cramping of the hands (lobster hands). This is all part of the process and completely healthy.

The Release

During these classes, I have felt it all. I have burst out laughing. I have swelled over with joy. I have shed tears during a session that I walked into knowing I was on edge. I have found that whatever needs to come out of me truly does. After the active breathing, in savasana, I always feel as though I am floating in a euphoric trance. It feels like an altered state of reality — not asleep but also not totally present. Thoughts come more slowly in this state, so meditation is easy. I am able to just be. I am completely happy and content. What’s beautiful about this happiness is that it comes completely from within me. It is not reliant on any external factors like validation from others or being seen. It is available to me at any time, all I need to do is tap into my breath.

Breathwork is a release. I use it weekly as an energetic cleanse. Since taking up breathwork, I have felt my energy shift. In general, I am less reactive. I am better able to take in triggers that once would have set me over my edge. I am happier, more relaxed, and more confident in myself. There’s actually an interesting study showing that a group who did breathwork alongside their therapy sessions reported a significant reduction in anxiety and an increase in self-esteem compared to the group who did therapy alone. I have also noticed a positive shift in my levels of self-love and self-esteem.

All emotions are necessary to help us navigate life. They guide us towards or away from certain people, situations, behaviors and ideas. Stress, anxiety, fear, anger, sadness — low energy emotions are natural and come up for all of us. Things happen throughout life that take us away from our center. The issue with low energy emotions, though, is that we identify them as “bad” and try to avoid them. While positive energy emotions are free to move through us and be released out into the world, negative energy emotions are held down. We don’t allow ourselves to fully feel these emotions by trying to avoid them. The issue with this is when we hold down these emotions, they get stored in our bodies only to come up again at a later date. Oftentimes, we don’t even realize that we are holding onto these emotions until we “explode”. Something that might have seemed small comes along and pushes us over the edge. For me, breathwork is the ability to clear any stagnant energy from my body. Doing this allows me to handle new triggers and take on the world in a positive light. Breathwork brings me back to my center, which is innately positive and loving and joyful. When I no longer am holding onto any negative emotions in my body, I feel free. I feel more me. I’m in a natural state of love and joy, living in the flow of the universe.

Resources

• Check out my live and on demand breathwork classes!!
• Revelation breathwork is unbelievable! I did my training through them.
• Open meditation is doing virtual classes during this time
• David Elliot has free recorded breathwork classes on spotify

“Spirituality is not religion. It is a path for us to generate happiness, understanding, and love, so we can live deeply each moment of our life.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

Unpacking my journey from religious to atheist to spiritual

___________________________

Who are you?

When you answer this question, really think about it… I’m not asking what you do for a living, but rather, who are you at your core?

What moves you? What are your passions? What do you believe in?

___________________________

Spirituality is the path to finding your elevated self. It means finding what makes you you, tapping into that, and expressing it to the world around you. When you are your truest and most authentic self, you are in a state of flow — totally in love with yourself and the world. You are connected to source or whatever divine being you tap into. When this happens, you are being a conduit of love, RADIATING POSITIVE ENERGY TO THE WORLD. It is when you stray from your true self that anger, betrayal, resentment, and all the rest of the low frequency emotions start to manifest themselves. The more you listen to your body and your spirit, the more you will come back to your true self. You will then feel better emotionally and show up more positively to the world around you.

Growing up in a Catholic household, I was definitely religious. As a child, I read the Bible, prayed often and loved Jesus Christ. It felt good to pray and to be connected to a higher power. To be a part of this shared consciousness — something bigger than myself. However, in 5th grade, when my religion teacher told me that my cousins would go to hell because they were not practicing Catholics, I went home and cried to my mom. “But they’re good people and good people should all be allowed into heaven!” That day, my relationship with religion completely changed. I began to question everything. I slowly distanced myself from religion until 15 years later I was living in San Francisco, believing that there was no god and no real meaning in life. Naturally with this state of mind, my life started to feel empty. Don’t get me wrong, life was “good “ — friends, family, work, travel, food, fun — all the boxes were checked but there was something missing. Life felt bleak without the spiritual aspect. It’s funny how life works — lessons come to you when you need them most. In the midst of this struggle to find meaning and depth in life, I was lucky enough to take a trip to Bali with a high school best friend, and let me tell you, my lessons from Bali rocked my world.

My trip to Bali helped me to find myself again. It challenged me to search deep, to find the essence of my soul and who I really am. This helped me to address deep rooted traumas and let go of the negative thought and behavior patterns that were holding me down. Embarking on my Bali trip, I knew my energy felt off, so I was planning on taking some time to dig deep and reflect. What I wasn’t expecting though, was such a profound reawakening of spirit. In the center of Bali, there is this magical town called Ubud. It’s known as the Yoga Capital of the world. In Ubud, we stayed at the Yoga Barn — a beautiful oasis for the yogis and spiritual. During our stay there, we tapped into the healing energy and immersed ourselves with all the things. We attended meditation classes, yoga classes, spirituality workshops, and energy healing sessions. My shift in spiritual perception came from a session we attended called Integral Grounding. During this workshop, I discussed my troubles with spirituality. I discussed my Catholic upbringing, then my issues with and subsequent drifting from the church. I went on to discuss how certain aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism really resonated with me. The teacher stopped me — he had been through a similar path, which he said is common for people raised religiously. He told me something so simple that I was shocked I had never thought about it. WE ARE NOT BOUND TO ONE RELIGION. Religions are schools of thought and philosophy. As spiritual beings, it is actually our responsibility to go out and learn about different religions, philosophies, and schools of thought. We need to decide what resonates with us at our core. From there, we can build an informed spiritual belief system, one that completely aligns with every cell in our being. Religion is great as a teacher of values. For some, it is a beautiful avenue to connect with spirit which is wonderful. For others though, it is hard to get past some of the flaws inherent in religious hierarchies. Scandals, war, discrimination, hate. My religious upbringing taught me values that I will never part from, but I know deep down that I do not fully agree with all aspects of it. Spirituality, to me, is an agreement with ourselves. We have the ability to determine our own spiritual path in accordance with the set of beliefs and values that are our own. When we are completely aligned, we are able to connect with source/god/spirit/goddess. This is when we “feel” the higher power. We can feel a strong energy of the divine connecting with us. We are in FLOW. We owe it to the people we care about to be in complete alignment because then we are able to show up more positively and authentically for them.

So now you might be wondering… with all this talk, what does your spirituality look like? I’m so glad you asked! Let me tell you.

Key pillars of my spiritual belief system:

• Lead with your heart, not your mind.
• Always choose love and joy over hate and anger.
• Energy is everything!! The energy you put out into the world is the energy that you’ll receive from it. Put out good vibes. Do the right thing even when no one is watching. Karma, karma, karma.
• Meditate. Be in control of your thoughts vs letting your thoughts be in control of you. Notice the type and quality of the thoughts that flow through your mind. If they’re overwhelmingly negative, change your mindset and it will change your life.
• Breathwork is a god-send. Make it a weekly practice.
• Unconditional self-love is an everyday practice. Never stray from it. The better your relationship with yourself, the better your relationship with the world around you.
• Forgive others for hurting you, forgive yourself for making mistakes. Learn from them. Grow. Move on.
• Treat others how you would like to be treated.
• Always strive to let go of negative energy emotions.
• Vulnerability is a beautiful thing. It connects us and helps us to understand others. When we understand others, we judge less. Everyone has a story.
• Nature is nurture. It reminds us how insignificant we are and how unbelievable the universe is. Take care of the planet, it takes care of us.
• Let go of the ego (the sense of self). Every day, in every moment and interaction, we have the ability to be exactly who we want to be. We don’t need to carry with us false ‘stories’ or ‘labels’ that we have identified with or been identified as in the past. Our only responsibility is to show up authentically in the current situation.
• Take care of your body — eat healthy, exercise regularly, practice yoga, sleep well, have some fun!
• It’s all about balance. You deserve that cookie!
• Express yourself freely — dance, sing, write, create, talk, paint. Whatever it is, express your unique talents and stories to the world.
• Live in the moment. Let go. Enjoy.
• Never take yourself too seriously :)

Spirituality is fucking rad. Here are three things that are absolutely amazing about journeying down this spiritual path:

1. Our spirituality can be moving, growing, changing and evolving just as we are. As I learn and grow, my spirituality will undoubtedly shift, evolve, take new forms, and blossom. Spirituality is not limited to one set of unchanging beliefs defined by someone other than myself. I am in full control.
2. Spirituality is 100% me. There is not one aspect of my spirituality that doesn’t feel authentic because the core of it is what sets my soul on fire and makes me feel totally aligned. Every single belief, value, meditation, energy healing session I go to is completely and authentically me.
3. I am 1000% happier, more alive, and more myself now that I’ve embarked on this spiritual journey than ever before in my life. I show up as a better friend, lover, coworker, and family member. I show up as a better resident of the universe.

Helpful Resources:

• Integral Grounding workshop attended in Bali. (these guys were rad!)
• Joy on Demand
• The Untethered Soul
• From Lo with Love Breathwork Subscription
• Go To Glow Meditation

That’s all folks!!

Lots of love,

Lo

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Reiki, Reiki, Reiki. Six months ago when I was on a trip in Bali, I had never before heard the term Reiki. So why I decided to sign up for a Reiki session at the Yoga Barn, a yogi’s paradise that I was staying at in Ubud, is beside me. I think at the time I knew I felt “off” and something along the lines of “Heal your mind, body, and soul” was written on the Reiki brochure . That’s all it took. Maybe the universe knew I needed this and gently nudged me to say “What the fuck, let’s do it”. For whatever reason, I signed up. I fully expected this session to be some sort of spiritual therapy where I would talk to a guru about my issues and then he or she would give me ground shattering advice and I would magically be healed. This was far from the case, but what I experienced was equally profound.

Ok, so first things first — what is Reiki, actually? Good question. Reiki is a form of healing that taps into the energy of the universe to promote health and wellness of body, mind, and spirit. Reiki uses Ki — life force energy — which is the same system that is used in acupuncture. I once heard Reiki described as acupuncture without the needles. The aim is to get energy flowing through the body to release any blockages.

From the International Center for Reiki Healing:

“Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. It is administered by “laying on hands” and is based on the idea that an unseen “life force energy” flows through us and is what causes us to be alive. If one’s “life force energy” is low, then we are more likely to get sick or feel stress, and if it is high, we are more capable of being happy and healthy.

The word Reiki is made of two Japanese words — Rei which means “God’s Wisdom or the Higher Power” and Ki which is “life force energy”. So Reiki is actually “spiritually guided life force energy.”

A treatment feels like a wonderful glowing radiance that flows through and around you. Reiki treats the whole person including body, emotions, mind and spirit creating many beneficial effects that include relaxation and feelings of peace, security and wellbeing. Many have reported miraculous results.” (https://www.reiki.org/faqs/what-reiki)

Naturally, the International Center for Reiki Healing explains it better than I would, so I’m just going to let them explain. What I’m going to tell you about is my experience with Reiki, and let me tell you — it was life changing.

After signing up, I get to the session totally unaware of what I was in store for. The practitioner offered me a seat and went through some introductory materials. She asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to get out of the session and if there was anything that I wanted to tell her. “No, not really” is what I got out. I could have told her that I had recently felt void in my life or that I was having trouble feeling confident in my relationships and quite frankly in myself. I could have told her that I was battling with negative self-talk or that I was looking for more spirituality in my life. I could have opened up a bit. But naturally, I pretended like nothing had been on my mind recently and that I was just there to be happy and feel good. With my lackluster explanation for why I was there, we got started. The setup was me laying on my back on a massage table. I was covered in a soft linen with an eye bag over my eyes. There was nice, gentle music in the background, and I could hear the practitioner calmly working around me. The general process was that she would work with her hands either on my skin or closely hovering above it. From my understanding, she (and Reiki practitioners in general) focus a lot of the energy on the human chakra system (another term I had never heard before this Reiki session).

Almost immediately, I could feel this intense feeling in my heart. It felt as though there was pressure on my chest that simultaneously opened up my heart and lifted my chest towards the sky. I felt like energy was flowing through my heart into the rest of my body. It felt good. You know that feeling in your heart when you are falling in love, super happy, or super grateful? The feeling of your heart opening and expanding with joy? It felt like that but more intense. There were also moments when I would feel my arms, fingers, and toes tingling. Then as the session progressed I found myself chanting over and over again “I am enough, I am enough, I am enough”. I now am very into chanting affirmations in meditation, but at the time this was not something that I had experimented with, so this was new to me. As time passed, I found myself in the middle of a pretty vivid flashback from growing up. It was probably one of my last solid memories with an old childhood best friend who I had since drifted from. Why this memory was coming up was bizarre to me, as it was so long ago and I had not thought about it in years. I felt saddened though, a wave of inadequacy rushed through me. Us drifting had not been something that I had hoped for. The flashback faded and I was back in the room. I tried to shake the feeling from the flashback and enjoy the remainder of the meditation. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have tried to shake it. The emotion had come up for a reason, I should have leaned into it. I should have let the emotion have its ride. Instead, I tried to swallow it down. Regardless, I was back to enjoying the meditation, breathing deeply, and tapping into the love in my heart. The Reiki, it felt nice. It was definitely relaxing and rejuvenating. The session ended, though, and I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Nothing profound or earth shattering.

But after the session, I opened up to the Reiki practitioner and that is where the magic happened. She asked me about my experience, and for a second I thought nothing noteworthy had happened. I considered telling her that “the Reiki felt nice” and leaving it at that. But instead, I told her everything. I told her about the tingling throughout my body and the feeling of my heart opening. Then I told her about my flashback to my childhood friend. I didn’t realize the significance of that flashback and how deeply connected it was with this next part. I told her that I found myself repeating “I am enough” in my head over and over. I tried to hold back tears as I said this, but I couldn’t. I began to sob. I had no idea why I was crying so hard, but I couldn’t control it. In reflection, I understand that my crying was a long overdue release. I was letting go of all the negative energy I had stored inside me from all the times I told myself I wasn’t enough. That people wouldn’t like me. I needed a release and this experience gave it to me. The Reiki session was my opportunity to address childhood “trauma” that I had been holding down for years. Holding me back from my full energetic potential. I had never given myself the permission to explore the possibility that deep down I was wounded and that those wounds still shaped negative thought patterns and programming that were affecting my daily interactions. When I finally collected my tears, my Reiki practitioner told me it was good to cry. To let out the emotions. She told me that during my session she could feel my throat chakra blocked. In non-“woo woo” terms, I was holding down emotions. I was not authentically expressing myself to the world. Happiness, sadness, joy, playfulness. All emotions are just part of life — we owe it to the world to express our emotions wholly and authentically. There is no reason to hold back.

In retrospect, I also realize that my flash back to my childhood friend was not random, but was intimately tied to my feelings of unworthiness. I was a suuuuper shy kid and had trouble connecting with people — especially in my grade school years. Naturally, as life goes on, people drift. Certain friends that I had drifted from, though, I had taken more personally. I thought that it spoke to my unworthiness of having friends versus the transitory nature of life. Growing up, drifting friends reinforced self-deprecating thought patterns that replayed in my head far too often. “They won’t like me”, “What if I’m awkward”, “What will I say” On the surface, I seemed confident, but deep down these insecurities had never fully left my psyche. Since grade school I had always doubted myself, and therefore, I had never fully loved and accepted myself.

If I had not opened up to the Reiki practitioner about these thoughts, feelings and flashbacks, I probably would have had a completely different experience. I would not have realized just how meaningful these small thoughts that passed through me during my Reiki session actually were. I wouldn’t have spent the time reflecting on why things came up as they did, and I wouldn’t have had such a powerful healing experience. But the healing did not stop in Bali. As I came home from Bali and people asked me about my trip, I started telling different people about my experience with Reiki. My boyfriend, my parents, my coworkers, my friends — honestly anyone who would listen. I told them everything — I told them about the tingling and the intense feeling in my heart, and most importantly, I told them about my realization that I had always carried with me this feeling that I was not enough. That people wouldn’t like me. I told them how at the surface I seemed confident but deep down, I always had carried with me the crippling self-doubt. Sharing this story was honestly liberating. The more times I told it, the more healed I felt. Every time I told it, it felt like a more distant memory. Like something of the past. I was letting go of this past version of myself. Don’t get me wrong I cried a lot. I cried in Bali telling my travel buddy about it. I cried on our car ride to our next destination just thinking about it. I sobbed as I told my boyfriend about it. But these weren’t sad tears. These were tears of release. I was letting go. They were tears that I needed to get out to fully heal that part of me. It felt good to cry it out. Oh baby, it felt good. Not only did I tell my story, but since this experience, I have also been actively seeking out healing activities. Chakra clearing meditations, cacao ceremonies, breath work, yoga — you name it, I’m trying it. Some things work better than others, but at the end of the day, I am always trying to raise my energy. To be happier, healthier, more grateful, more understanding, less triggered, less judgmental. Things that fill me up, I do more of. If something raises my energy, I subscribe to it. The thing is, everything in life is energy. We are energy. If we can do something to raise our energy, to make us happier, more grateful, more full of love, why not keep doing it?

So my take away from this experience is to be open-minded and willing to hear the signals that come to you. They might be subtle, so if you are not open and listening you could miss them, but they are there. Listen for them and if something comes up that seems irrelevant, it might be worth talking through with the practitioner. As you speak to it, you might realize that it has more relevance than you initially thought. This applies both during Reiki and just in life. The universe is constantly sending us signals. We are smart enough to perceive these signals if we slow down and listen. However, far too often, the mind and the ego get in the way. Slow down and take the time to listen to your own intuition. Listen to the world. You’ll be surprised with the messages you receive.

For anyone who is interested in exploring Reiki, Melani was my healer and she was amazing! I highly recommend checking her out if you find yourself in Bali :)

Lots of love,

Lo

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️