LAUREN OF NEXT LEVEL PSYCHIC FEATURE STORY

Lauren Of Love

As the collective evolves, we feel the ripples ripple into every area of our life that is primed and ready for evolution, expansion, change, growth. A rebirth begins to organize itself in our favor — favor of our desires and our highest self —

IF WE HAVE THE COURAGE TO WITNESS IT AS SUCH.

What often feels like a dark night of the soul, a death — of ego, illusion, pride, and inauthenticity — is an invitation into deep, sacred soul surrender. An invitation into rebirth, so that we may remember who we were created to be and live in alignment with our highest selves, fulfilling our soul mission here, in this lifetime.

At every point in our life path, we are faced with a choice — to evolve or repeat a cycle. And what we resist, continues to persist, and in some cases, we are forced to witness our shadows so we can hold space for growth and step into higher consciousness.

Those who know me, know that I often refer to business as a journey of spiritual homecoming to our souls and our true purpose. It is the biggest personal development exploration you will ever go on. It will heal you, elevate you, humble you, and bring you face to face with every part of yourself that you’ve refused to witness. It brings you full circle, years later.

This month, Courtney and I had the wonderful opportunity to reconnect with Lauren Eliz Love — both of us having our own unique connection with her.

For me, it signified a full circle moment of its own. Fun fact: Way back in my earlier years that now feel like a whole other lifetime, I had the honor of working with Lauren inside her old brand as her copy editor and copywriter — it has been so beautiful to witness her journey of rebirth.

Our interview with this month’s incredible feature guest, Lauren Eliz Love (also known as Lauren of Love) is a powerful reminder that it is never too late to become who you know you are here to be. That healing lies within your soul, within your body, within loving yourself whole. That you are and will always be nourished, supported, and held by Mama Gaia and all that she has to offer. Lauren is a force to be reckoned with — the warmest hug that your soul needs paired with the fiery empowerment and etheric wisdom of a thousand lifetimes. She is in a way, everything that Next Level Psychic Magazine stands for and represents: oneness with Spirit and Soul, taking radical responsibility for your healing, sharing your sacred gifts, and transmuting our greatest challenges into the most powerful medicine we can serve our souls and others.

Lauren is a small town Connecticut business owner, host of the Lauren of Love podcast, plant medicine practitioner, healer, spiritual business mentor, and educator. She has a fire in her heart to elevate the planet by helping women live in their power, midwifing them into their own journey with Spirit and higher consciousness.

Lauren’s life didn’t always look or feel like it currently does. Read on and soak up all the truth bombs and soul talk this beautiful powerful woman has to offer. Let’s journey back to where and when it all began…

We are so fascinated about your life and business journey. How did you get here — healing all of your challenges personally, emotionally, mentally, physically? When did you first identify your connection to Source/ Spirit, and attune to your channel?

I’m an open book, but to start with, my personal development journey began in 2012 when my grandfather died. It was a pivotal moment for me because a lot of my familial conditioning was about making my grandparents proud, achieving goals, being a good girl, and being recognized for the accolades. At the time, I was married to a man who was a heroin addict and I continued to live below the poverty line and with an immense amount of scarcity, fear, and darkness.

So naturally, when my grandfather passed away, I felt like I was in this existential crisis asking myself, ‘Lauren, who are you living for?’ I had this revelation that I’d been living for all the wrong people and not really living for myself. It woke me up to how I was truly living: I had spent so much time playing a victim to my life and decided I was ready to rewrite that story. I got a divorce, started my life over, and experienced a spiritual/personal awakening to my higher power.

Q. What happened next? How did you navigate life once you had this first awakening?

I didn’t always have a successful profitable online business, a relationship with spirituality, or a deep confidence in myself.

What I knew with certainty however was that I wanted to help other women live a life of freedom and radical self responsibility.

To give you context, I had spent my early twenties working my way up the corporate ladder working overnights as a television news producer, and drinking to cope with the stress. I was totally in the dark. Literally and spiritually! I thought I had landed my dream job, but it turns out I was in a corporate nightmare.

Somewhere in this timeline, I met the love of my life, my now husband - Matt, and truly, he is my soulmate. He has continued to expand me, hold space for me and my evolution, and together, we have both continued to HEAL. Ourselves and our lineages.

I’ll never forget this moment where I came home crying from work one morning because I was so unfulfilled with my job, my life, my purpose. Before I knew it, I was telling Matt, ‘I feel like I am meant to do something bigger in this world. I just want to quit my job, start a blog and try to grow an online business.’ He said okay, and after a few long talks and a ton of panic attacks (on my part), we left our city life, put our things in storage, and moved in with his parents for a year while I ‘tried this crazy business thing.’

In 2015 I finally decided to give the whole coaching thing a try. Up until this point, I had built a successful blog sharing my life’s journey. I wrote about my entire life on my blog: my eating disorder, my divorce, my past with alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, and my sexual trauma. I put it ALL on the table of my blog because I wanted to show every woman out there that she could own all the shadowy parts of herself too.

Q. Wow, this is so powerful, Lauren. To be a space holder for so many women isn’t a small feat and carries with it such sacred responsibility. What did a typical day in your coaching business look like? How did you feel now that you were in it full time? What did your business evolution look like — because knowing you and witnessing your growth, business offers us layers of misalignment we need to shed so we can come home to our soul. Could you share a bit more on that?

Of course! See, what I don’t think people realize is that when you consciously choose and your soul consciously chooses this decision to help other people, you get initiated into the deepest, darkest depths of your own healing, right? And that was what was happening for me.

The veils started to lift. Pretty much, from 2015 to 2018, my number one focus was work on yourself to make more money. I was working on myself to make more money, and it was working, right? So I kept doing all the things — all the self development, the rituals, the conferences, the learning.

By the time 2018 rolled, we had a team of four employees, maybe more. The business was bringing in a revenue of upwards of $80,000 months, more than once a month. We were almost at a million dollar level in the business. It was right there — the ‘mark of success’ — We did it. I did it. We reached millionaire status. I celebrated it. And while it was incredibly amazing, I felt a twinge of emptiness in me. If this is what success was… why then did I feel so empty?

At this point in 2018, I was becoming very aware that not only were the efforts, the energy, the mindset that I continued to use in both my business and personal development unsustainable, but they were downright abusive to myself. I was constantly beating myself up, chasing more, more, more, and it always felt like it was ever enough. I started asking myself, at what point does it feel enough? It was a vicious cycle. I was working twelve to thirteen hour days because every hour that I had needed to be poured into my business. In my consciousness, more effort = more results, more success even though my life, my body, and my relationships were all warning me that it wasn’t the way to be. My health, my marriage, my morale, everything around me was running on fumes, depleted, and receiving the worst of me. A representation of the chaos within me. I thought that more money would make me happier and peaceful. But it was causing me to become more of a neurotic mess. Because of my wounding that I had yet to heal.

My body was deteriorating. All of that extra time I was spending at work was starting to catch up with me. I was puffy, inflamed, brain fog for days — where I’d forget the simplest of things. My joints hurt and I didn’t fit into any of my clothes anymore. Every single symptom was a sign that my body was trying to get my attention.

At the same time, I was on 5 different mental health medications that I was trying to slowly step back from. Yet again, I reached this point in my business that I was repeating the same cycle that I had repeated earlier in my life.

This needed to end. How I was living wasn’t sustainable. There had to be something better than this way. And they say, ask for a sign and you’ll receive it. This is when I found plant medicine. This is when the trajectory of my life, my relationships, my health, my business shifted. I am forever changed. And I am grateful to plant medicine.

Q. Full chills, Lauren. This is the stuff nobody talks about — the behind the scenes within a business, the inner work, the depth of healing one has to journey through to step into their soul’s power and mission. A lot of your work right now is a beautiful blend of business artistry and mastery along with the focus on healing inside out with retreats and plant medicine — including your signature method H.E.A.L. Can you share with us your experience of plant medicine? What did this journey look like?

So the belief of plant medicine that I personally have and I share with a lot of people is this: The healing that we really need as humans is supplied to us through the Earth. Mother Earth has everything we need to heal. So I started to lean into my connection with her.

I found Ayahuasca, Kambo, Rapé (pronounced ha-pay), Sananga, Bee medicine, Bufo. I went on a mind-body-soul exploration and started to really study these medicines. To revere them. To trust that my body would start healing itself, the more I witnessed my shadows, my wounds, and finally allowed myself the space I needed to heal. To breathe. Not only did plant medicine activate my spiritual gifts, it healed all of the ailments I had, and completely changed the trajectory of my purpose. It healed my marriage. It helped me feel divinely connected to my business and birth a new way of living and being for myself. All because I was willing to look within. Because I wanted to end this cycle. I was gifted with my own rebirth.

Often before we experience a rebirth, an awakening, and evolution, we will experience synchronistic moments. Things going completely ‘wrong’, things and people and situations falling away organically as we are about to step into our next level of consciousness. I have some very synchronistic spiritual moments that I think I’ll remember for the rest of my life. The first one being that a core team member quit 24 hours before I could travel away for my first Ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica. This moment taught me to let go of the things that are naturally falling away and to release control.

Another moment I remember was not being able to lift my suitcase or even pack it because I was so sick. Once I finally landed, I passed out for almost forty-eight hours, sick with nausea and vomiting because flying was so hard on my body. However, within eight days of sitting with plant medicine, praying, looking at myself, healing my shadow, all my symptoms erased. They were all gone. By the time I left, my rash was clear, my joint pain was gone. Everything was just open. And then I traveled home and had to continue integrating everything that had surfaced for healing. It was deep work. When you’re healing your body, what people don’t realize is that it is so much more than that.

It’s not about losing thirty pounds after doing a detox, because you will gain that back. Why? Because you’ve not done the emotional healing. You’ve not reprogrammed your subconscious patterns. You’ve not faced your shadows. Which is what makes you gain all the physical weight back. So you have to be willing to release the emotional weight your body has been carrying around for lifetimes. To truly heal yourself, you have to look at what’s happening in the body as a symptom of something that’s going on internally within yourself.

So I had to spend all this time looking at what was going on internally within myself to heal what was happening: I had to confront the fact that I was sick constantly because I was living a life that wasn’t meant for me.

When I got back home from my first Ayahuasca sit, I had a trip on my calendar to go to Sedona and it was there I met a teacher who was practicing Kambo medicine. He taught many other things, but combo was the medicine I felt called to explore. I would study with this medicine, pray with this medicine, and learn with this medicine. Once I came home, I had this pain in my heart that echoed what my body knew to be true, I have to go move. I have to go. There’s something there in Sedona that I need to know that I don’t know.

And I thought, I’m crazy. That’s insane. My husband’s gonna think I’m nuts. We have our whole life here. Like, what am I supposed to do? And I said, okay, well you know what Universe, like maybe just show me like if I’m meant to be in Sedona, like give me enough money so that I can like propose this. And the next week we opened our cart for my old program and on the first day of the launch, we earned double what we ever would earn in any other launch for five entire days, and it all happened in one day! I fell to my knees and I cried and I said to my husband, ‘Matt, you’re gonna think this is crazy, but I have to go.’ It made no sense to anyone, but he understood that I needed to go. To follow this calling.

Once I was in Sedona, I stayed there for a couple of months. I rented a house, had someone living with me to help me with my diet — my whole diet changed. I had these teachers who were carrying these medicines from lineages that were profound. I got to sit in mushroom medicine ceremonies on Cathedral Rock, sit in Ayahuasca and more Kambo and learn.

As I continued my plant medicine and healing journey, everything inauthentic started to fall away, and I let it. My career felt more and more misaligned. I wanted to burn it all to the ground.

I remember going for a council session and it was so humbling, prayerful and deep. I had this knowing and wishing that God would just take this old career away from me — it no longer felt aligned. And in that very moment, I received an email from my lawyer that said, ‘Hey, you’ve been using the term business babe, and now you’re gonna get sued if you keep using that, you have to get rid of it.’

So right there, in a matter of seconds, the brand that I didn’t really want was gone! And then came the grief of identity and who am I without this identity? What am I going to do now — for work? What is my impact?

And not long after, my Kambo teacher saw me before a session, and said to me, ‘ Lauren, you just need to figure out what you want to do.’ And it was the way he said it that landed deep in my bones. And that’s when it hit me, Oh my God, I wanna help people do this. So I started working with the medicine in a different way because then I was healed and I didn’t have any of the symptoms anymore. I had clarity, I had spiritual connection, I had alignment. So I started praying with the medicine to map out my program. I would drink the medicine, go into a sacred ceremony, and literally ask the medicine. Lead me, I am here, I’ve been doing all this work with you… can you guide me to my program, the process, the impact. How will I share this with the world? what is my program, what is the process, And literally in moments of me asking for guidance, I’d receive divine downloads for the exact meditations, the exact programs and steps, everything! It was wild!

As I journeyed through this next iteration of myself, I also had to face the shadow aspect of coming out of the spiritual closet so to speak. The aspect of releasing something into the world that is so sacred, so surrendered, and truly has nothing to do with me. I was literally told what to do by Spirit. So that was its own layer of healing the insecurities I felt.

These insecurities slowly dissipated as we walked students through the program and witnessed their results — it was mind blowing! I’d have women come into the program who were so damaged from abusive relationships, and no w they were manifesting their soulmates and getting married. I’d have girls who had eczema for a decade, and now their skin had cleared. People who had alcohol addiction now had no addictive patterns. And all these people were walking through the exact same method I walked through with Ayahuasca, Kambo, Bufo, and all the medicines. The only difference? They weren’t taking the medicines… They were working through the training I recorded and the meditations and the journal workbooks I’d created. So it’s been amazing to witness healing not just for myself, but so many others, in so many ways!

Eventually, I felt called to teach business again. I realized that I am here to build a feminine business where I can flow and trust my spirit channel and birth what feels intuitive. That is what creates the freedom I truly desire and it brings the exact amount of wealth and more when we lean into that. So it’s been a full circle, homecoming, you know. This is how the Wild, Wealthy, Feminine method was born — which is all about entrepreneurship in a sustainable, Divine feminine way. While H.E.A.L is my methodology for life, body, soul healing. I love everything about my business now. I serve medicine. I facilitate with my teachers and hold space for women to heal with plant medicine the way that it’s helped me.

Q. Lauren, we have no words. We are both in full chills and tears as we listen to you share this journey. So before we wrap up this powerful conversation, we have one last question for you… What would you say to someone who is aware they have a discomfort in their life — where they know something needs to change — but they haven’t the first clue where to start? What are some steps they could take toward their soul alignment?

So on the plant medicine path, there are two aspects of healing that I think are the premise and foundation of everything I teach. When you are healing, you are doing two things: You are clearing what no longer serves you AND you are calling in what you want. That happens in tandem. You release the old and make space for the new.

What’s important about that cycle is that any of these plant medicines are purgative. For example, Kambo is the medicine of sovereignty. It focuses on clearing things out of your system — ridding the body and spirit of any old, stagnant, toxic energies.

A lot of times, in the online space, people tell you to ‘just manifest’ whatever you desire. And to an extent, that can work. That’s what I was doing at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey — you feel a niggle, you feel the misalignment and you think to yourself, Let me just slap more money on top of that, or let me just build a business on top of that without ever addressing the root cause of that misalignment. So we get stuck in this cycle of putting more upon more in our life. Whereas plant medicine will ask you to strip yourself of any excess, any misalignment. It will show you the root. And ask you to have the courage to lean into the shifts you know you need. It will ask you to surrender deeply. Let go of things that are disjointed, overwhelming and occupying heavy space in your life.

So a very simple way to do this is by going into your closet and getting rid of all the clothes that don’t fit. Go into your kitchen — declutter your cabinets. Donate what you no longer need — bless and release it. Clear things in your home environment. Clean up things on your laptop or phone. Clean up things in your business.

When you start doing this, there is a very visceral psychosomatic response that takes place in your body. It’s reminding your body energetically that you no longer need to hold onto everything. You can release what once served you, with love and respect.This way, your mind, your body, and your spirit energetically connect to the response of this pattern and get onboard with creating spaciousness in every way so you can ascend to your next evolution.

To make space for your healing is the most important thing you can ever do. The body is a sovereign vessel, it deserves to be treated as such. We need to remind ourselves that sovereignty is our birthright, vitality is our birthright, health is our birthright. And we live in a world where it’s really hard for every single person to have those things, but it is something every human deserves. And if I’m able to help even one person, and they go on to help others, that is the ripple effect. That is the impact.