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Many of you will be familiar with Laura Day already. She is one of the most talented psychics living today. She’s written several bestselling books. And she happens to be one of the most profound teachers in my own life.
Today, we’re talking about her system called The Prism, which is also the title of her new book. The subtitle of that book is Seven Steps to Heal Your Past and Transform Your Future. Which maybe makes it seem like it would be complicated. But what I love about this book, and Laura’s work in general, is how simple and practical it is. And how it’s grounded in reality, and in seeing real change.
We talk a lot about change today. Change, Laura reminds us, is not having to take your skin off and grow a whole new skin. Change can be tiny and incremental, and yet it can really reconstruct your whole life. We talk about the catalyst needed for this kind of change. We talk about Laura’s thoughts on terms like manifestation, and many other words I use that Laura can’t stand. And why Laura thinks that understanding our difficulties is overrated.
Laura also explains why things that we tend to judge as superficial goals or wants are often much deeper—and nothing to be ashamed about. We also get into symbols—and why Laura advises people to pay closer attention to the meaning that they ascribe to things.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
I've known you for a long time. I feel like I've known you as you've written many books that maybe haven't been published yet.
LAURA:
Yes, you are. So right.
ELISE:
Every time I see you, you're writing a book that has not been published
LAURA:
Yet, right? I think the last one I was writing was Hostage Negotiations for Lovers using CIA Hostage Techniques. But then I realized it was probably a better magazine article than a book.
ELISE:
Oh, so many books are magazine articles, just 300 pages too long. This is not though, actually, one of the things, I love many things about this book and I underlined many things and I texted you lines from yourself that I want to write on stickies and put on my computer. But one of the things I love about this book is that as one of the most incredible intuitives mediums, I know you hate that descriptor and or function, but this is a deeply spiritual book, Laura, and I know that's not your brand.
LAURA:
It is not my brand. On the other hand, I don't think anything is not spiritual. We're just spirit is energy. So a good bowel movement is a good spiritual act accomplished. Well, I think that when we medicalize with words, we make things harder to use. And really what the prism is about is making you easy for you to use is really an owner's manual for being human. But that title was taken so it's called The Prism.
ELISE:
The Prism. It's a beautiful name and obviously people might know your book. Practical Intuition. I like to think about what I do as applied spirituality. You're very much about the horizontal and making moving forward in your life in a way that's functional and aligned and without using fancy language
LAURA:
Aligned is one of those words
ELISE:
That you hate and you hate the word resonant. I just learned.
LAURA:
Yes. Well, it's the problem is that clean language gives us easy action. So I think that it's really important for language to be directive because we look for the tangles often as a way of not taking action. That's why we live in the past and we live in the future because we don't have to do anything in either place. We can't. We can only do it in the now. And so the now is really hard because the now is okay, there's something I actually have to do and yet I don't know what that is. And that's really what this book is about. This is what is missing, this is what you do. Don't look for your trauma, do something to create what you want. And believe me, you will meet your trauma as step number one and then you'll do something to resolve it. Because one of the things, and here I am going to be the opposite of what I just said.
One of the things that people don't realize is that they are so profoundly powerful and that change really change isn't having to take your skin off and grow a whole new skin change can be tiny and incremental and yet really reconstruct your whole life. But it does need to be consistent. And because we're creatures of habit, really what I think of is the prosthetic exoskeleton. When I first saw this machine that a quadriplegic could get into and actually have the experience of their legs moving for them, I thought that's what self-help is. It's the machine that we get into that shows us how to move. If we had known the right way, this is how it would be. So it shows us how to do that. And then because we create new things in the world, it sustains that act.
ELISE:
That's actually a beautiful vision and I think's quite core to this entire book, which is essentially, yes, you've lived and it's about acknowledging the things that have happened to you, recognizing that they've put holes in your artifice. You need to rebuild that as you move throughout the world and not be constrained by what happened to you in terms of limiting what's possible for you in the future.
LAURA:
And even if you had a perfect development and no holes, if you're a sea animal and you see land and you think, Ooh, I'd like to try to be a land animal, now you're going to have to put on a prosthetic exoskeleton and learn how to be a land animal.
And we can. I mean one of the most inspiring things for me, the reason I love working with people is that the capacity for change, not just internal change but changing their lives, but we learn to believe something else. The old placebo and placebo effect, we learn to believe in our powerlessness because it's easier to manage. And our schools are structured to believe in our powerlessness. Our societies are structured to believe in our powerlessness. And one of the great things about difficult times is they make us connect with our power because we have no choice. We want to survive.
ELISE:
Correct. And that your biology isn't necessarily a roadmap to your future. I just want to mention it. Oh, because I opened to it again and I feel like we were talking about it before. You write about James Fallon, I'm going to read to you in 2011, a prominent neuroscientist, James Fallon told the BBC that during his study of brain scans, he had come across one that clearly belonged to a psychopath and had discovered it was his own. He had inherited a brain wired for psychopathy. Upon further investigation, he found that he was related to more than his fair share of notorious murderers. Yet he had built a solid family, won numerous awards, chaired the university faculty at uc, Irvine and its medical school led a rich moral life and harmed no one his healthy ego, which he developed from an early age with the help of loving, supportive and hands-on parents gave him clear boundaries and redirected his genetic proclivities. So maybe we can start there actually, because the word ego, I think we've come to mistrust and malign in our culture, but it's functional. So let's take people through the architecture of this book, which is healing. I mean, again, I love it. It's the chakras
LAURA:
Because really the chakras follow your endocrine system and your endocrine system is causal when a certain part of it is working or not working. It does cause certain perceptions or behaviors. And the reason that I really responded to the prism as a title is that everything is energy. And that's not metaphysics, that's physics. Everything is energy. We as human beings are the prism. We are the machine so to speak, that takes that energy and creates whether it's our body and our thoughts or our external reality. Because when people say, oh, I live in such an unfriendly world, I'm thinking, wow, well maybe you need to just change cities. We all in an apartment building, every single person's living in a different world. And as children we have absolutely no control over our genetics and very little control over our experiences. So the prism, our ego, the machine that creates and interprets reality is imposed upon us.
And you're locked and loaded by age seven, but the rest of it's revision and that's what life is. Life is revision. Life is saying what I am creating in my life, I want that to change. And so I'm going to change, I'm going to find the tools. And again, that's what self-help is. It's the tool I would not have survived without self-help. And as you know from the book, most of my family didn't survive, but I am an adult now. Not only am I an adult, I am now my adult. That was not true when I was a child, but I am my own adult. So now I create, I structure reality and of course it's not. We're coming out of an era of click your heels three times and you're in Kansas. Very magical thinking. I have experienced that everything is possible no matter where you start from. And I love stories of what people like to call miracles, which are causal events that defy our beliefs, but we create those and the resources are there for us. We're tricked by the fact that our pattern behaviors do show us, wow, we think we're doing something new, but you really can't do anything new without a catalyst.
ELISE:
And just, I want to go back to the ego and just really clearly define it.
LAURA:
Ego is the structure of a human being. It is any sentence that starts with I believe, I love, I connect, I create, I enjoy I is ego. And when we say, oh my God, that person's ego, we're talking about ego damage or we're talking about an archaic ego that was great in middle school, but there really shouldn't be in the boardroom or in a marriage or parenting. But we're not talking about ego because ego is actually the difference between amorphous energy and energy that is directed to create something intentional. And people often say, well, I intended to create this, but this is what happened. That is a cue that you are not actually creating consciously, that there's a subconscious lock on what you want. And so with the prism, what I really have tried to do, and I've had the privilege of workshopping this with people for 10 years, is to say, okay, this is missing in your life. This is the part of ego that isn't functioning and here are some simple things. Take your choice, some simple things that you can do every day to change that. How do you know it works? That thing happens or here's something that's not working in your body or here's something you're not enjoying. So more people than you can imagine say to me, my life is perfect. I'm the problem.
I know that that is often true of me where everything is perfect and yet I'm obsessing about a spider vein on my ankle. And that mastery is a process we're all so good at pointing out what we think is wrong with us, and by the way, allowing other people to do it as well. Instead of saying, okay, this is what I want, let me find the tools, and that's what intuition is about, those out of the blue tools because imagination is great, but you can only imagine from what you know. Think about it, imagination is rearranging pieces you have that you've been exposed to. Intuition is out of the blue. It comes in as a catalyst. And so what the prism does is it invites intuition in along with best practices.
ELISE:
Some really clear I thought diagnostics that for me at least as I went through the seven different zones, it was very easy for me to say, doesn't resonate, this is accurate. You can use your own, I can use my own
LAURA:
Language, you can use your own language. But having been a psychic in the seventies and eighties, when I hear resonance, I think of crystal balls, purple calf tans and chanting for hours
ELISE:
And this book in many ways without saying it, although you do use the word manifest in here a few times at the beginning, there's a whole
LAURA:
Manifest because everybody loves word. And I always say to people, if you put water in ice cube tray, put it in the ice box, guess what you have? You have manifested an ice cube my cube. It means you make something happen. I think language is always what it means to you. And when I was young, I'm going to be 66, so when I was young, the F word was something you never use. Now it's this wonderful way to affirm your power and a statement. It really is different for everybody and I'm trying to be more flexible with language.
ELISE:
Yeah, well, these things come and go and come and go. They move throughout time. But yeah, you do mention manifesting, which is obviously the rubric under which most people understand this right now. But I think as you were saying earlier, when your intention is to go and manifest something and one, you might not even have clarity about what you want, which I want to to you about now, and then two, you're manifesting or trying to create out of a place of lack or injury or old patterns,
LAURA:
Really old patterns because of course when you want to create it is out of lack. Hunger is a wonderful thing
If we're not, when someone who is alone and wants a relationship says, I'm lonely, I say, good, stay that way until you find the peace that completes that puzzle for you or at least makes you want to work to make it fit. When someone says, I'm angry and they're not chronically angry, I say, good. Wow. Where are you going to set a limit in your life? When someone says, I'm sad, I'm like, well, good. Where are you looking for more depth? I think that one of my favorite phrases, I do have that awful habit that writers have of liking to quote themselves, but one of my favorite phrases is your pathology can be your potential. And my ability to predict the future as keenly as I can is the same disability that at Stuyvesant High School in New York made it impossible for me to memorize key theorems in geometry.
ELISE:
Can I just say that I just flipped open the book and that's what I have underlined on that page
LAURA:
And that's synchronicity. And I don't think that the idea, the reality that we live in a synchronous universe is magical. I think that when you pick up a penny heads up on a day, everything's going wrong and you say, oh, I don't have to work anymore because look, it's a sign things are going right. I'm like, no, everything going wrong is an equal sign to that. Penny's heads up maybe a greater one. And I'm really alchemy finds its crucial elements in reality just saying, okay, this is where I am. It may not be where I want to be. I may not even be who I want to be. I may not even, I mean, I've been people I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley and I've worked on it, but this is where I am, here are my real tools because fantasy tools give you fantasy results and this is what I'm going to build. Maybe it'll be easy, maybe it won't be. I don't know that yet, but this is what I'm going to build, which is why this book starts with what are your three goals? Because again, just like your ego, I want, I love, I believe I have your goals, give structure to your actions and everything is context. A scream at a party with music is different than a scream at a dark alley, but it's the same scream.
It's all context. So your goals give context. And I think that we tend to work out of context a lot and people say, oh, we should be, you're so goal oriented. Yeah, we're goal oriented ourselves, have goals. Our systems have goals. Everything has a direction. And consciously choosing that direction, that structure is a really important thing to do in life. And being able to revise it, not being so rigid, you may think you want this because of course you're a patterned creature and that's what you are patterned to want. But as you achieve it, you may find that it's a little different than what you thought you want. But the wonderful thing is that we're capable of change
ELISE:
And I'm a more spiritually open person probably than you are. And when we're thinking about things like synchronicity and the magic of the universe that there is a desire to co-create with whatever spirit or energy is present that I think can create direction and fuel in your life. Or do you disagree with that?
LAURA:
I'm not sure I completely understand it. I mean, I don't separate the language of spirit from the language of being because I don't think they're separate.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, you speak to dead people, which I know is both charming and diverse
LAURA:
That I don't advertise, but
ELISE:
Yes. Okay, but you've mentioned it in your book and you talk about
LAURA:
More than anything they speak to me, but only in ways that can be verified because again, I like proof. I think the wonderful thing about the material world is it's an evidential world. And so if something works, it doesn't require your belief because it proves itself. I do see people who are dead, they do tell me things they are verifiable. Do I know that that's not a telepathic pattern of energy that's left behind? Do I know it's an actual dead person? Do I know there's so many questions for a questioning mind. My real question isn't what is this, but is it useful?
ELISE:
Well, right, and I think this is where you've taught me so much over the years, and I think in this book you write about how sort of disembodied energy, the best way to get what it wants done is to work with someone who's embodied. And so I think you were talking about your brother, but you've talked to me about this with Peter where it's like give them a job or ask for support according to what they were actually previously good at. I don't remember if you remember telling me.
LAURA:
Yes, absolutely. I don't remember. I have no, do you remember for me is always no. But yes, I have some really good relationships with the dead people in my family, but they're functional because on some level, the yardstick, I think for everything in life is it functional. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't sometimes do things that don't have an actual productive function for us because experiencing connection, functional generosity is functional, charity is functional, all of those things are functional because one of the other things about this book that is certainly supported by science is I in thou, there's no real division. We are one. And the function of the ego, I really do think is to evolve that one energy because if you're omnisci omnipresent and omnipotent, you're not changed. And we change. Everyone struggles, everyone's actions is for all of us. And that is something, I don't use the word belief, I use the word experience because beliefs are things I believe in the goodness of man, even though there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. But that's a belief. I treasure it. It doesn't need to prove itself to me. Our tools need to prove themselves.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well you write about in the context of the way that we are in a field, you write a bit about entanglement and quantum physics, and I think you write about the Maharishi. Is it the Maharishi effect?
LAURA:
Yes. Yes. Where when enough people are focused on a certain energetic dynamic, it affects everything around them. And that's one of the things that I think is so important about healing. Even if healing for you is getting paid well for your services or having good sex or being more beautiful, even if healing for you is something that someone else would say, oh, that's ego. And the mis definition of ego, a challenge has a reason. And I remember in a workshop that I actually did at Demi Moore's house many decades ago, there was a guy and everyone was being super spiritual and his goal was, it was in a process I used called the Circle. His goal was a new car. And everyone was really like, oh my God, people were doing all these intense super spiritual goals, which by the way, often cannot be proven. When have you achieved world peace?
It's good for your subconscious to know that when you do X, Y happens because then you can replicate it. But for him living in LA having a certain kind of car, and he was from a very structured evangelical family, having a certain kind of car represented freedom. So often we pick things to achieve that represent something so important, so deep and so complex, but it's easier to call it a car than call it, well, I can accept that I'm gay, even though my family would say I go to hell and I can accept that I want to work in entertainment even though it's probably nowhere in the Bible. And we find our symbols, and I think that as we work for them, we heal on such deep levels. There's no simple thing. Someone can seem to have such superficial goals, but those goals have deep and complex roots because there's nothing a human being does that doesn't have a deep and complex root. So beautiful.
ELISE:
I was just with a group of women and we were doing this exercise around wanting and similar to that, it starts on the very safe and superficial. And as you probe and ask repeating questions about what the deeper want is, that's when you get to freedom and fear and really beautiful, nourishing things that start often in ways that feel like what? That's what you want. And I think so many of us spend most of our lives pursuing superficial and silly things with the hopes that it will bring us something.
LAURA:
And yet we grow anyway because the desire for the middle schooler to have the shoes everyone else has, they want to be part of a community. We're so quick to judge things and meanings are different for different people. One of my favorite things to say to intuitive students because they love books of symbols, and I'm like, eh, be careful. Because a symbol for you is a different symbol for someone else. For a country person being on a boat and the full moon and the gentle lake is just, that's peace for me. It's Freddie Kruger's glove coming up. It's good. You're going to fall.
Exactly. I'm a city girl. No, it's some horrible, scary lochness monster, lochness monster thing happening. And it is really important, and I speak in this book about our symbols and our rituals and our sacredness, and it really, it's important to notice the meaning we give to things. It's important to realize that every place is an altar. We're doing this interview in a pristine, very beautiful home, but my room is an explosion of me and it is my altar to comfort because I'm tired and it's my altar to comfort. Everything's an altar. And so when you begin to look at everything as an altar, you imbue it with a power to give you something the same way. Everything is a ritual, and it's important that we question, what does this ritual mean? The prism really is a call to action, to own your power. Stop giving it away. Stop medicalizing it. Make tiny changes and notice how everything changes in a way that you intend.
ELISE:
Well, it's interesting. The way the book is structured is the beginning outlines the way that you understand reality in a way that I thought was really clarifying and fun and interesting, and it's your life story, which I never tired of hearing because you have lived. But then when you get into healing these ego centers, you call them ego centers, and there are seven, and people will recognize that they align with the endocrine system slash chakras. But mine that I have been working on, and I know it needs constant attention is the second. And even the questions about potty training and stuff like that, I was like, oh, they're nails it and early sort of molestation event in my childhood, et cetera. So I still have stuff, but you're,
LAURA:
And also toxic nourishment, nourishment with judgment, that's toxic nourishment. We have a right as babies, we have a right to be nourished without expectation.
ELISE:
Yes, yes. And so that's all encapsulated into these questions. And the way to understand whether this might be an afflicted ego center that needs attention and care and your antidotes are really simple and they are the rituals that you can do every day, right? Seek out healthy pleasures, pay attention to boundaries with others and self moderate habits of both excess and restriction, be creative, so on and so forth, where I didn't leave this and think, well, I have to go and do all of these complex clandestine things. It was just a reassurance really of yes, seek out and create comfort and pleasure,
LAURA:
And you can pick one. I've been doing this on Instagram in the morning with my students really intensively every morning since the beginning of Covid, but I was doing it with them for five years before that as well. And it's interesting how something tiny, so for example, when you stop beating yourself up about what you want to eat, when all of a sudden that excess energy, you become creative in the kitchen
And then all of a sudden people want to know your recipes and you think, oh, I'm going to start a site and I'm going to charge for it. And then it brings in abundance and you make a living from it. We are so interconnected with every part of ourself, but also with the world that when you do one tiny thing, everything changes. And in all areas of your life, people will say, well, I have abundant finances, but I don't have abundant pleasure and I don't have abundant friends and I don't have an abundance of energy. But then when you actually have them look at their abundant finances, you find that they're restrictive and they're terrified of losing it. And that's not abundance. Abundance is there's so much here, I'm not even going to worry about it onto the next thing that's abundance. Abundance is you don't have to store it all or eat it all at once because you know it's there. That's abundance. And so when people take a tiny action that's different, what happens is all areas that reference that need change and a half degree of climate change somewhere in the world affects the entire world in huge ways. And that's what this is. I mean, we are a system within a system within a system. So when you move something tiny, the whole system changes.
ELISE:
So when you look at this moment in time where it feels heated and incredibly intense, is that to you, not to go into politics or world events, but is that us creating a lot of energy and heat and certain spaces and it just blowing up? Are we manifesting that?
LAURA:
Well, I mean we manifest everything. We make things happen. I mean, my experience is because every time you travel the country and the country isn't all New York, LA, and Washington and Miami, but you travel the country and you realize, well wait a second. Most people forget calling an Uber when it's late at night. Most people don't have access to adequate nutrition. Most people work a couple jobs. Most people don't have a safe school to send their children to. Most people actually are not living in a world that is kind to them. And if you entertain the idea of spirituality that we are one energy, there's an awful lot of pain and sickness that needs to be cared for, by the way, small changes. We're a rich country. Why don't we have adequate schools? Why aren't school breakfast and lunches free for children 365 days a year including transportation to and from?
I mean, why aren't these standard? And so I don't think that right now is per se so much worse than it was. What I think is that we are in a very telepathic time. The social media is a lot like telepathy everything right away, and you have to get rid of the static to figure out what it is you actually need to address. But all that information's there all the time. And we are being exposed to a lot of information and we're saying, wow, we've got to do something about it. To me, that's a good thing. A pediatrician once said something to me that has stayed with me for 40 years, which is a child's fever, and symptoms always peak before they abate. And I think we are peaking. And my intention for the world is that they abate because we address again reality. This is reality. Let's address reality. We can't be divorced from the reality of everyone.
ELISE:
Yes, and it's again, here we go, but in the Fifth Ego Center where I feel like I am quite balanced, you had written about the rehabilitation, healing and truth. And when we think about what's happening in our country, and I just finished this book called Outrage by this moral psychologist named Kirk Gray, and I loved it because it was about concept creep of harm, but also that how our reality is shaped by our perception of harm and who is being harmed. And it all comes from protection, desire to protect, not to destroy, and we ascribe a destruction idea to other people. And so when you're describing the experience of people all across the country and how varied it is, you write facts are not mutable. Truth, however, is it can be changed by time, perspective, new information and the multiple layers of reality that are ever present. Truth that serves you effectively is functional truth that doesn't is dogma. And so I think what we're also encountering is yes, facts are facts, but people's perceptions of truth are wildly dependent and all equally valid. And that in that telepathy of social media, there is a need to try to understand rather than dismiss what's
LAURA:
Happening for people or not even just understand, but address. I mean, I think to some degree, because we love being in our heads. It doesn't take many calories, doesn't take much sweat, but we need to do things. I mean, one of the things that I was very alert to when I was putting the prism down into a book, into a system was that understanding's highly overrated. If you know how to do something and you do it right, the understanding will come from the effect that it has. And so sometimes we don't have to understand all the difficulties. And I do put, this is where your injury may have come from, but not as something that you need to go into. You can go right to pick one of these things to do a little differently and notice the change, the understanding will come from the change. These expressions like hurt people, hurt people actually often feel like I'm being clubbed over the head. But the reality is that that's true. And when it's amazing how much horrible trauma goes away when people just have what they want in life, sometimes just getting what you want is so many things that we thought were these intractable problems. And so this is in a sense not to seem too superficial a book about how to get what you want.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, I think it comes down to this idea of, I mean, one of my goals is financial abundance is this idea of abundance. Because once you feel like your needs are met, once you feel safe or somewhat more safe and secure, then I think you get the room and the space to attend to everything that needs your attention. But when you're not able to give that to yourself, life feels very extreme.
LAURA:
Yes. And when you can give that to yourself, you'll find that you've also conquered so many other problems that you didn't realize or created so many other goals that you didn't realize that you wanted. I mean, I didn't realize I wanted a career, to be honest, back when I had one, I really didn't. I was very neurologically, not very anchored in time and space and very happy to be floating. And I had to have a career because I left my husband pregnant and needed to make a living and had met him when I was 16 and was now 32 and didn't have a clue, just had this kind of neurological anomaly that had been a source of curiosity for a group of people. And then because I had to address this problem of abundance, purpose came into my life. What a wonderful thing. I cannot imagine being my age right now and not having something that I dearly wanted to share with the world. Purpose is creating community because I train all these young people who become my new family in a way, we are again, interconnected people, interconnected organisms in an interconnected universe. And when you address one thing, it's incredible how many other things happen. And by the way, you know that you have solved your deepest problem when you have a new deepest problem to solve.
ELISE:
Do you feel like they're all laddered obviously for the way that our reality is structured? Abundance is typically connected to work, right? Or some sort of doing, and it's funny, when I wrote mine down at the beginning where you write down your goals, I was writing very long ones stuffed like Russian dolls, and then my instinct and one of the things that I get caught on is feeling like somehow having deep and meaningful work that I care about deeply and would do for free is at odds with financial abundance. It's like I feel bad making money doing things that I love to do. I don't know why
LAURA:
That is definitely a therapy issue, but by the way, that kind of, and it's interesting, it's more subtle than judgment is a intellectual issue for many people. It is for you, I think it's a first ego center issue, belonging that criticism, annihilation not being part of something because you want to walk to a different drummer. And that's what I really love about the prism. I'm going to say something that really does make me sound like a psychic. Some of my books have been books that I have written based on experience. So I was a test subject for experiments on extrasensory perception, practical intuition, practical intuition for success, practical intuition and love. Welcome to Your Crisis. Those are all books I wrote. They're books that I wrote based on experience and then tested it out with thousands of people. There are two books that came through me when I needed them, I guess you would call them channeled, not my favorite word.
One was the circle. That was actually the first system I ever put down, but I knew intuitively it was not the bestseller. That Practical Intuition was the bestseller. So it's not the first book I published, but it was the first system. It's how I became a bestselling writer. It's how I got a job. It's how I was able to be a stay-at-home mother with my son while still making enough. So the circle was channeled that just came through me when I needed it, when I thought, wow, if I'm so damn intuitive, why is my life such a mess? And I got the answer. And the answer was this circle, which really helped me create the life that I have now. The prism came through me and literally came through me before the suicides of my siblings. And I've had two siblings suicide in the last 10 years and my mother many, many years before my uncle.
But it came through me and it was the answer to a question I hadn't asked yet, which was how did I not only survive, but how did I thrive? Why me and the prism came through? And in a strange way, it is something that I always knew but that I needed to be reminded of because things that were ego shattering and your ego is what allows you to function. Ego shattering were about to happen in my life, and I tell this story in the book, but I always have seven books I'm writing on my computer. I chose this one because one day I opened my computer and synchronistically the Einstein quote about time and space being an illusion. The Einstein quote that he wrote shortly before his death at his friend Bezos funeral popped up as the first thing I had written on this book on my screen, and I hate to sound like a psychic again, took it as a sign that I needed to look at this material again, and it again saved my life. I was reminded, oh, this was a gift that was given to me as a child before I even understood what it was. This carried me through. This allowed me to create all the things that I wanted in my life and when life went wrong, which it inevitably does to recreate from the stones of a structure I once loved and didn't want to lose something even more appropriate.
ELISE:
Beautiful. Yeah, I love that story In the book, it was on your brother's funeral,
LAURA:
On his memorial card, his ex-wife who had made the memorial card. We divvied it up because it was not expected and we had to do it quickly, and he had a 6-year-old, so we didn't want to leave it hanging. We wanted conclusion for her. So she did the funeral card, I did the catering and blah, blah, blah. And when that hit me, I thought, wow, I've got to look at this. And it was really what came intuitively to me as a child, what did save my life.
ELISE:
Beautiful. This is one of those books, and I say this as the highest compliment where I feel like as you read it, you're like, of course this is so obvious and yet it's not. It's hidden and then revealed. And you're like, oh yeah, of course. I understand. I see.
LAURA:
I think it's one of the hardest things about teaching human behavior or teaching intuition or teaching that is who we are. And the other things are kinks or they're blind spots because of course we find what we're looking for. But there's a whole world out there that has resources we're not looking for that we haven't been taught to look for that we don't even know exist or experiences that we've never even entertained because they're not part of our history. But it is always, and of course, I'm sure you can recall this quote, but is one of my favorites that I hold in my heart, but of course I can never recall a DD in action, which is that the simplicity on the other side of complexity, and this is what I don't like about medicalizing and a lot of that language, good solutions are simple. It doesn't mean that they don't address very complex phenomena, but the solutions are simple. It's hard sometimes to get people to just do one simple thing because we do as mammals, resist change. So when it's a simple thing, my husband will not do screens before sleep. He has a circadian rhythm disorder, he's an insomniac. He loves reading books, but the simple change of yielding to sleep must have a deeper meaning for him that he's avoiding
ELISE:
Fear of death.
LAURA:
Exactly. So he doesn't solve it.
ELISE:
Yes.
LAURA:
So the prism challenges you to solve it. And one of the great things about hunger is you get hungry enough, you'll try caviar.
ELISE:
Something you just said reminded me of this, but we are taking action all the time. And I think that the whole point of this book is take it a little bit more consciously.
LAURA:
Or that you cannot think outside of the box because you are the box.
ELISE:
You are the box.
LAURA:
So if you're in order to take action to get a different result, you need to be exposed to something different. And that's what self-help is about. And that's what community is about.
ELISE:
Yeah, you are right because you came from spirit. You are surrounded by spirit. You are spirit. There is no such thing as being not spiritual enough. You don't need to make an effort to be spiritual. You are inherently an instrument for structuring spirit into matter. That is the function of what I call our human architecture, our prism. So I love that you're like, oh yeah, no shit,
LAURA:
Duh. And what's really funny is people say things like, oh, medicine is a billion dollar industry. Well, so is spirituality, so is yoga, so are vitamins.
I remember when I do a lot of hands-on healing, that's kind of my hobby. And before covid, I was going around the country and doing these thousand people laying on of hands anywhere that would invite me just to become part of a community and to teach people to do healing because I do. My experience is that when we heal what is around us, we ourselves are healed. And one of the things that used to really always surprised me is I'd go someplace and someone would come up to me and say, I have had bipolar one for my entire life, episodes of psychosis, and I got on this medication that totally managed it and I created this wonderful life in the past two years. But now that there's a healing circle, I've gone off of my medication because I believe in healing and I'm just left speechless because as healers and that's all of us of ourselves and of others, we want to use everything that works.
I have a relative who is a Christian scientist and she says, being a Christian scientist means being the oldest living member of your family. It really is important to say what's useful, not engage dogma again and really use all of it. And a lot of spirituality is very punishing. You need to do this for 20 minutes and that for 20 minutes and this other thing for 20 minutes and don't drink anything that's not a vomitous color of green. And if you do that, you don't have time to live life. One of the things that the prism asks you to do that life asks you to do is do your healing as your living life. If you want to take 20 minutes to meditate, great. If not, meditate on your way to work.
Integrate what we think of as spirituality, which is really effective use of energy into the daily function of your life. And I think it's interesting how so many philanthropists we later find out we're horrible to their families. It's not philanthropy. If it doesn't start with you, extend out to the people around you, then to your apartment building, then to your community, then to et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And not one single person can be left out. What your housekeeper is paid can't be left out how you behave to the person sitting next to you on the train or the person with a lot of packages who you might give your seat to. None of that is left out. Or by the way, expecting that in return from the world around you. Because if you're not in the place where you're rewarded, where you're welcome, where you are supported, where you are protected, where you are enjoyed, where you are honored, you're in the wrong place. That's not the world. That's you in the wrong place.
ELISE:
And I think to even end on this idea of the way that we see reality as these paradigms are somehow at odds with each other. And I think one of the reasons that I love your book is it's like, no, actually it all fits. There's a large enough paradigm in which this book about spirit slash energy and endocrine system fits in science and that you don't choose hands-on healing and abandon your rescue inhaler.
LAURA:
Exactly. It's one and the same as a healer. My referrals come from doctors because doctors, they know more than anybody the power of healing, the power of, if you read about placebos and placebos, the power of belief, I always tell my students, ritual has power. You give it. You want to be careful who and what you give power to and what powers you ascribe to those people and things
Because we are really powerful. And I think we spend a lot of time not feeling that. And I'm going to end on this. One of my favorite things, so when I go around on book tour, the typical book tour is you read from your book and I don't, I take the hour, I do some intuitive exercise which allows people to see that they have something undiscovered within them that makes them so weird that they might not want to talk about it at church, but that it's very useful. And at the end of that one hour, people are a community. And that is really, I think the real meaning of the prism, which is we are one energy. And the minute we begin living our lives like that, not in grand ways, but in tiny quotidian actions, we change everything.
ELISE:
We didn't get into Laura's story today, but she tells it briefly in the book and it is quite stunning, shocking at times. And I'll always remember this story that Laura shared with me. This is not in the book, but Laura's mom took her own life on Laura's birthday. I think she was 14, I might be wrong. And you can imagine what that experience might have been like for a child, particularly a telepathic child who was so young and so protective of her mother. And Laura had been speaking to dead people for her entire life, and yet her mother never came to her. And so obviously she had to deal with the loss of her mother physically, but then she also had to deal with it emotionally as well because she had abandoned her in life as well as in death. And so many, many, many years later, I think Laura maybe was with the father of her son driving across the country in her twenties, and suddenly her mom appeared to her and Laura was like, how could you have abandoned me for so long?
Where have you been? And her mom essentially said, I needed to leave you because you needed to grieve. I don't think you would've gone through the process if I had continued to be available to you. I'll never stop thinking of that story because it's so beautiful. And I think so many of us can relate to feeling somewhat by spirit, by whomever of how, where are you and how could you abandon me when I need you most? And yet her mom felt it wasn't essential to Laura's ability to sort of be an embodied person. Her ego structure, which she talks about in this book at length. I don't know that she would've done the work if she hadn't been forced to. It's in many ways threaded into the prism, which is really about taking the hand that you've been dealt and addressing these blows to your ego structure that as she mentioned, really begin in your early life before the age of seven, so you can start to create what you want in the world.
She writes, “I am eager to share this with you because many of you are carrying heavy histories. You may be exhausted, even hopeless, and welcome to your crisis. I wrote something I firmly believe rock bottom is a good place to start. We spend most of our energy holding on to what is when that is taken away. Our hands are free to create once we have the tools to do so. Like I carry the story and injuries of my parents and their parents as well as my own. I remind myself that without these injuries I would not be a teacher of. Sometimes it still sucks, but you've got to make the scars useful or they grow so tight, they squeeze the life right out of you. And then a bit later she writes, it is my privilege to share these tools with you. It doesn't matter where you are. High places make for big falls. The muck can yield treasures that once you emerge from will give you a life only you could have and gifts only you can share with others. No muck, no Lotus.”
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