Why Humor is the New Spiritual Must Have with Mia Lux
In this week’s episode, Mia Lux shares how humor helps us make the best of uncomfortable situations. She teaches us how to lighten up, lucid dream, and to fail on purpose. Her biggest advice to you: Become friends with discomfort, turn it into a story you can share later, and open up to trying new things.
Who is Mia Lux?
Mia Lux merges the playful and the profound - drawing on her experience as a stand-up comedian, personal growth junkie, and recovering lawyer. For over 5 years, Mia has been an international host, comedian & facilitator, specializing in top wellness/personal development events around the world.
As the creator and host of the late-night style digital series, The Conscious-ish Show, it is her mission to make the world's most powerful ideas more accessible by making them truly enjoyable - if you're laughing, you're learning!
Mia, like the most of us, had a life focused on academic achievement and having a high salary job. So she became a lawyer, and failed. She felt a deep sense of misalignment. Mia realized that she had followed society’s instructions but what she wanted to experience wasn’t being fulfilled.
She refers to herself as a personal growth junkie, driven to find a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and connection in order to create a joyful life. But when it comes to personal growth, it can feel like there is a secret code that you don’t understand, it can be overwhelming. Mia began to feel like she didn’t fit the stereotypical spiritual model, causing her to turn to humor. “As I really start to do the work on myself and really feel the transformation, I realized very quickly, like, you know, that humor has a place in spiritual development.”
She even goes as far to say that humor is a key tool in spiritual development, “because the quicker you can laugh at yourself, the quicker you can laugh at a situation, the quicker you can heal from it. Recover. You know, have perspective and grow from it.” Thus she created the Consious-ish Show, which merges personal development, spiritual development, and comedy. Humor gets its power by allowing challenging subjects to open us up. To be able to explore topics we normally might stay away from. Things that are a little taboo, like depression or sex can often be uncomfortable and serious, so approaching these with humor can make it easier to progress.
Practicing Failure
Why do we stay in bad relationships? With careers that are unfulfilling? Because after putting a certain amount of time and effort into something, we become reluctant to walk away from it. Mia became a lawyer because “I was like, well, I studied for five and a half years, I should probably become a lawyer. Right? Yeah.”
She wasn’t 100% happy but the idea of walking away was challenging. But she brings up an amazing thought: we aren’t in this life to live safe lives. So what if you aren’t deeply fulfilled living a safe life? You have to work on getting familiar with discomfort. This doesn’t have to be a major life change, just be willing to feel uncomfortable.
Along every journey is failure. It is unavoidable. But for Mia, in those moments of total failure was when her realizations came. She, like many of us, is a perfectionist and burned herself out in unfulfilling careers. She felt a constant sense of failure. So she decided to learn how to fail “and to do it in a spectacular public fashion.”
Which landed her in standup comedy. She challenges everyone to go out and do open mic comedy nights and learn how to step out of your comfort zone. And you will fail, but “try again, you have to reconsolidate your own sense of self esteem inside of yourself to learn how to hold yourself in discomfort.” Practice being uncomfortable, and it will become easier and easier.
Crossing the Barrier into Your Spiritual Journey
When it comes to finding spirituality, Mia was raised Catholic and always felt that there was a God and something beyond her. But it was through people and experiences that she delved deeper into her spiritual journey. As she was struggling with her depression, she felt like she had to find a way into the world of personal growth and spirituality. “I just felt like there wasn't another option. Like I pushed myself through the very strange awkwardness of of these environments that I wasn't used to.”
But growth and spirituality should be more accessible than that. So many of us need that experience, but trying to enter into that world can make us feel excluded, intimidated, and skeptical. So if you know what you’re doing isn’t working, you’re struggling, Mia says to have a very personal experience with yourself. Sit with yourself, use the tools you already possess.
Breathing with yourself, stretching, journaling. This is how Mia was able to push through the weirdness and began to feel the benefits. “So I think the barrier to entry should not be what it is. Because once you cross it, people go on their own little rides, and they don't normally get off.” Be encouraged to continue on your journey. Through this, mindfulness and meditation have become Mia’s lifelines.
Now, Mia uses her journey and experiences to fuel and surround her creativity. She usually chooses things that she’s struggled with because it’s important to her to speak from a level of experience. And then she does a brain dump using that experience. She says that even those that don’t feel like they are “creatives” could dump out a list of things you could “write a Netflix special around.”
For Mia, doing diligent work is how she goes through her creative process. But creativity “thrives with a committed structure.” Creative work is still just that, work. You still have to put in the time and effort and have the discipline. Even in creating through comedy, Mia has discovered that it’s the consistency that makes the best content.
Letting Your Mind Control You = Dysfunction
Your mind is everything. We use and trust how the mind performs and what it says. But constant reinforced cultural beliefs can lead to dysfunction. For Mia, this dysfunction played a large part of her depressive episodes, when she was “too identified” with her mind. When Mia became a lawyer she realized that she had done what her mind had been trained to do. She did everything right, she listened to her mind, but she felt an ache inside her.
Do you feel a sense of something missing inside you? Do you feel a yearning? “I think there's so many people who are feeling they can't reconcile the gap they have inside of them with the supposedly perfect life that they've created. And that cognitive dissonance creates so much dysfunction because we have to work so hard to tell ourselves stories about like, why we are doing the right thing.” She was able to start to break the cycle with one moment of being truly present and aware. “I don't like the word evolution. But I guess I do feel like that's what our souls are doing in a way, right? Like a little space for a little, a little evolution inside of us to just change things.”
How and Why to Lucid Dream
The biggest practice for Mia over the last few years has become lucid dreaming. In the Toltec Shamanic traditions, and in lucid dreaming, is when you become conscious in your own dream. Once you recognize that you’re in a dream, you become lucid and you stay in that dream. She describes it as “a high definition virtual reality simulator of your own psychology.” Your dream becomes interactive, allowing you to work with different parts of yourself and to do healing work.
So how do you train your mind to lucid dream? Being mindful when you’re awake.
“If you practice during the day, like I do a reality check, which is this, I look at my hands.” Do this 20-30 times a day. When you’re dreaming, your hand does not look exactly like your hand when you are awake, so checking lets your brain know you aren’t dreaming.
Waking practices and self reflective awareness are two things that Mia practices daily. “I look around my life and I go, Is this a dream? Is it possible that right now, you are in a dream? Are you dreaming right now about recording a podcast? Are you dreaming right now about listening to a podcast?”
Making this a habit in your daily life, starts to make it a happen in your dream life too. So then the habit carries over into your dream life and you start to realize you’re in a dream. And lucid dreaming can be spontaneous, we just haven’t been taught that our dreams are important. It's for anyone who's a kind of spiritual, psychological junkie, “it's the most powerful thing I've ever worked with.”
If you’re interested in learning about lucid dreaming, Mia recommends starting with Dreams of Awakening* by Charlie Morley. It teaches you all the practical things but in a “very powerful, spiritual psychological context.”
Affirmation
I know humor is the quickest way to manifest my desires. I am committing right here and now to see the fun in every situation.
Resources
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