LOTUS INTRO

Kaylissa Long shares her personal journey with podcasting through her show called Lotus. She explains that Lotus represents growth, self-love, and the raw aspects of life. Kaylissa values personal growth and believes that self-love is not just about self-care practices, but also about embracing vulnerability and learning about oneself. She emphasizes the importance of understanding and living by one's core values. Kaylissa's podcast covers topics related to self-care, life lessons, and the impact of interactions with others. She shares her own experiences and views on life, acknowledging that she is still learning and growing. The podcast is unscripted and includes funny stories and discussions on various topics. Okay. Hi there! Hello, my name is Kaylissa Long. If you are new, hi and welcome, and if you are returning, welcome back. This is very exciting, and also very overwhelming and scary process for me. I'm excited to share with you what Lotus means to me, how the process is for me, and what I'm excited to share with you. A little bit about the background. Lotus came about because it was a high school project, at least for a high school class at the time, like my senior year. Hi, by the way, I'm in college. Miss college girl, we're getting it. Anyways, not necessarily was it a senior project, but it was for a class. But I did end up learning more about myself in that process, and I realized podcasting is something that makes me happy, and it's something that I wanted to continue as a personal project. So it was called Lotus because it had a deep meaning to myself. Within Buddhism, it associates with purity and the spiritual awakening, and a lotus flower has the ability to emerge from murky mud-like waters, and it rises through it and becomes a beautiful and pure, clean flower. So to myself, I made this connection to how I feel through growth and how I feel a lot of us can connect to. It has to do with the process of no matter where you are in your life, it doesn't matter what it looks like, or it could be your own version of murky waters that you are learning to rise through and become your own flower and start to admire yourself through this growth because it is beautiful and it's a wonderful process that everyone goes through. I believe that personal growth or understanding yourself through life is never specifically an end point, and there's no destination if that makes sense. A lot of people, when I tell them things I like to pursue in life, it's that I want to further pursue happiness, and it's not that happiness has a destination, like at a specific end point, rather that it's a journey and it's a very exciting journey that I'm happy to go along with. Although with that journey, it comes with its weird loops and ups and downs, with a lotus flower, mud and murk, and through that time, it doesn't matter. Sometimes it may not feel like you're making the biggest change, but looking back at all of it, you really have grown as a person, and that's something that I really grasp and I like to carry within myself, and that makes me feel happy about who I am presently and who I look forward to becoming and changing and learning more about myself. That's things that excite me in my life, is a process of growth and self-love, and self-love never specifically looks like bubble baths or face masks or all these very romanticizing things about self-love. Yes, there are practices and ways that you can show self-love to yourself, but specifically, as a person, for me, self-love is through those processes, through the process that you may be vulnerable and cry, or the process where you're learning more about yourself. You're taking things that you're going through in life and learning about them, and it doesn't have to be big changes that you're going through in life. It could be about your every day, and I believe, to me, that these are things that I really value. It's the every day. By the end of the day, what kind of person do I choose to be? How am I presenting my values throughout what I do? A lot in my podcast, I will share with you the importance of having value, especially value within yourself and value what you do. I value how you decide to move in life. I like to talk about rhythm and the rhythm of life and flow. A lot of it has to go with growth for me. For me, I like to move at whatever rhythm I so choose, and that's okay. Everyone decides to move in life in the way that they choose, and I believe that this is a beautiful process for us as humans, but I personally really do value personal growth, especially growth within mindset, how people view things, how you view yourself, and how you choose to present yourself by the start and end of every day. It's hard to pick yourself up constantly to get up and get back into it, and I understand. That's the beautiful thing about being human is that you learn, and it's an amazing process through it all. Lotus to me is a representation of growth, self-love, and the process. It's the raw aspects of life. That's what I'm highlighting. Many of it is through my experience. Only at the moment, being 19, I feel like I've learned a lot as a person, especially through mindset. I don't know everything, and that's okay. That's something that I'm learning to be okay with is that I don't know everything this moment, and then now I can reflect on my experiences, but I can look forward to new changes and new challenges in life, and I think that's a great way to look at things, especially when all through life, all you're doing is really learning. It's a great process, and for me, I'm happy to share this through podcasting. I'm happy to share my experiences, my worries and stories, my past or present and possibly things that I would like to look forward to, especially when it comes to the future. Lotus is a podcast where I share my core values. I believe it's important for myself and anyone to understand what their core values are and what they mean to you, specifically values like respect and love, and for me, like I'm expressing now, it's growth. A lot of these things that you show or you carry within yourself, a lot of people have their own set of values, and I believe that's a great thing to have in life, and a lot of people are still trying to figure out what those values are or trying to grow with those values. It's something that you must seek within yourself, and a lot of people say, I don't know what values are, and I can tell you what they are, but it's more of like as an individual, you will go through your own awakening or you will go through your own process. Everyone goes through life a little differently, and that's okay, and it's okay if you don't know what your values are at the moment or at the time, but it's amazing to be aware. It feels so good to be aware, but it's also hard to be so much aware of that because by you being aware and if you don't feel like you're being the good best person at the moment, it feels so draining and drowning at the time, but it's like whatever I did today is enough, and that is something that I like to repeat within my podcast. Whatever you did today, either you believe it's big or small, it is an effort. It equals to an effort, and whatever that effort is, it is enough, and that's okay because a lot of times as humans, we push ourselves a bit too much. We don't understand how much enough weighs to us because we believe that there's so much more that we can be doing, but at the same time, that effort, either big or small, is still an effort, and I believe that all of us are doing an amazing job or at least trying. When at least you care, when at least you're trying to build a better version of yourself, it's the fact that it's effort even though it's hard, and that's something that's beautiful to acknowledge out of us. I don't need to know specifically your efforts, what your life is or whatnot, and that's something that I might not share even personally, but it's the fact that acknowledging people's effort as a general is a beautiful way to go about life. Nobody knows what you're going through and nobody knows what I'm going through, but it's the fact that we as people have our own ways of moving through life, and the fact that we put an effort to show up even if it's hard during those times, it's beautiful in that process. For me, with Lotus, I share my only experience as a 19-year-old in college and how I view life through this lens, and it's not always that way. It's hard. I'm a human myself. We are humans. At the end of the day, we break down. We have hard times, and all of it is just a very beautiful process. So for me, my podcast does cover self-care, ways and practices that I believe are true that really helped me or practices that haven't really helped me. They don't really help or benefit me, but they could benefit somebody else. Everyone has their own preferences because at the end of the day, people are learning more and more about themselves. My podcast, I share key topics, and that is what my episodes are based on. I basically name or title my episodes off those key topics that I believe resonate with it, and they're morally pulled out of my experiences about my day-to-day life, things that I look at and I view as life lessons. I like to look at life as specific things, either as a lesson or a blessing, and I like to talk about the web of interactions that people have in life and how you as an individual are impacted or how you as an individual impact that web of interaction with other people, and that's good to be mindful of you, your space, and everyone else. I like to think of the flower itself, the core, and then how it branches out, thinking about you, your energy, and how other people's energy affects you and how you move through life. Everything is mindset. Everything is how you decide to move, and I believe that with Lotus as a podcast, I share my experiences, and I share with you how I view life in my lens, and it's not something that's for everybody, and I understand that, but I'm just happy to share with you things that matter and things that I love. So podcasting for me, a lot of it is unscripting. A lot of it is me understanding or trying to understand adulting again. It is all my experience. I don't know everything about life, and I'm still learning, and it's amazing that I'm learning and everyone's learning around me, but I like to ramble, and I like to make weird noises and share with you stories that kind of are funny to me. I like to share with you hard times and good times and personally anything, I mean, that I feel is a great topic to share at that moment. In my past, I have done a certain episode that were called Space Caps, and for me, Space Caps was a way to interact with my podcast on a personal level. For me, it meant that I can still be unscripted but tailor off the fact that I wouldn't talk about set topics, so I shoot for these set topics to talk about that I believe resonate with myself as a lesson or a blessing or whatever it could be in my life, but Space Caps were a way for me to go behind the curtains and share with you, like, hey, this is the reality of my life, and this is what it looks like, and it could look like a lot of bathroom talks because I'm a person who enjoys podcasting in my bathroom or I have weird experiences, especially as I'm trying to learn how to adult in the adult world. I share with all, I share all my very silly and kind of hard moments. It's just me being raw as a human with my audience at that time, but they were then at the time called Space Caps, and now I'm excited to share with you that they are now called Slump Discussions. Slump Discussions, I will say that clearly. It is because I want to transition between environments, and this is what I will speak about a lot, especially when I podcast, how environment impacts a person, and I want to move from recording in the bathroom like how I used to my senior year to recording my room, recording in different areas, recording places for me that I feel could help me as I'm trying to podcast, especially for me when I try to talk about my scenery. I always like to share with people, this is what it looks like for me at the moment. This is what it is. Currently, I'm sitting down at my desk. I share with you what it looks like, especially because you can't see where I am, but I like to share atmosphere and spaces because it does really impact you as an individual, and I believe that's very important to understand, especially about yourself, is how you understand yourself and how you move through the world, how spaces impact you and how they make you feel. They do really reflect your emotions, and a lot of the times, space is very important, especially understanding how you better work or how you flow through life better, but Lotus for me is a space for me to share topics that I feel that are very important, at the moment, that either apply to me or apply to other people. They're a way for me to speak on the things that I personally value and speak on the times in some discussions that I feel are very silly to get off my chest or to just openly share. It's a space for me to be raw as a human and share with you things that resonate with me. I think this is really exciting that I'm podcasting again. Recording has been so hard for me, given that it's such a wide gap from senior year to now and a process with Lotus, and I'm pretty sure I'll share that sometime with you, but as of now, wherever you are and whatever you're doing at the moment, I hope you know that I love you and that I care for you, and that I hope you have a wonderful day. I hope you enjoy your listen, or I hope you enjoy your stay, but I hope you learn to love yourself and take care.