Dreaming My Reality - new EP in the works! 

Hello Hello! I've been a little quiet on here, but there has been a lot happening behind the scenes. What I thought would be a single album has actually grown into multiple projects - just due to different sounds and energies within certain songs. So the next release I'm planning will be an EP, which I'm calling "Dreaming My Reality." It's about the idea that our thoughts, our dreams, and what we choose to believe ultimately shapes our experiences. We may not always be able to choose what we experience, but we can always choose how we frame it and whether or not we grow from it. That's been a powerful lesson for me - it takes a lifetime to master, I think, but I believe I've made some progress. 😉

I've been working with my friend Zack Symes on the mixes and production of these songs, and I'm really excited with how they're sounding. After working completely independently on my last album, it's been really fun to work with other people on my new music. I'll have more collabs coming up on future releases too. Anyway, I just wanted to give you all an update.

Thank you so much for supporting my music - I couldn't do what I do without you! If you're not already subscribed, I'd love to invite you onto my free newsletter [at the bottom of this page] so you can stay up to date with the latest releases.

TTFN - ta ta for now,

Kristen

Video for Elemental 

So apparently April was the last time I did a blog post. 😬 Time warp. Anyway, a lot has been happening behind the scenes. If you haven't had a chance to see my illustrated video for Real, that is up on my website.

My next video release will be be public on September 1. I'm really excited about this one - it's my first attempt at actual video editing. I'm no pro, but I think it's decent considering that I never would have attempted this a year ago. [Shoutout to All Around Artsy for giving me the confidence and introductory skills to get started!] 

Plus, the song Elemental is one that I've felt very connected to since inception. As the title suggests, it's about looking to nature and the elements for support in times of chaos and struggle. It's always there for us if we need it, and I believe we all have elemental energy within us if we can just take the time to listen. Actually, disconnecting from it is much harder - the bulk of our struggles come from trying to deny who we really are.

Anyway, keep an eye out for this video - I'll send an email out to everyone when it's live, so if you're not already on my list [and would like to be] send me a DM or wander over to kristenlay.com

This will be the final video from my album Be More! This album is by far the most meaningful body of work I've ever created, and I'm so grateful to all of you who took this journey with me. And not to worry - plans for my next album and video are already in the works. More on that in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, take care and be well.

💖Kristen

Meet the character from my upcoming video 

Here’s another illustration from my upcoming video, Real. I’ve always envisioned this with an illustrated video, and it’s really exciting to see it slowly coming to life. All of the drawings are being drawn my sister and colored by yours truly. It’s been so long since I’ve done visual art like this, but it really feels similar to music in a lot of ways. I don’t know what the colors will be or how it will turn out until I dive in — similar to how I feel when I begin a new song. 

You can see in this illustration this little Blue Guy. He’s cozy in his house, and a bit unnerved by the black night outside. And yet he is curious. He could stay inside with everything that is warm and familiar, or he could go explore the unknown and see what magic awaits him. 

We're always searching for something. That is why we keep scrolling. It’s not so much that our technology is addictive, but we are tricking ourselves to think that happiness is somewhere just beyond our reach — somewhere just out of sight. 

But maybe the connection we need the most is the connection with ourselves. The recognition that our hearts, our experience, our perspective can never truly be validated anywhere else — especially if we can’t validate it for ourselves first. 

So what do you think? Will the Blue Guy find happiness? All will be revealed in the video next month!

We Are Alchemists in Disguise 

 

Do you ever surprise yourself by sharing stuff you didn't think you didn't think you'd share for a long time? Well, this is that.

About a year ago I went through a breakup that rattled me to my core. It was the first time I had really fallen for someone and been crushed into a million pieces. And then, covid happened. When we feel pain, our first instinct is to move away from it, to distance ourselves from it. We use our general busy-ness, our friends, TV, alcohol, whatever to not fully feel what is inside us. 

For whatever reason, I knew that I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t blame. I couldn’t judge. I could only cry and process and cry some more. I lost about 15 pounds. I lost friendships. I lost faith in myself. I thought, how can I be a spiritual, stable person if I’m this thrown off by a relationship? How can I understand this situation better? How can I know myself better? 

I didn’t want to stop loving him — it didn’t feel right to me. I think that when we bond with someone on a soul level, that’s not something you can turn on and off. You can try to, maybe, but it never really goes away. I wanted to know what unconditional love truly felt like, and this was the perfect opportunity to try and find it. 

Now, this is not for the faint of heart. I learned that very early on. It was excruciating. I would wake up in the middle of the night and cry. I would cry doing yoga, while running, in the shower, between bites of food. I watched spiritual videos daily trying to understand the nature of the soul and what we’re all doing here. 

I noticed something interesting. When I was able to be with this pain, this yearning, this need for love that was not being filled, there was something exquisite about it. It was like holding a stretch in a yin yoga class. It was uncomfortable, but somewhere underneath that, it almost felt good. It felt expansive. It felt like I was deeply healing a wound that had been inaccessible before. I was able to channel it into words and music and make something beautiful. Something without blame or shame or regret. Just a depiction of what I was feeling, and then — where the true expansion happens — the acknowledgement that things will be okay. That all things have the potential to open us to the light if that’s what we choose. 

So I believe that as artists and creatives, we are all alchemists in disguise. We have this incredible ability to take something that essentially sucks, and turn it into something divine. To create our own awakening. To let life and circumstances either push us around and make us build walls, or to be willing to part with our old restrictions and see what we can be without them. When we create, we elevate experiences. We create a vortex in time and space to take us from where we are to where we want to go. If we’re lucky, maybe we can provide that opportunity for our listeners too. 

I do still love him. I don’t know if we will ever meet again, but I choose what he is to me. Instead of the guy who broke my heart, he’s a master teacher who expanded my heart a thousand times over. My love is not dependent on anything he says or does. It simply is. I feel this love for myself as well. For the planet, for my experience of life, for my music. Love is limitless. Our perception of it is limitless. And I believe anything can be a door to it if we are willing to open it.

[Fun fact: my song "You May Never Know" is specifically about this experience.]

Never Stop “Talking”  - an Introvert's Journey to Effective Communication 

When I was in school, I never talked. Kids would literally come up and ask me to say something because they’d never heard me speak. People would forget I was in the class. One time, halfway through the semester, a guy asked me if I was a new student because he’d never noticed me in the class before. It was, you know, kind of my thing. 

Now, looking back, I can see that I was very ungrounded. All of my energy was in my top 2 chakras, and I had no idea what an empath was. It might sound strange, but it’s really been in the past few years that I’ve learned what it feels like to be present in my body. Yoga has been an absolute game changer. And I’m learning that I’m just someone who needs more rest and more quiet time to recharge that other people do. 

The thing is, we tend to equate success with “putting yourself out there,” a phrase I’ve come to loathe. To me, that meant pushing myself to act happy and friendly all the time, doing what others expected of me, and of course, hustling. 

But I’m not a hustler, you guys. I. Will. Crash. And. Burn. 

There had to be another way. There had to be something I could do to contribute something of value to the world without without having my essence slowly chipped away. [I call it “soul chafing.”] 

I distinctly remember reading in an Abraham-Hicks Law of Attraction book, “Your life is supposed to feel good to you.” It was one of those moments when you read something and you can almost feel it reverberating in the room, because it hit home that hard. My life was supposed to feel good. I had kind of forgotten that that was an option. What would that look like? What would it be like to feel good everyday? To be excited about your plans everyday? 

It’s been years of slowly learning to lean into that. Of learning to trust it. Of learning that life will support me. The thing is, we are always manifesting not what we want, but what we believe to be true. I believed that success was hard, that money came from hustling, and that nobody would be interested in getting to know the real me. And you know what? I created a life that reflected that. 

But when I paid attention to how I felt when I created art, when I wrote songs, when I expressed myself in subtler ways, I found that I had much more power than I thought — and a lot more to say. I had found a way to talk, to myself and to the world, that actually felt energizing and exciting. People seemed to be interested in what I had to say, and in what I was doing. And I could feel it resonating inside. It is truly possible to be totally myself, totally in alignment, and fully supported by life. I just had to stop and listen. I had to get out of my head long enough to deal with how I actually felt — not how I thought I felt, not what I thought other people might think. 

We’re not taught that it can be easy. Not to say that there won’t be challenges, but life doesn’t have to be an uphill battle. If it is, it’s probably just a sign that you’re moving in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s your soul trying to get your attention. “Hey, things can be better. You deserve better. You’re capable of anything you can dream.” 

That’s my two cents, anyway.


 

Major shifting happening this year 

Hi everyone! I can't believe we're almost a quarter of the way through the year so far. 

There's a lot happening collectively, and we all are processing that and feeling it in our own way. For me, it feels like I'm finally letting go of a lot of the things that were holding me back before. For the first time, sharing my music feels exciting, and like something I want to do to the fullest extent that I can. That is absolutely huge for me.

I'll be releasing a new video for my song "Real." And as I'm starting to promote that a little bit, I'm reaching more people, which is super exciting! In the past, whenever I shared something, there was always an element of not wanting to be seen, which ultimately led to self-sabotage and burnout. And now, that feeling is mostly gone. I can't really explain how or why, but I think it is related to the collective shift we're all going through as we move closer to 5D. I can feel that there are more and more people out there that are high-vibe and ready to be seen -- it's like I feel like I have somewhere to go now. Something to move towards.

It's just cool. I'm doing the same thing, essentially, that I did in the past, but the intention is different, and I'm getting a different result. It's like when a flower goes from being a bud to a bloom, and once it's out, it can never go back to where it was.

Anyway, I hope you're enjoying the new content I'm adding on youtube, facebook, and instagram. There's more where that came from. 😄

Shine on,

Kristen

 

Abstract musings: what is the ego? 

What is self worth? And how is it different from ego? And how do these relate to self sabotage? There’s a lot of information out there around spirituality, evolving into your best self, and transcending the ego. There’s a lot of mixed messages. Some of this information is clear and some of it’s not. Some of it is legit and some of it’s not. And some things are widely misinterpreted. In this age of information that we’re in, there’s not really a clear source anymore to tell us what is real and what is not. 

What is real and what is not? 

That’s something I think about a lot. I question it all the time in my music, as if I’m asking someone else for the answer. As if there’s an answer to be found that can give me a straight up answer. Probably even if such an answer existed, I might hear it and not be able to absorb it. 

I think maybe that’s the reason why a lot of us are kind of struggling right now, at least with this idea of the self and how we fit into this ever-changing world. We’re still operating like 95% in the mind. We want someone to tell us what to do, how to make money, how to find the right relationship, the right job, etc. In the past you could read a book and learn how to do something and do it. And that was it. But now it’s slipperier than that. You can’t quite grasp it. Even if rules or steps can be clearly laid out in front of you, you find yourself hesitating, making excuses, still not doing it. 

In the past, we thought the problem was lack of information, and we always grasped for more. But now, we are swimming in it, and it’s clear that lack of info was never really the problem. Not the total problem, anyway. In fact, maybe information has nothing to do with it at all. Information is facts. Facts are essentially neutral, although we can certainly have strong opinions about them. 

Where am I going with this? 

Self worth. First we need to define the self. I believe that the “self” is a particular aspect of source that perceives itself to be separate. Of course, we are not separate. Separateness cannot really exist in the cosmos- whether on a molecular level or on a galactic level or in nature, nothing is isolated completely. Everything is connected in some way to the things around it. If that’s possible, then, how are we able to have this experience of being so separate -- this experience of, at times, feeling so completely lost and alone and cut off from the rest of the world? 

The mind.

The mind kind of locks us into our own limited perspective, so that we’re not able to clearly see the ripple effect of our actions on others, or how the air we breathe is circulated through all other living things, or how the cells in our being came to arrive within us after being present through our ancestors and the earth and the cosmos. The mind allows us to perceive time -- again, an illusion -- that makes it seem as though there are experiences outside of the here and now.

There aren’t. 

So to define the ego, I would say that it is the self’s perception of lack, of scarcity, of limitation based on the way that reality is filtered through the mind. And it’s fucking uncomfortable. 

Why? If separation is seemingly everywhere, why is it so uncomfortable? 

Because our natural state is wholeness and connection — communion with all other aspects of life. You can feel it in your body. If you imagine the idea of separation, illusion, disconnection, how does that feel in the pit of your stomach? Not good.

If you contrast that with love, wholeness, connection, how does that feel? Amazing. Completely different, right? Your grounded feelings and your physical body will guide you every time. 

The isolated self will always sabotage itself because it thinks it isn't enough. The integrated, whole, accepted self will thrive because that is the nature of community -- to grow and get bigger. To see yourself reflected in all people and all things.

Living within these kinds of limitations in our modern society is not only unnatural to the soul, but it wears on us over time. So we look for validation. We look for ways to make it easier. Understandably. But as long as we live in the area of the mind, it will never be enough. As long as we feed the fear and believe that the answer is anywhere outside of our own being, we will not truly find it. 

Why would we do this to ourselves? Why would we choose this? I’ve painted kind of a negative picture, but I want to bring it back to self worth. I believe if we could truly perceive the value of our experience here in this body in this lifetime -- the range of emotions we feel, the textures, the up-and-down of the human experience -- how could the self be anything but worthiness? If we could bring the knowledge of the mind into the beauty of feeling and experience, things would start to shift. Things already have shifted, as I believe this is what’s happening now. We’ve exhausted information, the need to be right, the need to compete, the need to have more. We are pursuing these things and feeling in a very deep way that they are not enough. We are finding joy in experiences, in laughter, in friendships, and we are remembering our own power. Maybe we’re remembering who we were before all these things -- maybe the reason we are here is to remember who we are from the perspective of having totally forgotten. 

What kind of magic would that bring? How would it change the way you perceive yourself? Would it be worth it? As I write this, I can feel my soul smiling.

Happy 2021 

 

Here we are on the first full moon of 2021! 🌝 For me, this year already feels drastically different than last year. I actually felt that around the time of the last full moon and the solstice, I went through a shift and dropped a lot of the remaining negative energy that I’d been holding onto from last year. Since then, I’ve overall felt noticeably lighter and less intimidated by things outside my comfort zone. 

No doubt, 2020 was an important year. I hope it’s a year we can look back on and be proud of, not just for the things we accomplished, but for the difficulties we faced and worked through. Even if it doesn’t look like much on the surface, simply showing up every day and feeling your feelings to the best of your ability is, I believe, one of the most effective ways to move forward and make changes in your life. 

I definitely move slow, and at this point, I’m finally okay with that. Because I know that when I do move forward, it’s with stability and confidence. I am looking forward to more creative projects this year, including a music video or two, and more opportunities to work with people 1:1 to help them manifest their own creative potential. I believe this will be a year where we can continue rising up together and helping each other thrive. 

As always, thank you for showing up as you. It has never been more needed than it is at this moment, and it does not go unnoticed. 

Blessings, ✨

Kristen

Happy solstice / Christmas / New Year 

So here we are. At the end of this devilish year. The solstice was yesterday, and I saw the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn that apparently hasn’t been this close since the year 1280. There’s something special about these times, for sure. A lot of people are saying that this is the official beginning of the Aquarian Age, as the planetary alignment is happening in Aquarius. This new age is supposed to focus on expansion and growth with more ease and flow. The old structures are being disassembled. Our old selves are being disassembled. We are making room for something new that we can’t quite see yet. And that’s a scary thing. But for me, I think I needed to be gently broken into a million pieces in order to realize that this is the only way to go. We’re all going to the same place, and this is how we get there. By taking one step at a time- maybe grabbing a hand, maybe leaning on a shoulder, but ultimately taking each step ourselves.


The first video from my album will be for a song called “The Place Beyond.” This is actually the oldest song on the album- I wrote it around 2012. And it’s a little vague. A little magical. A little uneasy. Very much like these times. I didn’t write the song with a specific theme or message in mind, but I think it can apply to a lot of different things. 

For me, as a sensitive and an introvert, I’ve had resistance for a long time about being present and grounded and feeling my feelings. As current events have escalated, I’m seeing these feelings come up more and more. So I think wanting to escape is some of what this song is about. But even beyond that, I think what I’m really trying to get at is that there’s a greater perspective and a greater harmony available if we can tune into it. The chorus is “Sunsets on the Amazon, take me to the place beyond.” Somehow sunsets and sunrises- without any words or distinct shapes- always take us where we need to be. They bring us into a deeper part of ourselves that doesn’t need any of those external things. 

The next line “Marching where the mighty fall, in the jungles deep and tall,” for me, is an acknowledgement that we are in times that are scary and confusing enough to freak out even the bravest of people. And yet we keep going. Seeing what the next day holds. Sometimes living moment to moment or breath by breath. It’s all we can do. We never really could rely on the future, but now it’s unavoidable- the present moment is all there is.

So that’s what this song is. An honest look into the vague uncertainties that have always made me uncomfortable. Maybe all it really needs is to be looked at.

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