We live in an age of awareness. Everyone is healing, journaling, manifesting, optimizing—constantly looking inward, trying to fix or find something. There’s always another podcast, another practice, another voice telling you how to become your best self. We know the vocabulary of introspection by heart—boundaries, triggers, inner child, alignment. Yet somewhere between all that knowing and doing, it has almost become a performance. The goal today seems to be to appear self-aware enough to prove that we’re evolving, that we’re part of the conversation everyone is so passionately having.
It’s strange—to have so much access, so much language around growth and still feel so far from ourselves. You reach a point where you wonder if you’ll spend the rest of your life mourning and trying to glue back the missing pieces of your past, or if you can finally choose to move forward with what’s left, right here, in the present.
Laura Day knows the lived reality of that choice all too well. A New York Times bestselling author, Hollywood’s favourite psychic, and healer, she has spent more than four decades helping individuals and organisations use intuition as a practical tool for change. Her understanding doesn’t come from theory, but from experience—shaped by a childhood marked by loss, resilience, and the search for meaning. Laura Day’s mother died by suicide two days after her fourteenth birthday, leaving her to grow up quickly as the eldest of four in a home shadowed by instability and grief. “I have been trying to save her ever since,” she admits. “My whole life made sense only in reference to my usefulness to others.”
That early immersion in pain and responsibility became the architecture of her life’s work—turning sensitivity into structure, and intuition into something that could be taught, measured, and lived. Over the years, she has advised CEOs, artists, and some of Hollywood’s most recognisable names.
The Prism, her latest—and first book in fifteen years—follows the loss of her two siblings—a turning point that gave new meaning to her work and her way of seeing the world. “The Prism was not written,” she says. “It was downloaded. It saved my life. More than that, it gave me my dreams—better than I could have dreamed them from an old reality.” In an exclusive chat with Soigné, Laura Day unpacks what it really means to live with awareness in an era that sells it back to us as a lifestyle.
It’s been fifteen years since your last book. What changed in you, and in the world, that made you feel The Prism needed to exist now?
It’s funny how our lives are always full, whether we know it or not.
I published six books between 1996 and 2009 on how to train and apply your innate intuition in practical ways to have a better life. I thought I was finished with my writing career, and then two of my siblings suicided, the terrible results of our very traumatic childhood. These were two successful adults, parents of amazing and beloved children, educated, beautiful and brilliant. However, life had not healed their childhood injuries, despite therapy, wealth, support, lives that others would envy.
My sister used to say, “My life is not the problem, I’m the problem.”
When they each took their own lives within a two-year period, I asked myself why I survived and they did not. The Prism was the answer: an operating system for a human being and its interface with the world that I had been given intuitively during my earliest childhood. My porous brain, my neurodiversity (the new catchword of this decade), gave me challenges but it also gave me the gift of downloading what I needed from the unified field we all share. It created my life, love, and success. And I now found myself wanting to share this with others.
I see so much dangerous misinformation in the media about how to be healthier and happier. Usually someone’s selling you a machine, a vitamin, or a coaching program. There are now products everywhere, often unproven, that make us all the more scared and isolated, and, most of all, they’re not available except to those who are willing to pay—and pay a lot—for them. I have been around the block a few times. You as an individual are immensely powerful and able. It is the systems out there that are designed to make you feel defective that are themselves wanting.
Why do you think self-awareness has become such a valuable currency?
I find that while people have become hyper-aware of themselves, they have become so much less realistic about the world around them. Because of this they take actions that don’t give them the desired results.
We are not built to spend our lives being hyper-fixated on our diet or searching for where it is in our past that we were traumatized. A healthy human learns and adapts, as we were built to do, in interaction with the world and with others—and in doing so, recreates life in a way that allows for their growth every day.
The media gets a good bit of the blame, but more and more the problem is isolation. Isolation is so dangerous. Studies show that connection with others is a greater indicator of well-being than diet or exercise and that loneliness is more dangerous to your health and longevity than smoking! Several years ago, there was an experiment in unity called The Peace Project that was repeated successfully all over the world. People meditated on the word “peace” for a prescribed amount of time, and in the aftermath of those meditations, researchers found a significant measurable change in the world around them: a marked decrease in violence, fires, war, and other negative activities, and an increase in reported well-being — even a more jubilant stock market! We need to find the power in our unity once again.
You often mention that people miss opportunities — friendships, jobs, love — because they fail to really observe what’s around them. What does “seeing clearly” actually look like in everyday life?
One awareness that leads to real change is knowing that the assumptions, ego functions, and automatic habits we rely on to keep us going are also the very ones that keep us from changing. We see how necessary these systems are when for some reason one of them fails, when a health challenge occurs, for example, which no longer allows us to proceed on automatic pilot. Someone with a solid foundation will adapt under those circumstances, but most of us have lost this resilience through the calcifications of habit and belief that routine engenders. The Prism serves as a temporary operating system that keeps you on a successful track, allowing you to find your new habits and beliefs and live by them. How you live is reflected in the life you create around you. That doesn’t mean that if things go wrong, you are wrong, or even that you are doing things wrong. It simply means you are ready for change and growth. And we often unconsciously create or allow upsets in our lives, the better to facilitate this growth.
You often say that we can’t find all the answers by looking inward—that real change needs something, or someone, outside of us. Why is it so hard to see our own patterns until life forces us to?
You cannot look within and find the answer. You are blinded, as are we all, by your beliefs and patterns. In this moment, you lack the perspective to create the desired result. Making even a small change outside your usual routine can transform not only your perspective but also your circumstances. That is why I captured The Prism in a book. Change is not hard or complicated, it just isn’t available without an external catalyst. What do I mean by a catalyst? Self-help is a catalyst, as are groups, therapists, new people and situations. The answer lies in interaction.
We live in an age that celebrates constant reinvention—new jobs, new aesthetics, new selves. How do we evolve without losing the core of who we are, and how can intuition help us stay balanced through change?
Who you are is constantly changing. However, we often change things that are powerful and unique in our lives because we are told there is something better out there, or someone more perfect. The human body seeks homeostasis, a balance that allows it to function optimally. But when external circumstances change, or the body needs to prepare for an opportunity or challenge, we train it differently, creating, even in anticipation, a more adaptable homeostasis. Although your power is in the present, intuition allows you to prepare for the future and recontextualize your past so that it is useful instead of an impediment to your life.
You’ve spoken about taking responsibility when things aren’t going your way, not as self-blame, but as self-ownership. How does that shift someone’s perspective when life feels unfair or out of control?
Don’t give your power away to the villains! Your power is your responsibility, but that also gives you the power to change it. During over 40 years of working with tens of thousands of people, I have seen the tendency we all have to try to find healing by focusing on the person or situation that injured us. But studies show that revisiting trauma doesn’t heal us, it re-traumatizes us. I am a pragmatist. Forgiveness, moving on, letting go, owning instead of blaming (even when you are not at fault) is reclaiming your life’s real estate. The gifts you gained by surviving are useful to you, but the injuries you received are not. Be the hero of your own story.
For readers who feel stuck in a loop — attracting the same type of relationship, or facing the same career frustration — what’s the smallest, most immediate shift they can make to start changing the pattern?
There is a quote I love by Oliver Wendell Holmes “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give my life.”
We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about what changes we need to make in order to change our lives. But you can’t “see” the necessary change from within the closed system that is you. Only in retrospect do we gain perspective. Often, we think we are doing something different, and at the other end we find that we get the same result. Ask yourself why. Studies show that we find what we are looking for, and we don’t see what we don’t see!
In short, you need something outside of you in order to change.
Find a video of someone who has done what you want to do and mimic one small thing in it that doesn’t resonate with you (but is safe). Then do it. Practice a new way. If something “feels” right to you, if it “resonates” with you, beware: it is part of an old you that keeps your limitation in place. The Prism is organized according to the part of you and your life that you want to change. Go through the book and pick one—and only one—action to practice. Then practice it in every area of your life. You will be amazed by the immediate change, not only in how you feel but in whom and what you attract. One of the big “ah-ha”s for me when I put The Prism down on paper and used it myself in a more intentional way was how a tiny, tiny change in behavior made a dramatic change in my life. Of course, being as neurotic as anyone, I wanted to kick myself for not doing it sooner, only to remind myself that old blind spots and behaviours may once genuinely have served us. They just no longer do, not if we want to make a real change in our lives.
You’ ve advised CEOs, artists, and some of Hollywood’ s most recognisable names. What do the these people have in common?
They take the biggest blows and turn them into the biggest opportunities. The CEOs I work with run huge companies, with many dependents who often act like small children, in an ever-changing market environment. Sometimes it is exhausting just being in their lives for the moment it takes me to answer a question. But however frustrated they may become, they are energized, positively challenged and motivated, by both opportunity and obstacles. When they feel themselves slipping into despair, rage, or another emotion that ties them to powerlessness, they find something different to do. They find a new methodology. They accept the challenge without denying the pain.
I want to suggest my friend Demi Moore’s memoir, Inside Out. When I met her, we were barely adults, both at the start of our careers, and we had a very traumatic history in common. She doesn’t repress or deny her history; she uses everything in it as the fuel for change. And you see that both in her story and in her perspective in telling it. What you repress owns you, but make it all yours. Refuse to be shamed by your scars. Wear them as badges of success and focus on your achievements, your beauty, and your power. Where you focus directs the focus of your life.
And finally, after decades of guiding others toward awareness, what’s a recent realisation you’ve had about your own patterns?
My mother committed suicide two days after my fourteenth birthday. I have been trying to save her ever since. My whole life made sense only in reference to my usefulness to others. My only pleasure is pleasure shared. I depend on connection in order to feel any contentment. I used to think this was a gift to those around me, something that made me in some way superior.
But as lovely as living for others sounds, it is not healthy. It was what I was born to, having been born to a depressed and suicidal mother and being the eldest of four children in a dysfunctional family. Now I am working on finding the joy and meaning of my life when it is just about me, not about everyone else. That feels lonely at times and hard, strange as that may seem. But it is a necessary part of growth, not only for my own empowerment but in order for me to be less of a burden for the intimates in my life who feel that they always need to be connected to me to make me okay. In opening myself up to this fundamental change, I am finding both challenges and rewards that I had never even conceived of before.
Instead of doing constantly (and being in control). life is suddenly doing for me, and I am joyously unwrapping its gifts.
