Resting Bitch Face v. Reiki

The major difference between New York and LA

Hey everyone. For this week’s ritual note, I wanted to zoom out a little and look at the rituals we inherit from the places we live, and the biggest unseen differences between LA and New York. This essay is about the small ways a city shapes how we think, feel, and take care of ourselves. I hope you enjoy.

Everyone is always talking about the differences between New York and Los Angeles. How they compare and contrast in food, fashion, and lifestyle. We’ve heard the trope, “In New York, they are kind but not nice, in LA, people are nice, but not kind.” Translation:

LA will say your smoothie is great. NY will tell you there is spinach in your teeth.

LA says, “Let’s get lunch sometime.” NY says, “Tuesday at one. I booked the table.”

LA protects your feelings. NY protects your life.

LA Lee (left), New York Lee (right)

But today I want to talk about a difference that doesn’t get mentioned, but one that I feel deeply now that I am back in New York. And to me, this is the fundamental distinction that sits beneath all the other things we talk about when we compare these two cities.

People in LA are concerned with matters of the heart,

and people in New York are concerned with matters of the mind.

Let me tell you what I mean by that.

In LA, people are more connected to themselves. They are invited, by friends, the culture, and the environment, to sit back, reflect, and think about themselves. Everyone is on a journey. This is not a bad thing, by the way, it’s just something I’ve noticed. You can read about my time immersed in LA in my wellness influencer memoir. It is not uncommon for total strangers to blame the full moon for being late to pottery class. At one point, while at my serving job in Echo Park, everyone at the bar I was tending was a maker: potter, weaver, tarot card illustrator, florist, aura photographer. Not one economist in sight. In fact, if one did walk in, the regulars would have claimed the vibe shifted.

Both cities have their benefits, and during certain moments of our lives, we may need one more than the other, or we leave one in search of the other. One is yin, one is yang, and our intuition will tell us when we are done with one and need to balance it out with the other.

I lived in LA for a significant amount of time and was heavily in the self-healing space. Everywhere I turned, some person was “doing the work” in some way. It was so incredible,

until it wasn’t.

When I left LA, I *left* LA. No ifs, ands, or butt’s.

I wasn’t bringing my Reiki coach, my women’s circle, my ecstatic screaming practice, my 45-minute morning meditations, or my 400 jars of herbal powders with me. I was starting to feel like nothing gets done in LA. Its eternal summer led me to feel an air of stagnation.

No no, I was moving to New York because I wanted to get away from all that. I was feeling a pull back to my roots, to my family, to where I am from. I was craving New York’s harshness—I was tired of people smiling at me and telling me my energy felt bright. I wanted a full row of resting bitch faces.

I didn’t want someone to ask me my sun and moon placements; I wanted someone to talk about the economy with and where to get the best bagel above 79th street.

I was starting to see the real trap in places centered on healing. If you are not careful, the healing becomes yet another cage. Suddenly, you are in every night because you’ve fooled yourself into thinking your introvertism is an excuse for isolation, are spiraling over your glutamine levels, and dodging half the city’s yoga studios because they fall on the wrong astrocartography line.

You won’t date Virgos, refuse to see anyone during our luteal phase, and get used to people saying things like, “I saw my cat’s spirit last night through the medium I hired to talk to him. His real name, which is what he asked me to call him from now on, is George, not Whiskers.”

When I got to New York, I threw away literally all of my spiritual LA stuff (as I write about in my memoir) except my two tarot decks. They were both gifts to me, and something inside me told me to keep them.

When I arrived back in New York, I made New York friends, and we did New York things. We shopped on weekends, went out for Italian every Friday night, saw movies at the cinemas, and went to see the ballet at the David Koch theatre. There was not a yogi in sight. I left my self-healing job and started working for other companies and brands on the backend social side, dealing with ad budgets, Q1-Q4, and brand decks.

I didn’t hear any words like “somatic”, “grounding”, or “open container”. And honestly, it was what I needed. I joined a writing circle, surrounded myself with authors, thinkers, writers, teachers, journalists, creatives, tech folks, and finance friends. You know, New York. If anyone did mention juicing or “inner work”, I blocked it out. I enjoyed my new routine of not focusing on myself, and instead focusing on the external: how to pay rent, how to get back into dating, how to have fun on the weekends.

A few years went by. I moved to Cobble Hill, a quieter nook of Brooklyn. I made a good friend, I’ll call her Nina, and she started talking about TBM work and mentioned

Lacy Phillips

and manifestation. I remembered she did it very openly, but I wondered if she was testing my reaction, you know, the way we do when we meet new people.

Something about Nina cracked open that old LA healing pocket I thought I outgrew. She was both soft and had a rough New York edge. She wore vintage Dior and had a corporate job and a collection of Bottega bags, but palo santo in her bathroom. She helped me see that you can have both the spiritual and the material. Before, I thought they were separate containers; you can’t mix the two. To be pure meant to renounce capitalism (this is false.)

So Nina and I bonded over our love of CAP Beauty, of red light therapy, matcha and leggings. Nina let me get back in touch with my LA wellness self, and we did it quietly on our long walks and tea dates. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough. It felt like my safe space. Maybe after a little too much time in New York, I got out of balance again. Maybe I’d been talking too much about bagels, rent, career, and to-do lists, and hadn’t explored the veil, the unseen, the forces of the universe. The “work”.

And then last week, I went to Hawaii, a place that forces those of us who have the gene to access our softer side. On the first day of the conference, we opened with a traditional E Ala Ē ceremony on the Wailea beach by a Maui-born guide. It was an incredible hour. First, we named something to ourselves we wanted to let go of (prayed), then we swam in the water (cleansed), then we came ashore and chanted (sealed it), all silently and without cell phones. It was incredible. I was so moved. Let me tell you this much: this sort of ritual is certainly not available in New York.

I said as much to our guide.

“Oh man, I love New York, it has an energy unlike any other. You see, Manhattan and Maui are two different sides of the same coin,” he said.

“Maui gets its energy from the land. New York, from its people. They both have their benefits and their drawbacks.”

The Beaver moon at dawn at Wailea, right after our proverbial baptism.

I knew what he was saying, but it was not enough.

When I threw away my yoga mats, my yoga books, my books on taking charge of your fertility, I was throwing away a part of myself that exists. I needed to, for a while, but I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I tried to throw away the fact that…

I am a little woo-woo.

I do believe in the power of intentional action and divine timing. I do believe in God, I do believe in manifestation, I do believe in mindset shifts, and I do believe in the power of deep breathing. I may not be hiring a pet medium at the moment, but I do for sure know that Samson is my spiritual teacher.

And this fact did not suddenly come to me while bathing in the warm dawn Maui waters. I’d been feeling it for a while, especially when I went back to LA this summer during my book tour, and relished in seeing my old friends and hearing everyone talk about matters of the heart so openly again. I’d missed that.

I do know that LA is concerned with matters of the heart, and New York, with matters of the mind. It’s just up to me to learn to integrate both of them, to give both Lee’s the attention they crave.

Have a beautiful weekend, everybody, and I’ll see you Monday.

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