The Unimagined Life
An interview with Kenny & Julia Loggins
by Raz Ingrasci, President
(Edited by Shawn McAndrew)
Internationally renowned recording artist Kenny Loggins and
his wife Julia have collaborated on many projects, including their
1997 book "The
Unimaginable Life" and its companion
CD of music and poetry. To find out more about Kenny and Julia’s
book or Kenny's music, please visit their website at www.kennyloggins.com.
In 1970, Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina teamed up to form the
legendary duo "Loggins & Messina." Six years later,
Kenny became a world-renowned solo artist. He received two Grammys,
an Academy Award nomination for "Footloose," and several
gold and platinum albums. Having sold more than 20 million records
over his career, he is currently working on his next CD for Columbia
Records.
After remarkable results from her Process experience, Julia
became a health consultant and counselor focusing on nutritional,
emotional, and psychological healing. Julia also writes poetry and
her journals, which she has been writing since her childhood, were
the inspiration for the creation of "The Unimaginable Life."
Raz Ingrasci: I like the title of your book because
the path of love can take us into richness and beauty beyond imagination.
How do you find the courage to really trust love and live fearlessly?
Kenny Loggins: It's a daily work. I recently made
a meditation CD for myself where I use Julia's voice to read affirmations
that I wrote for myself. And then I put some background music in
and I use it as a way of relaxing after a show or when I'm on the
road and I start to feel alone. I find myself gravitating night
after night to "Love is a Choice to Make Every Day," one
of the poems/letters that Julia sent me. I find myself answering
emails with that as the closing line. But what I noticed just recently
is that I had ended one of my journalings, where Spirit was speaking
to me in my journal, with "love is a choice you make every
day." And then I noticed that Julia had closed one of her journalings
from Spirit in almost the exact same way. And I'd never got that
before.
RI: We all want love and the discovery that love
is a choice means you have the power to call it forth, to choose
it.
Julia Loggins: I know my heart belongs with Kenny
and I see the big picture of us being together. That in a way is
the easy part. The choice for me is dealing with my own patterns
and fears. When I'm feeling the "curse of my life" or
when my own fears become overwhelming, that's the choice —
my decision of how I want to live my life and teach my children
and live with my lover comes in. My choice is to call up the tools
that I have and work with my rage and my fears and my family patterns
as they continue to play out day to day in my relationship with
Kenny, in raising our five children and in the world that we have
taken each other into. It's continuing the Process. People say to
me, "Well, are you over this?" or "Do you ever not
deal with that?" Things don't come and wrestle me down the
way they did when I first did the Process. I was 23 then and now
I'm 46. I'm always committed to living courageously. I'm always
confronted with my next step.
RI: And you always know you're up to it. It’s
one of your 10 truths, Spirit doesn't bring you anything that you're
not ready for.
JL: Kenny and I remind each other about that regularly.
RI: Julia, what happened for you by taking the
Process? How has what you learned changed your path?
JL: At age 23, I had spent nearly half of my years
up to 18 either hospitalized or home in bed with a whole number
of physical challenges and body parts failing. Because of that,
I also had become intimately involved with the Spiritual world,
as sometimes children who are seriously ill do. At the time I was
around 23 and my body was failing me again, I met my first husband
and did the Hoffman Process. It was the first time that I had had
that microscopic teaching of my childhood to see where my illnesses
were based — how I created them and how I would eventually
come into the power to change that, and what the whole mandala looked
like in my life. I actually had such a profound experience that
in the first eight months of my work, my spine, which had been twisted
from scoliosis, started to allow itself to untwist and I grew an
inch and a half. I had asthma that was so life-threatening that
I couldn't leave the house without my syringe. In the emotional
work in the Process, without any dramatic physical changes, I had
already moved to a place where I was not in a life and death situation
anymore. I really claimed life and living as my path. Up until then,
that had not been the case.
RI: It's clear that both of you have dedicated
yourselves, your relationship and your professional careers, to
help people awaken to the infinite power of love that's within us
and beyond. That's a big choice. How did going public with all of
that and dedicating yourselves in a public way change your lives?
KL: The first thing that pops into my head is
that they asked John Lennon if the Beatles lost fans when they grew
their hair. He said, "Yeah, we also lost fans when we took
off our leather jackets." Yes, we definitely lost some fans
when we published our book. First off, I admitted that I was in
love with my wife and that's not cool in rock and roll. We talked
about our relationship with each other and to Spirit and became
too airy-fairy for a lot of people. As America gets back in touch
with its spiritual base, I think our work becomes less frightening.
We're basically saying there is a God who loves you and wants you
to have love in your life. That's not a scary thing. But because
it doesn't come under the umbrella of an organized religion, it's
difficult for some people.
One of the things I've had to cope with has been a sort of changing
of the guards, who's into my music and who isn't. By going public
with our spirituality and our relationship, a lot of people didn't
understand what we were trying to do. In my mind, it was very simply
a message of love. On my "Leap
of Faith," album which came out before "The Unimaginable
Life," I said, "Love exists, and courage is always rewarded"
like it was a movie poster. That to me was the essence of our message.
In this society, we talk about love, but most people don't really
believe in it or they'd be living in a completely different fashion.
When I did the Hoffman Process (it was then called Fischer-Hoffman),
Julia was my teacher. It was because of that work that I grew to
a place where I was capable of seeing the life I was living. Up
to that point I think I was sleepwalking. A year or so after completing
the Process, I was integrated enough in my body to where I was capable
of truly seeing Julia and becoming aware of my love for her. Like
I said in the book, there was this simultaneous experience of knowing
that we were destined to fall in love and knowing that life had
brought us together to be in love and share this life together.
At the same time, I knew that the work I had done on myself was
what took me to the place where I could do that. It was sort of
a paradox where I knew it was going to happen anyway, and yet all
that work had to happen in order to get there.
RI: Your work and your love were all of one piece.
KL: And just to "wake up." There's a
certain level of unconsciousness that permeates a life lived out
of reaction or imitation to the family patterns. Until you can get
to a place where you can recognize how those patterns are running
your life and begin to see yourself doing them, you can't choose
a different path. While you're in the throes of the madness, to
go, "Oh, I get it. This is that thing I do every time this
happens. I will now choose a different response to that." That's
what we call consciousness. I always thought consciousness was when
you have it all together and all figured out, and nothing ever ruffled
your feathers and you got to be at peace. You kind of floated over
everything. Now I see that, at least in my life at this point, I
define consciousness as being aware of when my feathers are being
ruffled and what they're being ruffled by and choosing to respond
in a different way if I'm capable. Most of the time, thank God,
I am. There are times where I am so in it that I'll react to it.
But I usually catch it within a few hours. "Whoa, that was
an old, habitual reaction."
I think the essence of Julia's and my relationship, the focal point
of our lives right now, is that everything we do is intended to
keep our hearts open to each other. And when we feel or find ourselves
drifting apart, and find our hearts closing to each other, that's
when we know something's not right.
RI: That's your touchstone for everything.
KL: Our relationship, our love affair, becomes
the touchstone for everyone and everything around us.
RI: That's very moving. Kenny, your music has
nourished millions and millions of people for 30 years. What is
it like to look back?
KL: Journaling was such an essential part of the
Hoffman work. When I look back, my songwriting was my journaling,
even during crazy times where I felt completely lost and alone I
can look at the lyrics. In the middle of a song like "I'm Alright,"
it breaks down to "just listen to your heart." I can see
that Spirit was consciously trying to get my attention.
RI: The central theme of the Hoffman Process is
not only getting rid of negative patterns, but that you're doing
that to take care of your Spirit. Your Spirit cannot consciously
manifest and express itself when it's covered over and imprisoned
by these negative patterns. So dealing with patterns is the way
you take care of your Spiritual life. It’s probably true that
most people come to the Process for healing, to get over some pain
or suffering, but then they find something there that they didn't
even know they were looking for.
JL: Having been involved all my life in a spiritual
life, I find that many people think that spiritual life is about
floating over what we're feeling and what's going on. One of the
things I love about the Hoffman Process is that it encourages us
to plunge into what we're feeling, trust what we're feeling, and
trust that the more fully we feel those things, transformation will
follow. That has been a profound lesson in my life.
KL: Check out Julia's poem
in our book, "Your Spirit, My Spirit." It chronicles the
hidden ghosts that the love relationship reveals. I think in many
ways it's metaphorical to the Process.
RI: We'll do that. Thank you both very much. ø
Your Spirit and My Spirit
By Julia Loggins
Your Spirit and my Spirit
Whirling round each other for eons
Let's be God this time
Let's be human
Let’s be light
Let's be all that is dark
Everything you are I see
And seeing is loving
And loving is remembering
Because this blueprint of your heart
I carry inside me
For all time
This soul memory of Spirit
Wakes me from my dream
Rips the veils, pierces the certainty
Of my ever-effusive despair
And I meet myself for the first time
We are. And all that I've
Learned about life
And love and men and women
Is false and phony and obscene
When my heart is open, is present
My lips offer kisses and poetry
My exiled selves hear our lovers' moans
Like a call from Heaven
They pack up and head home
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