Back To Blogging & To New Beginnings (My Soulful Journey)

WELCOME! WELCOME!

Hey, it’s me again!

It is clear to me as day that in a huge way I have abandoned my actual blog and I wanted to apologize for that. It’s so wild how things in the industry of blogging have changed dramatically since I first started this journey 5 years ago. That’s right, its been 5 freakin years man! Can you believe it? So surreal and wild to me.

It used to be that in order to call yourself a “Travel Blogger” you had to actually have a blog and everything else came secondary to it AKA social media, but as life and this world changes, this industry has changed a lot and now a “Travel Blogger” means you’re an Instagrammer and in the past year or more Facebook has faded out into an all advertisement world and a video feed that people have started to turn away from it as well.

However, I am here to be present and give my blog the attention it deserves and bring it back to life. I am committed to doing that this year. In the last few years my #1 priority has been Instagram…clearly & YouTube and now that I have FINALLY gotten to 100k followers on Instagram (YAY! Big milestone) and my YouTube channel has reached over one million views, it’s blogging time!

And with that, I’ll try to give you a mini life update of what has happened in the last year and a half, what lead me here, where I am now and what’s to come from me.

Recap of 2018, Struggles and Confusion About Life

2018 was one of the best and worst years of my life.

The first half of the year started off amazing, dreamy, full of dreams coming to life and more than I could have ever asked for! Life was a dream. (*Star Star* emoji)

Towards the end of June, things took an unexpected turn in more ways than one, my website got hacked and it seemed that all my hard work of years was just thrown to the trash. After about a month I was able to save my website but traffic dropped dramatically and I was so upset about it and almost over blogging altogether.

To top it all off, my friends from High On Life (Ryker, Alexey & Mindy) passed away in a tragic accident that I’m still shocked over and probably will never get over for the rest of my life. It affected me in ways that I couldn’t even begin to explain or tell you and I think at this point I have spoken about it endlessly all over my social media platforms but still, the pain is real AF and there is almost not a day that goes by that I don’t think about them. <3 (love you guys to pieces <3 Ryker & Alexey)

After the death of my friends, the hacking of my website, many more series of unfortunate events, I was completely lost. I didn’t know who I was, what I’ve become, what I wanted my mission to be about anymore. I was getting so frustrated with Instagram and social media as a whole. I kept comparing myself to others, wondering why they kept getting more followers and likes and I wasn’t, when I knew they weren’t being authentic to real life and so many of them were masking away at a fake identity online and having others help them and cheating their way to the top and yet others kept buying their fake illusion life and I felt like I was real all along and no know cared.

I guess you can say death brings upon so many newfound realizations we forgot about within ourselves and our core morals, values and beliefs.

I was at a very fragile and breaking point in my career and life. I actually thought of quitting blogging for the first time in my life and was just so over everything. I was emotionally, mentally and physically exhausted with life and the grin of surviving this ever-changing world of what seemed like unattainable hopeless dreams.

I thought that by going to Israel and hanging out with my family and friends and traveling a bit, life would get better but you know what they say, “you can’t run away from your problems, they will always chase you again” and so they did…Israel was in a way a complete disaster for the most part.

I didn’t get a chance to do everything I wanted to do, see everyone I wanted to see because I was trying to balance life, working, keeping up and spending time with friends and family. Meanwhile learning to master Lightroom, which made me lose my mind every single day for weeks on end.

However, I was so excited to finally release my Lightroom Presets Filters in February and if you haven’t check them out yet, it’s time you do 😉 (My Lightroom Presets). I worked on them endlessly in the last 6 months and I’ve so proud of what they turned out! I dedicated my heart and soul into creating them for you guys!

(Before and After, below, using My Lightroom Presets which will help you bring your photos to life!)

When I got back to LA (home), I think I had a nervous breakdown…well I actually think that also took place on my trip as I cried my eyes out 1-2 days before my trip back home. I had so much regrets about how my trip had turned out. How I was lacking time and balance in my life. But I really had another one breakdown when I got back and to prove it, even my body was rejecting all that I had gone through by getting sick for 3 weeks.

I was insanely overwhelmed, I stopped posting on social media for a month or more and felt like I need a complete life makeover — I NEED CHANGE! A Complete Life Makeover! (read that if you haven’t already…I basically lost my shit). However, I do believe that with distraction comes rebuilding. Sometimes we just have to tear our entire life upside down to find the root of our problems and find a new meaning and purpose to our existence.

I decided I wouldn’t travel again until I figured some things on my own. I needed a new direction, I needed to dig deep and look at the world around me and see what was really going on with me and my soul, only then can I move forward and find the answers I was looking for — through healing my life daily and entirely.

Soul Searching

I started this soul searching journey again at the end of December — a journey I have been on many times in my life but always finding new and inspiring ways to guide me — always searching, yearning for endless meanings and answers. I decided to even seek out physics to find answers (YouTube video soon), I watched YouTube videos about soulful things to better understand me, my life and what I wanted for 2019.

New Years – New Year – New Me

As the New Year rolled in, I didn’t go out and party, I wanted to find answers on that night, I wanted to write goals for what I wanted 2019 to look like but I guess it wasn’t my time…I believe that everything in life has its right timing and as hard as I search nothing was coming to me, so I took it for what it was…not my timing yet to get all the answers that are burning at my core.

I didn’t want to set intention and goals just for the sake of New Years, as ideal as it may have been. I wanted them to be clear and to come out of a pure, good and soulful place full of abundance but how could I do that when I felt like my life was lacking so much.

Whether it was truth or not, it was at the time, my current truth and nothing could be created until I realized what was really true.

However, I did make a dramatic change in my life and removed a few people who I thought were toxic in my life.

As much as I loved them I came to realize that more bad and hurt were coming from them then good and love. It was a hard and big decision to make but the moment I cleared out that space, I felt light, I felt like I now had space for new — literally like a hard drive on a computer, the moment I hit delete, my soul and life’s hard drive was operating fast and better because it had more space — more love to give to those who deserved it. This process awakened a new part of me. It cleansed my soul in a big way.

Sometimes in order to find peace, you have to be willing to lose connection of people, places and things that create all the noise in your life.

I was determined to be unstoppable in this process of finding me again and my purpose.

New Beginnings – What’s To Come For Vanilla Sky Dreaming 

Things started to really start making sense for me at the beginning of February and since then a lot of changed and I can’t wait to share with you where this newly found pathway has guided me to.

I have shared a huge part of me, my struggles, my journey and thoughts on Instagram more than any other place through my photography and captions I spend writing for almost an hour every morning but I want to dive deeper into this world with you.

In the last 5 months, I’ve been guided towards so many life-changing things. I’ve gone way deep into my spiritual self. I wouldn’t say more than ever (well maybe kind of), but definitely one of my deepest and most profound journeys of my life. I have learned so much about myself, my life, humans, our thought processes, energy, limiting beliefs and so much more.

I’ve toyed around and educated myself on tarot cards, crystals, moon cycles and so much more. I’ve learned so much by reading poetry, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos & documentaries and reading endless articles. I’ve tuned in and paid more attention to the signs the universe has been sending my way and wildly enough when you do that, wildly, wonderful things start to happen. Your whole world around you changes, dramatically, in a surreal and profound way.

I’ve been manifesting things I couldn’t even explain to the “natural person” because their existence is beyond unrealistic in the “normal” practical world. Situations that have literally saved my life a few times in the last few months just by tuning into the messages I’ve received from G*d/universe. I’ve gotten insane insides through visual imagery and dreams of things before they actually happened and it’s been a wild ride…to say the least.

I get and know that this world isn’t for everyone — this supernatural spiritual world. However, as human beings we are all seeking, searching and looking for answers to better our lives, our circumstance and the world around us, or at least my kind of people and me.

Whether you believe in G*d or you don’t, everyone believes in something, and there is something that connects all of us here on earth. There is a science to it all both spirituality, psychologically and scientifically. We all want more, better, bigger and greatness and I want to bring that into your lives. That has always been my mission, to inspire you to live out your wildest dreams.

I used to think that seeing is doing and believing. Like if people saw me living out my dreams and fantasies they would go out there and seek newfound worlds and make their dreams come true. What I never dove into is how I do what I do, how I know to go here and not there, what I’ve learned in my travels and life journeys that have changed and shaped me to the woman I am today. I want to show you the how and tell you stories of places that have changed me and my life forever. The people I’ve met along my wild journey called life that have moved me to tears and laughter, the people who have engraved their name across my heart and soul. I want to show you how to live your best life ever because I think you deserve it and not just by seeing someone else do it but also by telling you what drives them, what makes them tick.

I am so excited to bring my new world and some of which has always been there but hidden away out of fear of judgment and self-doubt. But I believe the time is now!

I love you guys!

Stay tuned for what’s to come for me, you and the Vanilla Sky Dreaming world!

xoxo

Hofit Kim Cohen