Daniel Aubrey Smith and Luna Lauren at AUREA: The Mirror Is a Portal

On the last morning of AUREA III, volunteers walked the rows handing out mirrors. A few minutes later the whole room was standing up, moving to music, holding a mirror to their own face and saying out loud, to one of their own eyes, "I love you." Then they switched eyes and answered themselves: "I love you, too."

The session was led by Daniel Aubrey Smith and Luna Lauren, two facilitators who decided that morning to merge the two sessions they had each been given. It was Easter Sunday and the closing day of the gathering, set aside for integration, and Daniel Aubrey Smith described the shape of it plainly at the start: it would run a little like a sober plant medicine journey, going in and out, with the two of them trading off. What follows is the map of it, so you can follow the practice yourself.

How the session opens: one word, one witness, two agreements

It starts with a song and an instruction to notice your own posture. Are your arms crossed? Are you still on your phone? Are you in the future or the past? Shoulders back, jaw soft, breath in through the nose and out through the mouth.

Daniel Aubrey Smith then asks for an intention, with one rule attached: do not think about it. Take the first word that arrives, breathe it into the body, and pass it to the people on either side of you. Several people say theirs out loud to the room. One woman says peace, and wants to carry it out of the weekend into ordinary life. Another says she is a doer, over-masculine, get-it-done, and wants to finish things with pleasure instead of grind.

Two agreements are set before anything vulnerable happens. The first is consent: if a question does not sit right, you do not answer it, and if you need to leave for water or the restroom you go. The second is confidentiality, agreed out loud by the whole room, so that anyone sharing could open all the way. Then everyone finds a partner, sits knee to knee so their hearts face each other, looks into one eye and then the other, and takes a full minute each to reflect back what they see. No advice. No fixing.

Why Daniel Aubrey Smith framed the day around your own masculine and feminine energy

Daniel Aubrey Smith's premise is that the divine masculine and divine feminine people go looking for in a partner have to be met inside first, or they get projected onto whoever shows up. When both aspects are welcome in you, she said, you stop asking a partner to be a shape they are not.

Her image for it came out of a recent meditation. The masculine is the concrete of a swimming pool. It is the structure that holds the water, and it exists so that the feminine can move in whatever intuitive direction it feels called to move. Flow with no vessel goes everywhere and arrives nowhere. That framing runs underneath everything else in the session, including the exercise it closes with.

Why Luna says the mirror is a portal

Luna's central claim is that you are the one person who never gets to stand in your own presence. "If I'm in the presence of Alex, I'm feeling wow, this strong essence, but I wonder how often he gets to feel that for himself," she told the room, naming a man sitting in it. "I wish I could clone Alex, put him in front of himself, so that he can feel what I feel when I'm in his presence." Her answer: "The mirror is a portal."

She asked what mirrors are for and let the room answer. Reflection. Vanity. Then she asked who has ever critiqued or judged something about themselves in a mirror, and named the usual inventory out loud: the blemish, the teeth, the weight, the gap between how we think we look and how we want to show up. Her position is that this makes rewiring your relationship to your own reflection a duty rather than an indulgence. In her teaching, mirrors get three uses and only three: self-love, self-pleasure, self-reflection. She calls it work of the sacral chakra.

What self-love means once you strip the cliché off it

Luna opened by admitting the phrase itself used to irritate her, because it had been repeated into meaninglessness. Her working definition is physical: "self-love, when it really comes down to it, is the ability to feel entirely safe in your body. To have a regulated nervous system that meets you in that reflection in pure awe. In pure admiration."

That definition has teeth, because it explains why people who genuinely believe they love themselves still contract in front of a mirror. The judgment is subconscious and it runs on old wiring: if only I were a little more this, if only I could dance more like that. She separates two things that often get confused. Confidence can be trained. Worthiness comes from inside, and the practice she teaches is a practice of worthiness.

The mirror practice, step by step

Here is the whole practice, in the order she gives it. Hold the mirror up to your face. Bring all of your focus to one of your eyes. Say your own name and "I love you," out loud, with your lips visibly moving, because it matters that you see yourself saying it. Wait a couple of seconds. Move your attention to the other eye, take it in, and answer: "I love you, too." Give that a few seconds as well, because receiving is the part most people skip. Then alternate, eye to eye.

After a while, sentences start arriving on their own. Luna invites people to free associate at that point and speak to themselves the way they would speak to their best friend, or their hero, or the love of their life. Say the thing you have been craving to hear. Say the acknowledgment nobody gave you. She noticed the room whispering and pushed back: see if you can say it louder, unapologetically.

The practice then moves through forgiveness. Over the Hawaiian Ho'oponopono prayer (I am sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you), she asks people to keep the eye gaze and give themselves the apology they never received, even for things that were never their fault. "Shapeshift into the healer that you need because you are your own medicine." Then the music comes up and people stand and dance with their own reflection. Her instruction for the self-consciousness that arrives right there is precise: if you feel silly, that feeling is the part of you that has kept you small. It closes with arms wrapped around your own body, eyes shut, speaking to the six-year-old version of you, calling yourself home. A throat singing sound journey from La Roam follows, so the room can lie down and let it settle.

The question Daniel Aubrey Smith and Luna Lauren put to groups of four

After the sound journey, the room splits into groups of four and each person gets two minutes, timed, to answer one question: if your heart could speak freely right now, what would it say?

Daniel Aubrey Smith sets it up with a hand on the heart and a note about permission. We are trained to look for validation from outside, she said, when the permission we actually need is our own. The instruction to the listeners is the same as it was in the opening exercise: witness, do not fix.

The appreciation round that closes the session

The last exercise is what Daniel Aubrey Smith calls feminine and masculine appreciation, and it is the pool metaphor made physical. The women spread out around the room and get into receiving mode, hands open, eyes open. For five minutes the men move from woman to woman and appreciate what they saw in them during the week, out loud. It can be one word. Anyone standing alone is told to appreciate herself in the meantime. Then it reverses, and for five minutes the women appreciate the men.

What comes after is the part that shows whether any of it landed. Daniel Aubrey Smith opens the floor for declarations. A man named Xander tells the room he started men's work seven years ago carrying something in his chest he could not get out. A facilitator at a retreat put a hand on his heart and told him it was running his life, then gave him an assignment: tell yourself you love yourself in the mirror every day for a month. He did it. It felt forced, awkward, untrue. Years of deep work later, sitting in this room with a mirror in his hand, the sentence finally landed as fact. He said the recognition he had been seeking outside himself had been right there the whole time.

A woman named Meg says the weekend stopped her from isolating and rejecting herself, and that the word she keeps reaching for is launchpad. A man named Edward, running on overdrive for the better part of a year, says the session was the first pause he had taken long enough to do the self-love work he tells his own clients to do. Each of them gets the same three sentences back from the whole room: I see you, I honor you, I love you.

Luna's closing note was the honest one. The path is not linear, she said, and there are always deeper layers of love to meet. The invitation Daniel Aubrey Smith left the room with was to spend the rest of the day in that presence, in fullest uninhibited expression, because that is where the world actually needs you. Then they turned the music up and everybody danced.

Watch the full session above.

Frequently asked questions

What actually happens in this session?

A grounding meditation and a one-word intention, spoken agreements about consent and confidentiality, a partner exercise of eye contact and reflection, then the mirror practice itself with movement and a forgiveness prayer, a throat singing sound journey, groups of four answering one heart question for two minutes each, a masculine and feminine appreciation round, and open declarations from the floor. It runs like a ceremony rather than a lecture.

How do you do the mirror practice at home?

Hold a mirror to your face and bring all your focus to one eye. Say your own name and "I love you" out loud, with your lips visibly moving. Move to the other eye, take it in, and answer "I love you, too." Alternate, eye to eye, until sentences start coming on their own, then speak to yourself the way you would to your best friend. Luna suggests saying it louder than feels comfortable.

What does Luna mean when she says the mirror is a portal?

That you are the only person who never gets to experience your own presence, because you cannot stand outside your own body. Other people feel your essence; you do not. Her example was wanting to clone a man in the room and put him in front of himself so he could feel what she feels near him. The mirror is the closest available substitute, which is why she treats the reflection as a doorway.

What is the difference between worthiness and confidence?

Luna draws a hard line between them. Confidence can be trained, practiced and performed. Worthiness comes from inside and cannot be drilled. She defines self-love as the ability to feel entirely safe in your body, with a nervous system regulated enough to meet your own reflection with admiration, and she frames the mirror practice as a practice of worthiness rather than a confidence exercise.

Who is this session for?

People who intellectually agree they should love themselves and still flinch at their own reflection. It suits anyone integrating after an intense stretch, which is what it was built for, and it works for beginners because every instruction is given out loud. You need a hand mirror, privacy enough to speak and move without an audience, and a willingness to feel silly for a few minutes.