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When Laurina Fleure left Bachelor in Paradise during filming in Fiji last November, she went home to Melbourne to grieve for her late brother Michael, who died weeks before she went to tape the series.
“Burying my feelings was an amazing way of dealing with everything,” Laurina tells WHO, “but I guess there was that final component of realising the pain. So when I was asked to go on a date in Bachelor in Paradise, I was so relaxed and had been talking to the psych about these steps in healing, that I was unprepared for them to shock me with that.”
Since November, Laurina has taken the time she needed to work with her mum through their familial loss and has now resumed the practices she developed to live a fuller life. “Being able to stop drinking and smoking has been one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever done for myself,” she says. “Quitting smoking is something that I’ve wanted to do for the last 20 years, and I promised myself every week I would stop doing it for the last 20 years and it wasn’t until I hit that low point where I couldn’t have any sense of self-loathing in my life that I gave it up.”
That low point came on June 26. “The last time I touched a cigarette was when I was overseas,” Laurina says, “and that ex who had broken up with me because he wasn’t capable of affection, he was smoking a cigarette and passed it to me. I had a few puffs and I passed it back, and we went our separate ways, and I have enver touched another one since.”
She adds, “It was a poignant day. It’s funny how you keep growing and learning in life. You think you’ve got the hang of it and think you’ve got it and know everything and you can still learn and grow and expand even more that you’re like, wow, still going! Still growing.”
Deciding to quit “made my mind and my body so much clearer to absorb the good energy around me,” she says. “I think it’s so important.” At home, Laurina also makes “batches” of green smoothies that she will drink over the course of three days. “Having that good vitality in my mind and my body, it just makes it so much easier to absorb the good energy,” she says.
For her mental and spiritual healing, Laurina says, “It makes the biggest difference in my day to spend a little bit of time connecting to life and practicing gratitude and setting out intention.” She explains, “Before you go out to meet people or go out in public, say, ‘I’m going to sense the beauty in everything I look at and in everyone,’ and set that at the beginning of the day. It helps me a lot. At first when I was really anxious or really down, I would do it religiously, constantly and then my days just started to become, like, magic and you need it less and less. It sounds like cheesy, cliche stuff but it really works.”
Read more about Laurina in the latest issue of WHO on newsstands now.
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