Hello and welcome to my website. My name is Krisztina Hajnalka Lazar and I was born in Cleveland, Ohio October 10, 1981. My middle name is unpronounceable in English, which I find amusing, and it means Morning Glory, the flower. My parents and their families immigrated from Hungary, my mothers family in 1957 and my fathers in 1949. Hungarian was my first language until I was 4 years old, when I learned English. I still speak, read and write today and have been back to Hungary many many times.
Since I was born my heritage has made a HUGE impact on my life and continues to influence me greatly in many ways.
So, since this is my website, Ill begin with how and why I got to where I am now. . . . . . . . . . . . .
As a child, I was raised with a sensitivity towards nature and an affinity for animals (especially birds). My wonderful parents fostered my vast imagination and creativity since day one and taught me to seek knowledge in everything and everywhere I went. I've always had a clear sense that there was something else to the world than what meets the eye.
The fall of 2000 brought my first semester at Carnegie Mellon University as an art student. Over the next year and a half, I adopted a work-hard play-hard mentality and surrounded myself with friends who did the same.
Though a constant level of high stress does foster some interesting products of the creative mind, it became obvious to everyone but myself and my close circle of friends that I was overdoing it. My school work never suffered, but my relationships fell apart and my parents and I were barely on speaking terms.
Then at the beginning of 2002, my grandmother was diagnosed with lymphoma. Instead of being there for my family, I mentally, emotionally couldn't handle it at all. Through my sleepless nights and constant pushing, I managed to erase any and all coping mechanisms and I stopped dealing with everything, retreating more and more into my work. On some level I knew I had lost a large part of myself and became someone I could hardly recognize.
Then, one March morning 2002 as I sat in my Semiotics class, practically falling asleep on top of my cup of coffee, something happened that would change my life forever.
In front of my eyes there was a white flash, then blackness, then I saw a great mandala, circling upon itself, stretching out into infinity on all axis. It consisted of eyes and flames and brilliantly vivid colors. All of it lasted probably for a few seconds if that, but after my classroom came back into my vision, I could still see the mandala slightly transparent over top. It stayed with me for the rest of the day and the image is still burned into my memory, clear as ever.
I instantly began to sketch it, and when I went home I drew a larger version. Within the week I began to paint it. The image became my obsession and I worked on nothing else day and night. I put in about 250 hours on it in four months. I had to get it out; I somehow could not rest until the image was out.
My vision saved me from the helpless self-destructive path I was heading further down on. Though this was clear, I couldn't understand how it had happened. I stumbled upon Jung's mandala research, and it all made sense. I started doing more and more research and the more I read, the more I felt I understood every word as if I've known it all along, but I needed to read it right then to remind myself.
My entire outlook on the world has changed since then. I am no longer pessimistic and am not self-destructive. I feel so full of life and hope and pure joy and I look at everything with an abundant love and compassion. I smile at the many miracles of our everyday lives through the good times and the bad. I seek that common chord in all of our hearts that unites us with the universe and is an essential part of what makes us human.
I share all of this with you because I realized something very important when I spoke to a man I sat next to on a plane from Atlanta to Cleveland. Though he was in his thirties and I in my early twenties, we had stumbled down a very similar path and had come into the light in very similar ways. In two hours we got to understand each other on a plane neither of us could express any better than, "you know?" "Yeah, I know." I saw then that I wasn't alone. That others had been smacked in the head by spirituality just when the darkness was so thick that nothing else could've opened their eyes. And that others were just as surprised by the whole thing as I was.
I feel there are many people out there who try and wade through the quicksand, assuming they won't drown. We all grapple with certain temptations within ourselves, some of us more seriously than others, and many times, we don't even realize when we've let go too far until it is too far. And this stress, this push, this very blatant introduction to a very dark place, is sometimes what we need to turn our lives around and do good not by just ourselves, but by others as well.
It is only through the darkness that we find the true light and only by a struggle can we reach the peak of the mountain.
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