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Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino

Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino

Written by: Arts mental health and spirituality: perspectives on the human experience.
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Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino delivers compelling insights on self-awareness, mental health, and spirituality through in-depth interviews with international authors, performers, educators, and philosophers.

lensofhopefulness.substack.comPassadino Publishing LLC Hygiene & Healthy Living Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Spirituality
Episodes
  • 38 Books, One Teenager, and a Trilogy About Clones

    38 Books, One Teenager, and a Trilogy About Clones
    Jul 1 2026
    I get a lot of guests on Lens of Hopefulness who found self-improvement later in life — as adults, sometimes as retired adults, like me. So, when I got to sit down with Shanti Hershenson, I was genuinely excited, because here’s someone who found her purpose before she could even legally drive.Shanti has written 38 books. She’s published 22 of them, with number 23 on the way by the time this episode is out. And she’s about to head off to Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. I wanted to know how someone gets that much work done, that young, in a world absolutely stuffed with distractions — and what she’s learned along the way that the rest of us could use.Finding Purpose EarlyShanti told me she’s never really doubted that writing would be her life. This is what she wanted to do as a kid, and it’s what she wants to do now.“This is what I wanted to do when I was a kid, it’s what I want to do now, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.”She’s in good company. She pointed out that S.E. Hinton was sixteen when she published The Outsiders, and Christopher Paolini was fifteen when he wrote the first Eragon book. So, a young author with a clear sense of direction isn’t unheard of — but doing it in this generation, with this much noise competing for her attention, is its own kind of feat.The Discipline Behind the WordsI asked how she manages to write so much with a phone full of apps sitting right next to her — because I have that same phone, and I know how it goes. Her answer was refreshingly honest. She’s not immune to it.“One thing I do is that I have a goal, and I have to write a thousand words every single day. I have been doing this since I was in seventh grade. Not writing a thousand words is not an option.”She admitted she still catches herself two hundred words in, ready to scroll. Her fix is noticing the pattern and talking herself back: finish the writing first, then the scrolling will feel good, because it’s not standing between her and something she still owes herself.This connected for me to something I read years ago in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled — his idea that so much of what troubles us as a society comes down to wanting immediate gratification instead of delayed gratification. Shanti described her writing sessions almost like a meditation — noise-cancelling headphones on, everything else locked out, fully present with the work and the characters she’s built. That’s not so different from what I feel when I’m on-stage improvising or lost in a scene. You disappear into it.Family, Environment, and Finding Your FootingI asked where the discipline came from — school, family, something else. Shanti said part of it was simply natural, an obsession with writing and creating for as long as she can remember. But she also said her family has been supportive without that support directly explaining her output. What shapes her work more, she said, is the environment she lives in — real events, things she’s seen and felt, opinions she holds, all filtering into even her more fantastical stories.We talked a bit about how tough the teenage years can be for anyone trying to find their own independence. I shared that I didn’t really find mine until later, and that I drifted for a while into a crowd that experimented with drinking — something that, thankfully, never took hold in me. What did help, looking back at raising my own two sons, was giving kids as many outlets as they can handle. One of my boys found music and never stopped; the other found a camera in his hand young and became a professional videographer. Shanti’s experience, and the response she gets from other young people telling her they’re inspired to write too, felt like a good example of what happens when a kid finds that outlet early and it actually sticks.On Being a “Pantser” and the New BookHer twenty-third book, Wolfgang One, is the start of a planned trilogy. It imagines a society where everyone is cloned from an important historical figure and raised from birth to live up to that person’s legacy. The main character is a clone of Wolfgang Mozart, on the edge of adulthood, when a DNA test turns up something that sends him spiraling.As a fellow author, I wanted to know her process — plotter or pantser (A person who writes by the seat of their pants!), in the language we use in the Long Island Authors Group I sit on the board of. She’s mostly a pantser.“I do actually have a whiteboard in my room, but I haven’t touched it in like two years. I’m definitely — I’ve always been a little bit more of a pantser.”She’s not a pure one, though. She keeps bullet points and loose paragraphs of what needs to happen next, and by the halfway point of most books, she knows exactly where the rest of the story is going. It’s a process a lot of working authors will recognize — start loose, tighten as you go.AI, Authenticity, and What a Computer Can’t ...
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    53 mins
  • His Daughter Asked Him What Depression Was. Nine Years Later, He'd Defined 272 of Them.

    His Daughter Asked Him What Depression Was. Nine Years Later, He'd Defined 272 of Them.
    Jun 17 2026
    D. Earl Johnston came on Lens of Hopefulness to talk about a book unlike anything else I’ve come across in years of doing these interviews. It’s a 376-page reference work that defines 272 separate emotions, not through clinical theory, but through more than 8,000 quotes and phrases from people who actually lived through them. The book is called Choosing Emotions: Thinking with Your Head and Acting with Your Heart, and it took nine years to put together, drawing on more than 1,800 contributors across roughly 2,500 years of recorded human experience, from Confucius, Buddha, and Plato up through voices most of us would recognize today.Doug, as he goes by, didn’t come to this work through psychology. His career was spent as a finance executive in banking, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity in Los Angeles, and later as a professional researcher retained by national law firms to assess complicated business lawsuits. He’s also a world champion sailor. None of that is the typical background for someone who spends nine years cataloging the entire emotional range of being human, and that contrast turned out to be one of the more interesting threads in our conversation. Understanding feelings, he kept reminding me, isn’t the exclusive property of psychologists. It belongs to anyone who’s ever felt something and tried to put a name to it.A Question His Daughter Asked at the Dinner TableThe book’s origin starts with a game. When Doug’s daughter was in eighth grade, the two of them began having dinner together once a week, just the two of them, and he’d bring a list of 150 to 200 trivia questions covering everything from geography to politics. They called it College Bowl, and every correct answer earned her a two-dollar bill slid across the table. It became something she looked forward to, and a way for a father to stay close to a teenager’s world, which isn’t always easy.Two years later, in tenth grade, after she’d been out of school for a month recovering from an injury and surgery, she came to dinner and told Doug it was her turn to ask the questions. Her question was simple: what is depression?Doug told me, plainly, that he faked it. He gave her the economic definition, a slowdown in business activity accompanied by a decline in interest rates, because he didn’t want to deal with the emotional one. She wasn’t fooled, and told him that wasn’t the kind of depression she meant. Doug admitted to her that he didn’t know enough to answer honestly, and spent the next two weeks researching it.What helped him most wasn’t the clinical literature, although he found plenty of it. It was quotes from people who had lived through depression themselves. The first one came from Rollo May, one of the original self-help writers from the 1950s, before the term even existed, and a depression survivor himself.“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”— Rollo MayA few days later he found a quote from J.K. Rowling, who has spoken publicly about her own depression before she became one of the best-selling novelists in history.“Depression is that absence of being able to envision you will ever be cheerful again. It’s the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever experienced.”— J.K. RowlingAnd then one from a freelance writer named Haley Cornell, who Doug suspects will be well known in her own right one day.“Depression lies. It tells you you’ve always felt this way and you always will, but you haven’t and you won’t.”— Haley CornellDoug texted the three quotes to his daughter, who was back at school. Three minutes later she wrote back: “I’m crying.” Alarmed, he asked why, since everyone in those quotes had survived what she was going through. Her answer: “That’s why I’m crying. Thank you, dad.”It’s a sweet father-daughter moment on its own, but Doug said it’s also when he realized something that shaped the entire book: clinical descriptions explain what an emotion looks like, while the words of someone who’s lived through it explain what it feels like. He was careful to add that this isn’t a knock on psychologists; he’s leaned on them himself and calls a good one “worth their weight in gold.” But there’s a gap that clinical language alone doesn’t close, and closing that gap is what eventually grew into 8,000 quotes across 272 emotions.From One Word to 272What started with depression expanded to anxiety, codependence, and eventually every emotional state Doug could document, including the lighter ones: excitement, enthusiasm, charisma, even an entry on zeal. By the time the manuscript was finished, it covered 272 distinct emotional states.In January, a friend suggested Doug submit the finished book to AI just to see what it would say. He was hesitant; the book was done, and he wasn’t looking to change anything. He sent it anyway. Within minutes, both Claude AI and ChatGPT came back with nearly the same response: this was the single most...
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope

    The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope
    Jun 3 2026
    I was not sure what to expect from my recent Lens of Hopefulness interview with Lolo—psychotherapist, paranormal explorer, and host of the REALMS Podcast but was happy to cover ground that I had honestly been wanting to explore for a long time: the space where clinical psychology and the unexplained overlap, where grief and ghost voices coexist, and where a practicing therapist can sit with questions that have no clean answers.REALMS is Lolo’s YouTube channel. It stands for Real Experiences, Answers, Lore, Myth and Sanctuary. I had watched his YouTube channel and liked what I saw. As I told him on air, it was the kind of show where you cannot bring yourself to turn it off. The approach is open, unhurried, and—something I rarely see in the paranormal space—genuinely humble.From Existential Anxiety to Podcast HostLolo did not arrive at the paranormal through fascination alone. He describes a history of existential anxiety that pushed him to ask the hard questions about life, death, and meaning. Several close brushes with death sharpened the urgency. His background in therapy—he is a licensed psychotherapist who works with trauma, anxiety, and grief, currently through Teladoc—gave him a clinical lens. But clinical tools, he found, have limits.“Things have to be proven, it has to be very black and white,” he said, describing the constraints of evidence-based practice, “but that’s also not real life. There’s so much that we can’t explain and we don’t fully understand.”That recognition—that the clinical model has a ceiling—drove him to create a community rather than a stage. REALMS is less a ghost-hunting show and more a conversation space where people with unusual experiences can share without being laughed out of the room. No slick host, no click-bait production values. Just people telling their stories, his co-host included, in a space where grief, wonder, and uncertainty are all allowed in at once.The Big Conclusion: The Answer Is Too Big for UsI asked Lolo what his most profound discovery has been after years of investigating, interviewing, and questioning. His answer was not what I expected. After all of it, he has arrived at a kind of acceptance of not-knowing.“Whatever the answer is, it’s too big for us to understand,” he said. “It’s just so out of our perception that we just can’t even try to understand.”He followed that with something even more practical: truth, he observed, is a little bit relative. And if a belief system makes a person feel better and helps them function, you have to ask yourself how much it matters whether it is objectively provable—as long as the person is not losing themselves in it. Balance, he said, is everything. He understands why people go all-in on certain systems; the exhaustion of seeking direction makes it tempting. But he holds back from that himself, always taking baby steps and staying skeptical enough to keep perspective.Personal Experiences That Are Hard to DismissThis is where the conversation got personal—on both sides of the microphone.Lolo described being present at a Catholic exorcism ritual—a full church closed down for a three-to-four-hour event, presided over by a priest, for a single individual. He witnessed the person behaving in ways he still cannot fully account for, while also noting, with his therapist’s eye, how much the cultural and media landscape (particularly the enormous impact of The Exorcist) could influence a person’s presentation. He does not dismiss what he saw. He does not fully explain it either. That tension is exactly where he lives.I brought my own experience to the table as well. I shared that when my father passed away, during a period of deep grief, I had what felt like a channeling experience. I asked him to give me a piece of information I could not have known—my grandmother’s maiden name—and I received the name Ingrassia. When I checked with my mother, she confirmed it. I also shared that during a particularly intense period of spiritual engagement, I found I could touch someone in pain and the pain would stop—and that the experience frightened me enough that I stepped back from it entirely. And there was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Long Island that a family had opened for viewings by appointment, once a year, after seeing the image of their late son in the painting. My family went. I saw my father’s face in that picture.These are not things I trot out in casual conversation. But with Lolo, there was no performance required, in either direction. He listened as a therapist does—with interest and without the need to nail it down.Science, Scripture, and the Surprising OverlapOne moment in this conversation that surprised me was when Lolo pointed out that the Big Bang theory was developed by a Catholic astrophysicist—and that its core concept, a sudden explosive emergence of light from nothing, aligns rather neatly with the opening of Genesis: “In...
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    1 hr and 7 mins
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