The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope

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 the beginning, God said, let there be light.” I thought that was worth sitting with for a moment.He also referenced something that resonated with me personally: the statistical near impossibility of any individual human being here at all. The probability of the specific sperm and egg that created any given person has been estimated at one in 400 trillion. Add to that the extraordinary series of cosmic accidents that make Earth habitable—Jupiter shielding us from asteroids, a sun at just the right distance—and the odds of existing become almost theoretical.“We are a like theoretic impossibility of existing,” Lolo said, “and here we are. So it’s like if I am and I’m only here for a blink of an eye, it has to mean something, has to be worth something.”Prayer, Meditation, and the Anxiety ConnectionLolo made an observation that felt important in its simplicity: praying is a form of grounding. Psychologically, he said, it does the same thing that mindfulness and meditation do. The act of saying a prayer is functionally a mantra. Why do we work so hard to keep these two things separate?I told him about my own attempt at morning prayer that very day. My mind kept jumping ahead—I have ADD, which I was fairly upfront about—and I finally said, God, help me pray. And the response that came to me was simply: breathe slowly. I did. My mind quieted. Whatever you want to call that, it worked.Lolo was not surprised. He said that in his clinical work, he has noticed that purpose and direction and motivation are deeply intertwined, and that a lot of what religion offers—community, ritual, a sense of being held—overlaps substantially with what good therapy offers. His take on the confessional was particularly candid: a priest hearing confession, he noted, is essentially an untrained therapist. You go in, you unburden yourself, you walk out lighter.Trauma, Anxiety, and the Bear at the DoorToward the end of our conversation, Lolo got into the mechanics of anxiety in a way I found useful—and personally recognizable. He described the way the anxious brain cannot reliably distinguish between a perceived threat and a real one. His analogy: if you are doing your taxes and a bear shows up at the door, the bear wins your attention. That is the right response. The problem is that anxiety treats the taxes themselves as the bear.“Your brain is like analyzing the world and perceiving a threat,” he said. I told him that described a good portion of my own life. For much of it, everything was urgent and dramatic and felt like a crisis. As I have gotten older—I am in my sixties now—I have settled into something different. The sands in the hourglass are visible. And I find I am less interested in spending them in a state of alarm.Lolo’s approach to coping with his own anxiety, when I asked him directly, came down to two things: grounding—feet on the floor, present in the body—and gratefulness. Not the forced, performative kind, but just genuinely pausing on what is actually there. His picnic analogy made the point well: if it rains and ruins your outdoor plans, you can either stay miserable about what did not happen or go bowling. Something better might come from the detour.What I Came Away WithAfter about an hour with Lolo, a few things stayed with me:The answer to life’s biggest questions may genuinely be beyond our comprehension. That is not a cop-out—it is actually a kind of relief. It means we are not failing to find something that is findable. We are simply small beings standing in front of something enormous.Stigma around paranormal experiences keeps people isolated. Lolo’s entire project with REALMS is about giving those people a place where the story can be told without shame.Purpose is a survival mechanism, not just a self-help concept. Viktor Frankl’s observation—that Holocaust survivors were more likely to endure when they had something to hope for—is a profound point to contemplate. It can apply to every person sitting with existential dread right now.Prayer and meditation are closer than most people allow. The separation may be more cultural than practical. If one settles you and the other settles you, they may be the same thing.Can human connection be the paranormal? Lolo observed that an emotion—love, loyalty, grief—can give people a kind of superhuman capability. A soldier shot seven times who keeps fighting for his fellow soldier. A mother who lifts a car off her child. A country that finds unity for a brief window after a catastrophe. Science can gesture at adrenaline, but it cannot quite account for all of it.Where to Find LoloLolo’s podcast, REALMS commune, is available on YouTube and is worth exploring. If you have any interest in the paranormal approached without sensationalism, or in the human psychology behind extraordinary experiences, the episode library will keep you busy. If you are looking for therapeutic support—particularly around trauma, anxiety, and grief—Lolo works through Teladoc.Both Lolo and I book guest appearances through Podmatch, for anyone interested in having either of us on their show.Listen to the Full ConversationThe full episode is available on the Lens of Hopefulness newsletter on Substack at lensofhopefulness.substack.com, and on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible. This article covers the main points, but there is quite a bit more in the full hour—including Lolo’s thoughts on near-death experiences, the fine line between mystical experience and psychosis, the Medjugorje apparitions, and what it means to live with “calm acceptance” when the people you love most pass away.Podcast and article copyright 2026 Passadino Publishing LLC This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lensofhopefulness.substack.com