Episode 189: How to Make Daily Life Feel Magical Again
Autumn greetings!
As the days grow shorter and the air cools, I find myself eyes-wide with enchantment.
Enchantment is the core of my spiritual practice.
Sometimes I think spiritual practice can be so aimed at transcending suffering that we forget that wonder is what we're here for.
My experience of enchantment is that it is less an escape into fantasy and more a deepening of intimacy.
All around you, enchantment is whirring and stirring.
The books stacked at your bedside, the lemon on your kitchen counter, the coat rack that holds your comings and goings—all dwellings of the holy, prayers in plain sight.
This is why I'm so excited to gather and bring you a free new workshop:
The Everyday Enchantress • A free workshop to bring magic, intuition, and meaning back into your days
Wednesday, October 29th, 6pm ET
✵
This workshop is for you if you'd like support with:
Lightening your load to let enchantment in more fully
A re-centering of matters most to you and ways to bring that to the heart of the altar of your life
Melting the physical and emotional tension that blocks your magic
More direct access to your intuition to make clearer, quicker, more confident decisions
A renewed sense of wonder in the living world, and bringing aliveness to your everyday routines
Inspiration to live seasonally, sensually and sacredly
Here's to embodying the slow, sensing, creative creature you came here to be.
Here's to making logs of cranberry butter with a simmer pot on the stove.
Here's to looking up at the stars more than we look down at our screens.
Enchantment matters. It really does.
Reserve your place on a velvet pouf, and I'll see you on the 29th.
Until the, Enchantress,
Mary
P.S. - Yes, there will be a playback!
P.P.S. - Two fun, supportive presents will be delivered to you the minute you RSVP. Here's a hint:
-
Hello, beautiful and welcome to the Come to Your Census podcast. I'm your host, award-winning, certified feminine embodiment coach, licensed aesthetician and enthusiastic foster dog, mama to animals across the land. Mary Lofgren. Here we explore how to bring more richness, radiance, peace, and pleasure to our lives, homes, and hearts.
Through the joy of beauty, the wisdom of the body, the warmth of connection, and the splendor of the senses. I'm so glad you're here. Pull up a poof and let's dive in.
Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to a brand new episode. I am so excited to be back here with you. I've taken a little time off because I celebrated my birthday a few weeks ago, and then I went to visit my mama, at which point I a upon touchdown contracted a case of COVID. That was kind of a cosmic joke to be in the same.
House with my mom, but not be able to be in the same room. But we made the best of it. We made it enchanting anyway, spent a lot of time on the rockers, on the porch, and. Right now in the Northern Hemisphere where I live, it is the first crisp days of autumn. Oh, raise your hand if you watched Practical Magic on August 30th this year.
I have not always been an autumn lover, but last year I got really into studying Enchantment and enchantment. When I mean, when I say that word is very simply a deeper intimacy with the living sensory world and a quality of attention. That we bring to our daily routines. So all around us Enchantment is worrying and stirring at all times, and enchantment is really the core of my spiritual practice.
Sometimes I think spiritual practice can be so aimed at. Transcending and overcoming suffering that we forget. That wonder is the whole reason that we're here, and there are so many tiny pockets of enchantment, like the books on your bedside. The lemon on your kitchen counter, the coat rack that holds all your cums and goings.
All of these places are altars of the holy, and that's what today's episode is gonna be centered around is the art of slipping behind the veil. Enchantment through a deepening of our attention and a enrichening rich, rich, enriching of awareness. And also what I wanna invite you to in this episode is a really exciting gathering that I'm gonna be hosting on October 29th.
It's a Wednesday called The Everyday Enchant. And it's all about how to bring more magic and meaning into your days. How to awaken your intuition and how to make wonder more of a way of life. And you can learn all about it at the link below this episode. Or if you go to. Mary lofgren.com/enchant. And yes, there will be a playback.
And yes, it's free. And this is my gift to you as a celebration of the turning of the season in a way to help you embody the sensing slow creative creature that you came here to be. So here's two logs of cranberry butter in the kitchen with a simmer pot on the stove. Here's to looking up at the stars more than we look at our screens and here's to centering enchantment on the altar of our lives because it matters.
It really. Really matters. So Mary lofgren.com/enchant. I shall save you a velvet. Poof.
So, as listeners of this podcast, know whenever I introduce a topic. I always find that the keystone of that topic is to look at the word and its etymology its roots so that we can really understand what we're exploring at its most paired down level. So. The word enchantment has a few definitions. One is a feeling of great delight.
Another is a feeling of great pleasure and attraction, especially because something is very beautiful, but my absolute favorite. Cue the tweeting birds is to sing into, oh, let's just ripple that through your nervous system. Enchantment means to sing. Into something. And what I love so much about that is that it elevates the mystery of Enchantment.
You know, when I think about Enchantment, I think about a. All of these realms of fantasy that we're usually presented with in fairies and leprechauns and gnomes and stories and shimmers and fireflies and all these things. And to me, what those things really symbolize is the mystery within ourselves that comes alive when we choose to become intimate with the mystery of life.
And that requires, like I said in the intro to the episode, a certain quality of attention. And so as we transition into our gems, what I'm gonna be sharing with you are some of the ways that we can draw this energy of enchantment closer in how we live, how we pray, how we make decisions, and the way that we spend our days.
And so the first gym. It's simply called Praying with your Senses. So I remember being a little kid. I was raised very Catholic and Catholicism, a lot of the rituals and incense and. Holidays that we see sprinkled throughout Catholicism, and a lot of Christianity are derivatives from the Pagan tradition.
And pagan is simply a word that means country dweller. Paganism is the religion of nature. And when I remember being a little kid. We did a lot of learning of our prayers, and one of the prayers was called the act of contrition. My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart and choosing to do wrong and failing to do good.
I have sinned against you whom I should love. Above all things I firmly intend with your help to do penance, to sin no more and to avoid whatever leads me to sin right out of the memory bank. And listen, could I slow that down and look at and hold up to the light each statement and find its deeper spiritual significance?
Of course. But when I look at being a little kid and learning to say by memory on a daily basis, I have sinned against you. And of course, this is my experience having grown up in a very Catholic home. You may have grown up in a religious home with a different religion, or you may have grown up with no religion, but the fact that our culture, especially here in the United States, is largely based on Judeo-Christian values and patriarchal systems in general, those systems.
Are largely based in a superiority and separation from nature. And when that happens, we lose this kaleidoscope of intelligence that our body possesses. We are separated from our innate instinctual sense of wisdom, sense of yes and no, and making clear decisions. And we tend to live primarily from where we've been taught the framework, which is the mind.
You know, the fact that I can pull that prayer out of the memory bank and that it was impressed upon me when my brain was still forming, is just evidence of how these things that were taught about life, about divinity, about sacredness, for better or worse. Become lodged in the folds of our consciousness.
But the good news is that our consciousness is informed by our subconscious and our subconscious. Speaks in a different language than the conscious mind. The conscious mind of understands language. It understands logic, it understands reason. The subconscious mind speaks in the language of image sensation.
Smell, touch, taste. And so this gem about praying with your senses is a gem of using the gift and the beauty of your senses to invoke the presence of the sacred. You might have prayers that you love, I do that are spoken prayers that help summon and conjure that essence and that energy that you wish to intend.
But a really powerful way that I have come to pray with Enchantment at the center of my spiritual practice is to simply place myself. In the center of the elements. So in the morning I will light a pillar candle. That's kind of my home hearth, central candle. Then I'll take little birthday candles and sometimes I'll correspond them to the day of the week.
There are systems of color magic where. For example, on Tuesdays, which are a day that possesses astrologically a lot of Mars energy, you might burn a candle that's red. And I'm not a huge esoteric astrology, sacred geometry, all the things kind of person. But I do find that these ancient ancestral messages just give a little bit more direction and a little bit clearer of a compass to my practice.
And birthday candles burn down in like a couple of minutes and. I burn half the birthday candle and use that as meditation time. I also will do writing during that time, speaking out my prayers on the page, which again gathers from a deeper place than just the front of the mind and the intellect. And sometimes I'll bring in sacred smoke for the power of aroma.
And even watch the curls of smoke. You know, there's all sorts of ways that we can deviate and connect with our intuition and staring at the curls of incense while asking a question or setting an intention and allowing yourself to partner with the magic outside of you to call upon the magic inside of you is a really powerful way.
To bring the senses and bring Enchantment into your prayer practice. And that makes a great segue into our next gem, which is about building that connection with your intuition, which that word has roots that reach into a direct, immediate understanding without conscious reasoning. Intuition can be broken down into, in which simply means.
Wait for it in and Tori, which means to look at. So to look within, and many of my clients who come seeking embodiment coaching or just a more embodied way of living, have often relied heavily on their intellect. Usually they've been successful in the worlds of academia or. Corporate work or working in very masculine dominated professions, and they feel like there's little to no contact with their intuition and their body feels offline.
We start exploring the different centers of the body, the energy centers and the intelligence centers, and. It's a very slow process to regain that embodied intelligence, but just like reintroducing yourself to a friend or a long lost loved one, intuition is all about relationship, and relationship comes from intimacy.
Whenever I think about intimacy, whether it's with a person or intimacy with my work, intimacy with my spaces, intimacy for me really centers around acceptance and saying, I see you as you are. You are welcome here without any conditions, and I wanna know you. And these are words that we use in my coaching sessions when it comes to especially some of these deeper, more uncomfortable sensations of emotional and physical tension held onto around fear or guilt or shame or anxiety.
And the first step to releasing any kind of tension is to validate it. Tension will only grip on harder if it's being ordered around or turned away from. And with your intuition, I share that because you might ask this. Enchanted cauldron that is your belly and your pelvic bowl, what would you have me know right now?
And, okay. Deep cut. If you're a fan of Super Mario Brothers, of which I am an evangelist. Apostle of such games that surprises a lot of people. In fact, on my online dating profile, I used to have one of the answers about my personality as glam queen on the outside Mario Champion on the inside. And there were these question boxes that, you know, your Mario goes under and you hit your head up on the question box and a mushroom or a feather comes out.
And then sometimes you would hit it and if it was dead, it would make this like sound. I don't really know why or how we wandered into this pasture of randomness, but a lot of my subconscious has to do with. I images and movies and games that I saw when I was a kid, because you know, I spent a lot of time doing those things.
So in therapy, a lot of times I'll be like, you know, it's like that scene in the Lord of the Rings, or it's like this moment when you're playing Mario because these part, these games and these. Movies and films engage that part of us that's rooted in enchantment and mystery. And so you ask your pelvic bowl, what would you have me?
Now it responds with the dead end question box in Mario, and maybe you throw up your hands and you go say, I'll never get this. This will never work. And the. Communication, the tin cans attached by a string. That is your communication and connection to your intuition becomes even more flacid. And the way that we can tighten and bring some healthy tension to that rope so that your interpretation and receptivity to the whispers of your intuition becomes stronger is to practice being with and using your intuition.
So. When I used to live in Brooklyn, I lived very close to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, and at one point I was studying to become a koya teacher. And Rochelle, who's the founder of Koya inspired Movement, taught me about intuition walks. And I would go to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and there's all these winding paths that veer off into forks and.
I would say, okay, intuition, would you have me go left or right? And sometimes I'd get a really clear answer. Sometimes I'd get an answer and I'd be like, no, that's my mind. We're asking intuition here. And I just couldn't hear an answer. So I would just do my best and choose with my mind. And just like you might practice an instrument or an art technique.
Requires that we sit down at our watercolor desk and we relate to it and we allow for mistakes. Misses times where we thought we were doing it right. But maybe weren't times where our hands learned how to work their way into a certain cord, even though it's not the taught way, our bodies intelligently knew how to get there in their own way.
Intuition is exactly the same. And when it comes to deepening your sense of enchantment, and this is something we're gonna talk about a lot at the workshop, is how to make quicker. Clearer, more confident decisions utilizing your fullest system of intelligence, which. Your mind is only 20% of your full system of intelligence.
You have an entire body, your physical body, your emotional body, your intuitive body there to give you a deeper felt sense of wisdom and clarity and certainty, and it all starts with a willingness to practice. So that brings us to our last gem, my friends, on bringing Enchantment more fully into your life.
And this is a gem of where you place your hands. So I don't know about you, but in our technology fueled world, I have like. A developing condition called Phone Pinky, where sometimes from holding my phone all the time, it's like I'm noticing this pain and this discomfort from that particular shape of my hands.
And our thumbs are constantly moving. Our fingers are constantly tapping and. Our hands are constantly manipulating and moving around this virtual world, sending messages like paper airplanes. Maybe you're conversing through your fingertips with AI these days. Maybe you're connecting with new people through a dating app, and all of this is happening through your hands and through this virtual device.
And if you want more enchantment in your life, the number one thing I would recommend is to look at where your hands are in life and bring them to something that connects you to the living world. So something else we'll talk about in the workshop is that so many of our everyday routines that often feel like burdens can be these portals to enchantment things such as chopping produce to put in a saute pan.
Reading a physical, tangible book that you can turn the pages of massaging your moisturizer into your skin at the end of the day. Recently in the Sanctuary, which is a membership that I have that is all about seasonal sacred sensory living in community. I created this little video of how to charm and enchant your journal practice.
And this has been, I mean, I have to just throw my hands up to the sky and say that. One of the most enchanting aspects of my life over the years has become my journaling practice, and what has made my journaling practice just this alluring grandi of enchantment is. Decorating it. So I have all these collage supplies that I collect.
I have feathers from trips to the beach that have wandered onto my blanket. I have greeting cards where family and friends have written words. The other day I pasted into my journal on top of a piece of collage paper. Just the words love and support that were pinned by my brother into a greeting card.
And you know, having that on the bottom corner of my journal page when I'm writing by my birthday candle in the morning, it's like this. Routine that ordinarily might be going through the motions or just rattling off my thoughts becomes this sacred portal to the eternal, and I'll close our gems by saying that for so many of us, I think the most common experience in our modern age is I'm too busy, I don't have enough time.
I don't have enough time. I life doesn't feel spacious. It feels busy. It feels cramped and. Yes, that is a symptom of having too much to do, but it is also a symptom of the absence of the timeless. And so these gems and the much deeper dive that will be going into at the every day in Chantri on October 29th are not just ways to make your life more sparkly, even though we'll take that.
They are also ways to evoke a sense of timelessness and eternity, which paradoxically is a what? Another way of saying a plush, exquisite experience of the present moment where all the clutter. Falls away and we are left with the simple enchantment of being alive in a body. And so if you would like to dive deeper into what you heard today, I cannot wait to see you at the everyday Enchanters.
Go to Mary lofgren.com/enchant to join us to RSVP, and I'm wishing you a luscious, textured, gorgeous week. I am so happy to be back with you, and I will see you in our next episode.