Episode 178: Weekly Rituals for a Life That Feels Like Home

When I was little, we had a family member go into the hospital for a major surgery.

Over a three-week stay, my mom would often sleep at the hospital, and my dad and I would complete our evening ritual: pick out snacks from the hospital cafeteria (chips and ice cream cones were our favorites), and head back to the hotel to watch a movie and wind down.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that steady rhythm of comfort and connection gave me a strong anchor in an otherwise stressful sea of change.

Tiny rituals like these create the drumbeat of our week, and the heartbeat of our lives.

They offer a structure for our bodies to orient to and say, “Ah yes. I know this. I’ve been here before. I know what comes next.”

In today’s episode, you’ll discover:

• The story of one of my greatest inspirations—and his beautifully simple approach to life

• My favorite rituals for closing the day and transitioning from doing to being

• The most reliable Monday ritual I know to cut through the noise and reconnect with what matters most for the week ahead

Pour a bowl of Jell-O with whipped cream (another cafeteria favorite), and listen in.

With love,

Mary

P.S. If a little rhythm, a warm cup, and a softer way of being sound like just the thing— The Sanctuary is open now through tomorrow, Wednesday June 25th. Come slip through the garden gate before it closes, and tuck yourself into a season of peace, pleasure, and presence.

• 178 Transcript. Weekly Rituals for a Life That Feels LIke Home

  Weekly Rituals for A Life that feels like home

   Hello beautiful and welcome to the Come to Your Senses podcast. I'm your host, award winning certified feminine embodiment coach, licensed esthetician, 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 pouf and let's dive in. Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode. Weekly rituals to bring you back home. So when I think about someone who has a sense of home within themselves, who has their priorities in order, who has an abounding serenity. No matter what's happening. One of the figures that I think of is one of the great inspirations for my work, which is the character Winnie the Pooh and Winnie the Pooh. You know, I think is a great titan of sensual living. A.A. Milne, in his writing about Winnie the Pooh, would sometimes say a bear, a very little brain. And I love that, actually, because Winnie the Pooh is all body. He loves his honey. He loves his naps. He loves his sitting by the fire reading under a tree. And he is really the rock upon which the other eccentric characters. The waves of those characters crash upon. You know, there's something immovable about Winnie the Pooh. And so in today's episode, I am going to share with you some of my most cherished rituals to create a sense of sacred sensory structure in your week, to ground you and to create this beautiful hammock of ritual in which your energy, your body, your creativity can unfurl because it has the support of these weekly rituals. And this episode was inspired by the fact that tomorrow, at the time of this recording, tomorrow being June 25th, is the last day to join the sanctuary, which is our online feminine presence collective. And the reason I wanted to make this ritual is because the entire essence of the sanctuary is these small rituals of peace and pleasure that bring you back home to yourself and create this through line of velvet presence throughout your life. So I'll be talking about the sanctuary here and there throughout the episode, but if you would like to join us before the Garden Gate swing closed for the season on June 25th, head to the link below this episode, or just go to Mary Lofgren Sanctuary. So let us now dive in to our gems on weekly rituals to bring you back home. And I'm going to begin with a story. So when I was about 9 or 10, we had a family member who had to have a pretty major surgery and be hospitalized in another city for a couple of weeks. And so my family and I stayed in a hotel near the hospital. And my mom especially, was there tending and taking care of this family member. And my mom would stay in the evening. And every night my dad and I would leave the hospital and we would have our régime. My dad was in the seminary for almost two decades, and he studied and was fascinated by the language of Latin. And a red gem is another word, or it's a Latin word for routine, ritual, repetition. And so we would go to the hospital snack bar and get Jell-O with whipped cream and drumstick ice cream cones and French fries. And we'd bring them back to the hotel room and we'd watch TV. And looking back on it. That experience really stayed with me, and I imagine provided a sense of security and consistency and just the freedom of a little extra comfort during this time of great instability. And so that story is meant to illustrate the power that these weekly rituals can have. To help us mark the passing of time in a sacred, contained, beautiful way that feels less random and more like rhythm. And so our first gem is the Ritual of Sundays. And this also begins with a story. So many years ago when I was first getting sober. Been sober for about nine years, and in those beginning phases I was. Not living in my old patterns and my old life, which was very familiar, but I was not yet established in my new patterns and my new life. So I was in this very uncomfortable wasteland of the middle, and I had just moved to a new city. I didn't really know anyone, so I was spending a lot of time alone, a lot of time isolated, a lot of time doomscrolling. And I remember waking up one Sunday and just saying to myself, I am not going to spend this entire day. Woe is me tucked away in my house looking at my phone. So I made a decision to put the phone away, put it in a drawer, and I started the day by reading on the porch, and all of a sudden I had this craving for red hibiscus iced tea. And I had a box in my A cupboard. And so I put the teabags in a pitcher, and I brewed the tea, and I put it in the refrigerator with ice cubes. And then I felt inspired to go out into my yard, where there was some fresh mint left by a previous tenant, and I sprinkled some of that inside the pitcher. And then I got this overwhelming urge to clean the kitchen. And so I remember listening to podcasts while I cleaned the kitchen top to bottom. And it just became this incredible ritual of intimacy with the pieces of myself that I was not yet fully comfortable with, but using the medium of simple pleasures and embodied presence as a way to soften the edges of that discomfort. And today, my Sundays look very different. I really love my Sunday mornings now. And one of the things that makes my Sunday morning so rich is that I have a weekly ritual of practicing my watercolors in Sunday mornings. So all week I save these little videos on Pinterest board of watercolor, like how to paint a radish or how to paint a tree, or how to paint a skunk or whatever. And it's like these little 1 to 2 minute videos. And then Sunday mornings pat out in my fuzzy slippers and my linen robe, and I make a delicious cup of steaming bergamot Earl grey tea. Sometimes I make a pot and I pad over to my watercolor desk and I get myself all set up. And then I turn on, like Benny Goodman or some other driving with the top down, under a lane, edged by cherry blossoms floating down through the sky situation. And sometimes it's the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack, actually. And then I just paint and sometimes I'll listen to a recording of some spiritual. Text or a recording. Lately I've been listening to a lot of Mark Nepo or a recording of a teacher that I follow, and it is just so wildly fulfilling. And I talk about this a lot when it comes to rituals that center around beauty. That beauty has a way of changing us without us having to effort towards change. You know, a lot of the spiritual work that I've done and rituals that I've done in my life in an attempt to find a sense of grounding, I. Had an opinion that if they weren't rigorous and if they weren't challenging, then they weren't spiritual enough. And it's this unraveling of this age's old myth that for something to be spiritually worthy, it has to include some kind of suffering or overcoming of suffering and beauty and the ritual of sacred space on a Sunday morning to just do something that brings you pleasure and a relaxed sense of play. You know, I like to think of some of that deeper, more analytical, archetypal shadow work, edge of spirituality and personal growth as like the stitches of healing, whereas beauty, practice and sacred space and being in sacred intimacy with the deeper parts of ourselves. Those are like a lavender calm, free balm that we smooth on to the skin, and both are essential to our becoming. So this first ritual, a Sunday morning or whenever, is your time during the week to carve out a little sacred space, to be with something that fills up your soul, and you might not know what that is yet, and that is totally okay. And one of the things that you might want to make your ritual is to assemble a basket of beautiful things and things that pique your curiosity. So if I were to create a Sunday morning basket for myself, I might include a beautiful journal and a weighty pen, actually. I can't remember if I mentioned this in the intro. I don't think I did that for sanctuary members. We have just come out with a brand new 30 day journal called the Everyday Sensualist that is filled with rituals, 5 to 15 minute rituals that you can do every day to expand your pleasure capacity, to deepen into your sense of presence, and to do so in a way that feels playful and sensuous and that honors the needs of your feminine nervous system. So something I talk about quite often here on the podcast, because I just want to preach it from the rooftops, is that for feminine oriented nervous systems, we find regulation center presence in a totally different framework than those nervous systems that are oriented more towards a masculine way. And this could be any sex, any gender. We all have these qualities that we have labeled masculine and feminine in our beings. Research has proven that these orientations towards these energies is completely fluid in our neural wiring. And so to just speak to this idea that spirituality. Demands some sort of rigor. You know, I think that that can be true in many ways, but that also is an approach that is designed specifically to suit the needs and the trajectory of a masculine system who responds to stress and creates safety through controlling the environment, who relates to the body through the lens of optimization improvement, and who excels at problem solving and taking action. Who is able to compartmentalize emotions as a superpower in some cases, and whose path to restoration, because of all that outward energy, tends to be one that is more rooted in solitude, stillness, discipline. But if you have a system that orients more towards these energies that we call the feminine. You are someone who will wilt. Like a houseplant in this structure. Or at least I have always wilted like a houseplant. In this structure, I mean, I always talk about how growing up, my relationship to spirituality was really soaked and saturated in the dogma of organized religion. And so I did a lot of soul searching and trying to find my way and find my center in meditation retreats and philosophy classes and yoga studios. And while those experiences were very healing in many ways, I often just felt like some part of me was constantly spilling out of the sides because my system is less linear and independent and is more cyclical and interdependent. Rather than trying to optimize my body, I thrive when I listen and soften into my body. Rather than trying to fix. You know, trying to fix often just makes me way more stressed out. Way more of a rabbit slash piglet in the Winnie the Pooh archetypal energies. So it's like rather than fixing going into that deep state of feeling to parse out what is not mine to fix and what is instead mine to feel deeply and feel my way forward on. And the main thing I want to communicate in this gem, and as it relates to this idea of beauty being a locus of spiritual healing, is that for feminine beings, rather than solitude and stillness and problem solving, our systems are literally wired to regulate through beauty, through sensory experiences, through emotional expression. Have you ever noticed that when you're really stressed out, you can talk to a girlfriend over a cup of coffee or over FaceTime and spill the tea, and then you feel immediately better and like all is right with the world again. And that is because the feminine system is really designed to center attachment as a mechanism of safety and stability in life. And so all of that is to say that watercolors matter. Sacred space matters. And following the path where that divine spark appears around the bend. For your unique system, whether that's a hike in the Himalayas or a glass of hibiscus iced tea, that tending to your unique garden of the sacred matters. And so may your Sunday rituals be abundant, colorful, fruitful. And our next gem is another day of the week and another weekly ritual. And that is the ritual of Fridays. Am I the only one who grew up counting down the hours to full house and a bowl of popcorn on a Friday night, Fridays, or any time where during the week there is a sense of sacred separation, are an extraordinary time to plant your flag of pleasure, where you leave the stress and the worries of the week behind and you unfurl into the fertile space. Of either the weekend or the end of the day. You know, I work from home and I spend a lot of time by myself, and at night I do a lot of movement, especially yoga. Here in the Bay area, we have the most extraordinary yoga teachers, and I go to Andrea's class on Mondays, Susanna's class on Wednesdays, and to Shana's class on Fridays and especially on Fridays to Shauna. You know, it's a regular Friday class, so there's always this theme of it being Friday. A sense of letting go through the breath, through the movement. To Shauna plays the most extraordinary music in her classes, where we were just talking about this the other day. She plays a playlist that is almost entirely neo soul, and it just immediately drops me into my body, and it's just the most velvety, delicious experience. And what's beautiful about it is that. You know, when I think about my grandparents generation, for example, and the way that their work environments were set up, it's like you go to work, you go home like it's I'm sure bringing work home happened. But, you know, nowadays, literally the same device that holds our alarm clock, holds our work email and all these other distractions. And so, more than ever, it is essential to have rituals that allow us to create a passageway and a blessing way through which to walk into our weekends, into the end of our day, and into these sacred portals and passages of allowing that more outward weekday self to soften, and allowing those more nocturnal all playful, loose parts of self that come out on a Friday night or in the evening. To have safe space to play and rituals like a regular yoga class or, you know, I've done numerous podcast episodes on different ways to mark the passing of time through simple rituals. One that's coming to mind is Golden Hour Rituals. You know, many times in my life I have marked golden hour by closing my computer and tidying my desk and making myself a delicious mocktail and turning jazz on the stereo. And, you know, just bringing in these sensory elements that help to create a marker for my body and my system to say, the day is done. It is now time to open to the pleasures of evening. And that brings me to our final ritual. The big cheese the day. We often need a ritual the most, but our least likely to give ourselves that space. And that is the Monday ritual. And for this ritual, you know, I try to keep it really simple on Mondays. And my most steadfast phone a friend. Save my ass in moments where I felt so desperate and like nothing could possibly help me or set me right. Is two way prayer. And so two way prayer is a practice. That is, I think, as old as spirituality itself, where it's a way of praying that isn't just talking to a power greater than yourself, but it's dialoguing with it. And this practice was revived for me recently, in the last couple of years by Elizabeth Gilbert, who has a Substack called letters From Love. And it's a community where everyone practices two way prayer with the question, dear love, what would you have me know today? Or dear love, what would you have me know about boundaries? Or you know, some special topic? And you know, there are a bajillion things that we can do on a Monday morning once again. I have purchased so many planners, so many planners in my life that are centered around hacking time and, you know, just all these, uh, I mean, okay, this is going to sound I, I'm a little afraid I might sound like a bitch, but here we go. Like productivity, bro practices. You know what I mean? Where I'm, like, trying to optimize my energy so I can start the week strong, you know? And sometimes I need that, you know, sometimes I need that real structured order and invigoration. Sometimes I need total softness and fluidity and flow. But more often than not, I need some combination of both. And when I think about Winnie the Pooh, it's like Winnie the Pooh has this perfect embodiment of all of these energies of gentle ritual, routine, structure, met with deep pleasure and presence and ease and flow, and creates this extraordinary resilience and serenity and contentment in Winnie the Pooh that I personally strive to have in my day to day life, and that more than any other ritual I can think of, two way prayer is the direct passageway to that kind of inner dialogue, of balance and of truth. And in the sanctuary, actually, I have a whole little mini master class on this practice that I actually created once a book of lines from my two way prayer. Because always like these lines that fall out of my pen are just. So deeply wise and profound and comforting. And I put them into a book and made it into a PDF where there are, you know, lines like a sheep, like a black sheep image and it'll say, don't worry about straying too far from the flock. I will follow you. You know, there's an image of a fiddlehead fern unfurling and it just says, I am the opposite of shame. And so the way that you do this practice, I don't think I've given instruction yet the way that I've learned this practice. And, oh, I already talked about the way Elizabeth Gilbert does it. Dear love, what would you have me know today? Sometimes I'll say, dear love, what is your vision for my life? What would you have me know today about this specific topic or this specific area? And I am always astounded at the Simplicity and deep wisdom that emerges when I sincerely ask love to occupy my pen. And so my loves, my hearts, my cherubs. It has been a pleasure, as always, to dance between your eardrums in today's episode. And once again, today's episode is really just a tiny window into the lifestyle of rhythm and ritual and small moments of peace and pleasure that is available when you join us in the sanctuary. Right now, there's an extraordinary bonus in a beautiful new journal that I've created for sanctuary members, and that is actually quite inspired by Winnie the Pooh, in the sense that each day for 30 days, you're invited into a 5 to 15 minute ritual of presence and pleasure that speaks to your inner child, and that includes watercolor images and poetry and rituals that involve your senses. And it's just such an extraordinary way to orient to presence and mindfulness and really, what we're all after at the heart of every desire, which is the ability to actually feel at home in our own lives and in our own bodies, and in a way that was designed for the unique needs of the wiring of the feminine nervous system. So once again, Mary Lofgren, or click the link below. This episode. Garden gates close for the season on June 25th and we would love to welcome you. Thank you so much as always for listening and I will see you in our next episode.