Episode 191 - Three Minute Magic: Tiny Rituals to Indulge Your Senses
Sometimes, the smallest rituals are what create the biggest transformations.
If you’ve got hours to spend by candlelight, journaling with a feather quill, Goddess bless you.
But if you’re like most folks, with barely a moment to huff some lavender before taxiing your kiddos to their next appointment… my friend, I’ve got you.
In this episode, we explore:
How to turn everyday moments—like getting out of bed or waiting in the car line—into altars of beauty and meaning.
Tiny, sensory rituals that soothe your nervous system
A small mindset shift that dissolves time obstacles by dropping you into the timeless.
Join me in these rituals as a thread back to presence, back to beauty, back to you.
🎧 Click here to listen in.
With warmth and wonder,
Mary
P.S. If you’re ready for more of this beauty-meets-presence kind of living, The Sanctuary is ready for you.
Perhaps this weekend you’d like to dive into:
👠 A private podcast on enchanted ways to adorn
🕯️ A guided meditation with incense as your muse
🧴 A morning skincare spell to conjure confidence
🔥 A fire-crackling visualization to connect with your ancestors
And that’s just the tip of the witch’s hat. 🪄
You'll get access to all these and many more mini-rituals the minute you join.
Doors are open for just a few more days.
🌸 Step into The Sanctuary here.
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Episode 191
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. I am always excited to come to you and wander with you through the woods on your morning walks, or drive with you to car line or wherever you happen to be listening to these episodes. But I am particularly excited about today, because we're talking about one of my absolute favorite topics, which is small rituals that help awaken sensory presence and make your day feel more enchanted. But also because we have just opened the garden gates of the sanctuary community. The sanctuary is our seasonal membership, where soulful women and feminine hearted beings come to slow down, to live with more intention, to lead from presence and to enchant life all through the body and the senses. And the reason today's episode is going to be like a small taste is because we believe in the sanctuary, that the best way to improve your life is to actually fully experience your life. And none of us were made to white knuckle our way through our days. We were made to taste and to touch and to feel and to experience life through our senses. And so if you'd like to learn more about some of the amazing features and benefits of being a sanctuary member, some of which include weekly sensory rituals, live embodiment practices, tiny pauses of peace and pleasure that are threaded throughout your week. We have a brand new full color journal to be a companion to your experience. You just have to see it on the page because it's like a treasure box of delights. You can go to Marie Lofgren Sanctuary. Or just click the link below. This episode we are open for new members between now and November 4th, and so come and recenter your radiance and be enfolded into the arms of warm, cozy community in the sanctuary. And so, my friends, let us now dive into our gems on small rituals that engage your senses and enchant your life. And so I want to begin today's episode by setting it up with a little bit of context, and I'd love to help weave a hammock of context through storytelling, because equally important to the content, the actual rituals and suggestions and practices is the deeper why of why these matter and why they're important. Because I know I don't need to tell you that there are tsunamis of information and things that we can and should and could do coming at us from all angles, all the time. But context drops us into the deeper purpose and almost clears a space in our hearts and in our bodies for these seeds of practice to take root and bloom through our lives. And both of my stories come from when I was a kid, and they sent her around the fact that my parents were amazing, and one of the ways they showed their love was to create a net of security for me and my brother by working really hard. And that meant that we had some amazing. Benefits to our childhood, like going to private school and living on this beautiful land. But it also meant that my parents worked a lot, and even when they weren't working, they were still kind of working in their minds. And even when they weren't working in their minds, they were doing other things around the house. And, you know, we're just like so many of us, especially in a capitalist culture, guided by that urgency of doing. And what I remember, there are these two isolated memories that stick out in my head. One was around the winter time. I still have this ornament. My mom brought home a craft kit and it was a beaded snowflake ornament, and we just sat at the kitchen table and we beaded these snowflake ornaments. And, you know, this was one of many moments. I don't mean this was the only moment from my childhood, but what I remember so vividly about it was her complete attention and sense of presence that we weren't going through a mechanical task or driving to a dance class that, you know, I had wanted to be in, or a field hockey practice or, you know, rushing through life. We were slowing down to savor each other, to use our hands and to experience beauty together. Another core memory of presence was my dad and I had white sweaters. We both happened to have these cable knit, cream colored, kind of Ireland esque white sweaters that we had bought separately, but we discovered we had the same sweaters. So one day we had White Sweater Day, where we both wore our white sweaters, and dad took me out to pizza. And it's like I can feel in my body now the joy and the specialness of, you know, having again the inclusion of beauty and something special, but having a moment sitting across the table from my dad where it was just us and where there were no distractions, and there was this unhurried presence. And in my coaching practice, you know, after coaching hundreds of women over the years, I used to think that what was at the core of every woman's desire was relaxation, whether it was a more illustrious career or more meaningful work, or starting a family or ending a relationship, you know. At the core of all of that is a release from the grip of needing to do, or needing to get to the next place, and a sense of bone deep relaxation and presence. And that is certainly at the core of every desire. But what's even beneath that desire is a desire for enchanted presence. And when I think about enchantment, it's like enchantment is awareness that meets magic. So I love awareness practices, meditation practices, calling upon that sacred witness that can observe and watch part of myself without interfering or interrupting. Being able to, you know, turn my head with awareness, you know, like all of these are really important practices, but sometimes they can feel a little sterile and just lack the richness that comes from being fully alive in our bodies and in the enchantment of being alive. And this is why my work. Really centers around the senses, because the senses have this magical power where they can both drop us into and yank us out of presence. So a lot of these more detached forms of awareness, you know, like meditation, stillness, solitude are a way of minimizing sensory stimuli so that we can become more awake to presence. But there's also this hidden superpower of the senses, where taste and touch and aroma and sound and music are these markers and imprints of actually being here and being alive in a body. And so as we transition into our gems now, I want to share with you rituals for the morning and ways to enrich your morning through the senses, rituals for gliding into your afternoon and evening. And really, these are rituals for marking transition so that our bodies can prepare to have a different experience. And then finally, some thought magic. Because, paradoxically, what often blocks us from being in our bodies is not our bodies at all. It's the thoughts that circle our minds. And so let us begin where every day begins, which is with morning. A few of the enchanted aspects of morning are. Birdsong. Morning light. Dew drops. Fresh coffee. That liminal space between sleep and the frenzy of day, where your creativity and your openness and your receptivity is a bit more on board. And for many of us, myself included, sometimes that liminal space can be interrupted, or the arousal of energy that we sometimes need to get out of bed can be, how shall I say, jolted into place by the immediate looking at our phones. And that jolts, you know, my one of my mentors, Jenna Ward, she talks about surrogate sensation and, you know, some of our compulsive behaviors, like Compulsively eating to self soothe or whatever it is compulsive spending that these are all ways of creating a surrogate sensation that we feel like we can't access through our bodies in the moment. So if it's comfort, if it's excitement, and often reaching for our phones first thing in the morning is a reaching for stimulation to generate energy. And what I'd love to invite you to do is use the magic portal that rests in the center of your face, called your olfactory system, to help arouse a more sustainable, more sensuous, more spiritual. Dare I say? You know, I don't like to classify things into spiritual hierarchy, but I know that I am myself way more connected to the realm of spirit, which I feel like is just the realm beyond my. Thinking and analytical mind. The realm of the mystery. When I'm engaging with something in the real world rather than the virtual world. And so some of the ways that you can perfume your mornings with more enchantment are having some essential oils on your bedside. You wake up, you reach over, you take a drop of peppermint. You suck that thing in through your nostrils. Let me tell you something that will give you some stimulation that no amount of blue light can ever compare to. You pad out of bed into the kitchen. You start to fix your coffee. Maybe you take a deep inhale of the beans before you place them in the grinder. And then something I'd love to do in the morning is pad over to my incense holder and light a stick of incense. There is something so hypnotic and settling to the nervous system Stem about the fragrance of incense swirling around our ankles and our wrists while we fix our breakfast, and another sensory element that I think often gets missed out on in the morning is the power of candlelight. You know, it's really common to light candles at nighttime when it's darker, to place a candle on your dinner table. But one of my favorite rituals, and this was inspired by a coffee shop in New York City. When I used to live in New York, there was this one coffee shop, and I'm blanking on the name of it. It was in Tribeca, but I'd go there in the morning. It was still dark out. It was like 6 a.m., you know, feeling in my New York crunch of my nerve endings and all stressed and all ready to get on the subway and get to where I'm going. And the whole place is illuminated by candles. And on all the walls are these little fuzzy model sheep. Okay, I have to look up the name. I'm going to pause my recording and check it out for you. Okay. It's called cafe 1668 with cafe spelled cafe. Check it out. It's charm on wheels. And so I would go in there in the morning and it's like, God, my nervous system would just be taken into this place of lubrication. I mean, there's just no other way to describe it where my nerves, which were brittle and weary, were just soothed and dropped into the sweetness and enchantment of warm candlelight. And so it's really inspired me to bring candlelight into my morning rituals and to leave the kitchen lights off, and to let myself be slowly woken up by the light of the sun and the light of soft flames. So that is one tiny ritual that you can include in your morning. The next is a ritual for transitional all times. So I think we can all relate to the experience of maybe working during the day, or taking care of the kiddos, or whatever it is you do to spend your daytime hours and then skidding into the evening like you're in the movie Risky Business, sliding on your socks on the floor and feeling like, oh my gosh, where did the day go? Oh my gosh, how do I relax? I don't know how to relax. So I think I should just numb out on Netflix in my phone at the same time. You know, maybe you skid right into bed and then you're laying there and your little peepers are propped open and you're thinking, I should be able to go to sleep. But your nervous system speaks a different story. And one of the things in my life that has taught me the most about relationship and about energy is my relationship with horses. So I have done some equine therapy and equine assisted education. And whenever I approach a horse. This is kind of one of the foundational core tenets of equine therapy is that when we approach a horse with energy that's stressed or distracted or dominating, you know, dominating in more of a capturing kind of way, transactional kind of way, what can I get from you kind of way? The horse will stiffen, it'll pull away, it'll lose interest in us. But when we approach the horse from our sense of center and where we see the horse in sacred relationship as a living, breathing, autonomous creature that we're interacting with through every eye gaze and every touch and every movement, subtle movement of our bodies, that is where things can really happen and blossom in relationship with the horse. Because the horse feels safe, it feels like it has your attention. It's like little white sweater Mary. And when it comes to your afternoons and evenings and the inclusion of enchantment, you know enchantment is much the same. Enchantment is something that exists around us all the time. But in order to be in relationship with it and receive it, we have to meet it on its own terms by slowing down. And so a ritual that I love to transition my evenings is mocktail hour. So I stopped drinking about, uh, 8 or 9 years ago. Coming up on nine years. Yeah, coming up on nine years. And I loved cocktails, and I was unwilling to give up that aspect of my life. I still love going to a beautiful bar and sitting at a bar and drinking a fancy mocktail. So something I love to do at golden hour when the sun is setting is I'll turn on some soft jazz. Get that Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Pandora going up in here, maybe light some candles, or if you have a fireplace. I'm a big fan of the electric fireplace space heater in the winter. Personally, even though it's not, I don't currently have a working fireplace in my home, and even though it's an electrical surrogate fire, it just still casts a spell of enchantment because there's something ancestral in our bodies that recognizes that sight. And I'll fix myself a mocktail which need not be fancy. And in fact, in the sanctuary, I have a video of myself making my signature simple mocktail. You know, the sanctuary is like this treasure trove of 5 to 10 minute rituals that you can use to enrich your morning, to transition into evening, to bring magic into your day. Recently, I made a video of myself making enchanted sowing potatoes to share with the sanctuary. And these are just really simple two step potatoes that you can make to honor the holy day of Sawan. Sometimes in other cultures, I'm sharing from my own lineage the Celtic culture. But day of the dead is another holiday that honors the ancestors and really honors death and the beauty and the necessity of letting go in this lifetime. I also love salon because it helps me relate differently to the parts of myself that I've been taught to fear and, you know, these quote unquote monsters inside of me and to honor them. Put glitter on them, dress them up, march them down the street on Halloween nights. So it's like, you know, one of the ways that we can honor that sacred transitional time in harmony with the seasons in the earth is with how we eat and how we adorn our food, you know? And these are just two examples of culinary treats. There's all sorts of sensory gems. I like to describe the sanctuary as a living, breathing garden for your senses. So head to Mary Lofgren Sanctuary. But back to mocktail. Our mocktails can be as simple as a can of spindrift. With a sprig of rosemary, you can go as far as concocting your own rose simple syrup and getting elderflower beverages and the like, but I like to keep it really simple. I love doing a little cranberry and ginger beer, and again, the inclusion of candlelight and taste and music and turning off devices. You know, I always say that if you want to clear the space for enchantment, just get thine self as far away from your electronics as you possibly can, except to play music, of course, although we do have a record player, which is a really handy trick to still have access to your most precious music without having to engage your phone and making it a ritual of transition which opens up. Your creative self. So oftentimes when we have a hard time relaxing at night, it's because we're so conditioned by that state of doing and frenzied activity that it can actually feel really uncomfortable to transition into a lower, uh, channel on the nervous system. A more bass note, like sitting at your craft table, or busting out those craft supplies, or laying down to read a book in the senses, have this miraculous power to ease us into evening. And in Italy, actually, there's a beloved tradition called Appassionata, which is where folks will take a golden hour sunset, stroll around their neighborhood, say hi to neighbors, and it's just a way to tuck the day away and to prepare to experience the different banquet of delights that evening has to offer. And the final gem that I want to share with you is some thought magic. Some thought enchantment. So, as I shared during the intro, the thing that often keeps us most from experiencing presence and experiencing our bodies is not our bodies, but it's our thoughts and. The most common thought, I think that keeps us from experiencing enchantment and presence is I don't have time. I don't have time. And I would like to introduce a seed into your consciousness. If you are so willing to accept that perhaps this barrier is not so much a lack of time, but a lack of trust. So often when we think we don't have time, what's really happening deep down, and that we think the only way to get to our goals and desires and to care for our people, is to stay in the frenzy of doing and enchantment a part, a big part of enchantment and presence is a reliance on other forces than our own busy minds and busy hands. And you know, I remember this one time I was working as a corporate trainer, and I was living in New York at the time, and the next morning I needed to go to Philadelphia for a speaking engagement. And I got an invite to go out dancing. And I was like, oh my God, are you kidding me? Like, I have to be on Amtrak at some ungodly hour. But I really wanted to go. And so I went and I stayed out until two in the morning, dancing and having just such a great time and harmlessly flirting with anything in sight. You know, just really being in my magic and really being in my joy. And ordinarily, I might stay up until probably the same hour, honestly, trying to perfect my speech and trying to get out all the details and memorize and whatever. And this time I just decided to try something different. And I got on Amtrak and I slept the whole way, and I got to Philadelphia, and I was feeling so in my magic and so in the enchantment, and with the delicious chemicals and neurotransmitters of pleasure running through my system, I had those folks in the palm of my hand. And when I say reliance on forces greater than busy minds and hands. It doesn't have to be these esoteric threads in the universe and the quantum field, you know, it simply can be as simple as there is creativity and magnetism when you are regulated. And our minds will likely always convince us that we don't have time for the things that bring us a sense of harmony and beauty and connection to the mystery. Because the mind doesn't want the mystery, the mind what it wants, what it can figure out, and what it control. Because that's super power. And in a world that is so driven by control, it makes sense that our minds and bodies would be conditioned and kind of set on this autopilot, that that is the only valid way to be in this world, and it's the only way to move forward. But this more feminine, more enchanted, more ritualistic way of being which ask any super successful person, I mean, maybe not any super successful person, but when I think of women in my life who really embodies the kind of success that I want, they are not squirreling at four in the morning in their email, like they have really made that switch from prioritizing. How it should look. And how to doggy paddle their way through life and get everything done. To radically stepping out of that paradigm and centering their self-care and radiance as the source of all other things. And so some thought magic that you can impart here is when your mind tells you to, you don't have time. A really powerful question to drop in here is, is that true? If we were to get a round up of folks in the room and ask each of them, is that true? Would it be universally true? And I believe that this is a part of Byron. Katie's the work. I'm not a I've heard of her. I've heard of her work, I've heard snippets. But I'm not a big practitioner of it. But I believe that this line of questioning comes from that lineage. So I just want to give some attribution there. And if it's not true, you know, sometimes it might be true. If your kid needs to be picked up from car line or soccer practice or whatever, and you have to be there in five minutes and it's ten minutes away. You may not have time to bust out the sage wand and go for it with an elaborate ritual. I get that. You know, like we have to apply these things practically and into real life. But if you've just been squirreling away, grinding and out at your desk and your mind tells you you don't have time to stretch, to get up, to go out, to experience the world through a walk, you don't. I mean, sometimes it can be as simple. I watch my mind say, you don't have time to light that stick of incense, you know, a fraction of a second. And so it's like dropping in this question. Is that true? Opens up a new doorway of possibility. And after that question. If the answer to your question is no, it's not totally universally true that I don't have time. What is the deeper truth here? What's the deeper story playing out, and what's the deeper truth that my body knows? Because trying to replace these thoughts with affirmations can be helpful. Affirmations and different thoughts. And you know, that whole world of mindset training I think, can be very rich, but I find that so much more important, you know, to bring our episode full circle, so much more important than the content of the thought is the working with the context of the thought. And that requires some deeper questions and some slowing down to be with the thought and the deeper stories that the thought is trying to tell, to get to the deeper, more aligned truth within yourself and start to carve new paths of possibility. And the last thing I'll say about that is that if you want to experience more time in your life, one of the best things you can do is to connect yourself to the timeless. If you want to have more enchantment in your life, one of the best things you can do is do less and look closer in the end. Presence is the one thing. When we look back on life that we wish we had tasted more fully. And that's exactly why I created the sanctuary, was to create a place where we could reverse engineer, and rather than wishing we had tasted presence more fully, to feast on it now and to feast on presents in a way that feels like a feast, in a way that engages your body's need not just for awareness, but for enchantment. And so if you are a soulful woman who wants to slow down, to lead from presence, to live in alignment with the seasons and the rhythms of nature, and to adorn your every day in small moments of enchantment, the sanctuary is open to receive you. We close on Tuesday, November 4th, and it would be my delight to meet you and take exquisite care of you in the sanctuary. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in our next episode.