Hi everybody, and welcome back to episode 10 of the Awaken Together podcast.
I'm Kat.
I'm Jenn.
And today we are talking to you about routine, ritual, and ceremony.
We'll go into what our daily routines have looked like personally for us in the past,
how we've developed these into daily rituals full of intention, and how the practice of
ceremony has evolved for both of us for better and for worse.
So Jen, could you kick us off?
What has your routine been like in the past?
Yes, such a fun topic.
And we have so many little side categories.
And this is also a huge thing that has changed on my spiritual journey.
So this is so perfect for Awaken Together because this has been a huge part of my spiritual
awakening where I can see such a difference.
So to go back into old routines, I definitely look back at my past and see how little mindfulness
I was moving through life with.
I was just kind of always in a rush and I think I was so out of present moment thinking
and I had never really realized I was out of present moment thinking.
But I think I was always like 20 steps ahead thinking of the next thing, which kind of
led to this kind of nervous energy.
And yeah, I had no sense of actual routine because of the panic of what's coming?
What do I need to do?
What's next?
You know, just such busy thinking.
I used to, yeah, I was a huge sleep in type person.
I always would sleep into the last second in college when I started really working full
time job and doing full time school.
I remember I would be the type to snooze my alarm until like the five minutes it would
take to just like throw my clothes on, brush my teeth and then grab whatever I needed and
head out the door.
And it's because I always felt like time was just slipping away from me.
So I would want to sleep longer, drag things out and it was just a very messy, scattered
routine.
And I think we were trying to think back to when my routine started to kind of have more
sacredness and more intentionality behind it.
And I think it's when I really moved to Denver that I started going, okay, so far my routines
have always fallen apart really quickly.
Every time I think I want to develop a better routine, it lasts for very little amount of
time and then it falls apart.
And then I have all this guilt behind it.
And I'm like, I can never stick to things.
I had a lot of that mindset.
I moved to Denver as kind of like a new, fresh start.
And it just really popped into my head one day that I really struggle with feeling like
I need to do things daily.
That felt like so much pressure for me that I started thinking, why don't I zoom out just
a smidge and think of weekly?
And so I started playing around with something that I call my happiness formula, where I
would take a whiteboard and put all the things that if I did in the week, I felt whole by
the end.
And I came up with running or hiking, meditation, yoga, reading a book, listening to podcasts
and doing some form of lifting or kind of going to the gym and get that extra muscle
building that always made me feel like accomplished, like I was working towards a goal as well.
And I started setting up like little tally marks of how many times I would want to do
each of those things in the week to feel accomplished by the end.
And it took some tweaking at first, but I came up with this formula that if I do three
times, yoga three times in the week, if I meditate five times in the week, if I run
or hike three times, if I read a book three times, if I listen to a podcast once, by the
end of the week, I can feel a sense of joy, completion, happiness.
And so I would check it off as I went, but zooming out for me weekly was a way for me
to start adding a lot more mindfulness into my routine.
So let's hear yours, Kat.
Yeah, I know that's so awesome, Jen.
And I think that's such great self-awareness because it doesn't, it shouldn't look the
same for everybody.
Right.
And the fact that you were like, uh-uh, this whole daily thing right now feels stressful.
I need to do it on a weekly basis is really knowing yourself well.
And yeah, let me tell you too, like the amount of pressure that that took off actually ended
up making me make better daily choices too.
But it was the, yeah, it was that mental pressure of like, my days are just messy and if I don't
start living every single day right, I was bringing that perfectionism energy into the
routine so much that it was hard for it to become mindful.
It felt worrisome and stressful.
Yeah, yeah, that's everything.
It's like, that's what it's all for is to make our days better.
So if it's making it more stressful, then it's kind of having the opposite effect.
So really, really great.
How long have you been following your happiness formula?
It has been three years.
That's awesome.
It changed.
It really changed everything.
Honestly, for me, that was, it was huge and I started seeing so many changes in my body
and my energy with adding this in that yeah, my days actually did start to change too.
And I was able to then start sprinkling in even more mindfulness exercises into the day.
But yeah, it's set the foundation that I was really desperately needing.
It's so great.
Yeah, I resonate with that a lot.
So when I think about my old routine, I think about, you know, pre pandemic days when I
was going into the office every day for my old job.
And I just remember really similar to you, like my alarm would go off and I would maybe
scroll mindlessly on my phone for like 10, 15 minutes until it was down to the last minute
where I still had to do all the things before getting off to work.
So I was already putting myself in that rush, rush, rush mentality.
So I'd get up, I'd brush my teeth, and then I'd go take my dog Minnie out for a walk.
I'd feed her, walk her, and I made my coffee in the morning and then I'd walk her while
drinking my coffee.
So it was just like a lot of things going on at once.
I only had one dog, one hand for the leash, one hand for my coffee.
And so sometimes that would even bring some stress to me if like I had to hold her away
from another dog.
And I didn't even realize that.
Nothing like some stress to start your day.
Right?
Some stress in the morning.
Cup full of stress.
Stress.
And yeah, so that's part of it.
I would rush to work and then right away, like I'd have my calls, I'd be in my emails,
I'd see my teammates and be in conversations.
And I didn't really have any time for myself.
And it was, it got to a point where I was like, okay, I like my job still, but something
isn't working.
I need to make a change.
And so that's when I really leaned into thinking about my week.
Where in my week do I feel most myself?
And at the time I was doing my self care Sundays consistently ever since I graduated college.
So it had been like five, six years of that.
And I was like, okay, I really like how I'm doing this ritual once a week where I'm not
drinking caffeine, I'm wearing my glasses and then painting my nails.
Those are my three staples of self care Sunday.
I love it.
And so I was like, okay, well, how can I make this more a part of my everyday, more ritual,
more intentional?
So I started waking up 30 minutes earlier and I still let myself scroll on social media
before I got out of bed, but I kept it to the same time.
So that extra 30 minutes allowed me that time to still kind of slowly wake up in bed.
Then I would make my coffee and I had it before walking my dog.
So I made this space of like 15 minutes where I was drinking my coffee at home and I would
just mentally list off three things that I was grateful for.
Just being with myself for that time.
And then it was time to still walk my dog, still had to do that part, but this time I
had two hands.
And it's so simple.
It's so small, but sometimes the smallest things make the biggest differences, right?
Yeah, so I would then listen to either a podcast or an audio book that I felt was giving me
what I needed, a sense of purpose, a sense of centering and the calmness that I really
wanted to bring into the rest of my day from that place, that energy.
And then I would bike into work, which I freaking loved because I just put on some feel good
music, bike into work, get my blood pumping.
And then I'd get into work about the same time and I'd have my breakfast there because
by that time I was hungry and just go through my emails and just feel like I had a bit of
a day before I had to throw my energy into my work.
That's good wording.
That really does change a lot.
Yeah, it really changed everything for me.
And just that little morning routine of waking up earlier, like you said, made me able to
shift and bring more things into my day to day, like meditation.
And it kind of falls into this idea of habit stacking.
Have you heard of that before?
I have read The Power of Habit, which went into such good stuff.
That's definitely a side notebook.
But yeah, go ahead and explain habit stacking.
Yeah.
So it's all about that idea of starting small.
So choosing one or two things that you're going to change in your daily routine and
sticking with that and doing that for one or two weeks until it feels like it's truly
habit.
You don't even really have to think about it anymore and only then adding little things
in.
Yes, and that's so being appropriate to how the brain works and how our brain wants things
to become automatic because it's so much less stressful when things become automatic.
But it's really good to look at what you have made automatic and also sprinkling in more
mindfulness on top of that because there is a big difference in our automatic routines.
And then also finding that that mindfulness in the present moment and moving through that
versus that audit automatic brain being how we're fully running from the start of the
day to the end of the day.
There's definitely a balance between the two.
I so agree.
And just, yeah, having the energy to show up for everything and everyone that your attention
needs throughout the day.
It's all dependent on that.
Yeah, I was thinking like before I started really, you know, onto the spiritual journey
and caring more about how I was moving through life, I think the only time I actually knew
how I was feeling and actually paused and was like, how do I feel, would be as I laid
my head to go to sleep at night and all of a sudden I can't sleep.
I feel, you know, I would feel the day, but it wouldn't happen until the very end of the
day.
And I didn't even perceive it that way.
But I would be like, why can't I sleep?
I don't feel great.
You know, I just wish I could fall asleep.
But when I started changing the way I was structuring my day and checking in on myself
more, I noticed the difference at night.
It's like some of the things that we perceive as, yeah, sleep trouble.
And some of the ways are like, my head just is so busy at night.
It's hard to turn it off.
Those things we can actually see a shift on as we start to change our structuring of our
mornings, change the mindfulness check-ins more throughout the day.
Not waiting till the very end of the day to determine how you feel, but setting how we
feel at the beginning of the day to move through the day with an intention that we've set at
the beginning.
A hundred percent.
It's life changing, right?
And it's starting small and then reaping the benefits the longer that time goes on and
seeing how it changes different areas of your life.
And this is really probably the biggest thing that I work on with my clients in health coaching
is establishing this intentional daily ritual.
And it's different for everyone.
If the area of your life that you're wanting to see the most change in is physically, then
your ritual can be around like adding movement into your everyday practice.
It can be mindfully eating away from screens.
If what you're really wanting to work on is about anxiety or self-love, then maybe it's
establishing a meditation practice or looking in the mirror and telling yourself three things
that you love about yourself, even if you have to fake it at first.
It sounds crazy, but it works.
Yes.
And so, yeah, I think the reason routine becomes hard to stick with is because routine has
not, as routine kind of gets pushed and we hear it, you should build a better routine.
What is missing from that is that sacredness.
And I think that's what changes as we tie this into kind of the spiritual journey is
when we start to bring sacredness into the space of routine, then it becomes more ritual.
So we were talking about what is the difference between routine and ritual.
And it becomes more of a ritual when there's a sacredness to it.
Like I want my day to be full of a sense of magic and a sense of wonder and presentness
and aliveness.
And I want that energy to be present most of the day.
That is what takes that kind of routine gets just shoved at us all the time.
We see like, add this to your routine or we see people advertise what their daily routines
are.
And I think that's what is the shift that happens mentally is I want sacredness.
I want to feel like I'm living life.
And so rituals, let's talk rituals and how the difference between what hops from ritual
or routine into ritualness.
And for me, one of the first things that I kind of added in on my spiritual journey where
I started adding a sense of ritual into that already slightly more intentional routine.
I started doing new moon and full moon ceremonies.
This was the first step for me.
And I had heard it described as one of my early new moon ceremonies I went to.
A lady was talking about New Year's resolutions and how as a society, we, you know, that's
very talked about set your New Year's intentions and try to move through your year with those.
And I don't think very many people ever stick to their New Year's intentions, but she described
it as if you look at the moon cycles and you honor those a little bit more, those happen
a lot more frequently.
So you get to do more check ins on what you want to let go of what you want to invite
in and the moon already shifts our internal energy a lot.
You might not feel it until you start checking in on those days, but you can actually feel
the energetic shift anyway.
So why not work with that energetic shift and let the moon kind of be your 30 day check
ins and your more frequent way of determining what you want to invite and let go of.
So I have been honoring the full and new moons now for about two years.
And that to me was a ritual where I'm always like really not only reflecting back, but
also really writing down what I want to invite into my life.
Yeah.
Setting those intentions.
Yes.
I love it so much.
And that's so beautiful that you do that because that's probably, is that twice a month then?
Yeah.
That's so great.
I love it.
And I feel like there's some more work I could do there.
Like I honor the full moon, but new moon is another one where I feel like I want to add
that into my practice.
So thank you for the inspiration there.
Yeah.
Once a month is great, but why not do twice a month?
Yeah.
And they definitely come with different energies, but that's a beautiful way just to set ritual.
Whether you believe that the moon has a lot of influence on you, which I definitely could
prove to you it does.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, just think of it even as that is a way I can mark my calendar to add in a level of
ritual and check in with myself because, oh, this is a good share.
I remember another thing that I used to do as a kid, which looking back I think was such
a good idea.
It was probably like a little sprinkle nugget for my spiritual journey.
But me and my friends at the beginning of the school year, we came up with writing down
everything that was currently happening in our lives and what we wanted to happen.
And we thought it was so fun for the school year to guess who was going to maybe get a
date.
We would just come up with these fantasies, but then when we would reread, we called them
predictions.
We would write our predictions.
And when I wrote them, when we'd reflect back on them the next school year, so much of it
would be accurate and have happened.
And it was just so funny looking back because we never saw it as being a spiritual thing.
But it was.
And it was another point of check in.
Like, oh, let me write down what's currently happening.
Let me write down what I wish would happen with the next school year.
So that was a fun one.
That is so fun.
I love it.
And then thinking too about New Year's, going back to the New Year's piece of it and like
intention setting, something I've gotten to the habit of in teaching in my yoga classes
and creating for myself is a Sankalpa.
So it's very similar, but it's a little bit more intentional than a normal, like quote
unquote normal New Year's Eve resolution.
So a Sankalpa, it's an intention that's formed by the heart and the mind.
It's like a vow that you are taking in holistically, like what you want to bring into the New Year.
So rather than a typical New Year's resolution, which is, you know, they're typically formed
by the ego or senses or conditioning.
That's what we typically hear anyway of like, I'm going to get a gym membership and then
dropping off like, oh, all the New Year's resolutioners and by March they're all gone.
Like no, this is different.
Sometimes you are returning to it monthly or bi-monthly or even weekly.
So you kind of get to choose how that continues to show up in your life.
And I'm curious, Jen, like I know you're really good at like holding yourself to these practices,
but thinking about like some of our listeners and myself too, like what are some of the
things that you've done in the past to like hold yourself accountable to returning to
these intentions?
Yeah, I think for me, I mean, it's a little bit, I've always kind of been a head type
as we talked about that more logical way of thinking.
But I think what shifted was really feeling the difference.
And as I was saying, like I used to not even notice how I was feeling and that disconnection
was so strong that when I actually started feeling connectiveness, I think it became
so such a good incentive to continue with it because I could really feel the difference.
Like if I fell apart from it, the difference in my energetic body was so I could perceive
it so much more when I did more check-ins and I can notice like my more aliveness.
I just felt it and it became such an incentive that I could not go back to the old way of
thinking.
And that I think slowly the scale for that started really shifting for me that I just
started craving so much more.
I wanted to make everything sacred.
I started, yeah, I really started wanting more and more.
And that I think that is an effect of kind of a spiritual awakening too is that you really
start craving that more because it's such a connected, you can just, you can feel that
you're connecting to whatever sense of your higher power is because you don't feel like
you're just coasting through.
And I think that was my biggest incentive.
It's just like, why go back to feeling so crummy when I know what it feels like to feel
alive in my body?
Yeah, it just started outweighing itself.
But I do think we should talk about what disconnects us from, and this is where we can kind of
blend more into ceremony because as we were pondering these topics, I was looking at it
as why did we fall away from sacredness as a society anyway?
And I started thinking about ceremonies and some of our classic ceremonial stuff that
we do is we have wedding ceremonies, I think kind of baby showers, we think of funerals.
When we come and gather with a common intention, and I think this also has existed in a lot
of religion where we gather and there's a sacredness about it.
But I think what we started seeing happen, as I'm just pondering some of these, where
we started losing that disconnection from ceremony is I think we really started feeling
like they needed to be done a certain way, whether that kind of came in with the internet.
Weddings started feeling like they had to be done a certain way and that if they didn't,
then yeah, you were failing in some way.
And I think the pressures of just starting to take ceremony and feeling so much pressure
to perform it a certain way that we lost that mindfulness and maybe that tie into intuition.
And the only example I can give when I was pondering this was I got very scared of ritual,
I think at one point, just as I deconstructed a lot of my religious beliefs and I started
figuring out how I wanted to stay connected to it versus disconnect from it.
I was thinking about communion and I used to be so scared that if I didn't do communion
that I would be full of this wrongness and I needed to do communion.
Otherwise it was bad if I didn't do it.
But now that I look back and I'm coming from a healthier place, that could have been a
very sacred thing of like, I want to reset, I want to invite a clean slate.
But I do think when we started maybe projecting fear in this right or wrong into these things
is when we've maybe lost or disconnected in some way.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And I think it can be traced back to the shift of moving from masculine energy to feminine
energy too, because the masculine way is very stringent.
It says, here's the formula we must follow.
We must fall in line and fit the mold and that's what's expected of us.
Whereas the feminine side is more intuitive.
It's leaning into that side of like, well, what actually feels good in this moment and
leading from that place?
So it's that empowerment to say, I know what the tradition is and for me, here's what feels
more aligned and I'm going to actually do that.
So I know for both of us, our weddings, we're very non-traditional.
I know.
Which is so cute.
When Kat just had her wedding, I was like, she really owned herself and I love it.
Thanks.
Yeah, even the littlest things, Kyle and I really tried to sit with, and I know you did
too, of we were considering even the names of our bridal party.
I didn't want to call my wedding women my bridesmaids because I'm like, you're not a
maid.
Where did this term come from?
And I think it's easy to just go along with the status quo and to think about things that
are already laid out for you.
It's harder to sometimes sit with it and ask yourself, do I like how this sounds?
Yeah.
And what am I going to do about it?
And it's not that it's right or wrong.
It really is an individual check-in.
I knew how much anxiety I was going to have doing a first dance and me and my dad have
social anxiety.
We were almost throwing up before our wedding because we were so anxious.
We were like a hot mess.
But I was like, why would two anxious people try to do a dance when we literally can barely
handle the pressure of being in front of people?
And I was like, screw that.
I'm not doing that because that is not honoring.
That does not feel sacred to me.
That feels like a nightmare.
So I'm going to have a talent show at my wedding.
I love that so freaking much.
And that's so you.
And I bet you and your dad felt so much more calm that day.
We did.
I mean, knowing that we were taking some of that away, like, yeah, that to me was saying,
I know that we've structured some of these ceremonial traditions around what a wedding
should look like, but it would not be me showing up authentic.
And as you care about the sacredness of your life, it is wanting to show up authentically,
not with this perception that if I don't do it right, then it's completely wrong.
Yeah, just going along with the motions and rather just being like, this is me and I love
me and I'm going to honor me by doing this.
And even like Kyle, we had a big conversation about our vows because our wedding celebration,
we were already married and we'd already said our vows.
And so a lot of people were like, well, why don't you just go up and say the same vows
again?
And, you know, we considered it.
But Kyle also has some really big social anxiety and maybe even friends and family listening
to this wouldn't know.
But the reason that we didn't say our vows is for twofold.
One, we wanted it to be the real vows and we were lucky enough to have our videographer
come to our elopement and record those.
So we played our vows, like a recording of our vows while we held each other's hands
and looked at each other's eyes and heard ourselves say our vows from when the moment
it actually happened.
And this took a lot of pressure off of Kyle day of, and he was able to just be more relaxed
and grounded and present for the whole day leading up to that and after, because we took
that time to make that shift and be in alignment to what felt right.
Yeah, beautiful.
I love that.
And yeah, that was huge.
So I think that shows both of our, you know, we definitely it's a it's a moment of growth
to realize, hey, I'm actually honoring myself and it feels freaking good.
And then the ceremonial aspect, too, like I think we need to remember that the difference
may be between ritual.
We were talking about this a little beforehand that ritual is kind of a little bit more of
an individual practice, but ceremonial is a form of gathering under a common intention.
But we don't need to feel that the ceremonial stuff still has to be done away.
You can still honor, you know, the traditions in the past, but then still have it look different.
And that's OK.
It really is.
There's a beautiful magic that happens when you gather with a group of people.
And I think that's we're lacking a lot of ceremony in our life.
And I think because people feel like it does need to be done in the right way, we don't
gather maybe as often or it's harder to find your people to gather into that sacred space,
even so.
Yeah.
More pressure is put on it.
And so it just happens less because people are more worried about, am I doing this wrong?
Whereas like if you're gathering with people and you're doing what feels right in the moment,
like what more could you ask for?
Yeah, a hundred percent.
And I wanted to share one other example of a kind of ceremonial thing that was kind of
eye opening for me when I moved to Denver.
Obviously, yeah, marijuana was legal and I partaked on and off.
But I also yeah, you can definitely abuse things and you can take it from being maybe
something that could have been good to way overdoing it.
And I signed up for this thing.
It was a marijuana ceremony.
And I was just like, oh, what a Denver thing.
I wanted to sign up and I was like, let's go check this out.
And we set in circle, which circle is very ceremonial anyway.
I love the space of a circle.
That's a side note.
But we set in circle and we passed the soil around that the plant had been grown in.
We took time to like evoke the senses, smell, pause.
And then we set an intention on what we wanted the plant medicine to show us.
And then we partake together and we did it in a way that each time you were checking
in on where it landed in your body, where you were feeling it.
And there was just this intentional like partaking versus mindlessly partaking.
And I had the most like spiritual experience with that ever.
And it really in my head like create a deeper change in how much I need to pause and slow
down and add intention to these things that I could be using as an escape when in reality
if I flip my perspective with them, it could be invited in with a lot more magic to it.
And I experienced effects that I have never felt in the years of partaking.
And it was a real changer in my way of thinking.
That sounds so special.
And where can I find one of these?
I want to go with you when you're in Denver.
Check it out.
Yeah.
Let's do it.
And we need it.
And I think, yeah, this is a great practice.
Maybe, I mean, hopefully you can find your people if you can't find them in your day
to day life.
And it is so lucky that we have the internet to seek like minded people if we don't have
them in our community.
But it's really important to find a way that you can connect and gather with people that
are going to understand the sacredness behind ceremonial gatherings and rituals.
And you can find your people.
And it's really starting, I think all of this stuff is starting to elevate as we tap more
into the feminine energy even collectively.
Mm.
Beautifully said.
So well said.
And if you ever have any questions on like how to find your people, please reach out
to us.
We have developed some pretty awesome communities and we're always looking to grow them full
of heart centered beings.
So we'd love to have you there.
And some resources if you'd like to dig into this work some more.
I have created a daily rituals recipe for joy that you can check out at www.catalystliving.com.
It's a free download if you scroll to the bottom of the page and there's a description
on kind of rituals like we talked about and lots of different examples and how to get
into habit stacking like we talked about before and an accountability tracker so that you
can really make this a part of your daily routine, weekly rituals and feel the benefits
from that.
Awesome.
And I will also, I will share my little happiness formula thing on our awaken together Facebook
group page.
So I'll share that too.
And yes, this is a beautiful first step or doors are always open if you have questions.
Thanks for sharing the resource on your website.
Kat is awesome you have that.
And I think that does it for this week.
Thank you for sharing Kat.
Thank you for good conversation as always.
Thank you Jen.
Love you.
We'll see you all next week.
Bye.
Brigarys, bye.