Come To Your Senses with Mary Lofgren

Holiday Care Package: 3 Nurturing Supports for the Season

• Mary Lofgren • Season 1 • Episode 164

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Explore the natural rhythms of the season in this cozy episode, with three supports for a slow, sumptuous, grounded holiday season.

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Free Audio Collection: The Enchanted Path of Beauty • Discover beauty as a devotional path, a healing practice, and source of the sacred.

Speaker 1:

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 poof and let's dive in. So glad you're here. Pull up a poof and let's dive in. Hello, beautiful being, and welcome to this episode of Come to your Senses. I am delighted to be here with you today.

Speaker 1:

Right now there's a soft rain falling outside that, no matter where I am in my house, I cannot seem to escape the pitter patter of. So if you hear a crackling sound in the background, just know that it has a very romantic, cozy origin. And this is a time of year where inside of our bodies there is a natural drawing inward. You might notice yourself wanting to be indoors more often, wanting to stay cozy and cuddled up, wanting to light a candle more often, snuggle up in a reading nook, and part of this is a real, ancestral, instinctive knowing that, just like the earth is preparing for her great slumber and rest after the harvest season. Our bodies, which are of the earth, follow that same inner rhythm.

Speaker 1:

Of course, modern advances in the industrial revolution have allowed us, as a species, to depart from those natural rhythms in a very dramatic way, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I give gratitude for being able to visit Walgreens at midnight on a Tuesday if I feel myself coming down with something. And while there are things gained from those advances, there are also things that are lost, or perhaps not lost, but instead the soft whisper of those natural rhythms become drowned out by the noise of the hustle and bustle, which is a special meditation that I recorded specifically for staying grounded around Black Friday or really any time your circuits are blown, especially around spending money, and you need to just reel it in and you can access this Black Friday meditation on the app Insight Timer, which is a meditation app.

Speaker 1:

I'll put a link to it below this episode. I love saving up all year for my Kosabella bralettes and my Kate's Magic anointing oils, and there are certain gifts that I give clients when they come on as a new client this beautiful come to your senses gift package, and so I buy multitudes of those things that I slip into those packages and I love the opportunity to save 20, 30, 40%. I have also. I remember after I bought my home for the first time in 2020, it's first time homeowner and I just didn't no to wear a helmet while surfing Wayfair after the Thanksgiving holiday, after I had just moved into my new home a month ago and I had virtually no furniture and there were these massive sales and I just ended up spending a lot and live to tell the tale and live to regret it and live to sell a lot of that stuff on Facebook marketplace in the following one to two years, and that is one example of the ways that the threat of missing out, which is really what sales like Black Friday are founded upon, is preying upon that instinct of fear of missing out, and so the Black Friday meditation that I created is designed for any time where you feel like your impulses might exceed and outrun your intuition, and so, again, you can download that. If you're listening to this in November, or if you're listening to it in July, it's a great meditation anytime, and again, you can click the link below this episode for that support.

Speaker 1:

The next gem of support to sail you into the holiday season on a smooth one horse open sleigh is actually a song that I want to share with you, and there's no Spotify link for this song that I can find you, and there's no Spotify link for this song that I can find, so I'm actually going to sing it as a gift and a vulnerable share. I don't normally sing in public, but I was just so moved by this song and it speaks specifically to what I was describing earlier about the rhythms and the cycles of the earth. But before we go into music time, I also want to share that in December and into January, I am going to be opening the doors to something I've never done before. I've done this practice myself and I've done it with friends many, many times, but this year as a special bonus for annual members of the sanctuary, which is our membership community, for, come to your senses, I am going to be running a word of the year mastermind.

Speaker 1:

So personally, I'm not a big manifestation kind of person. It's just not my jam, it's not something I really focus on. But what I am really into is devotion and the way that we can feel called by a desire or a word or a feeling and answer that call in devotion to that call and have our lives really transformed and deepened through the relationship to that calling. So stay tuned, little babies. Finally, allow me to clear my throat and say that I am now going to sing to you, dear earth, and I first heard this song in church, at a place called her church. So I've been holding back on this, my friends, because it is something so precious to me and has completely changed and enhanced my life in ways that I cannot describe. But in San Francisco, where I'm proud to say I now live in the Bay Area, there is a church that is completely devoted to the divine feminine and the goddess, and in a future episode I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that.

Speaker 1:

But what inspired me about this song is that you know we have this week the holiday of Thanksgiving and, as anyone who knows me even a thread or a speck of American history knows, the way that this country was founded is not necessarily on freedom and justice for all, but it was on the enslavement and genocide of indigenous people. And my descendants, my direct ancestors, are actually folks who came over on the Mayflower, so I have some intimate ties with this narrative that portrays the white colonialists as friendly new neighbors, when in reality the arrival of my ancestors, the pilgrims, the English colonialists, was anything but. And there's a lot of mixed feelings and layers to this holiday, because I know for myself, I grew up with this being a holiday, the Thanksgiving holiday being an opportunity to gather with family and eat bountiful food and sit around a table and give thanks for each other and for spirit and for the earth, and to be in connection, and so on. This week, where again here in the US, is a holiday called Thanksgiving, I wanted to share this song with you, because this is a song that honors the deep, instinctual impulse to reflect in awe and wonder and gratitude for the abundance of life and the earth, and these words are re-imagined by a very prolific songwriter and psalmist, jan Aldrich Clanton, who wrote many, many, many songs and poems and texts about feminine spirituality, and it's set to the music of the song For the Beauty of the Earth, which was a Christian hymn by Folliot S Pierpoint in the late 19th century.

Speaker 1:

And as I share this song with you, I invite you to allow the words to settle into your own consciousness as, once again, just an opportunity to pause, to look up and to bask in the beauty and the wonder of being alive on the earth in this moment. Me, me, me, me. Okay, here we go no-transcript.

Speaker 2:

May we nurture you each day. Christ Sophia guides our way. Lovely earth, your glory fills laughing brooks and flowering trees, soaring birds o'er golden hills, dancing deer. So wild and free. May we nurture you each day. Christ Sophia guides our way. All your life, deep value holds. Smallest ants touch wisdom's way. Working hard, they share all loads Equal partners. Every day. May we join them as we say Christ Sophia guides our way. Hear O earth our solemn vow to conserve your sacred life, caring for your future now, so your wonders will survive. May we nurture you each day. Christ Sophia guides our way.

Speaker 1:

Special thanks to Jan Aldridge-Clanton for those words, to Katie Ketchum, who is choir director at her church, who shared that song with us recently, and many, many, many thanks for the wonder and beauty and delight of connecting with you here on Come to your senses and many ribbons of excitement If you feel the stirring within to become a part of our word of the year mastermind. Again, you'll get lots more juicy details about that next week, but essentially it's included with the sanctuary membership when you join annually. So if you want to learn more about that in advance, head over to schoolofsensuallivingcom. Slash sanctuary.

Speaker 1:

All of these juicy, yummy links will be in the notes below this episode, and I wish you a sacred, slow, sumptuous start to the season that we call the holidays. Have a wonderful week. Ciao. If you enjoy this podcast, you'll be besotted by my new complimentary audio collection collection on the healing power of beauty as a spiritual path. These three audios take you on a journey of creativity, femininity, inspiration and delight. Head to the link below this episode or schoolofsensuallivingcom. Slash beautiful to enrich your life from the inside out through the power and pleasure of beauty.