How to Create a Soulful Environment

In this episode of the Soulfully You Podcast, Coach Chris Rodriguez discusses the importance of cultivating soulful environments in our daily lives, including spaces for productivity, pleasure, community, mindfulness, rest, and nothingness. 

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• 00:00 Welcome to the Soulfully You Podcast
• 00:44 Caribbean Family Stories
• 02:07 The Journey from Jamaica to the US
• 04:13 The Importance of Stories and Connection
• 05:27 Creating a Soulful Environment
• 05:42 Understanding Your Environment
• 06:27 The Evolution of Human Environments
• 08:00 The Impact of Social Media on Our Psyche
• 08:49 Cultivating a Soulful Environment
• 13:40 Six Soulful Environments to Cultivate
• 14:25 Space for Productivity
• 16:54 Space for Pleasure
• 19:04 Space for Community
• 20:15 Space for Mindfulness
• 21:22 Space for Rest
• 23:12 Space for Nothingness
• 25:59 Living Soulfully
• 26:30 Conclusion and Farewell

Transcript

Coach Chris: 0:05

Hey friend. Welcome to the Soulfully You Podcast with Coach Chris Rodriguez. I'm a movement and mindset coach, and I believe in a deeper way of living, a more soulful way of being. Join me each week for conversations about how to put a little more soul. Into our work, our relationships in our everyday lives. /When you grow up in a Caribbean family, your life is filled with stories. Sometimes the stories are when you do something wrong or you're not doing what you've been told. A lot of times it's when you complain about not wanting to do something. My Uncle Darryl, anytime we complained about doing work around the house, he'd tell us the story about how he'd wake up at 4:00 AM in the morning and walk two miles to go milk the cow and then walk back another two miles. And then he'd walk another two miles to get to school, and if he was late, his teacher will beat him and then all the neighbors would find out and they'd all beat him on the way home. And then he'd get the worst beating and they call it licks. He'd get some licks when he got home from my grandmother. Sometimes the stories are funny stories. Like how my uncles didn't wanna walk all the way to school, so they would hop on the back of the milk truck to ride to school and they grabbed my mom by the hand and pull her on the truck and she was so scared. And one day. She decided to pull away and not get on the truck, so they all had to get off because all of them had to show up to school on time. Otherwise, what would happen? They'd all get a beating from the teacher, from all the neighbors, and then they'd get one on the way home. I can tell all these stories. I can imitate my mom and my uncles and my aunties as they're telling the stories because I've heard 'em so much. But a couple of years ago, I was home visiting my mom and my aunt, and my mom told me some stories I never heard before. One of 'em was a story of pain. About what got them from Jamaica to the United States. It was the assassination of my grandmother's brother, who was a political leader, and he worked with contracts and the people who did it to him threatened my family and said, y'all need to get outta here too, or you're next. So my grandmother and my grandfather made a plan. To leave Jamaica and come to the United States where my story begins. But another story that she told me is one, after I recalled always remembering my grandmother in her garden, and we lived in the hood. There weren't a lot of trees, there weren't a lot of gardens. And I went to school down the street from my house, and in the classroom we looked outside and we just looked at a concrete apartment building with a laundromat underneath and graffiti tags on it. And that's what I would see every day. And the walk to school, sometimes the walk home from school, you get into a fight. You have to protect yourself from potentially getting robbed, but in the middle of this concrete jungle, I remember my grandmother had this garden and she had all these plants in her house, and she would sing hymns to the plants. And as I'm telling her this story, she said, well, you know your grandfather, that was the first thing he did when he moved to the United States. He planted a garden because he taught agriculture at the university in Jamaica, and our house was kind of a co-op where he would teach his students how to grow vegetation, how to harvest. And my mom told me that she would watch him graft different vines together and that this was a part of their everyday life. It makes sense that all of my uncles, all my aunties, they all have gardens. A lot of my cousins, they have gardens. They grow their own food even in the hood. We ate fresh fruits and vegetables with every meal. There's something about stories that helps you find connection to yourself. Specifically, when you learn stories about your history, when you learn stories about your family, where you came from, things start to make sense about your world, about your longings. About the things you might not have been taught directly, but that you picked up along the way? Like the stories I learned from my family, most stories of significance revolve around places. Most Proverbs and. Myths of wisdom use the metaphor of our relationship with the land, seed, time, and harvest. Lions and lambs and sheep growing like trees. Philosopher and author Joseph Campbell, he says this, the goal of life is to make our heartbeat match the beat of the universe to match your nature with nature. I think our broken relationship with Story and our broken relationship with nature. Have created a disconnect inside of us. And a block that stunts the growth of our souls truly flourishing. So in today's episode, I want to talk to you about how to change your environment, and I'm gonna give you. A few key environments that you need to cultivate in your life./ So what is your environment? Simply put, these are the places you dwell and occupy. These spaces and places can be physical and most times are AKA, the land, your home, your job, your places of fellowship and community. Your environment is made up of tangible elements, but also intangible elements. The people in your life contribute to your environment, and that can be a positive contribution or that can be a negative contribution. The activities that you do in your environments contribute. Some of the intangibles, the way you think, the emotions that you feel when you're in certain environments. For many of us in the modern Western world, most of the environments that we occupy are indoors. That is a good thing. There was a time when our ancestors didn't have indoor environments and they were fighting against the elements, weather and natural disasters. There were also fighting against predators in their environment. One of the ways that our ancestors survive those predators. Instead of getting really big arms and really big legs and really big teeth, they developed really big brains, a prefrontal cortex to problem solve, to create to. Make different kinds of decisions. They created tribes of support and communities that they can build things together for safety. And ultimately belonging. Again. These are all good things. And for us humans in the Western modern world, with the battle no longer being against the external elements in our physical environment, the battle moved into our psyche. What this looks like in our everyday lives is that we've advanced far beyond our primitive ancestors. We've moved in the safer spaces. But our brain still experience fear, panic, and threats from experiences in our lives. But one of the biggest ways that our brand experiences The psychological unsafety, the panic, the anxiety, the fear of threat. Is in the fight for attention that's been created by social media pull refresh apps on our smartphone, like our email And the way these processes have been gamified and made to be irresistible. Some great books that talk about some of this stuff, the shallows. It's essentially talking about our need to develop the ability to think deeply. Another one that's kind of a follow up to that book is Deep Work by Cal Newport. John Medina has a good book, uh, brain Rules. These are all if you wanna, nerd out, of course. But we just need to find a way to come back home to ourselves, come back home to our community, come back home to peace and cultivate environments in our life that aren't so loud with stimulation all the time. But feed our growth. And so as we talk about creating a soulful environment. And the parts of ourselves that we lost and losing our connection to land and losing our connection to nature and the stories that exist there. I, one of the biggest things we can do is find ways to get back out in nature. Now I'm pretty privileged and I live in the Bay area of California. I could drive 10 minutes in any direction, be at the ocean, be at a redwood forest, be at a mountain. It's easy for me to get out in nature. The weather is usually great. It is not so easy in other places, but making an effort to get out somewhere where you lose a little self on reception places that are so picturesque that you want to take a picture with your phone, but your phone. Can't quite capture its beauty. We need to spend more time in these kinds of places. So getting out in nature is one way to create and cultivate a soulful environment. I think another way to cultivate a soulful environment. It's not just getting out in nature, but valuing nature. In a few weeks, I'm gonna share a episode on soulful Spirituality. And I think about a time when I heard Alice Walker speaking and she talked about the African people and when they were taken from their land and brought to America and brought to Britain and all these places. For them, their God was tied to the land. They learned care and love and faith out in nature, using their hands to work the land for the African people for. Indigenous people in the Americas, not only were they stripped from their land, but the land was exploited I to produce sugar to produce cotton tobacco oil. And I believe there's this wound inside of our society from this continual exploitation of this earth, this mother that has given us so much, so much so that we have these broken relationships with the people in our lives. And I feel like this is more me as a man talking to other men in power. Maybe we'd have better relationships with the mothers of our children, the mothers who gave birth to us and all the mothers in the world. If we had a better relationship with his mother, that is our home mother Earth. So we get back out into nature and we heal our relationship with the land. We honor it, we value it, or we honor her, we value her, but that's one part of it. What about those other places and spaces that you occupy and that you do life? If you want to create a soulful environment in the places you regularly occupy, you need these three elements. One, your soulful environment should be a place that stimulates all five senses. What are you eating in those spaces? What are you drinking? What are you smelling? What are you touching? The second element you need to cultivate your soulful environment is your soulful environment. Should have some kind of door. That you can open or close. That door can be a literal physical door, or that door can be a metaphor for just, Hey, this is a place where I am uninterrupted, whether it's you by yourself or you connecting with other people. Some examples of a metaphorical door would be putting on headphones or. Making it a place that is a technology free zone, so no smartphones in this place. And the third element you need to create a soulful and environment is some kind of shutdown ritual, right? The best shutdown rituals are gonna have three components. One, a sound like an alarm or a chime. Two, a physical action, something that you have to do. So physically closing the door, physically closing your laptop, physically lighting a candle, physically taking a few deep breaths, and the third component of a shutdown ritual should have some kind of physical location or postural change, right? You're either sitting on a chair and then you sit on your mat or you're sitting on a chair and you stand up. You stand up, or you sit down, or you lay down. You go, you take a walk around the block, you go walk to brew yourself a cup of tea. You gotta have this type of separation from the ordinary, everyday things that you've been doing to transition you into, alright, this is sacred time. This is sacred space. So once you've established the elements that help you create a soulful environment. There are six soulful environments that you need to cultivate in your life. Again, these environments, they can be literal physical places, or they can be intentional intangible spaces. All right, I'll list them out and then we'll break 'em down. The first one is a space for productivity. The second one is a space for pleasure. The third, a space for community. The fourth, a space for mindfulness. The fifth one is a space for rest, and the sixth one is a space for nothingness. Let's break 'em down./ Productivity, we gotta work. And a lot of times we work, distracted, acted. This whole idea of. Our smartphones taking away our ability to concentrate and do deep work ends up leaving us one, disgruntled and frustrated in our current work. And two, it makes us carry the work that we are doing into our personal life. It all bleeds over. There's no boundaries. And there's no focus on the task that we have in front of us. So creating spaces for productivity is a powerful way to have what I call soul life balance, right? We put work in its right place. We're not dedicating our whole life to productivity. To doing? To working? No, we have a portion for that. If a space for productivity was like a room and a house, this would be. The study or this would be the office, right? Everybody doesn't have these big houses where they have a study or a library or, or a office, right? Take the elements of creating a soulful environment to create a space. For productivity, wherever you're at. So my desk is in the living room. Um, my wife's desk is up in the bedroom. Now our place isn't huge, but we needed to figure out a way for both of us to work from home. So one thing that we did in the bedroom is we created these curtains around the desk that. Actually look really nice, but you can pull the desk out, you can put it away when you're done. Um, you can also pull part of the curtain so that it blocks out some other areas of the room, right? We are able to put a physical separation, but I can't always do that in the middle of the living room. So I work with my headphones in. I put some music on. Sometimes I even use an app that helps me cut off the distractions, of surfing the internet. Sometimes I put my phone in another physical space if I'm not using it to record something, whatever, so I'm not getting distracted in this work block, right? Space for productivity. When you cultivate that. Then work doesn't come with you everywhere./ A space for pleasure. Pleasure's good. I talk about it a lot. If we were comparing our space for pleasure to A space in our house, it would be the playroom. It would be the backyard or the playground, right? I have a whole episode on the power of play. But pleasure doing things that are just for the sake of feeling good and being intentional about that. I have a few of those spaces. sometimes it's playing video games. Right. I can hook it up to the tv, but I want to be mindful of other people in my space. So I got a little handheld game that I can play every once in a while. Gaming isn't always a thing. Sometimes it's literally me just sitting down and listening to the music I love. My garage is a gym I actually enjoy and find pleasure in working out so. The garage is another place of pleasure for me. There are some places that aren't in my house. I go to the beach. I go to the forest. I go often. I have a beach that's about 20 minutes away from me. I have a redwood forest that's about 15 minutes away from me. These are places of pleasure for me. Having the shutdown rituals for around your productivity can help you to be more intentional about having spaces tangible and intangible For pleasure. Now, sometimes you need to access your pleasure. More times during the day. In the middle of work, in the middle of times of productivity, you need a little break, right? What I started encouraging people to do is always have playing cards with them or having some kind of physical artifact that is gonna give you joy or pleasure. All right. For some people it's like, okay, I'm gonna take a break and I have a playlist of music that brings me joy and I'm gonna put in my headphones and I'm just gonna listen to my music. Take about five minutes, take about 10 minutes, take about 15 minutes to just invest into moment of pleasure./ The next space you need to cultivate is a space for community. If this was a space in your house, this would be the dining room, right? This is where you break bread with folks. Sometimes it's a space that's in your house. I encourage you if you do have the space in your house to. Figure out ways to have people over. I don't have a lot of space inside my house. We have a little backyard, and one of the ways that I wanted to cultivate community in my life when I moved into this neighborhood is I was like, man, I want to meet my neighbors. And I saw that everybody like kind of grilled in their front yard, so I got a grill. And then I started inviting like the neighbors and eye shot over to come grow with me. And some of those neighbors have become some of my good friends. I like to have people over cook for them. The yard is a good place for me to do that. If you don't have the physical space of your house, where's the closest park? Where's the closest outdoor space somewhere else that doesn't cost you money, where you can go invite somebody and do something together? All right. A space for mindfulness. If this was a space in your house, this would be the meditation room. A lot of us don't have that kind of room in our house. A chair by a window, a yoga mat that you can roll out at the foot of your bed. I remember my mother, she would, and she does, she has an altar for prayer that she would always set up at a space in her living room. And for her, that was where she was mindful, where she was at peace and that was a very sacred space for her. It is important to cultivate energy around. Our mind not doing stuff, our mind, not problem solving, but our mind reconnecting with our body. One of the best ways to practice mindfulness is through connecting with your breath. Breathing in through the nose on a one count, breathing out on a two count, maybe counting all the way up to the 10, breathing in and out. I not trying to change any circumstances, but just to be present, mind, body, and soul, and unity./ The next place is a place for rest. All right. If we're, if we're talking about rest, and I'm not just talking about sleep. Yes, it could be the bedroom, but I think of a hammock in the garden, right? This is what I think about rest. We can work ourselves up so much. We can go to bed and still have our minds running Wild. So we cultivate spaces where we can rest our thoughts, rest our bodies, rest our soul. One of the elements that I like to. Used to help me cultivate rest in my life is a journal. Last episode, I talked about these six different journal prompts that you can do to to come back to yourself. Journaling can help you resolve issues that are working up your mind. That you worry about if you can get the fears, if you can get the worries, if you can get the to-do list out on a piece of paper, it frees up your mind to settle down. It frees up your nervous system to settle down. A lot of times the partnering, a journal with a cup of tea is a great way to rest a decaf tea and a teapot hits that brief of a really good shutdown ritual because you turn on the kettle. You have to go and you have to physically fill up the water, you have to put the water on the stove. You gotta let it boil. When it boils up, it makes a sound. And then you have to pour it and you have to steep it, and you have to wait. And when you hold the cup, you're holding something warm. When you sip the cup, you're drinking something warm, right? It hits all those notes to relax your body. And relax your mind. And the last space, and this is the space that we neglect a lot, and this is a space for nothingness. And if this was a place, I would say it would be a swing. On a swing. You're kind of playing, but you're kind of relaxing. There's really no point to a swing. You're not getting anywhere. You're just going back and forth, up and down. You kick your legs a little bit. It's not super physical. It's a place for nothing. I watch a lot of Winnie the Pooh, with my son The old one, the 1970s Winnie the Pooh. And one of the very last scenes is Christopher Robin talking to Winnie the pool, and he says, you know what my favorite thing to do is? My favorite thing to do is nothing. He says, what's that? He's like, well, it's when adults ask you what you wanna do and you say nothing, and then you go and do it. I think in this exploitative. Over consuming overproduced over manufactured world. We need to spend more intentional energy around cultivating spaces. To do nothing. I ain't trying to prove nothing to you. I'm not trying to be anything for anybody. I'm just here. This is the practice. The practice of being here. I. I am not worried. I'm not trying to fix anything. I'm not trying to change anything similar to mindfulness where you're trying to be present with your mind. But nothingness, it's like, yo, I don't, I'm not even, I'm not even trying to go there. I'm not even trying to settle my mind. I'm not trying to do anything. I am existing and there's something beautiful about existing and living. One is there's a part of. Living that requires action, right? You can be alive and not live right? You can stifle yourself. You can you not experience things right? You can be alive and not live. So there's an action that comes with living. But then there's also this other beautiful part about living of, oh, your body is doing functions that you aren't making it do. There's involuntary parts of you that are living and moving and active without your action and without your consent. And one of the greatest ways of expressing gratitude for this thing that is happening without us controlling it. This process of living that. We don't consciously think about what it's happening is to be comfortable with being with ourselves without the need to rush to do something, without the need to rush to be stimulated. When you cultivate these six environments in your life, another way we can say environment is atmosphere. And as you begin to walk into spaces with other folks where you work, the people you love out in the world, I. The stranger at the supermarket, there's a vibe about you. People start to pick up on the atmosphere that you've been cultivating and creating. So live from your soul and create an atmosphere that other people wanna be in./ Thank you for listening to the Soulfully You Podcast with Coach Chris Rodriguez. If you like the show, help others find me by subscribing and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget to connect with me on Instagram at Coach underscore Chris Rodriguez. For more episodes along with all of my coaching programs, visit me@www.coach chris rodriguez.com. Special thanks to my team behind the scenes music by Dan Smith. And remember, whatever you do, wherever you find yourself today, make sure you put some soul in it.