Practical Beauties: Rituals for your Wellbeing
The Short of It:
We asked a local artist Carmen Anastasia Paloma Proffitt to make a series of ceramic tincture cups for us, and we just received them. They are gorgeous and ready for you to buy and incorporate into your daily rituals! You can get them solo or add a 1 oz. tincture to the order for 15% off. The discount is automatically taken. They’re on sale through Monday, December 11th, and they make great gifts!
The Long of it:
Though I never really believed in God in an almighty-maker kind of way, I loved church as a teenager. I grew up going to an Episcopalian church that felt cathedralesque in all its vaulted stone glory. I couldn’t have named it then, but now I understand that I was in love with the ritual of it all. There were people swinging metal chambers of incense from long chains, candles galore, priests in tapestries of purple and gold, and a choir that I got to sing in five-part harmony with three times a week.
At home, I was always eager to put out the Advent Wreath. My yearly longing for the four-candled wreath representing the weeks before Jesus’ birth confused me in high school because I wasn’t religious, and doing a Christian ritual at home reflected far more earnestness than I had for the occassion. But I did it anyway. Because it was the only time of year, besides birthdays and fancy dinner parties, that we intentionally lit candles. And candles surrounded by cedar boughs, nonetheless!
My personal rituals have taken a different shape over the 30 years since my choirgirl days, but I still love me some candles surrounded by natural objects to call me into the present, honor the season or moment I find myself in, and offer up some gratitude and breathe my hopes and dreams into the flame. This kind of ritual, the kind that is intended to connect us with the big beautiful mystery we are all suspended within, is what I think of immediately when I hear the word ritual. Something slightly removed from daily life that holds us in the present and invites us to work with symbol and metaphor to deepen and grow. And I need this kind of ritual.
But there are so many other rituals too, right? The near holy one of the coffee- or tea- or smoothie-making process and the deep delight of the first sip. Slipping into an almost-too-hot tub, holding hands before dinner, stretching before bed… not a lot of symbolism or metaphor there, but each act has the power to take me to a place of YES, and I guess that’s the essence of my evolutionary (aka spiritual) practice—inhabiting my YES all the time.
Yes freshly brewed coffee, yes frosty morning walk in the woods, yes toast with tahini and jam, yes book on my lap. Those acts are easy and deeply fulfilling, so I make a ritual out of them. But the work of accessing my yes with all things, all moments, all truths is where the practice part of personal evolution comes in for me.
There’s so much I want to say no to in any given day: no to taking out the compost or driving into town. No to office work, no to the difficult conversation I have to have, no to being vulnerable in the meeting, no to the feeling of being not enough in so many ways. And yet I know that the most painful part of anything—whether it’s an action, experience, or feeling—comes from my resistance to it. That’s what the Buddhists say, anyways, so I’ve been working hard to minimize the friction by releasing my resistance to whatever I’m rubbing up against. And I think there are two main ways I do that.
For chores and actions I’d really rather not do, I accompany them with something that brings me pleasure. If I have to do office work, I make a special cup of spicy cacao. If I’m moving about I listen to podcasts or music. I think most of us do this naturally to some extent, but when I notice I’m really in resistance mode, I consciously get parental on myself and bribe the kid with a treat. It really works for me, which is a good thing because a lot of what I do looks and feels like chores. But they’re starting to feel like pleasure-filled rituals. They’re starting to feel like yes.
For emotions and human interactions I’d rather not experience, no amount of spicy cacao can help. It requires another whole level of grown-upness. Which, to me, means accepting that there are just going to be some super uncomfortable and painful moments, relationship dynamics, and emotions my life. In all our lives. We will suffer and we will experience the suffering of our people and have little power to take their suffering away.
The Buddhists also teach us that our suffering is intensified when we suffer for our suffering, or judge ourselves for judging others, or criticize ourselves for crying. It took me many years and some significant losses to be brave enough to test that theory. In the process, I discovered that surrendering to the awkwardness and pain—naming it, feeling it, letting it move through me—actually felt better than tucking it all away.
It’s taken me much longer—and I’m still working at it—to get to a point of being with hard interpersonal exchanges, or even engage in them in the first place. I’ve had to work a lot on boundaries, quieting my Pleaser, advocating for myself in arguments, and expressing my anger, and I can finally feel the work paying off in my body.
The first step for me was getting up the courage to state my needs, always trembling inside as I did so. But I kept at it. For years. And as I practiced and reinforced the positive outcomes by reflecting on them and celebrating them, my nervous system started to change. Because it was—IS STILL—learning that the scariest-seeming things actually aren’t as threatening as my nerves think. I don’t get adrenaline rushes in the same way I did even a year ago in difficult conversations, and that’s all happening beneath the radar of my thinking mind.
And yet it takes my thinking mind to lead my body to this quieter, more sure place. My thinking mind urges me to make rituals out of things my nonthinking mind wouldn’t choose to do on its own—like my chores and daily tincture doses and breathing and grounding practices and my commitment to experiencing my feelings rather than being swept downstream with them. And the more I consciously engage in those rituals, the more second nature they become, the less I have to think about them, and the better I feel.
It’s not just me! This is how the human body works! It’s amazing! We are all capable of significant, fundamental change!
This is all a very long-winded ride into my point: The assertion that ritual can play an important role in our relationship with healing plants. If you’ve made it this far, you probably also believe that what we put into our bodies matters and has a big impact on how we feel. And yet, it’s so easy to eat and drink in ways that we know make us feel crappy. So I create rituals for myself that make nourishing foods + herbs appealing. For me, it has a lot to do with dishware. I have handmade bowls and mugs of various shapes and sizes that I associate with different healthful foods and they inspire me to make them.
I also have clear rituals around treats—chocolate in the evening, a croissant on the weekend, a cookie at the market, stuffed spinach pizza and bourbon when I’m in Chicago. These rituals bring me great pleasure without throwing off my sense of balance, and I think they’re as important as the more wholesome ones.
As for herbal medicine, we have little ceramic shot glasses my sister made that I love! I didn’t take tinctures regularly until my she gifted them to us and I wanted an excuse to use them. I’m in good health and rarely get even a cold, but I like to work with plants on a regular basis because I know they support my body in an enduring way, and the cups have made all the difference.
While some herbs can be highly effective for acute issues over a short period of time (ie., Goldenrod for UTIs), most of the herbs we work with are known as tonic herbs, or herbs that support and tone a system when taken consistently over time. Lemon Balm and Nettles are two examples of tonic herbs.
When we talk to folks at markets, we encourage them to create a daily ritual with tonic and therapeutic herbs they can integrate into their daily flow so they can benefit from them in a lasting way. And so, inspired by my sister’s tincture glasses and the herbal ritual they inspired for me, we asked local artist Carmen Anastasia Paloma Proffitt to make a series of ceramic tincture cups for us, and we just received them. They are so gorgeous and ready for you to buy and incorporate into your daily rituals!
They’re on sale through Monday, December 11th. You can get them solo or add a 1 oz. tincture to the order for 15% off. The discount is automatically taken. If you have any questions about the best herbs for you, please drop us a line.
I’m now ready for my bedtime rituals, which include some hearty doses of Tulsi, Pedicularis, and California Poppy!
Sweet dreams my friends,
Becca
