Oana
Hi and welcome to a new episode of the Feminine UNCUT Podcast.
Today we’re going to dedicate our conversation to rituals, because they’re there for us every single day, and they tend to turn into routine.
So let’s see if we can bring a more in-depth perspective into our routines and turn them into profound rituals that ignite our feminine energy and bring us passion, aliveness, and magnetism.
So I’ll be joined as usual by my colleague, Ioana.
Hi Ioana!
Ioana
Hello again!
Oana
But before we go deep into the subject, for all newcomers, I’m Oana, founder of thefeminine.com, an online platform dedicated to empowering women all over the world to trust their voices, follow their hearts,s and embrace their womanhood. And we cover here a lot of things about feminine values, feminine lifestyle, and connection to our feminine energy.
How do we nurture passion, sensuality, and intimacy?
How do we bring a voice to our visions?
And how do we live a fulfilled, expressed womanhood?
We also want to challenge myths, and we dedicate this podcast to supporting you in living the life you love as a woman.
And today, with Ioana, my colleague, we’re going to tackle the hectic rhythm in our daily life. So coming back, one of the greatest sins of our modern world, right, is our hectic rhythm. We’re always in a rush. We’re always bombed by millions and tons of information, energies, and people around us who want something, expect something from us. And we’re always pushed into rushing, pushed into performing, pushed into acting all the time. We have a little space in our day-to-day life for introspection, quietness, spending time, and nurturing other parts of ourselves.
I want to talk about rituals and the power that they can bring to a woman’s life. And the most important thing we want to kind of explore and discover is how rituals can connect us with our feminine energy and how they can help us express who we are.
Ioana, what do you think about that? What is a ritual that you have, or even more, do you have rituals in your life?
Ioana
There’s something I do a lot. I don’t know if it’s a ritual. You’ll tell me. I run, I go jogging. Every time I feel furious or anxious or sad, I just put my sneakers on and just go out running. Is it a ritual? Can I call it a ritual? Can I look at it as a ritual?
Oana
It feels more like a routine or a habit or a hobby that you do, or a practice that you do that connects you with who you are. And to turn that into a ritual, you would have to become more aware you’re doing it as a ritual.
First of all, I think awareness is the missing link, the first missing link, and then the kind of devotion that habit or that routine to something. For example, it may be like getting back in balance and you hold an intention in mind through the running and then you actually end up asking yourself whether you have achieved that. So turning routine into a ritual is actually first of all intending to make it a ritual and asking something of that practice.
Ioana
So you’re telling me that before going out and starting running I should just take a few minutes, take a deep breath, try to understand what’s there, what’s bothering me, and go running with the intention to get more clarity of what I’m feeling?
Oana
Yes! If you bring an intention and awareness to the routine, then it becomes a ritual. What actually was meant by a ritual from ancient times till urban times is ritual is a step into a different dimension of yourself and that happens through awareness and what’s that dimension of yourself. It’s those deeper parts of yourself – like your emotions – that need a voice and they need a space to be voiced inside of, so the ritual is you bringing more awareness into your inner space and becoming more conscious of other parts of your own self that want to also have a voice in your experience of living life
Ioana
Does it matter what our rituals look like? Because, for example, for me, running doesn’t sound like a very ritualistic practice because when I’m thinking about rituals I’m thinking about a very sacred space and very ritualized behavior. Can we call running or just having the morning coffee a ritual?
Oana
If you make them with conscious awareness, yes, and if you hold an intention that during that moment and time and space, you are devoting that time to practicing something. If you’re just drinking your coffee then you’re just drinking your coffee. If you’re drinking your coffee with the awareness of being with yourself, of sensing who you are, of connecting on a deeper level with your experience of life, then that’s a ritual and I think that confusion came from the fact that in ancient times we went to a sacred place and we had a priest or somebody who was conducting the ritual, so the power of the sacredness, of the ritual, of the ritualistic experience was in the hands of somebody else.
In urban times we don’t necessarily go to Church or, if we do, we do it once per week, right? So how can we bring sacredness into our lives and why is that important? And I think sacredness can be brought into our life by taking the accountability that we can infuse everything we do with sacredness, and if we do that, if we come from our connection with our heart, for example, which is the first link of a sacred experience, then once we’re there in the heart and we’re drinking our coffee, in the heart, then that can really turn into a sacred moment.
So bringing the power to us and infusing sacredness in everything we do gives us a sacred life. Why is that important to women? Because women need their souls every day. They don’t just need it when they go to Church because a woman lives through her soul, she wants to feel, and she wants to understand how she experiences, tastes, and feels every single thing she does. That’s the moment when a woman becomes alive. So the power of routine turned into a ritual is the power of living a sacred experience connected to your soul every single day and that brings you a lightness of the woman. It’s like an action board. It’s like a start, engage, kind of an experience.
Ioana
Why is a ritual important for women?
Oana
It brings the experience of constant nurture not only to the physical body but to the emotional and soul bodies. And we need nurture in our lives, as women. And ritualistic practices give that experience of intimately connecting with ourselves and loving ourselves. Because when you are creating a ritual, when you’re giving an intention to any gesture, any practice, it can be drinking your coffee in the morning, you’re also giving the space to be with yourself. You’re not just doing the action of drinking, you’re giving something to yourself, you’re allowing yourself the space to be in connection with yourself and that’s nurturing for a woman and it puts her in contact, consciously and unconsciously, with how she feels, what she wants on an inner experience and that brings more awareness to her process in that day. It helps her feel more connected. It intimately connects her with herself and it brings a much more balanced experience of living life. And if you do that every day, then you are giving yourself the keys to self-love. You’re opening the door of the self-loving experience. And that just magnetizes love around. So it’s very important.
Ioana
Is there any specific ritual that can put us in connection with our bodies and with our sensual nature that we often lose?
Oana
Oh, yes! I think that due to the way we live life, we disconnect from our bodies and from our senses. And in a way, our experience of the feminine, our experience as women happen in the body, happens in connection with our senses. We keep talking about it.
Sensuality is the expression, the language of our beauty as women, and the moment we, connect with our senses through rituals, we also connect with our body, and in that way, we ignite this language in our expression, in our body’s expression. So a powerful ritual would be just to take a couple of minutes every day, tune in, see how you feel, and connect with one of your senses. It can also just be caressing something, feeling the texture of a material that you really like or a flower, visualizing a sunset, smelling a beautiful perfume, or enjoying the taste of your cup of coffee etc. Just bringing awareness to each sense, every day, can be a powerful ritual to activating your sensuality, activating your feminine energy, feeling your body more, and just melding, relaxing into your magnetism.
Ioana
Now, I would love to hear some tips and tricks. Can you give us some practical advice on what we can do tomorrow morning, for example, to get back in connection with our sensuality?
Oana
Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, instead of just jumping out of bed and rushing to shower, take a couple of seconds. You can put your hands on the belly or just breathe deeply with your whole body and ask yourself, okay, it’s my morning, how do I feel?
Why in the morning? Because most of the time, what happens on a deeper level for us as women gets more present to us in the morning, right after sleep. So maybe you feel pain in your body, there’s a constriction, or maybe you’re anxious about something related to your work, or maybe you’re creating something and your attention is there, so you’re having an emotional experience also while you’re doing everything you’re doing.
By tapping into that, you’re more aware of what’s going on in other dimensions, other layers of your womanhood. And then you go with that into the shower. And, for example, you turn the shower into a ritual by allowing the water to caress, nurture, feed you, and also meld whatever anxiety or emotion you have. Specifically and intentionally, you giving yourself access to the fluidity of the water, which is also feminine, and allowing yourself to flow with your emotions and see what changes; and see how you’re much more informed about your inner process and your emotions and what you actually want to accomplish.
You have much more clarity about what’s happening after a ritual or you will just feel more alive if nothing is happening or more connected with your body and bring more joy to your life experience. So that could be a ritual, that could be actually a routine turned into a ritual, and it can bring great benefits!
Ioana
Okay. Thank you for the very precious advice. I think I will take the morning practice and bring it with the evening practice because I have a really difficult time falling asleep. I was thinking if I do this before going to sleep, I will just fall asleep in a more relaxed way, and maybe, who knows, my insomnia will go away.
Oana
Yes, and I could give you a piece of advice. Go over whatever happened during the day and let go of it as part of your ritual, as part of your practice, before going to bed, and then close the ritual. Like, thank you for giving me the space. And then, fall asleep. And it’s a process of, in a way, losing the hectic rhythm of the day, settling your emotions, balancing your processes, your inner-outer processes, and preparing you to sleep. And actually, that’s what a ritual does. It’s a preparation step from one place of being to another – deeper, more aware. So it’s really powerful. You should definitely try it.
Ioana
I will and I will also follow up on our next podcast and tell you if it worked.
Oana
Great! Mentioning a new podcast coming next month… Ladies, it’s going to be about intimacy and I definitely know that’s a hot subject for us, so stay tuned. We’re going to unravel the beauty of intimacy and how we, as women, can be powerful in our relationship with our partner.
That was The Feminine UNCUT for today. Looking forward to the next one which is on INTIMACY…
Thanks for tuning in and I truly hope you take on rituals and sensuality and inspire yourself with those very beautiful feminine practices and bring magic into your life.
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