A Year of Slow Living

Last year, I committed to a year of sacred simple pleasures. I cultivated joy. I indulged in the little things that delighted me. I embraced the sacredness of pleasure. During my year of buying, using, and wasting less, I did just what it sounds like: I became ultra-mindful of my consumerist habits and focused on cultivating a greener lifestyle. If these past two years committing to both these things—consuming less and enjoying sacred simple pleasures—have taught me anything, it’s that the only way I can make meaningful changes in my life is if I slow down.

So much of my bad consumerist habits stemmed from being overworked, overscheduled, and in need of major soothing. I turned to retail therapy and stress shopping in an attempt to heal myself when what I really needed was to be more proactive about cutting stress and toxicity out of my life. The same goes for opening up to pleasure in all its forms. I had to create time and space to allow my capacity for enjoyment to strengthen and grow. I simply couldn’t explore what sacred simple pleasures were to me when I was too busy to have the energy to playfully explore my relationship to pleasure.

Both these experiences made me decide to commit to a year of slow living in order to continue cultivating a balanced life in harmony with self and nature. Slow living can mean a lot of things but, in essence, it’s about cutting out unnecessary things that clutter up your life and doing activities with purpose and pleasure. Rather than rushing around from commitment to commitment, you focus on the handful that you need or want to do. You take time for yourself and make every routine a ritual. So basically what I already do, with extra attention to examining and letting go of old habits that have me falling back into unnecessarily over-committing my time and energy to people, places, and things. I want to create space, in essence, for more everyday magic.

I have a few guidelines to help me focus on slow living (I won’t say rules because, well, that feels a little too restrictive for me!). They’re pretty simple but, as I’ve found over the past two years, pretty reliable ways of making sure I’m not moving too fast.

1. Enjoy more quiet time. It sounds funny, but towards the end of last year, I found myself fantasizing about quiet time. No music. No news. No loud conversations. Just me and my cat and the soft hum of our daily routine. The whistling kettle. The gentle clack of knitting needles making a blanket out of nothing but a strand of yarn and a few simple loops. The soft woosh of beeswax candles being lit. This intense desire for quiet made me realize how much noise I surrounded myself with each day and how important it was to unplug from it. I needed this quiet, in short, in order to hear myself.

2. Make more homemade meals. It’s no secret that I love cooking. And while I’ve lately come to enjoy the pleasures of the occasional take out meal, I find that slowing down for long enough to cook dinner during the week goes a long way to help me decompress and get grounded. I also get super excited at the grocery store thinking about what delicious, simple things I can make from the seasonal produce.

3. Carve out more unstructured time to play. In the past when I wanted to get out or doing something outside of my teaching life, I’d commit to a bunch of activities each week and pencil in all sorts of extracurriculars. It was fun at first….and then I’d inevitably get burned out on extroverted fun, usually mid-semester when my workload increased. I finally realized that part of the burnout was because I wasn’t always listening to what I felt like doing in the moment. Now, I’m learning to see what the day brings. I might have a few ideas of what I’d like to do over the week, but I don’t commit to anything unless I feel really excited about it. This has created such a relaxed, flexible way for me to explore my “playtime” without a strict structure that takes the fun out of things.

4. Prioritize reading time… I’ve seriously gotten into audiobooks over the past few years thanks to a friend (you know who you are!), and I absolutely love them. They are integral to my self-care and relaxation, especially during the heavy grading periods when my eyes hurt from too much computer time, but I need the comfort of a good book. Still, I miss the joys of an old fashioned paperback or ebook to sink into. There’s a magic to see the words on the page and slowly disappearing into a new world. Thanks to my HEAs All Day Books Club and my Occult Detective Book Club on Goodreads, I think I’ll be able to commit more time to reading. I’m shooting for 30 minutes each night before bed and am reworking my nightly routine so I can do it without falling asleep five minutes after I open my book, ha!

5. …and time in nature. It might be an urban hike, an afternoon reading in the park, or simply tending my potted herb garden, but I need time outdoors. I am a better person when I’ve had time to listen to the whispering of the trees and the idle chatter of birds. I’m even better when I’ve got dirt-stained hands and rosemary-perfumed skin. It reminds me that I am more than my accomplishments or the next thing on my to-do list.

6. Tune into my breath. It’s a funny thing, breathing. We do it unconsciously. Without thought or connection to our bodies. But I’ve found that when I stop and tune into my breathing patterns, I become more aware of the tension or feelings I might be holding onto. Sometimes in an effort to get through a packed day, for example, I find myself breathing short, shallow breathes which isn’t good for our nervous system or overall well-being. Pausing to slow our breathing—I’m talking deep belly breaths—helps soothe the sympathetic nervous system (that thing in control of our fight-or-flight responses). I also find that it has helped me stay better connected to myself and let of things that might be causing energetic stagnation or stressing my body.

What ways do plan to slow down and enjoy life?

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

5 Things I Learned From My Year of Cultivating Sacred Simple Pleasures

Last year, I committed to a year of sacred simple pleasures. I cultivated joy. I indulged in the little things that delighted me. I embraced the sacredness of pleasure. Sounds fun, right? And it was…once I got past the hangups I unwittingly nourished over the years. You know the ones: I should be working. This is all just silly stuff. It’s a guilty pleasure. I don’t have time for this. Other people enjoy this so I should too. I couldn’t just enjoy something without these ugly thoughts cropping up. In short, as I started this journey into the sacredness of pleasure, I realized that I had a complicated relationship with pleasure.

I like to blame this on puritan culture and run-of-the-mill religion that makes us feel guilty for enjoying anything that feels good. I also had to come to terms with the fact that, as a successful woman of color, I often came up against feelings of guilt or impostor syndrome that told me I wasn’t allowed to enjoy myself. Sick, right? It’s the epitome of everyday gothic when your inner saboteur comes out because the idea of bliss is a scary thing to hold onto. You begin to hold yourself back before others can do it all in some vague attempt to keep yourself safe from whatever the world wants to throw at you, the transgressive bruja that is living proof that minorities can not just survive, but thrive. Honestly, I’m like a walking threat to puritan values and toxic patriarchy!

Once I cleared through all that muck, however, I was able to indulge in the sacredness of simple pleasures. I learned a lot about myself as I explored what was truly pleasurable to me and what wasn’t. It was like a year of relearning what it means to experience joy, from the small quiet joy of brewing a pot of tea, to the loud silly joy of playing hide and seek with my niece. I learned how to give myself permission to not work, to rest. I made room for things and experiences that had no value other than that they made me smile. And I learned that I had to completely upend the notion of pleasure before I could experience its sacredness. This revelation can be boiled down to five truths I learned from my year of cultivating sacred simple pleasures.

1. What I thought would be pleasurable often wasn’t. Okay, calling on the sympathy of all introverts here, I’m embarrassed to admit that when I first started the year, my idea of pleasures conjured up more extroverted activities. Going out with friends, dancing all night, filling up my weekends with out-there stuff. And while some of that was fun (I enjoy a night on the dance floor as much as the next woman), I found that much of it felt like I was performing.

   I could never quite recharge and found myself starting the work week with an empty battery and no energy to enjoy my cozy daily routines. I realized when I stepped back to look at things, that I was relying on what the extroverted world said I should be enjoying, versus what I was actually enjoying. Mainstream culture’s notion of pleasure is not my notion of pleasure….aside from the occasional turn about the dance floor.

2. Quiet is delicious. So there I was a few months into the year, having to completely reframe my approach to pleasure. It wasn’t a loud, splashy thing. It wasn’t about being surrounded by people or chasing experiences. It was about listening to myself and my needs. And yeah, sometimes that meant being surrounded by people and chasing a new experience. But more often than not it was about giving myself permission to be quiet.

   In the quiet, I found that I was able to unplug from this fast-paced world and tune into myself. I experienced surprising revelations that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered if I’d continued on my path of loud, fast, busy. I reconnected with old parts of myself that I’d thought long gone. They’d only been in deep hibernation. My creativity and intuition blossomed under the soothing blam of quiet. I connected more deeply to life’s natural rhythms and, as a result, found greater peace in my daily goings-on.

3. Slowing down is an essential part of enjoying life. With quiet comes a slower pace. It takes time to settle in and indulge in something. Simple pleasures can’t be rushed. I’d begun to see that having a full to-do list or social calendar kept me from actually enjoying myself. It often left me disconnected from self and soul. In fact, I found that busy, busy is a great way to avoid yourself and the things you need to work through.

   I pretty quickly had to come to grips with the fact that, despite my best efforts, I can still be prone to overworking. But when I made a conscious effort to do less, I was rewarded with the time and space to clear out fo stagnant energy, outmoded ways of being, and the yuck I’d internalized from a world that isn’t comfortable with magical women of color. I replaced them with things that made me feel beautiful, stories that made me hopeful, and experiences that proved just how powerful pleasure can be.

4. Pleasure stirs up all sorts of unexpected emotions. Here’s the thing about enjoyment. When you create space for it in your life, you also make room for other emotions that bubble up as you begin to relax and open yourself to the softer, gentler things in life. Sadness, when you begin to realize that you’ve unconsciously denied yourself certain pleasures. Shock, when you realize how armored you’ve kept yourself—healthy boundaries are VERY important, but it’s equally important to remember to stay open to the good stuff. Guilt when you’re enjoying yourself a little too much…but there’s no such thing as too much, so then you feel anger at how you’ve let those pesky puritanical norms snake their way into your brain and make you doubt your own joy.

   See what I mean? I’ve got a complicated relationship to pleasure, or rather, the way society tries to manage and contain it and, sometimes, to crush it. This year taught me that I’ve had to consciously nourish and protect my sacred simple pleasures. The world is afraid of joy and, if I’m out of tune with myself, I can become afraid of it too. It’s the divine feminine incarnate and, like all powerful energies, can be at once healing, joyful, and terrifying.

5. Homey domestic comforts are the ultimate sacred simple pleasures. Seriously. Coming home to cat-cuddles. The smell of beeswax candles perfuming my home with their honeyed scent. The whistle of the tea kettle. These things bring me so much comfort and joy. I even found myself rediscovering old pleasures, like sewing and knitting, during this time. All of these homey tasks helped me to unplug from a long work-week, ground my energies, and fill my life with beauty.

   I began to more consciously craft the kind of life I wanted for myself. Full of luscious herbs in my garden and a pot full of stew in the kitchen. More books than I can ever read in my library and a bed piled high with knitted blankets large enough for two to cuddle under. I got rid of things that didn’t bring me joy in order to create space for my pleasure in my life and home. This simple domesticity brought me back to my core belief that true magic is in the everyday.

The thing about pleasure is that it’s pretty darn contagious. In fact, you could say that pleasure begets pleasure. It’s pretty wanton that way. If there’s one final takeaway I got from my year of cultivating sacred simple pleasures, it’s that the more you open yourself up to enjoying the little things in life, the more pleasure you start finding in the bigger things too. It is an act of everyday conjuring to invite this heady, hedonistic energy into all aspects of your life. My year of meditating on these simple pleasures might be over, but the cultivation of them is ongoing. After all, life is more delicious when you welcome in the divine feminine power of pleasure.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!