Beautiful photo by Eva Kolenko Photography
What creates a meaningful life? How can we craft lives full of the things that matter most to us? How do we live and love with our whole hearts?
We ask a lot of these big questions at Luminary. In fact, our mutual love of these big questions is one of the main reasons we founded Luminary in the first place.
Because we believe, as Carl Sagan so eloquently put it, “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and by the depth of our answers.”
We love exploring the answers in our studentship of the best and brightest thought leaders, in our interactions with the amazing women we work with, and, perhaps most importantly, inside ourselves. We ask these questions again and again knowing that each of us must ask and explore them for ourselves. And that the “answers” are ever-evolving for all of us.
But the transformative act is in simply asking and opening up. It’s in creating enough space, enough inner stillness, on a regular basis to get genuinely curious about what makes our life meaningful. And then practicing staying close to that. Because in the end, as Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” And most of us want to live a more elevated, connected, and intentional life every day.
The Power of Stillness and Ritual
The best evidenced based approaches to health and wellbeing out there confirm that cultivating rituals of mindfulness and personal reflection are vital and transformative practices.
Befriending our own attention, and seeing it as one of our most valuable resources is at the heart of living an intentional life. Some of the most profound rewards of our humanity are found in the most ordinary, familiar moments of our lives. If we can practice going slow enough to be present for them.
And yet, as a society, we’re so distracted. Our attention has never been more divided or in more demand. We are pulled in a million directions. So knowing where to invest our most precious resource–our attention–can be challenging. Most of us wake up and feel the momentum of our day propelling us forward; we end up reacting to what’s most demanding rather than aligning our days with something more valuable. Something that ensures our day to day choices reflect, in the end, the kind of life we really want to live.
Rituals of mindfulness and personal reflection pull us away from the pressures and demands of our day for a few precious, intentional moments. So we can be close to ourselves, create that incredibly important inner stillness, remember what matters most to us, and cultivate our most intentional, whole-hearted life in the daily moments.
Cultivate Your Own Ritual
There are so many ways to cultivate rituals of mindfulness and personal reflection in our lives. But for many of us, it’s hard to know where to begin. So we’ve designed a guided practice based on the the latest neurobiological research, evidence based approaches to whole-hearted living, and our own well of inspiration.
It’s a very special tool we’ve created just for the Luminary Community to help you cultivate your own powerful daily ritual. Our Luminary Morning Check-In helps you to generously bring your attention inward, reminds you to slow down, creates the space to connect with the best and most important parts of your life, and guides you toward making sure you begin each day with clarity on what matters most to you. Sign up for our newsletter (right on our homepage) to get the audio link sent directly to your inbox! And to get a monthly dose of our favorite Luminary tips, tools and inspiration. If you are already a part of our Luminary Newsletter, check the April newsletter for a link. And be sure to spread the love–let the amazing women in your life know to sign up for our newsletter so they too get invited to use this powerful tool.
Have fun trying out this lovely practice! We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
With Love,
Amber + Cara
Team Luminary
P.S. Love the daily check-in? Want to really dive in and explore your most vibrant and meaningful life? Check out our Be Luminary Course and Retreat happening again this Fall. It’s an amazing course where bighearted, big-dreaming women come together to discover and nourish their best selves. We artfully curate experiences and education to help you live into your healthiest body, thriving relationships, deep contentment, and your most inspiring work in the world. Join our growing and vibrant tribe of tender hearted and badass women!
P.P. S. Many of the concepts in this blog post were inspired by our studies of an approach to behavior change called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and the powerful work of thought leader Brené Brown.
