Pretty Spiritual Podcast

Does Meditation Work?

We hear a lot these days about the benefits of meditation. But if you’re new to the practice, you might be wondering, does meditation actually work? If you’ve been at it for a while, maybe you’re a little jaded with your mindfulness routine. What does meditation do? And why meditate, when it can be so terrifying, uncomfortable, or just plain meh to slow down and be still?

In episode 23 your spiritual besties talk about the benefits of mindfulness and share our experience with the question. We’ll each talk about how we began our practice, however haphazardly. And how we learned that it’s okay to be uncomfortable or anxious when we start to be still with our body and mind. 

Plus, we’ll share about the meditation techniques for beginners that helped us make a humble start at this practice. Like, did you know you can do a two-minute practice that totally counts? Did you know that you don’t actually have to have a quiet mind to meditate? Or that you don’t have to believe the thoughts you have about how your practice feels or what it looks like? Let’s applaud ourselves for our heartfelt efforts! The trying is what matters.

We’ll look at the meditation tools that have shifted our perspectives so slowly and so surely. Ultimately, this is less of a how to meditate talk and more of a conversation about the benefits of meditation in daily living. We’ll share realtime examples of what meditation benefits can actually look like in the midst of our busy lives. But we’ll also include a short, breath-based practice at the end in case you’re feeling courageous and wanna try a quickie!

How do you meditate? Join the convo and share the love! Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Insight Timer. 

How do you meditate? Join the convo and share the love! Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Insight Timer. 

Letting Go

Do you get annoyed when people say that you should just let go of something that’s bothering you? It’s that little word *just.* If letting go were a matter of just doing it, surely we’d have done it by now. Heaven knows we’ve tried hard and long enough to control that process ourselves! That’s right, spiritual friendies, episode 22 is all about how to let that shit go. 

Moving on from something that has been occupying our mind and our heart isn’t always a straightforward process. Often it requires frustrating attempts to release something that we just can’t stop picking up. Maybe letting go of the past seems like an exercise in spiritual futility because we watch yourself picking it back up before we’ve even finished putting it down. Been there.

If you’re wondering how to let go or how to move on, we’ve got some practical and perspective-shifting tools for you. We’ll look at what happens when we shine the light of spiritual practice on the messy process of letting go. How does our experience change if learning how to let things go becomes an end in itself?

We’ll share how using compassion and self-awareness to witness our emotional defaults can help us start to let go of the past and of our control strategies. It’s a gentle process, not a violent one. Most of us learn to let go not because we’ve forced ourselves, but because we finally feel safe enough.

Do you have tools or experiences to share with Pretty Spiritual Podcast? You can reach us using our site’s Contact page or find us on social. Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Insight Timer. Come join the party! Plus, if you have questions, feedback or want to suggest a topic, we’d love to hear from you!

How to Let Go of Anger

Dealing with Anger

 Grrr! In episode 21, we’re taking a look at what causes anger and what messages this intelligent emotion might have for us. Above all, we believe feelings are a healthy and normal part of the human experience. So how can we let anger be our spiritual teacher? What would be different if we could let our anger be... spiritual? Yup, we’re really going for it!

We’ll start by sharing our experiences with pent up anger and what it was like for each of us when we first started looking at how to deal with anger. Maybe you’re someone who feels angry all the time. On the other hand,  you might be someone who hasn't yet made contact with your own angry feelings. Certainly, some of us feel safer taking care of others’ feelings rather than acknowledging our own.

Wondering, “why am I so angry all the time?” Let's find out together. We’ve got tools to help us acknowledge, feel, and process this emotion in a way that is positive and affirming rather than harmful and destructive. Let's look at how to stop being angry using spiritual tools like mindfulness and awareness of our unmet needs.  

We can't wait to share our tools for how to deal with anger and, more importantly, how to release anger. It all starts with simple attention to what is happening inside of us.  Then we can let the emotion move through us and hopefully learn as it does.

Have tools or experiences to share with the Pretty Spiritual Podcast community? You can reach us via our Contact page or find us on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Insight Timer. Please come join the convo. Plus, if you have questions, feedback or want to suggest a topic, we’d love to hear from you!

Openness to Experience

Finding Yourself & Loving What You Find

 Today we’re talking about experience and how we relate to it. What is experience, anyway? How do we relate to what we’re thinking and to our state of mind? And is it possible to bring mindfulness and love to our relationship with self and our direct experience so that we can be okay no matter what life looks like? We sure hope so!

First, we’ll share what it has been like for each of us on this inward journey. We’ll talk about the ways we’ve learned to relate kindly and wisely to our own experiences, as well as the areas where it still feels weird and hard. Then we’ll explore how our patterns of thinking can become the habitual experiences and attitudes we have of life and ourselves. And, most importantly, we’ll look at what we can do to shift into a kinder and more resilient outlook.

Wondering about how to find yourself and make friends with the person you find? Want to know how to have a healthy relationship with yourself? Good news, we brought our spiritual tools with us. In our experience, all you need to begin the journey is openness to experience and an intention to be kind to yourself. We’ll talk about how to feel good about yourself regardless of life circumstances. And we’ll explore how to get to know yourself using mindfulness and compassion as your guides. 

So join the fun and share your experiences and tools with us! Let us know what works for you when you want to learn how to be your own best friend. Let’s get this spiritual feedback loop going, people! You can get in touch with us using the Pretty Spiritual Podcast Contact page or find us on all the social places: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Insight Timer. 

How to Break Bad Habits

Can people change? Yes, according to neuroplasticity. And, yup, it involves a lot of work and plenty of patience. Today we’re looking at how to use spiritual tools for changing habits, patterns and behaviors that no longer serve us. 

Many of us who are wondering how to change a habit can get stuck in self-loathing and aversion in the process. So normal! That’s why we especially want to talk about how we can be kind and gentle with ourselves when we’re deep in the work of acknowledging and addressing these deeply ingrained patterns. How do we cultivate an environment of loving acceptance for ourselves no matter where we are in the cycle of breaking habits? 

Are you trying for a change of habit? Wondering how to break a habit you’ve been struggling with? We’ll share what it looks like in real time when we’re working to unlearn outdated patterns. 

So, how long does it take to break a habit? Some studies suggest just over two months. This means it might be possible to form new, healthy habits faster than you think. How? We’ll share how conscious reminders can help us in the midst of changing habits that cause harm. And, of course, we’ll need some tools! We’ll share how we make use of tools like faith in our own experience, trust in the process, and humility to be right where we are today. 

What behavior changes are you working on right now? What helps you when you’re struggling with how to change behavior and habits that just aren’t working for you anymore? Please join the party and share your tools and experiences with us. You can get in touch with us using the Pretty Spiritual Podcast Contact page or find us on all the social places: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Insight Timer. 

How to Live in the Moment

Today we’re talking about how to live in the moment. There’s a lot of talk about how to be present and live in the now. Is this just some new agey, feel-good jargon or is it an actual spiritual reality that’s possible for each of us to practice with moment by moment? (We’re sure hoping for the latter!) If we believe that living in the present is a possibility, how do we actually do that? How do we be present when life gets really uncomfortable and hard?

We’ll start by talking about disassociation. What does it feel like when we’ve left our bodies and hearts? Why do we check out? We’ll share how we check out from the present moment and why it can feel so hard to just stay in the now. If living in the present is so hard, why do we think it’s a worthwhile practice? And even more importantly, what spiritual tools help us build our presence muscle and bring us back to this moment when we notice we’ve left? 

If you’re wondering how to be present or how to enjoy life more, we hope these tools can work for you, too. We’ll share how they’ve helped us and what it looks like to pick them up in daily life. 

And of course, we want to know what you think and feel about how to live in the present. What’s it like for you? Please share your tools and experience with the Pretty Spiritual Podcast community. You can reach us by visiting our website’s Contact page. We’re also all over the interwebs. Reach out via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Insight Timer. Please come say hi. Plus, if you have questions, feedback or want to suggest an episode topic, we’d love to hear from you!

Acceptance: It Is What It Is

This week, we’re grappling with acceptance. Wondering, “what is acceptance?” We’ll start off episode 17 by sharing how we make sense of this spiritual principle, what we think it is and what we’re pretty sure it’s not. Then we’ll each share our personal struggles with how to accept things as they are. We’ll dig in and talk about the reasons acceptance can feel so counterintuitive and problematic for so many of us. Spoiler alert: accepting something doesn’t mean we like it or condone it. It’s just the spiritual stance that means we’re intent on facing reality rather than fighting it.

Firstly, we’ll each talk about some struggles we’ve had with the topic and how it continues to come up in our lives. Just in time, we’ll lay out some of the spiritual tools that are helping teach us how to let go and accept life and ourselves just as we are right now.

Having trouble with how to accept yourself and love who you are? Wondering how to let go of your expectations of yourself, others and reality? Or maybe you’re struggling with how to like yourself in the midst of non-acceptance? Wherever you’re at in the tango with acceptance, we invite you to participate in the conversation. Most of all, we want to hear about your own struggles and victories with the topic. Let us know how you’ve learned to love yourself and accept yourself in this very moment.

Have something else to share with us or the Pretty Spiritual Podcast community? You can reach us by visiting our website’s Contact page or find us on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Insight Timer. Please come say hi. Plus, if you have questions, feedback or want to suggest an episode topic, we’d love to hear from you!

How to Pray

We talk about prayer kind of a lot. So if you’re wondering why, what is prayer, or how to pray, we made episode 16 to start a conversation with you! We want to open up the conversation about prayer so that it can include everyone. Whether you use prayer to talk to god or consider yourself an atheist or agnostic, we’ll share how we believe this spiritual tool can work across the board. At the end of the day, maybe it doesn’t matter if you want to know how to pray to god or just how to connect to yourself on a deeper level. We believe that the power of prayer can come alive for all of us, no matter what we do or don’t believe in. So join in the fun as we talk about how our relationships with this tool have changed over the years. We’ll also share our favorite practical and healing prayers, in case they might be helpful to you. What’s your relationship with prayer like? Come join the conversation and let us know about your beliefs and experiences xo

Self Pity Party 🎉

Stop Self Victimization

 We’re looking at the weird and sticky topic of self-pity. We’ll start by asking: what is self pity? If you’ve been stuck in a chronic cycle and want to learn how to stop feeling sorry for yourself, come join our spiritual pity party. We’ve got a whole bunch of experience with this topic. More importantly, we have suggestions that have helped us find our way through. In other words, we've got spiritual tools like compassion and mindfulness.

To start, we'll talk about our own difficulties with this sometimes toxic-feeling experience. And, of course, we’ll spend some time sharing the spiritual tools that help us through. 

If you’re someone who struggles with the experience of victimhood, please come join the convo! We want to appreciate self pity for the intelligence and information it has without getting stuck in its goop. 

What if we treat self victimization as a misguided attempt to care for ourselves, rather than something shameful and gross to look at? Let’s see how our thoughts and feelings about ourselves shift when we treat our suffering with care and tenderness. Our tools can help you be kind to yourself and listen to yourself in order to see what the self pity might be trying to communicate.

Do you struggle with feeling sorry for yourself? Tell us what self pity is like for you and share what's been helping. It’s a BYOP party and everyone is invited.

Do you have tools or experiences to share with the Pretty Spiritual Podcast community? Please say yes. You can reach us via our Contact page or find us on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Insight Timer. We seriously need your tools, people. Plus, if you have questions, feedback or want to suggest a topic, we’d love to hear from you!

Coping with Stress

Wondering how to calm anxiety and stress in your life? In episode 14 your spiritual bffs dive into the topic headfirst. Most of us have stress in our lives, so how can we learn to make friends with it? We’ll talk about ways to deal with stress and let you know about our most effective stress management techniques. We’ll focus on in-the-moment meditation and mindfulness for anxiety and stress. Plus, we’ll also share where we’re struggling with stress reactions and what it looks like to pick up spiritual tools in the midst of the big and little stressors. Do you suffer with chronic stress? Let us know what it’s like for you and what has been helping! xo