Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times

Tracee Stanley: And what I see in the world is a sense of loneliness, a sense of disconnection, a sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of distraction—that we’re not devoted to anything real. It seems that we’re devoted to our phone, we’re devoted to being seen in whatever way, but we don’t have a real sense of devotion to anything, or a connection to the Earth.

Tami Simon: Hi, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Tracee Stanley. She is a teacher of yoga nidra, meditation, and self-inquiry. She’s the founder of Empowered Life Circle, a sacred community inspired by years of study in Sri Vidya Tantra and the teachings of the Himalayan masters. She’s the author of the bestselling book Radiant Rest, the book Luminous Self, and now a new book with Sounds True. It’s called Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit. Tracee, welcome.

Tracee Stanley: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.

Tami Simon: As we talk about living ritual—you ready for this?—I want to begin our conversation and end our conversation, and maybe even somehow hold our conversation, as a ritual experience itself. For me, I think a lot of times people think of podcasts as, “Oh, that was an interesting conversation.” But it’s a lot more for me. For me, it actually is a living ritual, in that I bring my heart and intent, love and offering, to it. And I wonder if you, as a teacher of living ritual, could bring all of us into a sense of the sacred potential of all of us listening and speaking, co-creating this conversation.

Tracee Stanley: I absolutely love that. My first thought is to ask us to close our eyes, or soften our gaze, or draw our attention inward. So if you’re driving, just draw your attention inward, and take a moment to just recognize the power that we each have to create a sacred pause.

And in that sacred pause, we can also begin to reclaim our attention from all the times and places where we may have left it. So all the unfinished conversations, the projects that we’re in the midst of—just bring your attention back to yourself.

And notice how your energy also begins to return to you.

And in this space of calling our attention back, we are creating a threshold.

We have the power to create a threshold, to create a pause.

And when we walk through that threshold, we can ask ourselves the question, “What within me is dying?”

And what is waiting to be born?

How am I willing to be changed, to be reshaped

by the conversation, by the spaciousness, by the presence that we bring to this conversation as ritual?

And each ritual will normally begin with some kind of invocation or prayer.

So let us just take a moment to ask for healing for the collective.

To pray for healing for the collective, if that resonates with you.

And maybe pray for the healing of a specific person or place.

And then finally, pray for healing for yourself.

And then let the next two, three, or four breaths bring you back into the present moment, with eyes open, ready to receive and to remember: what is essential?

Tami Simon: Well, I appreciate getting right into the deep end right here at the start. What in me is dying, and what wants to be born? That was the question—one of the questions you asked us to feel into as part of our opening ritual. And I thought, Tracee must know a lot about dying: things dying, parts of the self dying, parts of her life and world dying, and new things born. When I say that to you, what comes up? What have been the big teachers for you of that death and rebirth cycle?

Tracee Stanley: Hmm. You know, I think first, my experience as a gardener. My experience as a gardener in the early days of gardening, having that desire to have everything constantly blooming, constantly beautiful, constantly abundant. And I remember living in Los Angeles at that time, where there really aren’t many seasons, and realizing that, oh, there’s an interesting reflection in the culture of Los Angeles and the seasons—that everything is constantly blooming, everything is constantly beautiful.

There’s never an opportunity to witness something dying. And I thought, there must be something dying inside of me. And I would think back to relationships, to ways of being, to ways of thinking. Eventually, in that contemplation, my answer to you would be, I’ve died so many times in this lifetime and been reborn. I’m not the same person that I was even last year.

And a lot of times I think one of the biggest transitions of dying was when I walked away from a career as a film producer, where I had thirty-five big budget movies under my belt and a lot of success, yet it wasn’t fulfilling. The money was great, but the money was also not fulfilling. I became aware that, the deeper my practice and my studies in yoga went, I was creating an energy in the world by the media that I was producing that was going to have an effect on people, and that needed to end.

That was something that I came to a conclusion about—this part of me needs to die. And what was born was the real creative me. I realized that I was actually outsourcing my creativity to other people’s dharma, other people’s purpose, and I needed to step into my own purpose. And that was what I was born to when I really let that go.

Tami Simon: You write in the conclusion to Living Ritual that living ritual might be the most important practice we need during these, quote-unquote, “threshold times.” And I think that so many of us have a sense that our worlds are falling apart as we knew them. We don’t trust necessarily even that a new world is going to come into being. How is it that living ritual, from your view, is such an important practice now?

Tracee Stanley: Hmm. I feel like, whenever I’m musing on writing a book, I try to look at the antidotes for what I think is ailing in the world, and if I have any teachings that I’ve received or any wisdom from my own life, I try to bring that forward. And what I see in the world is a sense of loneliness, a sense of disconnection, a sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of distraction—that we’re not devoted to anything real.

It seems that we’re devoted to our phone, we’re devoted to being seen in whatever way, but we don’t have a real sense of devotion to anything, or a connection to the Earth. And what I feel is that when ritual kind of becomes the constant in our life, it becomes an anchor for certainty. It’s something that we know that we can hold onto. Eventually, if we develop enough devotion around our rituals, our certainty is anchored in devotion. Our devotion becomes what’s certain.

So I think that living ritual is a way for us to gather together in community for a common purpose, in a time when we are so divided, in a time when there’s so much polarization—that if we all gather together just for the sake of healing. I just mentioned before we started the call that there’s a fire, right? There’s also national parks right now that are being bulldozed, and people are gathering together, letting go of maybe political concerns, but gathering together for some higher meaning and higher purpose, something greater than ourselves. I think ritual connects us to that.

I think that we’re also being pulled away from the essential question of who am I, right? And I really believe that on our spiritual path, the question that we have to answer is who am I, and also who am I not. And I think ritual leads us to a doorway of understanding who we are at a deeper level.

Tami Simon: I want to ask you more about this question, “Who am I?” Because of course I’ve heard so many different spiritual teachers say, “Contemplate this, meditate on this.” And then they’ll say, “There is no answer. There’s no answer, so don’t worry about that. Just ask the question and see what’s in the space when you ask the question—the is-ness that remains.”

Tracee Stanley: Mm-hmm.

Tami Simon: I wonder if you’re pointing to something else when you say that, and you say we don’t know who we are.

Tracee Stanley: Yeah, I think that when we ask this question of who am I, I think what comes up to the surface, at least in my experience, is who I am not. It becomes a mirror to say, “Oh, you thought this was who you are, but this is not who you are.” It’s like peeling away layers of: you’re not this, you’re not that, you’re not this, you’re not that.

Neti neti, right? Until maybe we get a glimpse one day of a shard of light—which is something that happened to me a very long time ago, before I even had a practice, before I even knew what yoga was. I got a glimpse of light inside of me, and I knew that that was something I needed to follow, and that’s what brought me to the spiritual path.

I think the question being answered of who am I is just as important as knowing who you’re not, and being able to let those labels go, and let those responsibilities go, and let all the stories go, because we thought that was who we were.

Tami Simon: Tell me about that experience of the shard of light. I know people say, “Oh, people’s awakening experiences—but they’re still human, and then they go through all these other things, and it’s not really that important.” However, I actually think it’s really important, and I think it’s important because it shows people something. It points something out, something that sometimes just comes right through the veil. And I think it’s important, so I’d love to hear what happened to you.

Tracee Stanley: Yeah. Well, I was living in South Africa, and I was modeling at the time, and I had this apartment in a little place in the city called Tamboerskloof that looked over Table Mountain. And I was up really early in the morning. I have no idea why I was up early in the morning, but I was waiting for the sun to rise, and there’s this tablecloth of clouds that covers Table Mountain that’s really beautiful in the morning.

I was watching this happening, and the next thing I knew, I felt this inner silence and inner peace and this inner light. And for what probably was less than a few seconds, but it seemed like it was a couple of minutes, I felt like I had the answer to every question that I had been asking. I felt like I was interconnected with everything. I felt my heart expand. I felt spacious. I felt like I was everywhere.

And then it ended, and I was like, “I don’t know. Something just happened to me. What was that?” I had no reference. I had no idea. I went and talked to my roommates, and they looked at me like I had twelve heads. And I talked to a few different people until finally I found a guy who was a little bit older. His name was Andoni, and he said, “Oh, I know exactly what happened to you. Let me bring you to this bookstore.” And he brought me to a spiritual bookstore, and he gave me a handful of books. He gave me Kahlil Gibran. He gave me The Celestine Prophecy. He gave me Illusions, Way of the Peaceful Warrior.

And I started reading, and recognizing—not my experience, but recognizing that there was a different reality than the one that I had been living in. There was something different, something new, a different perspective. Then cut to many years later, probably four years later, I practiced yoga nidra for the first time and felt that same experience of expansion. I felt that same experience of light, and that’s what connected me to my yogic path.

Tami Simon: Sometimes I think those are like these homing things that happen. Once you have an experience like that, it never leaves you.

Tracee Stanley: You don’t forget it.

Tami Simon: It keeps calling you back again and again. Now, you mentioned devotion.

Tracee Stanley: Hmm.

Tami Simon: I wanted to talk more about that because, when I picked up Living Ritual, I didn’t know what I was going to get. And some of what I expected, I got. But then I got a whole lot of things I wasn’t expecting from the book. I did get a lot of suggestions—

Tracee Stanley: Mm-hmm.

Tami Simon: —that I can bring rituals into my life. But the bigger thing that I got, that I didn’t know I was going to get, was this underlying sense of moment-to-moment experience as living ritual.

There was this—it wasn’t like something that I punctuated my day with, these practices, that I picked up the book and I looked and I said, “Oh, now it’s time to light a candle, or put a flower in some water or something.” But yes, and there’s this underlying space that I started entering as I was entering—I’m just going to use the language that occurs—the field of the book, the feeling of the book. And I was like, “Oh, I’m in devotional living.” And then I thought, I wonder how Tracee would explain this attitude of devotion to people, especially people who are questioning, like, devoted to what?

Tracee Stanley: I love this inquiry. So first I would say that I wrote this book for the householder. It’s very easy for us to say, “We’re gonna put aside three hours, and we’re gonna do a beautiful ceremony, and we’ll put our goddess dresses on and our flower crowns, and we’ll make a mandala.” That’s not realistic for most people. It’s realistic every once in a while.

But the question that I would often get after being on retreat, from students, was, “What do I do now? How do I bring this home? I have three kids, I’ve got a business, I’ve got this, I’ve got that. How do I bring this home?” And what I started to notice was that there was this idea that in order for us to have a sadhana, or a committed practice of some kind in yoga, we needed to be disciplined—and that discipline felt like it was coming with shame if we couldn’t complete the task, if we couldn’t complete the practice, if we didn’t have enough time.

It always seemed like there was a little bit of envy between the students—the ones who had hours and hours in their day to practice, and the ones who didn’t. And I felt sometimes that those students who didn’t have time, they were shrinking away from their practice because they felt like it wasn’t holding them.

And so I started to think about this in the way of weaving, and started to think about, what did I see my grandmother doing? My grandmother was a preacher, and she wove all of her practices throughout the day. It was just the way she lived, right? It’s like certain people I know would tell me, “Oh, I learned this mantra from my mother. She wasn’t a teacher, but I would watch her doing pujas early in the morning, and she would chant the mantra, and I would be either by her side or in the next room, and I would watch, and I would hear her chanting these mantras.”

So for me, I feel like we need to have a way to weave devotion through the day, and have a devotion to our practice in a way that we are devoted to ourselves. We’re devoted to the part of us that is waiting to be born. And it was Malidoma Somé who actually said that when we come into ritual, we are actually having a willingness to be changed. So if we think about this idea that we’re walking into change every day, and we’re devoted to changing to be our best self, to be our most shining self, to be whatever self it is that you desire to be—that that is the thing that you can be devoted to.

Tami Simon: I love that. We’re devoted to this sort of continuous creation through us.

Tracee Stanley: Mm-hmm.

Tami Simon: I love that. Let me tell you what my favorite part of the book was.

Tracee Stanley: Please.

Tami Simon: We’ve had enough conversation without me getting here. My favorite part was the ritual on allowing the Earth to dream through us—

Tracee Stanley: Mm.

Tami Simon: —and how you took us in. I was like, this is a ritual? This is the shit, just to use my language. Meaning this is not like something that felt at all like I was doing something. I was going deep inside my body and experiencing the water element as the rivers of the Earth that were also the rivers inside of me.

And tell people what this is, this doorway that we can experience our body as the Earth dreaming through us. This was my favorite part.

Tracee Stanley: Mm. Thank you for that. So, you know, as a tantric practitioner, I’m always in this as above, so below. The cosmos is just a reflection of our inner world, and vice versa. I was in an ecopsychology program a couple of years ago, and the word Earth dreaming came through as, like, this is what we’re gonna study for the next week. And I was like, Earth dreaming? This sounds like something I already do.

I’d already written Radiant Rest at that point, and I had these practices that were called elemental activations, where you commune with an element, and then you get close to the element while you’re in yoga nidra so that you can feel it in your body, because we have all these elements in our body.

And so this idea of Earth dreaming is a way to allow the Earth to dream through you—especially if you’re in a particular place, like the land that you live on—to be able to ask the land, to literally lay on the land, and to feel as though you can dream with the land and let the land dream through you as a practice. Especially as a daily practice, you start to get messages in the dream world that are pretty wild.

And if you listen to what the Earth is asking for and you honor that, the relationship becomes even deeper. I mean, it’s worthy of an entire book. I don’t think I’m the one who’s gonna write it. There’s other people who’ve been studying this and practicing this for a long time. But it’s a practice that we do quarterly in my portal, and I can tell you that people have had the most amazing experiences just being able to feel that they are the Earth and the Earth is them. And so I’m glad that you loved that practice.

Tami Simon: You write, “We consider our body a shrine. Tantric philosophy tells us that the human body is a microcosm of the universe.”

Tracee Stanley: Mm-hmm.

Tami Simon: So our body—and now you’re saying also the body of the Earth—this is where we’re practicing—

Tracee Stanley: Yeah.

Tami Simon: —ritual. This is why I was trying to say the book delivers a lot of unexpected things beyond punctuating your day. It was a whole way of being. What I want to hear more about, as the tantric practitioner you are, is how do you relate to your body as a shrine?

Tracee Stanley: Hmm. Well, the practice of yoga nidra, which is a practice that oftentimes we think about as a technique, right? We think about, oh, this is a technique. Someone’s gonna tell me to lay down. I’m going to get some instruction, a body scan. Well, the origins of yoga nidra are to consecrate the body as a divine temple.

It was based on a practice called nyasa, which means to place, or to put, or to draw, or to anoint. And so it was this way of anointing the body with either mantra or water or imaginary nectar from the moon, to consecrate the body as a divine temple, to make a place for the divine to reside. And so that is where I’m coming from when I think about the body as a shrine, the body as a temple. It’s like, what happens when we are in a place where our temple is ready for the divine to greet us and to meet us there? What is possible when I do that?

And if I don’t think about my body as a temple, my question to that person would be, why? Do you have a desire to see yourself as divine, to see yourself as worthy, as being close to the divine? And the divine is right here out the door—the tree, the bird, the rainbow. It doesn’t have to be at a mountaintop at some monastery. The divine is in the clouds. It’s everywhere.

Tami Simon: Now let me address a question that I think some listeners are going to be able to relate to. So I’m ready to talk to you, and I’m writing down these notes—body a shrine—and I’m feeling this pain under my back, under my ribs, because I was standing up for an awful long time in a tense position yesterday, dealing with a malfunctioning boat that I was the captain of.

Okay. So I’m like, “Okay, I feel this pain, but my body is a shrine. What am I gonna do? I think I’m gonna lie down. That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna lie down and breathe.” And I thought, “Okay, but I have all this stuff I have to do. But I think I’m just gonna lie down and breathe. I think I’m gonna keep lying down and breathing. I’m gonna trust that when it comes time to talk to Tracee, this is all gonna work out, and I’m gonna keep lying down and breathing, because I got a big pain back here.”

And I’m bringing this up because I think I’d like to hear your thoughts about living ritual with bodies that are suffering at different times, and how much space we can need to do that.

Tracee Stanley: Yes. I love this question too, because, one, it speaks to the fact that we’re not always blooming. It speaks to the fact that there are parts of us that are decaying, and eventually will go back to the dust. It also speaks to your knowing, your inner knowing of what was needed for you to do. Whether you did that or not, I don’t know. But you—

Tami Simon: I did a lot of it.

Tracee Stanley: It’s good.

Tami Simon: A lot of lying down and deep sighing, and I made a lot of sounds and stuff. Yeah.

Tracee Stanley: Yeah, so it’s like sometimes we get the message of what is needed, but there’s so much distraction, so much doing, that we don’t offer that to ourselves. So I think the wisdom is listening, connecting to our own inner knowing of what do we need to do. And sometimes we might not know what we need to do, but we also know what not to do. We know that if we go ahead and we keep pushing through, it’s going to get worse. So taking some time to back off a little bit, I think, is really important.

I think that the Earth is here to hold the body. The Earth is here to hold us. And whether we have a place where we can go outside and literally lay on the Earth, or we lay on the floor, or we lay on a bed, or we’re supported somehow—that supporting ourselves and breathing, supporting ourselves and asking, “What is this pain trying to tell me? What is the message that the pain has for me? Can I bring that message to my doctor, to my practitioner? What kind of knowledge does my body have that my mind doesn’t have right now?”

And I think that the closer we get to our body as a temple, because we start to know it in a more intimate way than it just being this vehicle that gets us from point A to point B, I think those kinds of messages will come through. I think it’s important for us to cultivate that kind of relationship with our body.

Tami Simon: Have you had to work through a physical challenge of any kind, and what did you learn about the body as a temple going through that?

Tracee Stanley: What I learned is very similar. I had a surgery years ago, and what I came to in that surgery was—they said, “Oh, you’re gonna be in the hospital for two days after the surgery, and you’re not gonna be able to leave until such and such happens.” And I thought, “I’m really strong. I’m not staying overnight in this hospital. I’m gonna show them that I can do the thing so that I can get out of the hospital.” And I did the thing and got out that day, and the doctor was like, “Nobody ever leaves the hospital this day.” And so I was like, “Yes, I did it.”

And then it’s like, oh, look at the ego. Look at the ego that doesn’t want the body to rest. Look at the ego that wants to be the one to—I’m gonna say optimize, because we have this optimization culture that’s really happening right now.

And I had to take a step back. I said to myself, “They’re telling me don’t lift anything heavier than a teacup. So what I’m gonna do is I’m not gonna lift anything. I have a little bell. I’m gonna let my ego go to sleep, and I’m going to ask for everything that I need. I’m not gonna try to be the one who heals in four weeks when they said it was six weeks.”

And I think that for me, that was a very powerful lesson to learn. I think the type of healing that I was able to access by slowing down and stopping and doing nothing and really allowing myself to rest was much deeper than anything that I could have imagined, because I was not only learning to heal the body, but I also felt like I was healing the causes of illness in the first place. I got to sit and ask, “What are you here to tell me? What are you here to show me?” And I got those answers, and it was very profound and very painful, but those were things that I needed to look at, and I was able to do that in those six weeks of resting and being still.

Tami Simon: You mentioned, Tracee, the Earth being a form of support—

Tracee Stanley: Mm.

Tami Simon: —for all of us, and that we can lie on the Earth. And I thought this was one of the brilliant teacher moments that you offer in the book. You divide the book into these four sections, which are the traditional pillars in yogic philosophy. You can share more about them. But these aims of human fulfillment, I’ve always heard described as: number one, let’s get prosperity—

Tracee Stanley: Mm-hmm.

Tami Simon: —and I thought, “Wow, they really knew how to sell yoga back then.” Number two, let’s get pleasure.

Tracee Stanley: Mm-hmm.

Tami Simon: And then three is we’re gonna live our dharma or our purpose, and four, we’re gonna achieve liberation. So this is the classical teaching.

Tracee Stanley: Yeah.

Tami Simon: And what you did in the book—you divide the living rituals into these four segments, but you renamed the first two—

Tracee Stanley: Yeah.

Tami Simon: —brilliantly. So the first one, you renamed this wealth or prosperity as support—

Tracee Stanley: Yeah.

Tami Simon: —and all of the different living ritual ways we can access support. I wanted to hear how you very cleverly updated prosperity and wealth into all forms of support.

Tracee Stanley: Yeah. You know, one of the things that I noticed, because I’ve studied those Purusharthas, as they’re called, for many years and many different variations with many different teachers—what I always notice is this idea of prosperity was charged. It was charged for us. It was triggering for us. It’s like, oh, prosperity means that I have to have a lot of money. I have to be able to show that I’m prosperous.

And I was like, I don’t think this is what this means. Yes, we wanna be prosperous so that we have the means to be able to follow the other pillars, right? That’s kind of where it started to boil down to. It’s like, okay, you need to have the means to be able to be supported, so that you can follow the other three aims.

And so I kept holding onto that word support, and I was like, what does it mean to be supported? And I started to think about dharma and the root of dharma, that D-H-R, which means to be supported, to be nourished, and to be sustained. And so that’s how I brought that back to: okay, let’s talk about support.

Yes, we need money to be supported. Yes, we need prosperity, but prosperity has so many different permutations. Prosperity shows up because I have so many tomatoes in my garden right now that I don’t know what to do with them, and I have to give them to all my neighbors and all my friends. That’s a form of abundance. That’s a form of prosperity. And if I can see that as a form of abundance, then that starts to change the way that I’m viewing this idea of support. Because if I don’t have support, if I’m not supported, if I don’t believe that I’m supported, if I don’t have access to support, I really can’t do much in the world.

Tami Simon: So what do you do when you feel, “I need some support right now”? What’s your go-to living ritual?

Tracee Stanley: My first go-to living ritual is to ask, right? Is to go and ask my husband, or ask my stepson, and tell them that I need support for this or that. The other, first thing, is practicing yoga nidra—is allowing my body to actually feel supported, because that’s something that I can instantly access, is the support that the Earth provides.

And I think when I do that, it becomes a reframe. Then I can start to think about, okay, I need support in other ways, whatever that might be. How can I plan on that, how can I effectuate that support, but know that I’m already supported? So I’m not floating around in the universe supportless. I am already supported. I have the support of my family. I have the support of the Earth. I have the support of whatever the other things are that I have put in place for myself that support me. And then I think it’s more helpful.

Tami Simon: Now the second aim of the Purusharthas, if I’m saying that correctly—I had traditionally heard it, as I said, you start with wealth and then you get pleasure. You reframed that too. We move into the pillar of relationship. Tell me how you went from people picturing traditional sex acts, pleasure, kama, to all forms of relationship—how you made that evolution.

Tracee Stanley: Well, I went back to the texts. I went back to several texts, and they all talked about pleasure. They all talked about the Kama Sutra and sexual pleasure, but they all talked about relationships, about being in relationship. And I thought to myself, well, most pleasure, most joy that we receive requires us to be in relationship with something—whether it’s relationship with the Earth, relationship with our pets, relationship with our lover. There’s a relationship happening in order for us to receive or to be in a pleasure space, for the most part. Even a relationship with ourself. So that’s how I came to the relationship.

Tami Simon: And once again, I think this is a good way to give people a taste, an example of a living ritual. You call them micro practices, micro rituals we can use. So what would be one in this relationship category?

Tracee Stanley: Hmm. A nice one is with a partner, where you’re anointing the partner in a way. There’s a practice in there about relationship—I believe it’s called the love anointing practice. And so this same idea of anointing the body as a sacred temple when you do your own practice of yoga nidra, this is almost you reminding your partner that they are also sacred and that they are also beloved.

That’s a really beautiful practice that I love to do, and that takes five to ten minutes. And you can do that as a sadhana every day and see how it shifts and changes the relationship, or you can do it once and see what happens, and then have a conversation afterward about it. And you can also do that to yourself. You can also anoint yourself every morning with water. We’re doing that right now in a group ritual class. Every morning we’re anointing ourselves with water with a blessing.

Tami Simon: Great. Tell me how you do it. What points are you touching, and what blessing are you using?

Tracee Stanley: Mm. So there’s an inquiry at the beginning of this container, and it’s really around what you are hoping to receive, what you need most in life. And we have a cup of water that we charge. We leave it overnight, or we charge it with a mantra. And I happen to have a cup of water here.

And we just dip our fingers in, and we start with the crown, and then we dip slowly, and we repeat silently whatever that thing is that we want to receive, at the heart, go all the way down through all the chakras. And you can do the whole body if you want. You can do the whole sixty-one points of the body.

And then at the end, you take three sips of water, thinking about what you wanna receive in those three sips, and then you pour out three drops of water to release what you wanna release, and then you make an offering to the Earth with the rest of the water in gratitude. So that is something that takes less than five minutes that you can do every day.

And that, to me, is something that anchors you in remembrance that you are divine and that you are worthy of devotion to yourself. And also just a way to remind ourselves, amidst all the distraction, that there is something that I’m really wanting to receive in my life, and there’s also something that I might need to release to make the space to receive it.

And I think when we do that, it creates new neural pathways, for sure, because we’re doing something every day. So there is science that backs up this idea of what happens when we practice ritual daily. It creates a sense of certainty for us. It releases anxiety. There’s so many different things. And I think we get to think in a different way. We get to see the world in a different way.

Tami Simon: You know, as you were describing that, and placing the water drops on different parts of our body, I tuned into what felt to me like something like body shame, and how some people may experience relating to ourselves and our body as a temple or as a shrine. Previously, I brought up physical pain, and that’s one thing. But another thing is we just may not be used to relating to ourselves that way because of some kind of body shame we’re carrying. I’m sure you encounter that—

Tracee Stanley: Oh, absolutely.

Tami Simon: —in your work. How do you help people use living ritual to transform that, to accept that?

Tracee Stanley: Well, I think the first thing is asking about that, and avoiding those places on the body where you might be feeling shame, moving to the places where you feel more comfortable, and then allowing yourself to take the journey there if it eventually does feel comfortable, or if you wanna inquire more about it.

I always recommend that people avail themselves of therapy if they have the availability to do that, or they have the option to do that, because I think these practices—not just the practices of living ritual, but the practices of yoga—can unearth so many things within us that we need additional support for. And I mention that in the book as a form of support. Therapy is a form of support, and I think that there’s no shame in saying, “I need this kind of support,” and availing yourself of therapy if that’s an option.

Tami Simon: These four pillars—we can briefly touch on purpose and spirit. This teaching: why did you think it was good medicine for our time? You said that you write books and you look out at the world, and you’re like, “What does the world need? How will this be an antidote?” Here’s this ancient teaching from a different time and culture. Why did you think, “Oh, this is actually a good framework for us now”?

Tracee Stanley: Mm. Because what I see is this desire for wealth isn’t healthy. What I see is disconnection, loneliness, isolation—there’s the relationship. What I see is a lack of purpose, a lack of—almost like outsourcing our purpose. People going onto AI to ask about what their purpose should be, people going to AI to ask questions that they probably should be asking their therapist, having relationships already with chatbots, right? And not having a clear sense of why we’re here in the world.

And for me, what I see is that we’re in this ritual of distraction. Everybody I see—if you go into a restaurant, people are not talking to each other. They’re on their phones. People are walking down the street, they’re scrolling. People are outsourcing their knowing and even their writing to AI.

And so for me, it’s like we have to come back to ritual in a way that reminds us of our own divinity, that reminds us who we are, reminds us of the connection that we have with the Earth, reminds us that we’re all interconnected. Because I think that this is what technology is doing to us. It’s creating an amnesia. It’s creating a forgetfulness, and that forgetfulness is allowing us to be under this illusion that we’re separate. And I do believe that ritual brings us back into harmony with nature, harmony with each other, and in harmony with the truth of who we are.

Tami Simon: Okay. Under this pillar of purpose, you’ve already shared a little bit of your own journey around this. I mean, you were a model—I didn’t know that—but I did know that you were a very successful person in Hollywood, in the film business, and you walked away from that world in order to be true to your dharma. And in this section, you offer living rituals around something that’s called sankalpa, making this strong commitment. And I think there’s a lot of confusion around that teaching, and I saw that you actually teach in an in-depth way on it. You have a whole three-month training—

Tracee Stanley: Mm-hmm.

Tami Simon: —on the art of auspicious sankalpa. I thought, “Okay, this is something that Tracee knows a lot about, and I want to understand more.”

Tracee Stanley: Yeah. I think that a lot of—again, this goes into the manifestation culture, right? We have this thing where it’s like, “Oh, I wanna manifest something. This is gonna be my sankalpa.” But if we think about the sankalpa being this vow that leads you to truth, it’s really a vow that leads you to dharma, right?

It’s not about manifesting a brand new car. It’s really about, how do I manifest my dharma? And so one of the questions that I ask—and this is a teaching that I received from my friend Charlie Morley years ago—a practice that I call do and do not do, and it’s a practice on impermanence. And that practice on impermanence brings you within five minutes to the last moment of your life, the last breath of your life, and asks you, “What would you do with that last minute?”

And when people get down to that last minute, it’s usually one word. It’s one word like love, that happens to be mine. And so how can I infuse everything that I do with love? How can I have every relationship be supported by love? Every project that I do infused with love? Maybe living this thing that I would wanna do in my last minute of life right now is a sankalpa, and maybe that will lead me to the things that are most auspicious in my life.

And sankalpa, to me, is not something that you create in a one-hour class. It’s something that is revealed to you, and you know when it’s revealed, because it feels true, and it feels like something you can do as opposed to something that’s insurmountable. So that’s my take on sankalpa. That’s why I do a three-month course. We meet a couple of times a month. I love that container. We’re almost done with the container right now, and it’s been very generative for people.

Tami Simon: I’m gonna have to ask a little bit more about it, because it really piqued my curiosity. “We weave the power of sankalpa into waking, dreaming, and deep sleep states”—

Tracee Stanley: Yeah.

Tami Simon: —and I thought that’s really cool. I wonder how we do that, the deep sleep states.

Tracee Stanley: Well, first of all, we have to create an analog cocoon. So you might have seen the practice for the analog cocoon in Living Ritual. An analog cocoon is basically removing your phone out of your bedroom—definitely you don’t want your phone to be within three arms’ length of you—and you don’t use your phone any longer for an alarm clock. And usually when I ask in class how many people are using their phone as an alarm clock, at least 50% of the people are using their phone as an alarm clock.

So you get an alarm clock that’s battery operated, and basically you use that as your alarm clock in the morning, and you go to sleep with your sankalpa as a prayer in your heart before you go to sleep. You just place it in your heart. And the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is you remember that sankalpa, and you pull it through as a thread, keeping all electronics and all technology away from you. After about a few days of doing that, your dream time will shift, and you are weaving—

This is what Sri Aurobindo used to call the night school: that when you’re practicing practices like yoga nidra, you can weave those practices through all the states of consciousness, including deep sleep. The reason why our practices kind of halt is because the last thing we do is we look at our phone, and generally the last thing you think about before you go to sleep is the first thing you think about when you wake up. So you’re losing all this time of potential practice, potential inspiration, potential messages that come through in the dream time, because we’re still connected to the phone.

So this is the night school. Andrew Holecek also talks about the night school. He used to have a container that was called night school. And so these are really deep tantric practices of using the dream time to receive information and to continue to learn.

Tami Simon: Just to be clear about the sankalpa—

Tracee Stanley: Mm-hmm.

Tami Simon: —I traveled with you when you said having everything in your life infused with love. Do you have, like, a statement that’s your sankalpa that you’re bringing with you at night and in the morning, or is it just this love radiant infusion?

Tracee Stanley: Yeah, I love this question. I’m not a big believer in the statement sankalpa. And the reason why—and I know many teachers teach it, and that’s great—what I notice is that people start getting hung up on the languaging. They start getting hung up on, oh, should it be phrased like this? Is it okay if I phrase it like that? Is it too many words? Is it this many? And all of a sudden now we’re having an English class, right?

What matters is the feeling when you go through that practice of the do and do not do practice. What is the feeling that you have in that last minute? It’s not just the word that comes through. It’s the feeling of love, and you bring yourself back to that feeling, back to that remembrance every time, and that’s what you place in the heart center.

And when you place it in the heart center enough, you start to realize that you’re not placing anything in the heart center. It’s already there. This is already who we are. We just have so many coverings of this and that, and this label, and this job, and this responsibility. So this is one of the reasons why I love the nighttime practices, because the practices that are the quiet practices, the practices that are done in stillness, and the practices that are done in darkness are often the most revealing.

Tami Simon: Now interestingly, this finding what’s already there in you brings us to the fourth section of Living Ritual, on spirit, or moksha, liberation. It was the shortest section of the book, which I thought was really interesting. There was, like, a whole big long section on support. And I thought, well, in a way it makes sense. Once you’ve got all the support in place and the relationships, and you’re on purpose, this last part—to use your blossoming language—is just kind of the flower, of course, before it dies, which you’ve emphasized so beautifully in our conversation, which I really like. I think I wrote down, “We’re not always blooming.” That’s a good takeaway sentence for me.

Okay, Tami, back to the topic of this last pillar as part of the living ritual offering in the book. Tell us a little bit about it.

Tracee Stanley: This spiritual freedom, spiritual liberation—there’s not a lot to say about it, right? It’s like those other three pillars, and there’s different teachings on this. So there’s some teachings that say, “Oh, you can pursue these pillars in any order.” And there are other teachings that say the last one is always going to be moksha, but you have to be in your dharma before you reach moksha. And so those are just the practices to help support the seeing and the hearing and the touching in space, to remember.

So I’m not someone that believes that enlightenment is a static condition, especially for us householders. So maybe we’ve all had a moment of absolute clarity, or the shard of light in the heart, something that reminds us of who we really are, but it’s really hard to hold onto—unless maybe you’re living in a cave and someone is bringing you chai a few times a week. But I still think that it’s gonna be hard, because you’re gonna taste the chai, and you’re gonna say, “The chai is too sweet,” or, “This chai is not hot enough today.” There’s some kind of preference that’s gotta come in there.

So I think that for moksha, we need to be able to be so disconnected from the unnecessary distractions that when we have a moment of freedom, that can happen in between a breath. It could happen in a moment when I see a double rainbow. It could happen in a moment when I see a baby breathing. It can happen like that. And if we can remember those moments and know that they’re available to us, that freedom is available to us in every moment possibly, I think that changes the direction of our spiritual practice, because we’re not looking for the big, grand enlightenment. We’re actually able to see that there’s moments of liberation weaving through the day, and we have become, I believe, too distracted to notice them.

Tami Simon: I mentioned, Tracee, when we started, that we would start by taking a ritual moment together, and I’d love to end on one as well. Before we do, and before I turn it over to you, I wanna say that during this conversation I’ve felt extraordinarily connected with you. I don’t quite know what it is, but there’s a way that I feel such a natural kind of simpatico with—I guess I’ll say it the way I’m experiencing it—with your spirit.

Tracee Stanley: Mm.

Tami Simon: I wanna thank you. I wanna thank you for all of the courageous work you’ve done to be true to yourself, to offer these ancient teachings in such a contemporary and accessible way.

Tracee Stanley: Mm.

Tami Simon: It means a lot to me, so thank you.

Tracee Stanley: Thank you, Tami. I so appreciate that.

So I think I’d like to end with some humming and some wrapping of our arms around ourselves. And if we just remember that we are divine.

And we can imagine that there’s a beautiful sun above our head. And any thoughts that come in that tell us that we are not divine, just imagine that you’re taking them and letting them go into the sun to be dissolved. And together we can end just with a few moments of humming.

Just remember the beauty and the wonder you are.

Thank you so much.

Tami Simon: Tracee Stanley, author of the new book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit. Thanks, Tracee. Thanks, friends.

Tracee Stanley: Thank you.

Thank you for listening. I’d also like to invite you to join us on Sounds True One, where you can enjoy early, ad-free access to episodes of Insights at the Edge. Sounds True One is our premium membership platform. It’s built around live classes and online events, award-winning specials, intimate learning experiences, and Q&A sessions with the world’s leading wisdom teachers. You can get your first month free at join.soundstrue.com.

The Sounds True Podcast Network.