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Episode 8 – How to Let Your Wine and your Creative Soul Breathe

Shownotes:

Episode 8 – How to Let Your Wine and your Creative Soul Breathe

This spacious episode features some great (creative commons) music and concerns the aerating of wine and (more importantly) of your creative soul.

(Yes, I have asthma and you can tell! Please forgive all my gasping for breath. It’s been a hard few weeks for me.)
Click to listen now:

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This episode is brought to you by…

Life As Prayer: Revived Spirituality Inspired by Ancient Piety
(on the life and legacy of Brother Lawrence’s habit of “practicing the presence of God”)

How can YOU find an enduring sense of God’s presence with you? Learn about 16th century Brother Lawrence and how his understanding of God’s presence continues to enrich lives today.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast AND to my newsletter!

Both your wine and your life must be able to to breathe!

Full and aware breathing can inspire your creative muse and enrich your life in so many ways.

minute 1:00

I excitedly announce two upcoming interviews:
• Daniel J. Lewis interview (a virtuosic creator who’s received national awards for podcasts he produces).

• Sarah Bessey (Jesus Feminist author) Interview (discussing her new Out of Sorts book).

 

WINE SEGMENT: Letting wine breathe!

minute: 5:00

In wine terms “aeration” is the process of bringing air into wine.

The term dumb (i.e. “dumb wine”) refers to a wine that has little flavor or fragrance.
• Swirling wine mixes it with air and allows it to both breathe and speak!
• Flavor and aroma and the beauty and richness of the wine emerges as space for air gets in (just like us).

TIPS to make a better speaking wine:

(If buying excellent wine isn’t an option….which is most of us!)

Option 1.

Use a blender.

Option 2.

Use a hand blender (this is a method I use)

Option 3.

A cheap and simple solution:
Pour wine into a bowl and whisk it with a fork or whisk (like you would for scrambled eggs).

 

minute 5:50
Sparking your muse

• Aeration of the soul

• (a short recording) Insights from the middle of my retreat time at the Jesuit Spiritual Center in Wernersville, PA.

Forgetting how to breath.

My asthma and stress; and tightness of breath and soul.

8:30

Sprit of God = breath of life

9:30

On slowing down.

9:50

The fantastic 4-7-8 second breathing exercise I learned to get your breath (and life) back.

11:30

Retreat invitation
(click link to learn more)

12:20

Giving breath to the creative soul…

Creating space and breath for the Creative muse/your soul to truly thrive

13:00

The Scriptural inspiration, history, and meaning of “Breath Prayer”
(as a Christian devotional practice)

Luke 18:9-14

9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable:10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

minute 15:00

Breath Prayer: A simple cry for help and connection

• How to do “breath prayer”

• My important adaptation to breath prayer (that helps me identify as a loved child of God).

 

Did you enjoy the podcast?
I hope you’ll share this episode with friend or family member who might need more space and air for her soul to breathe.

Cheers! Here’s to your health.


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Spark My Muse

Encountering your own loneliness

solotext

 

Managing a wine tasting room is a great job for a writer because, when it’s not too busy, you can become a kind of social scientist: observing people and trying to see why humans do what we do.

You can even allow your curiosity to navigate some of the deeper questions about the human experience.

One recent observation:
The “poison apple” of the smart phone has changed how we do things alone–eating, drinking, or traveling, in particular.

FACT: People rarely come to taste wine by themselves (at our place).

That may seem obvious. Wine tends to bring people together, right? Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that people only rarely come alone.

But it IS strange.

Think about it like this:
Shopping for food or clothes alone isn’t considered weird and people tasting wine are really just shopping for wine.

The only difference perhaps are presumptions, previous experiences, or maybe subterranean social exceptions.

• Feeling low…solo

When people visit the tasting room alone, I can usually sense their social discomfort. They might suddenly offer me a reason why they are alone this time or they might neurotically use their phone to look busy or connected.

The alternative, of course, would be to interact with and absorb the environment they are truly in or look for ways to subvert social fear through some modicum of meaningful interaction: friendliness, conversation, inquisitiveness, for starters. So terrifying is the prospect of looking lonely at a winery, that many solo customers barely experience it at all.

• Confronting fear

This observation got me to thinking of ways I try to numb or avoid these fears or points of discomfort in myself and in my life. What am I missing that I shouldn’t be. The default is to use technology to connect, but at what cost?

When I interviewed Rolf Potts, famed travel-writer and best-selling author, he talked about his own wrestling with the seduction of “not being where he was” by engaging with technology. One of the most memorable things he said was this:

“When you travel alone you are forced to confront your own loneliness and boredom, and interact with your surroundings in ways you can’t [when you’re] with a companion.”

We miss our chances for new experiences with the advent of constant so-called “connectedness”, don’t we?

The habit forms quickly. Only thoughtfulness will heal this malady.

(Here’s the video. He covers that bit around min 2:40.)

 

Do you question how you use technology and confront what it might be stealing from you?

Encountering our loneliness more deeply could create epiphanic moments of self-discovery and new insights into what we fear and what makes us each unique.

 

Maybe it’s time to do something alone to test your social fears, deepen your healthy sense of self, and develop a new sense of social, and even spiritual, courage and strength.

Maybe leave your phone is the car for the 30 min you shop, eat out, or exercise. Good things could happen.

If you like what you’ve read, consider getting my in-depth but consice weekly correspondence, starting soon.
Learn about it here.

How-To: start any YEAR (or DAY) right: Do a Sharpening Ritual

I wanted to be more intensional about my mindset in 2015 and I created something for myself to do each morning and evening to super charge that. It’s a simple worksheet that takes only 3-7 minutes in the morning and in the evening. And you see results and improvement after just a few days.

It’s free, so you why not give it a try and see for yourself.

You can download it, distribute it, use it in groups, or for yourself.

Just print out a copy for each day, or keep a journal and use the worksheet as your guide.

Habits and rituals for re-centering on what matters are a huge boost to personal improvement on all levels (career, relational, emotional, physical, spiritual, etc). A format (or roadmap) makes it easy to start and execute, but most of all, easier to stick with it until it can transform your thoughts and actions.

If you think that you’d like the new year to get off to a great start or if you feel like you need a guide to get back on track, this is a great resource, I promise you. Simply, download it free, print it, and try it.  If you like it, let me know, or tell me what would improve it.

In a goodwill gesture and love and warm fuzzies, I am releasing these to you and the world under a Limited Creative Commons license. (CC). They are free to reproduce, use, and distribute with author attribution to me (Lisa DeLay).

xo

-Lisa

• The SHARPENING Ritual 
Learn more HERE

• The SHARPENING Ritual
(PRAYER-centered VERSION)

Learn more HERE

Sharpening

SharpeningPRAYER