Self-Care Rituals: An Interview with Emma Loewe and Lindsay Kellner from Mind Body Green

I am so excited today to be interviewing Emma Loewe and Lindsay Kellner. They are co-authors of the book 'The Spirit Almanac: A Modern Guide to Ancient Self-Care.' I am so excited for the release of this book. It's something that really speaks to my soul.    Listen to this episode of the Love & Light Live Podcast on iTunes   Ashley: As many of you know, I'm a huge advocate for self-care. This is something that's so important in our lives and that not many of us really take the time to do like we should in modern times. So, I want you to take some time to sit back and listen to this interview. Take it all in because I know that these amazing ladies will be sharing some phenomenal advice with all of you. So Emma and Lindsay, thank you so much for being here today. Lindsay Kellner: No, thank you for having us, we're so excited! Ashley: Well, I am really grateful that you wrote this book because I think it is so needed in the world. I'm also just grateful that you are taking time to be here and share it with everyone. Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourselves and how you got started on this spiritual journey of self-care, and also how that inspired you to write this book? Lindsay: Yes, that's a great question. I am the beauty and wellness editor at MindBodyGreen. It's actually interesting - I'm in a little bit of a transition phase at work, so by the time this episode comes out I will be a contributing editor for MindBodyGreen and I will also be continuing my own blog and podcast called ‘Well Aware.’ I live in Brooklyn, New York. I'm a Leo, my mom is a Cancer. By trade, I'm a writer and editor, but I've always been interested in wellness, which I feel is such a weird word to use right now because it's so ubiquitous and it can mean so many different things. For me, the way I got started with wellness was actually through yoga. I started doing yoga when I was 13, which was quite a while ago (I'm 31 now!). I registered for a class at my town’s recreational center and it was me and a bunch of senior citizens [laughs]. Yoga really did bring me into myself and into my body. I wasn't somebody who loves sports. I guess, I never really developed that hand-eye coordination that you need to really succeed in sports. There was something about the solitude of yoga that really took the pressure off. It gave me the time and the space that I needed to come into myself. So I think, for me, my journey started certainly when I started taking yoga classes - even though I didn't really know it at the time. It was a physical release for me. In high school and college I had eating disorders, so like many of us who come into wellness because of some kind of illness, I think my spiritual journey began when I truly started to heal from that. Ashley: How does that translate for you into shifting into this appreciation for self-care, and how did that kind of tie into the creation of this book? Lindsay: I think that I'm somebody with a tendency to be a perfectionist.  I think that's a character trait that goes along oftentimes with having eating disorders and a certain personality type. So a lot of the time I see things as very black-and-white, and developing an awareness around that was really the first step in my journey. I started to do a lot of different types of healing modalities on my own. I also engaged in many years of therapy and one-on-one counselling - spiritual and non.   For me, I really notice when I'm not doing enough self-care. Even as I'm talking to you now, I'm going through a huge transition that I feel like is a radical act of self-care. I'm leaving a full-time job to give myself more time, because I've started to go through a personal health crisis, and that's manifested in a lot of ways. I've had a lot of symptoms over the last few months of heart palpitations and dizzy spells and all of these kinds of things that you can't really trace - or I haven't yet been able to trace.