“There’s a candle in your heart ready to be kindled.” —Rumi

What if I told you an enjoyable, even pleasurable practice existed to improve your health, inspire self-growth and heal you from past pain and trauma?

What good news it is to share that this is absolutely a truth about being human and how to elevate the quality of our life – the experience of our everydays, and therefore, is a necessary skill to live a life of true contentment.

The practice is being able to both understand how our nervous system is designed paired with knowing how to regulate, or bring ourselves home, to the ventral vagal system, all of which are taught in part quatre/four of this series (click here to read). We bring ourselves home when we return to nourishment, safety, comfort and the peace of mind to be able to take risks, to stretch ourselves, to grow into our full potential. “Profound changes can happen when we are anchored in ventral regulation and begin to live from that place, where there is a sense of trust. We move through the world willing to take a risk, with the belief that when we take a leap we will find a safe landing.” Conversely, when we are not anchored in the ventral vagal system, which is to not be ‘home’ – the sympathetic system, “we don’t believe in ourselves or trust that the world will support us in making a change”, and when we are even further removed from ‘home’ in the dorsal vagal system, “we don’t even imagine the possibility.”

This 7-part series began with the introduction of TSLL’s axiom, the guiding ethos of the content shared here on The Simply Luxurious Life, “The thinking and compassionate person’s blog with everyday ‘sides’ of living well to savor.” Then, in Part Trois/Three we talked about what ‘everyday “sides”‘ meant. Today, we’re going to dive deeply into exactly how to Savor those everyday ‘sides’ well so that we can enjoy the many benefits of doing so as it contributes to the elevation of living a life of true contentment, which lies at the foundation of living simply luxuriously.

Wonderfully, the practice of Savoring is one of the ways we bring ourselves back home, and how we learn how to regulate our nervous system. What a wonderful way to heal – putting into practice the skill of savoring.

It is important to note that Deb Dana in her book Anchored which is the source for today’s post, shares a multitude of skills to practice to help teach ourselves how to regulate our nervous system, and notably, Savoring is one of them. When we are able to bring ourselves (regulate ourselves) back to the “ventral vagal state, along with the energies it brings alive, [it] is a candle that is always lit, and when nourished and cherished it will burn brighter and warmer, bringing us health, growth, and restoration.”

In other words, not only do we benefit in the present moment by bringing ourselves to the healthy state of residing in the ventral vagal system, but we also improve the quality of our entire life experience – physical health, self-actualization (discovering our dharma), and self-awareness to strengthen all arenas of our life through having chosen to heal ourselves – which effects the entirety of our life journey.

Let’s explore how Savoring plays a vital role in this process of anchoring us in our healthy home of the nervous system and thus gifting us with the ability to live a life of true contentment.

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Solitary walks. Walks involving only one human (myself) and my pups. Typically, wandering about in Mother Nature.

For me, this is nourishment that I cherish. And because it is deeply nourishing for me, I engage in this activity every day.

A key component of living simply luxuriously is being aware of what nourishes us uniquely. Simply because I prefer walking alone in Mother Nature doesn’t mean it will be everyone else’s cup of tea. However, I don’t let others’ fears or dislike influence what I know to be true for me.

The more we engage in nourishing activities, the more our savoring muscle is guiding us, and how our savoring muscle gains the wisdom it needs is by our practicing the act of savoring – noticing something that captures our awe, something that prompts a spontaneous smile, glee, a moment of happiness is experienced, enchantment captures us; then, we hold ourselves in the present moment to drink up what we have found; and finally, we wisely simply delight in what is and desist ourselves from asking for more.

A necessary and powerfully life elevating ingredient in a life of contentment is savoring. To savor is to see, appreciate, and then relish, free from clinging. 

“The practice of savoring helps us make the most of a moment, or a micro-moment. Savoring is about seeing and celebrating the little things in everyday life.” —Deb Dana

As part of our toolbox of contentment which includes both skills and strengths, each of which are detailed in Living The Simply Luxurious Life: Making Your Everydays Extraordinary and Discovering Your Best Self, savoring is a skill we choose to learn that both helps us find the balance of ‘doing’ and ‘being’, but also gifts us with powerful health benefits, thereby elevating our everyday life both in the short and long-term. 

Research has shown, as clinician and consultant specializing in using the lens of the Polyvagal Theory Deb Dana shares in Anchored, that when we consciously practice savoring moments throughout our days, we anchor our nervous system in the ventral vagal system, the part of our nervous system where we feel calm, make healthy connections, go with the flow, engage fully with life, and can naturally practice compassion both to ourselves and others. As a result, “our immune system is strengthened, and we feel more creative, identify more life satisfaction, are more resilient, and have a reduced risk of depression.” Much like keeping our muscles toned with regular strength-training, when we regularly savor micro-moments throughout our day, they accumulate, teaching our nervous system that we are safe and that we have healthy connections. This trust in ourselves and the life we have built and are building strengthens our ability to be able to discover something to savor repeatedly throughout our days rather than to live in fear, doubt or cynicism.

An added benefit is that we come to realize and therefore trust that there will regularly and with great frequency be something to savor throughout our everydays. This realization liberates us from clinging, from wanting more or from devising ways to acquire more, all of which would not only take us away from the present moment (as wanting pulls us into the future), but counteract the act of savoring.

The skill of savoring, when done intentionally, changes how we engage with our day and what we discover; as a result, we find ourselves repeatedly energized more often than drained throughout our everydays. 

Deb Dana teaches the simple three-step approach to welcoming the habit of savoring into our life:

1. Attend. When a nourishing moment, no matter how seemingly grand or petite, is discovered (a blue bird day, the scent of freshly brewed coffee to begin the first step out of bed, settling into your seat in business class for your trip to France) bring your full awareness to the moment and hold yourself still. Stop. Notice it. If a smile naturally occurs, let it expand ever upward. 
2. Appreciate. Choose to stay in this moment, almost to memorize all of the pixelated details in your visual memory. 
3. Amplify. “Hold the moment in focused awareness for twenty to thirty seconds. Feel the fullness of the moment.”

In this third step, the brain is literally being rewired, creating new ‘roads’ of connection as new neurons are firing together – introducing themselves, then gradually, becoming more familiar with each other, and finally seeing each other out by default. With consistent savoring, what once was a barely traveled path will become a super highway. A-super-highway-habit of savoring with ease that prompts the brain to look for moments to savor, remembers to give them our full attention for a moment longer and simultaneously, the benefits of well-being are strengthened as we discover how beautiful, how full of possibility and compassion our lives are. 

Dana points out that our cultural conditioning may have us doubting that we deserve to feel this delighted in the everyday as we may have been nurtured to see such behavior as being vulnerable, and being unguarded is cautioned as being unwise, even foolhardy, or even that “it’s dangerous to feel good, or something bad will happen if we stop and appreciate the moment.” She calls this type of thinking ‘dampening’ as opposed to ‘deepening’ the latter of which is what we do when we follow the three steps of savoring. When we have lived to fear life, to doubt that good things happen and people and the world can be kind, the dampening way of thinking feels safe. But it prevents us from growing, from loving, from connecting, from creating what we each can uniquely give to the world, and true contentment will not be experienced with such a mindset. When dampening thinking occurs, she advises, “start slowly with five or ten seconds [of amplifying] and build toward twenty or thirty. Find the amount of time that supports your ability to attend, appreciate, and amplify . . . be gentle, be patient, be persistent. Over time you’ll find your capacity to savor will increase.”

The skill of Savoring to the untrained mind appears indulgent or at the benign level, simply a way to add a little something extra to our day, much like ordering dessert if we have the extra cash as well as the appetite after a meal. But in fact, Savoring is the ‘air pump’ of sorts as it keeps lifting our sights to see all the awesome beauty, delights and treasures that are scattered around us, there whether we notice them or not, and happening right before our eyes every single day. With the skill of Savoring, we see them, we appreciate them, and each day is more enriched as we curtail our wanting realizing that what and where we are at this moment is quite extraordinary.  

Once we have mastered the skill of Savoring which requires that we are present in the now, we are exhibiting another vital skill has also been well-toned – awareness and more broadly, mindfulness. All of these skills go hand-in-hand and help us to notice opportunities. Once we then put into practice the knowledge and skills surrounding the nervous system, bringing ourselves home whenever we let our being wander into the dorsal vagal or sympathetic, we then begin to be courageous. To live the life that is calling us, that keeps tugging at our curiosity. We begin to trust life and most importantly, ourselves that we will land, as shared at the start of this post, safely wherever that landing might be.

Today, take a moment and practice seeing the little things in your everyday life to celebrate. Follow the three step-process of Savoring. Intentionally savor at least one moment like this everyday, following these steps. In time, it will become your default, but it will take intentional effort initially. What you will eventually begin to do is savoring more than once each day, actually looking for things to savor, and this is what we want. This is what changes the brain, and this is what begins to change the quality of our days and thus our lives. We find ourselves more often savoring instead of stressing. Recall from Part Quatre/Four – the continuum we talked about (see below, and be sure to read the post to understand fully why this continuum helps to strengthen our regulation of the nervous system).

Savoring is a place of safety, a place of comfort and most importantly, a place where we are nourishing ourselves. When we are nourished, we can then stretch which means we can grow, take risks, realize our full potential.

Back to my encouragement for you to practice celebrating one thing in your life today. In Part Three we talked about the everyday ‘sides’ of living well to savor. Each of our ‘sides’ will be unique to every individual. The ‘sides’ we choose depend upon the nourishment they provide to us – the joy, the delight, the anticipation we feel and the energy we receive (no draining here!), when we engage with these ‘sides’.

I will use my own life as an example. As I shared above, my daily solitary walks with my pups are my vitamin extraordinaire. When we ventured on our walk yesterday, we chose a trail we had not walked upon in some time, and what we discovered was magnificent (both photos in this post were captured on this walk). While always a wonderful two-mile outing, on this particular occasion, the wetlands were full of water following all of the rainfall in late August and early September, and the reflection of the blue sky off the water created what to me looked like a painting. So without hesitation or forethought, I stopped, I gazed at this beautiful setting with intention for some time (thus why Nelle had time to romp about), and yes, I did take photos, but before I took the photos, I just soaked up the beauty with my senses – noting the depth of color, noting Mt. Bachelor in the distance, noting . . . as much as I could. I began to breathe more deeply, the corners of my mouth inched ever upward, and my mind was fully present.

These moments, which happen regularly on my walks, upon conclusion and I return to work, the house, wherever I am going next, I take a moment to acknowledge and check in with myself, and what I discover is that I am nourished, revitalized, and my mind is clear mind and a buoyant well-spring of ideas.

Not only do we need to know what nourishes us, we also need to nourish ourselves regularly without guilt, without shame, and instead, do so out of necessity. Self-care plays a necessary role as Deb Dana talks about that allows us to “tune in, take in and tend to.” She explains, “Tuning in and taking in are experiences of connecting and listening while tending to uses an accompanying action that is based on what we learn from connecting and listening.”

As we have talked about in episode #242, far from being a selfish act, self-care is a necessary component for on-going well-being. “Practicing self-care is often confused with being selfish. If we look through the lens of the nervous system, self-care is based in ventral vagal safety and connection while being self emerges from a survival state. When we are selfish, we’re trying to meet a need that comes from a place of fear [i.e. the dorsal vagal or sympathetic system] . . . while residing in a dorsal state, self-care doesn’t enter my thoughts or is out of reach, while residing in the sympathetic state, self-care is seen as a waste of time or will get in the way, and while residing in the ventral state, self0care is an essential ingredient for health and brings joy.”

What nourishes you? Dana presents two questions to help us answer just that: Ask yourself these two questions to design a self-care practice that is designed uniquely for you: “What does my nervous system need in this moment?” and “Is what I’m doing nourishing my nervous system?” When we can answer both of these questions with clarity and self-knowledge as well as knowledge about the nervous system, then we can create not only a self-care practice that nourishes us, but a sustainable one at that. And because we are designing what nourishes us based on the answers to those two questions, we may get different responses along our journey which is why we need to be present, practice awareness and give ourselves what is needed now. It may or may not be what was needed yesterday, last year, or ten years ago.

How Savoring comes into play is that it helps us communicate to our brain what we want to look for – what is a priority. When we practice Savoring, we first see what captures our delight, we deepen that experience by taking the time to be fully present and witness it, and in so doing, we convey importance to our mind that this is valuable, this brings us calm, slows our breathing and thus our heart rate, and the brain, with regular practice, begins to create a new connection that eventually finds such moments with ease.

One of the key, and actually, the concluding lesson of TSLL’s Contentment Masterclass is Savor, Savor, Savor. In fact, when students conclude the course, they have the exclusive opportunity to welcome one of TSLL’s Savor, Savor, Savor totes into their everyday as a reminder of all that they learned and how to go about the everyday.

I chose the text for the bag that spoke to the modus operandi of living a simply luxurious life. Savor, Savor, Savor. Writing in triplet is intentional. Let me explain. As I have shared before, to savor living well involves multiple faucets of our conscious attention:

• The verb savor is repeated three times as a reminder to (1) savor fully the Present moment, bringing our full attention and open mind to whatis without expectation; to (2) savor and thereby slow down while enjoying meals, conversation and activities that involve our senses; and lastly, underscoring it all, to (3) savor where we find ourselves along our unique life journey whether our current location and self is desired or unwanted because both are offering a gift. How so? If unwanted hiccups arise, we are given an opportunity to learn a necessary piece of information that if accepted as such will enable us to travel well forward. These hiccups deepen appreciation, clarify our priorities and bestow upon us an opportunity to become more aware of our true capabilities. Contrarily, during moments where our hopes are answered, happiness abounds and we are filled with peace, we savor by letting go of wanting more and reveling in all that is. 

And as you see when you look at the Syllabus for the Course, the final lesson centers around understanding this truth: When we savor, savor, savor, we are indeed living a life of true contentment.

Be sure to stop by this Wednesday when this 7-part series will conclude as we bring all that we have learned together sharing how

EXPLORE THE 7-Part SERIES: Who TSLL Is Written For

~Learn more about TSLL’s Contentment Masterclass here.

EXPLORE TSLL’s MANY POSTS on Savoring