Ritual: Five Daily Rituals from Finland for Connecting to Nature and Increasing Your Life Force!
Because we are born from Mother Nature, we are able to increase our life force when we connect with her elements, cycles and rhythms. This connection raises our vibration and makes us become fully alive!
I grew up spending summers with my family at our lake house in central Finland. We pulled dinner from the old forests and deep lakes that surrounded the little cottage that my grandfather built after the Winter War. We gathered water from the local spring and feasted on homemade rye bread, my uncle’s smoked salmon and the love of family. At night, we bathed in the sauna and launched our naked bodies into the cold lake under the midnight sun!
I learned more from my wanderings in those quiet woods full of berries and fairies and during sauna sessions with my aunt, mother, sister and grandmother than I did back home in Tennessee.
Once I was on my own, I went searching for that kind of connection and life in sync with nature, trying to recreate the magic of life at the summer house. On this path, I spent a decade working and studying on organic farms— which eventually led me to tea.
The magic of the summer house, I have realized, is in living so close to the earth. Because we are born from Mother Nature, we are able to increase our life force when we connect with her elements, cycles and rhythms. This connection raises our vibration and makes us become fully alive. In returning to nature, we return to ourselves and begin to vibrate at a higher frequency which helps us fight disease, depression and all of the ailments of modern life.
Whether you live in a high rise in a city or a cabin in the woods, these 5 daily rituals, gleaned from the Finnish way of life, can be practiced daily to lift your mood, heal your body and spirit, amplify your vibration and ground you into the earth.
Five Daily Rituals From Finland
1. Fresh Air: Especially while you sleep, fresh air cleanses your body and your mind. Open a window in your bedroom in all four seasons and sleep outside from time to time! Even in the Winter, the Finns wrap their babies up so warm with layers of wool, hide and down and put them outside to sleep. It makes them robust and resilient!
2. Bare Feet: Let your feet feel the earth daily! This simple practice has miraculous benefits from building immunity, reducing pain, improving sleep, amplifying energy levels and decreasing anxiety and depression. Returning your feet to the earth is a bit like plugging yourself in— it charges you up!
3. Cold Plunge: Immerse yourself in cold water: a mountain stream, a natural spring, a cold lake or a cold shower. It is one of the best ways to reinvigorate your system!
Scientists and gurus like Wim Hoff are now proving what the Finns have known for Millennia: flushing our bodies daily with cold water is an exceptional way to prevent disease and weight gain and to improve sleep, mood and skin!
The Finnish sauna ritual involves steaming your body in a wood-stove-heated sauna by throwing water on hot coals. Once you are sufficiently hot and your body is sweating, you you dive into a glacial lake and go for a swim! This cycle is repeated over and over again and is one of the most amazing feelings in the whole world! It leaves you radiant inside and out!
4. Wild Food: Make wild and foraged food part of your daily life! Wild food and water is alive with Earth wisdom to share and adventuring to collect it is fun! It also brings us into self-reliance and the awareness that we are completely provided for that we are given freely everything that we need.
Foraged food, water and herbs can be found in your local hills, forests, oceans and lakes- and sometimes at your local farmers markets. Natural spring water can be located at findaspring.org.
5. Quiet Time Spend some time each day outside merely watching, listening and receiving. Carl Jung believed that this was the most important daily practice for being Healthy. Mother Nature will teach us everything we need to know. She will answer all of our questions and fill us with gratitude and awe, if we only take the time to listen.
