005 - In My "Re-Enchantment Era": A Life Update

I’m back after a longer-than-planned break, here to share a life update and some reflections as I embrace what I’m calling my “re-enchantment era” and choosing FUN as my foundational frequency. I also share about how my work is evolving toward more ritual and ceremony, including a new, limited time, summer offering called Radiant Mama Ritual coming next month!!

🖤 Connect with me on Instagram @sarah.schott & @thewildreturnpodcast or email at rootandrise.life@gmail.com

🖤 Download your free Everyday Rituals guide to transform your daily life and bring the sacred into the everyday moments and alchemize your routines into acts of devotion to your one wild beautiful life. 

🖤Visit my website to explore the ways we might work together 

PS -- about this gorgeous music: it's the song: “What My Heart is Looking For” by Bonner Black from Soundstripe.com

Transcript

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Welcome to The Wild Return, a podcast where we explore womanhood as power, motherhood as alchemy, and the journey of remembering who we really are. I'm your host, Sarah Schott, a mother, matrescence coach, womb guide, somatic educator, doula, and circle facilitator. I've spent much of my life on my own rewilding journey back to my body, intuition, truth, and purpose, and it's all culminated to this work right now of both mothering my babies in these times and supporting other women as they journey back home to themselves, too. In this space, we gather to reconnect with how our womb and body, motherhood journeys, and nature are all gateways to our soul, healing, and power so that we can live fulfilling lives, show up as the mother our kids really need, and step into our unique role in creating planetary change. Because I believe that what the world needs now is wildly, deeply rooted mothers who remember exactly who they are and the power, clarity, courage, creativity, and joy that they hold and wield when they do so that we can do our part to birth the world we already feel in our hearts, are building in our homes, and wish to see for all of us. Let's walk together Hi, welcome back to the podcast. It's been a while, and I guess welcome back to me too. It was a much longer break from this than I thought it was going to be. At first, I thought I'd only be taking a couple weeks off to travel around the spring equinox and celebrate with my family and figure out the next little bunch of episodes I wanted to record for you, but it ended up being a couple months and a lot has happened. I feel like in some ways I've lived an entire lifetime over the past two months, and somehow it passed in the blink of an eye. Time is so wild. Um- Yeah I've got to admit, I wondered if I was ever going to feel called to come back to the podcast here. But when I realized that one of the commitments I made to myself while starting The Wild Return was to really allow myself to flow with my own seasons with it, to let the episodes come when they wanted to come and be quiet on here when I felt like I wanted to be quiet. That was the whole deal I made with myself. I didn't wanna make any straight-up commitments to making, say, like, an episode a week or anything like that. So I stopped trying to make it mean something, that I wanted to take a break. And rather than criticizing myself, I offered myself a lot of compassion, which is still a pretty new concept for me, so I'm really, really proud of myself. And here I am. I wanted to come back with a little episode here about kinda what's been going on for me, at least some of the stuff that's been going on for me these past couple months. I have a whole slew of notes here that I prepared because I wanted to really make sense of everything that had been going on for me. I don't know how much of this I'm really going to share today just based on letting myself take this episode where it really wants to go and stepping out of my mind and where I feel like I want to explain things from my head and really let my heart lead this conversation today. So if you wanna hear a life update, I think that's where this episode's headed, but I guess we'll see, right? Okay. So I have been through, I guess, this one turn of the wheel since we were last together here. Last episode I shared with you was about the energy of the spring equinox, and here we are already through Beltane and heading towards the summer solstice. So some of the stuff that has been going on has been a lot of celebrations of spring. We had a beautiful little celebration of the spring equinox with my family here in Pennsylvania, as well as Beltane, and they were both so much fun. We really dove into the magic of flowers and fairies and gnomes around Beltane. We put out little, we're calling them gnome doors, even though they're fairy doors, but we've been really into the Wonder Garten Waldorf early childhood homeschooling program. And they have these little gnomes that live in the trees and things in those stories. So we bought these little doors for trees in our yard and Evelyn decided which of the gnomes live in each one. And then we put out her little fairy gardens and I've recently become really into doing this with the girls. She started with some fairy garden things, I think last year or maybe the year before, but this year we're kind of like going gung ho and really expanding our collection and expanding where the little pockets of magic are in our yard. And that's been really fun for me. We've also just been doing a lot of spring stuff outside. We've been having picnics, enjoying popsicles. We actually had to plant our garden twice because we planted it just before we got this really late frost that killed off next to everything we planted in our six raised beds. So we planted our garden twice, and we've been enjoying all the flowers that we have, and we even tried camping outside in our backyard for the first time last weekend. We've been wanting to do this for years. We have had a tent and sleeping bags for all of us that we bought a few years ago. I think Evelyn was, like, two or three when we bought our camping supplies, and we haven't used them. So we decided last weekend was a perfect weekend to camp outside. So we put up the tent, we gathered everyone's things. We went outside, and it ended up just being me and Evelyn camping outside because Avalon just would not settle. So Ryan took her inside and tried to get her to sleep and bring her out, but she wouldn't settle till about 1:00 in the morning, so Ryan just gave up and they slept inside while Evelyn and I slept outside in our tent on the day of the Taurus new moon, so it felt really fitting to do that in Taurus season on the new moon, and it was beautiful and so much fun and we're really hoping to do that again this spring before it gets too hot and buggy here in Pennsylvania. Other than that, our-- we're just going through kind of normal life here. We just finished Evelyn's last day of school yesterday. She goes to a local Montessori school, and we're preparing for her birthday. She turns five next week, which is wild to me. I cannot believe that I now have an almost five-year-old, and I feel like that's a really big deal, but I haven't yet taken the time and space to really feel into what that really feels like for me. But I'm sure I will over the next few weeks as we're celebrating her turning five. So other than those family kinda updates, I've been doing a lot of traveling. I have been traveling back and forth to Massachusetts for ceremony. I am part of the founding circle of the Living Temple, which is a sacred feminine-based temple created by Sarah Jenks and Kelly Tavares. And I've been going up there for the different Wheel of the Year celebrations since Samhain, since Halloween last fall. So I was up there for the Equinox and for Beltane. And I was invited to join their Year Two Council, which is a sacred feminine leadership mastermind that they do. I did my first round of that back when I was pregnant with Avalon, and it was a big honor to be invited to join their Year Two. And that was, like, a last-minute thing. So Ryan had to reschedule his annual father-son trip that they had planned for about a year to make this work. And I know you probably know how much it takes to arrange all the things you need to arrange when you're going away, especially when you have young children. So I went through a whole, like, mental, emotional, spiritual whirlwind around, "How could I possibly go? It seems selfish to go. I'll feel guilty if I go. There's no way this could ever work." You know, all those thoughts going through my head. But I needed to go. I knew it was the right call. Ryan knew it was the right call, and he really supported me and, like, pushed me to do this. And it ended up being the best thing for me. I hadn't been away by myself since 2019, and it was getting to the point where I felt like I couldn't even do it alone, if I'm being perfectly honest. And getting myself to do this trip that was really for me on every level of my being was the best thing I could have done for myself. I really realized how much I had been struggling in my daily life once I stepped back. And I realized what a growth opportunity this was, not only for me, but also for my girls. And how I was showing them that this is one of the ways that I take care of myself as a mom, and I tend to my own needs and my own dreams and desires. And it was also a growth opportunity for our whole support system, my husband, my mom, everyone that was involved in that week. And it was a growth opportunity for them, but also for me to allow other people to really step up in the care with my girls. And I'm really just so thankful that I said yes. It was an incredible experience. I don't know how to adequately and succinctly describe what being in the Council is like, but you're basically living on sacred land for five days with an incredible, amazing group of women who are just so intelligent and creative and heart-led, and from all different professional backgrounds coming together for deep devotion to their soul, to their calling, and to changing the world really. And we are in high ceremony. We are having amazing food and dinner parties, and going in the sauna, and taking forest walks, and having fire ceremonies, and just living together, and having the best conversations about all kinds of things from our daily life with our kids and our partners to aliens and the gateway tapes, and how the pyramids originated, and the Artemis II astronauts, and consciousness, and quantum physics, and all kinds of stuff. It's just the most life-expanding, heart-expanding experience that I've ever had in my life, and I feel so lucky to have had it twice. And then after that trip, I also traveled to New Jersey for a training in Holistic Pelvic Care with Tami Lynn Kent to finish up level two training with her. And that was amazing in its own way, and so nourishing and beautiful to be receiving her wisdom for three days. So between the traveling and my normal life, I've been trying to integrate everything that I've walked away with from those experiences. And if you know, you know, that can be pretty rough when you're a mom of young kids. So it's been a little rocky at times, and a little like, "What even happened over the past couple months?" But I feel like I'm finally starting to settle into the changes that have occurred within me, and the changes I want to implement in my life based on all that came about over the past couple months from my trainings and the ceremonies I've been in, and just all the, the new experiences that I've had. There's been so many of them in such a short period of time, and I don't think I've ever experienced that, um... I'm, like, putting my hands in, like, a little ball, um That, that amount of transformation in such a small amount of of time. It feels like it was very, like, dense and compact and potent. So what's been shifting? So back when I turned 40 in October, I wrote in my journal that this new era of my life is going to be called my re-enchantment era. I am becoming re-enchanted with life. My intention and goal right now is to really see the magic that is everywhere, the sacredness that is everywhere and in everything and in every aspect of my life. I have very much let myself become critical and bogged down by what seems like so mundane in my daily existence since giving birth to Avalon. And when I turned 40, I decided to declare an end to that, and it's definitely been rocky since then. But the experiences that I've had over the last few months have really helped to give me the capacity to commit to that on a very new and deeper level. I have been really feeling into how much my perspective on things and my perception of things is forming the reality that I live and how everything in life is really, really malleable and so much of it relies on how we are perceiving it. Now, this isn't everything, but our perception does make a massive impact on how we experience and see our lives. I know I've seen this for myself. And what I want to see is how magic is everywhere, how the sacred is everywhere, how everything has meaning and purpose, and how everything that I choose impacts things, not in a way that feels burdensome, but in a way that feels empowering, and I've been really feeling into the difference of that. An example of this is I've been saying to myself how I can't seem to split myself well between motherhood and my work outside of motherhood, that I feel guilty for doing one and not the other at any given time, that I can't seem to have enough energy for both, that when I'm doing one, I'm not giving enough to the other. And this idea has been playing out a lot in my life since I've had children. And what I've been realizing lately is it's simply not true. And by me telling myself that I don't have the capacity for both or that I need to split myself between them and I need to find the ways and the times and the space to do both has actually been preventing me from doing it Instead of viewing my mothering and my work as competing, I'm now learning to see them as synergistic, and I'm figuring out ways that they actually play into one another, which is so interesting because a lot of my work is around motherhood, right? But I'm seeing this in a new way: that my mothering and my work are actually synergistic, and when I do things that allow me to feel energized in one area of my life, it allows me to then feel energized in the other. And I've let the guilt go, and that has been huge and energizing in and of itself. And before April, I couldn't let that guilt go. I held onto it, I think because it made me feel like a better mom to feel guilty about it. Another area that I have been really feeling into is that I've had this belief that I have to work hard to achieve success. Work has to feel hard. Mothering has to feel hard. Life has to feel hard if I'm doing it right. I have to work hard to earn my rest. I have to work hard to earn my fun. I have to check this, this, and that off my list before I could possibly relax. And I didn't realize how much this was running in my internal narrative in recent months. But I notice it now, and it's another one of those perspectives that I've had, one of these beliefs that I've held within me that I'm not even sure is mine. I don't know if it comes from my family or ancestry or just culturally, 'cause we know it's there. But I've let this perspective run the show in the background for a very long time. I don't even know how long. And I now see it clearly for what it is. It's just a belief, and a belief can be changed. So I'm working with that too What I have come to want to embrace in this re-enchantment era is fun. I want fun to be my foundational frequency. I'm realizing that when I am in the energy of fun and joy and play, I am myself. I am the most myself that I ever am. And I'm seeing how when I'm having fun, this makes me feel alive. It makes me feel creative. It makes me present. It makes me feel connected to my body, to my soul, to the Earth, to the moment, to the people I'm sharing the moment with. It makes me feel authentic. Again, I feel most myself. It makes me feel bold and courageous, and it makes me feel like I am closer to my divinity and really experiencing my essence, which I guess is kind of like my authenticity. And I'm realizing that this is paramount, that this needs to be a priority in my life, and it completely counteracts the belief that life needs to be hard, right? 'Cause hard and fun don't really go together, at least not to me. And fun needs space. We need space in our lives for fun, not pressure, not control, not a rigid schedule, not a miles-long to-do list that we feel we need to click off to be worthy of anything Fun is my foundational frequency right now, and I've been spending a lot of time in my morning devotional, spiritual, sacred practice, whatever term you wanna use for it. I have a morning practice that I do every day, and if I don't do it, I feel the massive difference. So I have this morning practice that I do every day, and I've done this for years And I've made the point of it right now to access the frequency of fun, of joy, of play, of feeling truly alive. And it is shifting me in ways I cannot explain right now fully, but I see how I am now approaching the rest of my days with more ease, with more joy, with more lightness, and with seeking out that same feeling that I'm feeling in my morning practice. And I'm finding it with more ease because I'm prioritizing it for myself in those little moments I have at the beginning of the day for myself. I've also been doing little things throughout my day to remind me that this is the frequency that I want to be inhabiting. I've been doing things like completely clearing out my closet. Well, I mean, not completely. I don't think get rid of everything. But I got rid of, like, seven or eight garbage bags full of clothes, and I started buying clothes that feel fun. And you may have noticed this if you follow me on Instagram, I used to wear basically shades of beige and brown and other earth tones for the past few years. But I am shifting that because it doesn't feel like me. It did at one point, but I'm bringing back color and pattern in my life. I guess it's just color and pattern, but color and pattern back into my life, and it feels so good to really, really dress like myself. Not like a role I'm trying to play 'cause I feel like I entered that, like, this is how a mom dresses phase, or this is how a 40-year-old dresses. I didn't really enter that phase because I just turned 40 six months ago, or I guess now eight months ago, maybe. What is time, right? Um, but yeah. I'm really dressing like I want to feel, and that is a huge deal. I think we don't give how we adorn ourselves enough credit for how that impacts how we feel. I've also been dancing a lot and playing a lot more music. I've been burning a lot of incense and wearing a lot of sacred oils 'cause these all remind me of what I want to feel like, what energies I want to embody. I've also been bringing in more color into my home. We just bought this amazing rug from Ruggable that has, like, mystical, mythical creatures on it, like unicorns and some weird cat thing and a hare and all these amazing flowers, and it's navy blue with all this pink and turquoise. And then we bought a bookshelf from Lowe's, I guess, and it's just a plain wood bookshelf, and we're painting it turquoise. And then I bought all these little bottles of acrylic paint, and I'm going to freehand some sort of pattern all over it. I kinda hesitate saying that because I'm really nervous for how it's going to turn out. But I'm doing it, because it's gonna bring so much life into our home, and I'm finding other ways to do that too- They're in the pipeline coming down the road, and I'm sure I'll talk about them as they're happening. All is to say is I'm really learning how my frequency matters, and maybe that sounds so stinking obvious, and I've known this. You know, I knew it on my head level, but I'm really beginning to feel it, and I'm really beginning to notice the sheer difference of what it feels like when I am in this new me, which is really the real, real, real me versus the old version of me, and how those perspectives create entirely different experiences and therefore create entirely different realities for myself, and how that then also impacts the experiences of my kids, and how I experience motherhood, and how I experience my work, and how I experience my other relationships, and how I experience life So this is my path of devotion right now: to fun as my foundational frequency and bringing that into all that I do. So I think I'm gonna wrap it up there. I could go on about a lot of different other things that have been happening, but I think I might save that for another time. So before I wrap up, I do wanna share a little bit about how my work is wanting to take shape right now. So I've never really resonated with the word coach, and I'm finally realizing why. It's because the work that I'm called to do goes a lot deeper than what I typically imagine a coaching session goes into. Yes, there's strategy. Yes, there are aspects of coaching in the work that I feel called to do, but there's deeper le- layers to it. It's, it's more potent. It touches more than the mental material layer of things. I always like to dive deep. I call myself a deep diver. I like to go to the heart. I like to go to the soul. I like to go into the body's wisdom, to our intuition. The work that I'm called to do feels more experiential. It feels more like ritual. It feels more sacred. It feels more ceremonial. So I'm leaning into how I want to shape my work so that it has the elements of ceremony in them rather than just coaching. And I feel like this clarity it's a permission slip to myself. I've been feeling into a sacred birth school and how that wants to take form. This will be something that will address not what a childbirth education class teaches you, but more so how to prepare mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and some physically for the ceremony of birth. I'm also thinking about chunking this down into a, like, one-time circle, and also doing one based on matrescence, that rite of passage that is so often overlooked as we transition into motherhood. I am also currently creating a new single session offering that will be out this summer called Radiant Mama Ritual, which will be a one-on-one, you and me, co-creative process to design your very own unique to you daily devotional practice that is not only doable based on you, your desires, your needs, and your current season of life, but also that feels deeply nourishing, connects you with your body and your soul, and feels juicy so that you leave it feeling lit up and ready to live your day. So that you can more easily step out of autopilot and overwhelm and into more presence and a feeling of being vibrantly alive this summer. So we're really going to be invoking and tapping into that radiant alive feeling that summer brings, and finding and crafting a practice that really works for you on every level of your being. Because so often we don't think we have the time for it. We feel guilty for taking times to ourselves. We don't have the tools to really set up the container for ourselves and really talk to our partners about helping us make space for it. Or we just do a daily practice that's like just open an app and do a meditation that's not really connected to us uniquely as people because it hasn't really been designed for us. Having a daily practice has been one of the most important things that I have used to anchor me into creating the life I want to live and not just living from autopilot. It helps me step out of feeling overwhelmed by the sheer stimulation and responsibility and tasks I have as a mom And really feel myself get connected to my body, get connected to my heart, to my needs, and to my greatest desires and dreams. Because if we aren't in touch with ourselves, we can't really create a life that feels truly amazing and aligned to us. Creating practices like this is something I love to do. It lights me up to no end. So I wanted to bring my passion, my gifts, and my skills in this area to you and serve you in this way, and help you design a practice that really works for you in this season and makes you feel really alive. Like making this summer the best one yet because you are feeling great in it. So this will be a limited time offer. I will be giving you more details about it on here and over on Instagram and through my email list in the next couple weeks. But I plan on beginning sessions right at the summer solstice next month, which is June 20th. I can't wait to share more about it with you soon. I think that's it. Thanks for sticking around and listening to my little life update and for just listening to this podcast in general. I truly appreciate every single one of you. I'd really love to hear from you if a thread from this episode really resonated. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and we'll talk soon Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Wild Return podcast. If today's message spoke to you, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone you know who might want to tune in too. Come find me over on Instagram @sarah.schott and check the show notes for ways we might work together. I'm sending you so much love. I'll see you next time