#82 Before the World Gets Hold of You - The Power of a Daily Practice
As the world feels increasingly chaotic and uncertain, Kelly shares her deeper WHY for maintaining a daily devotional practice. It's no longer simply about finding peace and stillness. It's about raising her frequency, cultivating a sense of equanimity, and deepening her connection to Source.
Whether you've drifted away from a once-powerful practice or simply feel called to deepen your connection, this episode is an invitation to rediscover the power of daily devotion, in whatever form feels right for you.
Kelly shares how her own meditation practice has evolved over the past decade, from learning to quiet her busy mind to cultivating a daily ritual that connects her to herself and to something far greater than the everyday circumstances of life.
She explores why how we begin our mornings matters, the importance of connecting to ourselves before allowing in the noise of the outside world, and how setting a daily intention can influence the energy we bring into our day.
Perhaps you've fallen out of your daily practice, become a little hit or miss with it, or meditation has turned into something you simply tick off your to-do list. Are you missing the way it used to feel?
Also mentioned: Episode 16 is where Kelly shares her journey from believing she couldn't meditate to discovering a method that transformed her life. It's a great place to start if you've always struggled with meditation or wondered what all the fuss is about!
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Read the Transcript for this Episode below:
Episode 82 of the Project Me podcast
Hi, I'm Kelly Pietrangeli, and this podcast is designed to be an entertaining, inspirational, personal growth journey. Each episode goes in a mostly chronological order as I piece together the books, modalities, people, and experiences that have fallen onto my life path exactly when I needed them, and how often I resisted the very things I needed the most or didn't see the gifts contained in the challenges until later.
By sharing my stories, I hope to inspire you to reflect on your life path. What are the seeming coincidences that have led you to where you are today? What are the hidden gifts within your challenges? And what magic is out there waiting for you as you let go of resistance and follow your own breadcrumb trail?
At the end of each short episode, there's an opportunity for you to breathe and reflect on how my story relates to your own life. You can find more inspiration on my website, kellypietrangeli.com.
Hello, I hope you're doing well. All is really wonderful in my world. In the last episode, I shared my excitement over my upcoming sweet 60th birthday celebrations, and I'm happy to say it all went fantastically well. I had an absolute ball. It's pretty hilarious to report that my 60th birthday party got shut down by the police here in Ibiza, by a police officer so hot people thought he was a stripogram.
Like he'd be whipping out his plastic handcuffs at any moment. People were trying to get their picture taken with him, which only seemed to make him madder. We had to turn the music off just before 11 PM. But by then, I'd had a full five hours of socializing and dancing, and I was quite happy to head off to bed.
It was our son's 24th birthday a week after mine, and I found a photo from my 24th birthday party to show him, and there was a picture at my party in Hermosa Beach, California, being shut down by the police. Some things don't change. Now, the high tourist season here in Ibiza is winding down. We get our island back, and everyone is wanting to get back into routines and find their flow again.
If you don't know, Ibiza is actually a very spiritual island. It's filled with gorgeous nature and incredible energy. Next week, I'm running a day event here called Soul Aligned Decisions. I've teamed up with Melchior Arnold, the incredible quantum guy I spoke about a couple episodes ago. He'll be teaching how to use your body as a pendulum for clear yes or no answers, plus other techniques for making decisions in life.
And I'm weaving in my soul plan work to show how to make decisions that are in alignment with your highest purpose. It's taking place at my friends Demir and Nicole's brand-new gorgeous yurt in the countryside. Nicole's gonna be cooking us all a nourishing Ayurvedic lunch. If you'll be in Ibiza on October 22nd and you hear this in time, do reach out to me for the details Today I wanna talk to you about something I'm feeling increasingly passionate about, and that's the importance of having some kind of a daily devotional practice.
Now, before you start thinking this might sound too religious or too spiritual or simply not for you, hear me out. I'm talking about devoting a little bit of time each day to connecting with something beyond the busyness of your everyday life. That might be a higher power, the divine, spirit, the universe.
It could be Mother Nature or simply life itself. For me, my daily devotional practice is meditation and setting a personal intention. For you, it might look different, but I believe there's something incredibly powerful about making this connection a daily ritual, something that lifts you out of the everyday 3D reality and reminds you that you are so much more than your thoughts, your to-do list, your worries, or whatever circumstances you're currently navigating.
And I'm noticing more and more, both in my own life and in the lives of the clients I work with, when we drift away from the practices that keep us connected, it's often not long before life begins to feel more confusing, overwhelming, or out of alignment. And sometimes we don't even realize what's missing.
So today I wanna share a personal story about why having a daily practice has become such an important part of my life, why I believe that even a few intentional minutes each day can make such a difference, and what to do if you do have a daily practice, but it's begun to feel a bit stale or like you're just ticking the box on it.
How to feel deeply connected to your daily devotional practice again. Here we go. Episode 82. Way back in episode 16, I shared the story of how I went from not understanding the point of meditation to trying it, but it not working for me, to finally hitting on a method that did work for me, to becoming a meditation addict.
If you've heard about meditation or tried it, but still have the belief that you can't still your mind enough to meditate, or you can't find the time to do it, or you don't really understand the point of it, I really recommend you listen to that episode, episode 16. Because I was you, and I've heard from so many people who started meditating regularly after hearing that story of how I overcame my monkey mind, magically found the time and the method, and how it tangibly changed my life.
But since that episode was recorded six years ago now, it might not be reaching new people, so I'm giving it a plug now, re-promoting it. And today, I'm feeling called to speak to those who perhaps years ago, like me, did establish a regular meditation practice and did experience a real shift in your life, an opening, a connection to something powerful, an awakening, a new way of being, whatever that was for you.
But lately, or even for some quite, quite some time now, those powerfully connected feelings have become less powerful. Maybe your daily practice has dropped off, or you're hit or miss with it, or it's more like ticking the box. "Okay, meditation done. Now time to get on with my day." Are you missing the way it used to feel?
I hear you. It's now been 10 years since I started my daily morning meditation practice, and I'm still a big fan of the meditation app Insight Timer. In fact, I just had a look at my stats there, and it says that over the past decade, I've logged more than 5,000 meditation sessions. That's an average of nearly 10 a week.
The Insight Timer meditation app now has videos, live stream events, an explosion of content. Almost all of it is still totally free, which is extraordinary. I took up a paid subscription many years ago to support the app when the founders were struggling, and I continue to pay for it because it's just been such a significant part of my life for 10 years.
But the ever-increasing amount of content has come with its own challenges. If you're a longtime InsightTimer fan, I think you'll be nodding along when I say that now there's possibly too much choice there. I have hundreds of meditations bookmarked. I've created folders with headings to categorize them, and still, you go in, and it serves up fresh suggestions for you, and you end up press-pressing play on something new.
And yeah, it's no wonder my wonderful daily meditation practice began to feel a bit all over the place. Just so many different voices, different themes, and concepts. I used to feel like a kid in a candy store with the selection available, but then I got like the kid who's eaten too much candy, only instead of a funny tummy, I was getting a funny energy, no longer always feeling spiritually aligned after a meditation.
So for a while, I took a break from the app. That was maybe two or three years ago. It felt like it was finally time for me to properly meditate in silence. I took a meditation course with a wonderful teacher called Burges. His focus is on deep mindfulness and concentration, cultivating a still mind and an open heart.
And I loved that in theory, but the truth is, I didn't enjoy this form of silent meditation at all. And it wasn't until I admitted this to a very spiritual friend that she shared she'd also taken a course and had come to realize that for some of us, herself included, silent meditation simply wasn't our way I felt such a relief that I could drop this method and go back to my guided meditations.
But in order to still have that more disciplined feeling, I decided to stop beditating and to get out of bed. I set up a beautiful altar with crystals and shells and feathers. I'd light a candle, and I sat on a sheepskin mat on the floor in front of it. It felt less lazy and more intentional that way.
I'd press play on a guided meditation with this new energy, and it really worked. I felt connected again to my daily practice, and I came to understand my new deeper purpose for having one. I mean, back in 2016 when I first started meditating daily, I had a 16 and a 13-year-old at home. My morning meditation practice was really about supporting me to be a calm, loving mother in the mornings.
Getting up 15 minutes before them in the mornings to get into alignment meant I was no longer barking out orders to, "Get up, get dressed, come down for breakfast." I was gentle, loving, and kind because I'd just done a l- guided meditation on loving kindness. And then I'd go back and do another guided meditation before the afternoon school run to transition me out of work mode and back into loving kindness mode.
My daily practice served a very specific purpose back then, and it worked. I truly became a calmer, gentler, more peaceful person who lives with so much more presence. That's just who I am now, and I absolutely credit my daily Insight Timer meditations for this. And so I think after the kids flew the nest and I was already well on my spiritual path and guiding others on theirs, I needed a daily practice that served a new purpose.
I always have to feel connected to my bigger why for why I'm doing something. If I don't know my why, I'm not consistent. Well, I found out my why for having a daily practice versus not having one. When I wake up in the morning and I reach for my phone and the Insight Timer app isn't the first thing I click on, I can way too easily get sucked into social media or checking my emails or any of the other totally non-spiritually aligned distractions that pull me from my center.
Do that too often, and it becomes a very poor habit. Maybe you can relate to this. I really do believe that whatever we first feed ourselves with when we wake up has an imprint on our day ahead. There's research showing that our emotional state, our attention, and the way we respond to stress can all be influenced by how we begin our day.
So for me, that simple habit of never clicking on anything else except the Insight Timer meditation app when I first wake up, it's my way of imprinting my day ahead with positive energy. That's a fact, no denying it. My why for meditating is crystal clear to me. I need to connect to myself and to source before connecting to all the outside noise.
It's too easy to get sucked into it. I don't want my day ahead to be imprinted by what I'm served by the algorithms. I choose to begin each fresh new day fresh, no social media, certainly no news. There is no worse way to begin a new day than by starting with the news. Please, if you are doing this, I beg you not to But going back to that issue of having too much choice within the InsightTimer app and hearing too many different voices and concepts, well, InsightTimer has its own algorithm, and it's serving me up what it thinks I want.
Sometimes it suggests really great meditations. Other times, I'm not so sure. I mean, anyone can upload meditations to the app. I even have one there. Again, I needed to find my even bigger why. Within this app, what do I really want and need out of guided meditations? I journaled on it, asked my higher self and guides, and what became clear was deepening my connection to Source via others who are deeply connected to Source, teachers of a high frequency, of integrity and truth, and who are in my same soul group.
I believe there are different souls, different soul groups, and when we align with ours, we can align with our greater purpose and mission. This is what has been missing for some time with my daily practice, not listening consistently to voices and messages and guidance in alignment with my greater soul truth.
And so I set a new intention to become much more discerning about who I choose to meditate with in the app. And with this clear intention, it happened. I was shown a teacher in the app who I aligned with instantly. And because she has so many meditations and talks and courses inside the app, I was able to stop all the hopping around and scrolling through my bookmarks and folders or suggested meditations and just stick to one voice.
Her name is Evelyn Van Omen. She's Dutch. She has a lovely voice, and I think we're in the same soul group because her words land deep in my soul. And so much of what she shares I already know and believe and even teach myself. And then she goes beyond what I've heard of in this lifetime anyway, and yet it sounds familiar.
It's like a remembering, a soul truth. I have now done many of her meditations and now several of her courses in the app, including Recalibrating Your Mind: Connect to the Frequencies of Source, Experience Your Higher Consciousness in a Brand New Way, Transcending Matrix Manipulation: Align with Your Divine Blueprint and New Earth.
And I can see that she also has courses in the app around things like self-love, self-doubt, scarcity and money, dealing with fear of unemployment, transforming fear and anxiety. All of these would have been helpful for me years ago, but I am now more than ready for her higher level stuff beyond the 3D.
And for 105 consecutive days starting early this summer, I listened almost exclusively to this one teacher. I know it was 105 days because the Insight Timer app has a daily counter, and my streak was broken when I went to Medicine Festival in August and there was no phone signal. Then when I came back from the festival, I went straight into my birthday celebrations, and we had a houseguest.
And by early September, I was feeling the difference between having that consistent daily practice and being inconsistent again. It's the contrast in how I feel when I do versus how I feel when I don't that shows me how important this is. And I noticed that Evelyn credits a man called Frits Evelyn for creating the background music for her meditations.
I was curious to see if they were somehow related, and it turns out they both are Dutch but unrelated. But they both credit Caroline Cory as their teachers. Frits Evelyn is also an Insight Timer teacher, and I realized that years ago I did one of his courses there, but I never finished it. So I pressed play where I left off, and this time it completely resonated with me, which shows that as we evolve spiritually, what may not have made much sense earlier can totally change later.
There are many layers of awakening, and until you peel back the layers, you won't even see the things you're not ready for yet, or you'll be given a peek, but it won't make sense yet. But when it does, wow. It makes you realize how much more there is that you don't know yet So I completed that Fritz Evelin course, and I started another of his.
And for the moment, I now have my two teachers in the app that really resonate with me. My morning practice is renewed. I feel elevated, connected, open to receive, and so aligned. I also now have a new daily intention that I wrote onto a bookmark. I've got it on my bedside table, and it's based on what Evelyn Van Owen says in most of her meditations.
It begins, "I ask, and I intend." And it was only when I did her course called I Ask and I Intend: Praying as Conscious Co-creation, that I finally understood the, the power of these words. "I ask, and I intend" is a charged formula. "I ask" opens the field, and "I intend" shoots it in a powerful and accurate way. I have for a very long time connected with asking.
I have a podcast episode called Ask and It Is Given, based on a book by that title by Esther and Abraham Hicks. We have a divine support team who will support us when asked. Adding "I intend" means you're meeting the process, co-creating. So my daily intention that I say either out loud or in my head is as follows I ask and I intend to live in alignment with my soul plan today.
May I attract people, opportunities, resources, information, and energies that support me all day long. Anything else does not enter my energy field. With gratitude in my heart for this amazing day ahead, and so it is. And wow, does it work. Every day I continue to attract people and resources and information that supports me, and if I ever don't...
if I ever miss a couple days, like I just don't think of it, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I need to do that again," and then it happens again. So, yeah, I, I do also take the additional step of writing down specific things I'm desiring. So if there's something I really wanna call in, I'm really clear on what I'm asking for, what I'm intending, so that I attract the support I needed.
It's... There's no point being vague about it. Like, the more specific you get... And then, of course, I release the, the, uh, expectation. You know? It's like I, I... This is what I truly want. This is what I think from my, my human point of view what I want, but of course, this or something better, this or something bigger.
You know? Like, I, I do surrender and know that I may not always know what I think I want, um, or what I want might not always be what I need. And so I hope my story today helps you to see how my daily practice has evolved from 10 years ago, from those first stages of quieting the mind, creating space between thoughts, becoming present, to living with intention, feeling connected to something greater than myself, trusting, surrendering, aligning, manifesting all that I need, to now going much deeper into the awareness of the old grid versus the new earth energies and staying aligned to the new energies and not getting sucked into collective programming and the heaviness of the world, feeling joy and love, wonder and ease.
Ah, true sense of it all, you know? There is... There's a lot going on in the world right now, and it's, you know, not being predicted by anyone to get easier anytime soon. And so really, this is my bigger why for continuing to have a daily devotional practice that gives me a higher perspective while keeping me grounded, while raising my frequency, so I can be in the energy of equanimity, where the chaos of life can swirl around me and I will remain calm and centered in my being.
Dear listener, relax your forehead Take a long, slow, deep breath in through your nose And let it out through your mouth with a sigh Do you have a daily practice that supports you? Whether that be to keep you from falling into social media vortexes or doom scrolling, or to raise your vibration, or to connect you to your soul Do you have a practice you genuinely love or is it simply ticking a box?
What's your bigger why for having a daily practice? How do you feel when you create space for it versus when you don't?
How important does it feel for you to be connected to something bigger outside of yourself and all that goes on in the world?
What might happen if you started or restarted a daily practice today or tomorrow?
I really encourage you to journal on this and see what comes through when you put a pen to paper and find your bigger why
Thank you for listening to the Project Me podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. That helps push the podcast out to reach even more people who may benefit from hearing these stories. You can join my newsletter list to receive an update whenever a new episode comes out, and when I have a new course or a workshop or a retreat, anything to share.
I don't email too often. Go to my website, kellypetrangelle.com. And if you're in Ibiza on October 22nd, message me if you'd like to join the Soul Aligned Decisions workshop. It's gonna be an amazing day. And if you can't make it to Ibiza for this workshop, do know that I give soul plan readings online via Zoom.
I'd love to share your soul plan with you. The day after the workshop, I'll be welcoming a private retreat guest who's coming to Ibiza for the weekend to work with me one-to-one and to explore this gorgeous island now that the high season tourists have left. Let me know if you'd like me to create a bespoke retreat for you this winter.
It could be sporty and adventurous, spiritual and transformative, healing and restorative, or a combination of any of that. I love putting these special itineraries together. Reach out to me, hello@myprojectme.com. Until next time, open your mind, open your heart, and stay curious. We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.