Where does sacredness live?

Life In Flow Podcast

0:00

-1:36:54

Where does sacredness live?

Ignited by a raw of experience of loss for one of us we are exploring somatic signatures of "ritual" and "sacred". Wondering what makes and breaks the potency and transformative power of ceremony.

Life In Flow, Yulia Bogdanova, Irina Mishina, and CoachingbyPolina

Jun 25, 2026

Greetings!

We are flowing with sacredness today.

Polina shares with great tenderness the recent story of her dad passing and questions it stirred. About relating to death, and saying good-byes, and also sensing into the transformative power of these moments, however hard and heart-breaking they might be.

What is it, we wonder, in or about rituals and ceremonies that makes them sacred? We’ve all been to those that feel empty even though meticulously organized.

Is it our attention, presence, access to something beyond the individual, cosmologies, or the lack thereof, that infuses ceremony with sacred potency and non-linear happenings?

As children of modernity that largely dismissed sacredness as obsolete and too irrational, how do we make a journey back into inhabiting sacred terrains?

Come, join us in this tender exploration.

Irina:

“To flow with life, one needs to attribute this significance and meaning to everything in the experience that goes beyond the ordinary, beyond the mundane. And for me, this is what makes things sacred.”
“The significance and meaning may come from the things that feel darker and heavier, like from the underworld, not necessarily from the highest realms.”
“We somehow in the modern world lost the connection to the significance of the rites of passage. That is why, I believe, many times we’re not able to go through the transitions: because there are no logistics that provide this passage.”
“Not any flow state or any process in the flow state will be sacred. But I would say that any process in the state of sacredness would be flow.”

Yulya

“Every transition is about death. And so, as a death, it holds a very special connection to the underworld.”
“If we are talking about ceremonies related to death, then one of the conditions for it to be viewed as sacred is holding some cosmological view that life doesn’t just end with the death of someone. Humans have navigated this for a long time. It’s one of the most important thresholds that we pass: we get born and we die.”
“There is a lot of wisdom and protocols that are available if you connect to the morphic field, so you don’t just fall into the precipice of grief. But it’s that sacredness that creates this very powerful container.”
“If you lose someone, you easily fall into the precipice. And when something bigger is available, it’s something that holds you so that the experience of grief can be different.”
“You create that sacredness also through tending to the space at the levels of objects or organizing the space or assigning roles to different people. And so it’s all together like a language or a pass to that door of the morphic field.”

Polina

“It could be an empty ritual, or it could be a very meaningful, significant, sacred ritual. So that made me feel like something that’s ritualized can actually be different depending on the energy and the attention infused into that ritual.”
“When I tune into the word sacred, I start getting the sensation of a longing in my heart area, like the energy of longing. And also something very guttural and significant feeling in my sacral area — some kind of a weight that has the energy of significance to it.”
“I didn’t need to physically be present at the funeral to experience some of the shifts and the transformations that I experienced when I was physically there. I just needed to open up to what already exists in the morphic field, which is like this human thing about ceremonies and rituals and sacredness. It’s already in the field. The most important is: is there the ability to fully tune in, have that kind of flow aspect into the sacredness of what is happening?”
“My partner thought three days later: ‘Well, all right, it’s over. The funeral happened, you cried for a few days — are we back to normal?’ And I almost wish that there would be a ritual and a ceremony that would instruct him to know: well no, I’m still fully giving my attention to this. We’re not back to normal life yet.”
“In the Jewish tradition, they sit shiva for seven days, and the person who loses the family member is not the one organizing everything. The family members come together and help with all of that so the person can actually stay in the experience. This was the first time I was like: wow, I wish I actually was sitting shiva for seven days, so that life could just stop and I could just really give my focus and attention to the meaning and the sacredness of this transition.”

In Flow,

Irina, Polina and Yulia

We cherish your presence, and joining us in flowing.

These conversations are open explorations, that become richer with time and participation of others. We’d love to hear if anything touched you.

Life in Flow is a reader- and listener-supported publication. If you enjoyed flowing with us, pls share with someone who might like it as well. It’s how this work reaches more people.