7 Tiny Ways to Cultivate Awe
Soul Gum
by Victoria Hutchins
4.9 • 560 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When was the last time you felt genuine awe? Not just happiness, not “that’s cool,” but deep, childlike wonder? In this episode, we explore 7 five-minutes-or-less practices that can help you feel more present, more alive, and more connected to the quiet magic all around you.
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00 Intro
01:28 MAKE BELIEVE is out now
02:50 Come hang with me on tour?
03:51 7 tiny ways to cultivate awe
03:54 1. Look closely at ordinary nature
04:20 The goggles of habit
04:41 Walt Whitman: what is the grass?
05:27 Thich Nhat Hanh’s tangerine meditation
07:31 Rumi & the blurriness of separation
09:14 2. Look up
10:00 The benefits of tree gazing
10:29 Mary Oliver’s When I Am Among the Trees
11:48 3. Unitask music
11:55 Music used to be the main course
13:06 One song no multitasking challenge
13:29 Make an awe playlist
13:40 4. Make unsmall small talk
14:19 Martin Buber’s I-Thou vs I-It
15:50 Challenge: be aware during small talk
16:17 The sacred ground of connection
16:50 5. Remember pale blue dot
17:08 The Voyager photo
17:36 Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
19:10 Pondering our tininess
21:04 6. Make an awe signal
22:21 7. Keep an awe list
22:43 The Zeigarnik Effect
24:53 Lightning round recap
EPISODE LINKS
• @boywaif post on the goggles of habit
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Sometimes & When I Am Among the Trees by Mary Oliver
• Rumi (Coleman Bark’s Essential Rumi)
MY LINKS
• MAKE BELIEVE is out everywhere now
• Get a signed copy of MAKE BELIEVE from Blue Willow Bookshop
• Join me in Bali June 1-7!
• Find me @thedailyvictorian on Instagram
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When was the last time you felt wonder? |
| 0:04.3 | Not passing happiness, not, oh, that's cool, but genuine awe. |
| 0:10.5 | What if it doesn't have to be saved for the tops of hikes and special occasions and rare magic moments? |
| 0:17.2 | Let's talk about it. |
| 0:20.4 | Sogum. Welcome back to Soulgum, the self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological, and literary flair. |
| 0:28.6 | I'm your host, Victoria Hutchins. |
| 0:30.6 | My goal is to give your soul something to chew on, and today we are talking about awe, wonder, deep delight. It's so |
| 0:43.4 | interesting to me that when we talk about wonder, we often say childlike wonder, as if wonder is |
| 0:50.5 | something reserved for childhood, as if it was something we were meant to lose. |
| 0:56.0 | My favorite poet, Mary Oliver, has a quote from her poem sometimes. |
| 1:00.7 | She says, instructions for living a life. |
| 1:03.7 | Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. |
| 1:07.5 | I think increasingly we are losing the ability to be astonished by the world. So today I want to |
| 1:14.5 | talk about seven tiny practices, none of which will take you more than five minutes to do, that can |
| 1:20.2 | help you instantly cultivate a sense of awe and start to develop a conversation again with your |
| 1:27.0 | sense of wonder. I want to give a quick |
| 1:29.2 | life update because y'all make believe is out. If you're new to SoulGum, I am a poet and my debut |
| 1:37.2 | poetry collection Make Believe came out on Tuesday. I am on book tour right now. I'm talking to you from my hotel room in Austin. And this has |
| 1:47.3 | just been surreal. It's been one of the wildest weeks of my life. I'm so grateful to get a chance to |
| 1:55.5 | meet some of you, get to hear some of your stories. Some of you know, if you listen to Soulgum, |
| 2:00.1 | that I would love for make-believe to be a USA Today bestseller. That's my goal that I put on my vision board. And I'm trying to stay hopeful without being attached to the outcome. And I know things like bestseller lists don't matter, but I do think it's okay to hope. I think it's good to hope and I think it's brave to hope out loud. |
| 2:19.2 | So I'm talking to you all about that in an effort to be seen trying. But no matter how this goes, |
... |
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