Hi everyone, and welcome! I am super excited today to be interviewing the amazing Cristin Smith at Saffron and Sage about sacred self care and finding your soul's calling.             Ashley Leavy: So, Cristin, thank you so much for being here to talk about sacred self care and opening your soul's calling with us. Cristin Smith: You're welcome. Thanks for having me! Ashley: I'm really excited about this interview because I think your business is a little bit different to anything else that we've really featured on the podcast before. You have such an amazing combination of products and classes and events. It's really exciting for me to speak with someone who's also in the health and wellness industry. You do so much. Would you mind taking a couple of minutes to introduce yourself to everyone and tell them a little bit about Saffron and Sage? Cristin: Absolutely! So, I'm Cristin Smith. I am the founder and owner of Saffron and Sage. We are a holistic health club located in Little Italy here in the heart of San Diego, and we really focus on preventative and integrated wellness. We do this through creating multi-sensory healing experiences for our clients. That could look like acupuncture, massage, energy therapy, or mineral therapy. It could look like yoga, breathwork, meditation, or sounds. Or it could be one of our workshops to really educate on things such as the science of mindfulness or one of our cooking workshops where we talk about the art of eating and intuitive eating and digestion. We're really focused on connecting mind, body, and spirit. Here in Saffron and Sage, we connect those through identifying thoughts, trauma, and toxins that have picked up residence in the brain and the body. We use an integrative way to really help our clients regain or maintain their wellbeing and we do that through our member-based approach. So, you can come in and take a class, or get a massage. Most of our clients have signed up for our membership that is two hundred dollars a month and it gives you access to one service every single month and eight classes in our studio. We're really having a great time supporting the executives, and entrepreneurs, and leaders in the community who are focused on doing the deep work.  Ashley: You know, I have to tell you, you are truly living the dream that I know a lot of our listeners would love to create in their own lives- running a wellness studio. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey and how that really got started for you, and how it all developed into the amazing success that it is today? Cristin: Sure! Yeah. So, interestingly enough, I come from the financial and insurance services sector. So I've been in business forever. This is my fourth company, but actually, the only company that I didn't realize I was starting and that grew organically out of my journey. It's been about a twelve-year journey I would say. After being so successful in financial services, I started looking at the interior landscape of my life and really exploring emotionally healthy spirituality. What does that look like? When you achieve your material goals, you start to ask the deeper questions and I was lucky enough to start exploring those in my early twenties. That really lead to this transition, and I started delving deeper into spiritual formation and spiritual practices like practicing solitude, silence, fasting, and all sorts of things. Shortly thereafter, that lead to a six month sabbatical in Mexico. I end up relocating to Tijuana, not Tulum. Most people think, "Oh my, you must live in a beautiful space." But I was in this incubator, if you will, for six months. I really focused on shedding my workaholism, and delving deeper into my beliefs and my values. During that time, doctors found four tumors in my neck and my thyroid, and they couldn't figure out why. After a second opinion, third opinion, fourth opinion,