It only takes shifting my attention with Claire Ragozzino

[Series] On Slow Living #11

March 23, 2025

Claire is one of my dearest friends. One who I consider ‘a lifer’ (kindred till the end). We are also colleagues. Not in the sense that we work for the same company, but that we have established ourselves in a similar ecosystem. Ayurveda is a common language between us. So is our love of food, cooking, travel, nature, beauty, and cats. Haha. Our first conversation, maybe twelve years ago, was over a Banyan Botanicals sales call—a company I’d worked with for eight years. And Claire was on my wholesale client roster.

Though we each came to Ayurveda in our own way, I believe we share an undercurrent of curiosity. One that keeps us exploring the magic (I cannot think of a better word for the visible and invisible mysteries present all around us) of the body and the natural world.

Today we live in very different places, New Mexico and Kaua’i, and are constantly sharing notes on Ayurveda, holistic wellness, what we’re cooking, business, and life—pretty much everything in this weird, wild, wonderful era we now live in. From afar we nourish one another by swapping soup recipes, pasta techniques, and a mutual love of persimmon spiced cakes. We are both soloists (founders and creators of our 1 person business) devoted to living a simple, connected yet very abundant life.

Slow living is about our relationship to the movement of time and how creatively we can expand or contract it through our awareness. Peaceful gravitas.

Our friendship has remained strong—spreading, softening, deepening. It’s easy. It fills me with immense joy. We even think that there’s a possibility we could be cousins through our maternal Portuguese line—the Santos, Canha, Freitas, or Gomes. Our families migrated from Madeira and the Azores to Hawai’i well over a hundred and fifty years ago. From photo shoots, website overhauls, to long conversations on how best to pivot an offer, to retreats, to play, to her forthcoming cookbook, we’ve collaborated and supported one another time and time again.

We have grand plans of hosting intimate retreats full of good food, tea ceremony, flower art, and contemplation…So stay connected because it’s only a matter of time and place.

Thanks Claire

Yours, Erin

What does slow living mean to you?

Slow living is about expanding time through present moment awareness. How often do we hear filler phrases like, “I don’t have time for that (ie. cooking, shopping, meditation, movement, etc) ”, “I’m running out of time,” or “There aren’t enough hours in the day!”

These imply how compact and limited our days feel. Somehow, in our modern pace of life, we have become more time-obsessed and yet we have less of it with all our time-tracking tools and ways to optimize our productivity in the day. As a kid of the 90s, I didn’t have a smartphone, a tablet, or even a watch to keep track of time. I just ran around barefoot and built tree forts with my best friend in the desert washes of Arizona where I spent the first ten years of life. Time was infinite.

I’m fascinated with the concept of time, our perceptions of it, and our cultural obsession with the lack of it. Slow living isn’t a matter of putting your feet up in a hammock and doing nothing. Slow living is about our relationship to the movement of time and how creatively we can expand or contract it through our awareness. An hour can pass in minutes when sucked into the infinite scroll on Instagram, and suddenly I’m “behind” in the day. An hour walking by the ocean can feel like a whole afternoon when I let my mind wander aimlessly and free, present to the experience of my senses. And I leave feeling refreshed.

Sure, physical slowness can anchor a wandering mind (i.e. balance Vata). But more than a week long vacation or the fantasy of dipping out of society to live off-grid, I believe expanding time is a practice we can dip our toes into everyday, no matter our schedule or location.

What's one thing (action, mindset, ritual, habit, etc.) that's essential to maintaining it in your day to day life?

I tend to follow Ayurveda’s dinacharya principles that help me to move through my day with nature’s rhythms in mind. I wake with the sun, I cleanse my sense organs, I move my body a little bit, and then I eat three times a day at consistent times. These little rituals anchor me without feeling rigid. Sometimes I luxuriate in a long morning, sometimes the practices are more abbreviated, but I never feel bound by them.

Dinacharya aside, I can also get really wound up with my To-Do lists and let my mind spin out in intensity. Especially when I’m in a busy stretch of work and up against a deadline. All of a sudden, I find myself lost in that panicky “I don’t have enough time!” feeling. In these stretches, I will actually schedule Open Space into my calendar so I can zoom out from the deadlines and tasks, and touch back into that timeless place within myself. Whether that means giving myself more open time in the transitions between tasks, or actually taking a full day or afternoon off.

Adult life will inherently be full of duties, some enjoyable and some not, and I’m learning that the delicious unstructured time of our youth is a potent antidote to getting wrapped up in the hustle culture.

How do you ensure that a little bit of wildness and or nature remains close?

I live in the tropics, and in a more remote landscape. This in itself lends to keeping nature pretty close. I’m able to live with my windows open year round. It only takes a shift of my attention to hear the wind in the palms, the birdsong signaling sunrise or sunset, or the steady pulse of the ocean waves outside. At sunset, I head down to our garden plot and pull weeds or clean up the plants.

I always leave my cell phone at home.

I don’t keep track of the time.