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, still no one could figure out the root cause, but they were all in consensus that I needed to have surgery and said that I was going to be depending upon pharmaceutical drugs for the rest of my life.
That just didn't resonate with me, so that lead me to reading and researching, and I stumbled upon traditional Chinese medicine, and Ayurveda, and really understanding this mind-body connection. That altered everything.
I started pooling together my own multi-disciplinary team of practitioners from Tijuana to San Diego all the way up to L.A. I was seeing the best of the best. But it was expensive and very scary. It was a really lonely period of time. I was having to understand their diagnosis as well as their treatment plans, and figure out which advice I should take. Which therapies do I move forward with right now, which don't I? It was a lot to decide.
It's the world that I think a lot of us find ourselves in. We are diagnosed with chronic conditions, but then how do we navigate this world of holistic healthcare?
You almost feel like you're moving through a jungle with a machete, right? Like trying to figure everything out. Thing's that I feel embarrassed to say like how much money I spent and how much time it took. There were so many moments where I thought "Wow. This could be so much easier if..." and that's really what Saffron and Sage is. It's the culmination of all the treatments and therapies and modalities that I have incorporated under one roof, and we really design this membership model in order to provide affordable access to holistic health care.
Our brand is really centered around wellness.
When I was in Kaiser, I was in this very clinical sterile environment that was anxiety-provoking, but yet that is the space where we often feel most comfortable, because we know that the practices there are based on science, right? Versus when we step into wellness spaces that, you know, there's crystals and tie-dye, and we get spooked, right? We worry like, "Are you going to put a hex on me?" Like "What's going on here?"
So, what I really aimed to do was create a brand that was accessible to the modern woman.
Accessible to the woman who is a researcher, who is doing reading and wants to make sure that what she's doing is supported by evidence-based research, but it's gonna hold the space for her soul. It's gonna hold space for the questions that are floating to the surface. Holding space for the liminal experience where things are falling apart. We need someone who we can trust who's going to companion us and hold space for us emotionally and spiritually.
Ashley: Well, it sounds like everything kind of evolved out of your personal journey. You took that and realized it. It wasn't just you that needed that, it was all of us that need this. You've really created a business and a brand that offers this in a way that is truly unique.
I have not seen any other wellness centers that offer the diversity of practices that you do, and it's really refreshing and exciting to see that this can exist and really thrive and be successful.
I really hope that there are people listening and watching right now that will take your success and run with it and know that this is really possible to create this. Not only for yourself but in the lives of others as well. It's really exciting for me to see this unfolding.
I want to touch on something because a lot of your story was about shutting out the workaholism, and shutting out the need and push for the day to day grind and really living more in alignment with your body, with your mind, and with your spirit. A lot of that kind of comes down to self-care. And I think the idea of self-care has been so distilled as of late that it means find yourself a fancy sweater or eating a chocolate bar that you want to eat. Self-care should be so much more than that.
You have something called Self-care Saturdays -- I was wondering if you could touch on the importance of self-care and then what you're doing at Saffron and Sage to really encourage this through Self-care Saturdays?
Cristin: Great question. You know, I agree with you. I think self-care has been really idolized as something that's trendy and sexy and lost its connectivity to depth and transformation. Here, we want to invite people into the depths. Most of the experiences that we facilitate are about stepping into the Yin, stepping into the darker spaces that we tend to been locked in our everyday lives and leaning into that discomfort.
I think self-care takes a lot of different forms.
Just a few days ago, we had our full moon circle and ceremony. We're hosting ritual experiences twice a month around the lunar cycles, and that is a self-care ritual for a lot of our members. It's a time of introspection and connection with other members. I think we had almost twenty women, and actually, a few guys were in there as well which is amazing to see.
So, it's a time where we open up the body with a few gentle restorative postures as well as really getting to connect and share with those that are in sacred space with us. We draw out of us some things that are still causing friction or disconnection in our lives and in our relationships. Sitting with those things, we partake in a cacao ceremony, which is an ancient ritual that's been used in cultures throughout the Americas for forever. It's a heart-opening dream that's allowing us to connect to our true center. Connect to the cosmos and what's percolating in and around us.
Self care could look like taking a bath. I know for a lot of our community here, breathwork, part of our sacred Sunday experience, is in the ritual that I do.
I think it's really important to start small. Here, everything we do is about meeting you where you're at.
We figure out what's that one thing that we can start with. It doesn't have to be, "I'm going do yoga four times a week." That's a bit overwhelming. Start with,
