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Ruby Warrington is sitting on a comfy sofa at the very back of Shoreditch House’s cosy sitting room. I am a little nervous to meet her – as a former employee of the magazine world myself, Ruby is someone I had spent a long time admiring in my early career days at Conde Nast. I loved everything she did at The Sunday Times Style – her weekly barometer, the style reports and her articles on social trends (she later tells me that, looking back, it was the trend writing that really appealed to her because “I’ve always been quite tuned into the public, well the kind of mass consciousness, you know?” There was no need for me to be nervous at all – Ruby, was not just lovely and open but she was also totally on my wavelength (a little bit hippie, a little bit hipster). After a few minutes of chatting, I was completely at ease even though still in awe of everything she has achieved. Her blog, The Numinous, clocks up hundreds of thousands of hits a month and her recent book “Material Girl, Mystical World” (Harper Collins) has a testimonial from Arianna Huffington, not to mention she can read Birth charts (she read mine – it was potentially one of the quickest ways to see things about myself that I knew but hadn’t truly accepted as part of me yet). After over an hour of chatting, here are seven lessons I learned from the spiritual goddess herself…

 

  1. It’s OK when your dream job isn’t your dream anymore…

“The team at Sunday Times Style was amazing – really fun and smart and Tiffany Dark is a brilliant editor, a very powerful, strong woman and became a real mentor to me. It was fast-paced, and I was writing about all the stuff I really loved. However, the pressure, the pace and the repetitiveness of working on a weekly magazine began to take its toll after a couple of years and I became bored, which manifested itself as anxiety. I was devastated when this began to happen, but it was also the beginning of something really exciting as it was at this point I started working on a side project – which would later develop into The Numinous.”

 

  1. Follow your passion and see where it leads

“When I got given the party pages {at Sunday Times Style} it became my job to be out at events every night, which was strange for me as I am such an introvert and I found it a little intense. I started using alcohol more and more as a way to just switch off and enjoy myself and escape from the fact that I wasn’t really happy. So, I started looking for something that would inspire me and that I loved and that’s when I turned to my passion of astrology; I’ve always loved astrology and had always been fascinated to learn more plus I wanted to know how to read a chart. That’s when I introduced myself to the well-known astrologer, Shelley von Strunckel, and asked if she’d mentor me. Although she didn’t teach me astrology, she would invite me over for dinner and we’d talk about all her mystical travels to Ashrams, study different spiritual teachers, and all the different mystical traditions that she’d experienced in her life. That’s when it hit me – it’s not just astrology, all of this is so endlessly fascinating to me. It was like being given an unlimited store card for Selfridges shoe department. It was that same amount of excitement.”

 

  1. Trust the process – not everything needs to happen NOW

“I put a lot of pressure on myself for The Numinous to be big right away. But I soon learned that from the beginning it was very explorative, and I would just meet people that were doing stuff that I might want to write stories about. Just very gradually, built it up until I felt like I was ready to launch it. Which was September 2013. I’d lined up some pretty small hard-hitting stories, and actually, one of the stories from that launch week ended up in Style magazine.”

 

  1. Build a community no matter where you are

“I have the ‘Moon Club’ and I also have ‘Club Soda’. ‘Moon Club’ launched in November last year, and for me it was a project that I’d been working on with my collaborator, Alexandra, who’s been working for the site for 3-4 years. She had really wanted to start a community, to start offering the healing, mystical work that we do, to a wider audience, who didn’t necessarily have access to it. Whether that was because of their location, or whether that was because of their financial situation, we were very aware that living in New York and L.A., we had access to incredible workshops, healers, talks and speakers, but that outside of these major cities, you might find it quite hard to find someone to share that with, and learn about it with, so we really wanted to create something for people anywhere, to access. So that was the bases for ‘Moon Club’.”

 

  1. It’s OK for your project to be scrappy

“I feel like I’m completely just making it up as I go along, but actually that is part of the grand plan, that’s part of this new feminine paradigm. It’s a different way of doing business, it’s more collaborative, there’s much less hierarchy involved, it’s about building and growing stuff from the ground up. So when I find myself going ‘this is so scrappy and unprofessional’…’say’s who?’ Says who? This is operating really nicely and giving me a kind of lifestyle that I really want, I don’t answer to anybody, I’ve got complete freedom over what I do. And it may be taking a bit longer… but then I’m in it for the long haul.”

 

  1. Living your dharma is harder than you think

“Working out your Dharma, or feeling that you’re living your Dharma is about answering three questions – who am I? What am I here to give? And what do I need to be able to do that? For me, in astrology that’s represented by our sun sign – who am I? What’s the essence of my being? Our rising sign – How do I express that in the world and what am I here to give with that? And then our moon sign – what do I need to feel nourished and supported, so that I have the strength and the energy and the confidence to actually show up and do that? Because, obviously serving, doing, walking the path of your purpose is actually so much harder than so many of us give it credit for. It’s something you see all the time, you know, ‘just be you, just be yourself’, that is actually so hard. Once you stop and think about that simple statement for just a few minutes, you realise it’s very hard to do you. Because there’s so much conditioning, and there’s so much expectation, and there’s so much to compare with, and just so much external stuff that we measure ourselves against.”

 

  1. Use astrology as a tool for confidence

“One of the reasons people love astrology is because people want to be seen, people just want to be seen and recognised, and astrology is a mirror for you to see yourself. What an amazing tool! Because only once you see yourself fully, know yourself fully, can you really feel confident about being seen in the world as yourself.”

 

Interview conducted by Hip & Healthy’s Director & Founder, Sadie Reid

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