…an honest letter about starting over in the world’s most famous city
After a month in New York, I’ve concluded that it really is like living inside a movie. Yesterday, walking through the West Village, we passed one of the leads from YOU and that comedian my boyfriend calls “the ‘I’m a swan!’ guy.” I wouldn’t have recognised either of them, but he’s a pop culture encyclopedia, which I find endlessly entertaining.
The most charming thing about this city is how hard it tries not to be American. It’s clinging tight to its immigrant roots, claiming the most obscure and beautiful bits of the many cultures that built it.
In the vlog above, you’ll get a glimpse of my first chaotic, cosy, overstimulating, sunshine-filled weeks in the city, from yoga class revelations and focaccia-making to lazy girl makeup rituals and navigating PMS in a place that never stops buzzing. I reflect on how long it takes to feel grounded somewhere new, what I love about NYC (surprise: the water??), and the tiny wins that help me find my pace in the madness.
I came here with the intention to document it all. To share the magic of experiencing everything for the first time. But the truth is, while I love it here, I don’t have as much space or time as I once did. I used to languish in my creativity — let it ooze out of me like molten lava. Now, I live in a studio apartment on the Lower East Side with my boyfriend (who also works from home), and the luxury of spaciousness just… isn’t available right now.
Which means two things: one, I need to carve out more time and space that’s mine, and two, I need to learn how to create within the chaos. To let inspiration move through me, even in the chaos and noise.
Something is changing in me. I’m becoming someone I don’t quite recognise yet.
Usually, I’m a step ahead of life. I can see what’s coming. But right now? Life is a step ahead of me. I’m being asked to trust. Not because everything is certain, but because I can.
People often ask how I’ve built such deep self-trust. The answer isn’t about what I’ve done differently. It’s about what I’ve let go of.
My self-trust lives in the space I’ve cleared for it.
In my early twenties, when I was stumbling through my first spiritual awakening, I discovered — quite accidentally — a clearing process I now call the RRRRI Method:
Reflect · Review · Release · Replace · Integrate.
I’ve taught this to hundreds of clients.
It came to me one night, maybe 15 years ago, while I was lying in bed meditating. I was new to it then, but it gave me a peace I hadn’t known before. A quietness that made space for things to rise up. The kind of space that lets truth speak.
I carried around a lot of pain.
My mum struggled with depression and anxiety, and as a sensitive kid, I absorbed much of it, believing it was mine. My dad died when I was ten. My stepdad, who entered the picture when I was four, was cruel, verbally and emotionally abusive. At one point, when I was six, he made me live in a caravan outside while the rest of the family was in the house. My mother joined him in the abuse. She told me later she thought siding with him would make it easier on me.
That’s the surface-level story, and honestly, it’s not the point. I share this not for pity, but to offer context — to show you the shape of the beliefs I had to unravel in myself.
Maybe you’ll recognise some of them:
I am not wanted.
I am not lovable.
I am not safe.
I have to do it all alone.
I can’t ask for what I need.
It’s not safe to speak up.
I must not upset others.
There’s something wrong with me.
I have to hide who I really am.
That night, in meditation, I felt frustrated. I kept circling back to these painful memories. It felt like I couldn’t move forward. And suddenly, a thought came:
These memories aren’t hurting me. I’m hurting me — by replaying them.
They were still active in me because they were unresolved.
I realised that every emotional block, every limiting belief, is just an unprocessed experience we’ve held onto for safety. At one point, those beliefs helped us survive. But they outlive their usefulness. And instead of releasing them, we keep them close out of habit — or fear — and they start to manifest in our lives, in our bodies. As pain. As illness. As stuckness. As stories we can’t seem to rewrite.
That night, I didn’t get caught in the stories. I just let the feelings rise. Memory after memory. Sadness, anger, grief — I let it all come, and I felt it. Fully. Until it softened. I cried for hours. I forgave myself. For how I had carried it all for so long.
And something in me shifted.
Over the days and weeks that followed, I kept practising. Feeling. Releasing. Replacing. Integrating. And little by little, things began to change. I lost the extra weight I was carrying. My skin cleared. My eyes were brighter. My relationship to food, to my body, to myself softened. I began to like who I was. To see my own beauty, not just my flaws. Life itself looked and felt different.
And now? I teach that same method inside The Way She Knows.
Because when you begin to clear out the old noise — the stories, beliefs, and inherited patterns that were never truly yours — you don’t just feel lighter. You feel free. Free to trust yourself. Free to choose what’s true for you. Free to follow your feelings without needing to explain, justify, or prove a thing.
From that place, life starts to unfold in the most unexpected, beautiful ways. You stop gripping for control, and instead start co-creating with the world around you. You stop chasing clarity, and somehow, it finds you.
You might fall in love on an ordinary Thursday and move to New York six months later. (That’s what happened to me :). You might find yourself changing careers, shifting relationships, saying yes to things you once feared, and letting go of things you thought you needed — not because something’s wrong, but because something inside you has become deeply right.
When you trust yourself, you don’t need to have everything figured out. You just need to listen. You need to stay close to that quiet knowing within. And when you do, the next step always reveals itself.
That’s the way she knows. And it’s already inside you.
We begin on Monday, May 26th, enrolment closes Friday, May 24th.
Vienda Maria 