when I kept hitting breaking point in November I booked a flight
JAN 07, 2026
The sky is pink. The temperature is perfect. The air feels like skin. There is no boundary between my body and the sky. We are both naked, in perfect harmony.
I eat in a ramshackle hut sitting on stilts at the northern end of the beach. Papaya juice and momos or a mackerel thali. The second time, the proprietor thanks me for coming back. When he brings me the bill, he has written a scrawling love letter across it. I can barely make out how much I need to pay. It makes me smile.
I look for the huts I stayed in seventeen years ago, but I can’t find them. I walk farther than I meant to. I slow down. I scan the shoreline. Everything has changed, of course. The beach. The paths. The way things are arranged. I have changed too.
Seventeen years ago I was naive and new. I still grasped onto purity. I hadn’t yet felt the full depth of life, the particular weight of it, the way it settles into your body and rearranges your inner furniture without asking. I didn’t yet know what life could ask of you, or what it would take.
I was on an ardent spiritual path then, under the illusion that a particular flavour of consciousness made me exempt. That being “spiritually conscious and evolved” somehow placed me outside the ordinary contracts of grief, fear, longing, pleasure, disappointment. That belief is seductive because it flatters the ego while pretending to dissolve it.
What I know now is that avoiding pain doesn’t remove it. It just delays your willingness to let it sit down beside you. It creates another layer of suffering. Tension, resistance, self-judgement. Because life keeps arriving anyway.
These days my spiritual practice is much simpler. I let life be as raw as it is. I let grief have weight. I let joy be bright and felt. I let pleasure move through me without needing to turn it into meaning. I let fear exist without trying to alchemise it into wisdom. Reverence, for me now, looks like staying. Staying with what is actually here.
It was here, seventeen years ago, that I was inspired to start my first business. The one I poured forty thousand dollars into. The one that failed. I saw the reality of textile workers’ lives. So I started an ethical fashion brand called ética & ella. I was ahead of my time. And completely unprepared.
Sometimes I think I’m still failing at business even though I’ve run one successfully for a decade. I don’t like convincing people they need things they don’t. And if we are honest, we probably don’t really ned very much.
I think of something Mara Hoffman said when she closed her brand. How maybe the great human project of this era is simply finding ways to sell things to each other. Every day we wake up and offer something: a product, a service, an idea, a body of work, a version of ourselves. And if we aren’t selling, we’re buying.
All the mysticism, all the beauty, all the cosmic intelligence of the universe and the punchline is just… buy and sell.
Here, that world feels far away. The urgency of it. The hunger. The constant wanting. I don’t need most of the things in my suitcases. Both of them. When I left Paris, I packed everything I own. Except the winter coats, the Pilates mat, the ring light. I don’t yet know where I am going next, and didn’t want to leave anything behind that I might miss.
Every morning, I journal for a couple of hours. A part of me has come back online. A quieter intelligence. Less managerial. Less vigilant.
Access to a heart-brain that’s been tucked away tells me truths I’ve not had space for. The ways I contorted myself in ways that are rewarded by our western society. How I negotiated a world I didn’t fully believe in by staying busy, competent, contained.
Time loosens its grip.
When I kept hitting breakingpoint in November, I booked a flight. I knew I needed to do something drastic. A friend recommended going to an Ayurvedic Hospital for treatment. By the time I got the visa for India, they were all booked out. Until two days ago, when a space opened up for February 7th. I’ll be here until the end of February, for now.
Vienda Maria 