Vienda Maria

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Category: life design

  • become a creator

    8/8 — the eighth rule of her way club (aka: how to change your life in 6-12 months)

    NOV 11, 2025

    The final of our 8 rules of her way club series. If you’re just joining, begin here:

    1/8 — deciding to play by your own rules
    2/8 — subtracting what doesn’t belong
    3/8 — the natural consequence: uncertainty
    interlude — her way deep rest
    4/8     — trust yourself
    5/8 — inner life
    6/8 — outer life
    7/8 — life design
    8/8 — creator

    walking through the streets on errands yesterday

    Yellow-gold leaves fall like snow outside my window, drifting in gentle spirals before surrendering to the earth. Nature is shifting from outward display to inward repair, from the urgency of life to the humility of dying. Inside my body, a similar transition is underway. The lining of my womb is dissolving, shedding, releasing itself through me. There is a tenderness in this inner autumn; a sense of being thinned out, emptied, more bone than blossom.

    On days like this, I feel less like a creator and more like those leaves outside: untethered, weightless, caught in forces larger than myself. Creation feels distant, like a memory it has temporarily forgotten. 

    And yet… I know this perception is only half the truth. Because in the very same moment that life inside me is breaking down, life is also preparing to renew. What looks like loss is, in fact, nature reorganising itself. What feels like death is the unspoken prelude to emergence.

    This is the essential paradox of existence: two opposing truths held in one body, one moment, one heart. We are both the falling leaf and the seed beneath the soil. We are endings and beginnings, decay and future possibility, all at once. Maturity, real maturity, is learning to live inside that tension without collapsing into either. To honour the ache, and yet trust the regeneration.

    If you are anything like me — porous, perceptive, shaped by instinct and feeling — you have likely sensed a similar shedding on a global scale. Something in the ‘old world,’ the one many of us were taught to obey, is splitting at its seams. Systems that once seemed stable now reveal their fragility. Ideals we inherited are dissolving, and the scaffolding of what we were told to trust is quietly shaking itself apart.

    Which is why choosing to become a creator is so imperative right now. What is really happening is that humanity is quietly rearranging its resources. And you are a vital part of that.

    I don’t believe this is a collapse. I believe it is a rearrangement. A redistribution of attention, energy, power, possibility. Humanity is composting its outdated structures and beliefs, and whether you feel ready or not, you are part of that metamorphosis. 

    Which is why choosing to become a creator: not merely a consumer, observer, or critic, is not optional anymore. It is essential.

    Creation is a way of relating to life. A discipline of perception. A willingness to meet the world as an active participant rather than a passive witness. To create is to engage: with your thoughts, your desires, your environment, your body. 

    Every choice you make, every emotion you metabolise rather than outsource, every space you shape, every idea you dare to hold… these are acts of creation. Quiet ones, often unseen, but foundational.

    By this point in this 8-part series, you have already stripped away the noise. You have practised discernment. You have learned what no longer deserves your time, your energy, your belief. You have strengthened the inner ground that makes outer integrity possible. All of that was preparation for this final threshold: stepping into your life as a creator.

    Creation is not linear. It is cyclical, like the body, like the seasons, like breath itself. To create is to stay in conversation with who you are, who you are becoming, and the mystery that moves through and beyond both. You are never shaping your life alone. You are co-crafting it with uncertainty, with intuition, with timing, with forces that are ancient and wise and not always rational.

    Real creation asks something intimate and courageous of you: coherence. 

    The willingness to bring your inner life into alignment with your outer actions. The bravery to trust what you feel before you have proof. The devotion to act even when the path ahead remains partly obscured. Creation is less about control and more about participation. A dance between intention and surrender, vision and mystery, action and grace.

    We do not create because we are certain. We create because it is the only honest response to being alive.

    Being a creator begins with your personal ideal lifestyle. This is the first lens through which all your choices, projects, and decisions must pass. By now, you have an inkling of what that looks and feels like. 

    It is not just a set of routines; it is the container that supports your creativity, your energy, your relationships, and your work. It is a framework for how you move through your days and weeks, a blueprint for how you honour your body, your mind, and your desires. Before you make a decision that could impact your future, you consult with your ideal lifestyle. You ask yourself, “Does this align with the life I want to live? Does this support my growth, my energy, my joy?”

    Creation also requires radical responsibility. This is the part that most people resist. It is easier to blame circumstances, wait for permission, or hope that someone else will shape your life for you. But creators know that the only power they can fully claim is their own. You take responsibility for your mind, your body, and your environment. You choose your thoughts, you manage your energy, and you shape the spaces you inhabit. And you do it continuously, intentionally, with courage and curiosity.

    not linear at all…

    The path of a creator is not linear. 

    You will encounter problems. Infinite problems. But every problem is soluble, and each is an opportunity. Problems are the curriculum of your life. Solve the problem in front of you. Learn. Grow. Share your solution with others. Repeat. Life becomes an ongoing laboratory where progress and contribution converge. Happiness is a byproduct of solving meaningful problems. Joy arises when your skills meet a challenge, and your work serves something greater than yourself.

    Humans are tool builders. From the moment we learned to make fire, to the invention of the wheel, to the creation of the internet, we have transformed our environment through creativity. It is our most fundamental skill. And yet so many people never take the time to recognise that this skill extends to the life they live. 

    Becoming a creator is central to a good life, because it is through creation that you experience progress, purpose, and contribution. Every time you solve a problem for yourself or for others, you grow stronger, wiser, and more capable of tackling increasingly complex challenges.

    Being a creator is both intensely practical and deeply spiritual. You take the reins of your life, but you also recognise the presence of forces larger than yourself. There is a mystery, a flow, a life energy that cannot be forced, only leaned into. Creation is the dance of holding on and letting go. You set the stage, cultivate your resources, and take action, but you allow life to meet you halfway. There is grace in that surrender, and strength in that presence.

    To make this tangible, here is how I recommend stepping into creation:

    1. Start with lifestyle. Map out your ideal day, week, and month. Where do you want to spend your time? How do you want to feel? What relationships, work, and activities support that vision? Compare this to your current reality, and identify the gaps. Every adjustment, no matter how small, is a creative act.
    2. Shift your mind. Begin noticing the stories you tell yourself, the patterns that hold you back, and the beliefs that no longer serve you. Replace them with curiosity, experimentation, and a commitment to problem-solving.
    3. Take care of your body. Energy is the currency of creation. What you eat, how you move, how you rest—all of it matters. Creation requires vitality, not just motivation.
    4. Curate your environment. Your spaces influence your thinking and your actions. Choose surroundings, tools, and people that elevate you. Remove what drains you. Design an environment that reflects your values, your rhythm, and your vision.
    5. Solve a problem, share a solution. Pick one thing that matters to you. Identify the problem, create a solution, and release it into the world. Repeat. This is the engine of creation, and the path toward impact and independence.
    6. Seek support where it accelerates growth. Courses, mentorship, and community do not replace your agency; they amplify it. They allow you to shortcut the trial and error, integrate ideas faster, and find others walking parallel paths. They are accelerators, not crutches.

    Creation is not about perfection. It is about alignment. It is about being awake, aware, and active in the process of building a life that is yours. It is a practice of presence, of integrity, and of courage. And it is infinitely rewarding, because each problem you solve, each solution you share, and each step you take toward your vision is a step into freedom, joy, and mastery.

    The time is now. The stakes are everything. Your life is waiting, ready to be shaped by your choices, your attention, and your care. This is where being a creator begins.

    You don’t need to join a community, take a course, or seek mentorship to get where you are going. You could do it alone: slowly, quietly, piecing yourself together through trial and intuition. Many people do, and there is nothing wrong with that path. But in my lived experience, support doesn’t replace your power; it accelerates your evolution. It adds oxygen, perspective, and momentum to the fire you are already tending.

    We resist guidance not because we don’t value growth, but because it requires effort to integrate, to act, to change. Transformation asks something of us. It isn’t passive. It doesn’t happen from thinking alone. The discomfort people feel around learning containers is rarely about the container. It is about the part of us that fears our own expansion. Because to grow is to become responsible for a bigger life.

    Yet community, mentorship, education… these are some of the most life-altering investments we can make. Information becomes embodiment. Insight becomes behaviour. Aspiration becomes lived reality. We pay for accelerated becoming.

    I was reminded of this in a way I didn’t ask for. If you’ve been here with me through this past year, you know I walked through the most painful and disorienting breakup and rapid change of circumstances in my life. A rupture that rearranged my world from the inside out. I trusted I would heal — I always do — but I also knew I wasn’t willing to drag the grief behind me for months. So I found help. I chose support in devotion to my future self. 

    With the right guidance, what could have taken a year unfolded in four months; not rushed, not bypassed, but metabolised with clarity, compassion, and pace. That experience crystallised a truth I already knew in my bones: life moves faster, more gracefully, when you allow yourself to be supported.

    We are entering a new era. One where creators are not just artists or entrepreneurs, but the sense-makers, the bridges, the ones translating chaos into meaning and possibility. In a world that is shedding old structures and outdated authority, people look not to static systems, but to humans they trust: those a few steps ahead, living what they teach, offering perspective, skills, and orientation in real time. It’s about resonance and proximity to truth.

    If you feel the pull to build these capacities — to become someone who can shape meaning, lead yourself, create value, and root deeply into your vision — I share resources, pathways, and invitations. High-value skills. Creative confidence. Nervous system leadership. The inner and outer muscles of a self-directed life.

    You don’t have to walk into the next season alone. You can; you are fully capable. But you don’t have to. And there is a particular magic in choosing support not because you are collapsing, but because you are rising.

    For those ready to step into your next iteration, in Her Way Club, I offer pathways to accelerate your becoming:

    Her Way Club Community — $33/month
    A gentle container to practice habits, stay connected to your vision, and build momentum through small, meaningful steps alongside women walking a similar path.

    CLEAR — special opening price $150; increasing to $200
    A practical and self-honest process for identifying the patterns, beliefs, and behaviours that are holding you back, and shifting into a more aligned, empowered way of moving through the world.

    Practical Dreamer — $1,800
    A two-month mentorship for women ready to turn their ideas into tangible expression. This is where vision meets structure, where dreams become plans, and where you build confidence through real progress and accountability.

    1:1 Business Mentoring — starting at $1,250
    For the woman ready to build a values-led, creatively fulfilling, financially aligned business — one that honours her rhythm, her expertise, and her deepest calling. This is intimate, strategic support to craft offers, refine messaging, and build a business that feels like you.

    Ongoing Private Mentorship — by application, enquire within
    For those who desire close support as they evolve, create, and lead in alignment with who they truly are. This is a private, personalised journey where we go deep, build steadily, and expand your life, your work, and your inner world together.

    Becoming a creator is a lifelong journey, but the first step is conscious action. You have everything you need to begin, and every problem you face is part of your curriculum. Show up, experiment, share, and trust yourself. Your life is your creation, and the world is waiting to receive it.

  • outer life

    6/8 — the sixth rule of her way club (aka: how to change your life in 6-12 months)

    OCT 15, 2025

    Continuing our 8 rules of her way club series. If you’re just joining, begin here:

    1/8 — deciding to play by your own rules
    2/8 — subtracting what doesn’t belong
    3/8 — the natural consequence: uncertainty
    interlude — her way deep rest
    4/8     — trust yourself
    5/8 — inner life
    6/8 — outer life

    Before we continue, 2 important things:

    1. Next week, starting on Tuesday with the New Moon 🌚, I am gathering a small circle of writers and dreamers for six weeks of writing together for The Art of Noticing. I’d love you to join me. Doors close on Saturday at midnight. Join here.
    2. Please continue completing this questionnaire. The competition ends at the end of this week. If you haven’t completed it yet (and you’d like the gift of working with me 1:1), please, do so here.

    Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant. You choose a new way to view your life, and suddenly it takes on an entirely new flavour and trajectory.

    I remember the day that I decided to devote myself to living a life that is truly my own. I was living in Venice, just a couple of blocks back from the beach in Los Angeles. It was a sparkly late September afternoon, the sun in that part of the world a generous haze that fractures the light, scattering it in such a way that there are no shadows. I had just come home from a date with a curly-haired actor who lived in a garage and was delusionally committed to his acting career. If he can be so devoted to his dream, so can I, I decided.

    My dream was not anchored in what my life would look like, but how it would feel.

    I want a life that feels soul-led, heart-driven, alive, romantic, bohemian, and rich. I want a life that, if at any given moment it comes to an end, every moment of it was well-lived and full.

    On that afternoon in Venice, I surrendered my motivation for curating a life that looks good on the outside for a devotion to one that feels good on the inside. And to allow my outer life to be a co-creation between me and a higher power based on my inner life and essence.

    At first intentionally, and more recently, with a stronger desire to find my place, I have been moving between cities and countries, following the rhythm of my life and the quiet pull of my work. I don’t have a dedicated office or a desk that anchors me, but I have something far more powerful: a dedication to my expression and my work and as an extension of both, to my writing that exists in my mind, in my days, and in the life I’ve intentionally crafted. 

    On some mornings, I write in a sunlit café overlooking cobbled streets; on others, in a small apartment with the hum of a city below me. Sometimes, I’m sitting cross-legged on a patch of grass under a tree, letting my notes scatter into the wind. The space itself is secondary. What matters is the commitment, the devotion, and the intentionality I bring to it.

    This is what outer life is really about: creating the conditions for your inner world to find expression.

    The first five steps of this series built the internal architecture for this moment. 

    You’ve taken back your power, carved space for yourself, leaned into uncertainty, trusted your instincts, and begun tending your inner life. Now, all of that work begins to take shape. This is where the choices you make daily, deliberately, insistently, start to build a life that reflects your authentic self. 

    You must understand this: your outer life is a reflection of your inner life. The more intimately you know yourself, the more consciously you can build the world around you.

    Outer life can be divided into three intertwined arenas: belonging, contribution, and life design. Each is a reflection of the inner work you’ve done. Each requires courage, curiosity, and clarity.

    belonging

    Belonging is one of the quietest, yet most vital parts of your outer life. It is about the subtle, soul-deep resonance that occurs when you are seen and reflected in ways that align with your inner self. 

    There is a paradox here: authentic connection requires both discernment and vulnerability. You must choose wisely, noticing who nourishes your essence and who depletes it, and yet you must remain open, willing to reveal your true self even when it feels risky.

    I learned this while building my life across cities, coasting between cafés, shared apartments, and rented studios. Some friendships, no matter how long or familiar, feel heavy. They pull on my energy, asking for parts of me that I am no longer willing to give. Others, sometimes newly formed or unconventional, carried me and lifted me higher. Conversations sparked ideas, laughter became inspiration, collaboration became growth. I had to learn to notice the difference, to audit not only who was present in my life but how their presence made me feel in my body, mind, and spirit.

    You started this practice in rule 2: subtraction. Take stock of the relationships you have: colleagues, friends, family, collaborators. Ask yourself, who energises me? Who inspires curiosity, excitement, and possibility? Who mirrors the essence you’ve begun cultivating through your inner work? Then notice the opposite: who consistently drains, frustrates, or diminishes your energy? The goal isn’t to cut everyone away or to judge harshly, but to become conscious of how your interactions affect your alignment.

    Once you’ve mapped it, create space for the relationships that resonate and set gentle but firm boundaries with those that don’t. This could mean choosing to collaborate only with people who value your creative ambitions, or spending more time with friends who encourage risk-taking and experimentation rather than comfort and stagnation. It might mean letting go of obligations. Dinners, calls, or group chats that no longer serve your inner or outer growth. 

    In my own life, I’ve found immense freedom and clarity when I consciously chose to invest in friendships that fed my curiosity, supported my projects, and shared my love for a life that is deliberate and full.

    Belonging, at its best, is about alignment. It is choosing to be seen and to see others who reflect your values, your energy, and your evolving essence. And paradoxically, when you practice discernment, when you allow yourself to step away from the relationships that weigh you down, you also become more open, more present, and more available to the connections that truly matter. This is where your inner life finds its reflection in the outer world.

    contribution

    Your contribution to the world is the vehicle through which your inner life can be expressed and give back to the world you live in by shaping it through your creations, thoughts, words and work.

    Think of contribution as a state of mind.

    High-agency individuals do not wait for instructions or validation. They notice a problem, a need, a desire, and move toward it, creating solutions that ripple outward. Low-agency individuals wait, follow, and defer. The difference is not titles or job descriptions; it is the inner decision to act, to trust your ideas, and to cultivate the skills that make those ideas real. Entrepreneurship, creative work, leadership, and artistry all function in this high-agency space. They require the courage to take risks, to fail, to experiment, and to use life itself as a laboratory for growth.

    I’ve learned this through my own contributions in the world, by testing ideas that feel aligned with my essence. I have discovered that the work itself exposes the gaps in knowledge. It is in the doing that I learn what you don’t know and discover what only I can create. 

    Contribution occurs when: I give myself permission to start following a desire, pleasure, or an inspiration, before being ready.

    To put this into practice, start with one project aligned with your inner life. It could be writing, a business idea, a piece of art… whatever resonates with you. 

    Set aside a notebook, a document, or a blank page. Brain-dump everything that comes to mind about the project: the goals, the feelings, the possibilities. Identify 3-5 sources of inspiration: people, books, practices, or models you admire. Study them. Break down what works, what excites you, and what you can adapt for your own path. Then outline your project in phases: the milestones, the skills you’ll need, the experiments you’ll try.

    Most importantly, start immediately with what you know. Don’t wait to feel ready. Let the project teach you. Let it expose gaps, questions, and opportunities. Each day, complete 1-3 priority tasks that move you forward. Progress matters more than perfection. Over time, the work itself becomes the teacher, and your contribution becomes a living reflection of your inner life.

    life design

    There is a romantic impulse that lives in all of us. The longing for a life that feels as beautiful as it looks in our imagination. We dream of sunlit mornings, meaningful work, creative expression, and evenings that feel expansive and unhurried. 

    Dreaming is not enough. Romanticism must meet reality, and reality must be shaped intentionally to reflect your inner life. Life design is the art of building a world that aligns with your essence, day by day, hour by hour.

    Your life is not a checklist to complete: it is a way of being to cultivate. 

    Your routines, your rhythms, your work, your rest, your play, all form the architecture of your lived experience. When your inner life is tended to, the outer life begins to mirror it, but only if you make it visible through deliberate choices. 

    Life design is about crafting that visibility.

    Start with your day. Observe how you move from waking to sleeping, noticing where your energy flows, where it stagnates, and where you feel most alive. Map out routines that nourish and reflect your essence. Begin with your mornings: the way you wake, the rituals you practice, the tone you set for your day. Then structure your work blocks around your peak focus, creative bursts, and the tasks that move your projects forward. Schedule time for rest, play, and reflection as the infrastructure that sustains clarity, energy, and joy.

    You will have to compromise old ways of being to bring in new ones. There are parts of you that will have to die. It may not be easy to start living the life you want to at first. 

    Treat your life as a project. Every week, plan, iterate, and course-correct. Some experiments will fail, some will illuminate hidden desires, and some will unlock surprising ease. Creating, making, curating spaces that feel alive, or testing new habits: each is an experiment in aligning your outer world with your inner truths. 

    The key is not perfection but responsiveness: noticing what works, what nourishes, and what elevates your capacity to live fully.

    The ultimate aim of life design is coherence between your inner life and outer life. Your values, your priorities, your creative impulses, and your work all converge into a living, breathing system that serves your essence. When done well, life design allows your days, weeks, and years to feel intentional, expansive, and deeply satisfying.

    Living a life that reflects your inner world asks you to take risks. Emotionally, creatively, financially. To fail forward, knowing that each misstep illuminates the next step. It asks you to romanticise your days, letting joy, curiosity, and pleasure lead the way, while simultaneously honouring the structures and boundaries that give those impulses space to flourish.

    Have you ever been so absorbed in a book, a song, a painting, or a piece of writing that you were entirely pulled in, entranced by it? That feeling, that rush of energy and attention, is what Rick Rubin calls the ecstatic: a compass that arises in the moment. Your outer life works the same way.

    Notice when fear, doubt, or external expectations are slowing you down. This is when the inner work you’ve done: the self-trust, the enthusiasm, the surrender, becomes your guide. It is your signal that you are moving in the right direction, that you are living in alignment, and that you are capable of generating a life that resonates with your essence.

    Your inner landscape determines your outer reality. Clarity, boundaries, purpose, and energy are the tools of life design. Every choice you make, every connection you cultivate, every project you take on is a reflection of your inner world.

    practice

    Choose one project (personal, professional, or both). Identify three small but tangible steps to take this week to bring it into reality.

    micro-vow

    I will take one deliberate action this week to translate my inner alignment into my outer world. I trust my guidance and my ability to learn through action.

    comment

    What is one relationship, project, or habit you will align with your essence this week? Share below.

  • inner life

    5/8 — the fifth rule of her way club (aka: how to change your life in 6-12 months)

    OCT 10, 2025

    Before we begin, 2 important things:

    1. This fall/autumn, starting on October 21, with the next New Moon 🌚, I am gathering a small circle of writers, dreamers, and noticers for six weeks of writing together. It’s called The Art of Noticing. I’d love you to join me. Learn more here.
    2. Thank you for completing the questionnaire I sent out last week! The responses are so valuable, interesting and beautiful. If you haven’t completed yours yet (and you’d like the gift of working with me 1:1), please, do so here.

    Continuing our 8 rules of her way club series. If you’re just joining, begin here:

    1/8 — deciding to play by your own rules
    2/8 — subtracting what doesn’t belong
    3/8 — the natural consequence: uncertainty
    interlude — her way deep rest
    4/8     — trust yourself
    5/8 — inner life

    Let’s zoom out for a moment and look at this her way club series, this living guide to “how to change your life” from the inside out, from the meta perspective.

    1. Play by your own rules → agency + permission.
    2. Subtract what doesn’t belong → space-making + integrity.
    3. Embrace uncertainty → courage + surrender.
    4. Trust yourself → embodiment of agency + intuition.
    5. Inner life → alignment + authenticity

    This chapter is about self-intimacy and alignment.

    You’ve taken your power back. Now you have to learn how to use it well.

    Each step so far has been designed to move you from external orientation to inner sovereignty. To peel back the noise and return you to your own truth.

    Here, in Rule 5, the invisible becomes visible. Your inner world: your beliefs, your essence, your nourishment, begins to take shape in how you live. This is the bridge between the private self and the life that others see; between what you feel and what you create.

    Everything that follows next: where you belong, the work you do and what you createin the world rests on this foundation.

    Your outer world can only expand as far as your inner life allows. Prosperity, creativity, and fulfilment all flow from how well you tend to the unseen parts of yourself.

    Let’s unpack this with some questions I’d like you to sit with, ponder, or journal on:

    • Who are you when no one is watching?
    • What are the themes that keep repeating in your life (your soul’s curriculum)?
    • What qualities define your way of being (not what you do)?

    Before we look outward, we must look inward. 

    Your authentic life begins with knowing yourself intimately, noticing how you show up in your life, and distinguishing your authentic essence from the patterns and conditioning you’ve absorbed. 

    This is where you learn what truly nourishes you, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually and cultivate the inner alignment that allows prosperity, clarity, and vitality to flow naturally. The life you want doesn’t need to be chased; it meets you when your inner world is tended, your essence is clear, and your choices reflect who you truly are.

    your life is a mirror

    The way you see yourself shapes the life you inhabit. 

    Psychologically, it’s perception in action. The human brain is a meaning-making organ. It filters billions of pieces of information each second, searching for coherence: evidence that matches your existing story of who you are.

    Every encounter, every opportunity, every setback, reflects back to you what you already believe about who you are. If you carry a story of not being enough, of not being ready, of being small or invisible, the world obliges in its own subtle ways, nudging you to notice evidence that confirms your fears. And so you move through your days tense, alert, protective, half present, waiting for life to prove you right or wrong.

    Three months ago, I filmed this simple Q&A. While answering one of the questions, I happened to start speaking about one of my deepest core wounds and fears: abandonment. It’s a pattern that stems from childhood. My core caretakers abandoned me as a child. The day after I published that video, my ex-boyfriend abandoned me with a phone call, leaving me alone in the city we had moved to together. Life was mirroring a self-perception I had of myself, encouraging me to release it. The past three months of my life have been a deep dive into clearing this old pattern and telling a new story. I have been on a journey of consciously changing my self-perception to change my reality. I teach how I do this in CLEAR landing in Nov.

    When you begin to see yourself with gentle curiosity instead of judgment, things shift. Your life experience as a mirror is never against you. It is a teacher, a reflection of the energy you carry, of the care or the neglect you hold for yourself.

    There’s a paradox: the more you accept who you are, exactly as you are in this moment, the more room you create to evolve. 

    Acceptance does not mean complacency or stagnation. It is where growth, change, and transformation can take root. By acknowledging your current limits, your fears, your flaws, and your brilliance, you create the space for new parts of you to emerge. 

    You breathe into yourself the permission to be fully present and fully human, and in that presence, the world shifts around you. Opportunities appear, guidance flows, relationships deepen, and your own intuition becomes a clearer, more unwavering compass.

    Self-perception is the foundation of everything. It determines what you notice, how you act, and what you allow into your life. If you want to cultivate a life that feels aligned and expansive, the first place to start is here, in the mirror, in the tender, unwavering attention you give to the one person who will always be with you: yourself. 

    You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are. You already know. You need to listen.

    your essence

    Your essence is not hidden. It is already present, already alive, already breathing within you. Your essence is your lived expression of the nexus of your soul.

    What obscures it are the layers of conditioning, the inherited expectations, the shoulds, the stories you’ve been told about who you are supposed to be. Essence is what remains when you subtract those things.

    You uncover your essence by paying attention.

    Notice the moments when you feel fully alive, when time seems irrelevant, when your attention sharpens effortlessly, when your body and mind are in quiet alignment. These are signposts. They show you what lights you up, what nourishes you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. 

    Make a list of these moments. Be specific. What activities, conversations, environments, and ways of moving make your energy sing? Which choices leave you depleted? Which patterns make you feel small or constrained?

    Parallel to discovering your essence is recognising conditioning. Conditioning is subtle, woven into your daily life like a thread you don’t notice until you pull it. It shows up as automatic reactions, habitual thoughts, the urge to conform, the fear of disappointing others, the compulsive need to perform or prove yourself. 

    Once you notice these patterns, you can begin to deconstruct them. You can experiment with saying no to old rules, with acting differently than you “should,” with testing new ways of thinking, feeling, and being. Each choice to step out of conditioned patterns is a reclamation of your energy, a clearing of space for essence to breathe and expand.

    Essence is living, breathing, and fluid. It evolves as you evolve. 

    The needs and desires of my authentic self, my essence, shift constantly. The person who began writing online twelve years ago, compared to the person writing now, is entirely different. My values remain, yet they are lived and understood in entirely new ways. Love is felt in the willingness to show up for myself even when it’s hard. Freedom is claimed not through limitless choices but by being able to choose what is meaningful to me. Beauty is found in the attention I place on the ordinary. My essence is always maturing. It is a conversation with myself across time, a deepening dialogue between who I am becoming and the life I am willing to inhabit.

    You cannot fully access essence when you are operating from the script written for you by others. 

    The act of naming your essence is also an act of claiming it: I choose this. I am drawn to this. I move in this way. I feel alive here. With that recognition, you create the foundation for all the inner and outer work that follows. The clarity to decondition, to reshape your habits, to remove the old narratives that no longer serve you, and to step forward with intention and alignment.

    Sometimes we lose touch with what we’re drawn to, what we want, desire, or even like. It happened to me recently. I couldn’t access the parts of myself that once pulsed with desire. Too much had happened too fast, and life spun me around until I didn’t quite know who I was anymore. So I began a small, secret practice I call ‘Things I WANT’ list. Since I no longer knew what I wanted, I started collecting clues. Every time I heard someone talk about something they were doing, experiencing, or feeling, and my body reacted with a quiet spark of recognition, a soft ‘me too’, I wrote it down. Because they revealed something about how I wanted to feel. Over time, those little notes became signposts back to myself. 

    some things I overheard ppl speak about that I noted down

    Desire is a compass. The things you want are indicators of what nourishes you, what enlivens you, what helps you remember who you are.


    nourishment

    Nourishment is the way you feed your mind, body, emotions, and spirit so that your life can function at full capacity, so that your presence can hold space for yourself and others. 

    Rest is nourishment. Play is nourishment. Silence, ritual, beauty, immersion in nature… they are infrastructure. 

    When you nourish yourself, you create a nervous system that feels safe to expand, a body and mind capable of holding joy, curiosity, and creativity without depletion. Everything you build: your work, your relationships, your life path, is only as sustainable as the inner ecology that supports it.

    Pay attention to what sustains your energy rather than depletes it. Notice which conversations leave you full and which leave you empty. Notice what thoughts and stories you tell yourself that feel like nourishment, and which ones tighten, constrict, or exhaust. Notice how movement, food, and environment affect your clarity, focus, and vitality. Nourishment is as much about subtraction as it is about addition. Removing what drains you, creating space for what feeds you. 

    The more devoted you are to this kind of inner prosperity, the more effortlessly your life flows, because you are operating from fullness rather than deficit.

    prosperity

    Prosperity is measured not just in money but in clarity, in capacity, in the freedom to create the life you want. It is the overflow of a well-tended inner world. A life in which your essence is honoured, your instincts are trusted, and your energy is devoted to what makes you feel alive. 

    The work is always inward first: nourishing yourself, holding space for your evolution, cultivating self-trust and intuition. 

    Then, and only then, does the external world respond, drawn to the light you carry. Your inner abundance becomes a magnet. Attracting resources, opportunities, and experiences that match the vibrational reality you have already created for yourself.

    Nourishment and prosperity are inseparable. One is the root; the other, the fruit. Without tending the root, the fruit cannot ripen fully. With devotion to yourself, your energy, and your essence, abundance flows as a natural consequence of a life lived in alignment.

    The heart of transforming your life is knowing yourself intimately. 

    Not superficially, but at the level of your thoughts, feelings, instincts, desires, and patterns. Change doesn’t begin with the outside world; it begins with you, with the way you show up in your own life. 

    The question isn’t just what you want, but who you are being as you move through each day, as you respond to challenges, as you make choices. Are you living out of your authentic soul essence, or are you unconsciously following old patterns, conditioning, and expectations that no longer serve you?

    Taking responsibility for this is understanding that every small choice either nourishes you or depletes you. When you begin to show up for yourself in alignment with your essence, you learn what truly sustains your energy, what makes you feel alive, what your life needs to flourish. 

    This is the work of self-knowledge: observing without judgment, naming the ways conditioning has shaped you, and making deliberate choices to nourish yourself in the ways that matter. Only when you are clear about who you are and what nourishes you can you begin to recognise what kind of life is right for you. 

    In our next step of this series, we begin to build that life externally. But first, let’s complete this section here:

    practice

    Take this week to quietly study yourself. Not your habits or productivity, but the subtler currents underneath: what lights you up, what drains you, what makes you feel most you.

    Each day, jot down one small observation about what nourishes you and one about what depletes you. Don’t try to fix or optimise anything. Just notice. This is how self-intimacy begins: through witnessing, not forcing.

    At the end of the week, look at what you’ve written. See if you can trace the shape of your essence through those notes. The qualities, environments, and rhythms that bring you alive. Those are the clues to the kind of life that fits you.

    micro-vow

    “I am willing to know myself deeply.
    I take responsibility for how I show up in my life.
    I will tend to what truly nourishes me,
    so the life meant for me can find me.”

    comment

    What’s one subtle way you’ve noticed yourself living out an old pattern that no longer fits? Share it below. Naming it is the first act of coming home to yourself.

    P.S. A peek into CLEAR (clear your path, change your life), landing in November.

  • trust yourself, trust your path

    4/8 — the fourth rule of her way club (aka: how to change your life in 6-12 months)

    SEP 28, 2025

    Continuing our 8 rules of her way club series. If you’re just joining, begin here:

    1/8 — deciding to play by your own rules
    2/8 — subtracting what doesn’t belong
    3/8 — the natural consequence: uncertainty
    interlude — her way deep rest
    4/8     — trust yourself

    where I am writing this to you from, today

    The fourth rule of her way club is about owning your path.

    I’ve just returned from a kundalini yoga class. At the start, our teacher said: “There are two things people fear most in themselves: their anger and their instinct. But we need both: to metabolise anger and to connect with instinct. How could anyone not feel anger in these times, with the world stage pulling antics that belong to centuries past?”

    I thought about her words all class. Anger and instinct are scary because they’re truth tellers. And truth is confronting. It forces us to face ourselves or others in ways we’d rather avoid. It makes us choose paths outside the norm.

    The kriyas focused on metabolising anger. Hot, annoying, fast movements and breath that help me unglue myself from my subconscious resistances. I have my own private anger to metabolise. Anger is a fire: it burns away what isn’t meant for you and fuels you to do things differently. Anger gives you agency to choose your most authentic path.

    Instinct is different. Instinct is information. It tells you, moment by moment, what next step to take. And every time, you have a choice: trust yourself and your path, or not and pay the consequences until life offers you the chance to choose again.

    If rule one was claiming your agency, rule two subtracting what doesn’t belong, rule three embracing uncertainty and the deep rest required to hold yourself through it, then this, rule four, is about owning your path. We are at the heart of our journey.

    Most people follow the crowd, chasing safety, belonging, and love. They measure success on someone else’s scoreboard: celebrity culture, external validation, possessions that inflate the ego for minutes rather than decades. They mistake comfort for alignment. They choose paths where the ending is visible. But knowing how the story ends doesn’t mean it’s the right story for you.

    Comfort, in fact, can be the cage that keeps potential small and life mediocre. The more your life reflects your authentic code, the more alive you feel. The more you resist it by staying small, safe, palatable the more numb you become. At some point, you have to admit: the life you’ve been living might not actually be yours.

    There are three keys to owning your path:

    • Self-trust: developing your instinct and allowing yourself to make mistakes.
    • Enthusiasm: devoting yourself to what makes you feel alive.
    • Surrender: letting yourself not know exactly how it will play out, and trusting anyway.

    This is the ‘her way’ approach to creating a life that is actually yours.

    Key 1: Self-Trust

    Everything is spiritual, even the most ordinary logistics. Self-trust is where your inner world meets the outer one. It’s deeply practical. The more you trust yourself, the easier life feels.

    Without self-trust, you continue to outsource decisions, scanning others’ opinions, adapting to their expectations, and doubting your own instincts. This is exhausting. It makes you feel wobbly and unsafe.

    With self-trust, everything shifts:

    • You get things done. Procrastination fades when you trust yourself to follow through.
    • You feel steadier and safer. The world softens when you know you can rely on yourself.
    • You grow your instinct. Each decision becomes practice, and even mistakes turn into evidence that you can handle whatever comes.

    Self-trust begins with a choice: gathering your energy back from the outside world and returning it to yourself. Each time you stop looking outward for permission and instead ask, What feels true for me? you strengthen that muscle.

    It’s about being available to yourself. That means listening inward and actually honouring what you hear with action. It means tending to your body, energy, and emotions so you have the capacity to show up for your own needs. It means following through with integrity, doing what you said you’d do because you are in relationship with yourself.

    Self-trust doesn’t mean getting it right all the time. It means allowing yourself to act in the unknown, to risk imperfection, to treat mistakes as feedback instead of evidence against you. The more you do this, the more natural and effortless it becomes.

    When you trust yourself, you stop second-guessing, stop beating yourself up, and start freeing up energy for what matters most. Life flows differently. Relationships soften. And you begin to notice how the universe meets you halfway, aligning the pieces once you’ve chosen to stand firmly in your own inner ground.

    Key 2: Enthusiasm

    To live your way, you need enthusiasm. The word itself comes from the Greek enthousiasmos, “having god within.” It’s being lit up by a divine spark. Enthusiasm is devotion to what makes you feel most alive. It’s the master key to the good life.

    To practice enthusiasm, your task is simple, but not easy: notice. 

    Notice what distorts time, what makes focus effortless, what fills you with ideas you can’t put down. Enthusiasm leaves traces: goosebumps, a quickened pulse, the sudden sense that the world has tilted open in possibility. These are signals pointing you toward your path.

    Redirect your intensity away from chasing people or external validation, and toward the skills, projects, and fascinations that nourish you. Pour your energy where it multiplies, not where it leaks. Accept what cannot be changed. Eliminate or outsource what drains you.

    Then make it real. Literally block off one to two hours each day: a standing appointment with your own aliveness. Do the things that bring you excitement, that light you up. 

    For me, that’s starting the day, phone off, writing for two hours every morning. As I have shared before, writing informs every other part of my life that literally brings my dreams and visions to life. For you, it might be something else. Devote yourself to it.

    Enthusiasm is both compass and fuel. It shows you where to go and gives you the stamina to keep going, even when the path is uncertain. The more you cultivate it, the more your life begins to feel like your own: alive, expansive, divinely guided.

    Key 3: Surrender

    Surrender is the alchemy that allows everything else to work. It’s letting go of the need to control the outcome, releasing the illusion that you can map every step of your journey, and trusting anyway. It means holding your agency and your enthusiasm, while allowing the unknown to unfold.

    Surrender begins with a choice: to step into the unknown without fear of being “wrong.” Life rarely delivers guarantees, and the map you imagined often fades the moment you try to follow it. Surrender is the practice of leaning into uncertainty with calm, of showing up fully even when the next step is invisible.

    It’s also a recognition that the universe, or life, or your own deeper self, is smarter than your anxious mind. When you act with integrity, follow your instinct, and devote yourself to what makes you alive, surrender allows the pieces to align in ways you cannot predict. You trust that the guidance you feel, the enthusiasm you cultivate, and the self-trust you’ve built are enough.

    Surrender is giving over. Giving over to the flow, the timing, the magic that only emerges when you stop resisting. It’s a practice: showing up for your life without needing to know the whole story, trusting that the steps you take, even imperfectly, are carrying you forward.

    When you surrender, you move with grace instead of struggle. You release the tension of trying to force outcomes, and you open yourself to the full richness of living her way.

    I have so many stories from this year alone about practising self-trust, enthusiasm, and surrender, stories I’d love to share. But for this her way club series (aka: how to change your life in 6–12 months), I want to stay focused on giving you the tools to take steps in your own way. I trust your innate intelligence to guide you. If you’d like more of my personal stories woven in, let me know.

    practice: the self-trust check-in

    Take five minutes to check in with yourself and your inner guidance. Write down:

    • One decision you’ve been hesitating on, and what your instinct is telling you.
    • One area where you’ve been looking outside yourself for approval.
    • One small action you can take this week that aligns with your own guidance, not someone else’s.
    • One way you can honour your energy, emotions, or body to show up fully for yourself.
    • One past moment where trusting yourself paid off, and how it felt.

    Notice the difference between what your mind overthinks and what your deeper sense knows. This is your internal compass — your self-trust — sharpening.

    micro-vow

    This week, pick one moment where you’ll act from your own guidance, not what anyone else says you “should” do. Say it aloud:

    I trust myself. I trust my path. 

    comment prompt

    What’s one small act you can take this week to follow your own instincts, rather than someone else’s rules? Share it below…

  • uncertainty

    3/8 — the third rule of her way club (aka: how to change your life in 6-12 months)

    SEP 12, 2025

    Continuing our 8 rules of her way club series. If you’re just joining, begin here:

    1/8 — deciding to play by your own rules
    2/8 — subtracting what doesn’t belong
    3/8 — the natural consequence: uncertainty

    Without inherited structures, you’re floating.

    If the first rule of her way club is making the choice to play by your own rules, and the second rule is subtracting everything that doesn’t belong to your life, then, if you’re doing it right, ultimately you will be led to the third rule as a natural consequence: uncertainty.

    Uncertainty acts as a doorway. 

    You’re supposed to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing.

    The moment you stop living by borrowed rules and strip away everything false, you feel lost. The familiar timelines and “shoulds” vanish. And in their absence, uncertainty arrives.

    This is an initiation.

    It might feel like failure or danger. But it’s not. It’s the proof you’re on the right track.

    This is the part where you lean in and learn what is actually meant for you on a moment-to-moment basis. This is what being truly alive feels like.

    Your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you’re willing to embrace.

    If you’ve been journeying alongside me for a while, you will know that I spend extraordinary amounts of time in uncertainty, which I call by various names: the unknown, the void or the magic dark.

    Here are some examples:

    Career/Work

    I figured out pretty early on, in my early twenties, that the status quo career path was not going to be able to offer me the kind of life that I wanted. I had concluded that school was never meant to teach us how to learn effectively. It was to train us to be obedient. 

    Apropos nothing, but a side note I want to venture down briefly: Now, with the rise of AI, this truth is becoming impossible to ignore. The stable, predictable career paths of our parents and grandparents that promised safety and security are dissolving. The world now demands agility, responsiveness, and creativity. It’s an exciting opportunity. It means we get to consciously and deliberately choose (in true her way club vibes) how we spend our time, how we create value, how we resource our lives. The cost is that it requires a willingness to linger in the discomfort of uncertainty, sometimes for long stretches of time.

    I had to carve out a path of my own. 

    At the time, I didn’t know what direction I wanted to go in. I had a psychology degree, a love for writing and a personality. Those were the three things I had available to me.

    It was 2012.

    I used my writing hobby to start a blog.
    I used my psychology knowledge to provide a lens.
    I used my personality to build connections and relationships.

    Over time, I learned how to trust my own rhythm, built a successful personal brand and saw how clients, ideas, and opportunities began to appear because I was willing to hold steady in the uncertainty.

    The journey of uncertainty often looks like:

    • Letting go of control
    • Trusting your intuition
    • Embracing failure as a learning opportunity
    • Discovering your true passions and strengths

    In 2022, ten years later, I became complacent.

    I lost my drive, my direction was diluted, I forgot what I stood for, and I burned out. 

    After many mini cycles of uncertainty throughout my career up to that point, I entered one large period of uncertainty that lasted almost two years. Until recently, I spent a lot of time in confusion, feeling lost and being on the verge of giving up. 

    This is where the magic dark comes into play.

    I had to spend enough time in uncertainty for the right amount of vision to form, for clarity to arrive, to be able to launch myself into a new way of life.

    I have been promising you that I will share what this journey is all about, and I will. I already have an essay drafted, but keep editing, adding to it, and rewriting it because there’s a lot to say. And today, here in this space, is not the place.

    Home/Travel

    If there’s one area of life where I seem to have an unusually high risk tolerance, it’s where I place my feet and call home.

    In the past decade alone, I’ve packed my life into a suitcase or two and moved to a small town in Canada, a village in Mexico, a coastal city in the UK, then Mallorca, and most recently, New York City, each one chosen without ever having visited before.

    Sometimes these moves worked out beautifully, sometimes not. One thing has become abundantly clear:

    There is no perfect place.

    Every place will offer you something. A piece of yourself you hadn’t yet met, a lesson you didn’t know you needed, a relationship that will shape you.

    If you can choose a place that supports the season of life you are in and leave it when it no longer does, you are doing it right.

    Landing in a new place with no safety net, no mapped-out plan, just a suitcase and the decision to trust your instincts offers a peculiar kind of initiation. There is a mix of thrill and terror as you wander strange streets, question if you belong, and feel the weightlessness of having no context.

    But there is also something else: a sharpening of your senses.

    Living without inherited structures forces you into presence. You notice what food you crave, which streets feel friendly, who looks you in the eye, and the natural rhythm of your creativity and agency. Belonging drips in slowly, one kind stranger, one favourite café, one new friendship at a time.

    Each place I’ve lived has stripped me bare and handed me back to myself with greater clarity. They’ve offered me relationships I never could have imagined and moments of beauty that would never have happened if I had stayed still.

    It’s not that relocating is easy. It is often lonely. It is unmooring. But if you can stay with that discomfort long enough to let the edges soften, if you can learn to resource yourself from within while waiting for the puzzle pieces to fall into place (or don’t, and then you get to choose again), what comes from that space is unmatched.

    My career, friendships, and creativity all have roots in the decision to keep moving until I found places that matched my internal world. Without those leaps into the unknown, I suspect my life would be much, much smaller.

    Personal Connections

    If you’ve been with me a while, you know that I just went through the most brutal breakup of my life, so I am keeping this section brief. And… I am glad it happened.

    (If you want to catch up, the whole story is tucked inside the archives; a breadcrumb trail from the day we met a year ago to the day it ended two months ago.)

    In truth, there isn’t a single romantic relationship or friendship I regret releasing. Because what has grown in the fertile soil of those endings has always been worth it: deeper intimacy, clearer boundaries, a closer relationship with myself and others.

    It is never easy.

    There is always a deep and terrifying ache right after an ending. The kind that empties your chest, keeps you up at night, and makes you question every decision you’ve made in your life. The mind spins a million scenarios about how this is the end of love, the end of goodness, the end of belonging.

    But on the other side of that ache, there is something else, waiting. Usually, exactly the kinds of personal connections you have been yearning for. The ones that needed you to be ready for them.

    You can’t skip this stage. You can’t think your way through it. You can only live it. Floating in the unknown until the ground reappears beneath you. You can never arrive here without being in the uncertain in-between.

    Creativity

    Creativity is your unique contribution to the collective. But letting yourself be seen in your creative expressions can feel life-ending. 

    Many of you reading this are here right now: standing in that moment of decision. Should I start a Substack? Should I release the thing I’ve been dreaming about? Should I show myself more fully online, or dare to call myself an artist, a writer, a maker, a founder?

    This year, my biggest leap of uncertainty was finally admitting to myself that I am a creator and giving myself permission to share what I create in a way that feels aligned, meaningful, and honest.

    For more than a decade, I’ve been publishing writing for mostly free. I had it drummed into me that content marketing was a single file path and that I couldn’t deviate from it. I couldn’t bring myself to put a paywall around the tender, personal parts until just a few months ago. 

    And then, the moment I did, when I went all in, in valuing my writing and my memoir-style expositions, everything shifted. The work deepened. The readers who stayed became more engaged. As of today, I am only ten subscriptions away from becoming a Substack bestseller.

    There are other projects: courses, offerings, collabs that I sometimes sit on for months because I am scared no one will value them, that they won’t be well-received, that they’re not good enough, that they will vanish into the void. 

    But I’ve learned that if I can stay in that liminal space, uncomfortable as it is, something happens. The edges of the idea sharpen. The delivery deepens. The work becomes more potent. 

    And the things that don’t work out feed into things that do, which, as a counter-effect, become better than anything I have created before.

    Uncertainty is a creative pressure. It forces me to listen more closely, to refine, to make sure what I’m bringing into the world is the truest version I can offer.

    And with every round of staying with that discomfort, my capacity grows. I get better at holding myself in the unknown. Better at waiting for clarity to arrive. Better at trusting that what emerges from that space will have more depth, more resonance, more impact than if I had rushed to get it out just to soothe my own anxiety.

    The act of creating while uncertain is the transformation. It is what gives the work its aliveness, its resonance. When I let myself create from that place of risk, readers feel it. Clients feel it. I feel it.

    You’re supposed to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing.

    But when it comes to living an extraordinary life, which is the only way to live a life that is truly your own (and what her way club is all about), most people interpret “feeling uncertain” as a sign they have taken a wrong turn. So they give up. They run back to the familiar and comfortable life that was planned for them. The one the system approves of, even if it’s the very life they were trying to escape.

    And maybe that’s why you’re here, reading this.

    Because deep down, you know you want more for yourself than the version of life you were handed. And to enjoy your life. Not just one day, but now, and into the future. 

    To enjoy your life, you have to keep learning, growing, evolving, and changing. And there is no way to change your life without spending time at the edge of the unknown.

    Uncertainty is the doorway.

    It’s the signal that you are in the exact place where transformation can happen.

    If the first rule of her way club is deciding to live by your own rules, and the second rule is subtracting everything false, then this… this floating, this disorientation, this not-knowing, is where the magic happens.

    Stay here.
    Stay with it.
    Stay long enough for your new life to appear.

    Some related articles you might enjoy reading:

    not ready

    VIENDA

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    23 JANUARY 2024

    not ready

    When I was 15 I went on a long overseas trip for the first time entirely on my own. I had signed up to be a foreign exchange student in the States fo…

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    not yet

    VIENDA

    ·

    11 APRIL 2024

    not yet

    I’m sitting in Brighton’s Artist Residence looking out at the English Channel, frothy white foam on the tips of waves sparkling between mist and bursts of sun, and hot chocolate to accompany me on th…

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    how I learned to put myself ‘out there’

    VIENDA

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    10 APR

    how I learned to put myself 'out there'

    To answer the title, how I did it is:

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  • the first rule of ‘her way club’

    1/8

    The first rule of her way club is simple… 

    You have to decide if you are in or if you are out.

    Because until you make that choice, everything else in your life will be decided inside someone else’s frame.

    Every life is shaped by decisions, small and large. And there is one decision that sits above them all, one that becomes the axis of everything else: the choice to refuse the life you were handed at birth, without your conscious consent. You cannot create a life of your own until you first spit out the one you inherited.

    Yet, I know, I do know… saying no without knowing what you are saying yes to can feel more terrifying than leaping into thin air. Bear with me here…

    Most of us are taught to believe that the path is already paved. Follow the milestones. Take the job. Choose that kind of partner. Buy the house. Keep your head down. Belong by blending in. Stay safe by avoiding risk at all costs. 

    But the truth is, no one can hand you your way. They can only hand you theirs. To choose yourself, you must reject the average, the conventional, the status quo. You must be willing to step outside of the structure, even when your knees are shaking, and build your own frame of meaning.

    I want you to think of your life like a frame through which you see and choose. Most people live inside a frame they did not build. It tells them what to want, what to work for, what to measure themselves against. And then one day, something cracks. 

    The desire for freedom stirs. The realisation dawns: this frame is wrong for me.

    Here’s the paradox: freedom is not the absence of barriers. It is not drifting without edges or guardrails. Left unchecked, that kind of freedom quickly becomes its opposite: chaos, distraction, exhaustion. You don’t want freedom without form. What you truly want is the freedom to shape the form yourself. You want choice.

    That is why people are drawn so quickly to external structures: human design, astrology, sacred systems, even self-help frameworks. They promise clarity, rules, a map. But as soon as they become limitations, they are no longer helpful. We are here to do whatever we want, to follow whatever expression of Self is closest to the nexus of our soul.

    When these systems become limitations (see: projectors saying they can’t take action unless they have been tangibly “invited”), we must decondition ourselves from the programming that has us operating from “shoulds.” That’s why you need to create your own system, structure, framework, or code of existence. An inner guiding light.

    You do not want goals handed down by parents, teachers, bosses, society or culture. You do not want to inherit someone else’s scoreboard. And yet, in mistaking all structure for confinement, you risk throwing away the very thing that can save you: a system of your own making. Structure is not the enemy. Borrowed structure is.

    The ones who flourish are not the ones who float freely. They are the ones who build a world they want to live inside. They create rules that make sense for them, principles that become a compass when life threatens to scatter their attention.

    That’s what her way club is about. 
    Now… are you in, or are you out?

    Most people will give you a destination. Some will give you the steps to reach it. But almost no one will hand you the most vital thing: the navigation system to set your own coordinates and chart the path.

    Her way club is a way to unearth the rules that make sense for you. Over the next two months, I will send you weekly rearrangements of perception, direction, and focus. Each one is meant to become a small hinge that, over time, swings open an entirely new door.

    Integrate them into your mind, your choices, your actions. Give yourself 6-12 months. And then look back at the life you’ve quietly built.

    I remember the first time the words “not this” rose up inside me like a prayer and a rebellion all at once. I must have been nineteen, maybe twenty. I was living in London, filling in as a temp admin for a world-famous bridal magazine while I searched for a career path or life direction that felt like me. In a room too bright, clinical, fluorescent lights buzzing above a room full of people. People who looked bored, resigned, living a life that was supposed to be glamorous but really was pushing papers around to meet the deadlines and fill the ad pages. Their shoulders rounded, already defeated by life.

    I stood there, pretending to be immersed in my work, printing page after page at the printing machine for someone else to read through and sign, my body buzzing with a strange, quiet panic.

    In that moment, I felt it in my bones: not this.

    Not this life of ticking boxes and following rules that don’t belong to me. Not this slow suffocation dressed up as success. I remember staring at the clock, the second hand dragging itself forward, and thinking if I stay here, if I follow this way, something in me will wither before it even has a chance to bloom.

    That was the first crack. The first place I realised that the path laid out in front of me was never going to be my own.

    For me, it was less of a clear epiphany and more of a visceral aversion. A slow gathering of no’s. I looked around and saw lives that felt like cages: bodies grown stiff with lack of movement and sunshine, minds dulled by routine, relationships that had calcified into resentment and silence, jobs that took more than they gave. 

    Something in me whispered, with startling sharpness: Not me. Not this. Nope.

    I will not have a partner I resent.
    I will love in freedom and respect.

    I will not hate my body.
    I will live at home in my skin.

    I will not live to please a system that is broken.
    I will build a life that pleases my soul.

    I will not silence my voice.
    I will speak the truth that burns inside me.

    I will not abandon myself.
    I will choose myself, again and again.

    That whisper was the first hint of my anti-vision. If I could not yet say what my life would look like, I could at least say what I refused and wanted, instead. And that was enough to begin.

    This is where your way begins too… with the clarity of rejection. 

    When you truly reject the outcome of being like everyone else, you begin to gather fuel. Every time you encounter something that makes you contract, something you know you cannot live with, you are being handed a data point. Write it down. Take it on a walk. Let it carve an outline of the life you will not accept.

    This is the first half of the frame: the shape of what you are walking away from. But then comes the harder work: choosing what to walk toward.

    I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but I began to set my aim, in the form of living principles. I wanted to build a body that could carry me well. I wanted a mind that grew stronger every time it was tested. I wanted work that felt like service, not servitude. I wanted to live in devotion to excellence, the soft and steady commitment to becoming myself more fully.

    Your version will look different. It must. 

    This is not about copying a blueprint. It is about cultivating your own. Every woman has her own constellation of desires, but the throughline is the same: to grow in body, in mind, in spirit, and in the work you contribute to the world.

    Still, here is the truth that stops most people: 

    The fear of the unknown is heavier than the fear of becoming like everyone else. 

    And so you stay in place. But there comes a moment when the grief of sameness, the dread of mediocrity, the ache of a life unlived, becomes more unbearable than the fear of stepping into uncertainty. That is the moment of decision. 

    That is when you know you are in.

    Over the next eight weeks, this ‘rules of her way club’ series will serve as a navigation system. Not a map to someone else’s life, but a framework to help you chart your own. Together, we will learn how to treat uncertainty as signal, how to live a life so unique it becomes spiritual practice, how to root into your inner essence and your prosperity, how to shape an outer life of belonging and contribution, how to claim the mantle of creator, and how to design a life that is unmistakably yours.

    But all of that begins here. With one decision. With one yes, or one no.

    a practice for you, to begin:

    Take ten minutes today to begin your anti-vision. On a blank page, write down everything you know you do not want. Allow this to be your sharp truth. What type of existence would kill your spirit? What kind of love would shrink you? What routines would flatten your days? Take that list for a walk. Let your body feel the weight of it, and notice how the air tastes different when you silently promise yourself: 
    Not me. Not this.

    a micro-vow:

    “I commit to the excellence of being fully myself. From now on, I choose my way.”

    a note from the field:

    I often work with women who have built their lives according to rules they thought they had to follow. From the outside, they look accomplished. Inside, they are hollow, uninspired, disconnected, and alone. Worse than lonely… cut off from themselves, from desire, from the messy, vital core of living.

    And so the questions rise, sharp and relentless:

    Why start a business if it only multiplies your stress?
    Why birth a child if it means years of fractured sleep?
    Why create, when that same time could be spent doing something useful?
    Why fall in love, when the ending might split your heart clean in half?

    Because that is the point of being alive.

    This — messy, uncertain, beautiful — is what life is. And when a woman finally admits, often through tears, that she hates the trajectory she was on, the story that felt already written with a predictable ending… something shifts. 

    That acknowledgement is not despair, it’s the crack in the frame. The fracture where light gets in. The first signal of her way. Your way.

    Every new life begins there.

    comment below:

    Tell me one thing you refuse to accept for your life. What belongs on your anti-vision list?

  • you are planet powered 🪐

    …as I discovered one day when I went for a walk with my astrologist Zoe on London’s Hampstead Heath

    I didn’t set out to live in rhythm with the planets.

    I was just trying to figure out how to get through the week without falling back into the old paradigm of life and work.

    It was a decade ago, sometime in the early years of my business, that tender in-between season when you’re no longer in the old world (but still haunted by its rules), and not yet anchored in the new one. I had refused traditional work because I craved freedom. Flexibility. Something that felt like mine. But what I found was that freedom — without structure and rhythm — can feel like floating in deep water without anything to hold onto.

    Each day bled into the next. I was either wildly inspired or totally untethered. I’d start Mondays trying to be productive, then spiral into guilt when I couldn’t focus. Some days I’d push myself to work until 10 pm. Other days, I’d drift, half-present, getting nothing done and feeling even worse about it.

    It wasn’t that I didn’t love the work. I did. But I was still trying to move through time as if it were a flat surface. Like each day should hold the same energy, the same productivity, the same focus.

    And then something shifted.

    One day, I went for a walk with my astrologist Zoe on London’s Hampstead Heath. We were examining wild-grown herbs and trees, discussing how they relate to each individual. At some point, the conversation drifted to how we organise our days and how fortunate we were to go for a walk in nature on a beautiful day while everyone else was stuck behind a desk in a square room somewhere. She mentioned in passing a simple idea: that each day of the week is ruled by a planet. Each one carries its own essence. A mood. A direction. A rhythm.

    Fascinated, I took myself to the British Library and fell into a deep research dive on anything I could find out about the days of the week being related to planetary systems. As it turns out, in a vast number of languages, the names given to the seven days of the week are derived from the names of the classical planets in Hellenistic Astronomy, which were in turn named after contemporary deities, a system introduced by the Sumerians and later adopted by the Babylonians from whom the Roman Empire adopted the system.

    Monday is ruled by the Moon. Of course it is. Monday blues are real! That’s why it always felt so emotionally dense. Tuesday, by Mars — no wonder I always wanted to push through my to-do list that day. Wednesday — Mercury — my best meeting day. And so on…

    It’s not new information. It is ancient, and that felt like remembering something I already knew in my bones. So I started experimenting.

    Just gently at first. I stopped scheduling intense work-heavy starts to the week on Mondays. I started batching bold, courageous tasks on Tuesdays. I held my meetings on Wednesdays and saved my writing for Thursdays. I let Friday be soft. Sensual. More space, less noise.

    The changes were subtle, but the impact was immediate. Suddenly, I wasn’t pushing against myself anymore. I had a relationship with time: one that felt intimate, reverent, and alive.

    I started feeling less like I was managing time, and more like I was dancing with it. Listening. Responding. Moving in flow. The more I lived this way, the more everything began to shift.

    My business felt more coherent. My body relaxed in response.

    I could actually feel the difference between a Moon day and a Mercury day. I have language for my inner world and permission to meet each day with integrity and grace.

    Introducing:

    PLANET POWERED ~ https://stan.store/herwayclub

    A new rhythm for life — soft, structured, and alive.

    Inside, you’ll find:

    • 114-page guide
    • Six tailored lifestyle guides
    • Energetic themes for each day of the week
    • Planetary symbolism and modern integration
    • Custom: calendars, cheat sheets, and daily rituals
    • Journaling prompts, reflection tools & real examples
    • A live Telegram community for connection and support: July 13–August 10

    $55 — INSTANT ACCESS

    What if your whole week made sense?

    What if you knew exactly why Monday always feels a little heavier… And why Tuesdays feel sharper, more focused… And why by Friday you want to wear something cute and take yourself out dancing (or at least light a nice candle)?

    There’s a reason. You don’t flail or feel your way through the week by accident.

    There are real, rhythmic forces influencing your emotions, energy, and attention — every single day. But we’ve been trained to ignore that rhythm.
    To push through. Force clarity. Work like we’re machines.

    Planet Powered invites you to live differently.

    To stop fighting time — and start flowing with it.

    Planet Powered is a new way to move through time — ancient, intuitive, and wildly effective.

    ✦ Why this matters

    ✔ You stop wasting energy on the wrong things at the wrong time
    ✔ You feel more emotionally supported and less scattered
    ✔ You create with more ease, confidence, and momentum
    ✔ You find a rhythm that’s both soulful and sustainable
    ✔ You stop asking “what’s wrong with me?” and start asking “what’s the energy today?”

    This guide will teach you how.

    Time isn’t flat. It’s textured. Alive. Rhythmic.

    ✦ Who this is for

    • You’re self-employed and want a rhythm that balances structure with flow
    • You’re in a corporate job but craving more soul and spaciousness
    • You’re a parent trying to stay grounded inside the chaos
    • You’re a student or seeker looking to live more intuitively
    • You’re done with pushing. You’re ready to align

    Whether you’re an entrepreneur, seeker, parent, student, or simply someone craving a new way to relate to time, this guide offers structure without rigidity, softness without chaos, and a return to something your body already knows. 


    Planet Powered includes tailored guidance for different life paths.

    Each day of the week carries a unique planetary frequency.
    It has since ancient times — and deep down, your body already feels it.

    • Monday is ruled by the Moon — emotional, internal, tender.
    • Tuesday belongs to Mars — bold, active, focused.
    • Wednesday is Mercury’s — clear, communicative, connected.
    • Thursday expands under Jupiter — wise, generous, abundant.
    • Friday glows with Venus — beauty, love, creativity.
    • Saturday grounds us in Saturn — structure, integrity, completion.
    • Sunday re-centres in the Sun — joy, self, radiance.

    When you honour that rhythm instead of override it — everything changes.

    You stop pushing against your own energy. You stop trying to be everything, every day. You stop feeling like you’re constantly behind.

    Instead, you begin to flow…

    This is what Planet Powered is here to help you do:
    Reorient your life around the energy that already lives in the week.
    Through a steady rhythm.

    $55 — INSTANT ACCESS

    Why I created this

    When I first left behind traditional work, I was craving freedom. But freedom without rhythm just left me overwhelmed. I didn’t want the rigid 9-to-5. But I didn’t want to drift endlessly, either. I needed something that felt both fluid and practical. A system that could hold me, without boxing me in. That’s when I stumbled across the planetary week… and everything clicked.

    Suddenly, I understood why certain days flowed and others didn’t. I stopped forcing deep work on Moon days. I started writing on Mercury days, launching on Jupiter days, and resting on purpose. This rhythm didn’t make me productive. It made me present.

    That’s what I want for you.

    What You’ll Get

    This is more than an eBook or a course: it is a living rhythm, with beautiful tools and a community of friends to help you step into it.

    Let your days become a devotion.

    Let your week become a map.

    Let your life be Planet Powered.

    This isn’t a one-time read. It’s a way of living that holds you, day after day, cycle after cycle.

    ✧ The Guide

    A beautifully designed 114-page PDF and digital resource that teaches you the energy of each day, with poetic insight and grounded, real-life examples for all different life seasons — whether you’re self-employed, working in a corporate setting, parenting, studying, or walking a spiritual path.

    Each section offers real-life suggestions, energetic check-ins, and practical ways to honour the rhythm within your unique lifestyle — so you can make this work for you, not the other way around.

    Includes:

    ~ Tips to integrate rhythm into work, relationships, creativity and rest

    ~ Planetary day-by-day breakdowns

    ~ Journaling prompts & rituals

    ~ Practical lifestyle guides and tools for entrepreneurs, professionals, parents, students, and seekers

    $55 — INSTANT ACCESS

    ✧ The Calendar

    A downloadable iCal/Google Calendar layer that brings the energy of the day right into your digital schedule, so you don’t have to remember. It’s just there. Subtle. Seamless.

    ✧ The Spotify Playlist

    An ambient, atmospheric playlist to support you through the week — music to match the mood of each planetary energy.

    ✧ The Community

    Our private Telegram group, where we share the rhythm in real-time. Daily check-ins. Honest reflections. Celebrations. Gentle support. A place to not do it all alone.

    One-Month Live (July 13–August 10)

    Join us in a private Telegram group where Vienda will share live daily reflections, answer your questions, and guide you through the rhythm together.

    This is more than a group chat — it’s a virtual hearth. A live rhythm lab. A space to bring structure, magic, and collective resonance into your week.

    $55 — INSTANT ACCESS

  • practices that help me reclaim my self-trust

    one decision at a time

    “When I came in this evening, I was so identified with my emotion,” I said, twisting to face the teacher. “I was like: I’m so saaaaad! WWWAAAAHHHH!!!” I exaggerated, earning a few giggles from behind me.

    It was a rainy night in NYC’s Lower East Side. I was at a yoga and philosophy class.

    Speaking in front of others used to terrify me. I’d flush with heat, my thoughts would tangle, and my voice would betray me. I’d prepare what I wanted to say in advance, rehearsing endlessly in my head while others spoke. By the time it was my turn, I wasn’t even there anymore. I was so consumed by trying to say the ‘right thing’ that what came out was a jumbled mess. Then came the shame spiral. I hated the awkwardness of being seen.

    I used to think I was shy.

    But really, I didn’t trust myself.

    As I continued sharing, I said, “But then I moved and sweated and got into my body, and loosened the grip sadness had on me. I remembered that I am not my feelings, I’m just a person having feelings. And now, I feel fine! So I guess… yoga works!”

    We all laughed. That’s why we’re here. Because it works.

    It struck me again how easy it is to forget what we know when our minds are loud and cluttered. When we can’t hear the part of us that already knows. 

    That’s the ache of self-abandonment.

    When, at the end of the day or week, or season, you realise you’ve lived from doubt instead of trust. You ignored your intuition. You bypassed your knowing. You outsourced your truth. And now you feel like a stranger to yourself.

    That is not a feeling I enjoy. 

    You don’t trust yourself because you’ve never been taught how. Because you’re afraid of making mistakes. Because the noise of the world is so loud that your inner voice doesn’t get heard.

    Self-trust doesn’t just happen. 

    It’s not the result of being perfect or always making the right choice. 

    It’s a relationship. 

    One that begins when you decide to start showing up for yourself with consistency, clarity, and care. A big part of that is creating enough mental space to actually hearyourself.

    One of the most practical ways I anchor into my own self-trust is by gently clearing out the mental and energetic clutter. When my mind is quiet, my intuition becomes louder. My clarity returns. I know what to do next because I can feel it again.

    Here are some of the practices that help me return to that place:

    Let yourself take a proper social media break. Even one full day away can shift your entire nervous system. Delete the apps. Reclaim your attention. Eat breakfast without scrolling. Go for a walk without your phone. Remember what it feels like to live in your body, not just online. You’re not going to miss anything. Everything important will still be here when you return.

    Stop checking email first thing in the morning. Give yourself at least one sacred hour before you open your brain to the demands of the world. That slow morning is magic and deserves to be protected. Use it to write, stretch, dream, create, listen. You can reply to emails later, when your creativity doesn’t need your full bandwidth.

    Turn off all unnecessary notifications. Not every ping deserves your attention. Not every alert is urgent. Let your phone serve you, not the other way around. (The only notifications allowed on my phone are phone calls and messages.)

    Make a list of the decisions that are swirling in your mind. Take note of the unmade choices weighing you down, and decide on them. All at once, if you can. Yes or no. Now or later. Decide to decide, or decide not to decide until next month or next year. Give your brain the closure it craves.

    Close open loops. Send the email. Pay the invoice. Return the item. Follow up with the person. You will be astonished by how much mental energy you free up when you stop dragging yesterday’s loose ends into today.

    Declutter your phone. Most of us have dozens of apps we never use. Delete what doesn’t support the version of you that you’re becoming.

    Delegate what you can. For so long, I resisted delegation. But delegation is actually about accepting and receiving help. It’s wise. It creates more time, space, and energy for the things only you can do. And it gives others a chance to support you, which they often want to do.

    Make amends where needed. Apologise. Forgive. Repair. Set things down that you’ve been carrying around in silence. Even if it’s something small, clearing the emotional debris makes room for a deeper self-trust to take root.

    When you do all this, even a few of these things, you begin to soften into yourself. You feel more grounded, more lucid, more resourced. You don’t need to grasp or hustle for answers because you can access them right here, within yourself.

    This is the work of The Way She Knows.

  • you might fall in love on an ordinary Thursday and move to New York six months later

    you might fall in love on an ordinary Thursday and move to New York six months later

    …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.

    Come join us.

    We begin on Monday, May 26th, enrolment closes Friday, May 24th.

  • choice architecture + invisible currents

    because so much of what we do each day isn’t really a choice, not in the conscious sense

    A month ago I was invited to teach this workshop for The Wild Ones Community. Today I decided I would share it with you too.

    The premise is that we are moved by invisible currents. Nudged by our surroundings. Directed by systems we didn’t design.

    Through this workshop, we’re going to pause and pay attention.

    To notice the subtle structures shaping our decisions — from the arrangement of a room, to the rhythms of our inbox, to the silent expectations in our relationships.
    And then… gently, deliberately, begin to redesign them.

    practical exercise (if you feel called to it)

    Choose one area of your life where you feel stuck, or where you tend to make choices you later wish you hadn’t.

    Then:

    1. For three days, notice and document all the environmental cues influencing your behaviour in that area — the physical setup, digital distractions, people nearby, time of day, even your energy levels or mood.
    2. Identify the three strongest “currents” — the forces most powerfully pulling you off course.
    3. Share your most surprising or interesting discovery in the comments below. What did you notice, now that you are really looking?

    You never know — your insight might help someone else spot a current they didn’t even know they were swimming in.

    this is where we go deeper

    One of the quiet teachings of The Way She Knows is that your inner knowing isn’t something you have to find but rather something you return to, again and again.

    And to return, we need to notice what pulls us away.

    We need to see the systems, structures, and subtle influences that guide our days and ask: Who designed this? Is this serving me? What do I want instead?

    This is an act of reclamation. 

    It’s a way of lifting the veil on the environments and patterns that keep you in loops and gently beginning to reorient them toward the life you actually want to live.

    It’s less about control and more about tending. Less about discipline, and more about designing your life to support the way you want to feel.

    That’s the deeper current of this work: To live in a way that’s attuned, not just to your values, but to your body, your seasons, your intuition, your truth.

    This is how she knows.
    Not by force, but by design.

    Maybe today something was brought into focus — a pattern, a pull, a way you’ve been shaped — The Way She Knows is where we go deeper.

    Together, we release the limiting beliefs, patterns, and conditioning that keep you stuck — and rebuild trust in your own voice. Guided by the RRRRI Method (Reflect · Review · Release · Replace · Integrate), you’ll receive daily audio teachings, soul-led prompts, and two live group calls to support you in returning to your truth and leading your life from within.

    You’re invited. If your body says yes, come join us. We begin in 14 days.

    JOIN HERE

  • let life be really good

    some thoughts on softness

    Some years are made for fighting shadows, some years are made for dreaming dreams, some years are made for wholly living, some years are made for falling in love, some years are made for heartbreak, and some years are the dark, rich spaces in-between that tie all the other years together.

    There are moments in every woman’s life 𓂃 often subtle, always significant 𓂃 when she realises she’s been waiting for life to feel good later.

    I am that woman, too.

    After the move.
    After she’s earned it.
    After the next launch.
    After she’s healed enough, achieved enough, grown enough.

    It’s not that she doesn’t want goodness now.
    It’s that her nervous system doesn’t recognise it as safe.
    She’s built her identity on high-functioning self-reliance, on holding it all together, on always preparing for the next hit of chaos.

    Goodness feels foreign. Untrustworthy. Fleeting.

    But there comes a point when you get tired.
    Not just tired in your bones, but soul-tired.
    Tired of bracing for bad news.
    Tired of living on emotional adrenaline.
    Tired of feeling like peace is something you can only visit in short bursts.

    This moment is an invitation: what if life gets to be good now?

    your body doesn’t lie

    If your system is used to surviving, “good” can feel unsafe.

    Calm can feel like a threat.
    Pleasure can trigger shame.
    Stillness can summon panic.

    We don’t override that reality by shaming it. We honour it. We meet ourselves there.
    Letting life be good begins with learning how to stay with good. To recognise it. Receive it. Regulate in the presence of it.

    This isn’t just a mindset shift. It’s a somatic one.

    Which is why I ask myself:

    What are the tiny signals of goodness I can practice noticing?
    ✧ the softness of my sheets in the morning
    ✧ the kindness in a stranger’s eyes
    ✧ the miracle of a moment with nothing to prove

    The more I notice, the more I can hold.
    The more I hold, the more I trust.
    The more I trust, the safer it feels to expand into joy without sabotage.

    you don’t have to earn softness

    So many of us were raised on invisible contracts that said:

    Be good, then you’ll get love.
    Work hard, then you’ll get rest.
    Suffer well, then you’ll get your reward.

    It creates a rhythm of deprivation, where we become addicted to proving our worth through pain. It keeps us stuck in cycles of over-functioning, over-giving, over-efforting.

    But what if we broke the contract?

    What if softness wasn’t a prize at the end of your endurance?
    What if it was the starting point?

    This is the paradox of receiving: you can’t force it.

    You have to soften enough to allow it. That softness — that capacity to receive life fully — is a practice of presence, not perfection.

    It asks:
    Can I let myself enjoy this moment without earning it?
    Can I stop bracing for it to be taken away?
    Can I let it be this good, this easy, this free?

    practicing your way into goodness

    Letting life be good isn’t about bypassing the hard stuff.
    It’s about refusing to let pain be your only portal to meaning.

    Here are some ways I’m practicing:

    1. Noticing where struggle has become identity.
    Do I feel more real when I’m suffering?
    More valid when I’m busy?
    More lovable when I’m useful?

    2. Replacing performance with presence.
    Instead of performing wellness, I’m allowing mess.
    Instead of performing peace, I’m regulating in real time.
    Instead of performing power, I’m rooting into truth.

    3. Setting up small rituals that remind me I’m safe to enjoy.
    A slow morning. A spontaneous dance break. A walk without my phone.
    Tiny practices that say to my system: this is safe, this is safe, this is safe.

    4. Choosing environments that don’t require me to shrink.
    The people, spaces, and structures I choose are part of the goodness.
    They reflect back the truth that I don’t have to abandon myself to belong.

    a closing truth

    There’s a quiet rebellion in letting life be good.
    In refusing to rehearse old wounds.

    In choosing to orient toward pleasure, peace, and enoughness, not as a reward, but as a right.

    And like all rebellions, it takes practice.

    But the more we choose it, the more it becomes familiar.
    The more we hold it, the more it grows.
    And the more it grows, the more we remember: this is what we were always meant for.

    Let your life be good, not someday, but now.

    Not because you’ve earned it.
    But because you’ve remembered how to receive it.

    This is the work we do inside ‘The Way She Knows’.

    A gentle, practical journey to release the limiting beliefs, patterns, and conditioning that keep you stuck and to help you reconnect to your quiet knowing.

    We start on Monday, May 26.

    Earlybird price ends on Monday with the full moon.

    The Way She Knows

  • this life is a dream within a dream ☁️

    about NYC being a place of contrast requiring inner stability, and the quiet strength of being well-resourced

    When I stepped out of JFK airport and followed the signs to the subway, I braced myself. New York is known for its edge, its abrasion. I am soft. I tend and protect that softness like a flame cupped in two hands. I wasn’t sure how it would survive here.

    I tapped my phone at the turnstile and joined a tall young man in the elevator. He wore headphones and held himself like someone accustomed to noise. Still, I turned to him, map pulled up on my phone, unsure where to go. He removed one earbud, glanced at the screen, and said in the gentlest voice, “You can’t get the F from here, but if you take the K, you can transfer in three stops.” 

    I blinked. He had such a kind presence. His softness mirrored mine. Maybe there’s space for gentleness here, after all.

    I followed his directions toward the Lower East Side. A few minutes into the ride, the unmistakable smell of urine filled the carriage. A man down the carriage—middle-aged, Chinese descent—had wet himself and begun swearing loudly. Slurring. Angry. A different kind of edge.

    This city, I’m learning, holds everything. Softness and despair. Precision and chaos. A young man with headphones offering quiet directions. An older man unravelling in public. Here, opposites coexist, unapologetically. New York is a city of contrasts, and that is, perhaps, its defining trait.

    The days have spilled into one another like rainwater pooling in uneven stone. Time behaves differently here. Moments stretch. Then vanish. Weeks slip past before I can grab hold. What I’m learning is this: I cannot tether myself to the outside world. It’s too volatile. Too fast. Too much.

    Instead, I tether myself inward. I return to a still point inside me — a quiet place I cultivate through ritual and self-devotion. I nurture it like a small garden: feeding it with breath, rest, laughter, water, movement, music. A daily act of remembrance. Of protection. Of belonging to myself.

    Sometimes, it’s as simple as walking to Whole Foods alone, sending a few voice notes to the women who hold me in their hearts. That ten-minute walk fulfils two needs: solitude and connection. It’s imperfect. But it’s enough.

    Work is another tether. Returning to it each day — whether I want to or not — grounds me. I write. I build. I teach. I remember who I am. Even when the city pulls me in every direction.

    Last night, friends made homemade pizza and poured glasses of white wine. We ate slowly, talked about art, about cities we’ve loved. And then, walking home, we passed a man with his trousers around his knees, bare bottom exposed, head buried in a trash bin. Of course. That’s New York, too.

    Right now, I’m writing this during a live co-writing session for The Art of Noticing. Eight of us are here, silent on Zoom, warm orchestral music in the background. Earlier, we spoke about a line from one of my recent essays about being a well-resourced woman. We explored how writing can teach without instructing. That sometimes, the lesson is simply in the living.

    In Her Way Club, this here community I lead, that’s what I teach: how to listen inward. How to find your way—not the right way, not the perfect way, but yourway. In writing. In loving. In parenting. In creating. In becoming.

    And to find your way, you must first be resourced. You need space. You need softness. You need access to yourself.

    Being resourced is a privilege, yes. But it’s also a practice. A skill we build and rebuild. I see it as the art of tending to our inner ecosystem. Of becoming our own safe haven.

    It means expanding your capacity to meet life without collapsing. Learning to sit with discomfort. Making choices from groundedness, not panic. It doesn’t mean you never need others. It means you’re not uprooted every time the wind blows.

    How do you become that person?

    You start small:

    • You build a daily rhythm that supports your nervous system.
    • You learn to breathe when you want to scream.
    • You create a home that feels like a hug.
    • You save a little money, even when it’s hard.
    • You learn to cook a meal you love.
    • You reach out and you know how to be alone.
    • You keep learning. Keep listening.

    This is what I’ve brought with me to New York. Not just clothes and books and dreams, but tools. Practices. A soft heart and a solid core.

    And maybe that’s enough to belong here.

  • make friends & steal their magic

    a note 📝 on why trying to do life alone is not a vibe, and how the right people make everything easier, better, and way less confusing

    The first marker of growth is realising that your parents are not all-knowing guides but imperfect humans navigating their own paths. 

    The second is recognising that while life may have handed you challenges, your power lies in how you choose to play the hand. Whether you stay stuck in your stories or rise to meet your own becoming. 

    The third is understanding the art of connection. How presence, warmth, and authenticity shape the way the world responds to you, weaving influence and possibility into every interaction, every moment, every version of yourself that you step into next.

    This morning, I woke up feeling like a half-formed thing. My bones, my skin, my memories had melted overnight into something unrecognisable. My heart, my lungs, my thoughts, all swimming in some liminal space between what was and what is becoming.

    I wanted to do everything at once. Crawl out of my skin, burrow deep inside myself, grasp at the illusion of normalcy. That fleeting sense of steadiness that comes and goes like sunlight through moving clouds.

    But that’s not the life I chose. 

    I throw myself headfirst into new things. Willing myself into expansion, into shedding, into becoming, and then — wide-eyed, bewildered — curse myself for it.

    This is what it means to be alive. 

    A continuous rhythm of unravelling and reassembling, of losing myself and finding my way back home.

    Human transformation is peculiar in that way. We appear mostly unchanged on the outside while, internally, our very foundation liquefies and reforms, shifting us into something both familiar and unrecognisably new. Some metamorphoses take years. Others happen in a single breath. We are forever mid-wifeing ourselves through cycles of undoing and recreating.

    And yet, we don’t do it alone. Evolution, growth, becoming: the process demands others. Those who have walked the path before us, showing us what’s possible. 

    People who, by simply existing, illuminate the shape of our own becoming. They are proof that what we long for isn’t just a dream. It’s a direction. A gravitational pull toward who we are meant to be.

    There was a time when I felt so disillusioned by who the world was telling me to be. And then, a woman entered my life. She embodied a grace, clarity, a way of moving through the world that felt like poetry in motion. She didn’t hand me a map. She didn’t give me step-by-step instructions. She simply lived in a way that whispered to something deep inside me: “This is possible for you, too.”

    I learned to echo her grace in my way. 

    We are not islands, shifting and reshaping in solitude. We are ecosystems, intertwined with those who expand us, who stretch our perception of what’s possible. The ones who have already created, built, or become something that stirs something deep within us. 

    A silent recognition. A quiet knowing: this is meant for you, too.

    Expanders are not accidental. 

    We are drawn to them because they reflect what already lives within us, waiting to be awakened. They show our subconscious that the path we crave isn’t just a fantasy—it’s real, and it’s attainable. Their existence cracks open the walls of our own limitations, permitting us to step forward, to believe, to act.

    A few years ago I met a woman who made big decisions without over-explaining or second-guessing. She laughed easily, moved boldly, and showed me — without ever meaning to — that I didn’t need to agonise over every choice or justify my desires. By being in her orbit, something in me softened. 

    I started letting things be easier. I started trusting myself more.

    Who we surround ourselves with matters. 

    Our communities shape our possibilities. The people in our orbit either reinforce old versions of us or pull us toward expansion. Without realising it, we are always absorbing, mirroring, and becoming.

    So this morning, as I sat with the discomfort of my own evolution, I asked myself: 

    Who is showing me the way? Who expands my world? And am I allowing myself to follow the pull?

    It is impossible to avoid the challenges, aches and pains that come with life. 

    True community emerges when we surround ourselves with those who understand that meaningful relationships are born out of action. 

    Love is a verb.

    We need to be the people willing to witness vulnerability without flinching.

    Our emotional lives mirror the natural world’s cycles: darkness and light eternally embracing one another. Each experience of sorrow carries within it the seed of joy; each moment of connection bears the imprint of our separateness. When we touch one state deeply, we become intimate with its opposite.

    This is authentic connection embodied.

    Recognising that friendship and community require us to honour the completeness of human experience, to practice presence in both suffering and celebration and to build relationships that nurture our collective well-being.

    This is where expanders come in.

    An expander is someone who has created or achieved something in their life that we desire to also have or create. This concept is based on simple neuroscience and the creation of mirror neurons.

    It’s not that expanders are perfect beings who have mastered life. They are everyday people, like you and me, who have flourished in certain areas, and because of this, they can expand us on our own journeys.

    One of my closest friends is a woman nearly a decade younger than me. Her emotional maturity and dedication to skillfulness in relationships astound me. I watch the way she approaches difficult conversations — not with avoidance or defensiveness — but with curiosity and care. 

    Being in her presence taught me to be a better friend, lover and human.

    Every single one of us inhabits the full spectrum of humanness. Those very aspects of these people that are bringing you so much inspiration are actually a reflection of aspects of you that have gotten lost due to societal, media, parental, or peer programming.1

    The beauty of expansion is that it doesn’t require perfection. Only possibility. We expand one another simply by existing in our truth.

    This is why I created ALIGNED.

    To provide access to the expanders and community that will walk alongside you as you navigate the transitions and transformations of your own becoming. Because you are not meant to do it alone.

    ALIGNED is more than a course. It is an incubator for expansion, for transformation, for meeting the people who will hold you in both strength and tenderness as you step into the version of yourself you know you are meant to be.

    Enrolment closes in 5 days. Learn more here: ALIGNED

    Client Receipts

    real stories, real impact 💫

    “I’ve been following you, Vienda, for years on Instagram long before Plannher, and will join whatever community you create because I know it will be fostered in an energy of growth, acceptance, and soul.”

    “I loved having someone in my court, to have someone waiting for me and knowing that would be a resource, a thing that wasn’t mine to solve, but someone I could collaborate with on solving or discovering things. That was a really lovely feeling.”

    “Having a group of people to get to know helped me feel like there was a community of like-minded people and feel supported even if we had different areas working through and on.”

    “I love the way you always include accountability partners and listening partners into your courses. I have always found it so valuable. I also do feel you attract interesting and powerful people to your courses that have so much value and I’ve stayed in touch with people in the past afterwards and supported each other’s businesses/visions which have been really special.”

    1

    If you are curious about finding your own expanders, choose something in your life that you would like to make real and then ask yourself these questions:

    • Who do I know that I feel drawn to almost instantly?
    • When I look at this person, what do I find appealing about them?
    • What is this person’s vibe that draws me to them? Is it something about their personality? Their career? Their spiritual approach or practices? The vacations they go on? Their relationship? The way they talk or how they dress?
    • What characteristics about this person resonate with me/remind me of myself?
    • What is their life story: are there any overlaps or similarities with my story?
    • How can I learn from this person? Do they have a book, podcast, or course? Can I spend time with them? Can I reach out and learn more about how they got to where they are?
    • Can this person help me become super clear on my desired manifestation? Do I realise details about their life that I would really like for my own?
    • What can I learn from this person?

  • how to actually change your life

    who am I when I am not running toward something new?

    For the next ten days, I am inviting you into a conversation about transformation—the kind that is deep, sustainable, and truly liberating. I’ll be sharing insights, stories, and practices from ALIGNED, my 6-week programdesigned to help you take intentional action in your life and business. This program is the culmination of years of personal exploration and guiding others through the delicate process of inner shifts that lead to tangible change.

    This work is profoundly important to me because I have lived and breathed it for years, testing its principles in my own life and witnessing its impact on the lives of those I’ve worked with. And nothing speaks to its power more than the experiences of past participants:

    “One key takeaway from this course was identifying my limiting belief: ‘I have to do it like everyone else.’ Realizing this and choosing a different story feels incredibly freeing.”

    “Having a group of people to get to know helped me feel like there was a community of like-minded individuals, offering support even as we worked on different areas of our lives.”

    “I love the way you always include accountability and listening partners in your courses. It creates such valuable connections, and I’ve stayed in touch with past participants, supporting each other’s businesses and visions in truly special ways.”

    “I took your course on money, and my entire life shifted within 2-3 months—that was crazy! I had been aware of my fears and beliefs for years but never found a way to let them go until I took your course. I am still mind-blown.”

    So much of what holds us back is invisible to us. 

    Our minds become intricate labyrinths of inherited narratives, subconscious fears, and well-worn patterns that shape our choices, often without our awareness. 

    This is why today, I want to talk to you about how to actually change your life — starting with the very thing that keeps you stuck: limiting beliefs.

    It’s been five months since I moved to this little surf town on the Atlantic coast of Portugal. Five months of waking to the sound of waves rolling against the cliffs, of salt-drenched air that clings to my hair and skin, of slow mornings wrapped in mist and coffee and the promise of something unknown.

    And yet, despite all this beauty — this wild, unpredictable, heart-expanding beauty — there have been moments when I have felt utterly, inexplicably stuck. As if something inside me was pressing against an invisible ceiling, a quiet resistance lurking beneath the surface.

    It never fails to astonish me how I carry every part of myself wherever I go — every fear, every belief, every invisible boundary I have ever built. 

    In the past five months, I’ve found myself face to face with an unfamiliar stillness, a startling absence of the urge to chase something new. It lingers like a question I can’t quite answer, so foreign that I wonder if I’ve misplaced my ambition entirely.

    I used to think that growth meant running toward something new — more freedom, more success, more peace. 

    But I’ve learned that the most important work isn’t in the external shifts, but in the quiet, often uncomfortable act of meeting yourself where you are and asking: 

    What is actually keeping me here?

    I recently ran a free challenge to help you find clarity in your life — over 100 people joined (you can, too) — and the most common struggle you shared was this: 

    How do I uncover my limiting beliefs when I can’t even see them?

    That’s the thing about the patterns that hold us back—they exist in the shadows, shaping our choices without us even realising it. It’s an inside job, and our limitations are often our biggest blind spots. 

    That’s exactly why I created Aligned —a deeply supportive, transformative space designed to help you move through those hidden limitations in a way that feels pragmatic, expansive, and fun. Because real change doesn’t have to be heavy—it can be meaningful, energizing, and deeply freeing.

    Doors close in 10 days, and there are only 12 spots available per group.

    Hit reply if you’re on the fence, or sign up here.

    the simple process I use for shifting limiting beliefs

    1. identify my current challenge

    The first clue that I am operating from a limiting belief is the sensation of being stuck. That heavy, unmoving energy that tells you something isn’t working but doesn’t quite reveal why.

    For me, in those first few months in Ericeira, I felt a deep-seated fear that no matter how much I expanded, I would always find myself circling back to the same struggles—uncertainty about what I was supposed to be doing, my business growth, and the question of whether I was truly doing enough. 

    It was familiar, frustrating, and maddeningly persistent.

    I had to sit with it. To acknowledge it and feel it.

    TIP 1: Instead of trying to bulldoze through it, pause. What’s the exact problem? Name it. Be as precise as possible. The more clarity you bring, the more power you have over it.

    2. taking ownership without shame

    What I discovered was that, after years and years of living the life I had dreamed of, my dreams had run dry. 

    I was out of alignment with who I am, and what I wanted because I didn’t believe I was worthy of having big dreams anymore. I discovered that I am someone with enormous desires. Desires that I had squashed.

    Career-wise, I blamed the algorithm (it’s changed so much!), the economy (people are spending less!).

    And then! My 12k Instagram account was hacked and then stolen from me. A decade of work, gone overnight!

    But the truth? None of that was the real reason I felt stuck. 

    The real reason was that I was clinging to old stories about my worth and ability, stories that whispered: You have to work harder to deserve more. You have to struggle for this to count.

    Taking ownership didn’t mean blaming myself. It meant acknowledging that if I was the one unconsciously building these walls, I was also the one who could tear them down.

    TIP 2: Here’s where it gets tender: can you take full responsibility for your current reality—without shame, without self-punishment? Can you look at the patterns that have led you here with compassion, rather than criticism?

    3. seeing the invitation for growth

    I know — even though, like all of us, I often need to be reminded — that my biggest frustrations are signposts pointing me toward the exact lesson I need. The solution is always to lean in and ask: What is this here to show me?

    The moment I did, things shifted. I saw how my limiting beliefs weren’t just abstract ideas—they were running the show. Success requires struggle. Ease is irresponsible. If you slow down, you’ll fall behind. And I realised: these weren’t truths. 

    They were choices.

    TIP 3: The blindspots are the areas in life we are not in alignment with because we have limiting beliefs around them. Your mind is powerful. It will always find evidence for what you believe. The good news? You get to decide what to believe next.

    4. embrace the ripple effect

    I am going through growing pangs. This is an opportunity to build something even stronger. It’s a painful shift, but these moments create space for new approaches that end up being more aligned.

    I am valuing myself and my work in ways that I should have a long time ago, but did not, because I did not believe I was enough. This shows me that my external reality was only ever reflecting what I believed to be true about myself.

    TIP 4: When you start dismantling the old stories, your life shifts in ways you can’t yet see. The work you put in today—challenging your beliefs, choosing different thoughts, moving from a place of trust instead of fear—will show up in unexpected ways. New opportunities. Conversations that change everything. A lightness you can’t explain.

    This morning I woke up, warm after many cold nights, my hair stuck to my face.

    It’s one of those mornings where everything feels a little lopsided. 

    My soy milk has curdled so I can’t make myself a matcha and have to settle for a herbal tea. My dentist appointment is cancelled because the dentist is ill. I am relieved because I don’t feel like walking the 20 minutes in the torrential downpour anyway. I journal.

    Your life is always responding to you. And if you want something different, you don’t have to work harder, force it, or prove yourself. You just have to start believing a new story — and living from it as if it were already true.

    I am learning, awkwardly, how to embody the new version of myself that I am becoming. Anticipation builds alongside the next steps life is revealing to me.

    TIP 5: What makes this process so transformative is that it moves us from feeling powerless to feeling deeply, profoundly capable. When you stop trying to change everything outside of you and instead start working on what’s within, everything shifts.

    If you’re considering joining me for either ALIGNED OFFER (business-focused) or ALIGNED ACTION (life-focused), now is the time. Doors close in 10 days, and there are only 12 spots available per group.

    LEARN MORE HERE

    If you’re unsure, email me — I’m happy to help you decide.

  • everybody has a different story

    …and you know you want to live yours

    I never planned to be here.

    It’s 7.34, and the sun is just starting to peek over the hill covered in tall buildings that shadow the village in the mornings. I am cross-legged on my sofa, wrapped in a blanket grateful for the ache in my chest that arrives whenever I sit, fingers softly poised above keys, ready to pour all of myself into the words on a page. I can hear the waves crashing onto the shore 300 metres from my balcony and the washing machine slopping wet dirty clothes around inside itself.

    What I did plan on is to feel alive.

    To me, Ericeira smells like sea salt and algae. It smells like fishing lines and burnt coffee. Most days the humidity is around 90%. It feels like walking through a neverending water wall. Mostly infiltrated by people not from here this winter the streets have been silent. The locals shuffle through their days in their unhurried solitude. The cold, humid ache that goes deep into my bones is interspersed by warm sunny hours in the middle of the day.

    Here, my everyday life is quiet.

    When I arrived I had followed something in my body that told me ‘not here’. A subtle disquiet that had been with me. Because place matters. But I had decided to stop planning and start living without knowing how this story ends.

    It brought me here.

    For so much of my life, I thought that to live a meaningful life I needed to choose my steps carefully. That it would all unravel and fall apart if I wasn’t meticulous in my decision-making and planning. It’s me and the world. I am alone. I don’t have a family to fall back on. There is always some risk involved when I do anything new and I am acutely conscious of the fact that I lack a cushion to rely on if things go wrong. Which they do.

    Frustrated with living in fear I cultivated a new approach.

    What I discovered was that there is a state of alignment you can reach in which magical things will start happening for you. I often call it kismet but really, it’s being in a relationship with the dynamic aliveness of life. Once I figured out how it worked I was able to relax and now have a lot of fun inviting that kind of serendipity into my decision-making processes and day-to-day life.

    I have very literally been in the business of living in alignment for years and I still need reminders that the way I move through life is enough.

    It’s no surprise. The rampant roar of the outside world is strong. It overpowers the subtle nudges and the cultivation of inner stillness necessary to enter into alignment. Despite years of evidence that living in alignment works I still have times of doubt and uncertainty. I have had to learn how to stay centred and not let that derail me.

    I have to be resolute in my devotion to alignment.

    I’m teaching exactly how I do this — both in my life; and in my business — across 6 weeks starting on Monday, March 10 2025. There are only 12 spaces in each cohort. Join me for ALIGNED, here.

    I could never have planned the life that was waiting for me.

    I left England last year because it dimmed my light. I was becoming someone I didn’t recognise. I had outgrown my environment and had become complacent and indolent in every area of my life. I was out of alignment. This misalignment isn’t just uncomfortable – it’s costly. It drained me of my energy, dampened my creativity, and held me back from the life I was meant to live.

    But I know I always have a choice.

    So I left and it took me on a misadventure through the Mediterranean Sea where I was redirected to a village by the Atlantic Ocean where I fell in love and am now moving to New York. I could never have planned any of this. But life, in its mystery and intelligence, did. All I had to do was let go of trying to control the uncontrollable and get into alignment instead.

    Choosing change is hard. Choosing a new story without knowing how it ends is even harder. But when you choose alignment, life moves you to where you are meant to be with so much grace and ease, that the obstacles on the way no longer matter. 

    They don’t go away. But they become insignificant in comparison to the bigger vision. The project of living your most alive, vibrant, dynamic and meaningful life.

    Aligned teaches a dynamic way to live and work in alignment, where action flows from clarity, trust, and surrender.

    ALIGNED is not just one program — it’s two distinct pathways, running simultaneously, designed to support you based on where you are right now.

    • ALIGNED ACTION is for you if you are ready to transform your personal life — activating changes in relationships, career, purpose, and finances with trust and confidence.
    • ALIGNED OFFER is for you if you are ready to build or grow an online business — creating offers that sell with ease, alignment, and momentum.

    Both programs follow the same structure but focus on different areas of life. You’ll be part of a powerful container with daily insights, live workshops, and a supportive community—all guiding you toward aligned, inspired action.

    LEARN MORE & JOIN HERE

    I don’t know exactly what is next.

    What I do know is that as long as I remain aligned, life happens for me. Things that I can never imagine or plan or prepare for. Things I hope and dream for but only reach when I move into alignment and let go.

    As these winter days and nights come to an end and spring starts to make itself known in the slightly longer and warmer days I relish the tiny moments. 

    Some afternoons I see the locals leaning out of their windows watching the world pass by and if we have crossed each other often enough we smile and nod. Bright purple and yellow wildflowers are beginning to cover the cliff edges facing the restless Atlantic Ocean reminding me of the dynamic nature of life. The damp air as I walk home in the evening carrying dates from the organic market and I look up and see the stars. A luxury that is here and won’t be when I leave.

    I can’t wait to see how this story continues.