Category: pov musings

revealing how I develop my online courses and programmes

I’m currently accepting applications for my two-month live business mentoring program COWORK. 

While I am marketing it, I am also seeing private clients, running two other programmes, and working on two new ones in the background while I also attempt to grow. ~ want to have me on your substack/podcast? :) 

Email me: studio@viendamaria.com

That’s the way it is when running a business, and I wouldn’t have it any other way because it’s not just a business to me but a way to create a life. I see myself as an artist and my life as the canvas and my work as the extension of both, built into a body of work.

I thought I’d share the behind-the-curtains aspect of creating an offering. 

As I mentioned, I am working on two programmes: one is an update and revamp of a money, mindset and manifestation programme called AFFLUENT that I stopped selling because it no longer matched the current landscape. 

The other one is a weekly writing and coworking subscription that I have been asked for literal years to set up, but that I just haven’t had the affinity to… that’s the thing with working like this: I need to wait to catch the wave to move and take action on certain things becasue I only create within natural forward movement cycles. I never force creation if the wave that moves something forward isn’t there.

And so this thing, despite being asked for it so often, just hasn’t come to fruition. Until now. Last week, a client asked the same question: if I would be willing to create this kind of container where she could come and be held accountable for showing up to build her body of work. I told her what I am telling you: that I have been meaning to and that I want to, and that maybe now I will finally do it.

So, the steps I take are:

• momentum!!! this can come from within you ~ where you just have this really powerful feeling that you need to move towards something and pull it from the ether and turn it into something tangible OR, as in this case ~ you have been asked for something so many times, something that you actually want to create, that it is inevitable…
• start exploring the idea. I start with a Note or a Google Doc and start playing with the overarching elements: names, what it is, where/when/how it’s held, who it’s for, how much it will cost. 

example:

• decide when you are ready to start offering this thing and then reverse-engineer the timeline from then to now
• build the information page where all the information about the ‘thing’ will live, including application/sign-up button/payment processing
• map out a marketing plan across the time you have starting now until the start date
• BEGIN!
• AND: look, the truth is there’s no guarantee that the thing you make is successful by conventional standards. it might not sell out, it might not fill up, it might not quite hit, it might not be the right time, etc etc etc. BUT that’s actually a very important and beautiful part of the process!

Because IF IT DOESN’T WORK, you instantly are moved closer to something that does. maybe it needs to be reworked, maybe you need to change the timeline of the wording or the container, maybe you have some inner work to do to get into alignment with it, maybe it’s not really authentic to you, and you need to face that and get to know yourself deeper and commit to being fully expressed and seen in your flawed human imperfection in ways you didn’t really want to be when your ego was trying to protect you, etc etc etc. TRYING IS NEVER WASTED. It is part of the devotional path of the artist who is building a life and a business

This is what COWORK is essentially about: COMMIT > MARKET > SELL.

I know I make it sound easy, like lalalala these are the steps you take et voila, everything is magic, tralala, and on the surface it IS a bit like that.

It IS magic imo. But underneath there is a murky dark ocean of fear, doubt, resistance and understanding the energetics that lie BEHIND everything you are creating and doing on the surface.

In COWORK I support you not only in making the thing – taking the surface-level steps – but also guide you through the layers underneath that cripple you, freeze you and stop you from moving forward. This container is fun and freeing, as well as deep and excavating. 

This is the work!

Applications to join me for the last round of COWORK in 2026 close in a week. Even if you’re not quite sure yet but curious, I suggest completing the application form.

hello!!! ~ from very hot, very dry, very beautiful Greece.

The jet lag doesn’t fade. It breaks like a fever, leaving me suddenly, beautifully awake in the middle of everything. For five days I had been a ghost moving through the white Mediterranean light, but now my skin finally feels attached to my bones again.

Below me, the ancient Olive Valley of Phocis is a giant, shimmering ocean of silver-green silk rolling down to the Gulf of Corinth. The air smells of baked red dirt, wild oregano, and the heavy, intoxicating sweetness of overripe figs splitting open in the heat. Every few minutes, a sudden, cool breeze sweeps up from the gulf, forcing a million olive leaves to turn their silver underbellies to the light all at once, flashing like a school of fish. In the distance, across the blue water, the rugged peaks of the Peloponnese mountains looked so impossibly jagged and violet they almost break your heart. 

High above them, pinned to the sky, hangs a pale half-moon, lazy and faded.

I sit in the heavy heat, my linen dress sticking slightly to the hot metal chair, completely mesmerised. In front of me is a glass of the house rosé. The glass is thick, heavy, and coated in thick beads of condensation that pool on the rough wooden table, glueing the base to the wood every time I set it down. It is ice-cold, tart, and tastes like crushed wild strawberries and flint. A cheap, honest wine, exactly like the colour pink I want to be fused with right now.

A young waiter appears, smelling faintly of loose tobacco and cheap cologne, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes and casual grace found only in boys who know they are beautiful. He drops a small ceramic plate onto the table with a flourish, his thumb leaving a damp print on the rim.

“On the house,” he murmurs.

On the plate sits a thick slab of something totally unrecognisable to my eye. It is pale, dense, and gleaming with a slick coat of green olive oil and a heavy dusting of dried mountain herbs. I look at the mystery block, then up at his beautiful, indifferent face.

“What is it?” I ask.

He looks at me like I had just asked him to explain the basic mechanics of the sun.

“Grilled cheese,” he says, flatly.

He turns on his heel and saunters off, leaving me alone with the mountain breeze, the silver trees, and the salty cheese. I turn to my journal and write.

you have to be more afraid of wasting your life than embarrassing yourself

AUG 09, 2026

Every evening after I have closed down the external world — turned off my phone, closed my laptop, locked the front door, showered, washed and moisturised my face, and brushed my teeth — I like to sit in bed with a low light or no light on and let my mind wander. A scaling back of my interaction with the outside world to tend to the one inside me. I listen to the tropical cicadas’ shrill and the geckos’ loud to-kay! to-kay, and the occasional vehicle that grinds past on the dirt road below my balcony. In this tepid mental dusk, there are no intellectual acrobatics, but rather a sort of day-dreaming that brings secret longings into existence.

When I told my friend Helen last week that one of my secret longings was to write a screenplay, direct it and act in it, she urged me to do it. I love your writing! she exclaimed. You’re so enigmatic with people when you want to be! Immediately I began to backpedal. The urge to avoid doing something so monumental and new — the entire contents of my dreams — is always my knee-jerk response to feeling overcome by my fear of total and abysmal failure. And when I reason through how impossible this dream is, I spiral further into all the potential ways I will embarrass myself.

To want, and to dream, risks humiliation. Though I am taking the babiest of baby steps towards it every week, writing it out loud makes me want to bail and pretend the dream is actually something much smaller, more manageable, more achievable.

It is alarming how quickly I can shut down any one of my dreams. It’s not even about this particular dream. It’s about any hope or dream or vision that I hold for myself that pushes me so far beyond a reality I am familiar with that it makes me want to immediately run. Both towards it and away from it. It’s that push-pull that will drive any sane person into a state of delirium.

As I have written before, I love dreaming and wanting. I love the heat of it, the ache, the way it stretches me toward something beyond my current life. Dreams work to not only fuel our creativity but to define our lives. They offer us turning points again and again and again, for any moment that we dare to take hold and ride them out.

Right now, so many of us are at a turning point. But this one is actually about becoming more yourself. And to do that, you need to put your life on the line. You can’t be passive and hope it happens to you. You have to be more afraid of wasting your life than embarrassing yourself.

This inner tension is a universal human tragedy. Rather than convincing ourselves that our dreams and hopes and aspirations and desires aren’t so important and prioritising more practical aspects of our lives, a meaningful life will always entail a certain amount of risk and humiliation. Flourishing is fragile and vulnerable, and in pursuing it we must sacrifice parts of ourselves.

I live a fairly charmed life and still regularly find myself making this process much harder than it needs to be. It’s misguided to assume that embracing humiliation for the sake of fulfilment requires unbridled effort. A rational part of me wants to believe that if I just try harder, my fears of failure and complete embarrassment will disappear and be replaced with everything working out magically because I willed them into place by doing everything perfectly. As if there is some headmistress in the sky measuring every action and dropping a gold star onto my head for every perfectly executed effort. In fact, this isn’t rational at all, but a form of blind hope, delusion even. 

This is the detritus of any form of linear thinking. It assumes one step leads straight to the next. Reality is far messier and runs on a trail of unknowns and failures on the path to fulfilled dreams. When I take rational thoughts out of the equation, a more organic approach opens up. 

When you deeply care about the things you’re trying to do, and are ready to reach the turning point for your next chapter, you have to stop trying to do everything in your power to reach for your dreams, and instead allow them to float down to meet you. The moment you stop resisting your own dreams, something else becomes possible: your life-force, creativity and capacity to initiate can begin meeting them halfway, in a way that feels intimate and alive.

What I appreciate about the ways that we can go about this process of allowing is that it works in indirect ways. You don’t need to keep up with everyone else to create a turning point for your next chapter this summer. I encourage you to take the time to bask under the sun, eat warm berries fresh from the vine and dip your toes into a cool pool of water. Doing those things is what will get you there faster. It actually helps to accept that the fastest way to your dreams is following the smallest specks of joy and pleasure that are guiding you to your destiny.

8 ways to create your turning point this summer

For when you are faced with the impossible problem of feeling your fears when following your dreams, I’m going to leave you with 8 ways to create your turning point this summer.

1. relax

My Chinese medicine doctor said to me recently that “tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you really are” which changed my brain chemistry. So much of the anxiety that we are walking around with in the outside world comes from not trusting ourselves. We are constantly trying to anticipate what might happen next, trying to get ahead of ourselves, trying to make sure we are doing the right thing and being the right person and making the right decision, as though we can think our way into some kind of guaranteed safety.

2. create a pattern interrupt

We underestimate how much we practice rigidity in tiny, everyday ways, and then wonder why we find ourselves so overwhelmed when life inevitably asks us to show up differently. If every deviation from the plan is experienced as an inconvenience, a disruption, or something to be corrected, we become very good at needing things to be a certain way. By becoming a little less precious about the familiar things, we invite flexibility into our lives. Take a different route to the store. Rearrange your furniture. Work from somewhere you don’t normally work. Join me for COWORK :) Change your plans because you feel like it. When you practice meeting unfamiliar things with curiosity instead of resistance, you begin to build a different relationship with change.

3. anchor yourself inside yourself

In our last call one of my going pro students asked me how I manage to keep showing up to my work when I move, change homes and base myself in different places so often, and I replied that it is because I don’t anchor myself to my environment in the way that most people do. I anchor myself to my creativity and my work, which remain the same and continue on regardless of where I happen to be. There is something incredibly freeing about knowing that you can take yourself with you. Your routines might change, your surroundings might change, your circumstances might change, but the part of you that makes, thinks, dreams and creates is still there. And when you know how to return to that place, you become much harder to knock off course. Watch how much opens up for you when you stop anchoring yourself to what is happening around you and start anchoring yourself to what is happening inside you. 

4. stop trying to please your future self

I think we can all become strangely tyrannical towards the person we imagine we will be in the future. We are constantly making decisions for her, trying to make sure she will be proud of us, grateful that we worked harder, grateful that we didn’t waste our time, grateful that we made the sensible choice. But the future version of you is a person you have completely invented, and I am increasingly suspicious of how much authority we give her. She might not want what you think she will want. She might look back at this version of your life and understand perfectly well why you made the choices you did. She might even wish you had relaxed a little more. What feels good now? What are you curious about now? What do you want to experience before you become whoever it is you are going to become? You don’t have to sacrifice the present for your magnificent future.

5. decide what kind of life you want to live

The older I get, the more interested I am in this question. I find myself asking it in the most ordinary moments. Where would I wake up if I could wake up anywhere? How much would I work if I didn’t have to prove anything? What kind of life would actually feel good to live? It is a strange question because the answers are often much less impressive than I expect them to be. There is a life that you have been taught to want, and then there is the one that keeps appearing in your imagination. Maybe it doesn’t make sense on paper but makes something in you soften when you picture it.

6. do it scared

There is no universe in which you are going to break past your old self and become the person your new life requires you to be without feeling uncomfortable. You are going to feel scared and insecure and exposed and ridiculous. You are going to wonder if you are making a terrible mistake. You are going to have moments where the old version of you feels so much safer and more sensible and familiar that you will wonder why on earth you decided to do any of this in the first place. I think we waste an extraordinary amount of time trying to get rid of these feelings before we allow ourselves to move. We think confidence is supposed to arrive first, followed by the brave decision, followed by the new life. But it happens the other way around.

7. do it kindly

Something really shifted for me when I started treating myself like I was four years old. Before that, I had this angry voice telling me to push and force my way through things, as though I could bully myself into becoming the person I wanted to be. It never really worked. Eventually I just started resenting that voice, and the part of myself that was always being shouted at by it. One day I thought, why am I so mean to myself? And then, this isn’t working. I’ve got to find another way. So I decided to try treating myself with the same patience and sweetness I would give a four-year-old. If something feels difficult, I hold my own hand and try to find a way to make the next step easier. When I wasamscared, I stay with myself until it passes. etc.

8. let yourself enjoy your life

I am very good at being the person who is always on her way somewhere. There is always something I could be doing, something I could be figuring out, something I could be improving, some future version of myself I could be working towards. Even pleasure can somehow become part of the project. Rest so I can work better. Take the afternoon off so I can come back refreshed. Go outside because sunlight is good for me. Have fun because it is important for creativity. What if we stop making everything justify its existence. What if I lie in the sun because it feels good? What if I waste an afternoon just becasue I can? What if something can simply be lovely without being useful? What if we don’t rush towards the next chapter simply because we can see it coming. It is already happening and this life right here is enough.

currently under construction + identity thrifting + lions gate birthday incoming 🦁

AUG 02, 2026

Unusual winds and relentless rain have settled over Indonesia, the sprawling archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands that stretch across the equator that, for the past six months I have called home. Even here, where the jungle still swallows buildings whole and the ocean dictates the rhythm of each day, the signs of climate change are impossible to ignore.

In thirteen days, this chapter will become part of my past. Another version of my life folded away, another home that will soon exist in memory. 

If you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you’ll know that this past year has been defined by one recurring theme: not knowing. I’ve shared about how foggy this season of my life has felt. The path ahead, the next iteration of my work and of myself, has refused to reveal itself in the neat, crystalline way I so often wish it would. 

Change has always been a constant in my life. We are all evolving all of the time whether we notice it or not. But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a prolonged period of standing on the edge of something I can feel so deeply without yet being able to fully see it. It has felt at once incredibly significant and intangible, as though I’m living inside something that is reshaping my entire life while, from the outside, it looks like almost nothing is happening at all.

Judging by the emails you send me and the conversations I find myself having almost daily, I know I’m far from alone in this. So many of you are living inside your own version of this in-between, questioning. Clear, unclear, right, or wrong, trying to make sense of the uncertainty. I keep returning to it because it makes the process of becoming something new a shared experience.

At first, I resisted this season completely. Like most things that arrive uninvited, my instinct was to escape it, to solve it, to move through it as quickly as possible so I could get back to feeling certain again. But somewhere over the past year, the place that once felt so awful has slowly become… not comfortable exactly, but familiar. I’ve spent so long in this underground season that it no longer feels like somewhere I’m trapped, but like I’m being prepared. I have stopped demanding to know exactly when I’ll emerge and where I am going. I (impatiently) trust that I am exactly where I need to be right now.

I can’t help but feel that this is one of the defining invitations of our time. We are being reminded to stop producing packaged versions of ourselves, to stop optimising every part of our lives and to become more deeply ourselves in the actual living of life. To enjoy where we are while we’re still messy, uncertain, changing our minds and becoming. To return to life as it is really is.

Over the years I’ve come to trust that our individual lives are often little microcosms of broader cultural shifts. We don’t all experience the same thing at the same time, but there are seasons where enough of us find ourselves asking the same questions that it begins to feel less like coincidence and more like a real movement taking place beneath the surface.

What I also notice is that so many people are responding to this season by making themselves smaller. As though uncertainty is asking them to quieten down, want less, risk less, become less visible, less ambitious and less expressive until the answers eventually arrive. 

While I do think we’re collectively being invited to loosen our grip on consumption, on external validation, on endlessly chasing more things, more status and more proof that we’re doing life correctly, I don’t think that invitation is asking us to become less. If anything, I think it’s asking us to strip away the layers that were never really us in the first place so that more of our essence has room to breathe. There is a difference between consuming less and becoming less. There is a difference between simplifying your life and shrinking yourself to fit inside it.

The universe never stops expanding. Everything in the natural world is in relationship with expansion, not as an endless pursuit of accumulation, but as an expression of life itself. I can’t help but think that we are, too.

Whenever I see people online insisting that you must know exactly where you’re heading, have a crystal clear vision for your future, a five-year plan, and should map out every step between where you are and where you want to be to get anywhere, I shake my head. I don’t think life works quite so neatly. It never has for me, anyway.

The only way we truly create a life that is different from the one we’ve already lived is if we allow it to reveal itself to us as we’re existing in it. Evolution isn’t something we can pre-plan because every experience changes us, and each version of ourselves makes different decisions than the one before. The woman writing this today would make choices that the woman I was three years ago couldn’t imagine making, because she hadn’t lived as much life yet.

I’ve been sitting with a question in my journal for a week now: Who and how am I being when I’m unmistakably myself?

Every time I have attempted to answer it, my words feel strangely incomplete. They skim around the edges of something I cannot capture. I can describe qualities, values and characteristics, but none of them quite reach the essence of what I’m trying to articulate. I realised that, like with many things, ‘who I am’ cannot be designed but rather needs to be lived and breathed into existence day by day. By showing up, by trying on different versions of self, by connecting with my inner child, by destroying old identities that have acted as protection and letting myself be raw and naked and in the void for extended periods, as uncomfortable and unsafe as that feels.

I’ve been reading about this idea recently that we don’t have one fixed identity, but countless identities already living within us, waiting for an invitation to be expressed. Another one of my kismet book finds: “an investigation into the occult, the paranormal and the supernatural” by Colin Wilson.

Not identities that are fabricated but real aspects of ourselves that we’ve either cultivated or neglected over the course of our lives. Somewhere along the way we convince ourselves that we are one thing. The quiet one. The responsible one. The anxious one. The successful one. The creative one. The sexy one. The ugly one. The fit one. The lazy one. They begin as descriptions that then harden into identities. We stop saying, I feel anxious today, and instead begin saying, I am an anxious person. 

We stop noticing that we’ve been playing a particular role and begin believing that we are the role itself. We rehearse these identities so many times that we begin to eblieve that is who we are now.

Children don’t have this problem. One moment they’re an explorer, the next they’re a dragon, then a teacher, then a pirate, then they’re drawing in the corner. They move so fluidly between ways of being because they haven’t learnt to choose one version of themselves and remain stuck in it forever. Which makes me think that this internal pivot is less about becoming someone new and more about remembering that I have access to far more of myself than I have allowed. 

I’ve started thinking about these identities almost as different levels of expression of ourselves. Some identities keep us operating within the boundaries of who we’ve always believed ourselves to be. Then some identities call us into a fuller expression of ourselves. More courage. More creativity. More openness. More play. More generosity. More leadership. More love.

There are versions of me that keep me small because they were created to keep me safe. They learnt to anticipate disappointment, to seek approval, to stay quiet, to avoid taking up too much space. I don’t judge them because they did exactly what they were created to do. But there are other parts of me too. Parts that feel expansive, creative, generous, deeply trusting of life. I’m learning to let those new parts of myself to lead.

This conversation has been occupying so much of my thinking lately that it has found its way into my journal, into my client sessions, into conversations with friends, and into a new video I filmed. It’s part diary, part Q&A and part exploration of what it really looks like to shift identity from the inside out. A lot of the questions you sent in circled around business, money and creating work that feels deeply aligned.

watch the full video here

video timestamps so you can see where you want to go:


0:00 Hi, I’m Vienda — properly introducing myself for the first time

0:26 Tuesday 6:45 am — let’s spend the day together

0:55 Ten years as a psychology-educated mentor for women

1:50 Getting dressed, coffee, morning walk

2:40 Life has been asking me to do things differently

4:10 Answering your Q&A questions — the real question beneath them all

5:41 The question is never “how” — it’s “who do I need to become” & COWORK

6:41 After the hairdresser — little crush confession

7:16 Wednesday morning — I love slow mornings but hate up and out

8:09 The questions you sent in are really about identity shift

8:56 What do I miss most after six months in Bali?

9:19 Bali as an adult playground — and what I’m ready for next

10:56 If I knew I couldn’t fail — my secret childhood dream

12:43 Why identity shift is the answer to every question

13:30 You cannot think your way into a new identity

14:30 The three pillars: environment, body, self-talk

17:05 Q&A: How do you create a life of freedom?

17:23 Freedom as an identity decision before a practical one

18:20 Q&A: Where is the line between surrender and avoidance?

19:25 You do your 50% — then take your hands off

20:46 Q&A: My relationship with money

21:08 Why I think the stock market is ridiculous

22:11 Money as a sacred and beautiful resource

22:58 Coming soon — my Affluence course

23:49 My income sources: clients, courses, sponsorships, investments

24:13 Wrapping up — next video will be from Europe

This is particularly timely because applications for the next round of my live group mentorship, COWORK, opened yesterday. We’ll spend two months together not just talking about strategy, marketing and building a business that supports your life, but exploring the identity that is required to build it. Because in my experience, your business can only ever grow to the extent that you’re willing to grow alongside it. The practical and the personal have never felt separate to me, and COWORK has become the place where those two worlds get to meet. Applications are now open for our September cohort.

more on COWORK here

Next Saturday is my birthday, which makes me a Lion’s Gate1 baby. 🦁 Rawr. 

Birthday month has officially commenced, and after spending so much of this past year learning how to receive, rest, soften and celebrate the ordinary moments, I’ve decided to be very, very generous with myself this year. So far I have: made my inner child a crystal necklace, bought myself a sorbet lemon linen mini-dress and a pair of gold-and-pearl heart earrings, and booked myself a 3-hour massage experience.

If you’d like to celebrate with me too, I’d love to invite you to become a paid subscriber. As a little birthday gift from me to you, I’m running my biggest subscription sale ever for the whole of August. Annual memberships are 70% off, which means they drop from $50 to just $15 for the entire year (!!).

celebrate with me

If my writing has ever made you feel a little less alone, helped you make sense of a season of your life, or simply become a comforting weekend ritual, becoming a paid subscriber is one of the most meaningful ways you can support my work. You’ll also unlock the full archive of essays, including the more personal, vulnerable pieces that I keep tucked away behind the paywall.

Thank you for reading, for replying, for sharing your own stories with me and for letting me do this strange, beautiful little job of writing letters to the internet.

See you soon. 💋

1

The Lion’s Gate portal opens as the Earth, the star Sirius, and the Sun move into complete alignment with the pyramids of Giza (Egypt). The powerful peak occurs on August 8 (8/8) and is considered one of the most ideal times of year to harness good luck.

+ a list of things keeping me sane while the world falls apart

JUL 19, 2026

As uncertain, wild, crazy, despicable, confusing, scary and confounding as the world is right now, I am fiercely excited about the future we get to co-create with the mystery of life from this wreckage. 

Mother Earth is protesting with environmental extremes, our economies are volatile, the job market is precarious, and nobody seems to know up from down. 

Yet, the wildflowers keep growing through cracks in the cement, young artists pursue their craft while the very walls of reality melt before them, more people are investing in their local communities than ever, and the sun rises every morning without hesitation.

𓍯𓂃

Ribbons of rain slick the black tar road, a warm tropical wet that does nothing to deter the morning walkers from their daily routine as I begin to write. From my perch up high, I track the storm’s advance, listening as the next wave rattles the tin-roof shed twenty meters away a few seconds before it reaches me. I cradle a cup of hot hibiscus tea, my legs stretched out to lean on the balcony railing, content to watch my tiny world move below.

I am caught in the bittersweet gravity of missing a place before I have even left it. Knowing my departure is less than a month away acts as a filter, softening every raw imperfection and washing this place in a sweet, doughnut-glazed luminosity.

𓍯𓂃

This past week, flattened by a brutal cold, I spent every hour of the day drifting between heavy sleep and bleary-eyed awareness, a raspy cough rattling my chest. Lying there letting a small death move through my body, I was filled with a strange, deep optimism. 

All I can think about is how futile it is to try to optimise or manufacture our way through a life and a world that is simultaneously falling apart and rebuilding itself. We try anyway, driven by a perverse obsession to maintain control because control feels safer than surrender. But letting go is exactly what we need to practice. We cannot effort or self-improve our way through this chaos; we have to be with it, letting life lead us through the dark until the cycle is complete.

The only true antidote to a crumbling world is a tunnel-vision focus on beauty, rest, joy, creativity, and nurturing ~ both myself and those around me. It requires letting things be simple. It demands letting what is be enough. Because I cannot control the macro-chaos, I turn my attention to the micro. 

Here is a list of things that currently offer me sanctuary and reprieve.

PRP microneedling: Focusing heavily on my under-eyes to strengthen thinning skin, triggering a rush of collagen and elastin. It is the perfect marriage of nature and science, satisfying my vanity metrics while treating my body with respect to its natural processes.

Somatic and non-linear movement: Obsessively attending every myofascial release, yin yoga, and primal movement class I can find. Learning to move my body in non-linear, unforced, and unformatted ways breaks down the stagnant, clawing, clutching-at-certainty feelings my mind so easily defaults to.

The JSTOR Archive: Seeking refuge from online noise, I recently opened an account to anchor myself in peer-reviewed publications. I find I no longer trust the random, fleeting thoughts people throw online. Stepping into this archive is a quiet revelation, a space where I can lose myself in the brilliant, enduring works people have spent lifetimes creating.

Fiction and film: Devouring novels and watching beautifully filmed series every day. Stepping into these visually stunning, curated stories provides a soft place for my mind to rest. Here is the running log of what I am currently into, or waiting impatiently to dive into, at the moment.

Long walks: I have been, and will forever be, a lover of long walks. My favourite ritual here is to make my way down to the beach and sink my bare feet into the black volcanic sand, letting the foamy ocean lick at my toes. I walk until the heavy confusion of my mind is entirely shaken loose, replaced by a constellation of new ideas, hopes, and dreams, and my legs ache pleasantly from the effort.

Voice notes and solitude: In this season of life, my closest friendships are kept alive through long voice notes sent across time zones and vast oceans. I have mentioned before that I have found Bali to be lonelier than most places, but without bypassing the reality of that isolation, I have also found this quietude deeply nourishing. It is just me with me. In this space, I have stripped away the noise, reconnected with my essence, and tuned back into my own spiritual energy.

Wanting less and needing less: We live in a culture that demands we engorge ourselves on things, metrics, and endless striving, but the soul does not grow by accumulation; it grows by shedding. When I stop lunging at the world to fill me up, I return to my true psychic weight. I am learning the ancient medicine of the empty hand: that when we cease our frantic grasping, we are finally light enough to be carried by the current of life itself.

Current food hyper-fixation: A double-shot iced latte with oat milk in a cup I bring to the pop-up coffee cart up the road and then carry home to drink in bed while I work. A simple 3-egg scramble with a slice of sourdough toast, no butter for lunch. In the afternoon, a young coconut, sucked dry, its wet jelly roughly scraped from the dark hull with a spoon.

My work: Running Practical Dreamer: a live, three-month mentorship for six incredible women ready to birth their own bodies of work, as well as supporting four women building their businesses and guiding three long-term private life-coaching clients. As these women stretch and grow under my care, I find myself stretching and cracking open right alongside them. Standing in the gap between who we were and who we are becoming is a bruising, terrifying labour. Redesigning a life to mirror the soul requires standing naked and raw until things we are creating become tangible.

𓍯𓂃

The wind is howling around the sharp corners of this building, a restless current cutting through the air. From my perch on the balcony, I watch the budding rice stems below get whipped and pushed completely sideways. It is a perfect, grey, dreary Sunday.

how to set goals in your 30s & 40s (new paradigm)

JUN 12, 2026

Something I think about a lot is the access to spiritual qualities implicit in pain, grief and unhappiness. Often my darkest moments ~ heartbreak, loss or rupture in the fabric of my life ~ impose a sort of presence that melts down the world around me.

The moments that bring me to my knees are also the moments that bring me closer to my faith. They crack me open in ways that innocent happiness and joy rarely do. 

During a particularly difficult breakup in 2018, I sat on the living room floor of the Italian-style bungalow we had bought together. It had a peach tree and plums, raspberries and wild roses in the garden that I still think of fondly. I loved this man so thoroughly but love it rarely enough. I knew I had to leave to give us both a chance at the lives we dreamed of and deserved. The grief was all-consuming that afternoon. 

As I wept, my face pressed down on the antique rug I had imported from Morocco, I decided to go all-in with feeling the pain. It was either repress or feel, and we all know what happens when we do the former. The latter chases us until we let ourselves be vulnerable enough to go there. So I let myself feel the pain at the deepest level of my aching heart until I was one with it. And then something beautiful happened.

I found joy. I found joy inside the pain, so generous and broad and soothing, it made the pain worth it. I found clarity and comfort and understanding for the human experience and our internal technicoloured emotional worlds. There is poeticism to our suffering. 

Right now so many people are aching deeply for a life that is yet unknown. So many people I know are renegotiating the terms of their existence. They are pivoting and choosing a new path even though it is painful and uncomfortable. These moments tether us to the truth, and in their greatest intensity, can feel more intimate than anything else in the world, bringing us closer to our faith. 

Faith in life, in god(dess), in the universe, in ourselves, in the good of others… whatever speaks truly to you. Built into the other side is some kind of transformation. We are in that transformative process right now. 

When I was trying to summarise what I was saying in this video, what came through and landed for me really clearly was the following:

We have faith in a future that resembles us more accurately than the past has. It is the only thing that carries us through. It is an initiation. We feel the pain and fear and confusion and still move towards it knowing that this is the only way. 

Pragmatically, the ways that we relate to one another, the ways that we make money, the value of things, the things that we call our work, our relationship to our homes, to our lands, to our earth, are all changing, and rapidly now. We have long known the need to. As I say in the video, it’s an exciting time.

𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼 

VIDEO TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Almost full moon — new bangs, sunset walk

0:14 So many people are going through big life transformations right now

1:08 It’s a weird and destabilising time — but also really exciting

2:42 Sunday morning beach day

3:22 Monday — construction chaos, escaping to a secondhand bookstore

3:46 Finished Alias Grace and The Luminaries — thoughts

4:06 What this video is actually about: pivots, dreams, aligned goals

5:23 My story — the dream I had 13 years ago

5:32 Psychology degree, music festivals, starting a blog

6:22 How the blog became a business and the traveling began

7:26 Back when travel was still inconvenient — and I loved it

8:28 The dream came true — and then I had no idea what came next

8:51 The global panini and everything that changed

9:21 Years of feeling unanchored and disconnected

10:11 This is happening collectively — so many people are pivoting

10:34 Busy work vs real impact — what are we devoting our lives to

11:25 Three questions to ask yourself right now

11:31 Question 1: How do I want my life to feel?

11:41 Question 2: Who am I becoming?

11:54 Question 3: What is the next aligned step?

12:57 The old way vs the new way of setting goals

13:25 It’s about our becoming — not where we arrive

P.S. This one has a slow and gentle start. I like to think I’m helping you stretch your attention span. (You’re welcome.) I am still very much a beginner at making videos, and spent this week inside the very sharp (and frustrating) learning curve of editing with DaVinci Resolve, so thank you for your patience with me as I master this particular form of expression. 

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Last week I opened up enrolments to going pro: 

A live six-week writing course for women who want to use a newsletter or substack as a functional brand-building tool.

After years of working with and watching women build businesses online, I’ve noticed it comes down to this:

1. build something with your name on it

A product, a project, a body of work. This forces you to persuade people to care, which means learning rhetoric. It forces you to understand what others actually want, not what you think they should want, which means practical psychology. It forces you to act without permission and iterate based on what reality gives back, which means real agency. You learn by making something and putting it in front of people.

2. write publicly. consistently

Writing compresses your thinking into something others can hold. It builds an audience, a reputation, and proof of work, all three of which compound over time. A newsletter is where both of these things happen at once: you are building something, and you are writing about it, and the writing itself becomes part of what people buy.

LEARN MORE

Some mornings, the angsty compression in my chest seems unbearable. It feels like there is only so long I can stave off my own insanity about what the future holds. We stumble forward into a world that is changing both too fast and too slowly to make sense of anything. What does it all mean? No one really knows. 

Then the little details of daily life take over, and the existential questions are forgotten for some time. I answer emails, make a cup of tea, reply “haha yes totally” to a friend’s message.

Outside, the puppies are tumbling over each other again. Both had found homes and then came back. Their potential families realised that raising a puppy is inconvenient and exhausting. I worry about them more than I should. I had happily agreed to foster them temporarily, but now it feels as if they’ve been forgotten about. 

Human beings do this constantly, I think. We fall in love with the idea of something and then realise it’s not as easy in reality.

This morning, as I type these words to you from my bed, I am thinking about the different layers through which we experience life. How they relate to flirting with life. How we can cultivate abundance through playful awareness.

There is the human layer.

The layer of personality, memory, conditioning, ego, fear, longing. The part of us constantly reacting to life and trying to make sense of it through story. The part of us that spirals at 3 am, that wants certainty, reassurance, answers. It narrates everything. “Why did they say that? What does this mean? Am I behind? Am I safe?” It interprets reality intellectually to feel some sense of control over it. 

A lot of people live almost entirely from here, mistaking the narration of life for life itself.

There is the soul layer.

The deeper layer underneath the performance of the self. The layer that seems far less interested in comfort or social approval and far more interested in growth, truth, expansion, evolution. The soul does not experience events in the same way the human self does. The human self says, this is painful, unfair, humiliating. The soul understands life as a curriculum. It asks, ” What is this trying to teach me? Where is this trying to lead me?” It sees meaning in the challenges of life.

The cyclical bodily layer (for women).

The hormonal landscape that alters perception, sensitivity, intuition, emotion, desire, energy, openness, grief, creativity, sexuality, tolerance. Women underestimate how much wisdom lives here because we’ve been taught to distrust the body and worship output instead. But the body knows things long before the mind catches up. Truths become unbearable at particular points in the cycle. Desires surface. The female body metabolises reality differently depending on where we are within ourselves.

The observing consciousness layer.

The awareness capable of noticing the story without completely becoming it. The part of you that can witness your fear without obeying it. Witness your heartbreak without turning it into your identity. Witness the hormonal wave without assuming it is permanent reality. 

This layer is where free will begins. Maybe not total free will. But the capacity to choose how you meet the moment.

This is the layer that understands that the quality of your life is not determined entirely by external conditions, but by your relationship to them. The part that knows happiness is not something handed to you by circumstance, but something cultivated through attention, perspective, meaning, devotion, openness.

Depending on how developed this observing awareness is, it changes your entire experience of the other layers.

A person fully consumed by the human layer experiences life as something happening to them. A person connected to awareness experiences life as something they are participating in consciously.

This is why flirting with life matters so much.

Flirting with life is the practice of consciously bringing your openness, curiosity, playfulness, sensuality, attention, warmth, and aliveness into your experience instead of waiting for the world to hand those feelings to you first.

It is a way of participating in your reality.

The more conscious you become, the more you start noticing how your inner state shapes your reality. How openness creates more openness. How warmth invites warmth. How attention reveals beauty that was always there. How curiosity creates connection. How playfulness creates possibility. And how abundance, in all its forms, tends to flow toward people who are fully participating in their lives instead of defensively withdrawing from them.

Flirting with life is really just conscious participation in your own existence.

I’ve never had one

MAY 22, 2026

When someone asks my five-year plan, it’s like… why don’t we get our palms read? Why don’t we shake an 8-ball? You want me to tell you the future?? You want me to lie to you and act like I know what’s going to happen?? 

I had no idea all the things that happened in the past five years were even possible, and you want my projection for the next five years? No.

I am dizzy from the sheer number of things I’ve had and done and want. My life is bursting at the seams and there is very little order to it all. And I want and I want and I want.

I want to fall in love again, I want to grow a garden, I want my hair to grow past the soft curve of my under breast, I want to live near the ocean (I already live near the ocean but wherever I live I want to live near the ocean), I want a collection of friends and their tiny humans (and maybe my tiny humans) swinging and out of my doors, I want to write and write and write, I want to drive acoss North America in a 4WD or a convertible from the West Coast to the East stopping in New Orleans to see some friends, I want to see Olivia Dean perform at Lollapalooza this summer, I want my home made messy from love, I want all my days filled with creative projects the make the world a more beautiful place, I want to be tired of doing load after load of laundry because it means that I am caring for others, I want to bake naughty-made-healthy things that dissappear into crumbs within minutes, I want to go to Farmers Markets every weekend even when it rains and to know the farmers by name and the produce by season, I want to go on road-trips to places without wifi and drink in the stillness and wrap my arms around my man and lay my face against his back and smile while he measures out where to set up for the night, I want to go back to New York and do it better this time.

My five year plan is for life to be an extension of me and since I am always always always growing and changing and evolving so is the plan. And the plan is less a plan and more a thread of desires and wants and needs and hopes and dreams woven together around me and my life and body of work.

I want to have finally answered the question “what do you do?” with something simple that doesn’t need explaining. I want to sing more, I want to forgive everyone who hurt me and be forgiven too, I want to know more people who are living in ways that I admire because they are so authentically themselves, I want to feel at peace in new social circumstances instead of tightly wound up (I don’t know if anyone else has figured this out, but if you have, please lmk), I want to think less about my body, I want to think less about myself, I want to go on girls trips with girlfriends I’ve had for a decade and drink wine and laugh at all the things we used to do and worry about, I want to make everyone’s birthday cakes and decorate them with flowers, I want to go through the painful learning curve of renovating my home by hand, I want to foster animals that need a home. I want to savour the slow seasons, to surrender to their stillness, to their illusiory unmooredness.

One of the things that makes any of this meaningful is to fully experience it. Every moment. To be present with life. I don’t want to miss any of it, not one second. I want to be excited about my 40s and 50s and 60s and beyond. I want to be delighted by how well not having a five-year plan works out. I want to enjoy the ride.

Wanting is the easy part. The harder part is surviving the uncomfortable, uncertain space while waiting and hoping and doubting (dear god, the doubting) whether any of it is ever actually going to come to life. The part where you look around and don’t see anything yet and you have to keep going anyway. How do you maintain that essential and nearly delusional belief and trust? Where you can’t explain to anyone, least of all yourself, how this is going to work. 

You just do. Even without a plan. You refuse to give up.

the more uncertain the world becomes, the more essential it becomes to become unmistakably yourself

MAY 06, 2026

I went on a date last night1. He was not my type, but the conversation was interesting enough. At one point, while explaining his startup, he leaned forward and said:

“It’s 2031. Imagine a woman. She’s thirty five. She’s a lawyer who worked her way up to junior partner at a top firm. She has a beautiful house in Sydney, a second holiday property somewhere else, a life that looks exactly like what people say it’s supposed to look like. She did everything right. And then AI becomes so good that it can do her job better than she can.”

He paused.

“She loses the job. The income. The partnership. The status. She spends six months trying to find something equivalent but nothing exists anymore. She gets two thousand dollars a month in universal basic income, has to sell the house, give up the second property, downsize her life. But more than that, she loses her identity. She doesn’t know who she is without any of it. She becomes angry. Aggressive. Unstable. She needs help.”

Then he smiled.

“That’s where my startup comes in.”

I took a sip of wine.

“What a beautiful opportunity to create a more meaningful life.”

He looked at me like I hadn’t understood.

“She’s suffering,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Obviously.”

I told him he was making her sound one dimensional.

“She is not her job. Her career might be an expression of her, for a season, but it is not the entirety of who she is. She’s a human being. She has instincts, contradictions, private curiosities, old dreams, unfinished parts of herself, talents that never made it onto a résumé, desires she may not even have admitted to herself yet. She is an ecosystem. Not a title.”

He looked at me for a moment and said, completely seriously:

“So… she has hobbies?”

I stared at him.

“No,” I said. “Don’t belittle her.”

And suddenly I could feel myself getting fired up.

“I mean that she is a living ecosystem. A psyche. A body. A nervous system. A soul. A woman with instincts and contradictions and unfinished parts of herself. A woman with ideas she hasn’t followed yet, gifts she hasn’t fully developed, parts of her that have never had the chance to come all the way alive because she’s been too busy being useful, successful, productive, good.”

He stayed quiet.

“Her career might have been one expression of who she is for a season. But it was never all of her. It was never supposed to be.”

I thought about how many women I know who have already lived some version of this.

Women who became mothers and realised the identity they had built no longer fit.

Women who left marriages.

Women who moved countries.

Women who got sick.

Women who burned out.

Women who fell in and out of love.

This isn’t new.

Human beings have been dying into new identities for as long as human beings have existed. The difference now is that many people have built almost their entire sense of self around institutions that may not exist in the same way ten years from now.

If the structures most people have built their identities around start disappearing, whether that’s because of AI, redundancy, motherhood, illness, divorce, burnout, heartbreak, relocation, grief, or simply waking up one morning and realising you can’t keep pretending your life fits when it clearly doesn’t… then the people who will suffer the most won’t necessarily be the least intelligent, or the least educated, or even the least prepared.

It will be the people who got very good at becoming who the world rewarded, but never got particularly curious about who they actually were. The people who built careers, networks, reputations, maybe even entire lifestyles, without ever developing the self-awareness, individuality, or courage required to discover what was genuinely theirs.

The more uncertain the world becomes, the more essential it becomes to become unmistakably yourself.

Let’s say, for a moment, that his version of the future is real. Let’s say that in the next five or ten years entire industries begin disappearing. Fewer people sitting in offices pretending to work while answering emails that no one really needed to send in the first place. Let’s say that the careers our parents and grandparents once built entire identities around become increasingly unstable, increasingly automated, increasingly… optional. Let’s say that the pace of change really is that fast.

Then there are, as far as I can tell, two things you can do now to prepare.

One, as you already know if you’ve been walking through this 8-part series on how to change your life with me for a while, is to become intimate with uncertainty. 

To stop treating the unknown like a threat, or a punishment, or evidence that you’ve made a wrong turn, and begin relating to it for what it so often is: the place where your next identity is quietly forming. The people who are going to navigate the next decade with the most grace will not necessarily be the smartest, the richest, or the most technically skilled. They will be the ones who have already spent enough time in the void to know that losing one version of yourself does not mean losing yourself altogether. The ones who have sat in enough silence, enough heartbreak, enough reinvention, enough endings, enough in-between spaces, to know that identity is not something fixed, but something living.

The other is that you become more than the bare minimum. 

You stop building a life around being employable. 

And you start building a body of work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because maybe you’re not actually meant to build a “business.” Maybe that word is too small, too transactional, too loaded with internet bro energy and passive income fantasies and funnels and logos and launch strategies and all the other things that have made so many deeply intelligent, creative, sensitive people decide that entrepreneurship isn’t for them.

Maybe what you’re actually here to build is a body of work. Something that doesn’t begin with market research or niche positioning or “what problem do I solve?” but with curiosity. With obsession. With the kinds of questions that keep following you from city to city, relationship to relationship, season to season. The kinds of ideas that wake you up at three in the morning, not because they are commercially viable, but because they feel alive. Because they feel like yours.

A body of work, as I’ve come to understand it, is the accumulated evidence of what happens when you take your curiosity seriously for long enough.

It is what begins to emerge when you stop asking what people want from you and start paying much closer attention to what life keeps trying to draw out of you. It is the trail of essays, conversations, experiments, offerings, questions, photographs, frameworks, teachings, retreats, communities, products, philosophies, and perspectives that begin to form when you stop trying to fit yourself into existing categories and start allowing your own way of seeing the world to become visible.

And from what I can tell, after more than a decade of writing online, building businesses, burning out, reinventing myself, moving countries, changing identities, falling apart, starting over, and paying very close attention to the women who seem most alive… a body of work tends to grow from three things.

1. Depth.

And by depth, I don’t mean expertise in the traditional sense. I don’t mean certificates or credentials or another weekend course you can add to your website. I mean the depth that comes from paying attention to your own life with enough honesty to notice the patterns that keep repeating. The conversations people always seem to have with you. The themes that have followed you since childhood. The books you can’t stop buying. The problems you’ve had to solve the hard way. The pain you survived that, over time, became wisdom. The questions that won’t leave you alone no matter how practical you try to be. Depth begins the moment you stop consuming other people’s ideas compulsively and start observing your own life as if it might actually contain the raw material for something important.

2. Difference.

Which sounds obvious, until you realise how much of adult life is spent trying not to stand out. Trying to sound more professional, more polished, more digestible, more hireable, more marketable, more… normal. And yet the irony is that the very things most people spend years trying to tone down are often the exact things that make them unforgettable. Your intensity. Your sensitivity. Your strange combinations of interests. Your contradictory opinions. Your way of connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. Your obsession with human behaviour, or design, or healing, or language, or food, or systems, or beauty, or whatever it is that lights up your particular nervous system. The parts of yourself you’ve been trying to smooth out are not the problem, but the point. Your weirdness is not something to overcome, but something to study.

3. Devotion.

Because a body of work is rarely built in public at first. It’s built introspectively. In notebooks. In half-finished drafts. In long walks. In voice notes to yourself. In years where, from the outside, it looks like nothing much is happening. It’s built while other people are waiting for permission, waiting to feel ready, waiting to know exactly how it all turns out before they begin. It’s built when nobody is clapping, nobody is paying, nobody fully understands what you’re doing yet, and you keep showing up anyway, not because it makes sense on paper, but because something in you knows that this… whatever this is… matters.

I suspect that in a future that becomes increasingly automated, increasingly optimised, increasingly efficient, the people who thrive will not necessarily be the people who can do what everyone else can do, only faster.

They will be the people who took the time to become themselves unmistakably.

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practical dreamer: a three month mentorship for women ready to build their body of work

~ using Stanford’s Life Design framework, 

you go on a journey to build something meaningful ~

WE BEGIN JUNE 1

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If you’re serious about building a body of work, not just a career, not just a personal brand, but something living, something that could hold your identity through seasons of reinvention, loss, growth, motherhood, relocation, heartbreak, abundance, obscurity, success, and all the versions of you still waiting to emerge… then this is where I would begin.

Not with a business plan. Not with a niche. Not with a logo, a website, a strategy, or an Instagram bio.

I would begin by getting radically honest about who you actually are beneath all the roles, all the conditioning, all the places you learned how to belong by becoming more convenient, more agreeable, more impressive, more useful.

Take a notebook. Go for a long walk. Sit somewhere quiet. Pour a wine / kombucha / cacao. Light a candle. Turn your phone off for an hour. And sit with these.

— your relationship to belonging.

How much of your identity has been built around a group, a community, an industry, a friendship circle, a family system, a culture, a profession, a political ideology, a version of womanhood, a place?

And more importantly… does it still fit?

Does the life you’ve built around belonging actually reflect who you are now, or who you had to become in order to be accepted there?

— your belief systems.

What do you actually believe about how the world works?

About money.

About love.

About ambition.

About beauty.

About freedom.

About what a good life looks like.

About how people should treat each other.

About what success is.

About what is worth your precious life force.

And how much of that did you arrive at through lived experience, hard-won wisdom, and deep reflection… versus quietly absorbing it because it helped you fit somewhere?

— your relationship to being different.

Not performatively different. Not “quirky.” Not aesthetically unconventional.

Actually different.

Outgrowing people.

Being misunderstood.

Being underestimated.

Being judged.

Being ahead of your time.

Being too much for some people and exactly enough for the right ones.

How have you learned to exist as an individual within the collective?

Have you been paying the cost of being fully yourself…

Or finding increasingly sophisticated ways around it?

Because, in my experience, your body of work begins the moment you start becoming unmistakably yourself.

1I find dating to be a bit of a social experiment these days. It’s fun! I’m enjoying it. I also notice how much sharper my senses have become, how quickly my body tells me what my mind hasn’t caught up to yet. After everything that happened last year, I trust that intelligence more than ever. We meet at my favourite sunset spot. This man was perfectly nice, interesting even, but he touched me too often, too casually, assumed intimacy rather than earning it, and when I subtly moved my body away, leaned back, created space, he didn’t notice. Or perhaps he noticed and didn’t know what to do with the information. And when he asked me if I was a physical touch person, and I said I am, once I feel comfortable with someone, he replied: “How long does that take?” I looked at him incredulously. Some men live almost entirely from the neck up. The conversation we had tracks because the mistake that these kinds of men often make is that they believe they can predict and control the future by outsmarting it. Really, they’re just very afraid.

notes on place, belonging, and panic attacks

APR 30, 2026

Whenever they get a chance, the mosquitoes swarm, attacking my exposed legs. In the morning I slip out of the air-conditioning in a t-shirt and panties, into the outdoor kitchen to make a matcha or cacao, braving the hungry creatures of the tropics. I stand there in the half-dark, waiting for the water to boil, watching the garden breathe.

It is raining. When the monsoon season ended, weeks of sunshine followed, and I became complacent about sunny days. People think monsoon season means constant rain and dry weather means none, but neither is true. The downpours are sudden and daily during the monsoon, but enough gaps exist to go about everyday life. Now, in the dry season, sunshine is steadier, but the thunderstorms roll in every few days and cover everything in a moist drizzle that smells like soil and something green and alive.

For the last week, it has rained every day.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

I write about the weather because it influences place. I think about place a lot. I think about it the way other people think about money or love, with a low-grade obsession, a need to understand something that keeps slipping out of reach. And when I think about place, I also think about belonging, and home, and whether those two things are the same.

Bali has been home for two months now. A place that acts as a liminal hinge for me. A place that holds multiple futures in suspension.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

The last time I was in Bali I was in a relationship with a man I loved completely. We had been together for three years by then, the kind of shared life mostly on the road that compresses time and manufactures intimacy, makes you believe you know someone because you have navigated bus stations and food poisoning and beautiful sunsets together. I remember the particular quality of the light. The way the rice paddies held the dusk. I remember being in a restaurant with cheap plastic chairs and somewhere in that evening a decision getting made, the way decisions sometimes happen.

We moved to Canada. He had grown up there, in a small town a few hours east of Vancouver, in the beautiful province of British Columbia, where the winters are brutal and the summers short-lived and often filled with smoke from the wildfires. I believed I could make any place work. I had already lived in so many places by then — Salzburg, Florence, Cairns, Barcelona, London, Abu Dhabi, San Francisco, LA, Chiang Mai, Byron Bay, Nelson — and I had found the magic and the beauty of any place so easily. I believed this was a skill I possessed. A kind of portable contentment.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

Within weeks of arriving in Canada, I started waking at night with unexplainable panic attacks. I would cry and shake, and my man would patiently hold me until they subsided and we fell back to sleep. I dismissed it. Blamed the transition, the cold, the adjustment. I had the optimistic perspective that all it takes is time and grunt and magical thinking.

Then came headaches. Ever present. Then the exhaustion that was eventually diagnosed as adrenal fatigue. I would spontaneously begin to cry. Unloading the dishwasher. Driving to yoga. Picking flowers in the garden. Ordinary, beautiful moments coloured by what felt like a psychic rejection happening inside my body.

I noted that every time I left this place — a trip to Vancouver, a weekend away, anything — every physical ailment disappeared. And as soon as I returned, they came back with full force.

I gave that place everything in my being for thirteen months.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

I left the place and the relationship and moved to Mexico to counteract the cold and grey. In Mexico I healed, blossomed, thrived. I didn’t fully understand why. I still don’t, entirely. But I knew it in my body the moment I arrived, that particular sensation of a place receiving you, of the air fitting your skin like it was made for it.

In hindsight, the relationship was also not for me. I loved this man deeply, but I was blind to all the ways I twisted and contorted myself to fit what he wanted, completely abandoning myself in the process. In hindsight I wonder: how much of the rejection was the place, and how much of it was my soul saying, quietly and then louder and then in full-body revolt — no. Not this.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

Since Canada and then Mexico, I have lived in more places than I can list without boring you. The UK, which I have used as a base for most of my adult life because it is easy — I moved there at nineteen, it is the only place I have ever done any official paperwork, paid tax — despite the endless cold and wet and the culture’s general cheerful pessimism. The UK is a neutral place for me. Neutral places make me soft and lazy and bored. I hold an extra two or three kilograms there, some kind of padding I don’t fully understand, as though my body is insulating itself against something. I don’t thrive there. But I feel safe there, like some comforting ancestral memory knows this island as home.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

Mid-pandemic I drove through France and Spain with my cat to Mallorca, which I had heard many nice things about. Mallorca was the second lesson that not every place is for everyone.

Once we got off the ferry and I settled into the hotel I had booked for three weeks while apartment hunting, I walked outside and let the air touch my skin and looked at the hibiscus grazing the sidewalk and felt… nothing. I could cognitively see that I was surrounded by beauty. But instead of feeling moved, all I felt was anxiety.

It was a weird time in the world, we all had a myriad of reasons to feel anxious, a cross-continental trip during a pandemic is no small feat, so I dismissed the feeling and focused on the practical efforts of making a new place home.

I was lucky. I quickly found a beautiful apartment with Mediterranean views at a great price. I made friends. I was generously invited into new circles. On paper everything was perfect.

But inside myself, a war was waging.

No part of my body wanted to be here. Despite the beauty, the perfection, the luck, the friendships, the Mediterranean, the safety, the abundance and goodness. My body could not find peace. I started getting sciatic pains pulsing through my back so debilitating that sometimes I couldn’t move. 

No amount of practitioners or exercises or adjusted belief systems improved it. There was an ever-present purring anxiety that made every moment and interaction feel tense and precarious, and I could find no logical reason for it. The beauty was right there. Everything was perfect and I was so lucky: the friendships, the Mediterranean, the abundance and goodness. My body could not find peace.

Again, relief arrived the moment I left the island. Every time. In disbelief I couldn’t accept that this was true. That a place could have such a total, encompassing negative impact on me. That no amount of trying could alter it.

Almost two years later, defeated, I left.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

After that I tried Ericeria in Portugal = neutral. New York City = love, love, love (but couldn’t stay for logistical reasons). Mallorca again = same as before. Paris = neutral. India = for healing. And now, by absolute chance, Bali.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

I had a terrible time in Canada and remember being in Bali, where I decided to move there as a sliding doors moment, where every decision I made contained a multitude of futures. Now, as if time has folded in on itself, I am back a decade later. 

Bali is unrecognisable and so am I. 

I consult my astrocartography chart, which affirms what I am feeling to a startling degree. It points at this island as a place of deep homecoming. I find this useful as one small piece of the map, not the whole answer. The whole answer, I suspect, does not exist in any single framework. It lives somewhere between the body and the sky, between biology and mystery.

What I know is what I feel.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

This place is far from perfect. Away from the sanctuary of my home it is overstimulating. So much traffic, the beaches sometimes covered in washed-up rubbish, the relentless commercial sprawl of what Bali has become in the decade since I was last here.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

What makes a place right for a body? I have been asking this question for years, have offered myself as both researcher and subject, have moved enough times to start to see patterns, if not yet fully understand them.

Some places I feel the signal clearly: yes. Some I feel it clearly: no. Others are neutral, which is its own information.

What I notice is that the body knows before the mind catches up. In Mallorca I felt the no within hours of arrival and spent almost two years arguing with it. In Canada I felt it too, and spent thirteen months trying to override it through sheer optimism. The body, it turns out, is not interested in optimism. It is interested in truth.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

What I know about place is also what I know about self: that there is very little separation between them. The places I have not been able to stay in are also the times I have not been able to stay in myself. Canada was the first lesson that there are some shapes I will not fit into, no matter how desperately I try. The question I could not ask then, but can ask now, a decade later, is whether the place was wrong, or whether the life I was building inside it was wrong, or whether those two things were always and inevitably the same.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

Here, again, at this particular hinge of my life, in this place that holds multiple futures in suspension, I feel the most alive, regulated, supported, safe and happy that I have probably felt since I left it a decade ago.

The mosquitoes still find me every morning. I still stand in the half-dark waiting for the water to boil. It rains, and then it stops, and the air smells like something I cannot name but recognise. Like the inside of a memory. Like somewhere I was always going to come back to.

I don’t fully know why this place and not the others. I’m not sure knowing would add anything. And that is enough. Right now, this place, here and right now, is enough.

---

notes from my office

COWORK applications closed on Monday; our first cohort starts next week. To be informed for the next round, get on the waitlist here.

Applications for PRACTICAL DREAMER: a three-month mentorship starting in June, for women ready to build their body of work, are now open. More here.

For something to dive into right now, try my Office Hours or the Substack Starter Sessions.

we are all aware of mysterious forces at play that we have no control over

APR 24, 2026

there are some parts of the human experience. unnamable supernatural things. that can only be experienced and felt. they can not be explained. we’ve all had them. 

they’re so subtle and piercing and whole-making and inconceivable that we don’t speak of them. spiritual in nature but not fitting into the spiritual paradigms that we have created to make sense of them. they happen in slow ordinary moments. they happen in nature. they happen when we are still enough to experience what is. they exist only as an inward expansion.

in a sense these are moments of ecstasy. moments we yield to and yearn for even though we cannot make sense of them or explain them to ourselves or others. they exist as a secret, a mystery, a private encounter with the trifecta of living, life and the cosmic cosmos.

we are all aware of mysterious forces at play that we have no control over. in fact, the incessant clamouring for control is probably the major thing that stands in the way of our lives naturally unfolding

there is a part of us that wants this experience all the time. but we cannot exist in this heightened presence all the time. life pulls and tugs at us, and we sweep in and out. 

there are ways to prolong it. movement, meditation, and music are some of them.

---

A final reminder: Applications for COWORK starting in May close this weekend. you don’t need more strategy, advice or ideas. you need support to do what you need to do and space to do it in. More here.

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I’m sitting on an airport floor next to a charging point, simultaneously charging my laptop, phone and writing these words to you. it smells bad here. there is nowhere else to sit and I wish I didn’t have to sit here but the need for electricity coursing through my gadgets is higher than olfactory pleasantry.

I didn’t bring my adaptor, not realising the plugs would be different and stubbornly resisted buying yet another technical item I would eventually have to carry around, so I made the power in my laptop and phone stretch across two days of work and life until I made it here.

there are stains on the blue and green 80s-zigzag-patterned carpet that has been stretched hastily, leaving bumps along it. and people’s hair and bits of, idk, food, and threads falling loose from clothing. I’m grateful my clothes exist between me and it. I’m on my way home. I can’t wait to return to my little green villa and tiny puppies and daily rituals.

I think a lot about how any decision you make at any time can change your life. it’s a game of roulette. you make hundreds of thousands of decisions every day, and every now and then, you make one very similar or even the same decision you’ve made before and everything changes.

you talk to a stranger. maybe you’ve spoken to dozens of strangers over the past week but this one stranger changes everything. you get on a bus. in a plane. you eat at a specific restaurant. you stop and linger someplace just a little bit longer. decision roulette. 

what makes one decision different from another? not much, really. we can’t control these things. it’s another one of those unnamable supernatural things. but I do think that you can increase your surface area of luck through the quality of your decisions.

a decision made in a moment of total presence takes on an entirely different life and quality than a decision made in autopilot. it becomes a living entity that has a will of its own.

this form of devotional presence, where half my attention is inside my soul looking out at the world observing the lived experience, and half of it outside my body responding to my current moment-to-moment environment, is the closest I can get to living in the mystery of the human experience. 

and when I make decisions from that place: intuitive, illogical, kismet, they lead me to moments that can only be explained by there being some kind of unknown mysterious forces at play. 

that’s the high I keep chasing. the human experience as half mystical, half physical.

my 6 habits as a type-b business owner // how uncertainty reveals the path

hey, hello

— this first part is an invitation into my 6-week business cohort COWORK. Applications close on April 27 (in a week), and you’ll hear from me next Monday.

— the second part is for paid subscribers. as someone who models uncertainty, I want to say: protect your ‘uncertainty’. protect your boundaries. protect your path. protect your decisions. you’ll never regret staying in uncertainty longer. it’s literally what reveals the path.

— p.s. I almost broke my brain learning HTML coding (yes, I am that nerd 🤓) to improve your user experience for finding your PENPAL after a lot of helpful feedback. The people who have signed up already are SO interesting! I can’t wait to read about the new best friends you make across the world. And even if you don’t have time for a PENPAL right now, please applaud my efforts (haha) and share it with friends who might be interested. thank you

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“I am the most low-key type-b business owner… apart from that being my default personality… It’s because I value ‘living’ over ‘working’ ~ I believe work is an extension of life and my contribution to life, but it’s not everything. It’s not my whole life. Nor do I want it to be! So I thought I’d share with you the key habits that I have as a type-b business owner.”

Enjoy!



Timestamps:

0:00 Why I value living over working 

0:41 Habit 1: Morning routine 

2:30 Habit 2: Calendar system & the energy of the days of the week

6:01 The brain dump to-do list 

6:48 Habit 3: The 10 minutes per day method 

7:21 Habit 4: Choose the most fun and easy thing first 

7:52 About Cowork — my six-week program 

8:34 Habit 5: Know your effective hours 

9:07 The future of work & getting paid to be yourself 

10:15 Habit 6: Rest, play, and pleasure as nutrients 

11:22 How these habits keep me relaxed as a type-b business owner



music: Can’t Swim by Noah

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More and more women are going to lean into business and entrepreneurship as the world changes because the need for conventional work will disappear, and what will be needed is people sharing their unique gifts and experiences. The vehicle for self-expression and contribution is business. Getting paid to be who you are at both a practical and essential level.

If you want to work on your business and bring it forward in a meaningful way and with support, this will be helpful: COWORK with me this May & June

review COWORK

If you’re not quite there yet, my lovechild, Practical Dreamer, will help you get there. I’m softly accepting applications for this June, July & August.

check out Practical Dreamer

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“I’m tired of trying so hard” is a sentiment I’ve explored before in half-assed. But something that we all seem to struggle with is this tension between ambition and surrender. We all have desires. Sometimes even enormous ones. Desire is good.

Continued here…

𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼 

Everything I use in this video — https://shopmy.us/shop/vienda

Work with me — creative consulting and mentoring: https://viendamaria.com

Email me — studio@viendamaria.com to interview me/have me speak at your event or panel/for creative consulting for your company/to say hi

About — https://viendamaria.com/about

Instagram – @viendamaria / https://www.instagram.com/viendamaria

Remember to subscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/@viendamaria 

To get these videos directly in your inbox when they come out, make sure you sign up to HER WAY CLUB: https://vienda.substack.com

Thank you for your support on this channel. It’s so lovely to see this community grow. 

Lots of love, Vienda

you have to just do things.

APR 12, 2026

Sitting under the shade of a gazebo, my best friend from university (college for my American friends) asks me if I remember how we used to talk about uncertainty. About how we didn’t know what we wanted to do after we finished… My mind blank, I don’t remember, but I believe her. There are seasons in life that return us to this place over and over again. We have to decide who we are now and how to change direction.

I weep when I first see her, the tears welling behind my eyelids threatening to submerge me in a combination of joy and grief. We haven’t seen each other in 12 years and only loosely kept in touch, our lives taking on very different trajectories. Quickly, though, we fall into a familiar rhythm, and I find myself grateful for the easy intimacy that comes from sharing some of the most formative years of our lives.

Last night, on my return home while watching the sun set in bright yellow hues across the sky, I think to myself about what we had said. 

It takes a great deal of strength and self-trust to say to yourself, “I have not been living life in a way that is my truth and aligned to who I really am. Who I really am is [ ].” The dreaded response may come back, “How do you know?” And, of course, you cannot absolutely know until you’ve changed direction and tried it, lived it. There is just this dream, this feeling, this urge, this desire.

I want to defy the idea that you have to know what it is that you want, who you are and what your gifts are at any given moment.

You can reinvent yourself over and over again. You can change direction and choose a new version of yourself, a new pathway, a new way of existing and engaging in the world as many times as you need or want. Perhaps every form of your soul’s expression is just one piece of the journey. And when one part completes itself a new one can begin.

Not knowing and making moves anyway is the only real way to change direction. You have to just do things. 

But first comes the sense that something is wrong. That you’ve somehow fallen down a path that is not actually yours and you don’t even remember having chosen it or how you got here. The desire to change direction comes from the feeling that you and your soul have outgrown the container your life has become.

It’s a restlessness that I am very familiar with. A sense that you’ve been living slightly outside yourself for too long. A sense that the life you’re living doesn’t quite belong to you. According to Jungian psychology, these moments, where life doesn’t quite fit, are pointing quietly and insistently toward the life that would.

So the first thing to do isn’t to find direction. It is to acknowledge the discomfort, the in-the-wrong-skin feeling that is humming in the background. And then, once you’ve acknowledged it: don’t wait.

When something has genuinely caught light in you is the moment to act. It inspires you to act differently. There’s an enthusiasm to it, an aliveness. Being able to take advantage of that feeling when it arrives — to respond to it rather than file it away for later — is one of the most satisfying things you can do for yourself.

You will never be fully ready. There will never be a perfect time. The version of you who has it all figured out before she begins doesn’t exist, and waiting for her means the thing never gets made, never gets started, never gets tried. It’s not about the right time. It’s about doing things before you’re ready just to have them exist.

Again and again, when something has worked in my life, it came down to this: I just did it. Imperfectly. Without certainty. I just prioritised getting the thing done over getting it right.

Small steps have a way of setting off chains of events you couldn’t have predicted or planned. One tiny thing done today can be the beginning of something that looks, from further down the road, like it was inevitable.

If you’re in this place right now — feeling the hum, sensing the edges of a change in direction — I’d love for you to come and do things alongside me.

2 things:

Cowork is a six-week program for people who are building something and need the structure, the company, and the gentle pressure of actually showing up to do it. 

apply to join COWORK

Penpal is a brand new free letter-writing community, a place to think out loud, to track your own becoming in writing, to have honest conversations with yourself and others who are doing the same.

find your penpal

I created both of these because I know the power of a) not doing things alone and b) not waiting until you’re ready to begin.