It’s 7:31 am. I just opened my laptop to write this email to you. Only to notice that an old draft of it had already been sent out! I have no idea how or why… It wasn’t in my scheduled drafts. And more importantly, it wasn’t ready! So let’s try this again…
Two tall candles are flickering on the bedside to the left of me. A freshly made hot ginger tea is steaming to the right of me. Nothing but darkness and the occasional window light being turned on or off is visible through my French door windows. Mostly, it is pitch black.
Early in the morning, when I first wake up, has always been my favourite way and time of day to sit down and connect with you like this. Lately, it’s been happening less than I would like.
It’s been one of those times where the days and weeks merge and melt into each other. I look up from my life that is all-consuming in various iterations of growth, and cannot tell if it’s Saturday or Thursday or Monday. In fact, this year felt like it folded in on itself in March and then came back out in November, making it 4 months instead of 12.
I have chosen to surrender to it all. The lack of certainty, the lack of environmental consistency, the lack… lack lack lack… I say ‘lack’, but what it really is, is an emptying out. The things I deeply yearn for cannot come from lack nor from fullness. They can only come from space.
the art of noticing ~ photo challenge
Every December, I want to notice and savour the calendar year just passed, and this year I feel something different asking to come through: a communal ritual, a way of remembering beauty together. A way of closing the year not through analysis or productivity or resolutions, but through presence. Through the practice that has quietly held me through so many seasons: noticing.
Noticing is my way home. It is a return to the small, the immediate, the sensory, the real. It is a nervous system soothing mechanism disguised as creativity. A micro-dose of aliveness. A gentle psychological intervention. And when a few of my students from The Art of Noticing writing club asked if I’d offer a two-week photo challenge to help us all see the beauty in our everyday lives… I said, “Yes, of course! I’d love that!”.
So I’m opening it to everyone: the whole extended circle of people who orbit these pages.
A free, two-week invitation into the world as it actually is: imperfect, unguarded, quietly shimmering. A collective exhale at the end of a hard year. A bridge ritual between what has been and what is beginning.
The Art of Noticing: 14 Days of Everyday Beauty December 17–31
It’s a gentle daily nudge toward a softer gaze. One prompt each morning. One photo each day. A moment you saw that you might otherwise have walked past. A flicker of light, a corner of rest, a colour that feels like hope, a texture that surprises you, a symbol of care you didn’t know you needed.
We’ll move through the world together in a slow arc:
from the external world → inward → relational → closing → opening again.
A choreography of attention. A small pilgrimage. A way to let the year exhale through you.
When you notice beauty during hard times, beauty becomes the thing that carries you through. This is the paradox at the heart of the challenge. People often imagine they must feel better before they can see beauty, but the act of seeing is often what begins the softening. This practice flips the sequence.
Over the 14 days, we’ll notice:
light as it finds us unexpected softness what stayed quiet corners the simplest joy the colour of hope and the doorway into the next year
The prompts are intentionally simple because simplicity is the practice. This is about reconnecting with beauty and your creativity. A photo is small enough not to activate perfectionism, but meaningful enough to reveal something true. A way to express without effort. A way to see without striving.
And we’ll do it together, in community — because when a group notices beauty at the same time, everyone’s eyes sharpen. My noticing widens yours. Your noticing shifts mine. We become a shared lens, a communal field of attention, each of us offering the day back to each other in the form of a single captured moment. This is how ordinary days become luminous.
The vibe: gentle, imperfect, real. cosy in the quiet-hours sense. a place to land at the end of each day. zero pressure. no catching up. come as you are, miss a day, rejoin, it doesn’t matter. a slow collective walk toward the threshold of a new year.
Your next steps: Join the challenge inside the community space. It’s free. You can come alone or bring a friend. You’ll get the daily prompt, you’ll take the photo, and you’ll share it if you want to, with words or without. You can scroll through the others’ posts each night, letting their way of seeing alter your own. And at the very end, on December 31, we’ll close with a final moment of stillness. A breath shared across distance.
If you’ve felt rushed, overwhelmed, disconnected from yourself, numb, or stretched this year — come. If you’ve wanted to make something but haven’t had the energy — come. If you’ve longed for softness, for ritual, for a simple way to feel more alive — come.
This is a doorway disguised as a challenge. A ritual disguised as a photo exercise. A remembering disguised as something casual. It’s not about taking pictures. It’s about noticing your life with an eye looking for beauty and a gentler gaze.
Save your login details. You’ll likely need to sign in more than once, so it’s best to store your username and password in your password manager.
Bookmark the community link in your browser, so you don’t have to search for the invite email each time.
You can also download the Stan Community app to your phone for easy access (or do both, whatever feels simplest):
Search for “Stan Community” in your mobile app store.
Install and open the app.
Sign in using your Stan Store login details.
Once inside
Come say hello! Post a short introduction with a photo, your name, and where you’re based, plus a few lines about what you hope to experience here and a little bit about you.
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:
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.
Thank you forcompleting 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.
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.
We were sitting in my friend’s garden in upstate New York a few weeks ago. Both of us trying to reclaim our lives after they had been dismantled by forces beyond our control. Our conversation hummed with ways to feel just a little lighter when everything seemed too heavy.
The afternoon air was warm and green. Bees staggered from flower to flower. Cooled white wine warmed in the sun. Behind us, the house held the relief and wreckage of recent change. Boxes half unpacked, a rug rolled like a sleeping animal, the door left open to catch whatever breeze might pass. My chest felt unsteady, as if the ground under my ribs kept shifting. Hers too.
“The one thing that works for me when I’m deeply unhappy, when life feels misaligned and everything seems to be falling apart, is subtraction,” I said. “It’s looking at my life and stripping away anything that doesn’t make me feel good. Habits. Expectations. Commitments. Thoughts. Words. It’s usually less about what I need to add, and more about what I need to put down.”
Her face lit up. “I think that’s what I need to do, too. Remove everything that isn’t essential to the life I’m rebuilding.”
Life is so much better when you know what you’re living for.
Most of us have been tricked into thinking that “more” equals fulfilment. That meaning comes from piling more onto our plates. More doing, more striving, more proving. A fancier job title, a fuller calendar, a prettier home, a shinier version of ourselves.
And yet, the moments I’ve actually felt joy, contentment, relief, almost always arrive after letting something go. After I’ve stopped trying so hard to live up to some imaginary standard. After I’ve decided not to carry what wasn’t mine.
We are far better at adding than subtracting. Adding habits, projects, rules, identities, expectations. A way to reassure ourselves that we’re worthwhile, lovable, keeping up.
But what if the thing we actually need isn’t more? What if it’s less? A stripping down, a paring back, until what remains feels closer to who we are at our core.
Subtraction is the quiet art of laying things down. It brings us back to center without scolding ourselves. It builds a frame we actually want to live inside.
It asks simple questions: What habits, expectations, commitments, thoughts, words, beliefs, practices, attitudes, people, places can I subtract to get my life back on track? Where have I gotten sloppy? Where am I leaking energy, quietly wasting the life force I will never get back?
And then, decide for yourself what that is and how much is enough.
At a party on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut tells Joseph Heller that their host, a hedge fund manager, made more in a single day than Heller earned from Catch-22 in its entire history.
Heller shrugs. “Yes,” he says. “But I have something he will never have: enough.”
It’s the pause in your chest when you could go for more but don’t. It’s the quiet nod in your mind that says: this is enough.
Enough is peace, it’s relief, it’s contentment. It’s seeing what you have, what you’ve built, what you’ve earned and letting it be enough.
It’s the opposite of greed. and the opposite of more. It’s radical. In a world that screams more, more, more, saying enough is rebellion.
The way you know it for yourself — the way you choose it — is exactly like the way you decided if you’re in her way club last week (or not.) You stop inheriting other people’s scoreboards. You stop following their timelines, their expectations, their “shoulds.” You pause. You look at your own life. You name what nourishes you, what sustains you, what fills your essence.
You decide: this is enough for me.
From that clarity comes another quiet practice: negative gratitude.
It’s giving thanks for the things you don’t have. For the health issues that never arrived. For the responsibilities you don’t carry. For the lifestyles, people, pressures that could have crushed you but didn’t. For the “no’s” that gave you freedom.
We’re always told to be grateful for what we have. And we are. But what about what we’re relieved of? The space, the energy, the freedom quietly gifted by what is absent?
Take a moment. Look around. What’s missing in the best way possible? What doesn’t exist in your life that makes it lighter, easier, more yours?
Negative gratitude trains your attention to absence as well as presence. It shows you where you’ve already been spared, already held, already enough.
Write it down. Say it out loud. Feel it. Let it settle in your chest. Let it remind you: life is not just what arrives, it’s also what doesn’t.
In that garden, with my friend, subtraction, accompanied by enough-ness and negative gratitude, began to feed the same thing: choosing lightness where we can, so that what remains has room to grow roots.
We exchanged whispered subtractions, starting small. A newsletter I wasn’t reading, a recurring Zoom meeting that made me tense, a habit of scrolling before bed.
Each tiny release returning air to our lungs, giving space to our souls. By the time the sun dipped behind the trees, the practice of subtraction transformed from a theory into a reclamation.
a practice for you:
Take fifteen minutes today to look at your life through subtraction. Grab a notebook or your phone. Make a quick inventory: habits, commitments, expectations, thoughts, people, places, anything that quietly drains you or keeps you from feeling like yourself. For each one, ask: Does this nourish me? Does this serve me? If the answer is no, make a note to let it go.
Imagine letting go of a routine self-talk you give yourself without thinking. Every morning that you think, “I should do better,” or “I need to push harder,” like a mantra. It feels harmless, even responsible. But it’s not. It’s a subtle weight you carry, a quiet pressure that shapes your whole day before it’s even begun.
What if you simply stopped? Not replaced it with another mantra. Not “I am enough” or “I can do this.” Just stopped.
The silence that replaces it is startling at first. Your chest feels lighter, your mind less crowded. Instead, you notice the warmth of the sunlight on your skin, the rhythm of your breath, the hum of life around you that had been muted by the constant mental checklist. That small, almost invisible habit of self-criticism had been subtracting from your energy for years, quietly shaping your hours into tension and obligation. Releasing it doesn’t make you lazy or complacent. It makes you present, aligned, capable of pouring your attention into the things intentionally.
the NO list:
Here’s a little thing I love doing. I call it the NO list. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a list of all the things you’re done with. All the stuff you’re letting go of. All the habits, commitments, obligations, and little drains you no longer have to carry.
Grab a notebook, a piece of paper, your phone, whatever works. Set a timer for five minutes. Write fast. Write messy. Don’t censor. Just let it pour.
What are you done saying yes to? What are you done carrying? What are you done pretending is necessary?
It could be huge: “I won’t take on another project that burns me out.” Or tiny: “I won’t scroll Instagram first thing in the morning.” It can be easy: “I won’t drink coffee past noon on weekdays.”
Every NO you write is like a little exhale. A clearing. Space for more energy, more focus, more joy.
When you’re done, leave it somewhere you’ll see it. Saying no is saying yes to yourself.
Optional: Share one NO in the comments. Let’s celebrate the things we’re done with.
a micro-vow:
Before you close this tab, pick one thing you can subtract this week. One habit, one commitment, one mental loop. Say to yourself: I release this. I make space for what truly matters.
comment below:
What’s one thing you can subtract, a sense of ‘this is enough’ or a negative gratitude this week that will bring you closer to yourself? What’s the thing on your ‘NO’ list that you’re most excited about letting go? Share it below, so we can be inspired by each other.
Vienda Maria 