I’m writing this in the last sun of an August evening, alone on a patch of grass watching an oak make shadows that dance at my feet, with a glass of wine & half a bag of chips.

Sometimes the practice is pranayama & sometimes the practice is dry rosé & salt & pepper ridged.

Have a spill of fucking truths.

Two weeks ago one of my notes popped off. Twenty six thousand somethings & counting, more than 300 000 impressions, subscribers arriving in numbers my little publication had never seen.

The thing every creator is supposed to be chasing. The algorithm finally pointing its giant spotlight at my corner & saying her.

& you’d think it feels like winning. In a way it does.

In more than one way I’m thrilled. (Hey new friends)

Yet, I’ve gotten so damn quiet.

The freeze

Not writer’s block. I have a stack of drafts thick enough to insulate a wall in winter. I’m not experiencing a creative drought. I’ve been penning poems on the backs of my to-do lists. Not laziness, you’ve seen my rundown of ‘the girl summer’

I don’t have the square footage for laziness.

Straight up freeze.

I’ve been filming classes & deleting them.

More than two decades of practice, six years of teaching, at least a handful of years sharing ‘presence & progress not perfection’ & truly believing that.

Yet I’ve watched myself back hesitantly in to a corner, like a stranger auditioning for my own life & pressed delete.

I opened the drafts & none of them felt right for right now. I told myself it was imposter syndrome, then that I was just a bit rusty, then that it’s general overwhelm & then because the mind loves escalation, naturally it boiled down to maybe I was just never any good to begin with.

& underneath all of it, one true sentence

My nervous system’s not built for going viral.

Except, fucking nobodys was.

There is no ancestral template for three hundred thousand strangers looking at you at once. For most of human history, sudden mass attention meant exactly one thing, something big is about to happen to you. The nervous system reads big & sends out threat signals to prepare you for fighting off a tiger.

Even if accompanied by the joyous cheer of thousands, the deer in the headlights eyes, still would’ve been wide with fright.

The body doesn’t come with a separate setting for it’s fine, they’re clapping.

Visibility spiked massively & some old sentry in my brainstem read the surge, ran the numbers on demand versus capacity & pulled my damn plug.

Fight, flight & the one people tend to leave off the motivational posters — freeze.

Which unmoving & silent as it may be, isn’t the absence of a response. It’s a very evident response of woah too much, hold still.

So the woman who writes about nervous systems got yet another masterclass from her own.

I’ve been right here friends, both excited by the spotlight & playing dead in it, like a possum who writes.

A core sample at present

Viral numbers & the subsequent freeze hasn’t been the only the searchlight. It was the searchlight landing on a mind already running at capacity.

The other night, feeling defeated in even attempting to explain why “a bit stressed” was an understatement wearing a brave face, I wrote out what my brain actually holds on any given day, to the person who asked, the only person who catches glimpses of how much mental & physical responsibility I’m gratefully & exhaustedly baring.

Write articles, free & paid. Film classes. Edit classes. Delete classes because nothing feels good enough. Keep up with comments, reshares, messages. My Substack’s blowing up, yay, but see above re overloaded nervous system. Gained 1000+ subscribers, lost 2 paid. Back on Instagram after ten months — the platforms changed, think up hooks, run trial reels, watch trial reels go nowhere. Don’t let the baby see you on your phone too much. Sharing again is making me feel as though I hardly know who I am anymore, it’s fine, postpartum identity crisis is normal. It’s normal, we’re fine. Sort long term data storage for a year on the road. Run comms with every workaway, keep the spreadsheet up to date & alive. Pitch brands. Pitch resorts. Gather what baby’ll need while we’re on the road. Don’t spend much money though, I’m not bringing in much of an income yet. Keep bringing income in. Wait — when was his next doctors appointment? This coming wednesday. Visa waivers, but hold for the passport renewal, a group application’s easier. Forty dollars, even for a baby. Ridiculous. Upload to Vinted, answer Vinted, walk to the Vinted drop off. Groceries, laundry, food prep. We’re running out of diapers. We should really switch to the reusables. We have some. Do I truly want the extra work of washing them? Daily feeds, naps, walks — joy, & also work. I just want to be a full time mama. I don’t want to lose myself to being a full time mama. Slow down, be present, fill your cup. But make sure enough gets done. Take time alone to recharge. But don’t isolate. Make sure you find time & energy to socialise. But Leo needs me more than anyone for this short season of life & that’s where I really want to be. It’s fleeting. It’s endless. You’re doing as much as you can, it’s got to be enough. You’re a devoted mama, you’re doing everything. Even when it’s invisible. Crap, I forgot to unload the dishwasher.

It’s fleeting. It’s endless.

The word nobody taught us

Woven through every line of that list, the littlest & biggest note of all —

I know who I am & yet I don’t.

My boy turned eleven months a few days ago. This is his last month of officially being a baby & I am not okay about it in the most gorgeous way — aching with nostalgia for a season that I’m still standing in. I beg to burst with the love & then, in the very same hour, omg stop needing me so much.

I want to be nothing but his mama. I refuse to be only his mama.

I’m an ambitious women but god if I could be nap trapped beneath his bundle of love with a good book until my body can’t bare his ever growing weight any more, that’s just where I’d be.

There’s a word for all this & I’d bet money I don’t have that nobody taught it to you until after the fact either.

Matrescence.

The developmental passage into motherhood, coined by an anthropologist half a century ago, dusted off by psychiatry only recently. It sounds like adolescence on purpose. Same scale of upheaval. Hormonal weather, a body redrawn, a brain measurably restructured, an identity dismantled & renovated in bits & pieces, except this renovation happens while open to the public.

We hand teenagers a word, a decade of grace & a shared cultural agreement that they’ll be a mess & the mess is developmental.

We hand mothers a six week checkup & a bounced back yet?

So no, what lately feels like a postpartum identity crisis isn’t a crisis. It’s a stage of human development arriving on schedule, in a culture that never bothered to give me its name until I was 6 months deep in it.

I’m not lost. I’m mid metamorphosis.

So again, I’m here but working on the ‘I’m’ & the ‘here’.

Not this, not this

The yogis practice for this vertigo is almost laughably simple.

Neti neti.

Not this, not this.

An old Vedantic inquiry, to find what you are, by peeling away everything you aren’t. I have a body — I am not only the body. I have thoughts — not only the thoughts. Roles, titles, moods, reputations — things worn, not identified with.

So, sat by the oaks, kissed by this ever shrinking patch of August sun, I’ve been playing with the old subtraction.

I am not the note that popped off. Not the subscriber count, in either direction. Not the deleted classes, nor the verdicts I stapled to them. Not “yoga teacher,” not “writer,” not even “mama” — I do those things, gloriously, imperfectly; I am the one doing them but I am not defined by them. Not by the snowball of success, nor the frozen weeks, not where I’m from or where I’m going.

Not the woman I was before him & not whichever woman is still developing in the scarlet light of my internal dark rooms.

Peel it all back & something remains, the same something that has survived every identity I’ve outgrown, grieved & been surprised by. The awareness underneath the rebuild. The one sitting tenant in a home that through out life, keeps changing shape.

I know who I am & yet I don’t. Both true, existing side by side in the same timeline.

Meanwhile, I read forty novels

In early June I realised I hadn’t read a novel in two years. As a lifelong avid reader I was naturally, appalled. Since then I’ve read nearly forty.

No, not a typo & no, not kids books.

350 - 850 page novels, inhaled through the cracks of a life that doesn’t really have any cracks in it. While ‘behind’ on everything, while frozen, while the drafts sat & the reels went unedited, I was stealing away in the pages of Jim Dodge, Peter Hoeg, Thomas Pynchon & Janet Evanovich like a woman at a banquet after a two year fast.

I’ve decided to call it research & I fucking mean it.

As a writer — paid, dabbling, part time, substacker, hobbyist, expressionistic journaler, whatever — curling up with a book that tantalizes the lyrical centers of your brain, that feeds you that which we most crave, delving in & out of worlds IS productive.

A creator who only outputs is a well nobody lets refill — & I’ve been pouring for years straight. Handed one free hour at midday with my babe asleep on my chest, my system didn’t choose the to-do list.

It chose input. Story. Voice. Other people’s sentences, composting down into whatever I make next.

(I told you rest is part of consistency. Apparently I’ll keep being made to prove it.)

Forty novels devoured, I promise, not as procrastination.

As an aquifer dousing droughted land.

So fuck it, here’s what’s true

To the thousand of you who arrived on the back of one note, & to everyone who’s watched me be quieter than a growing publication is supposed to be —

here is who you actually subscribed to.

A woman one month from a one-way ticket, selling her entire life one padded envelope at a time. A mama in the last month of her baby’s babyhood, trying to savour it’s every drop whilst not being consumed by it. Something between a nomad & a homemaker, organising the ludicrous limbs of that. A teacher who sometimes deletes her own class. A nervous system that froze in the spotlight & is thawing on its own damn schedule. A reader again, at last.

A creative renovation in progress, writing to you from inside some occasionally really dodgy looking scaffolding.

I’d rather be true in my ‘art’, than stick to a strategy about ‘content’.

So if your own life’s blowing up or breaking down or seems to be doing both at the same time. If you’re frozen in some spotlight of your own, or mid metamorphosis in a culture that skipped the naming ceremony, come sit by me.

Bring rosé & chips your favourite flavour.

This life — It’s fleeting. It’s endless.

& we’re allowed to just keep becoming ourselves, for all the world to see.

If this or any of my work has been useful to you & you’d like to keep me caffeinated or support a slightly feral, very passionate new mamacita without any commitment

you can buy me a coffee here.

Who does she think she is?

Starting a publication about consistency & then disappearing for most of a month? Leaving one lonely article gesting how healthy it can be to abandon the to do list fluttering in her wake like a note stuck to the fridge — brb — no ETA, no apology.

A publication about showing up. About resilience. About the practices that help humans human. & the woman just… left?

Let’s be clear about who’s asking, because I’m damn sure it wasn’t you. Not one of you sent that message. There was no how dare you dissapear comment, no unsubscribe avalanche, not even a gentle everything okay hun?

In fact the only substacker to reach out in my silence was one of my paying subscribers to tell me they’d just added me to their recommendations list because I’ve fast become one of their favourite writers.

Yes, I damn near joyfully weeped.

So no the heckler isn’t any of you. The heckler lives somewhere above my ears, below the feral blond-ish mess usually trapped in a mama bun with one frangipani clip or another. She with her front row seat & endless season tickets & uff, she’s been warming up her best booming commentator voice for weeks.

& I’d wager money I don’t have that you know her cousin. The one who pipes up about your abandoned meditation app. Your pretty journal with the January to March entries & then the sea of stern blank pages subtly singing their dissapointment at you. The running shoes by the door doing a remarkable impression of furniture. The sourdough starter you let die & still grimace over the fact that it’s funeral featured garbage men.

It’s only human that you know that voice & so this article is well, for fucking all of us.

The shifting of seasons

The funny thing is, that last article I left fluttering on the fridge was actually about clocking an overloaded nervous system almost too late & subsequently booking a mental holiday.

& barely a week after that mental hiatus ended I flew off to an actual holiday, sort of.

Two weeks on the Balearic rock I’ve always called home, that surely photographed like one. Gin clear ocean in a thousand blues & greens, burnt out grass & hazy sunrises, vivid bougainvillaea trellaced everywhere, tortured oaks & almond trees, cafes that’ve held so many versions of me over the years. Friends I’d not seen in too long, half of us having become mothers in the gap, sweat on our brows above new smile & worry lines, babies on our hip in nothing but diapers (if that) because we’d all be naked if we could be in the 38 degree, 90% humidity wave throttling the meditarranean in mid July.

Two weeks on home island & me treating it like a holiday, wearing three sweaty jobs & a sundress.

Apparently, out there beyond my rock, everyone’s been aiming at having a 90’s girl summer. A sardine girl summer — someone’s gotta explain this one to me, are we wearing the fish? eating them? befriending them? — a jelly heeled summer.. Everywhere I look there’s seasons only made real by their hashtag. To hell with the meteorological 365 day clock, give it a trending name & an aesthetic & a tote bag.

Well, I’ve been having a chasing-a-ten-month-old-who’s-discovered-walking-&-seperation-anxiety, selling-everything-I-own-one-padded-envelope-at-a-time, planning-a-year-on-the-road-for-a-family-of-three, visting-new-&-old-versions-of-self… girl summer.

Can’t quite seem to make it fit on a tote bag. Doesn’t even fit in an overloaded browser. I’ve got four seperate windows running on my steaming macbook, each with it’s own definition of too many tabs, I can practically hear it hiss ‘woman make this stop’ every time I open it & no, I’ve no idea where the music is coming from.

& whilst yes, it’s a whirlwind of exciting, nail-biting, head & heart spinning demands, it’s also my one summer where my baby still qualifies as a baby. Putting down the to-do list to taste the golden edge of it & just be present in the chaos is as frequently as I can muster, priority numero uno.

This publication was born inside my just-had-a-baby bubble, somewhere in the run up to month 6 when I watched the end of maternity pay come barreling towards me full steam ahead & I like bambi on brand new legs watched it inbound with a spectacularly spiritual well now wtf do i do, started writing a book or 2 & built myself a substack — which was its own crash course in learning how to do anything alongside full time mamacita-ing. Laptop balanced on one knee at midnight between dream feeds. Voice annotating snippets of things on the third stroller walk of the day. Handing over learner spoons of banana, peanut butter & chia smash with one hand whilst typing with the other.

& like anything given some practice, over a month or so, this mad multitasking stopped costing so much effort & became second nature. Autopilot.

But autopilot is calibrated for the load it learned on. As Spring careened into Summer modules kept being added — 2 week stints each month of solo parenting, the daily data dance of the vinted mission, shuffling to & from the drop off so frequently the staff & I qualify for situationship, the researching of umpteen farms & resorts & communities & all the long, considered messages I tippity-tapped to them. The ceaseless sensation of returning to body, to breath, to art, to presence whilst wrapping my energy around some new hurdle in the schedule, some new skill my lil love had mastered that required living room & nervous system reorganisation — until the seams of my second nature gave off an almoist audible threat to bust.

Life really do just be like that, there will always be something to adjust around, a new hallway added to your maze, a disappearing door in your funhouse. Just when you think you understand the zig, our one wild, precious, ever pesky life asks that you also learn to zag.

So naturally, almost like I dare follow my own damn sound advice I stepped back to let myself recalibrate to the ever shifting season.

Kumbhaka

In pranayama there is a phase of the breath called kumbhaka.

The pause. The held moment between inhale & exhale, or at the very bottom, after everything is emptied out & before anything new arrives.

You know what nobody watching a breathwork practice has ever thought?

‘She’s holding her breath, how inconsistent of her.’

Because the pause isn’t the absence of breath. It’s a phase of the breath. & not a passive one either — the pause is where a biological exchange happens. Oxygen crossing into the blood. The nervous system reading the stillness & softening its grip. Pressure equalising. The nourishment of the breath gets cashed in during the reprieve.

A breath with no pauses has a name too. It’s called hyperventilation. It could look impressively productive I guess — so much breathing! — only sometimes it’ll drop you to the floor.

Kumbhaka is generally described as an advanced practice, in my own classes I’m gentle with how I introduce it to beginners because it’s common to feel some flutterings of anxiety in the chest when we’re not used to practicing it. A massive amount of humans are on a quest to learn how not to hold their breath & there I am attempting to teach you how to.

& isn’t that kind of funny when this is the analogy for rest. We’re all so used to hustling towards our goal that resting gives us anxiety just as much as trying to hold for a count of 4 after an exhale.

I have banged this drum in my notes until the skin’s gone thin & I’ll bang it again here, in full, in the place it can live permanently —

Rest is part of consistency.

Time off isn’t the reward for showing up. Nor a failure of it. It’s a phase of it. Simply an ingredient in the recipe. My last month may have looked like a gap in my practice, yet I carried on living it. I paused the publishing of it.

The month was a grand kumbhaka.

The power of an off duty brain

When you step back from active work, the brain doesn’t idle. The machinery of consolidation kicks in, of connecting far flung things, of turning experience into understanding. It’s why the answer arrives under the hot baptism of a shower & not at the desk you’d been gripping for three hours. Researchers call it the incubation effect. Stepping away from a problem measurably improves the solving of it, because a part of you keeps working on it without your supervision, & to be totally honest, without your interference.

Rest is when all your best material composts into something you can actually spread on solid ground.

Naps consolidate memory. Boredom breeds creativity. Daydreaming is a form of problem solving. Deep sleep power washes the brain. Doing nothing is doing something.

There is no forced clarity in a pause, the pause creates space for clarity to sparkle in the corner & catch your perusing eye. It creates space for curiosity.

& curiosity, when given time to linger over, becomes certainty.

The gap isn’t what stops you returning

Now if someone would hand me a megaphone real quick —

It is not the missed week that kills a practice. Not the missed month either.

It’s the shame waiting at the re-entry.

Nobody quits meditating because they skipped a weekend. They quit because three weeks later, sitting back down on the cushion their own inner heckler kicked up & berated them until returning started to feel like an admission of failure. Continuing to avoid the cushion is an easy way to avoid that verdict.

The killer of consistency isn’t the gap, it’s the dread of a comeback. The penance workout. The sorry I’ve been quiet post.

So we don’t come back. Because coming back means facing the gap & facing the gap means feeling the shame & feeling the shame is optional if we just... never return. Well heck, I didn’t want to write that book / build that app / learn how to crochet / get 3 pull ups that much anyway.

The practice dies not of absence but of embarrassment.

Which means the actual skill, the one that separates people with twenty year practices from people with twenty January restarts, isn’t never leaving.

It’s returning without an apology.

Walking back in like you live there. Because you do.

I named this publication The Art of Returning for a good many reason. In this case I’ll call it a disclaimer. I never promised I wouldn’t leave. Life makes leavers of us all. Babies & deaths & house moves & the Vinted queue see to that.

I promised I’d come back. As I have to all those things I love & choose to make part of my autopilot over & over again. Not only not kicking myself for taking time off, but actively celebrating all the good that percolated in a much needed pause.

It’s a whole art.

So, who does she think she is?

In case my inner heckler didn’t get the memo while I was writing this —

I’m someone practicing what she publishes.

& you my love, with your cousin heckler & your momentarily abandoned whatever

The door’s still there, wide open to you when you feel pulled back towards it. There’s no bouncer in its frame checking how long you’ve been gone & no apology tour owed on the other side of it.

You haven’t failed. You were simply in the pause between breaths.

& the beautiful thing about a pause between breaths?

The next breath was never in question. It’s naturally & nourishingly, yours to take.

If this article sang your song you might also get some goodness from —

If this or any of my work has been useful to you & you’d like to keep me caffeinated or support a slightly feral, very passionate new mamacita without any commitment

you can buy me a coffee here.

Somewhere at the end of June, smack bang in the middle of two weeks solo-parenting my adorable & demanding nine month old through an obscene city heatwave — I don’t need to tell you heat hits different in a city than on an island or mid-jungle — I shot a note out to Substack.

FUCK I HAVEN’T WRITTEN IN A WEEK, MY DREAM IS DONE FOR, I’LL FALL BEHIND, THE ALGORITHM POLICE WILL COME FOR ME..

Oh wait no, taking breaks is a part of consistency.

I must just be soaking up the gorgeous, maddening intricacies of life to their fullest & percolating something juicy.

Carry on 🤍

It went moderately viral. Which, given the subject matter is at least a little funny.

But more than funny — it clarified some things about my own & a lot of your present experiences.

A literal hot mess

The first of those two weeks I confess, I was frequently beyond a bit frustrated. Trying to write between naps that, in the heat were few, far between & practically a full time job of their own. Trying to keep up the rhythm I’d gotten into of photographing, uploading, selling & shipping most everything we own (more on that soon enough). Trying to keep the guided practices sequenced, filmed, uploaded. Attempting to keep myself & my baby cool, fed & content. Trying to keep his now very mobile hands out of the dangerous corners he’s so fixated on. Keep the notes flowing, the articles coming, the presence consistent, the platform growing.

Trying to do all the things in a short season that wasn’t structurally sound for doing much of anything, let alone all of it.

Unsurprisingly, nothing was flowing. But I didn’t clock how far gone I was until one sweaty Thursday morning, sandals & my sanity threatening to melt on the sidewalk.

Baked pavement, air thick enough to chew, my boy strapped to the stroller radiating the whimpers & fury of a small, hot person who can’t find rest. The front wheel of the stroller jammed on an uneven rock at the exact moment he kicked his water bottle out onto the path — for the umpteenth time that morning — & something in me flickered hot white. I snatched the bottle up & flung it into the pram bag with an immense, startling force.

& then I stood there. On a path, frozen in the who-left-the-oven-on air, one hand white-knuckled on the stroller, the other hovering, only mildly horrified after its assault on the pram bag, watching myself.

I know this body. I’ve spent years studying the systems that run it & teaching other people to listen to & regulate theirs. A nervous system that frustratedly hurls a gorgeous baby’s water bottle.. over gravity doing what gravity does, isn’t a nervous system with capacity to spare. The fury had fuck all to do with the bottle. It had everything to do with the fact that I was running on empty & both life & myself just kept demanding more.

I’ve mentioned before, I’ll mention again — knowing better doesn’t make you immune to humane nature but it can shorten the recovery time.

So there I was, suddenly aware I’d been prescribing myself productivity in a myriad of moments that were begging for the opposite.

A fictional one way ticket

A morning or so after the note went out, we were at the dining table. Him in the highchair conducting his usual breakfast symphony — yoghurt on the tray, in his hair as well as deep in his bellybutton, blueberries smushed into any & every gap, banana smeared just about everywhere à la small artist who’s found his medium.

Me with my coffee, loaded sourdough & feral mama bun, phone buzzing avidly at the edge of the scene.

The comments were flooding in faster than I could ever hope to keep up with. Holy shit I needed this today. Yes! You take that time, can’t wait to read what you percolate. Dozens & dozens of humans — writers, mamas, millennials, midlifers, the stretched thin of every variety — relating so hard to the need for a fucking break that they’d stopped mid-scroll to celebratedly say so.

& sitting there, watching a cripple banana slide to its fate, I decided what I needed was a dose of the medicine I’m always prescribing.

So I deleted every item on my mental to-do list.

All of it. & booked myself a one way mental holiday.

Return date: whenever the capacity came back, or the helping hands did.

The effect was so immediate it was laughable. The yoghurt splattered warzone of my dining room stopped being stressful in the space of a single breath because there was no longer anything waiting on the other side of cleaning it up. No rush. No next. The mess went from obstacle to scenery.

I devoted that morning to clearing the entire first floor of things I didn’t want my son getting into & oh! Gone was the endless wrangling of him away from an area only to wrangle him away again fifteen seconds later when he’d crawled back. So gone too was the frustration building at his fixation on anything he’s not supposed to touch. I embraced a sea of resistancelessnessnessness — if it wasn’t actually dangeous, I wasn’t intevening. You want to tip over the paper bin, spill the contents everywhere & push an egg carton round the living room? Do that thing.

Even my mildly overwhelming notifications section suddenly became a simple, joyful part of the picture, because it was put on hold — all those comments incited the opposite of a rush to respond.

Same nap-resistant child. Same blistering heat. Same city, same four walls.

Same ever growing monster to-do list, same me.

To be clear — I didn’t go on holiday from motherhood. You don’t get to clock out of that one & I doubt any of us really would even if it was an option. We don’t want time away from our babies to get the to-do’s done, we want the to-do’s done so we can be fully present enjoying time with our babies.

It was a holiday from the idea that this season needed to be more than was realistically manageable. From performing productivity for the captivated, urgent audience of one (me). From the invisible pressure I’d been creating for myself in a necessary gap between creating.

Mentally off the clock

Just before babydaddy left, my Belgian residency — after a six month purgatory — finally cleared. Meaning various things, mostly that I can finally leave the country. We booked flights to my home island almost immediately, we leave mid July & I am ecstatic.

But the residency card carried a second exciting permission. I walked straight from collecting my ID at immigration to the library round the corner & got myself the library card I was newly allowed. I snaked uncertainly through the small English section the way you do when you haven’t in years, lil man scrambling about the burgundy carpet after loud protests at being left sat in the stroller, doing his damnedest to pull every book off of every bottom shelf & if it were an olympic sport, he’d be taking home first place.

I can’t say the collection was amazing. But I struck gold. An author’s name leaped off a top shelf at me — a mystery-cum-romance series with enough wit to qualify as comedy, one I was somewhat obsessed with in late childhood... Lo & behold, it’s still being added to. Sometime in my teens I finished book twelve. Here I was, fifteen plus years later, eyeing books twenty nine & thirty, free for the take-home.

I left with a screaming tot & a handful of books in tow, thinking there is maybe nothing more ambitious in this world than a mother with zero village holding a physical book, believing she’ll have the time & free hands to actually read it.

Silly me. I’d almost forgotten — time for what we love is something we make, not something we have.

& while I devoured two books in three days during that first week, mostly at night, sacrificing precious sleep for the sweet nostalgia of Stephanie Plum’s haphazard, heated, frequently hilarious Jersey world, in the second week I found myself poring over pages mid breakfast, beneath my babe mid-feed, a page at the park, a chapter over a rare coffee when he slept twenty minutes longer than me.

We took long walks & swam in cold lakes — & my god, that first slide into water cold enough to bite after days of city swelter, every nerve ending singing the same note — you’re here now, you’re whole. I shlepped halfway across the city to buy a cheap baby float in his size to give my arms a break in the water for the first time. His glee as I spun it & played peek-a-boo dipping my head beneath the water will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I savoured plenty slow lovingly-made meals & got over the internal pressure that everything I eat has to be whole food & home prepped cause ‘I’m on holiday ffs’ — devoted a couple different evenings to frozen pepperoni pizzas pimped with extra mushrooms, olives, garlic & jalapeños, eaten in front of chick flicks I loved as a teenager. Balance, baby.

Instead of dealing with raught panic everytime my incredibly mobile son attempted to launch himself off the step between home-gym & living room, I spent hours spread across various afternoons teaching him to clamber down it safely — with only varying degrees of success, a lot of wild applause & plenty laughs. & uff, the pride the couple times he got it, the joy at knowing I’d helped him towards figuring something out.

I kept calling things the lazy girl version, ‘lazy girl tabbouleh’, ‘lazy girl veggie batch prep’, ‘lazy girl morning routine’ & lovingly knowing that while I was choosing the minimal version of some things, nothing about my days actually qualified as lazy.

I laughed when my mini made a riotous mess of his lunch instead of clenching the teeth of my ribs around it.

I made collages & kimchi & satisfying bullet journal spreads. I put things like fucking chill, oil your body like it’s a temple you’ve been gifted to polish because it is & steal ten minutes of movement that brings joy on my to-do lists. I hadn’t read a novel in two years & I’m damn near through my ninth in little more than two weeks.

Far from being a period absent in action, it was a refocus of it. A slow, luxuriating pace turned towards compassion, presence & fulfilment. A removal of the idea that my worth has anything to do with my output.

You know — that state you get into on holiday.

& for every moment the first week was agitating, difficult, sticky & stressful — the second week was revitalising, joyful, regulated & peaceful.

A Sanskrit holiday state of mind

In yogic philosophy there is a concept called Upeksha. Literally translating as equanimity.

Not signifying indifference or checking out. Definitely not the absence of caring — I promise you I cared no less about my writing, my boy, my one wild plate-spinning life in week two than in week one.

Upeksha is the capacity to be fully present to what is without being destabilised by it. To hold the moment — yes even the shoulders screaming, yoghurt everywhere, feels like 44 degrees moments — without grasping at them, burying them or flinging them furiously into a pram bag.

The whole thing has had me thinking, between the cold lakes, snack plates & the devouring of novels. The holiday state of mind we all chase — the one we book flights & count down days for, that halfway across the world childlike state of learning & play I’ve spent more than half my life prioritising — isn’t really about the destination.

It’s that on holiday we grant ourselves permission to meet each moment as it is. No agenda leaning on it. No list waiting behind it.

The beach soothes your nervous system sure, but so does the permission you give yourself to relax on it, or indeed, anywhere.

So it’s equally available on a random sweaty Thursday. During a heatwave or a thunderstorm. In the city you call home as much as at a resort in Bali. With a baby who can’t find rest but can find secret corners of the dining room to smear foodstuff into.

I stopped fighting the season I was in & let it be exactly what it was. Loud & exhausting. Hot & achey. 24/7 of my favourite tiny human & forty degree heat & cold lake water & the unbridled joy of a cheap frozen pizza eaten whole, sat on the carpet in front of the TV I almost never watch.

Upeksha, equanimity. A nervous system reset sourced through imagination alone.

& since we’re toying with Sanskrit for a moment I want to bring Lila back into frame. I wrote about Lila recently in ‘Life is art’ & it’s a concept I never stop returning to. Divine play — the creative pulse beneath every waking hour of a life fully lived. The exquisitely breathing source of creativity itself. The collages nobody will see, the kimchi begging to be burped, the novels consumed with the hunger of a lifelong avid reader whose life hasn’t let her bury herself in books in years.

Play, in a child’s life just as much as an adult’s, is where the good stuff ferments.

The science of a switch off

Cortisol — you know her as the stress hormone & she is that, but one of her less advertised jobs is narrowing your attention. When she’s elevated, your focus tightens & your brain zeroes in on the task in front of you. Useful for getting things done. Useless for generating ideas, making unexpected connections or having the kind of creative leaps that never come when you’re straining for them.

Broad associative thinking — the kind that produces the good stuff — needs cortisol to drop. It needs the brain to stop racing & start dallying.

Enter the default mode network. You’ve met her here before — I think of her as a friend. She’s the circuitry that lights up when you’re not focused on a task & she is anything but idle. She’s where memory consolidates, where distant experiences shake hands, where the thing you’ve been turning over for weeks without resolution suddenly — beneath the trees, buried in a book, hands fervently working away for half a day to make kimchi — becomes clear.

You cannot access her while you’re performing productivity nor when you’re redirecting bottled stress at something as ludicrous as a babys water bottle.

She only comes out to play when the list shuts up & guess what — no one has the power to quieten a to-do list quite like the person writing it.

We’ve been sold that rest is the reward for output. Earn your break. Finish the list & then you can stop. The philosophy & the neuroscience are saying the same shit here in different languages —

Rest isn’t the reward for creativity. It’s the condition for it.

Your friendly neighbourhood reminder

Slow down like it’s your birthright.

Put fucking chill on your to-do list.

Steal ten minutes of movement that brings you joy.

Make something with your hands that’s totally indifferent to an algorithm.

Savour every bite of the homemade meal.

Eat the pizza unapologetically.

Peruse the library. Chase your crawling toddler round the lake.

Get grass stains & salty hair & leave coffee flavoured thumbprints on books.

Take a god damn nap.

Not in aim to optimise fucking anything — though it may do just that.

Just to be a whole-ass-human, embodied, present, living.

The to-do list will still be waiting. Substack will still be here. The almighty algorithm awaits whenever you feel like engaging with it again.

Book the mental holiday. No flight or queue at customs required.

Vanish for as long as you need & you’ll come back to all of it dripping with something that never could’ve been scheduled.

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More than several lifetimes, but in the grand scheme of things not so long ago I was the kind of child that made some parents weirdly competitive at parent teacher meetings & had the children vacillate between wanting to be my best friend & wanting to slam my head between heavy doors. Most often it was both which was thoroughly discombobulating for mini me.

Yes the latter actually happened, yes it hurt.

Top of the class without ever trying too hard. Lead in the school play. Chief boy scout — no not brownies, boy scouts, a difference that said mini me always felt needed asserting. The only troop in England that accepts girls sat round the corner from our little London flat. I loved it & as with most things I enjoyed, I excelled at it. I was a gymnast who progressed faster than the programme anticipated & much faster than my fellow kid gymnasts wanted to cheer me on for. I was on television in adverts before I was old enough to have any kind of opinion about TV. The kind of child teachers described with phrases like ‘so much potential’, ‘gifted’ & yadayada.

I was also, for most of those early years, really, truly happy.

My first memories are painted in green & gold & Balearic blue. We moved between an island paradise & a quaint European city & then on to Texas & in each place I arrived curious, open & seemingly incapable of not throwing myself headfirst into whatever was available to try.

At 2 years old I stomped up to my mama (if she’s to be believed, I was wearing little more than her comically oversized on me then Doc Martens) & declared that I was going to be a singer. She said “okay tiny human, let’s see what we can do to help you get there.” She put up with me singing on trains & in supermarket queues & putting on performances at every family gathering. Not many years later we bounced down to a local performing arts group & she, in her cheeky stubborn ways convinced them to let me do a trial class even though they didn’t accept kids my age.

“just let her do one day, if she’s not fit for it, we’ll come back when she’s older.”

They did & at the end of that day they gave all of us tiny humans a full A4 page of poem — intended to be the only solo piece in the upcoming spring performance — which we were all supposed to learn for the next week. Next week when I showed up in my dungarees with bunches bouncing atop my blond head, a couple of years younger than everyone else, I was the only one who’d learned it. I absolutely loved the company & wound up progressing within it until I was 15 when I decided, I really didn’t want to do this after all.

Performing arts — modelling, acting, singing, dancing. Gymnastics, creative writing, painting, scouting, climbing, abseiling, pottery, sewing, reading. The list of my passions was practically endless. My mama, who had the opposite of pushy parent energy, who was in fact one of the most supportive humans I’ve ever encountered somehow… & I still don’t entirely understand the logistics of this given that we were not a wealthy family, found a way to let me try everything I was inspired to. & the things I loved I kept doing until I stopped loving them & then I tried something else.

It was a glorious, chaotic, golden way to grow up.

But at six years old we’d moved back to London where I was born. I stuck out like a fat gold thumb & everything got quite a bit more complicated.

London didn’t know what to do with me & I didn’t know what to do with it. I was a child shaped by island light & European pace & the freedom of community amongst travellers that incited my little soul had been built for wandering — & suddenly I was in a very big, very grey city that moved too fast, held a lot of very hurt people & cared too much about things I didn’t understand yet.

The bullying started almost immediately. My best understanding of it, looking back, is that it was for the oldest & most boring of reasons — I was happy, good at things & I was naive enough to believe that everyone, like me, just wanted to make another person smile. I didn’t yet understand that on the playground, in fact even in adult life this combination can make you a target.

I also didn’t yet understand that I was growing up in a home that most people would consider more than a little complicated.

My mama & her partner were addicts. I need to be careful here because I have no interest in your pity & even less in reducing them to this single fact — they were the most functioning junkies you’ve ever met, capable of extraordinary love & extraordinary presence & extraordinary creativity. I was cycled to school every day with both of us singing, there was no lack of support, warmth, hygiene or anything else we tend to picture when we imagine a child raised by those dependant on a substance. But by the time I was twelve my mama was supremely sick. By thirteen she was on life support.

Suffice to say the colours of my world had changed considerably.

The dropout

At thirteen, somewhere in the accumulation of all of the above — the bullying, my mama’s illness, a steadily worsening relationship with myself that had taken the form of self harm & an eating disorder, a newfound love of being anything but sober & a somewhat fractured relationship with reality — I stopped going to school.

It wasn’t immediate, it was more like a slow fade. For maybe 6 months I’d go to school, usually early, sign in for morning registration & 3 days out of 5, walk straight back out the gates afterwards.. laughably I was bunking off school to go hang out at bookstores & libraries & okay fine to go smoke weed with my friends too. My attendance dwindled to an obscenely low percentage & eventually I decided my life was actually big & messy & loud enough that I didn’t need to be going somewhere that wasn’t challenging me intellectually but supremely challenged me socially.

They had tried to move me forward a year when I was nine. The same year they kept calling my mama in pestering her that I wasn’t doing homework… to which she always replied “how are her grades?” They were immaculate & so she pointed out with no subtlety & a little sass the women in my family just can’t escape, that it was possible I was actually learning what I needed to during my school hours so could probably skip doing extra work on the same things at home.

I turned the opportunity down. Even at nine I understood that being a ten year old in high school was not going to help remove the bullseye from my back, I figured (probably correctly) that it would only make it larger & more visible. It was one of the more pragmatic decisions of my young life & nobody gave me credit for it at the time. My mama, bless her just said “Okay if that’s what you really want.”

By thirteen I had made the much less pragmatic decision of simply opting out entirely & for a while nobody noticed because I had the smarts to pass end of year exams, was good at performing & the world around me was otherwise occupied.

At fourteen social services got involved. A newly filled roster of shrinks & psychiatrists arrived alongside them — most of whom seemed primarily interested in pointing blame at my mama, who to be clear was not just my mother. She was my safe place, my sister & my best friend. & this blame I found not just unhelpful but genuinely infuriating. Nobody seemed interested in the fact that I had my own considerable shit going on quite independently of hers.

Social services decreed I couldn’t simply do nothing. I certainly wasn’t doing nothing, I was partying, hanging out with friends, all of whom were a few years older than me & in similarly complicated teenage scenes. But they were adamant I couldn’t just not go to school & I was adamant I wasn’t going back.

So they suggested I start attending a city learning centre near where we lived.

The teacher who saw me

It was four hours, a couple of times a week. Easy enough. So easy that a part of me resented it & another part of me desperately needed it.

My first day, the teacher asked what I liked doing & I told her I love to write.

“Great. Write me something.”

So I did. I have no recollection what it was about. My generally precise memory is of these years, a sleepless, calorie scarce blur. I handed it to her at the end of the four hours & went on my way.

When I came back the following Thursday she didn’t even say hi, she just said

“Write me something else.”

So I did.

The week after that she pulled me aside & asked if I understood where I was. I looked at her the way teenagers look at adults asking stupid questions.

“…The city learning centre in Camden.”

“Well yes. But this is a centre for people with learning disabilities. You really shouldn’t be here. Would you mind doing some tests for me?”

So for the next couple of weeks, every Tuesday & Thursday, I did exams. What I didn’t fully realise at the time was that they were advancing in difficulty, incrementally & carefully, all the way up to university level.

She contacted a college nearby. Told me I’d been accepted to do a foundational degree & that I could choose what I wanted to study. So at fifteen, that same autumn, I started college — studying performing arts with a minor in creative writing. The two things I’d been convinced since childhood were all I wanted to do.

I actually loved going to college, being the young one there in too much eyeliner was kind of a high but it taught me pretty quickly, that I no longer lusted to have my life ruled by performing arts.

Every time I got on stage I was overcome with crumbling anxiety. I found none of the joy I’d always found in standing in the spotlight. I wanted in many ways to disappear. I had stopped self harming & the effect was that my eating disorder had taken a drastically dark turn, one that the following year would see me hit 31kg ft. thinning hair & blackouts — I was disappearing, before everyone’s eyes & I wanted it that way.

India, the island & healing

It took going to India at sixteen to begin to really heal any of it. I arrived somewhere in the early stages of recovery but deeply struggling & left a little over a month later with a kind of golden glow about me. A glow I’d forgotten existed somewhere in my late childhood when I had sort of skipped the tween & teen years & gone straight for messy grown up life.

I won’t compress that trip into a neat paragraph because it doesn’t deserve one. Suffice to say that what happened there was the beginning of a long, extraordinarily worthwhile study of myself. Of the body. Of the mind. Of the relationship between the two that I would spend the next fifteen years — well more, since it’s present to this day — exploring in every way available to me.

I went back to London. Got a job. Felt my newly healed self beginning to spiral back toward old toxic patterns — the way an environment teeming with years of bad habits can unravel a person regardless of how much work they’ve done. I told my mama I was leaving, travelled Europe through that summer & at the ripe old age of seventeen packed up some boxes & shipped myself to the island I’d always felt was home. The island where my mama too had grown up, that she’d had her own valid reasons for leaving.

Perhaps that’s just the nature of hometowns, we accumulate a need to escape & then spend years figuring out wherever we go… well, there we are & have to discern what we were actually running away from & what it is we want to run towards.

From there I worked my butt off in the Spanish summers, travelled mostly Asia in the winters & I studied. Not in any institution. Not any one specific topic. Just voraciously, in the way that had always come most naturally to me — following curiosity wherever it led. Using any & every learning tool I came across on the wide web & deep in the tomes I’d always loved immersing myself in.

Writing, from journalism to poetry. Photography. Physiology. Anthropology. Biomechanics of breathwork. Anatomy. Yoga asana. Yoga philosophy. The neuroscience of habit & nervous system regulation. Grief. The immune system. The gut biome. The intelligence of the body when it’s finally given permission to speak. This list is unfinished because it’s incredibly long & I’m still adding things to it.

Svadhyaya & the study that’s never stopped

In Sanskrit philosophy there’s a concept called svadhyaya.

It’s usually translated as self study — one of the niyamas, the personal observances of yogic practice. But its meaning is broader & more interesting than simple introspection. Svadhyaya encompasses the study of sacred texts, but also the study of oneself as a text, the study of oneself learning, which we all are, basically all the time. The ongoing, curious, non-judgemental observation of who you are, how you work, what you need & what you’re capable of.

It is in other words, the opposite of what the school system asked of me.

The school system wanted me to be assessed. Categorised. Told what I was & wasn’t capable of based on criteria that had very little to do with how my mind actually worked. It wanted me to fit in to one of a few acceptable boxes.

Svadhyaya asks something different. It asks you to become the student of your own experience. To treat your life, your patterns, your resistances, your obsessions, your inexplicable capacities as the curriculum.

Looking back, I understand now that I’ve never stopped practicing svadhyaya. Even in the years when I was doing my absolute worst by most external metrics — the dropout years, the disappearing years, the years when a great deal of what I was studying about myself was painful & difficult & nothing I’d have chosen — I was learning. Constantly, compulsively, in the only way that has ever really worked for me.

Through living it.

& it must be said those darker years were rapid & valuable learning for me. I wouldn’t be the woman I am today without them. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone & yet in my own journey they meant I got a great deal of hard, important shit out of the way young. They gave me a level of eye contact, connection & empathy that I genuinely don’t think can be studied into existence.

I’ve never met a soul who astounded me with the lightness of their being who hasn’t been through a ringer or six. The two things aren’t unrelated.

It’s not just me

It’s worth saying that I didn’t arrive at this brand of unconventional entirely alone. I come from a long line of highly intelligent humans who were, to varying degrees less than ideally served by standard institutions.

My uncle is perhaps my favourite example. Another high school dropout who last I heard was curing cancer or some such universally important thing in a laboratory gifted to him by Johns Hopkins University — which is, I think we can all agree, a fairly compelling argument against the idea that being a dropout has much to do with intelligence or in fact a problem when a human drops out of a system that isn’t supporting them.

The schooling system as we know it is an old machine. It was designed for a different century, a different economy & a different understanding of how human minds actually work. For some children it’s fine, they fit the shape of it & the shape of it fits them & everyone gets along reasonably well.

For others it’s like being handed a violin & assessed on your ability to play the trumpet — The instrument isn’t wrong, the assessment is.

What I’d argue we desperately need & what I was lucky enough to find through a combination of an incredibly supportive mother alongside a second family I was blessed to exist within for many of my adult years, a lot of independent study & a life lived at full tilt plus a whole lot of serendipity, isn’t a better version of the same system. It’s the courage to question whether the system is the right one for this mind, at this moment.

Socialisation matters enormously. I’m not suggesting otherwise. But as someone who had an extraordinarily full youth — gymnastics, performing arts, scouting, travel, languages, communities in multiple countries — I can tell you that meaningful socialisation doesn’t require eight hours a day in a room being taught to answer things correctly rather than question things intelligently & intuitively.

The plot thickens

At twenty seven, after some years of working as a yoga teacher & breathwork coach & building a life that largely felt & probably looked, like someone who had figured themselves out — I discovered I’m autistic.

I want to sit with that for a moment because I know what you’re thinking. She was top of every class. She was lead in the school play. She had heightened social skills & deep empathy & the kind of warmth that made strangers talk to her on buses. She was just about the last kid anyone thought to neurologically assess.

Yes. All of that & also autistic.

In my very brief time on TikTok several summers ago a girl popped up on my screen & asked if I understood that being able to read & write before the age of two wasn’t normal because she hadn’t & her therapist had just diagnosed her as hyperlexic… off the app I popped because hey, I was reading & writing before two.

‘An avid fascination & aptitude for words. Exceptional memory, advanced reading skills & focus on visual-spatial tasks. Most often a splinter trait of autism.’

I tuned my mouth to a hm of acknowledgment, filed it away in one of my many mental boxes, this one labelled ‘random interesting things’ & carried on with my Saturday.

But not too long later another video appeared — a call out to all the women who were little girls fascinated by literature, acting, anthropology… who are now discovering they are in fact autistic & were just learning how to human.

I was more than a little floored. She had just listed a chunk of my fixations as a child.

As I love to do, I did a bunch of research & over the following months accepted I was indeed neurospicy before sitting down one day at 6am to take the test. A test that like our definition of autism definitely needs an update but did confirm I have low flying neurodivergence.

This is the part where I get to tell you that we have collectively done a spectacular job of misunderstanding what neurodivergence actually looks like — in girls especially, in children who have learned to mask so thoroughly that even they don’t know they’re doing it.

The presentation that gets spotted, that gets the early intervention, the support & the understanding, tends to be one specific kind. Struggling socially, struggling academically, temper tantrums & so on, those clearly finding the world difficult to navigate.

The presentation that gets missed, that gets called gifted & then gets called troubled & then gets called burned out without anyone connecting the dots. That presentation looks a startling lot like me.

A child who learns in great leaps rather than steady linear progressions. Who is passionate to the point of obsession about the things that capture her & entirely unable to manufacture interest in the things that don’t. Who finds certain social environments electric & others completely overwhelming with no obvious explanation for the difference. Who has an internal world so vivid that the external one sometimes struggles to compete.

The neuroscience of this is genuinely fascinating & I’d encourage you to look into it if any of this is ringing bells but what I want to say here is simpler than any clinical definition.

Knowing changed everything. Not because it gave me an excuse, I basically went from knowing what I’d always known — that I’m a bit of a special sunflower to understanding what field I was grown in. It gave me a framework. An extra set of tools. A way of understanding why certain things that seemed straightforward for everyone else had always required a different kind of approach for me. Why certain environments & structures & demands produced unexplainable resistance & others lit me up like the houses of a small American town at Christmas time. I even understood why I’d always loved singing so much & why even after I left performing arts I continue to be a person who sings whilst she walks down the street or busies herself at work, especially when it’s a stressful day — simple vagal toning, my body intuitively regulating my nervous system. One living in a world not particularly well built for it.

It turned out this dropout hadn’t failed the system, the system had failed to account for the dropout.

What this means for my son

I think about all of this differently now that I have a baby. He’s 8 months old & already I find myself watching him with the curiosity & fantasy of someone who has spent years studying how minds work & who knows, from the inside, what it feels like when a mind is misread.

I don’t know yet what kind of mind he’ll have. I don’t know if he’ll be the child who thrives in a classroom or the one who needs a different kind of container entirely. I don’t know if he’ll have an aptitude for music or sports or both, if he’ll hate rules or thrive under them, if he’ll excel at something doldrum or want to do something nobody has invented yet.

What I do know is what my mama gave me — the freedom to try everything & the permission to stop when something stopped being right. At six I went to a ballet class & we’d barely exited the building before I told her “that’s not dancing, there are too many rules.” & that was the end of ballet. No argument, no insistence that I give it more time, no disappointment. Just “okay, what’s next?”

Turned out I liked contemporary, hip-hop, tango & breakdancing.

That gift is the thing I most want to give him.

I’m actively trying to build a life — which is part of why this Substack exists, part of why the books exist, part of why I’m writing at midnight between feeds instead of sleeping like someone who is as tired as myself — that would allow me to homeschool him or find some alternative to the standard model. Not because I think school is universally wrong. But because I know what it looks like when a mind is forced through a machine that wasn’t built for it.

& what me & babydaddy agree on more loudly & clearly than anything. Is that we’d like him to have options. More options than we had.

The five year old with the pale blue pages

Recently my stepdad read one of my articles. He’s known me since I was a babe. He was there for the dropout years, the extremely troubled years, the years when the adults in my life were doing their best to figure out what on earth to do with me.

He sent me a text with laughing curiosity —

“What university did you go to?” Knowing full well the answer.

None. The university of life if we’re being poetic about it. Which apparently given the question confers a reasonably decent degree. No cap, no gown, just a masters in the mess.

I think about the five year old version of myself who wrote a story on pale blue pages & took black ribbon from my mama’s art box to bind it into a book. The small adamant blonde thing who flourished her proud creation at her mama & said “I’m going to be a writer” with the certainty of someone who the world hasn’t yet ingrained a sense of what they can & can not do. Which I’ll be honest — I’ve had everyone from drunks in bars to CEO’s ask how I got it into my head to leave school, heard how everyone wants to but you can’t a hundred times — & I don’t have a better answer than I’ve never had all that clear a grasp on the concept of can’t.

That little blond thing brandishing her first bound authored work wasn’t misguided.

She was just taking the scenic route & it turns out the scenic route, for some of us, is the only one worth taking.

If this or any of my work has been useful to you & you’d like to keep me caffeinated or support a slightly feral, very passionate new mamacita without any commitment

you can buy me a coffee here.

If I could get every single person on the planet to do one movement daily it would be spinal waves.

Asides of being a delicious way to sync up the breath & body, they work fluidity into not just the spine but the hips & hamstrings whilst also training shoulder strength & mobility.

They strengthen the deep stabilising muscles of the spine rather than the superficial ones & decompress the vertebral discs in a way that most of us — hunched over screens, carrying babies, carrying life — are desperately in need of.

The rhythmic undulation of a spinal wave also stimulates the vagus nerve through the combination of movement & breath, making it one of the most accessible & effective ways to drop the nervous system out of fight or flight & into something softer.

Repetitive, rhythmic movement is regulating in a way that’s hard to explain until you feel it.

In yogic tradition the spine is the Sushumna nadi — the central channel through which Prana / life force, moves. Keeping it fluid & unobstructed is considered foundational to everything else the practice offers. Which is an ancient insight that modern research now confirms — a mobile spine supports a regulated nervous system & a regulated nervous system supports everything else.

Ten minutes. Your body & mind will thank you for it.

As always it’s an honour to practice with you.

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My Substack is full of gorgeous humans muddling through the thick of it. Mamas in the time & energy scarce trenches. Neuro-spicies frequently low on spoons. Those navigating grief, identity shifts, career changes, autoimmune disorders, menopause. People very much deserving of some TLC & often running on not enough of it.

& lets be real, when you’re navigating any or all of the above, knowing how to squeeze in some self care, in the age of wellbeing-is-work can be confusing & damn hard.

I’m a yoga teacher & breath work coach who’s done a near-absurd amount of research on the nervous system, our hormones, the connection of wellbeing with the gut biome, this list gets long. One who is very much against the idea that wellness needs to be complicated or another source of pressure. In a world of complex morning routines & ten step optimisation yadayadas I really just want to shake the globe & watch a gentler, simpler form of self love settle. Not in the least because just taking the pressure off is fucking effective.

I also have an eight month old who’s learning to walk this past month & has subsequently forgotten how to sleep. We’ve had about four decent nights since early April. I’m not at all hanging on by a thread.

Ha. Help me.

So I’ve not been enjoying hour long asana practices or meditative breath work sessions. I’ve barely been moving asides of carrying my 10kg ball-of-love weight vest around as he screams from his own nap-resistant-exhaustion, tidying the daily baby bombsite that is my living room & multiple daily walks with the stroller. I’d love to be treating myself to a monthly massage with the magic lady down the road but maternity pay is up, I simply can’t rationalise the expense, so I rub Argan oil into my shoulders for a few minutes when I find the time instead.

Small, steady acts of consistency & love turned inwards is the basis of much of what I’ve taught in 1:1’s over the years & indeed largely what this Substack is built around but as I write long form, these important nuggets of goodness are being stretched across different articles & different recorded practices & so, this article, is going to be a little different.

This one’s for the no bones days. A simple grab box of the things you can actually turn to when you’re stretched thin & so is the thread you’re hanging on by, backed by enough science & philosophy to earn their place on the list without over-intellectualising any of it.

Start wherever. Return as many times as you need.

Breath

The fastest, most accessible tool you have & the one most people forget about completely until someone like me just won’t shut up about it.

Your breath is the only autonomic function — the only thing your body does automatically to keep you alive — that you can consciously control. Which makes it the most direct line available between your conscious mind & the nervous system that is constantly running the show.

Three fast-acting practices. All doable whilst rotting on the couch, over a sink full of dishes, brow furrowed behind a screen at work or bouncing a baby back to sleep with your teeth clenched at 3:46am.

Exhale longer than your inhale. Inhale for four counts, exhale for eight. Inhale for two & exhale for four if that’s all you can manage. That’s it. The extended exhale directly stimulates the vagus nerve & signals to the brain that the immediate threat has passed. Three rounds & something will shift. Not everything. But likely enough that you’ll carry on for more than three rounds.

The physiological sigh. A double inhale through the nose — one long & rich, the second a sharp sniff — then a long slow exhale through the mouth. your nervous system rewards gold stars if you let out sound with the exhale. An audible sigh as you completely deflate the lungs. Researchers at Stanford identified this as the most efficient breath pattern for rapidly reducing physiological stress. Your body already knows this one as it’s the involuntary breath that follows a really good sob.

Box breathing. Four counts in. Four counts hold. Four counts out. Four counts hold. Slower to work but deeper & more long-lasting in its effect. Used by surgeons, navy seals, first responders & me to no-end — people whose nervous systems need to function under conditions that would floor a lot of people.

Which right now, may well be you.

Body

Grief, stress, exhaustion & the accumulated weight of navigating a life that demands we keep going regardless — all of it lives in the body. It’s not a metaphor, stress is alive in your tissues. Which means sometimes the most useful thing is not to think your way through it but to move.

Shake it out. Stand with your feet hip width apart, soften the knees & begin to bounce — gently, barely perceptibly. Let it travel upward. Don’t direct it. Shaking is the nervous system’s built in mechanism for discharging stress & it works whether you believe in it or not.

Put on a favourite song & dance to the full length of it. Wildly, till your laughing or crying. Alone with the curtains closed if necessary. With a friend if you want to double the seratonin production of it. Four minutes of this will shift something in you that an hour of scrolling or your best attempts to reflect on what you’re feeling will not. Dancing is one of the only things we do as adults that grows new brain cells so there’s that fun fact.

The hot baptism of a shower. Not a quick rinse. A proper, standing under the warm waterfall in your home for longer than is necessary shower. Let the heat do its work. Let the water wash away all the sins you somehow managed not to commit this week. The temperature change, the sensory input, the privacy of it — all useful. Extra gold stars from the nervous system if you hum / sing while you do so, this incites vagal toning & activates the parasympathetic nervous system fast.

Tap your sternum, chest & collarbones. Gently, rhythmically, with your fingertips. This stimulates the thymus gland & sends signals through the chest that interrupt the stress response. If it’s all feeling a bit timid & non-effective bang on your chest like a gorilla & let whatever sound wants to come out, come out. Think King-Kong baby, let loose. Yes, it looks strange. Yes, it works.

Go for a walk. Not to up your step count or listen to a podcast about productivity, mindfulness or how to want to scream less. Just to move your body through space & let the bilateral rhythm of it — left, right, left, right — do the powerful neurological work of creating stillness through motion.

Cry. Not to piss you off or anything but you’re actually allowed to not be the super strong one all the time & contrary to popular opinion crying isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s biologically intelligent. We literally leak cortisol in our tears (not cutting-an-onion tears, wildly those have a completely different make-up to actually-letting-it-out tears) & while cortisol is best known as ‘the stress hormone’, it’s actually the hormone that signals the end of stress. Meaning every time you let loose & cry, your body & brain gets the green light of ‘we’re okay, we’re safe’ & that cues a snowball of physiological effects that downgrade the level of stress we’re existing with. You don’t need to try & bring on a breakdown, put on your favourite sad movie or that song that really gets you in the feels, scribble a painful truth you’ve been resisting in to your journal. Just let some of what you’re holding out.

Nature

Your nervous system evolved outside. It doesn’t find fluorescent lighting & indoor air particularly soothing, it never has & likely never will.

If you’re lucky enough to have a garden — go sit your ass in it. Better yet dig your hands into it. The microbial diversity in healthy soil has been shown to increase serotonin production. You’re not dallying, you’re not even gardening, you’re medicating.

If there’s a park, a lake, a beach, a small stretch of trees within reasonable distance — spend time in it. Your book reads just as well there as on your couch. Your notes write just as well on a bench as they do in your home office. The work / your projects / your passions won’t suffer & you benefit enormously.

& if you can do any of the above barefoot, do it barefoot.

Connection

The nervous system is a social organ. It regulates itself partly through the proximity of other nervous systems that are not in crisis — which is a very scientific way of saying that other people help, even when you most want to hide.

Call the friend who makes you laugh until your ribs ache. Go see your mama if you’re lucky enough to still have her around. Reach out to that person who always leaves the lovely comment on your Substack. Make time to hug your partner for longer than feels necessary — twenty seconds is the research-backed minimum for oxytocin release, which is to say the hug that counts is the one that goes on slightly past the point of comfort.

You don’t have to perform being okay. You just have to let someone be nearby.

Time alone

This can be incredibly difficult to encounter if you happen to be attached to a baby 22 hours a day or are a caregiver of some other sort. The application of it also requires a level of discernment that can be challenging as sometimes — as listed above — what we need is real, human (animals are good too) connection. BUT I have turned down oh so many social engagements in this past month, ones that a less tired version of myself would love to attend yet I had to accept & even more annoyingly vocalise that actually recharging in this stretched thin season looks more like time by myself in any quiet I can find than stimulation & socialisation. The discernment to put off projects, people & passions in favour of a desperately needed nap or even just a few minutes starfished on my carpet staring at the ceiling. For me this has meant asking for help (which theres a whole lil section on below) & I implore you, should your body & mind be begging for a little time — even twenty minutes is highly impactful — with no external demands on your nervous system, find a way to make it happen.

Creativity

For the love of existence, make something with your hands that has nothing to do with productivity or output or the algorithm or anyone else’s opinion.

Kimchi. A bullet journal spread nobody will ever see. A collage — pretend you’re eight years old, cut up a home & garden magazine & make something totally pointless & completely soul enriching that’s a visual representation of what you want your life to feel like. Write something for the pure relief of the spill rather than the gratification of a reader.

The act of making something — anything — activates the parts of the brain associated with reward, focus & self expression simultaneously. It’s not a luxury, an uproductive way to spend time or procrastination. It’s energetic maintenance.

Ask for help

I’ve left this one for last because it’s at least for me, though I believe for many, the most challenging. It’s a demand on mindset rather than a simple action. I have (always had) what I refer to as ‘the wonder woman complex’ — an innate belief that I can do anything. Yes all by myself, against all odds, until physically proven otherwise. & yes over the moons this has caused more than a fair share of physical injury & mental suffering beyond what needed to be.

I don’t remember what my mama said when I was sat on the end of her bed at 16, I only remember my response was thinking ‘wow, you really can’t ask for help & that really hinders you’ & the immediate recognition that it was a trait I’d inherited. I have over the years done a lot of frustratingly slow, steady work on being able to ask for help & made great progress with it. I’m still not a pro at it, I’m not sure anyone is. What I know is that asking for help gets even harder when we most need it. So here’s a plea from me to you.

Reach out — Your partner, your friend, your therapist, whoever. Make it known that you’re struggling, your superhuman capabilities aren’t lessened any & you’ll be beautifully surprised at who & how they whip into action to lend a hand.

May this land to someone it’s meant for.

Big love & big breaths to you all.

If this or any of my work has been useful to you & you'd like to keep me caffeinated or indeed, help me get a massage from the magic lady down the road

you can buy me a coffee here.

Our hips are our heaviest, most complex joints & according to ancient Yogic philosophy & modern holistic medicine it’s also where we store most of our weighty, difficult-to-alchemise experiences.

Often this area is targeted in impactful, fast-paced sessions —

This is something a little different.

A slow, juicy, mindful hip-focused practice combining somatics, yoga asana & mobility work — a flow for when you’re low on energy or low on mood & want to bring some gentle, loving space into what is generally a strong, static area of the body.

I hope you enjoy this offering. As always it’s an honour to practice with you.

P.S. Do I wish I’d tilted my camera up a little more for better framing or not mixed up my left & rights somewhere in the middle there? Sure. But am I going to get perfectionistic about it?

No, if I did that I would never share anything at all. I invite you to embrace that compassionate, expectation-loose approach to your movement practice & indeed your life. Big love, big breaths, carry on.

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The weeks after my mama died I had these fleeting moments where I wondered if something was wrong with me. Because this wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

A nice tidy map with levels that you conquer & a destination called healed if you just move through them correctly, in the right order.

Nobody had described a category for the strange glimmering acceptance I felt the day she died. The gratitude — for her life, for what we’d had, for the love between us that ached so much because it hadn’t & would never leave, even though she had.

& was I supposed to be in denial just a couple days later when I absolutely lost my shit at a man in a Tesco who’d apologised for not bumping into me?

No that’s not a typo.

The english say sorry so often it lost it’s meaning centuries ago & being that I’d known this for years & was newly back in the UK in the many shades of grey static, deep loss — he almost grazed me with his shopping basket, said sorry & sent me right over the edge.

“SORRY? Sorry for WHAT? Sharing AIR with another HUMAN? There are things far darker in life to ACTUALLY BE SORRY FOR”

All flailing arms & tear streaked face squished between the fresh vegetables & fridges full of meal deals, screaming electric at a man who’d done absolutely nothing wrong, he just happened to be too close to the pressure cooker when the lid came loose.

She passed the day before my birthday & that birthday was lit by a full moon so each month was counted as such. The sky’s bright again — it’s been one moon. Three moons.

At six moons someone at work asked how I was ‘hanging in there’ & I suddenly found myself lying on the floor hollering I want my mama.

No, not three years old at a sleepover.

Twenty three. At my job. & I wasn’t even embarrassed.

The beauty of grief is it can make one wholly shameless. Why isn’t that advertised as readily as sadness or rage?

I’d been through a fair share of grief prior so by the time a year had passed even though I was still battling a lawsuit to keep a roof over our heads — sleeping in her room & clinging to a home she’d so nested in — sometimes it really was almost like I was fine. My generally smiling, tenacious, vivacious, try & stop me self lived on.

Even at the start plenty people told me how gracefully I handled it all.

& then I’d burst into tears on a bus because there was a brunette mother & a young blond daughter stood next to me & we’d just passed the spot where once mama was cycling me to infant school & my foot (ft. it’s little patent red leather sandals) got stuck in the wheel of her bike & the sight of my blood had made her cry & take me straight home for a medicine marathon of cuddles, favourite movies & ice cream.

That memory, like a ghost, lived in that stretch of street & that day — as though I didn’t pass that spot all the time with no flashback nor breakdown — ambushed me with zero warning & zero apology.

It wasn’t alone, the city in those years was full of ghosts.

& grief doesn’t only arrive in the shape of death. I ended a relationship spanning nearly half my life & most who have lived that kind of loss can tell you, it’s grief too. But it was a different creature entirely. That one arrived with initial days of puffy eyed, nauseous tummy’d, achey boned, all too familiar static but acceptance almost immediately, alchemised through self compassion & singing frikking everywhere. Rage channelled into a sudden love of weight lifting & a reignited social life. A peculiar sad, thrilling freedom at not knowing what on earth came next. No floor hollering. No supermarket breakdowns. Just a furious, self righteous, heartbroken forward motion that proved what a fantastic relationship I’d built with myself & propelled me half way across the world.

Same woman. Different grief — both completely valid & not at all matching the map.

These are but two of a multitude of times I’ve grieved. What I was experiencing in any of them wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t disordered, broken or evidence of failing to move through anything correctly.

There is no correctly in grief.

Even Kübler-Ross said it’s not a map

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her five stages in 1969 working with patients facing their own deaths — not with bereaved people, not with the grieving, certainly not with people facing grief that doesn’t stem from death at all.

The model was observed, not prescribed. She never intended it as a sequential map, she said so herself.

But the framework got extrapolated, simplified & handed to every grieving person & all those loving friends standing on the sidelines of deep loss, unsure of what to say — as though it were clear instruction rather than highlighted observation.

Which means that on top of losing something enormous, people now carry the additional weight of wondering whether they’re doing it correctly.

Angry before sad? Wrong order. Nowhere near acceptance a year later? Behind schedule. Oscillating between devastation & strange okay-ness in the same afternoon? Unclear what box that goes in, maybe get your head checked.

The stages aren’t a map & the insistence they are has made grief lonelier than it needs to be.

The tides of love & loss

In Sanskrit there’s a concept called Spanda — the divine pulse, the vibration underlying all of existence. The idea that reality doesn’t progress toward a destination. It pulses. It contracts & expands. Things arrive & recede without ever permanently leaving.

Grief moves in Spanda.

Imagine a tide lulling in & out. Each time new ships arrive on the shore of you.

That’s grief.

Waves. Some arrive as rage. Some as strange peace. Some as gratitude on the day of the death & a supermarket breakdown three days later. Some arrive years on, triggered by a street corner or the smell of the brownie recipe she passed down, the colour of orchids he used to buy you for your birthday or the quality of April light spilling in through the window that the body can never forget.

The wave doesn’t mean you’re back at the beginning. It means you loved something. It means the love is still moving through you in the only way available to it now.

So Spanda. The rhythm in which grief actually moves, demanding you dance with it.

Stroebe & Schut’s back Spanda

Stroebe & Schut’s oscillation model — one of the most evidenced frameworks in contemporary grief research — shows that healthy grievers move back & forth between loss oriented & healing oriented states.

Not steadily climbing a ladder of stages. Oscillating between states.

Some days you’re deep in the loss — sitting with it, feeling it, letting it be as big as it actually is. Some you’re resisting it, doing anything to pretend it’s not there. Other days you’re surprisingly functional, making dinner, laughing at something, dancing with your friends, briefly & guiltlessly present in a life that continues.

& then back again. & then forward. & then unceremoniously pulled under.

The tide doing exactly what tides do.

That oscillation isn’t a sign of being stuck. It isn’t evidence of inconsistency or insufficient mourning or moving on too quickly. It’s just the process — your nervous system doing the snails pace, exhausting, totally non-linear jaunt of integrating an enormous empty space into a life that has to keep going anyway.

Which means the good day doesn’t betray the grief.

& the bad day after the good day doesn’t mean you’re back at square one.

There are no squares.

Just the waves & you tasked with letting them wash over you.

The grief muscle

I wondered about this for years & now that I’m no longer a 23 year old knowing little to nothing about grief but ‘damn I’ve lived a lot of it’ & the idea of these stages we’re all handed I can confirm research shows it to be true —

Going through grief, makes you better at going through grief.

It won’t make you immune to it or any less affected by it. Just more practiced at metabolising it. You gather more of an affinity for alchemising it. Become more capable of holding the ambiguity of it. More able to let it move through you rather than being so wholly floored by it.

Researchers studying people who have experienced a multitude of significant losses describe something called grief literacy — a developed capacity to tolerate the uncertainty of loss, to find meaning within it, to move with it rather than against it.

The grief after my mama moved nothing like the grief after losing dear friends, which moved nothing like when my woven-into-my-identity-relationship ended, which moved nothing like the grief of losing a home or a country or versions of myself over the years.

Different losses grieve differently. Some slowly, some with surprising speed, some returning in waves for years, some completing themselves almost cleanly. None of those timelines say anything about the size of the love or the person navigating the loss.

But the grief muscle is real, it gets stronger. & the people with the most developed grief muscles aren’t the ones who’ve suffered least — they’re the ones who allowed themselves to feel it fully, in all its rude non-stagey ebbs & flows, rather than spending their energy trying to manage it into something more socially acceptable.

I have lost many things & I have become, through the losing, more capable of loss.

Which sounds like a really shitty trade off until you understand that it also means being more capable of love, more capable of presence, more capable of embodied wholeness in the full, gorgeous, catastrophe of being alive.

You were never wrong

In Yogic & Ayurvedic philosophy there is a concept called Ritu — season. The understanding that life moves in cycles, that each season has its own cause & effect, it’s own medicine. Spring doesn’t follow winter once & stop. It comes back every year & it’s same same but different every time.

Grief returns in seasons.

The anniversary. The first birthday after. The milestone they didn’t get to see. The joke only they would get that you think to send them before you remembered you can’t. The street corner haunted by a mothers protective love & a little foot grazed by the spokes of a wheel.

That’s just love, returning in the season it was always going to return in.

Every person on this planet has grieved something & not a single one has ever grieved wrong.

But you’ve been in it. & being in it, fully & without apology is the only way through it.

I have a fair amount to say on grief — so much so I'm writing a book on it, no longer secretly. If this article found you at the right time, you might also enjoy

Birthdays, deathdays & the strange medicine of gratitude

Grief is not what society says it is

Which is to say, I’m really excited to share this deep dive with you.

The philosophy in its fullness. What it is & isn’t both through ancient & modern lenses. The neuroscience of why grasping is neurologically expensive & what happens in the brain when we practice releasing it. The distinction between Aparigraha & its cousin Vairagya that frustratingly is often translated as the same word.

& a recorded practice — Vishama Vritti, extended exhale pranayama — that is, breath by breath, the body practicing non-grasping in real time.

Thank you for being here. Let’s get into it.

The ethical architecture of a life well lived

Before we dive into Aparigraha specifically lets get the lay of the land it’s planted in, the system that it belongs to.

The Yamas are the first of Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga — the outermost layer of the practice, the one that governs how we exist in relationship with everything outside ourselves. They’re not steadfast rules, they’re more like guidelines, advocations for the conditions under which a human being can truly thrive — the ethical soil in which everything else the practice offers can take root.

Ahimsa. Satya. Asteya. Brahmycharya. Aparigraha.

Non-violence. Truthfulness. Non-stealing. Non-excess. Non-possessiveness.

In that order & for good reason.

Patanjali builds outward from Ahimsa — non-violence — which is arguably the most fundamental & helpful orientation a human being can have toward life. Not to harm ourselves, the souls we cross paths with or the natural environment to which we’re born. From there the Yamas expand in scope & subtlety. Satya asks us to be honest with ourselves as much as those around us. Asteya asks us not to take what isn’t ours which can be broadened far beyond just the traditional concept of theft. Brahmacharya asks us to use our energy wisely rather than scattering it. & Aparigraha — the fifth & final Yama, the outermost ring of the ethical system — asks us to loosen our grip on that which we think of as our own.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Aparigraha is last. It’s easily the most demanding. It’s the one that asks the most of the ego & mind, that offers in return, the most freedom.

The ancient texts prescribe the Yamas not as a checklist but as a lifelong practice of refinement, much like the shapes we practice in asana. There is always something more to learn both about the principles & the one practicing them, there is always more to unearth, always a new situation to apply the teachings to. You don’t master Ahimsa & move on. You return to it, find new edges of it, discover it operating in places you hadn’t noticed. The Yamas are the practice of becoming more honest, more generous, more spacious in how you hold everything that life hands you.

Through the modern lens they’re laid out very effectively onto what psychology now understands about human wellbeing. Non-violence toward self & others maps onto self-compassion research. Truthfulness maps onto the documented benefits of authenticity & good will. Non-stealing maps onto what researchers describe as reciprocity & the foundations of social trust. Non-excess / the wise use of energy maps onto what is generalised as boundary setting & sustainable living. & Aparigraha maps most directly onto the neuroscience of the wanting system, the psychology of attachment & the research on psychological flexibility.

Thousands of years before the vocabulary existed, yogis were outlining the same territory, the same path to a kind of ultimate wellbeing & liberation from avidya (ignorance).

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Aparigraha is most often defined as non-attachment / non-posessiveness. It’s one of the Yamas in Yoga (ethical restraints) & at its core speaks of not clinging to what you have — This being just one stone in the path to contentment, freedom & inner peace.

The other day I was on the phone with one of my best friends. We’re busy women & don’t get a lot of face time these days, so she joyfully babbled away at my baby boy for a couple of minutes before we made a quick u-turn to catching up on all the very adult parts of our lives, a part of which is my relationship with baby daddy — which has been an interesting & not exactly traditional journey.

‘Feel free not to delve too far into it if you don’t want but I’m so happy to hear you guys are happy & really curious, do you think the fact that you were essentially not trying to be together has helped create this happy togetherness?? It’s just i’ve got quite a few friends who are newly parents & it seems they’ve been trying so hard to be together, trying to be the perfect family & they’re really struggling, they seem quite unhappy..’

‘Do you think not trying to be happy has made you guys happy??’

The short answer to this is hell yes.

Luckily we’re on substack so I don’t have to stick with the short version.

I’ll put it bluntly, I spent 8 months of pregnancy firmly believing (& with good reasons) that I was going to raise this baby alone. Not in an ‘I have no support system, woe is me’ sort of way.. in a preparing to be a single mamacita, baby daddy wants nothing to do with this, hasn’t really spoken to me all summer sort of way.

So how is it that my son is now nearing 8 months old & hasn’t lived a day without the loving presence of his dad? How is it that we’re now partners in crime with the littlest bandito in arms, planning the next steps of our life together, excited for the continuation of our adventure?

Luck?

Fate?

Hmm maybe a bit of both but mostly.. Aparigraha.

In Spring of 2023 I ended a relationship that spanned 13 years of my life. The thing with ending long term relationships is your sense of identity is all tangled up in that person. Your sense of home, your vision of the future. You have past & plans to unravel & let go & 0 people are going to tell you that’s easy to do.. because it’s not.

When I say things ended badly I mean that was my best friend & lover for nearly half my life & we now haven’t spoken in over 3 years. That says enough about that.

I was in no small way heartbroken & being that we lived together, had been planning to move country together, start a family & all that jazz, I found myself at a bit of a loss of WTF I was going to do.

Luckily I have a lot of experience moving through grief which allows me to do that with at least a little grace & more than a little speed/ease. Whilst I had an amazing job offer that would move me to Barcelona, my intuition told me settling in a new city (cities aren’t my fave anyway) where salary vs cost of living was not going to be my bestie wasn’t the wisest move. Instead I had to lean into deep trust.

So I booked a one way ticket to the other side of the world, spent 5 weeks working like a fiend, partying even moire fiendishly (I hadn’t had much of a social life in years & this was a series of joyful goodbyes) packed up my belongings & off I went with not really enough money to sustain what I had in mind, just a whole lot of faith in myself. I knew that I could teach online & in person as I traveled & that I’d traveled enough in the past to be able to do this.

Essentially it was a ‘fuck it, I’ll figure it out’

& figure it out I did but I never could’ve imagined that year would lead me to this one.

Long & short that is how 6 months later in a funny little Laotian border town called Huay Xai - where almost no farang (foreigner) stays longer than a night I met a man who would change my life irrevocably.. Yup you guessed it, baby daddy.

I’ll be honest, almost as soon as I laid eyes on him something in me glimmered. I’m not too often struck by someones looks as it’s what lies under the surface that generally brings me to real attraction. But there he was all gorgeous eyes, built shoulders & glowing smile. I was a little taken & unbeknownst to me, he was too. To make a long story short, we wound up chatting for the better part of ten hours, emphatically, the way in which — especially when you’re traveling — you just click with some people & click we did, practically like a metronome. Suddenly it was midnight, he had a boat to catch early in the morning so we parted ways & when we saw each other the next morning I waved him off as he got in the tuk tuk & distinctly remember thinking —

‘I’m gonna see that guy again. No clue how or where but it’s not the last time our paths will cross.’

I was absolutely right. Just a few weeks later we reconvened in the town where I was then teaching yoga at an eco resort & in no time at all we’d manoeuvred it that he was working there too. I managed the wellbeing side of the resort, he handled their website & much of their tech configurations, we stayed in some of their gorgeous accommodations free of charge, spent long afternoons by the pool & adventuring around Luang Prabang, ate a hearty three plus meals a day — we were, with not much overstatement, living a bit of a dream. So much so that he extended his visa & then extended it again, until he couldn’t anymore & then again, we parted ways.

I should mention that I knew not long after we met that I loved him. But then I have to clarify my stance on love for you. It’s not about owning someone, to be loved by me is not necessarily to be mine. I have loved people I’ve spent a weekend with as much as those I’ve spent months with. I’ve loved deeply & platonically. I believe the quality of our experience of almost anything is directly linked to how much love we can be aware of & put it into any given act — the way we make our breakfast, talk to a stranger, write an article, look in the mirror. Love for me is in just about everything.

& particularly in the wake of this great separation from my ex, this unraveling I found myself in, of a new identity where I was discovering what being single meant for me — I was definitively not looking for anything serious or otherwise & neither was the gorgeous man I was sharing so much time with.

Funnily enough I discovered that he had a curious relationship with the idea of love, he professed to me that he didn’t really believe in it or didn’t resonate with what the masses claim it to be.

The irony that a boy who didn’t believe in love travelled half way across the world & met a girl who believes everything is love was not lost on me then & it still wrings a smile from me now.

Again to tighten this lest I write our whole startling story, which the details of aren’t as important here as the theme that ran through it all — we parted ways & not long after life drew us back together for a month in Indonesia over my thirtieth birthday. We parted ways & life drew us back together for a summer in Europe. We parted ways & I found myself through a winter in London, taking a more or less monthly trip back to visit him to enjoy the freedom of togetherness we’d been enjoying ever since we met.

For a little more than a year we were both free to do whatever we wanted, what we wanted to do was each other & that was more than enough.

& then I found out I was pregnant.

Which was scary for a few reasons, amongst them — I’d had very different plans, didn’t feel financially or circumstantially settled, was not in an ideal position to become a mama (are we ever?) & I knew with every bone in my body before I’d even told him that he didn’t feel ready to be a dad.

I knew that if I was going to have this baby, I was going to be doing it alone.

Beyond all that, I knew my options. I firmly believe in womens’ right to choose & yet almost as soon as I saw two lines adamant on several sticks, with all my rationale, all my logic… I existed with a reverberant hum — the intuitive sense that this baby was meant to be mine. Both awe-inspiring & terrifying.

& so weeks later when I finally told him, I expressed all of this & explained if I was to bring our lil’n into the world, I wasn’t asking or expecting him to take on the role of papa. All I asked was that he behave like the friend to me he was, to make pregnancy & the whole process a little easier on me & to keep his mind open to getting to know his kid one day, for the babes sake & for his own.

There are a lot of nuances to the months that followed & I won’t try to shrink them into a tidy paragraph here. Suffice to say that I concentrated on building the best circumstances for this baby that I could, caring for myself & my growing bump & did my best not to hold too tightly to the ideas of just about anything.

Month nine rolled around & with it some clarity on his part & urge to offer what he could — which was then to support me through birth, the immediate recovery & to legally recognise the child. I’ll be honest, it was work to consider letting him in for that but motherhood is funny in how it shuffles your priorities, my own pride was pushed aside in the knowing that if my cub had a chance to know his dad, I had to make room for that possibility.

What I’d imagined was to be a visit of a few days turned into togetherness for a month & a half. I wondered before he arrived how we would feel in the same room together, worried that there wouldn’t be the same ease & connection we’d always known.

I needn’t have worried, almost annoyingly we felt just like we always had.

He was a rockstar through birth & the aftermath of my tender recovery.

& as a temporary plan that came about through various limbs of serendipity, we decided to extend our time together by a couple of months, bring the babe to baby daddys’ home country, sort the liln’s paperwork, enjoy some more time as a trio & then as we always have, we’d part ways.

The parting ways bit just kept getting pushed along the timeline. Life had brought us back together & again seemed to be keeping us together. While we, as we always had, held each other with a very light grip on what this was. With no demand for it to be more than what felt true in a given moment. No expectation of what was to become, just an acceptance for whatever came — essentially with a whole lot of Aparigraha.

I have for a long time called myself the unluckiest, luckiest girl in the world (for good reason & if you want clarity on that feel free to check back through my articles for some of the other messy life experiences that ultimately brought me ineffable goodness) & this, my little family of late may be the true-est expression of that I’ve ever lived.

Because daily & for many months now, I feel incredibly lucky. Somehow, all our non-clinging over the years, all our freedom to choose, all our kismet has created a present reality where we are a very happy little family unit, our days are filled with just about as much ease & love as new parents can experience.

Baby daddy is not just a rockstar dad (he so is though) but as I always knew, a rockstar human, a man made of much love, logic & strength of both body & mind. Someone that I feel wholly blessed to be planning the next adventure with, gorgeous cub in tow.

Traditions & misconceptions & other truths

Aparigraha sits as the fifth & final Yama in Patanjali’s eight limbed path — the outermost ring of a system of morality. The Yamas govern how we exist in relationship with everything outside ourselves & I believe it’s last because it is the most demanding, arguably the most difficult.

The tradition translates it most often as non-possessiveness or non-attachment. I understand why but I also find those translations do it a bit of a disservice — they make it sound like a practice of withdrawal, of caring less, of a kind of spiritual Marie Kondo-ing your emotional life in aim to detach from whatever doesn’t spark joy anymore.

The misconception I encounter most — in yoga spaces, in conversations about philosophy, increasingly on the more spiritually adjacent corners of the internet — is that non-attachment means not being moved. That the person who has mastered Aparigraha is the one who meets loss with a sort of serene shrug. Who leaves & arrives with equanimity & no visible evidence of preference either way.

A bit ‘no fucks given.’

I find this generalised image not just incomplete but kind of harmful because it turns a profound practice of love into a performance of indifference.

What the texts are pointing at is something far more demanding & much more interesting. Non-grasping. The light touch of an open hand. The practice of loving, wanting, caring, grieving — fully & honestly— while simultaneously releasing your grip on the outcome of it all.

You feel everything, you want many a thing from this wild, weird & wonderful life.

You hold it all loosely.

This distinction between feeling & grasping is where the whole practice lives. The grief is allowed. The longing is allowed. The deep ferocious caring isn’t just allowed but is basically the whole point — you cannot practice Aparigraha toward something you don’t care about. The non-grasping only means something in the presence of importance.

What it asks you to release is merely the control. The demand that what you love remain exactly as it is, exactly where you need it, for exactly as long as you’ve decided you need it there.

& in my own understanding — lived more than studied, though both & one has certainly helped the other — I’d go further & say Aparigraha is so far from a lesser form of love, that it is in fact a fuller one. To love something in its freedom rather than in your grip. To not pick flowers because you want to keep the colour of them. To not ask someone to stay when leaving is their truest path. To hold your work, your sense of self, your child, your lover, your dearest friends with hands open enough that they could go & choose daily to remain.

We can call it non-attachment sure, it’s also devotion with the fear taken out of it.

Wanting, musting, needing

A huge part of what makes the practice of aparigraha so damn hard is that the brain is not really designed for the open hand. It’s designed for acquisition. For securing. For the perpetual reaching toward what it doesn’t yet have & the anxious protecting of what it does. Gather, hunt, preserve.

The dopamine system doesn’t actually light up in the having. It lights up in the wanting. The spike happens in the anticipation, not the arrival. Which means we are literally wired to feel more urgency toward what we might lose than satisfaction in what we already hold.

Which is much why the grip tightens exactly when it should loosen. Why the more uncertain a relationship feels the more desperately we try to nail it down. Why the version of the future we’re most afraid of losing is the one we cling to most fiercely — & in clinging, most reliably damage.

Aparigraha interrupts that. Not by eliminating the wanting — the tradition is clear that desire is not the enemy, it’s the grasping that causes suffering — but by inserting a breath of space between the feeling & the fist. A moment of noticing the grip before you decide whether to tighten it.

In my experience that pause is where everything changes. It’s where I chose not to make demands of a man who wasn’t ready. Where I chose to prepare for solo mamacita-ing rather than collapse the space that was needed. Where I’ve held so many things over the moons of my life & trusted that whatever it became would be enough. That what would be, was what was meant to be.

That pause is the practice.

A revelation & an action. Repeated. Returned to. Until it becomes, in the way all steady habits do, a way of moving through the world.

Do it for you

I think Aparigraha belongs in far more conversations than it occupies because of how universally applicable it is.

The reference of messy lived experience I’ve used here is a relationship sure, but aparigraha doesn’t just apply to romantic love. It’s capabilities are profound in grief & loss & love of every kind. It’s for every monday heading back to work & dreaming of a different future. It’s for every relationship you’re in right now. Every plan you’ve made. Every version of yourself you’re currently on the front line, defending.

The friendship you’ve been holding to a past version of. The career you’ve wrapped your identity around not because it still fits but because releasing it would mean not knowing who you are without it. The version of your life you’d planned before life demonstrated it had other ideas.

Even the version of yourself you’ve been protecting so fiercely — Aparigraha invites you to hold that a little more loosely too. You don’t have to abandon the you that you are to remain curiously open to the you you’re becoming.

Again, the loose grip doesn’t mean caring less, it means trusting more. That what is meant for you doesn’t require a clenched fist to keep it. That love & work & identity & the whole beautiful precarious thing can be held with open hands & will flourish more freely for it.

Let things be what they are.

Watch in awe as they unfurl, delight in what becomes.

The fitness world understands something the wellness world often misses — Sustainable growth happens through progressive overload.

In strength training, this means gradually increasing weight, reps, or intensity. Muscles adapt to manageable challenges & break down under sudden overhwelming increases.

The same principle applies to meditation, creative acts, yoga practice, morning routines, reading more often — literally any habit you want to build.

Yet wellness culture still says things like “21 day challenge! Meditate for 30 minutes daily starting tomorrow!” or “Transform your body, commit to 90-minute yoga practices!”

It’s a bit like telling someone to deadlift their bodyweight on day one —

Maybe doable but definitely not sustainable.

Things launched at with this level of enthusiasm & lack of preparation go the way of almost every new years resolution —

You’re rocking it for maybe a week or two. You feel superhuman, you are a new you. You miss a day, scold yourself for sucking, the practice becomes harder to return to. But you get back on the horse, miss another day or three & begin to begrudge this pressure point you’ve created for yourself. Saddle up again, miss again.

You decide whatever habit you’re trying to build isn’t viable for the life you live & it get’s tossed out with most everyone elses’ before march 3rd.

Ruined shoulders & other physiological wonders

The nervous system and muscle tissue follow similar learning curves. The curves of gradual adaptation. Both strengthen when challenged slightly beyond current capacity & both break down when overloaded.

Consistent micro stresses trigger protein synthesis, improved neural connectivity & enhanced stress tolerance. But for the stress to bring about positive gains it’s got to be relative to your current baseline.

This all started to make sense for me after, right at the start of 2020 I was diagnosed as hypermobile & told my shoulders were ‘ruined & likely not reparable.’

All respect to medical professionals due, this was a fairly shoddy consult & diagnosis. I showed up in serious pain, having had to take a few weeks off my physically intensive job, being plagued again by chronic immobility & debilitating soreness that had appeared on & off for over a decade. I explained the history, the immobility & agony that had me switch to a paleo diet (anti-inflammatory) for a while when I was twenty (which at least for a season or so fixed it) & that generally when it flared up I tried to manage it with diet & rest but had for quite some years been in a season where rest simply wasn’t an option. I added as an afterthought ‘I’m pretty bendy.’

She moved my limbs about a bit & essentially gave me a diagnosis of being really bendy.

I stood there under the crap white lights with an eyebrow raised at this friendly faced brunette kind of just waiting for the other mic to drop. I couldn’t help thinking

hang on, isn’t that what I just told you?

She told me I’d have to quit Yoga, I probably wouldn’t be able to fix the issue with standard physio. All in all it was a ‘heres your problem, now you have just enough information to intellectualise what you’re already living with & no solution.’

Fab.

Needless to say this was just another opportunity for me to delve into my own beloved research. I set about hunting for what hypermobility actually means — which is infinitely reduced when a doctor tells you it’s about being bendy. Funnily enough loads of hypermobile people aren’t actually particularly bendy or often are very bendy in one area & totally stiff in all the others.

Hypermobility signifies a difference in the makeup of your connective tissues.

Which means hypermobile muscles are structurally different, they start with a lower baseline of strength, the stabilising muscles fatigue much faster due to their constant attempts to stabilise the joints. Any strength they do build can be lost much more rapidly than the average muscle. The brain gets fuzzier signals regarding proprioception — where the joints actually are in space — so it compensates by allocating more resources to tracking the body. The amygdala (threat detection center) of hypermobile people is generally much larger because their nervous systems are constantly receiving extra signals of stressors — which goes some way to explaining the heightened emotional sensitivity that tends to come with the territory. Anxiety amongst hypermobile humans is incredibly common due to the bodies life-long background hum of extra effort, even when nothing particularly stressful is going on.

The good news?

Targeted, consistent strength & stability training improves all of it.

The joints & the nervous system are in constant conversation — strengthen one, you strengthen the other.

Once covid hit, having learned most if not all of this, my location & lifestyle drastically changed, I thought…

So the last thing my body is naturally built to do, is stand on my hands..

That’s what we’ll get working towards then.

I absolutely did not quit Yoga, in fact I massively upped the amount of time I spent practicing asana but I slowed my practice of it wayyyy down. Made every movement of it strengthening, placed attention in my micro muscles. I started working towards forearm balance, a little or a lot every damn day. Reasoning that while it was wholly demanding of my weakest point (shoulders) it had a shorter base — didn’t involve so many weak & wobbly joints — than handstand which made it a solid entry point. I continued to practice consistent, conditioning movements. In less than a month I was catching moments where I felt surprisingly stable standing on my elbows, stable enough that I started little by little turning my hungry gaze & my adamant practice to standing on my hands. Specifically pressing into it as I figured that kicking up created more impact than my then teetering joints had any chance at finding balance in.

Half bodyweight exercises then bodyweight. Perfecting form before adding load, gradually building tolerance.

Within four months, my shoulders were stronger than they’d ever been. I’d gone from being a person who could barely hold a plank let alone a handstand to being able to straddle press into one — A skill that often takes years to accomplish.

The chronic on-off pain & immobility I’d dealt with for more than a decade? Well it left six years ago & to date, has never returned.

Even more wild — that natural bendyness increased in ways I never could’ve imagined because I worked active flexibility through my vast range of motion. Creating strength in what was once painfully lax. By request, I started teaching handstands, before I was even certified to teach Yoga. Basing my offerings in what I knew to be true — what is strong is not usually mobile & what is very mobile is not usually strong. People are always more one than the other & balancing these two states builds the sweet spot where incredible skills become possible & indeed, just feeling more equilibrium & less painful restriction in your own body.

& balancing them at a rate the nervous system as well as the physical body can adapt to, in actions sustainable enough to be truly consistent with… well, suffice to say I’ve become a little more than convinced that with the right measures of understanding, self awareness & persistently applied methods — we are all capable of some pretty superhuman things.

Sure, proving doctors wrong was part of the fun but it wasn’t really the point. It was about learning & respecting the body’s adaptation timeline.

It was about proving to myself more than anyone else, that nothing was ruined.

Sthira Sukha

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali offers exactly one instruction on the physical practice of yoga.

Sthira sukham asanam —

The posture should be steady & comfortable.

Three words. That’s it. Two thousand years of asana philosophy condensed into a single instruction & it has nothing to do with how deep you go, how long you hold it or whether your forehead reaches the floor.

Sthira — steady, strong, stable.

Sukha — ease, spaciousness, comfort.

Both cultivated simultaneously.

This sutra is usually taught as a meditation instruction — find the balance between effort & ease in your practice, don’t grip & don’t collapse. & it is that, but it’s also, best as I can see, the most clear description of progressive overload that exists in the yogic tradition.

Too much Sthira — too much force, too much load, too fast — & the body overcompensates, develops chronic patterns of overuse that become pain & limitation.

The practice that was supposed to build you starts to erode you instead.

Too much Sukha — too much ease, too little challenge, no meaningful load — & nothing adapts. The body stays exactly where it is.

The practice becomes static & stops showing signs of making any progress at all.

The only magic ingredient to a practice is the mix of both. Enough challenge that the system is asked to adapt. Enough ease that the adaptation is actually possible. Enough steadiness that you keep coming back. Enough comfort that coming back doesn’t feel like a set of hurdles.

Eg… a version of it that’s actually sustainable.

The same thing Patanjali prescribed to a posture is what the fitness world calls progressive overload. In the yogic tradition a posture is not just a shape the body makes — it’s the relationship you bring to any position you find yourself in. On & off the mat.

Your meditation practice. Your creative acts. Your eating habits. Your relationship with your own nervous system.

Steady advancement + comfortable starting point = Sustainable progress.

The math may be ancient but it’s mathing just fine.

Your nervous system doesn’t give two figs

— About your motivation that is. The nervous system in general gives all the figs. This a drum I’ve banged in previous articles & one I’ll surely bang again in those to come.

She’s always listening & she always wins.

It learns through repetition of manageable challenges, not through drastic efforts that exhaust it & require days of recovery before the next attempt. Every time you show up to a practice that asks just enough of you — not too much, not too little — you are literally building new landscape of the body & the brain.

The 5 minute meditation that you can do every day is building more than the 20 minute one you attempt twice a week & abandon in frustration. The gentle, most-days-a-week 15 minute yoga practice is building more than the intensive one you do when motivation strikes & berate yourself for when it doesn’t. The short daily creative session is building more than the marathon weekend ft. the muse followed by two weeks of nothing.

Consistency at the right load is always more effective than intensity at the wrong one.

This isn’t a permission slip to stay comfortable forever. Progressive overload requires progression — the load increases as the capacity increases, gradually & deliberately. But it starts where you actually are, not where you think you should be. & it builds at a rate the nervous system can follow rather than a rate the ego demands.

Since somehow I’ve made it through this & every article without saying it & it’s one of my favourite things to gently drill into students IRL…

Meet yourself where you’re at.

Your practice of progressive load

This is an invitation more than a demand. It’s for those who are reading this thinking ‘hey wait, maybe I can do…’

Pick one practice you’ve been trying to build — or rebuild, or return to after the inevitable interruptions of our messy magical lil lives. Something that matters to you. Something you have over the moons, started & stopped & started again.

Now ask — what is the smallest version of this practice that I could show up to consistently? Not the version I aspire to. The version that is genuinely, on my worst day, my roughest week, my most impractical season of life, doable.

Now start. Not as a stepping stone to something more impressive as quickly as possible. As the practice. As the full expression of Sthira Sukha applied to your own life — the steady, comfortable, sustainable commitment that the nervous system can learn to trust.

When that version becomes genuinely easy — & it will, that’s the whole point — add a little. A minute more. a paragraph in place of a line. One more round. One more breath. Slightly more load.

You’ll get to notice that the capacity is there because the foundation is, the progression is natural because your minimal version of it is making way for something more.

The body & the mind are not obstacles to your practice. They are the practice & they respond to being met at their baseline rather than whatever level you’d like them to be at.

May you find / create / tend to some sukha out here friends.

It’s all too easy to forget that your whole messy, embodied life is where everything worth creating & sharing is born.

Occasionally these days there’s an hour — rare as a solar eclipse & double-y disorienting — when no one needs anything from me.

My mind does the classic new-mama dance faced with free time — to shower, or yoga, or clean, or work, or stare at the ceiling & soak up the nothingness — & in this one for a whole few minutes I just starfish atop my dark green fluffy duvet & muse.

The multipassionate person never knows what they want to be when they grow up.

I want to write the books & build the platforms I can sing them out to. I want to disappear to a jungle homestead, put my hands in rich soil & leave them there. Tend to home, to heart, to hearth. I want to travel interminably, speak at events, host retreats. I want to be a homebody & watch my boy chase vivid things, real or imagined through long grass between unschooling sessions & baking shit that fills the house with ecstatic olfactory ambience.

I want to stand in front of a room full of people, guide them through their own goodness & watch a woman cry in beginning breathwork only to laugh in shavasana — to see the woman I used to be right in front of me. A full circle — ugh that most fulfilling feeling.

& so I want to be right there in the public eye, in reach to help any body, mind & soul. I want to with ineffable ecstacy & a little ick ‘go viral’.

& I want to go so offline the wifi can’t find me with a search & rescue.

I want to write practical things that help people, put my can’t-stop-won’t-stop style of independent studies & all this mess of lived experience to good use. I want to write poetry so delicious it drips off your chin & has absolutely no purpose other than it feels fucking good to spill. I want to hone my shares so my readers know what they get from me. & I don’t want a fucking niche.

I want to be my own boss but it’d be easier if I had a boss & I actually just don’t want to work.

I want to make my pretty crochet dresses of a hundred thousand stitches that take weeks & get worn once to somewhere that deserves them. I want to build a library in my home, the kind with ladders that slide round the room & spend hours every day in a comfy chair reading exquisite words, diving in & out of worlds. I want to build a business so booming, so aligned that it’s a joy to hustle at. I want to meditate on the quality of light at sunrise — not as a practice, definitely not as content — just cause it exists. Light. Morning. Gold spilling on every surface it discovers.

I want to learn everything & teach everything, preferably online so I can be anywhere. I want to retreat into beautiful unproductive silence & cook something — anything slow, seasonal & completely indifferent to an algorithm.

The specifics of this change but the dichotomy lasts a lifetime. Decades arriving at the same gorgeous impasse — too many lives to live, only one body, one hour alone in my milk stained fluffy robe.

Gratefully it all just is what it is, I am who I am & I let that be enough.

Small town, expansive existence

There’s a university town in Northern California — funky, definitively psychedelic, Chico in name but in energy it’s anything but — where I spent a handful of autumns in my early twenties. Largely between stints at trim farms in the surrounding hills. It was a halfway home between my summers on the island & my winters in Asia. In Chico we lived the kind of life that from the outside could look like it has no direction but from the inside felt like the whole world was a studio someone handed me the keys to & said — go on then, make your mess & your masterpiece & some friends while you’re at it.

One of those friends — Tall, handsome, one of the most astounding guitar players & singers I’ve ever had the pleasure of filling my ears with. Which was only one of his talents, the man was pure artist. His paintings were hanging at an art studio a few blocks from the naked lounge — a café frequented by all of us lost boys & girls where musicians occasionally played & the coffee was as good as the humans serving it.

One night near witching hour he hoisted me up to the fire escape of a building near the studio & leaped to catch the bottom rung once my feet were clear of it. We climbed three stories to the roof & sat with one leg either side of the edge, the moon so near-full & so abstractly enormous it looked like someone in our optic nerves had zoomed in on the scene with a telephoto lens & forgotten to zoom out.

We talked about life & travel & the glaring contrast in some of our experiences. We talked about the things we hungered for. He sang me the bridge of a song he was working on. I told him with complete sincerity that his songwriting floored me & asked when he’d learned to play.

He grew up in a trailer park with seven siblings, this I already knew. Turned out his grandfather had left a broken guitar behind that had only two strings left on it. An instrument held together by hope & stubbornness, not unlike the man sat in front of the moon & me. & on this two stringed instrument, he taught himself guitar so well that when years later he got to a whole 6 strings — I speak for him here — no one could resist stopping what they were doing to listen to his long fingers dance across the frets.

I don’t often find myself humbled by other people’s pasts. My own upbringing & the life thats followed had enough chaos to make me a fairly un-surprisable person. But his stories always gave me more than a moments pause. Which is how we’d connected in the first place — one night staring up at the Milky Way in shitty camping chairs amidst the many ganja plants we were tasked with taking down, trading origin stories that only get told in the dark when the work is done & something in you has decided ‘this humans allowed in.’

There was no medium of art he didn’t enjoy & so there was no medium we didn’t play with together — play being the operative word. Painting, drawing, laser cutting wood on a CNC machine, screen printing, sculpture, graffiti. Photography in every form — analog, digital, instant. Guitar, piano, banjo, drums, singing, songwriting. I attempted to teach him how to crochet, unsurprisingly he wound up writing a song about this 5’3 cat he was watching play with yarn instead. Somewhere I still have a small wooden board he etched my face into from a photo he’d taken. A portrait of me made by a self-taught artist who learned how to create on an instrument missing more than half it’s strings. Creating was his therapy sure, but more than that, it was his way of living.

I was twenty one & for a few months I got to share in his Chico — an artistic playground.

Another friend — a beautiful ecstatic girl, wise before her years — & I did photoshoots in the woods. Nude, with feathers & petals we’d collected. Or in her living room with coloured lights & a bubble machine her ex had bought her for a birthday that had outlasted the relationship. Funnily enough years later they got back together, they have a son now. Midnight dance parties to Harry Nilsson & other artists from the seventies, both of us long since convinced we’d been born in the wrong decade & could bring it straight into 2016.

That halloween a handful of us decided last minute to go to a concert on Main Street, no costume to speak of I donned a little black dress, my fluffy cream coat, painted cheetah print on one cheek & brow bone, borrowed a bell from a friends craft box & turned it into a choker & spent the evening telling people I was a cat dressed up as a human. The main act was a seven piece band wearing giant Chinese paper dragon heads. The vials of california white fluff straight from Red were a-plenty. Needless to say it was a party that bled colours, some of them not on the known spectrum & laughter ricocheted around our ribs until long after the sun rose. They ached that really good ache for days.

You could barely walk down the street in Chico without stumbling on someone making music. A small group on a corner, a lone guitarist we came across en route to our favourite burrito spot, a circle near broadway that had formed from nothing & would dissolve just as organically twenty minutes later. We stopped constantly. The tall & handsome almost always had a guitar on his back. Alongside being a lifelong singer, I’m a natural percussionist — if you can dance, you can drum — & so we’d stop, play & sing with strangers who by the end of a jam were something closer to friends.

None of it looked like work. Yet all of it exists in the plethora of raw material life’s gifted me, brushstrokes of it are in everything I’ve created since & the spirit I’ve created it from.

Existence as creative act

In Sanskrit philosophy there’s a concept called Lila.

Divine play. The idea that existence itself is creative expression — that the universe is not a problem to be solved but a dance being danced for the sheer joy of the dancing. That creation is not separate from living. It is what living is.

The child building a sandcastle not because it’s gonna last but because the building of it is the point. The musician on the street corner playing to no one & everyone. The woman on a rooftop in California, twenty one years old, humming along to a song that’s not yet been born at a moon taking up a third of the skyline.

Lila isn’t the opposite of craft or discipline or the long devoted hours of making something that matters. It’s what makes that devoted, discliplined craft more fruitful.

Because without the play — without the stolen hours of art & bubble machines & strangers who become friends through serendipity — there’s nothing to bring to the pages, nor the canvas, nor the feed. No ocean to draw from. Just the image of creativity without the life that feeds it.

The brain that creates while you live

I love when I come across neuroscience that vindicates my beliefs.

I’ve mentioned the default mode network before, truly I think of her as a friend — the brain’s so-called resting state, the circuitry that fires when you’re not focused on a task — is not resting, not even close to resting. It is one of the most metabolically active states the brain enters. It’s where memory consolidates, where disparate experiences weave into narrative, where the connections that feel like inspiration are relentlessly being made. She’s largely the source for the often hilarious inner commentary I exist alongside.

The conversation amidst a ganja field becomes the lyric. The boy from the trailer park becomes a chapter. The colours that danced alongside you, inside bubbles one night becomes the understanding of a palette that shows up years later in the way you write to describe a sunset.

The brain is always making art but it needs the raw material of a life actually lived to make it from.

Which means every autumn that looked unproductive. Every medium tried badly before it was tried well. Every soul from a world nothing like yours that you sat with long enough to actually understand — all of it is in there. All of it is working.

The multipassionate is never wasting time. We’re always researching.

A niche for your platform. Not for your life.

So niche your platforms. Yes, I guess. Give your readers a way to understand what they’re getting from you. Find the thread that runs through all of it & name it — I’ve written about that elsewhere & I believe in it.

But please, for the love of all existence, do not niche your life.

Do not stop taking the photographs because you’re a yoga teacher. Do not stop playing the guitar because you’re a writer. Do not stop sitting on rooftops with gifted humans from worlds nothing like yours because your brand doesn’t have a category for it. Do not feel like you have to stop traveling because you’re a mama. If you want to do any of these things, choose one over the other because it feels more aligned or you really just don’t have the time, by all means go ahead.

Just don’t let your new passion cancel out your old one because it doesn’t quite fit or isn’t productive or succinct with this latest self you’re embodying.

Your current identity does not have to delete the ones that danced you into right now.

Your life is not contending with your art. It is the source.

Your art / your content / your books are what happens when you take everything your life has given you & sit down & try to make it into something that might do someone else some good. That might feed another soul from a peach you yourself have tasted & gone ‘fuck that’s amazing.’

The living comes first. Always. The multipassionate person is not failing to focus — she is taking the long, exploratory route to a depth the single discipline path cannot reach.

She is living her research.

So go be a creature in the world. Let it be messy & unprofitable & wildly outside your niche. Collect the fire escapes & broken guitars & naked girls covered in feathers & petals & grass stains & the strangers who sing with you. Come back when you’re full of it.

Then make the thing.

Presence isn’t the reward. It’s the point.

& luckily it’s also, where everything worth making comes from.

Since we’re talking art for arts sake, this seems a good moment to share with you — I launched a fun lil something this weekend. A second substack. The Art of Returning is where I write with purpose — the aim to do someone, somewhere, some good.

I needed a place for my writing that has no job & doesn’t want one. Poetry, prose, old & new. Wild creatures being unearthed from old journals & spilling out at 1am once I’ve got the baby back to sleep that have no home. So I made them one. If that sounds like your kind of flavour, you can join me over at Relief of The Spill

There was a version of me — very young & completely unaware of that fact, wearing far too much eyeliner & five inch heels, hair cut or dyed differently more times in a year than there are weeks, headphones permanently in my ears — who would have laughed in your face if you’d suggested she meditate.

Probably not much of a polite laugh either, a medio defiant, largely dismissive, are-you-kidding kind of laugh.

The headphones weren’t for funsies or for any kind of aesthetic. They were functional. A deliberate attempt to drown out the noise — external & internal — that persisted at a volume few others around me appeared to be contending with. Inexplicably fast, very loud, more often than not, dark — so went the epithet of my mind & I’d more or less concluded it was simply the model I’d been issued & there was little to be done about it except for drown it out in some raucous manner or another.

My mama, bless her, had other ideas. Our little two bed flat was half bookshelves, big gifts we’d largely found abandoned on the street & hauled up to the 5th floor as we certainly had enough books to home in them. These great wooden statues were more than a little overflowing with, well all sorts, but amongst the fantasy, poetry, cult fiction & mysteries were more than a fair share of Buddhist & Yogic texts, tomes on Taoism, beat poetry by people who’d read a lot of all of the above. Hardbacks & paperbacks alike with spines so cracked it was clear before you even pulled them off the shelf that they’d been read & re-read until they showed no pretense of holding themselves together.

She’d suggest, occasionally & gently — probably so as not to hit the horse with the stick, lest she never stop — that I try meditation.

I’d laugh the maudlin snort that only a teenager can really pull off (& will, exhaustingly), make some sort of retort of ‘maybe’ or ‘I don’t think it works for me’ or what the F other deflection rolled swiftly out of my million-mile-a-minute-mind & straight off my tongue that day.

I did give it a go a couple of times but I can’t say I really tried it. Retrospectively, I simply didn’t understand it. I continued residence inside the racing, revving, voluminous mess of my mind & thought — yeah. My brain’s not built for that.

I was wrong or at least temporarily misguided, as teenagers so often are. But as I grew (up?) at least older, formed my own studies, fell enamoured with ancient texts of my own volition, wound up hungry for a career where lo & shock behold I set about teaching meditation, moving & otherwise, I discovered a great tragedy —

It is not just fifteen year old me out here thinking meditation is solely for those whose brain started out zen. That it’s some kind of mystical silence we’re supposed to happen upon when we sit cross legged — a position that’s barely sustainable let alone comfy for many. No, that’s actually a pretty common misconception & so here I am writing an article in hopes to adjust the thinking on it & offer you a practice a whole lot more attainable.

So before we go any further, lets get it clear — meditation is not reserved for those who can comfortably sit in lotus pose on the rocky pillow of a himalayan cave. It is not only for gurus, self proclaimed or otherwise. It is not about thinking nothing.

It is a trainable skill.

The stillness in motion

What I discovered way back when — through the only door my body & mind would agree to let me through at the time — was asana.

Not serene, slow or candlelit though that would come many moons later. The sweaty, shaky, physically demanding version that asked so much of my body that there was no cognitive bandwidth left for the noise. In the middle of a challenging sequence something happened — not silence exactly, but a quality of mind that was almost quiet. Almost peaceful. Enough that I kept returning to the mat over the years to touch it again, even, in fact especially when everything else in my life was on fire.

Movement was my first meditation. My body had to be exhausted before my mind would agree to settle. Which is what keeps a lot of the yoga for fitness crew coming back enough times that they unearth something different.

Through the mountainscape of my late teens, thanks to more than a little work on it, my mind did slow a little, became just a bit more spacious. Somewhere in the deepest grief of my life in my early twenties, I did find a stillness. But it was less peace & more like the static of an old television — shocked by too much input, too many signals, the system temporarily overwhelmed into something that resembled quiet. That’s not the same thing but it did open a door of sorts.

What I returned to through all of it— all the patches of years that did their damndest to take me out — was the moving meditation that the mat had always offered me. That quality of stillness in motion that first tickled my curiosity & captivated me.

I kept following it & incrementally, so slow you almost don’t realise it’s happening — the way so many of the best things happen, I learned to sit still.

Even more slowly, I learned to enjoy it.

The noise of the mind stuff

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali opens with arguably one of the most radical statements in the history of philosophy.

Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah.

Yoga exists to still the fluctuations of the mind.

This is, how I have begun quite a few yoga classes when I know theres more than a handful of beginners in front of me.

Because this ancient text defining that Yoga exists to still the fluctuations of the mind — means that for thousands of years before written language was even a thing, we humans had need to still our inner waters.

If that doesn’t make you feel more comfortable & less alone when your own messy inner commentary interrupts you mid Yoga class, I don’t know what will.

Chitta vritti — mind fluctuations, or more evocatively, the churning of consciousness. The endless commentary, the planning & replaying & worst case’s & what-ifs. The narrative. The voice that has an opinion about everything, including the opinion it just had. The noise.

Patanjali wasn’t suggesting the noise is a character flaw. He wasn’t prescribing silence as a state to be achieved & maintained. He was pointing at something much more interesting — that the noise & the one who hears the noise are not the same thing. That somewhere beneath the churning is a quality of awareness that was there before the noise started & will be there when it stops.

Yoga, in its fullest sense, is the many limbed practice of learning to access that awareness. Not to silence the mind but to practice not being so thoroughly convinced that the noise is you.

The self with the small s

The brain constructs a continuous narrative of self. Running in the background of almost every waking moment is a storytelling system — the default mode network — generating a running commentary on who you are, what’s happening, what it means, what might happen next. It takes your experiences & weaves them into a coherent story of you — The narrator.

But researchers studying consciousness & self-perception have identified something else. A distinct mode of awareness that exists separately from the narrator. The experiencing self. The one who is simply present in the moment, perceiving without commentary, existing without the story.

It was a core theme that weaved in & out of lectures on a gigantic wheel of topics in my favourite teacher training. The self with the big S — being pure consciousness & your natural state at oneness with it — & the self with the small s — the human in the muddy waters of existence learning to wade through it.

Meditation researchers studying long term practitioners have found measurable differences in how the brain processes self-referential thought following consistent meditation — less automatic narration, more deliberate awareness.

The practised mind doesn’t stop having thoughts. It stops being ambushed by them.

Same girl, different mind stuff

I still have the inner commentary. She’s just considerably better company than she was once upon a few lifetimes ago.

Generally funny. Quick to the wit. Pretty sarcastic. Still occasionally dark but only really dark of humour. Sunshine-y & optimistic in a way that would be genuinely startling to anyone who’d had access to the same internal ecosystem fifteen years ago.

When a thought arrives I can usually watch it arrive. I notice its particular flavour, decide whether it deserves attention, let it pass or engage with it. By conscious choice rather than compulsion or what that teenage version of me experienced so plentifully — the constant dropping of thought anvils.

I wanna be clear, none of this puts me on a pedestal. This is not enlightenment, this is an average human story, so old it’s worn thin at the knees, so accessible it’s almost boring — how wonderfully possible it is for anyone to train this skill & have their lives changed by the benefits.

This is just what years of returning to the practice, staying open to & evolving with it looks like.

The girl with the headphones & the five inch heels wasn’t wrong that her brain was loud, intense & unmanageable. She was just wrong that it was her permanent architecture. She was wrong that the quiet was something other people got to have. She was wrong that she wasn’t built for stillness.

We only have to reveal or create our own doors to access it.

Your practice

A practice that demands very little time or energy that you can always return to.

This is something you can do mid load of dishes, whilst rocking a baby, just about anytime, anywhere. But when you next feel like devoting a couple of minutes soley to training your meditation muscle, find somewhere comfortable to sit & soften your gaze or close your eyes if that feels good.

For the next two minutes, don’t try to meditate, don’t try to clear your mind, just take the seat of the observer — notice your thoughts as they arrive. The groceries you need to add to the list, the response you wanted to give in the conversation that’s already passed, that you forgot to take the clothes out of the machine. Don’t follow or fight them. Just watch them the way you might watch clouds moving across a vast sky you’re lucky enough to be lying beneath.

Notice that there is a you doing the noticing.

& if you’re feeling really experimental, as you watch a thought float in, acknowledge it & return your attention to your breath. Watch that same thought float right back out of your horizon.

Observe. Accept. Release.

That’s the gap between the noise & the one who hears it. That gap — however brief, however narrow — is the whole practice. Returning to it over & over just makes that gap wider.

You are not your thoughts. You are the one watching them & becoming aware of that, in time changes the whole weather system you live inside.

Maybe you know this already but perhaps you’re new around here.

I am one of those women they say is rawdogging motherhood. I’m attached to my baby about twenty two hours a day. No crib, no pacifier, no daycare. A new mama in a new city with zero village extending past babydaddy. Just 236 nights of my favourite 10kg weight sleeping on my dead left arm, rocking my overflowing / deflated milk bags, persistently messy hair, exuding a whole lot of joy, surrendering to the occasional breakdown & thanking my gorgeous man for taking our double-y gorgeous cub out for a little walk most days so I can catch the occasional shower in peace or do anything whilst not ceaselessly multitasking, which most recently is — write, write, write.

Two essays a week. A note or two a day. Two books in progress. Classes being sequenced & filmed. A paid deep dive philosophy / practice series. The framework of a new series forming in the back end of my brain & my documents. All of it built in the margins of a life that gives me, generously, maybe forty five uninterrupted minutes once every day or so.

Most recent weekends the big love takes the little love out & ensures that free time stretches to a whole couple of hours — which has been wild.

& so I guess unsurprisingly a lot of people here, in comments & dm’s are asking me about creating consistently.

Which tells me something & it’s not a reflection about me — it’s about what most creatives are telling themselves regarding what consistency requires. The muse as a constant houseguest, a clean aesthetic desk in a silent, undisturbed home. The ability to write with both hands because one isn’t bouncing wooden blocks to & from an adorable nose a la ‘boop the baby’ — keep him giggling so he doesn’t meltdown about the fact that you’re also trying to do something else. A version of life that well, I don’t know about you, but for me definitely isn’t currently reality.

Here’s the thing. I write about consistency in general — for people working on their wellbeing, their yoga practice, their creative acts, their positive habits, their many different missions. The broad thesis that showing up in small steady acts builds the life you’re after. Because it does.

But this one is specifically for you.

Yes you there. Substacker.

Grinding away to churn out an article or two every week & from the best that I can gauge, making it much harder than it needs to be.

In seated postures in a yoga class I often cue those feeling a bit heavy, experiencing rounding in the low back, struggling to hold themselves upright — to place their hands behind them on the floor & use their arms as a second spine.

An extra backbone that makes it easier to breathe fully, to have solid form. & in time, with consistent practice, they stop needing their arms to hold themselves there.

That’s what I’m offering here. An extra backbone for your content. Not a strategy or a systematic hack. Just some things equally of your own creating that you can lean on. A few practices that hold you up when the blank page & the busy life & the brain fog of trying to do too many things at once are conspiring to make you feel like you’ve got nothing.

You’ve got plenty friend. You just need to stop starting from scratch.

Titles first. Pounds of flesh later.

Recently I discovered that most people write their article & then figure out a title.

& my first thought was — Wait. Am I ass backwards?

Maybe. In fact probably. Could be it’s the Instagram captionista in me. Possibly the remnants of a seventeen year old who was convinced she wanted to be a journalist so learned early on that the hook is everything. Either way I can confirm where my articles here are concerned I have never once sat down to write without knowing what I’m writing towards & I think this might be one of the most useful things I can hand you.

I have a note on my phone. At any given time it contains ten to twenty title ideas I’ve scribbled on a stroller walk, voice annotated while making dinner or — & I will not pretend this hasn’t happened — typed one handed on the toilet while wrangling my son away from the roll of toilet paper with the other.

Inspiration hits when it hits okay.

No full ideas, not a nice polished outline. Just titles. Some provocative catchy thing. The thing my brain spins out between loads of laundry that I think might make me stop scrolling & go — ooh I want to read that.

Far beyond the fact that a good title is better for catching your readers eye, having a title first tells you what you’re writing about. It gives the piece bones before you add enticing, voluptuous curves. It means you sit down knowing where you’re going rather than staring at a blank page & dealing with that horrible feeling when the blank page refuses to tell you what to write. We all know blank pages can be bitches.

So start there. Next time you’re walking, cooking, existing — notice what you’re thinking about. What’s inspiring you, annoying you, interesting you, surprising you. Turn it into a title. Voice note it. Scribble it. Chuck them in to a note on your phone or your journal & leave them there.

When you next feel really inspired & sit down to write, you can just open the note & pick the one that’s pulling at you most. The title can always be edited once you have the piece done, just let it be a visible sign post directing you first.

Let it hook you, the writer before it hooks a reader.

The blank page problem dissolves. Evoila, you have ideas you can always to return to.

The bundle of bones exercise

Say you’re not feeling particularly inspired but you find yourself with a whole hour — even half works — open your notebook or your pages app or whatever your favourite place to spill in is.

Write down six to eight of these hook / title ideas from your notes. Just one line.

A message you want to get out. A cool fact you think might serve someone beyond you. Something beautiful & poetic if that’s your thing. Doesn’t really matter what, I could put a thousand different examples here, it’s going to be different for everyone.

One line, with space left beneath each, no pressure on where they’re going.

Drop five to six bullet points under each one. I really suggest limiting the amount of time you spend on these bullet points, mind dump all over them, get messy, free flow. The flavour of your Substack applied to this idea. A direction to take it in, a sense memory that links to it, a question it raises, a quote, a piece of science, an unpopular opinion — whatever lives at the crossroads of this idea & your voice.

Six to eight titles. Five or six bullet points each.

If you’ve got eight & you’re a one article a week kinda substacker, you’re staring at the bones of two months of content.

Now pick your favourite & start expanding the bullets into paragraphs. The decisions have already been made. All that’s left is the writing — which is the part you’re actually good at & the part that gets lost when you’re using all your energy deciding what to make instead of making it.

Notes for value, notes for freedom, notes for friends

Okay confession time. When I very recently started my Substack I didn’t even know notes were a thing. I genuinely thought this was the antithesis of social media, when in fact it’s just social media with a longer attention span, a more wholesome feeling to the community & considerably more room to breathe.

I know, I know. Notes, notes, notes. Everyone’s saying it & I’ll admit I find things on repetitive spin cycle mildly grating, maybe thats just me, maybe it’s you too. But I’ve accumulated over 500 organic-to-substack subscribers in the month since I arrived here & only recently discovered three quarters of them came in through notes. In fact damn near half of them came in from one. single. note.

So, there’s that.

Luckily I like a short form message — hello (ex?) IG captionista — so on day one I settled on a format I could lean on. One valuable note & one personal note a day, with full permission to share just one or neither whenever I feel like.

Your format may look different but have mercy on yourself — decide on a format.

Same as with your articles, give yourself something to fall back on so that when the text cursor is blinking at you in an empty box & you just want to share a quick note but don’t have a flying fig of what, you have framework to get inspired within.

A valuable note in my framework is something I think might ground, empower, inspire, bring an interesting reframe or a slow moment of peace / a pause to someone. For you value might be making someone feel something with your poetry, getting someone hooked on a character in your novel or offering a recipe, who knows!?

Well you do, it’s your substack.

A personal note in my framework is where I get to just be messy lil me, currently somewhere between a hot nomadic mess, a milk stained fluffy bathrobe & a domestic fucking goddess. Not the version of me thats an authority on consistency, resilience & creativity, not a yoga teacher or a breathwork coach. Just a woman stopping in awe or frustration at the outrageous, occasionally maddening beauty of existence, frequently sleep deprived (hello 7 month old), always caffeinated. Some small spill that serves up a slice of me & allows me to make friends with other similarly human humans.

So like we have a note for title ideas & practice pages for fleshing them out in bullet points, we too write note drafts. I think I have about 30 — some are great, legitimately some of my favourite recent writing, others are near nonsensical, some exist only to be deleted. Quality amongst note drafts genuinely doesn’t matter. What matters is you have them, you don’t ever have to stare at the blank box unless you’re inspired to write something new in to it.

Build the spine. Lean on it when you're slouching.

Kriya & the creative muscle

Kriya is both a Sanskrit concept & a powerful array of practices, Kriya Yoga is even it’s own style. It sounds ancient because it is — & if you’ve ever practiced it you’ll know it feels exactly that. There’s a quality to the surge of energy it ignites that feels older than any room you’ve ever been in. Kriya means a purifying action. Internal movement sourced through meditation, breath & body. It’s designed to turn the senses inward & evoke evolution — of the mind, of the body, of the spirit. In yoga, Kriya practices are precise & deliberate sequences that clear what’s stuck, move what’s stagnant & create the conditions for something in you to shift.

Here we’re applying that to creativity.

Because the creative act is its own form of Kriya. While we cannot expect the muse to move in permanently, wouldn’t that be nice — we can steadily stoke the fire, take consistent action, evoke our intent by continuing to create. Masterpeices & total trash alike. Action taken not because inspiration showed up but because you showed up & in doing so, cleared the channel enough for something to move through it.

You grab the muse by the hand when she’s there & when she isn’t, you sit down anyway & trust that the sitting is the work.

Which is, gorgeously enough, exactly what the neuroscience of habit confirms.

Repeated behaviours shift — gradually & measurably — from conscious effortful processing to automatic processing. The brain stops treating the behaviour as a decision & starts treating it as a given. The energy required to repeat the action begins to drop. The resistance softens. The creative act gets cheaper to run the more consistently you show up to it.

Not a metaphor. Actual measurable change in how the brain routes the behaviour.

Every time you sit down to write — even badly, even briefly, even with a baby on your arm & the vague memory of having last showered sometime this week — you are making the next time fractionally easier. The creative muscle doesn’t get tired with use, it gets more efficient.

So Kriya. Not trying to recreate the article you’re most proud of. Not studying notes that went viral. Definitely not perfectionistic procrastination or metaphorically scrunching up a page that is in fact digital. The ordinary faithful act of inciting something to move through you. Just getting things out of your head & into something tangible.

Creativity is a muscle. & muscles are best built through steady nourishment & progressive load.

Less time = more efficient?

Weirdly enough — or maybe not so — I’m discovering having little to no time can focus you magnificently.

When you have unlimited hours it’s all too easy to spend a significant portion of them deciding what to do with them. Topped off with an excessive amount of them spent procrastinating & doubting the ideas that you do have.

At the very least I’ve had plenty seasons like that.

Now I have forty five minutes & a title already in my phone & I sit down & I write because if I want to spill with no interruptions — Uff what a luxury to have a single point of focus, the mamas here will just get it — it’s this window of time or nothing, it doesn’t matter if it sucks, it just matters that it’s out somewhere I can edit it later. It’s no longer dancing around in my head waiting to get buried under laundry, groceries & all the other ideas doing the funky mambo up there.

Parkinson’s Law — work expands to fill the time available — runs beautifully in reverse for the creative with real constraints. The work contracts & in that contraction it becomes more essential.

Maybe you’re swimming in time so set a timer if you must, treat your creativity like work you love showing up to — with hours on as well as off. Give yourself deadlines, you will meet them.

& more importantly, remember, the clear desk & the quiet house are a trap. I’m not sure they actually exist outside of reels. You could wait a very long time for both & produce nothing in the waiting.

So, lovely human, stop making things harder for yourself. Sit down in the margins. Make the most of the time you have. Write your hooks. Play with your bundles of bones. Expand on them with or without inspiration. Do it again tomorrow.

Creativity doesn’t have to be the outlier in your practices of consistency. You just have to set your system up to keep the muse on speed dial.

In this practice I’ll be guiding you through active rest / a body scan.

All too often when we feel the need to recharge we can find ourselves glued to the couch in a scroll-hole, which is it’s own kind of disconnect but today I offer you something a little different. Here to return to whenever you need.

I hope you enjoy this offering. It’s a pleasure to practice with you.

Read more

I am an accidental specialist in grief.

& so I can tell you, in fact I must — I confess I’ve a second book draft being tapped away at through midnights with an urgency to share some of what I’m going to share with you now.

Grief is not reserved for the loss of people. It is not a velvet rope experience, exclusive to those who have stood in the static at graveside or on the pinhole end of the worst phone call of their lives.

It is not something that only happens to you when someone dies.

Grief is what happens when love meets loss. & love — if you’ve been paying any attention — has a habit of attaching itself to a great many things that aren’t people.

You lose a job you’d built your identity around — not just the income, not just the routine, but the version of yourself that existed inside that role, the security you’d built from that desk. That is grief.

Your home is taken from you — through debt, through circumstance, through someone else’s decision — and you grieve not just the building & the area you knew as home but the specific quality of safety it held. The comfort of knowing how light comes in through the window. The self who lived there. That is grief.

A relationship ends — one that lasted long enough to become a part of your identity — and what you’re grieving is not only the person but the entire future you’d constructed alongside them. The inside jokes. The idea of growing old. That is grief.

You are violated in some way — attacked, betrayed, robbed — and beneath the rage, the shock, the turmoil is grief for the version of the world you believed in before it showed you what it was capable of. For the ease you used to move through a street or a relationship or the dark car park of a train station. That ease was something you had & now you don’t. That is grief.

Most of us were handed a definition of grief that covers only a fraction of what we actually feel & the cost of that narrow definition is that we find ourselves in the middle of something enormous, internally riotous & damn near un-nameable, wondering what on earth is wrong with us, rather than recognising what we’re experiencing for what it is.

Nothing is wrong with us.

We are grieving & grief, in every form it takes, begins in exactly the same place.

Love.

The losses that made me

Once in my late teens I was in bed with a lover, a radiant man with a lot of good sense who one night said something that could be construed as totally senseless. Except you can’t really fault him for it, he was right.

Moonlight spilled in through his loft window on our tangled fingers & bodies atop the white sheets while we told stories of our lives. All of a sudden he sat up & said ‘wow, people have really just been dropping like flies around you your whole life.’

It made me laugh & now makes me laugh harder still. Sure by then I’d lost a great many things & here we are over a decade later — I’ve lost a great many more.

I lost my mama. I lost the Mediterranean island life I’d spent years building — the warm mornings, the winters in Asia, the freedom of a life with very few fixed points — lost it overnight to a concrete jungle I’d escaped at 17, to three jobs & debt collectors & a lawsuit to keep a roof over our heads.

I lost the ability to scream when I needed to — the residue of having been attacked by ten men & having to fight my way out of it with a bevelled torch & a flip-knife.

I lost a thirteen year relationship. One that had become so woven into my sense of self that when it ended — harshly, irrevocably, the kind of collapse that doesn’t just end something but dismantles the entire architecture of a life built around a shared future — I couldn’t have told you where I ended & it began.

The man I loved & considered my closest friend for near half my life is now someone I haven’t spoken to in over three years.

I have lost family & homes & countries & versions of myself that felt so damn permanent even though I know nothing is. I have lost a sense of safety so completely that the world felt like a place that could turn on you without warning — because more than once in my life, it has.

I am telling you this not to catalogue suffering or garner pity. I tell you this because what came after each of those losses is the point of this piece entirely.

My mama introduced me to yoga when I was six years old. Bare feet on a hardwood floor in a bright orange living room, neither of us with a mat, both of us with bed head. When I asked her what yoga was she furrowed her brow, turned a cheeky grin at me & said yoga is a way of living.

After I lost her I reached for the only thing that still worked. The practice she’d shown me on that orange-walled morning seventeen years earlier. No mat, no money for classes. Just my body moving in the half-dark before the city woke up & whatever the morning brought.

I had no idea I was building what would years later become my most fulfilling career, I thought I was just surviving. Turned out those were the same thing.

I became a yoga teacher. Then a breathwork coach. Then someone who built an entire life — purpose, community, identity, travels — around the practice that had kept her standing through the worst years of her life.

If she hadn’t died I would not have needed it the way I needed it. If I hadn’t needed it that desperately I would never have gone that deep. If I hadn’t gone that deep I would never have had anything worth sharing.

The loss made the life.

& the thirteen year relationship — the collapse, the uncertainty of wtf to do now, the one way ticket to the other side of the world, the year teaching on the road with nothing but my practice & a badly packed gigantic bag — gave me something I couldn’t have imagined from inside the devastation of it.

It gave me my son.

He is, to put it with every grain of understatement I can muster, the light of my entire life. He exists because a relationship ended in a way that utterly broke my heart. I have held that equation many times & I still don’t entirely know what to do with it except to say — this is what I mean. This is the whole point.

I could list handfuls of my own hard earned grief turned gift examples here but I’m hoping these two are sufficient to express —

You cannot know, in the middle of the loss, what the loss is making room for.

The habit of surrender

In yogic philosophy there is a concept called Ishvara Pranidhana.

It’s one of the niyamas — the personal observances of classical yoga — & it’s usually translated as surrender to a larger unfolding. Or to the divine. Some call it god. Others say trust in what comes. Whatever you want to call it, it is the practice of loosening a white-knuckled grip on outcomes & timelines & whatever version of the future you had planned & opening — not with resignation but with genuine active trust — to what is actually unraveling before you instead.

I want to be careful here because surrender is not the same as giving up nor is it toxic positivity. It is definitely not ‘everything happens for a reason’ delivered at a funeral by someone who couldn’t bear the silence. It’s not a spiritual bypass — a way of skipping the grief by heading straight for the silver lining before you’ve been allowed to properly feel the loss.

The surrender it describes is not passive. It is one of the most demanding practices in the entire yogic tradition. It asks you to hold both things simultaneously — the enormity of what you’ve lost & the trust that the unfolding is not finished. To grieve fully, honestly, without performing recovery that simply hasn’t happened yet — & to keep, in the background, a small but wholly alive faith that your story isn’t over.

Because it isn’t.

This is extraordinarily difficult in the acute phase of loss, I’m not pretending otherwise. In the immediate aftermath of the worst things I’ve been through the idea that something good could possibly grow from this felt something between insulting & absurd.

But Ishvara Pranidhana doesn’t ask you to believe it yet.

It asks you to just stay open to the possibility. To not foreclose the future before it’s had a chance to arrive. To trust — not blindly, but with the earned faith of someone who has survived things before & found, each time, that surviving changed them in ways they hadn’t anticipated & often couldn’t have chosen.

That faith is a practice. It does not arrive fully formed. It grows, incrementally, through the accumulated experience of having been through things & knowing that one way or another we come through them changed

Whether that change is positive or not is something we cultivate in the gardens of our hands, hearts & minds. It’s something we craft by making surrender a habit.

The gift no one asks for

There is a body of research called post traumatic growth.

Not to be confused with post traumatic stress — though the two often coexist — post traumatic growth is the documented phenomenon in which people who’ve experienced significant loss or trauma report positive psychological change that they directly & specifically attribute to having gone through it. Not despite the life-wracking experience, because of it.

The changes researchers document are consistent across populations, cultures & types of loss. Increased personal strength — the specific, embodied knowledge that you can survive something you didn’t know you could survive. New possibilities — directions, purposes & identities that became available precisely because the old ones were dismantled. Deeper relationships — the raw empathy & quality of connection that becomes possible between people who have both been through something & stopped pretending otherwise. A greater appreciation for life — not the romanticised Instagram version, but the raw, morning-coffee, my-child-is-breathing, birds-sing version that you can only really access after you’ve understood what loss actually costs.

Researchers Tedeschi & Calhoun, who coined the term in the 1990s, were careful to note something important. Post traumatic growth is not the same as resilience — the ability to bounce back to where you were before. It is something qualitatively different. Unlike a lot of what I share, it is not in fact about returning.

It is the emergence of a self that could not have existed without the rupture.

The loss doesn’t just take something away. It clears the ground.

& on cleared ground, given time & the right conditions & the willingness to stay in the process rather than skip over it — things grow that had no room before. Roots find depth they couldn’t have found in unbroken soil.

This is not a promise. Positive growth is not guaranteed, it is allowed for. Sadly it’s not distributed fairly & it does not arrive on any timeline that will feel soon enough when you’re in the thick of it. But it is documented. It is real & it tends to visit most reliably the people who allowed themselves to feel the loss fully rather than spending their energy managing it or squashing it into something more palatable.

The interminably dark seat of grief is not a waiting room, it is where the work of letting light in happens.

An invitation

Something for you to sit with, not solve.

Find somewhere comfy to exist when you next have a few minutes.

Bring to mind something you’ve lost. Not necessarily the biggest loss & nothing too recent — the older ones gathering dust on your inner bookshelves are easier to begin with.

A relationship, a job, a version of yourself, a home, a sense of safety, some dream that didn’t survive.

Let it fully arrive. Give it a moment to be real rather than managed.

Now ask yourself, with no pressure to discover a clean cut answer — is there anything in my life right now that couldn’t exist without that loss?

Let me be very clear, you need not magic up a reframe designed to make the loss feel smaller than it was.

Just — what is here now that wasn’t there before? What grew in the space the loss created?

Even if it’s tender. Even if it’s still becoming. Even if the answer is I don’t know yet — because sometimes the gift is still arriving & the only thing asked of you is to stay open to it.

You don’t have to resolve the grief to find what grew from it. You don’t have to be finished with the loss to acknowledge what it made room for.

Both things can be true at once.

The grief & the gift. Together. Inseparable.

This isn’t a contradiction.

It’s just what love looks like across the full length of a life.

P.S. If you do happen to practice this little reflection — what you harshly lost & what gorgeousness you gained… & you feel like sharing what comes up with me, I’d genuinely love to hear it. It may even — with permission of course — wind up in the book I’m writing. To show further evidence to those sitting is the dark seat of grief that we can never know what goodness it’s making room for. Either way thanks for taking the time to read this.

If you’re reading this it’s because you decided to back this little corner of the internet I’m building & honestly, I can hardly wrap my head around how grateful I am, let alone express it. You are the living glimmer that a dream I’ve been harbouring for years is possible — not just to keep writing long form & sharing but to take the time to go deeper on the philosophy, the neuroscience, to let you further into this wild life of mine & the things that have held me together through it. To record practices both in individual style as well as ways they’re traditionally taught, to build a space that doesn’t confine me to one medium that simply, hopefully —

does some good to all those who arrive to it.

To share the larger aspects of the practice in ways I’ve always wanted to.

So first from the bottom of my wild eyed, consistently messy haired heart thank you.

This is the first of what I’m calling The Sadhana Scripts. Once a month I’ll be sending one of these — a deep dive into one Sanskrit concept or one specific practice, told the way I’d tell it sat on the floor with you at the edge of a shala, a coconut in each of our hands. Philosophy & ancient contexts examined & unraveled. The traditional version of the practices not usually offered to beginners. The philosophy as it was actually handed to me, lived with & evolved over the years. Guided offerings of the powerful techniques I write about in my articles, ones that over the moons have saved me in more ways than one.

Consider it an open extended hand, it’s the closest thing I can offer to actually teaching you in person from here — where there is usually some sort of homemade baby puree in my hair & a 7 month old dangling off my tired loving body.

For this first one we’re going where my recent article on Nadi Shodhana didn’t have room or requirement to go.

The deeper philosophy & it’s branches. Insight of the traditional practice with breath retention, understanding of the channels, the centers they weave through, the mudra & a recorded guided practice for you to return to whenever you need.

Again, thank you for being here. On we flow.

The 72,000 channels & what actually moves through them

In the free article I touched on the three primary nadis — Sushumna, Ida, Pingala. Ancient texts describe a network of seventy-two thousand of these subtle energy channels weaving through the body. Let’s call that number more symbolic than literal, I certainly can’t name them & I doubt Patanjali himself would’ve tried — what the texts are pointing at is the sheer density of subtle energetic pathways that support the physical body we recognise more easily.

The nadis are but one part of a larger system the yogic tradition calls the pranamaya kosha — the energy body or breath-sheath. One of five layers or sheaths the human being is understood to consist of. The physical body is the outermost. The energy body sits just beneath it & the practices of pranayama work directly on this layer, recalibrating the flow of life force before it expresses itself in the body & the mind.

This is why pranayama is considered such a foundational practice in classical yoga. The Yamas & Niyamas outline the ethical & moral codes by which we thrive. Asana works on the physical body. Meditation works on the mind. Pranayama works on the layer between them — the energetic infrastructure that determines how freely or how stuck either of those expresses itself.

When the nadis are clear & in balance, prana — generally translated in modern Yoga as ‘breath’ but more literally translated as ‘life force’ — flows freely. The body has access to its full vitality. The mind settles more easily. The system regulates itself with less effort. When the nadis are blocked or imbalanced, through stress, suppressed emotion, illness, prolonged fatigue, the accumulated weight of unprocessed experience, the whole system runs less efficiently. We feel it as anxiety, as brain fog, as a sense that our spirit is scattered, as exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix, as a mind that won’t quiet down no matter what we try.

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Fear of sharing for the creative is like that in reverse — Self doubt can seep into the palms until it’s all your holding.

For a few weeks before I hit launch on this little platform thats landed in front of you, I passionately & silently worked away on it. For months prior my every hour had been devoted to my baby & every drop of free time I had was spent intentionally putting something back in my cup so I could keep wholly pouring out.

Then quite suddenly I was someone who was voice annotating on most every stroller walk, tapping away at my keyboard furiously while I fed myself & my babe breakfast, doing this weird achey overarm lunge at my laptop with my little love snoozing on my boob at midday. I went from being a woman who went to sleep almost as early as her babe to one who was awake at 11pm in blue light glasses with her cub snuggled in next to her, writing.. something. More accurately, some things.

My son was only mildly outraged at this sudden split in my attention & my man watched all of these shifts happen, practically from one day to the next with plenty curiosity. More than once he asked ‘what is it you’re working on?’

& I’d say “an idea I’ve had” or “I don’t want to jinx it” knowing full well the second I opened my mouth about it my brains was going to get the same hit of dopamine it would get as if it were already done. Too many a creative project has been lost this way.

Bless him, he’d accept that with a “cool, you tell me about it when you’re ready.”

Realistically it was an idea that had been percolating for years that had suddenly been lit up with a surge of clarity & inspiration. So I kept my mouth shut & buried myself in the creators urge — as much as a woman attached to a baby 22hrs a day can.

Spilling the secret

My 10kg ball of love in arms, one morning with my man working from home at his desk, I sat on the edge of the bed & told him everything.

The book answering a question thousands have asked me. The Substack, a place for me to help people create some breathing room in their own lives & to get to know me as a writer, not just a yogi. The paid tier, the growing vault of guided practices & a little library of reset rituals. Eventually getting back on instagram & letting what I write here feed my content there & vice versa. The whole shape of the thing I’d been assembling in the snippets of free time I barely have — the only version of a plan I could see that might let me keep being the full time mamacita we all want me to remain whilst also maybe bringing in something that resembles a small income when maternity pay soon upped & quit.

He listened & then he did what he does — considered it logically & started asking the sensible questions.

You want to self publish? Like an ebook? If not many people are sharing Yoga classes on Substack, is it the right platform for that? Have you looked at what’s actually converting for people doing something similar?

Reasonable, practical & delivered with all the compassionate calm of someone who loves you, someone who’s trying to help you think clearly.

I answered the questions, feeling mildly put out that my lightbulb of inspiration suddenly seemed like something I had to convince him was giving off a glow. I took the baby back downstairs, sat on the couch & watched a tear land on his perfect blond head. The crying got ugly, the way a poke at an old wound instigates your nose to stuff up, your chest to collapse & your hands to grip each other, hungrily seeking comfort in themselves.

I wasn’t really on that couch, I wasn’t thirty one & I wasn’t in Belgium.

I was fifteen, in London, supremely unstable, winning writing competitions with pieces I’d hungrily penned on no sleep in days, watching my work get published in the national history magazine & still dissonant from the idea that it was good enough. Still waiting for a confirmation that never arrived in a form I could hold onto.

My dad — a logical man, chronically full of devil’s advocate questions, not unlike my man upstairs — all throughout my messy teen years would pose ‘so what’s the plan? What do you want to do?’ Which for a long time felt like a small assault because truth be told, I didn’t have a plan, I was just trying to survive.

But more than once I said ‘I want to be a writer.’ He would ask write about what? Not unkindly I should add, even if it felt so at the time, just practically. He generally gestured that writing was a pipe dream rather than a viable direction & it stung, not at all because he was trying to be cruel but because I didn’t have a clean answer on what I wanted to write about yet. I wouldn’t for many moons & being faced with the not knowing felt like scary evidence that he might be right.

These particular kinds of sting have a long memory in the body & so when we’re faced with them it’s like bumping a bruise that’s refused to heal for a decade or so.

Later that day, puffy eyed & still more than a lil effected I went back upstairs & my loving man asked if he’d said something wrong, asked why I’d gotten so upset & I blurted out in a voice that had gotten much smaller than my own that this idea meant a lot to me & it felt like he didn’t believe in me.

He looked at me — eyes wide, baffled — of course I believe in you.

& I heard myself say something every creator eventually has to admit in order to persevere.

I know you do. It’s me who struggles to believe in me. Where my writing is concerned I have always dealt with self limiting beliefs.

No matter how brave, ballsy & blunt a woman I am. No matter how much an intuitive go getter. Regardless that I’m a life-long creative & I’ve never been short on people telling me I’m good at whatever I’m passionate about. Despite how thoroughly I’ve learned to call out & squash the self doubt monster. Long form writing has always slipped just a little under that radar, always remained something tender. A vulnerable joint in my generally strong mindset. Something I’ve never been sure was worth offering. I know I can write an IG caption that can bring in thousands of responses but a whole essay… a whole platform of them… a whole book…

My fear wasn’t wearing his face, it was wearing his questions as a costume.

The way you do one thing

“The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” This was quoted with certainty & clarity at my favourite teacher training & sat on the floor as I was carrying all my personal ethos of sādhana like a backpack I’d been toting around for years, it struck a chord in a way I’ve never forgotten

While scrolling through social media watching people perform incredible physical skills could seem like a grand segue here bare with me —

My IG feed is full of incredible movers — yogis, calisthenics pros, contortionists, dancers & no matter the style, when I see a movement that stops me in my tracks, I almost don’t see the skill.

I see the characteristic attributes it takes to get a person there.

I see determination, perseverance, the ability to fall a thousand times, laugh it off & try again. I see the audacity to try something damn difficult, the resilience to suck at it & doubtlessly keep sucking at it for a while. A person who shows up to the impossible so many times it begins to look (& feel) effortless.

Truthfully it’s the same here on substack when I come across an article that stuns me with it’s realness, the beauty of its prose, it’s wit, it’s knowledge. Sure I read the words, I hear the context, I get the story. But mostly I see a life voraciously lived, I see a craft honed over a million midnights, journals full of scribbles next to coffee stain thumbprints. I see a person who overcomes all that creatives must, not just to keep creating, but to balls up & set about the altogether teetering, heady mission of sharing.

When I’m teaching someone to handstand or deepen their backbends there’s usually an initial mental block to get past. It’s fear. Largely the fear of falling — so we learn how to fall. Literally we practice falling, every which safe way there is. & we work with the breath, exhaling longer than our inhale as we move — training the nervous system to understand that what we’re doing, the shapes we’re making, the transitions we’re playing with are safe.

& once the nervous system knows that, you wouldn’t believe the rapid progress people make, then we can start getting into the actual conditioning & consistency. Once we get the head settled we can start getting to work on the body.

Creative endeavours are no different. The body demands safety first, then builds strength, then takes flight.

As if this header didn’t give it a way, the same way I approached teaching myself to press to handstand, I approached this substack, hell it’s the same way I approach my breakfast, my travels, my love life, my journey into motherhood.

After that couch & those ugly tears on the top of my sons perfect head. Crumpled in my acceptance that I was in fact projecting my self doubt on to the face of my man — I mulled how to get back to the page & the answer was there before I’d even finished the question.

The same way I do everything.

No demand for commitment or discipline.

No waiting until the fear passes because it never does, not entirely.

Just keep building a practice that feels so good it’s easy to show up to tomorrow & keep returning to it, day after day & then again the day after that.

The seed that needs a steady mind

In Sanskrit philosophy there’s a concept called sankalpa.

Usually translated as intention or resolve — but the meaning for me is something closer to a seed planted in a steady mind. San meaning connection to the highest truth. Kalpa meaning a vow, a commitment, a rule to live by.

The key component being steadiness.

A sankalpa planted in a scattered, fearful, unsteady mind doesn’t take root the way it should. Seeds rarely do in soil that isn’t ready. Which is why we set an intention at the beginning of a yoga practice rather than the end because the practice itself is what steadies the mind enough to receive it.

This is what I’d been doing during those weeks of silent building. Not pointing out my freshly planted garden to passers by, just steadying the ground. Making the soil ready.

The moment I named it — before the ground was ready, before I’d done enough returning to feel certain — the fear rushed in to fill the gap between the intention & evidence.

Sankalpa asks you to plant the seed in the practice itself. To let the doing be the declaration. To trust that the intention strengthens with each return rather than each announcement.

With every article we draft, every note we share, every chapter added to the dream, every connection we make on the corners of the internet we’re building — we water our planted seed, we nurture our intention to overcome the fear.

Naming things too soon

Yes the dopamine hit of telling someone that you’re doing a thing is practically the same of having done the thing, but there’s other research backing us to build in private.

Research on our big beautiful brains revealed what psychologists call ‘social reality’ & it shows that when we share an identity based goal & receive acknowledgement for it — even a simple nod, even a somewhat annoying sensible question — the brain begins to register that identity as partially real. You said you’re a writer. Someone heard you say it. The social reality of it exists now & the brain, efficient creature that it is, eases off the urgency that was propelling you toward the pages.

While that’s annoying the brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do — seeking the most efficient route to the reward. The problem is that creative work doesn’t reward efficiency. It rewards return. Repetition. The slow accumulation of days spent at the desk honing your skill & cultivating your craft before anyone is watching.

Which means the most protective thing you can do for a creative intention in its early stages is keep it close. Let it grow roots before it grows an audience. Let the practice become the declaration.

Numbers are weighty in more than one way

There’s something people don’t tend to share about building a platform for your art, your passion, your practice that I really need to express. The whole world is hungry for numbers, for impressive metrics, for something to go viral, for the validation that all your hours put in & doubt overcome was worth it. I can’t say I’m any different, who doesn’t want their truths to land to those that it’s meant for.

But.

I watched an Instagram account grow past ten thousand in under a year & discovered that numbers don’t dissolve the fear, they actually tend to highlight it. They move a little extra weight in with them. Suddenly things need to be more valuable, more helpful, more polished, more considered. What started as total creative freedom, a place where I played equal to the play in my Yoga practice, began to feel a little constricted, I became more & more hesitant to share as the amount of eyes, hearts & minds I was sharing to grew exponentially, before my nervous system really had time to adjust to the idea.

Essentially you still navigate stage fright but on a much bigger stage.

Which is why what you’re maybe sitting on right now — sharing notes to tumbleweed, writing essays into the void, finding three subscribers on a Monday morning & thinking woah, there are actual humans reading this is far more valuable than it looks.

This is where your voice is cultivated. This is you singing out the window before you’ve built a stadium. The notes that land to silence today are the ones that teach you what you need to say, what art you have to make. It’s that level of authority & authenticity that makes those who stumble upon your work want to be a part of what you’re doing.

What I’m saying (& doing alongside you) is don’t rush it, don’t perform, don’t falter in the face of online tumbleweed.

Just create & let the creating be enough for now.

The creatives sādhana

I’d so love to tell you there’s a magic button for making sharing bits of your soul easier, if anyone finds one do share it with me. The only magic ingredient to putting yourself out there is doing it & doing so in small, steady acts that don’t overwhelm you & moot your joy of creating.

The fear that slips through the creator’s fingers & fills their palm doesn’t disappear when you have enough confidence or enough success or enough subscribers. Little by little practicing awareness that the fear exists & taking baby steps through it eventually becomes more familiar than the retreating.

In time the showing up becomes more natural than the hiding. The overcoming it becomes more second nature than the shrinking in the face of it.

Don’t slam your fist shut trying to block the fear out. Tell yourself ‘lightly my love’ & millimetre by millimetre close the gaps between your fingers.

Recognise that we’re all here, overcoming self doubt, one publish button at a time & as always — awareness is a most powerful seat to keep at home.

Plant the seed. Steady the mind. Return to your practice.

Your art is the remedy to the fear, it always has been.

Whilst most of these practices will be living behind a paywall I wanted to ensure that everyone who arrives at The Art of Returning has the chance for a little guided grounding practice.

All my gratitude for choosing to back this corner of the internet I’m building. Free or paid, your presence here means the world to me.

I hope you enjoy this offering. It’s a pleasure to practice with you.

Just because it was a Thursday & whether I was rocking my massive bump or not that’s what Thursdays (& every other day that ends in y) looked like. A featherlight press, a series of breaths & bandhas, the bliss of being upside down & completely in my own body. A daily expression of the strength & stability I’ve cultivated over the moons.

I didn’t know it’d be the last one for quite some time.

There is a specific, total reorganisation that happens when a tiny human arrives in your life. Books & podcasts gesture at it. The multitude shifts of just existing through pregnancy give you a good guess. Friends who’ve been through it try to describe it.

You nod, imagining you understand & you don’t really. Not until you live it.

Because it’s not just the schedule that changes. It’s the concept of a schedule — something reliably yours that you can plan around & return to — temporarily ceases to exist.

Someone else’s hunger, regulation, sleep & joy become the weather system your entire life is lived inside. A weather system with no meteorology, no seasonal logic. There isn’t an app in the world that can tell you whether today will be patchy cloudy, soft drizzle or an 8.5 on the richter scale. So you learn to dress for all conditions, pack layers & snacks & call it motherhood.

By last September when my cub came earthside I’d already spent years practicing, studying & sharing about consistency. I’d built practices that sustained through an array of when-it-rains-it-pours adversities. I knew almost too well what it felt like when life applied intense pressure & I thought I knew what it looked like to hold your ground through life when it’s a living typhoon.

& then 3kg of light-of-my-life arrived & completely, lovingly dismantled everything I thought I knew about showing up for myself & taught me some things I couldn’t have understood until well, now.

The caterpillar doesn’t become a smaller caterpillar

I expected my practice to shrink, what I didn’t expect was that it would essentially change shape entirely. Shrinking implies that same thing just gets smaller — we squish the same identity in to a tighter container.

Nice idea but no. What we have here is metamorphosis.

It’s the minimum-three-times-a-day walk with the stroller that becomes your dedicated movement practice — feet on the ground, eyes on the way morning light hits the trees at this hour, babe smiling at the world passing him by, letting out small satisfied sounds at the sky or screaming his head off with you ushering ‘I know little love, I know’ when you don’t in fact know but you will always try to know. It’s three intentional breaths taken over a sink full of dishes. It’s one handed typing at midnight because the writing won’t wait & the other arm is lost to the embrace of his sleeping body. It’s a couple handstands at the park that you think of as old friends because even though you never spend time with them anymore you meet with so much familiarity & ease. It’s five minutes on the living room carpet when you’ve got a mat rolled out in a little practice sanctuary just a few metres away but this is easier to reach. It’s movements that barely resemble the practice you used to have, that remain profoundly impactful. A moving meditation that’s adopted a whole new style & is still entirely, unmistakably yours.

The birth, as births tend to had its own ideas entirely. My plan & its plan had a long, somewhat riotous disagreement & its plan won after days, yes days of me trying to stick to mine. & so recovery was slower, more tender than I’d imagined which.. well, what is imagination for if not to envision ease & beauty & guess y’know, totally wrong once in a while.

What the slower pace gave me, entirely against my initial wishes was the gift of having nowhere else to be. No practice to rush back to. No identity to reassemble on a deadline. Just him & me & the rich quality of time that only exists when you’ve stopped fighting it. When you’ve surrendered completely to being only in the moment you’re in.

I wouldn’t change a single snails-pace, devoted day of it.

& in fact what I’ve been doing in these post-birth months isn’t a lesser version of my practice. It’s my practice adapted. Plotting all new routes to the same destination I’ve been arriving at for well over a decade.

The tab the body keeps

Something that again I really thought I understood that I wish someone had written on a post it & stuck to my forehead in those first early months.

The body is always keeping an open tab. Not just of the obvious things — the sleep deprivation, the physical recovery, the hormonal upheaval that is whilst totally normal, actually the singular largest hormonal crash a body can experience. But of everything. Every change required. Every new demand absorbed. Every shifting tectonic plate on this new land you’re learning is now your identity? Every moment of sustained high alert - even during sleep - for the safety, comfort & survival of something other than yourself.

Scientists call this allostatic load — the cumulative physiological cost of chronic stress & adaptation over time. Not the acute stress the body is built to handle relatively well, the sharp thing that arrives & resolves. The sustained kind. The kind that’s hard to explain because it is also blended with utter joy. The kind that rudely depletes the very resources you’d normally reach for to cope with it.

Allostatic load explains why new parenthood can feel so disproportionately exhausting even on the days when nothing particularly impossible has happened. The body isn’t just tired from last night. It’s carrying the accumulated weight of every night, every recalibration, every new normal it’s been asked to absorb & integrate at rapid pace without instruction in the nervous systems language & without real time to adjust.

Which means that in those first months, the most intelligent thing a practice could do was not demand more from a system already running at full capacity.

The micro practices — three breaths, five minutes, a walk, a single moment of stillness — weren’t a cop out & it’s not the first extremely demanding time in my life I’d leant on them. They were the neurologically correct response to a nervous system carrying more than it was letting on.

They were precisely what my body & mind has been able to actually put to good use.

Faith but not blind

In Sanskrit philosophy there’s a word I’ve been sitting with a lot lately. Shraddha.

Usually translated as faith — not the passive, hands-folded, mother-Theresa kind. Shraddha is more earned than that. Less of the heavens, more salt of the earth. It’s the deep trust that accumulates through lived experience — built from all the times you showed up & something, however imperceptible, shifted as a result. The faith that isn’t blind because it has evidence. You trust that steadiness will outlast this earthquake too because you’ve felt the ground hold before.

It’s trust in the process even when the process is invisible & in those early months post partum, even often these days if I’m honest, the process was invisible.

No triumphant returns to form. No elaborate ‘bounce back.’ No instagrammable sunrise sequences. Simply not a lot of visible proof from the outside that anything of the old me’s was still alive.

Just the stroller walk taken with full attention. The breath found in a hard moment instead of abandoned. The five minutes starfished on the floor. The thread, some days gossamer thin, held onto because I’d learned enough by then to know, that as long as it existed like a single strand of spiderweb hit by light, the practice did too.

Shraddha has kept me holding it. Not discipline — a new mama has no surplus of that. Not motivation, some weeks I had none at all. Just a steady accumulated trust, built over years of returning, that the small acts were doing something real even when I couldn’t see it happening.

& they were. They are.

My brain is gratefully still learning, still adapting & growing around this new life of mine. The nervous system still integrating. The identity — I am someone who practices, I am someone who returns — still being reinforced, repetition by steadfast repetition, even in its most lightly travelling form.

Progress in these seasons doesn’t make many loud announcements, it doesn’t have to be visible on a photograph. It accumulates unseen in the dark the way roots do — invisible from the outside, essential to everything above ground.

The guilt trip & why it’s wrong

Let me say something clearly because I think it needs saying out loud to as many people on the internet as I can land it in front of.

There is a societal message that new parenthood serves up, sometimes wrapped in softness, sometimes brash. That your needs & your practice & your creative life are now secondary. That wanting time for yourself is somehow in conflict with being a good parent.

It’s not.

A regulated parent is a better parent. A person who keeps some version of themselves alive — however different from what it used to look like — is more present, more patient & more genuinely capable of constantly giving out love, attention & care than one who has abandoned themselves entirely in service of someone else.

The oxygen mask analogy is a cliché because it’s never not been true.

Your practice is not a luxury. Your creative release is not an afterthought. Your sense of self is not a sideline. It is the infrastructure that everything else runs on.

& here’s what the allostatic load research adds to that: a nervous system under chronic stress without adequate recovery doesn’t just feel worse, it functions differently. Attention narrows. Emotional regulation decreases. The patience, energy, creativity & presence you most want to bring to your child — the things that arguably matter most — diminish without you ever meaning for them to.

Five minutes to yourself is not selfish. Asking for help is not needy. It is the maintenance of the system that makes everything else possible.

What the season is actually asking

Maybe it’s not a baby for you. Maybe it’s a job that takes everything. A family member who needs care. A season of grief or other upheaval that has reorganised your life in ways you didn’t choose & can’t entirely control.

The principle holds regardless of the specifics.

When life is no longer fully yours, consistency cannot look the same as it did when it was. Expecting it to is the fastest route to feeling like you’ve failed at something you never had to succeed at.

The question is not why can’t I maintain my old practice in my new life.

It’s what does practice look like in the life I’m actually living now.

Not the life before. Not the life you’re planning to return to eventually. This one. Today. With its rudely interrupted sleep & its non-negotiable demands & its gorgeous, maddening, monsoon-y, completely uncontrollable weather system of someone else’s needs.

What is available right now?

What can you do today that you might be able to repeat tomorrow?

Three intentional breaths under the hot baptism of a shower. A five minute dance party in your milk stained fluffy robe. One eye on the paragraph you’re writing with pear cinammon puree on your sleeve & one eye watching your babe splatter some on the floor.

It all counts. It’s always counted.

Be so consistent you can be inconsistent

So my practice looks different now. My yoga too. Especially in this last month or so where so much of my focus is on writing. The shape has changed almost beyond recognition from the outside.

But the identity hasn’t. I am still someone who practices. Still someone who returns. Still someone who finds, in the small daily act of showing up to something — even something that looks nothing like what it used to — something that is recognisably, unmistakably mine, something that does me (& so my little love) a world of good.

I’m still handstanding. When the time & the inspiration meet — which they do more & more often now, as the season slowly shifts.

But here’s what all those years of early morning hardwood floors & stolen hours & micro practices lived inside utter chaos have taught me again & again

The handstand was never the point. Asana, my sādhana — the whole physical practice, the shapes & the strong sequences & the deep delicious backbends were always just tools. A way of meeting myself where I was.

A route home to the present moment.

& in that sense, in this last half year where nothing looks the same, I have been entirely, perfectly consistent.

Something I aim to drill in to my students who are working on consistency is this —

Be so consistent that you can be inconsistent.

Show up so many times that not showing up derails nothing. The practice bends while the identity holds. We miss days & come back anyway. Find new practices that have the same effect & call them enough. We are not a perfect streak, we are people who return & when the season shifts — it will, it always does — the practice & the self find their shape again.

Not an old outdated shape, a new one that feels like it was made for you.

Because it was.