I sprained my ankle this month. I told the nurses in York hospital’s accident and emergency department that I was paragliding. I wasn’t, and they knew I wasn’t. I slipped taking out the washing.

First of all: never wear thick socks with slides.

Second of all: feel the guilt and rest anyway.

Today I noticed all the stuff I’ve not done this week and I felt guilty about it. Why? I work to my own schedule, I have no one breathing down my neck, and I implicitly know the deep requirement we all have for downtime — even without a movement-impacting injury.

But we’ve been trained to feel guilty for not being always on. So my mission this next month: feel the guilt and rest anyway. Read more on this here.

In other news:

I’m working (semi)hard to get my book proposal out to literary agents right now and I’m so excited about it (know someone who’d be a good match with me? Let me know). The book’s currently sitting at about 35k words and counting. Yes, I’ve written way less recently and that’s okay (she says with a slightly feral eye twitch).

I’m also prepping for September’s live session — a counter to the madness of spinning those 4638 plates, attempting to control everything, and working ourselves into the ground. We’ll unpack some light philosophy, move a little, and rest a lot, with the aim of getting clarity, perspective, and a way calmer system.

• September 17th, 7pm BST

• 60 minute session, replay available, free for Joyful members

• Not a member yet? Join me and this session for just £14.45

And I've opened two 1:1 spots for September — if working closer with me sounds like your jam, just reply and we'll talk.

If you’re tired of earning your rest, your wellbeing, your happiness, and you want to feel calmer and clearer for whatever’s coming next in your life, that’s what I do best. Glad you’re here for the ride 😊

More good stuff below.

Big love,

Chloe
🧡

Read

A new favourite of mine on Substack — feminist, no-shit-taken, powerhouse writing from on her The Good Girl Recovery Guide. I’ve loved every piece she’s written lately. Think you will, too.

Listen & Watch

The best thing I made this month, and it’s from the Joyful podcast:

A session to schedule: September 17th, 7pm BST

I’m tooting my own horn again, but this live will be brilliant. We’ll explore:

• The best question the Stoics asked 2,000 years ago and why it still cuts straight through modern overwhelm

• A simple, practical way to tell the difference between what’s yours to carry and what isn’t

• Gentle, seated movement — no mat, no leggings, no yoga experience required

• A guided nervous-system unwind to help the idea settle in your body, not just your head

• Space to reflect, connect, and ask questions

This isn’t a yoga class. It isn’t a lecture. It’s an hour to get some joyful perspective, rearrange the anxious part of your head, and recharge your batteries.

Join Joyful at 15% off (£14.45) and your spot in the live is included.

You’ll also get everything else inside Joyful for a whole month, from the weekly essays and practices to the full 6-Week Joy Experiment.

After your first month, it’s £17/month. Cancel any time.

chloemarkham.co.uk/joyful-live

A book I’m loving: Three Men in a Boat​

Yeah, it’s taken me this long to get around to reading this. And I’m so glad I am. It’s hilarious.

Another book I’m loving: On Writing by Stephen King​

A wonderful insight into a master’s life and habit. Although if you’re like me, you’ll just have to skip over the fact he writes 2k words every morning, rain or shine, birthday or Christmas… way to intimidate us mortals, Steve.

Good news: Australia’s music industry are banning AI music from the charts

Thank god. Because you know how much music is made entirely by AI every day? 90k. Every day (according to Deezer).

_{Originally published on my website: The Joy Edit #18}

And it’s bang on.

I’m wearing the truth of that in the scars of every iteration of my business past. Closing my 18-month old, sell-out yoga studio in the pandemic. Reducing my live classes from fourteen a week to none. Yoga coaching. Nervous system coaching. Other teachers coming to spy on my classes, dramatics from members when I stopped teaching daily, bone issues from teaching daily, and endless, endless marketing that made me feel like I was selling-out.

Especially when we’re running a business that’s us. When we’re selling ourselves, our mission, our entire souls, instead of plumbing hardware or tyres or blankets for dogs (not that there’s anything wrong with selling these things). When it’s us, we’re forced to look ourselves directly in the trauma and figure shit out.

And the most recent iteration of my business, as is always the way, is more me than anything that’s come before. I’m a writer, I always have been. I just needed the permission of a few learned souls to realise it. And in that’s the problem: I needed the permission.

Subscribe now

And I don’t think it’s just me — we all need the damn permission. We’re scared to demand the thing simply because it’s right for us, because it feels right in our bones. No. We must ask first. We must ask the opinions of others, get feedback from as many sources as possible. More info is better, right? Until it’s not. Until we realise we’re outsourcing our innate ability to feel and know, to trust and judge.

And AI is exacerbating the problem.

There’s a wonderful non-fiction writing coach I love, and, until I got out of the habit, I was asking Claude to act as this coach and critique all my work before I’d publish it. Not write it for me — I get enormous pleasure out of this myself (and can we really call ourselves ‘writers’ if we are, in fact, not doing the writing) — but giving me the signal that’s it’s good enough to ship.

Sometimes, I’d learn things. I’d agree with the changes it suggested and see the glaring error of my ways. Most of the time, I disagreed with what it told me. Poetic or not, abstract or not, that sentence or ending or opening makes me happy, and that’s alright by me. But every single time I used AI like this I was doubting myself and allowing the doubt to lead me. Scratching that itch. Soothing the pain of uncertainty. Taking a pill to make it all go away.

I’m the first to pipe up for the brilliance of AI in a chat down the pub. As a team of one, sometimes less than one if I’m in luteal and want to strangle the postman (no offence, Clive), having a tool that helps me work out Wordpress problems, plan some aspect of marketing that doesn’t make me want to be sick on myself, or work out complicated spreadsheet formulas is an absolute miracle. Thanks, AI. May the robots note my appreciation and treat me kindly when they eventually start farming humans.

But there’s a counter to this. AI is highlighting all our weak spots, like perfectionism, hustle, over-productivity, permission-seeking, lack of self-worth… We see our weakness, and we lean on the robots to help us patch the holes and soothe the irritation. Except all it’s doing is exacerbating our weaknesses.

Let’s consider an article — like this one — that I publish without getting the ‘it’s good enough’ permission from AI first. I’ve spent an hour, two hours, writing and editing it and a little extra time to fluff the formatting and hit publish (subscribe if you’re into it. Makes my hard work worth it). And here it is: that little knot in my stomach telling me that it’s not quite okay. I’m calling myself a writer, and this isn’t worthy of that, actually. And wow, does that hit the wound right in the middle.

Subscribe now

But I’m here, feeling that friction anyway, and every single time I hit publish without getting the permission I need to undo that knot is a tiny step toward trusting myself more. Because my writing — whether you think it good or sloppy, whether my favourite writing coach thinks it could be improved upon or is a work of utter god-like perfection — is my damn writing.

And I’ll be writing stuff next month, next year, in ten years from now totally different to this — better and sleeker and way more refined. Until then, I need to write and edit and trust in my writing and editing enough to publish without seeking permission from Claude or anyone else. This is how I improve as a writer. This is how I learn to trust myself.

It’s been brought up around Substack’s new AI feature, too. We’ve now the ability to check if the work of those we find and follow on the platform has been written with AI. AI is checking how much AI is involved. Two robots pointing the guns at each other. For what, exactly? So we can prove that author with the opinions we don’t agree with has been a non-writing charlatan all along? So we can feel morally superior for a moment? And let’s not forget the AI checker gets it wrong, too…

No, it’s absurd. Another example of bypassing our own ability to know and feel and trust for ourselves. You’d know if this article you’re reading was written with AI by now. There’d be too many tells. It would feel stilted and inorganic and… something would be off. Or, perhaps you really wouldn’t. Entire books (and TV shows, and music, and podcasts, and businesses) have been created using AI and we often can’t tell. But we need to improve our sniffer; we need to get better at noticing and flagging content as AI ourselves, not trusting in another AI robot to do it for us.

As long as we’re outsourcing to AI, we’re not evolving ourselves; we’re staying stuck. As long as AI is writing your work, checking your work, checking for AI, giving you permission, cheering you on (the sycophant that it is), we’re doing none of these things for ourselves. I see a bleak future in which we lose all ability to trust in ourselves and our intuition because we’ve outsourced it for so long.

Fuck outsourcing to AI. Publish the imperfect work. Make the typos. Make it weird and fruity and slightly off-key. And can we learn to trust in ourselves for once. To make a stand for anti-productivity, anti-perfection, anti-hustle, and anti-AI. Stop the outsourcing and bring it back in-house. This is how we maintain our humanity. Until you want to learn spreadsheet formulas, of course. In which case ask the robots. No one needs to learn that shit.

With love,

Chloe
🧡

I’m going live in September! Learn more and find my free stuff, short courses, and one-to-one coaching on my website.

On Wednesdays I share the theory for all. On Sunday I’ll share the practice for paid subscribers — we’ll get it out of your head and into your body.

Learn more about the paid subscription

_{Originally published on my website: Outsourcing to AI?}

I watched as the days passed by and my task list grew dusty and un-ticked. Even writing’s been a challenge because healing and resting are apparently exhausting, and Rory Gilmore does enough for the both of us anyway.

Cue: enormous guilt. And it’s not the first time I’ve taken unprecedented time off work and felt guilty for it. My wonderfully fluctuating energy levels due to my menstrual cycle mean some weeks I become entirely blob-like. Not much more gets done than the wake-up, make tea, stare out the window cycle.

And in my most energised days, I was forced to create a new time-off-work mission so I’d actually take that time off, instead of panicking and resorting to work again to stave off that weird, empty feeling that came up.

Read this next:

It’s almost ubiquitous: rest isn’t productive, and being unproductive isn’t okay, hence the guilt.

And it’s not our fault — we were raised in a society of hard workers, just ask any boomer or older. My ninety-three-year-old grandma and my late granddad built a fish-and-chip empire here in Yorkshire. They worked until their bones couldn’t take it, my baby mum and uncle wriggling in potato sacks hung on the back fence while they ran their first shop.

The industrial revolution showed us a new way to work, and we’ve been living it ever since. It began with the question: how can we squeeze as much production out of this line as possible? And this question we’ve internalised. It’s been in our schooling, prepping us for the relentless workplace, in our jobs and the glory days of our forebears.

And let’s not forget those forebears: work hard, and you can buy a house for your family. A single modest salary bought a home fifty years ago. Today, you’d have to be earning almost six figures in order to have the same house-buying ability that a Regular Joe in 1970 did.

And we’re pelted by the endless numbers of productivity-boosting books and podcasts and hacks and apps on a daily basis. They’re in our social media feeds, advertised on the tube, in our inbox, making us feel less-than if we’re not keeping up, and ever-more guilty for shunning work for ten minutes because the sun’s come out.

So we overwork. We spend longer in the office because our bosses are clueless automatons who think hours sat in an uncomfortable, strip-lighted, dead-plant hosting box equates to a job well-done.

We squeeze in more work on our commutes, we work the weekends, we have our emails ever-present in our pockets always just a tap away. And don’t forget our habit of filling any brief second of unaccounted time with a scroll on the social tickers of doom, justifying it by telling ourselves we might find the next great hack, we might find the inspiration we need, that we’d be missing out otherwise.

Is there any wonder we’re fried? Anxious? Overwhelmed? Mentally and emotionally over-stimulated with the attention span of a wooden spoon?

It’s not just you, you’re not a weirdo, and there’s no wonder we feel guilty when we opt out for a moment.

But we can be the revolt against this tirade of always-on usefulness. And it begins by recognising we’re simply a product of our environment. If we can go easy on ourselves for being stuck in these ways, if we can rest anyway, opt-out anyway, find more time to be idle and easy even when we feel friction around it, we’re not only setting ourselves up for a smoother ride, but we’re healing our messed up heads, too.

After a decade of working with over-worked humans, helping them move and breathe and come back into presence, and after five years of healing nervous systems and figuring out my own rest-derived guilt…

Here’s what I recommend to step off the treadmill of head-fuckery and come back down to earth again:

The rest of this post is for paid subscribers. For the price of some nice supermarket flowers you can get access to this article + the full archive.

Why join as a paid subscriber?

I’m here to help you live your most unoptimised, zero-hustle, favourite life. If you’re chasing hacks, this ain’t your place. But if you're tired of earning your rest, if you’re ready to stop renting your worth from how much you get done in a day, I made Joyful for you.

Every Wednesday I write the theory. Every Sunday, paid subscribers get The Practice — a class, meditation, or exercise to put it into your body. Some recent ones:

• I Burned Out Selling my Anti-Burnout Programme

• ‘Perfect’ Health? No, But It’s Enough

• How to Disappoint People Without Dysregulating

Paid subscribers also get full access to The Yoga Revolution: 250+ joyful movement and mindfulness classes.

“It’s permission to stop treating yourself so hard, to take off the pressure of performing and achieving, and simply enjoy the moment. It's a reminder that movement is about feeling good in your body — not pushing through and hating it."
— Em

“Everything has clicked and I’m checking in with myself daily and feeling better in general, despite a stressful few weeks.”
— Katherine

Join Joyful to access everything

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

Read more

I couldn’t eat properly for months. I redirected the clouds in my head to another, incredibly toxic relationship for a while (did I ever tell you he was once four hours late to a date?), before I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t wish away the pain; I had to stand my full height and embrace it.

Grief is the loss of the future we’d hoped for. The loss of the dream we’d thought up. The painful, unending realisation that you’re not in the place or time you’d imagined for yourself.

Subscribe now

I white knuckled this feeling in my twenties when, in a nine-month period, I held both the death of my boyfriend from suicide and the death of my step-father from cancer.

I was too young and unsupported to know how to bear that kind of weight, so I just did what I could to get through it. Bottled my feelings until they aged and morphed and became something monstrous and self-destructing. Years later, I ran out of a perfectly reasonable barbecue with new friends embarrassed and in tears after someone mocked my university grade — it wasn’t the grade I was sensitive about, but the reason I didn’t get the grade I’d wanted. Dealing with both a suicide and a terminal cancer in a short few months will fuck up your ability to learn, it seems. (And yes, the person who mocked the grade was a massive bellend, you guessed correctly.)

Thankfully the grounded, supportive folk around me and the fact I don’t have an addictive nature (unless we’re talking about my mum’s carrot cake) meant my coping mechanisms were relatively tame. I ate my feelings, drove too fast, made shitty decisions and embarrassed myself more than once. But I’ve seen friends, the people closest to me, turn to alcohol and drugs to cope with the blanket of emotion they’ve no idea how to escape from. Understandably. There’s no road map for this.

But embracing is all we really have. Do we want to shove our heads in the sand and ignore the reality of our life’s experience? I love the idea that there are souls, out there in the cosmos somewhere, queuing up in orderly British fashion, ready and excited to have a human experience. All of it. The highs and lows, the emotions we run scared from, the awkward conversations, the belly rolls and cellulite as well as everything brilliant and easy and kind.

But what of grief when we’re in the depths of it? What of that black, heavy, life-draining feeling I had after I left that relationship? Embrace it, she says, as if it’s easy or simple.

Grief is heavy and dark, so dark you don’t think the light will ever come back on. Embracing that heaviness asks us to allow ourselves to be so consumingly sad and hopeless for a time. Don’t worry, it won’t eat us alive. It’s what the person we’ve lost, the relationship that’s ended, that part of us that hoped and imagined and built a future out of nothing and nowhere deserves: our time.

Constant optimising and optimism are demanded of us in our modernity — do more, be happier, look great. And then grief comes along and asks us to do less, be sad, and collapse in a crumb-covered heap in a corner and play hermit for a while. No wonder we resist it. We’re trained to resist it. Perhaps so we’ll buy more L’Oreal and Temu and TV subscriptions to continue avoiding the pain of it.

But showing up for what we’ve lost — for who we’ve lost, including ourselves — is how we process grief. Standing by as we crumble into a new version of ourselves. Trusting, perhaps only a tiny bit, that from that dust we’ll build a new future to hope for.

What I didn’t know in the depths of that pain was the future I was stepping into. It’s never easy, or comfortable, or even all that inspiring to make a change. I needed to leave that relationship. He and I needed to forever dam the flow of toxic sludge we’d begun to leak. I didn’t know that it would lead to a life-wide healing, a head-fuck relearning of what it was to be me, with all my flaws and foibles, and to trust myself perhaps for the first time in my life.

From the ending of things come the starting of things. We don’t remember that when we’re sitting beside the darkness of our grief, but it’s there all the same. A tiny glow in the darkness, perhaps reminding us of our humanity and what a fucking joy it all is, underneath it all.

Get more from Joyful

The practice of grief

Here’s the grieving toolkit I’ve created for myself. Because grief is unavoidable, but the monsters we become if we don’t allow it are.

Get support.

A good therapist coupled with a willingness to lay the bare bones of your fucked up head on the table is life-changing. I started therapy after leaving that relationship, and I’m still seeing the same therapist, twice a month, almost five years later. Ashley hasn’t only held space for me while I dealt with Big Feelings, but she allowed me to see them, embrace them, and to heal more than I would’ve ever done alone. I understand myself more than ever and I trust myself more than ever.

Interestingly, Ashley is a relationship therapist — she mainly sees couples and those struggling in or out of relationships. She told me in our last session that people wonder about her work: can clients bring up other things, or is it just relationship stuff? Her reply: everything is relationship stuff. And our conversations — about my work and my ponderings as well as my relationships — prove just that.

Allow it to get weird.

After the death of my partner by suicide in 2000 I remember the protective mechanisms of my brain convincing me he wasn’t dead, and it was all just an elaborate charade to stop seeing me.

After my relationship breakdown more recently, I convinced myself for a while that I could look past the toxic sludge and we’d get back together. It was how I coped.

We cope in weird ways, and sometimes you’ll feel emotions or think thoughts you don’t think are appropriate or acceptable in these circumstances. But there is no ‘appropriate’ or ‘acceptable’, there’s only what’s here.

Be gentle with yourself.

I stopped eating properly for almost a year. I lost a lot of weight, and people commented on how wonderful I looked. Sure, the depths of despair will do that to a gal.

Clients of mine inside Joy Unplugged have joined me with grief alongside acute jaw pain the doctors can’t understand, the inability to get out of bed in a morning — more than just an aversion to the alarm clock, and a struggle to do basic tasks like brushing their teeth or cooking a meal.

When we’re going through it, our systems are in threat-protection. Mysterious, weird, and inconvenient stuff will happen in your body, the trick is to be kind to yourself. I ended up eating small, eating often, and throwing any idea of hitting my macros out the window. Over time, my appetite came back. Over time, their jaw pain went away and they found the energy for life again.

In the meantime, this isn’t a crack-on sort of situation. We must be gentle with ourselves, go slowly, and allow it to be a bit messy.

Confliction is allowed.

My step dad was at home when he died. My mum and I listened to his laboured breathing on a baby monitor for about a week. He was on more drugs than The Stones, no longer able to communicate or engage, he wasn’t really alive but there was still a thread. We listened, and sometimes he’d stop breathing, and we’d hold ours — tensing and pausing and waiting for his next — and it would come. Over and over again, his rattle would pause then start again a moment later. Until one day the pause didn’t end. His breath didn’t return. And my mum and I felt relief. Relief that my father figure and her husband had died.

I have similar stories about anger around death and loss. And resentment. And that enormous guilt you feel when you have fun without them.

It’s all allowed. It’s just a sign that you’re still alive.

Living a joyful life is impossible without allowing our grief and anger and marrow-deep sadness. The grief I felt around those I’ve lost, the relationships I’ve ended, around that which never came to be — there’s a foundation of love and aliveness to it all.

Joy is the meaning and the marker and the root of all things. To be alive in our humanity, to throw our fists in the air like those souls who finally got to the end of the queue, who finally got to experience human existence, is to feel joy, even if sometimes you doubt whether the light will ever come back.

Without loss there can be no life. Without darkness there can be no light. And without grief there can be no joy.

With love,

Chloe
🧡

I’m going live in September! Find out more alongside my free stuff, short courses, and one-to-one coaching on my website.

If this resonated, keep reading:

_{Originally published on my website: Grief Isn’t the Opposite of Joy. It’s the Foundation of It}

So I’ve gone back through the archive and pulled together some of the sessions I most want you to try, including some you’ve told me you love, too.

And rather than organising by type, I’ve organised by how they’ll make you feel instead.

Bookmark this page. Come back whenever you need something.

The practices below are available to paid Joyful subscribers.

Join Joyful to access all classes

I want to go slowly

• Slow Flow Restorative
  19 mins · Comfy

• The Ritual
  26 mins · Guest teacher

• Bedtime Slow-Down
  18 mins · Sleepy

• The Regulating Slow-Down
  45 mins · Calming

I want to move

• The Battery Recharger
  60 mins · Mindful

• Stress-Release Flow & Nidra
  40 mins · Fluid

• Yoga For Renewal
  48 mins · Tension releasing

• Slow Strength
  19 mins · Build steadiness

I want to feel less anxious

• Anchor Point Meditation
  10 mins · Brain training

• Living in Joyful Alignment Visualisation
  10 mins · Perspective giving

• Somatic Surfing
  10 mins · Emotionally regulating

• Ocean Meditation
  6 mins · Grounding

I want to nap like a kid

• Thunderstorm Nidra
  26 mins · Nature sounds

• Nidra for Deep Rest
  20 mins · Regulating

• Nervous System Homecoming
  15 mins · Settling

• Nervous System Energy Reset
  18 mins · Energy-boosting

The classes above are for paid subscribers. For the price of some nice supermarket flowers, you can get access to all of them, plus 250+ more classes inside The Yoga Revolution.

Why join as a paid subscriber?

I’m here to help you live your most unoptimised, zero-hustle, favourite life. Every week I share an essay alongside a class to put it into action (yoga, meditation, nidra…), things like:

• I Burned Out Selling my Anti-Burnout Programme

• ‘Perfect’ Health? No, But It’s Enough

• How to Disappoint People Without Dysregulating

Members say:

“I had a super difficult day, edge-of-panic-attack difficult. I’ve done a couple of your mini sessions. They’re like magic.”

“This is the everyday rest and reset I never want to miss.”

“Every single class feels like exactly what you needed in that moment, even if you didn’t know it was what you needed.”

Join Joyful to access all classes

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

When I ran out I landed with the cheaper option: regular old needs-chopping garlic. Having spent the required time chopping said garlic — four cloves, because one is never enough — chucking it into a pan of diced courgette, herbs, and eggs — I realise what the efficiency had taken from me: fresh, wonderful garlic. The smell, the taste, the glorious magic that it adds to a meal. Whatever you think to pre-chopped garlic, there’s a little of that magic missing.

Subscribe now

And whatever you think to endless efficiency, it’s stealing some colour from our lives. We’re no longer taking the long way round just because, we’re not doing things slowly, we’re taking shortcuts and simplifying and skipping the fundamentals. Because there’s always something better to do after we’ve finished this, some imagined future to hurry towards that steals us from the present.

My dad and step-mum, both almost eighty, struggle to use the train as neither of them can work the necessary (and very efficient) apps on a smart phone. My grandma can no longer call the doctors for an appointment, they insist on her filling out a form online and she doesn’t own any kind of device.

Lampposts and doorhandles and bins in the park, unless they’re decades old, are ugly; it’s no longer efficient to add any kind of beauty. Even modern architecture has fallen into this trap. Compare the brutalist architecture of London’s Southbank Centre to St Paul’s Cathedral.

Even cars are becoming machines of insanity because of their efficiencies — my mum’s 2025 Mini, which has a giant tablet instead of a dashboard, doesn’t show the indicator lights or full-beam light on the driver’s side, and the dials for the fans are lost inside a touch-screen settings menu.

We’ve got furniture and toys and clothes made in a rush, delivered in a rush, only to be used for a third of the time our grandparents would use them for.

We’re becoming ultra efficient at the great loss of independence, humanity, beauty, and craftsmanship. At the great loss of that magic. Of the present moment.

Efficiency is great, until we’re putting it on a pedestal it doesn’t belong.

Surely our ultimate goal with become uber efficient is the time we’ll get back to spend on being present. On kicking off our shoes, leaning back into the grass, and arguing the merits of The Lord of the Rings franchise with someone we love. Throwing a ball on a beach for a beloved dog who’ll later get under our feet as we cook something slow (with fresh garlic). Lounging and daydreaming and pottering. Surely this is the purpose for which we press so earnestly for efficiency?

But in a twist of wonderful irony, so efficiently we’ve learned to become efficient that we no longer know how to stop. You’d think with the wonderful invention of AI, which takes the most tedious work off our hands, we’d be spending more time doing less. But no — with the spare time we’ve been given we’re working harder than ever.

Efficiency can be helpful, but let’s remember why we’re using it in the first place. Let’s relearn to be idle, to shift gears from fifth back to neutral, to come back to the present moment where nothing all that much can be improved upon.

And if the efficiency gods have taught you well and you’re afraid of wasting your potential, remember these words from A. A. Milne: “Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something.”

With love,

Chloe
🧡

I’m going live in September! Learn more and find my free stuff, short courses, and one-to-one coaching on my website.

If this resonated, keep reading:

_{Originally published on my website: The Efficiency Trap}

And what if you could spend one of those hours refilling your batteries so that everything above (the sleep, the chores, the taking care of the kids) becomes easier and lighter? What if this single hour could give you an opportunity to think about the way your hands and feet impact your spine and your hips, to practice a way to be more in your body and less in your head, and to embody what ease actually feels like?

That’s this week’s mission.

You'll come out with a body that knows the difference between gripping and grounding, and a nervous system that's had an hour of genuine rest for once.

One hour for battery recharging

You don’t have to be ‘good at yoga’ (whatever the fuck that means). You don’t need to be bendy, fit, capable, or even all that willing.

Just press play on this class, follow the movements that feel the best for you (even if that’s flopping in a heap every two minutes — that def counts), and trust me when I tell you: this will recharge your batteries.

This post is for paid subscribers. For the price of some nice supermarket flowers, you can get access to this article + the full archive.

Why join as a paid subscriber?

I’m here to help you live your most unoptimised, zero-hustle, favourite life. Every week I share an essay alongside a class to put it into action (yoga, meditation, nidra…), things like:

• I Burned Out Selling my Anti-Burnout Programme

• ‘Perfect’ Health? No, But It’s Enough

• How to Disappoint People Without Dysregulating

Paid subscribers also get full access to The Yoga Revolution: 250+ joyful movement and mindfulness classes.

“It’s brilliant. She’s brilliant. An antidote to all the stupidness about over-achieving and atomic habit building and getting more done.”
— Karen

“Everything has clicked and I’m checking in with myself daily and feeling better in general, despite a stressful few weeks.”
— Katherine

Get this week's practice

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

Let’s practice…

Read more

They had a manifesto on the wall that didn’t in any way translate to the culture, spending too long in the kitchen or the bathroom was frowned upon, and leaving on time wasn’t showing commitment to the company. I felt like I was chained to my desk Monday to Friday, and time off became the antidote to all of it. The things I’d do with my freedom!

The weekends came and I spent them probably like most folks who work a nine-to-five: re-establishing myself within my own life again — trying to keep my houseplant habit under control, watching travel shows with my partner, converting an old Renault Master — before Monday came and those invisible chains were replaced.

Time off as an entrepreneur felt different. I no longer knew how to take it, how to spend it, and because there’s always work to be done and no one else responsible for it, I might as well just plough on. Except this is a perfect recipe for burnout and disillusion.

I spent years burning out, over and over again. Until I finally woke up and realised I was replacing those invisible chains I worked hard to leave behind with ones of my own making.

Time off, then. I’d add it to my calendar, procrastinate about it, skip it entirely. The concept became overwhelming — what was I supposed to do with this mysterious time? I knew what I’d like to do — read, create, adventure, do the things that re-established myself within my life outside of my work, just like before — but the concept was too vague, so I’d wiggle out of it.

I knew, though, that I couldn’t keep burning out, that something had to change. How could I carve out time away from my work without feeling overwhelmed?

Introducing: study time

Subscribe now

Our brains are so fucked from a culture of overworking, over-optimising, overthinking, and making every last inch of our sanity productive, that we can no longer sit and be idle without effort. I’m clearly no exception, time off just wasn’t happening for me.

So instead of forcing a vague notion of simply not doing work, I replaced it with something concrete: study time.

Study time allows me to feel productive, useful, like I’m growing (despite the fact I don’t need to be doing these things at all, but here we are). In this allotted space, I read, play music, visit a new place, make art, move… it doesn’t matter what I do, as long as I can somehow justify it as a learning period.

And as a writer and business owner, as a creative and world-betterer, we can justify almost anything as fodder for learning and insight — hunting perfect pelts on the video game Red Dead Redemption, reading the latest Dan Brown, going to the coast for the afternoon… anything can offer inspiration for the next creative spark.

Study time has become a sacred slot in my calendar that, ironically, also fuels the magic of my business. It’s helped me rebuild my creativity, reconnect with hobbies and outlets I desperately need to stay functional and motivated, and engage with the world outside of my work again. I had no idea what I was missing, until I rediscovered it.

Sure, we’re all messed up because of our culture of endless productivity porn, but this is about working with it, instead of letting it consume us or attempting to rewire our brains. And study time is exactly that for me.

As artist Austin Kleon says, “You’re often most creative when you’re the least productive.”

With that in mind, I’m off to craft a new beaver-pelt hat for Arthur…

With love,

Chloe
🧡

Want more? My free writing, short courses, and one-to-one coaching all live on my resources page.

If this resonated, keep reading:

_{Originally published on my website: How to Rest When You Can’t Switch Off.}

I’m day twenty of my cycle as I type. Painfully exhausted, tolerant of almost nothing, mostly eating from the food group known as ‘cake’. And yet, I managed one of my minimum workouts this morning, just in case you know someone handing out medals.

Minimum workouts is my antidote to the tiny-outfit wellfluencer workout community, and the health bros whose advice betrays the fact they’ve never actually met a woman. Most of them telling me that my workouts are a waste of time unless I’m progressively overloading them — lifting heavier, doing more reps, spending more time under tension.

Meanwhile I’m asking myself, while feeling depleted and cranky: how little can I get away with doing while still showing up? At first, I felt these easier sessions didn’t count. I’m not doing enough, this isn’t worth it, what’s the point… a hangover of the toxic social crowd. But what if showing up is the point, rather than how many reps I do? That I’m here at all, rolling out my mat, having a little sit down or a slow wiggle, noticing how I’m feeling and responding accordingly rather than listening to some algorithm-chaser’s zero-experience-of-my-body advice on Instagram. It’s enough. Perfect? No. But it’s enough. (And perfect doesn’t exist anyway.)

This approach, despite it’s easy-going-ness, takes a weird amount of effort because I’m essentially bypassing what everything is telling us: we must be constantly improving, getting one-percent better every day, pushing harder, lifting more, doing more yoga / Pilates / steps / reps.

And I think, like Steven Bartlett’s life being ruined after three glasses of wine, this standard advice is missing the point.

This isn’t about how good we are at any particular movement regime. This isn’t about how well regulated we are. Or whether we’ve hit our macros or nailed our metrics, reached our daily steps or whatever nonsense productivity frat-bro statistic has come our way recently.

Absolutely, those things matter. But toward what, exactly? Our physical health, sure. Our mental health, of course. But why do we want to be healthy in the first place? Surely it’s so life becomes easier and smoother; it helps us climb the mountain, paint the watercolours, build a shrine to Iggy Pop in our front rooms.

Our daily levels of happiness, contentment, and joy is the undercurrent to all of it. Regulation, eating healthy, moving well, sleeping for ten hours a night means nothing if we’re so uptight about it all that it’s causing tension.

Life is gloriously, wonderfully more than endless betterment. And yet, we’re outsourcing it all to ‘experts’ on Instagram, bypassing our innate wisdom, and feeling shit because of it.

I’m over it. But how do we stop outsourcing to everyone else?

You’re reading my book before anyone else

Every so often, a chapter makes its way to paid members first (not shared anywhere else). Join us, and you’ll also get new essays, experiments, and practices every week, plus full access to The Yoga Revolution’s 250+ classes.

Joyful is the companion to the life well-lived.

Join us

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

And if you’re here for the free stuff, you’re so welcome — I write free articles every week.

Read more

I realised this is a part of my — and probably your own — taught condition: put everyone else before yourself.

Everyone else eats first. Everyone else gets the iron first. Everyone else’s needs are the ones that count, not our own.

In this ep, I talk about that instinct, and how setting boundaries isn’t the same as being difficult. It’s about the vulnerability hangover that comes after you finally say what you need, and about why feeling like a bitch for asking isn’t a sign you’ve done something wrong.

Want more? My free writing, short courses, and one-to-one coaching all live on my resources page.

Ping, scroll, message, thought, distraction, repeat.

And it’s fucking exhausting.

Is there any wonder we’re all burning out?

But meditation (and bear with me on this one) can offer a proper, easy-going antidote.

My own meditation practice, when life is chaos, sometimes slips into a bit of an ad-hoc thing. I end up doing it here and there, when I “have time” (which really means: hardly ever). And when this happens, I always feel the difference: I get more scattered, less grounded, and I’m quicker to spin off.

When I notice how untethered I am from the anchor of this practice, I commit right back again. Daily, rather than occasionally. It feels like putting my brain into a warm bath every morning. A kind of soft reset button. Necessary, grounding, and a little bit magical.

And it’s this kind of practice that can become a serious (whilst not being all that serious) antidote to our always-on culture; meditation can offer space in your brain-box, calm between the chaos, and stillness in all the frenetic energy.

Meditation, if you let it, can be absolutely life-changing.

A class for this week: a meditation to get you (back) into it

Scroll down to go straight to the session. Looking for a movement class instead? These new easy-going sessions might be just the ticket.

This isn’t a sit-on-a-mountain-for-three-hours-in-a-weird-robe sort of meditation. I’m talking about an easy-going, down-to-earth, do-it-in-your-pants sort of meditation. The kind that gives you some flippin’ respite from all the noise, and teaches your brain there’s another, easier, and calmer way.

Your anchor point

For boats on the water, anchors don’t stop the waves, they just keep the boats from drifting off. It’s the same in meditation: an anchor gives us something to come back to, over and over (and over) again, even when your tax return looms, you think about dinner, or you remember that thing you forgot to tell that person…

The entire practice then becomes the awareness of noticing you’ve wandered, accepting that wandering without judgment, and a re-focusing on the anchor. Every time you notice and return, you’re remembering that you don’t have to be swept away by every thought or ping or distraction.

Awareness, acceptance, focus.

These are the skills this meditation teaches us. It’s the gentlest kind of strength training I know. And it really, really impacts everything we respond to, engage with, and focus on in our everyday.

Anchor Point Meditation (10 mins)

This easy-going meditation is designed to give you some space inside all the noise of modern life; it’s about respite from the chaos; the antidote to our always-on culture.

Practice this regularly, and you’ll see a shift in the way your brain responds to life. If we’re talking about making life more joyful (and we always are inside Joyful, of course), this is a brilliant first step.

Try this class right here on Substack below, or join me in committing to your own meditation practice with the 30-Day Meditation Challenge inside The Yoga Revolution library (become a paid Joyful subscriber to access, learn more here) — 30 simple practices to help you find your anchor, build consistency, and maybe fall back in love with the simplicity of just sitting and noticing.

Subscribe now

This kind of meditation doesn’t fix everything, but it does something pretty radical: it gives you a choice. A choice not to be yanked around by your thoughts all day, a choice to come home to yourself, a choice to find calm. And that’s real freedom.

This is how we live our favourite life.

Every week I share a new experiment, essay, class, or practice with paid subscribers — we’re building a life you don’t need to recover from. Join us, and you’ll also get full access to The Yoga Revolution: 250+ joyful movement and mindfulness classes.

Upgrade to paid

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

And if you’re here for the free stuff, you’re so welcome — I write free articles every week.

Let’s meditate:

Read more

Anyone else been way less productive this month? I have. It’s been too hot to function all that well, the world is literally on fire, and my emotions have been on steroids.

But, we’re still here. I want to remind you (and myself) that lacking productivity isn’t a failure, feeling emotional isn’t a failure, and taking a bit of a break all round… isn’t only just not a failure, but a fucking good idea.

And, despite of all the down-time, I’ve been showing up in my business in brand new ways this month. Because burnout can do one, and who wants to be sold to?

I’m finally running things sustainably. Throwing away the marketing rulebook only because I’ve spent a decade learning it. Realising my abilities as a writer only because I’ve taken countless chances and prioritised curiosity and learning for the last three years.

So every Wednesday I’m publishing free articles, and every Sunday I share a new experiment, class, practice, or insight with paid subscribers — we’re building a life you don’t need to recover from (learn more about that here).

August looks hazy and hot and uncertain for me right now, but here’s what I’m sure of: I shall be here writing every day, our downtime matters, and the weather will begin to cool soon (HURRAH!).

In the meantime: you’re doing brilliantly, and I’m properly glad you’re here.

With love,

Chloe
🧡

PS. All my resources — mini courses, one-to-one coaching, and signature 8-week programme (now open any time) — live here.

Subscribe now

Listen

I made this playlist for one of my besties, Kat.

Did she listen to it? No. Did I have a blast creating it? Hell yeah.

Expect classics, awesome new stuff, and some fun juxtapositions that’ll improve your next music-listening adventure (if I say so myself).

Listen & Watch

The best thing I made this month, and it’s from the newly-renovated Joyful podcast:

Practice: 5 new movement classes, zero workout energy

Over the last month I created five new, easy going movement classes for your nervous system, for balance, and for everyday strength (even if it’s been a thousand years since your last proper session).

Watch: 12 Angry Men (the 1957 version)

Un-bel-ievable movie. I watched this on a date-night with my man, and we’re both agreed: this is firmly in our top five movies of all time. Intelligent, emotional, passionate… if you listen to nothing else I waffle about, listen to this.

Find it on Prime here.

A book I’m loving: Moby Dick​

For the past few years I’ve been on a mission to rebuild my attention span and read the classics. A few years ago, pre mission, I found this a bit dense and hard to get through. Now? I’m utterly loving it. And it’s funny!

Good news: plastic bottles are saving dolphins

Hundreds of dolphins die as a result of fishing nets every year in the UK — their echolocation doesn’t detect them. But scientists have found that plastic bottles attached to the nets reduces dolphin bycatch by almost 90%.

_{Originally published on my website: The Joy Edit #17.}

Nowhere else on earth has idleness been shown to us before, at least not in an Instagrammable way. The stripes and fresh bread, the long lunches and strolls around the market. Cosplay as a Parisian, and you’ll begin to finally ace your downtime. But make sure to snap it for the ‘gram first or it doesn’t count.

Subscribe now

Or, perhaps, we can admit that for most of human history, Sundays have been sacred. Even industrial Britain shut up shop and changed pace for the day. But we’re too young, too brain-fried, and too disconnected to remember what uncharted leisure looks like.

Our always-on, anxiety-inducing, downtime-ruining champions of social media have created an aesthetically-pleasing cultural export out of wasting time. The irony. Perhaps instead we can see this trend for French Sundays as a reminder that this is what happens when we’re all a bit fucked. We’re justifying our downtime, optimising our commutes, unable to even eat a croissant without checking our emails. We’re permanently available. Of course we need to make an aesthetic out of the antidote, of course a chic new secret to switching off is going viral.

We don’t need a linen shirt and a wicker basket, we don’t need to document our aimless-strolling and long lunches. What we need is permission to waste time again. Sundays or, perhaps any day of the week, with space and time for not much, no optimising, zero content, no buying or working but a simple return to the state of human being again.

We’ve become so deprived of the feeling of this that we’ve mistaken it for a stereotype. It’s not. It’s a deep human need to inhabit our own lives without extracting value from every inch.

It’s not French Sundays we need, but a recalibration of how we show up in our lives.

With love and downtime,

Chloe
🧡

Want more? My free writing, short courses, and one-to-one coaching all live on my resources page.

If this resonated, keep reading:

_{Originally published on my website: French Sundays Wont Save You (But This Might).}

Watching something like this on repeat adds a whole new layer to the experience. We know what’s coming, so when we see one of them having a breakdown over a crappy relationship, or an argument over almost nothing, we can play god for a moment: don’t worry Lorelai, Max isn’t The One and all things work out fabulously in the end.

What if we had that kind of perspective in our own lives? Of course, in reality, we have a breakdown when things go ‘wrong’ because we have zero idea that it’ll work out fabulously in the end.

Think of the last time a plan ‘failed’, or you missed a train, or someone flat-out rejected you… and you later found out it saved you from something worse, or led you somewhere better.

We’ve all already lived this, we just didn't call it wisdom at the time.

And there’s an old Taoist fable which is exactly this. I’m not sure what’s reminded me of it this week, but I’m glad for it. My perspective has been tweaked and I’m feeling more wu-wei as a result — way more relaxed about some really hard things in my life.

In this week's drop, I'm sharing the fable — the one that's rewired how I see my entire life right now — and where it's showing up for me at the moment, plus a visualisation to help you feel it, not just think it. New perspective? I gotchu.

This is how we live our favourite life.

Every week I share a new experiment, essay, class, or practice with paid subscribers — we’re building a life you don’t need to recover from. Join us, and you’ll also get full access to The Yoga Revolution: 250+ joyful movement and mindfulness classes.

Upgrade to paid

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

And if you’re here for the free stuff, you’re so welcome — I write free articles every week.

Read more

Pausing work isn’t preparation for more work, it’s the entire point.

Are you resting, sleeping, and taking breaks so you can improve your focus, clarity, and performance?

Or are you doing those things for the sheer pleasure of it all?

Even me, as a nervous system guide, yoga teacher, studier of joy… I struggle to rest just-because.

But this optimisation of our down-time is keeping us anxious, overwhelmed, and stressed.

This week I’m handing the reins to a new Joyful guest-author, Tatjana, founder of Teapro. She writes about the pause as the point.

Read this one with a cuppa. It’s basically mandatory.

Author: Tatjana Apukhtina, co-founder of Teapro

It’s late, the kettle has gone cold twice because I keep forgetting I put it on, and my to-do list has somehow grown longer over the course of a day I spent crossing things off it. If you know that particular flavour of tired, this one is for you.

We are raised to believe that productivity and success matter above almost everything else, and I will be the first to admit I am not immune. I love being busy. Running my tea business, Teapro, is more than a full-time job - any founder will tell you that as rewarding as it is, it somehow feels like doing the work of five people at once. And as if that weren’t enough, I also make films, another one of those pursuits that quietly demands all of you and then asks for a little more.

Don’t get me wrong. I love what I do. And I know plenty of people just like me - brilliant multitaskers who simply NEVER STOP. Maybe you’re one of them.

So how do we deal with the constant pressure, the overstimulation, the occasional and very real need to re-centre?

When you’re drowning in work and need to come up for air, there are usually two ways to do it. The first will satisfy you for about ten minutes and leave you feeling worse than when you started. The second feels strange at first, almost uncomfortable, and it’s the one that actually works.

The first path

The first path is the one most of us take. Dopamine junkies that we are, we reach for the phone and start scrolling, anything to avoid the to-do list glaring up from the notes app. Whatever your poison - Instagram, YouTube, or worse, the news - I can almost guarantee the same arc. A little hit of stimulation, and then the slow slide off the cliff.

Because the inevitable starts to happen. You begin comparing yourself to the impossibly impressive people on the screen: the ones with the multimillion-pound companies built from nothing, the sculpted bodies, the faces that look effortless and almost certainly weren’t. Be honest - have you ever once closed the app feeling better about yourself?

And even when the content is perfectly wholesome, there comes a moment, an hour or so in, when you remember with a small jolt of guilt that this was meant to be a ten-minute break.

The second path

The second path involves doing almost nothing at all. Not quite nothing, because you are allowed to brew a tea, settle into your favourite corner of the sofa, or step out onto the patio and simply be. It feels faintly ridiculous even to write it. I can hear you already - surely you could use that gap to plan the week, or clear a few emails, or -

No. What you are doing in that moment is “ma”.

Ma is the Japanese idea of negative space, often described as a pause in time. We usually meet it in physical things - the empty areas in a painting, the silence between notes, the room a building leaves around itself - but it reaches well beyond the visual.

In a life, “ma” is the space we deliberately leave for nothing. A moment of idleness. A break in the endless stream of content and noise competing for our attention. And the rewards are real: it makes room for creativity, restores a bit of clarity, and quietly returns you to yourself. Only when we allow these pauses can we step back from the relentless chase, and from the false promises our efficiency culture keeps making about health, wealth and happiness.

I won’t pretend it’s easy. The first five minutes are genuinely uncomfortable - your hand will twitch towards your phone, your mind will offer you a dozen useful things to do instead. But sit through it, resist the pull of the screen, and on the other side is a kind of stillness most of us haven’t felt in a very long time.

Where the tea comes in

Here’s the honest part: going from a hundred to zero is hard. For me, the tea ritual is what made it possible. It gave my restless mind something to hold on to.

When you make a proper cup of tea - and yes, the snob in me means loose leaf - almost every sense is drawn in at once. The smell as the leaves meet hot water. The warmth of the cup against your hands. The slow unfurling, the colour bleeding into the water. You wonder, just for a second, about the journey those leaves took, and the hands that picked them. You are, almost without noticing, completely present.

Tea has been understood this way for a very long time. In the eighth century, a scholar named Lu Yu wrote the Cha Jing, the Classic of Tea, treating the growing, preparing and drinking of it not as a chore but as a discipline worth real attention. That spirit travelled into Japan and became the heart of the matcha tea ceremony, built around harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity. Across both traditions the message is the same, and I find it quietly subversive: paying close, unhurried attention to something small is a worthy way to spend your time.

So next time the day is coming apart at the seams, try this. Put the kettle on. Measure the leaves. Watch them stain the water. Let the minutes it takes be minutes when you are not solving, fixing, replying or planning. Just brewing, and waiting, and being there for it.

You won’t have done anything, in the productive sense. You will have practised the lost art of doing nothing - and, if I’m right about any of this, you’ll come back to the fires a little steadier than you left them.

That is what the pause is for. And the lovely, quiet secret of it is that it tastes like tea.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tatjana is the founder of Teapro, a premium loose-leaf tea and teaware brand. She loves discovering incredible teas from all over the world, as well as inventing new herbal blends. Creative, curious, and refreshingly unserious about herself, she’s on a mission to turn tea lovers into teapros.

Find her teas & tea ware at teapro.co.uk and her blending workshops at Classbento.

Thanks to Tatjana for this brilliant takeaway: stillness is a skill we’ve never been taught.

That discomfort you feel the first two minutes of sitting in silence, of meditation, of not reaching for your phone, isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong, but proof you really needed it.

Want to build the skill? I created The 10-Day Pause to help. Ten days, two minutes a day, a structured experiment in learning to stop. It’s only £10 and you can start today, which, if Tatjana’s convinced you of anything, is exactly the right moment.

The 10-Day Pause

See you next time,

Chloe
🧡

Subscribe now

Of being told I need to do ten push-ups before breakfast every day, to walk at least 10k steps a day, or to wear a weighted vest for every walk.

Life is hard enough without these often-ill-qualified wellness-hackers adding more to the pile. Give us another reason to feel less-than before 9am, why don’t you. Nice one.

We know movement is good for us. We don’t need reminding. What I’m seriously bored of is how we’re constantly being asked to participate.

Model-looking women teaching badly-cued classes (you just haven’t been taught to notice), full of impossible transitions and poses that make you contemplate your squishy belly and how much you don’t look like her before you’ve even broken a sweat. Classes that flat-out aren’t that enjoyable, certainly aren’t sustainable, and ask more of you than they give back.

And then there’s the Pilates Girl beauty standards as set out by the fucking manosphere (this brilliant article, by the amazing writer , will change how you see it).

No wonder we’re so over it.

If you want the full rage-and-reasoning behind why most movement content misses the point entirely:

So this week I made something else. Five short classes. No weights, no sun salutations, no grand poses. Just simple, sustainable movement for when you’re injured, or tired, or it’s been three years since you last did anything formal.

Classes for when you’re noticing your body ageing and you’re not sure what to do about that.

For when you’re PMSing and the last thing you want is a class that demands more from you.

This is for you if you’re bored of hard classes that don’t feel good in your body. If you just want to move, and you don’t want to think too hard about it. If you want your movement to actually feel fun.

In this week’s drop, I’m sharing all five classes in this brand new bundle (my favourite one’s embedded below), plus a new playlist I made this week, and a film I LOVED.

This is how we live our favourite life.

Every week I share a new experiment, essay, class, or practice with paid subscribers — we’re building a life you don’t need to recover from. Join us, and you’ll also get full access to The Yoga Revolution: 250+ joyful movement and mindfulness classes.

Upgrade to paid

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

And if you’re here for the free stuff, you’re so welcome — I write free articles every week.

Read more

As I attempted to keep feeling in my fingers, I peered out into the heart of midnight. I was on the deck of a sailing ship off the coast of France, and I distinctly remember feeling pinch-me joy.

I was seventeen and in Cornwall, away from home for the first time and working as a deckhand for a sailing company called Square Sail. Their beautiful age-of-sail ships featured in Poldark, Hornblower, and Doctor Who, and I was paid £50 a week to work hard and do what I was told.

On watch that night — as we sailed across the Bay of Biscay towards a sailing festival in France — I saw stars I’d never seen before. Listened to sounds I’d never heard. Despite the horrible weather and a coat that did little to protect me, I was on a grand adventure, and I was bloody loving it.

That feeling came to be something I thought about a lot. Utter presence in the face of undiluted joy. Why isn’t all life like that? How do we find this more often?

Of course, I responded with hedonism for a while, until I discovered that getting drunk all the time and eating my weight in gummy bears before bed was actually a bit grim.

Unwittingly, I’d stumbled on a simple form of epicureanism: a philosophy of enjoying life.

That was a while ago. I’m in my late thirties as I write this, and my life derailed from this philosophy multiple times. I’ve dealt with bad relationships and burnout, jobs that left me soulless and sad.

Since those days at sea I’ve seen death and despair and wonder and elation… and it’s taken me a long time to land back in that way of seeing life again. Maybe it’s a maturity thing? Regardless, I’m glad for it.

Since leaving a shitty relationship and finding myself at rock-bottom, I decided to unpick — consciously this time — the philosophy of joy I’d stumbled across in my twenties. I wanted to recover my rotten attention span, and read long books again. I wanted to heal from heartache and choose a better partner for myself. I wanted to stop self-sabotaging, eating my feelings, hating my body.

I wanted to be that girl on the ship again. Soaked and delighted at being alive.

So last year I began experimenting with tools and mindsets and ideas I could weave into my every day, rather than lofty concepts I’d need to learn in some overly-expensive retreat somewhere too hot for my redhead nature.

Here are those things — the ones that properly worked for me and continue to work. I use these tools every day, every week, and they don’t cost me much, if anything.

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself of these priorities, and hopefully a signpost for you in the direction of your own joy.

Break the routine

In all my healing of the past few years, I found myself getting stuck in a predictable routine. Healthy for me, sure, but it also became a little monotonous. I can’t believe it’s July already, I’d say. Or this year’s gone way too fast. I started to see that this sense of time slipping out of my grasp was because I wasn’t learning and finding novelty like I was in my twenties.

So I decided to make a priority things that broke my routines, helped me learn hard things, and were unfamiliar. My budget’s been small, so I’m still working on this, but I chose to learn a ten-page behemoth of a Beethoven piano piece (somewhat regrettably — I’m still learning it a year and a half later). I started to learn portrait drawing. I went to a life-drawing class, and new meditation sessions. I took different routes to the post office, found an undiscovered-by-me woodland and its new trails, and joined a writing group.

I have much grander plans to get a van, start surfing again, travel around the UK, meet new people, go sailing... In the meantime, these smaller things have helped my brain wake up a little more.

Inside the safety of the routines and habits I’ve built, time congeals into one solid, rushing mass. When I add just a pinch of novelty, my mind stops skimming and wakes up again. It’s like I am slowing down time. Because I don’t want to get to the end of this year and wonder where it all went.

Confront emotions, don’t avoid them

That pinch-me moment on deck at midnight was me trying to save the polaroid of the moment a little brighter. I wanted to hold on to how magical it all felt. Of course, time moved on, and some really shit things happened in the following couple of years. Did I have a pinch-me moment while I processed these shit things? Of course not — that would sound insane. But I should’ve done.

I white-knuckled the turbulence, pushed my feelings down, and refused to acknowledge the despair I was feeling. I distracted myself and got lost in bad habits. What I should’ve done — and what I do now, even and especially when things are hard — is open my eyes to the moment. As long as we minimise how we’re feeling, ignore the emotions and crack on regardless, we’re staying stuck. We simply get really good at minimising, ignoring, and cracking on. Until something innocuous makes our brains explode at a really inconvenient moment.

Our brains tell us the feelings will eat us alive. But they don’t. The feelings are just a mouse in the corner asking for a seat at the table.

Here’s more I’ve written about this if you want to dive deeper:

Move for pleasure, not punishment

I used to treat my workouts the same as my diet: something to earn, or something to correct myself with. I needed to be better, to be a super flexy Instagram yoga model, if I ever wanted to teach award-winning classes (spoiler: my classes won awards even though my handstands were shit and I was a size 14).

I trained hard for my yoga teacher training in Bali in 2016 — I knew I’d be the slightly-fat pale chick in a room of tanned, handstanding babes. I was (although it’s all in my head, I know that now, and none of it fucking matters anyway).

I moved as punishment for the packet of sweets I ate the day before, I looked at my squishy belly and pushed myself harder.

Sustainable? Of course not. Injury-inducing? Absolutely. If we’re moving to correct ourselves, we’re assuming we’re broken in some way. And that shit is hard to maintain — it’s deeply demoralising, and who wants that?

What if, instead, I moved in a way that’s genuinely enjoyable? This one runs deeper than I can get into here, but the main takeaway: find movement you enjoy and do it often. This has changed the way I approach my entire routine.

Quit the apps that made me feel like shit

Social media was infecting me with outrage and reduced worth every day. I didn’t realise the extent of the problem until, six months after deleting the apps, I went back online to tweak my Instagram bio and got lost in the black hole again for a few minutes. By the time I resurfaced, my bio hadn’t been changed and I felt invaded.

The ads, the influencers, the algorithm-chasing vanity. None of it is healthy, helpful, or happiness-inducing. So I quit for good and installed News Feed Eradicator on Chrome on my laptop (get it for Chrome here, and I’m certain they do it for other browsers, too).

This was an act of self-preservation and I’ll never look back.

I wrote a whole piece about this — the ship metaphor runs deeper than I first thought:

Get outside more often

I went for a walk in the woods the other day and literally told the trees my problems. I came home feeling not only lighter — I had a solution I couldn’t have imagined on the drive in — but I had more energy, more creativity, and less doubt.

It’s co-regulation, in its most basic sense; we’re regulating our systems alongside that of a calm, unhurried baseline; we’re connecting with something bigger than ourselves. The ocean, the forest, the skies. And when we’re moving our bodies, when we have nothing but time and space for brain-chewing and digging into the corners of our minds, more often than not some magic comes.

We need a dose of the non-human to bring us back down to earth. In the city we have the skies, the trees, parks and gardens. If we’re lucky we have deep woodlands, and coastlines, and moorland.

Especially when I’m tired, or pre-menstrual and feeling like the world’s against me, I need to remind myself: never doubt a walk outside as the greatest tool for inspiration and problem-solving.

Use my hands without monetising it

I remember a mentor once asking me, with a baffled look, why I bother playing the violin. Someone else gave me the same look when I said I was taking my grade five piano exam. Why put yourself through that? What’s the point?

Because it’s a joy. Sure my stress-sweat in the exam made me fumble, my voice cracked at the singing part (why there’s a singing part in a piano exam is beyond me), and after six years of owning a violin I still sound too much like a dying cat. But the certificate is framed — I got a merit (which is better than a pass, but not as good as a distinction) and I was enormously proud of myself. And I found a group of excellent folks to join. We gather every month and play fiddle tunes.

Working with our hands is a human tradition — our ancestors wove it into their days because they had to. Whether we’re playing music or making stuff or gardening or fixing a car — it’s a human necessity. Evolutionary science even tells us that our use of tools and manual dexterity drove the development of language and intelligence, not the other way round.

The happiest people I know use their hands, whether in their work or outside it, and they’re better off for it. So I prioritise this every day in some small way.

Slow down long enough to properly soften

This often happens to me in a restorative yoga practice or a nidra: I feel like I’m resting fully when I begin, until two minutes later I realise my hands are clenched, or my shoulders are bunched up, or I’m bracing my entire core.

Relaxing isn’t as easy as going from work-mode into our favourite chair and having a glass of wine. Our bodies take time to unwind properly. It’s the same reason we need the entire week we’re on holiday to properly relax; by day six we’re finally a goddess of the restful, it’s just a shame the flight home’s at 8am the following day.

Slowing down, being bored, loafing about — these are the philosophies of the truly joyful. Don’t discount making shapes out of clouds: it’s how we truly begin to soften.

I wrote more about this here:

Memento mori

Remember you shall die. Depressing or liberating? I choose the latter. Living somewhat in the perspective of the finite every day, every week, is one of the best decision aids we have. Should you sack off work for a day and visit the museum with your mum? Should you take the big shiny job in the city only for the money? Should you tell the stranger she’s got excellent hair?

The answers come quicker and easier when we’re rooted in the magnitude of our wondrous, impossible lives. That you’re alive right now, with that brain and those thoughts, reading my words; that human evolution is such that I’m typing this on a fast, capable little machine that fits in my bag and connects me with people all over the world; that the people we love the most — ourselves included — will one day expire… fuck yeah I’m telling her she’s got great hair.

Don’t wait for later. Later is never guaranteed.

Thanks for reading, friend. Hope this stuff helps you as much as it does me.

With love,

Chloe
🧡

Want more? My free writing, short courses, and one-to-one coaching all live here.

^{Originally published on my website here.}

“It’ll pass in a week or two” I remember telling a client as she confessed her worry about this new virus, “it always does”.

Less than a week later we were forced to close the doors.

I taught a final evening session in the space on Wednesday, and Thursday morning’s class was hosted online via Zoom. Just as good, just as joyful. We were keeping the magic going.

But the lease was up for renewal. By April, the landlady told me, I had to make a decision. Did I want to spend a fortune on securing the building for another year? Or… something else?

When we talk about uncertainty, I don’t think there’s been a bigger case for it in my life than during the pandemic

Tomorrow isn’t promised

And this makes today all the more glorious, doesn’t it? Memento mori — remember you shall die — is one of my favourite perspective-givers. Rather than filling us with morbid despair, the darkness of our lives, the darkness of art, can act as a reminder to act with integrity, to care less what others think of us, to love more, live more, to wear the damn swimsuit. But when we’re living in extreme cases of uncertainty, we can start to dysregulate.

That’s exactly what happened for me in spring 2020. I wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t eat much, struggled to think clearly. My then-partner and I had put our souls into that studio — our blood was in the fabric of it all, our fights and tears and joys and pride. Could we really just tear it down? After the success and hard-won elation of it all?

Our bodies resort to fight or flight. It’s a protective mechanism to keep us safe in times of threat, and the pandemic was that for all of us.

Despite all of that, my uncertainty wasn’t a problem to be solved. I just needed to work with it in a different way.

This is how we commit to our joy.

Every week I share a new experiment, class, practice, or insight with paid subscribers — we’re building a life you don’t need to recover from. Join us, and you’ll also get full access to The Yoga Revolution: 250+ joyful movement and mindfulness classes.

Upgrade to paid

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

And if you’re here for the free stuff, you’re so welcome — I write free articles every week.

Read more

For years I’ve handed the decisions over to someone else first. Whether it’s about my business, my body, my rest… I used to run it all through a partner, then a coach, then whoever’s shouting loudest on Instagram. Never my own instincts.

Because that’s what some of us have been taught: don’t get it wrong, ask for permission first, you’re not capable to do it alone.

I used to think I just needed to find the right system. But I didn’t. I just needed to start trusting the thing I’d been outsourcing to other people the whole time: my own instinct.

This episode is about that pattern — in relationships, in business, in the algorithm’s advice on how to eat, sleep, and heal. About the peculiar gift of burnout. And about finding real certainty in the face of chaos.

Want more? My free writing, short courses, and one-to-one coaching all live here.

And it sounds easy. It’s definitely cheap. And you can do it mid-Starbucks run.

Except it’s seriously hard work.

Especially when you’ve got debt, and kids, and a job, and relatives to care for, and a fridge that hasn’t been cleaned since the lockdown.

Couple that with politicians starting needless wars and climate change that will likely end in a fiery collapse of our entire species.

Be present, you say? Hilarious. No wonder we spend so much time on Instagram.

2500 years ago when Siddhartha began touting his ‘living in the moment’ philosophy, we didn’t have smart phones or online shopping or step-counters. As a consequence, a lot of this ancient philosophy can feel a bit jarring.

So how do we make this practical for modernity?

We practice, like anything else. Want bigger biceps? Practice bicep curls every day. Want to bake nice bread? Practice baking every day. Want to get present? Practice presence every day.

This practice doesn’t have to be difficult, lengthy, or all that pretty. We just need to make it sustainable, enjoyable, and impactful.

Because once we’re present, life gets spacious, decision-making improves, and that niggle in our back gets easier. Those ancient philosophers were right: life just gets better when we’re present for it.

Inside Joyful this week I’m unpacking my every-day presence practice (plus a free entry into The 10-Day Pause), sharing a morning practice that’ll help anchor it in, and the best album to improve your week.

The every-day presence practice

Building the bicep of your presence is easier than they make us think. You don’t need a 10-day silent retreat, any more self-help books, or even an app. You just need a tiny, do-able-in-chaos practice.

This is how we commit to our joy.

Every week I share a new experiment, class, practice, or insight with paid subscribers — we’re building a life you don’t need to recover from. Join us, and you’ll also get full access to The Yoga Revolution: 250+ joyful movement and mindfulness classes.

Upgrade to paid

Not sure yet? See what’s included here.

And if you’re here for the free stuff, you’re so welcome — I write free articles every week.

Read more