The crazy part is that necklace is still with me. It hangs right above my workbench in my studio and I look at it all the time. I’ve carried it with me for more than three decades, through becoming an artist, a mother, an entrepreneur, a wife and then a widow, through painting, producing music festivals, raising children, building businesses, losing my husband, walking through grief, deepening my spiritual practice and eventually creating Kavacha Designs. I’ve looked at that necklace hundreds of times, but seeing this photograph of myself actually wearing it all those years ago made me see it differently.

And the timing of this photo showing up is what really got me. On the very same day, I finally finished a video I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. It tells the story of how a Kavacha goes from concept to creation, starting with my drawing, moving into CAD, casting and finishing, and eventually becoming something worn on the body. As I looked at the old photograph and then at what I had just created, I realized that all these years later I’m basically still doing the same thing. I have an idea, I put my hands to it, I figure out how to make it, and eventually it becomes something someone can wear close to their body. The process has become much more sophisticated, but that original passion is still there.

What I couldn’t have known back then was the purpose that life would eventually give to that passion. I hadn’t lived the life yet. I hadn’t experienced the kind of love and loss that would change how I understood what it means to hold something close to you. I hadn’t lost my husband. I didn’t know grief the way I know it now. I couldn’t have understood how powerful it could feel to carry the ashes of someone you love close to your heart, or how a physical object could become part of prayer, remembrance and ritual. I didn’t know that my spiritual life and my creative life would eventually come together in such a tangible way.

That’s really what Kavacha has become for me. Yes, I make jewelry, but I don’t think of Kavacha as simply jewelry. I’m creating sacred objects that can hold something meaningful inside them. A prayer, ashes, an intention, a tiny piece of something sacred or something that connects us to someone we love. I believe the body is a temple, and what we choose to carry on it can have meaning. Somehow all these different pieces of my life, my art, my spiritual practice, my grief, my love, my loss and my need to keep creating have found their way into this work.

I think that’s what I’m beginning to understand about passion and purpose. We’re always trying to figure out our purpose as if we’re supposed to know what it is before we begin. I certainly didn’t. I was just bending wire and stringing beads. I was following something that interested me and gave me joy. Maybe purpose isn’t always something we go out and find. Maybe sometimes we live our way into it.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about this feeling that everything in my life was somehow leading me here, even the things that seemed completely unrelated at the time. This photograph feels like another little piece of that story. My path certainly hasn’t been a straight line. There were plenty of years when jewelry wasn’t even part of what I was doing, but apparently the thread was still there.

When I look at that old necklace hanging above my workbench now, I see more than one of the first pieces of jewelry I ever made. I see the beginning of something I couldn’t possibly have understood yet. I had no idea where any of it was going, and maybe I didn’t need to. I just knew I loved making things with my hands.

Sometimes that’s enough. I follow what I love, I keep creating, I live my life, and somewhere along the way those experiences give my passion a deeper meaning. Then a friend sends me a photograph from more than three decades ago and suddenly I can see the thread connecting then to now.

Maybe my purpose didn’t suddenly appear. Maybe I’ve been living my way toward it all along.

I’ve been doing some deep work lately. Some of it I’ve chosen, some of it has been brought directly to the attention of my nervous system, and some of it comes through my own restless mind. But I’m beginning to understand that all of these things are part of the journey of self-discovery. And when I say self-discovery, I don’t mean discovering myself simply as a human being. I mean discovering myself as an eternal spirit soul.

I know this is a human experience. I know these senses are connected to this body, and that the mind is constantly taking in information through them. What we see, what we hear, what we touch, what we consume, what we focus our attention on, the stories we repeat to ourselves, all of it feeds something. There is consciousness behind all of this, but there is also this subtle body, this subconscious collection of experiences and impressions that we carry with us. Spiritual life doesn’t mean pretending those things aren’t there. Maybe part of spiritual life is becoming conscious enough to actually see them.

For over a year and a half I put myself out into the dating world after losing my husband, and eventually I found an incredible human being to share life with. I am learning so much about myself through this relationship. Recently we were on a hike and I started thinking about relationships and how powerful they can be, they are like an ashram, a place of spiritual practice, a place of self-discovery, and maybe most importantly, a place to do your own work.

I started wondering, why do we as human beings search so hard for a partner? Is it comfort? Security? Companionship? Is it because we want someone to witness our life? Is partnership itself another place for self-discovery?

Some people lose a partner and choose to remain alone. When my husband passed away, being alone wasn’t something I chose. It was thrown upon me. We had never really talked about whether I would ever take another partner or whether I would ever remarry if he died. Why would we? We were busy living our life together. Then suddenly the life I had known for decades was gone, and I was standing in a completely different one.

What I discovered about myself is that partnership is a huge part of who I am. I like sharing my life with someone. I like having a person. I like the intimacy of building a life alongside another human being, having adventures together, making plans, sharing the mundane things, having someone beside me at the end of the day. For me, partnership makes life better. That doesn’t mean I am incapable of being alone. I know now that I can be alone. I just don’t necessarily want to build the rest of my life that way.

But choosing partnership again has also meant choosing another mirror.

Relationships have this incredible ability to show us ourselves. Not the polished version. Not the version we present to the world. They get into the places underneath all of that. They show us our attachments, our expectations, our fears, our need for reassurance, our desire to control outcomes and all the places where our mind can create an entire story before we even realize what it is doing.

This is where I keep coming back to the idea of relationship as an ashram. An ashram isn’t supposed to be a place where everything is arranged perfectly for our comfort. Spiritual practice isn’t about making sure nothing ever disturbs us. It gives us a place to see ourselves more clearly. To observe the mind. To notice our attachments. To recognize what belongs to this present moment and what we may be carrying forward from another chapter of our lives.

There is a lot inside of me. There is the little girl who experienced loss. There is the woman who loved and built a marriage for decades. There is the widow who learned that someone can be here one day and gone from this physical world another. There is the mother, the entrepreneur, the artist, the spiritual seeker, the partner. There is also the eternal soul underneath every one of those identities.

All of them can exist at the same time.

Maybe that is why I keep thinking about grief and joy occupying the same space. I can still grieve the life I had with my husband and be completely present in the life I am creating now. Loving again does not erase what came before it. Happiness does not betray grief. Grief does not make new love less real. My heart somehow has the capacity to hold all of it.

I think sometimes we imagine spiritual growth as becoming less affected by our humanity. I’m beginning to wonder if it is actually about becoming more conscious within it. I can know intellectually that I am not this body and still feel everything that comes with having one. I can understand that I am not my mind while simultaneously watching my mind run in ten different directions. I can know that I am an eternal spirit soul and still have a nervous system responding to decades of human experience.

The practice for me is learning not to confuse those experiences with my deepest identity.

That doesn’t mean pushing them away. It means becoming curious about them. What is this trying to teach me? What is actually happening right now? What story am I adding to it? What is mine to work on? What needs to be communicated? What needs to be surrendered? What am I being asked to see about myself?

I’ve spent so much of my life seeking spiritually, and yet some of the greatest lessons seem to happen in the most ordinary places. On a hike with someone I love. In a difficult conversation. In the silence after something activates me. In catching my own mind creating a story and asking myself whether I have to follow it.

Maybe that is the ashram.

Maybe the ashram isn’t always a temple or a monastery or some quiet place removed from the complications of everyday life. Maybe sometimes it is the relationship. The business. The family. The grief. The love. The restless mind. Maybe all of these become places of practice when we are willing to pay attention.

I don’t have this figured out. I am right in the middle of it, and I think that is important for me to say. I’m not writing from the other side of some great realization. I’m writing while I’m working through it.

I’m learning how to let grief and joy sit beside each other. How to love another person without asking them to carry everything that came before them. How to honor my human experience without forgetting that I am something beyond it. How to allow partnership to be a place of comfort and security and tremendous joy, while also allowing it to show me the places where I still have work to do.

Maybe that is what this chapter of my life is asking of me, not to arrive somewhere perfectly healed, but to keep becoming more conscious.

To keep loving.

To keep doing the work.

And to remember who I am underneath all of it!

Traditionally, a kavacha is an amulet carried for spiritual protection. It could contain sacred words written on bark, birch leaf, or another material and worn close to the body. A kavacha can also be a protective prayer or mantra, a way of invoking divine protection and symbolically placing that protection over different parts of the body.

When I first discovered Kavachas, something in me immediately understood it. Kavacha was more than a name for the jewelry. It described what I had been searching for throughout my own life: a way to move through the world with an open heart without feeling completely unprotected. That meaning feels especially important right now in a world that is moving so fast. We are constantly receiving information, opinions, images, warnings, and predictions. There is always another reason to feel afraid. Another reason to brace ourselves. Another reason to believe that everything is uncertain and we must somehow control what happens next. Our nervous systems can barely keep up. Fear try’s to enter us in every way possible. Anxiety follows us into our relationships. We carry it into our businesses, our parenting, our health, and even our spiritual practices. Sometimes we become so accustomed to protecting ourselves that we don’t realize how much of our energy is being used to stay guarded.

But sacred armor is not about hardening ourselves with boundaries or an energetic wall around the heart.

It is remembering of what protects the heart, so the heart can remain open.

We talk so much about “boundaries” these days. I understand the need to recognize what is healthy and what is harmful, but I do not want to spend my life building walls around myself. I want to protect my conscience with love and integrity. I want to know what I stand for, what I will participate in, and what I will no longer allow to pull me away from the person I am trying to become.

That is a different kind of protection.

It does not require anger or fear. It does not mean closing the door to compassion. It means becoming anchored enough in what is sacred that I do not abandon myself when life becomes uncomfortable.

This is what putting on my armor means to me. It begins with intention.

Each day, I enter my prayer room. I make an offering. I sit down with my prayer beads. None of these actions are complicated, but they tell my mind and heart that I am entering sacred time. This is the power of ritual. A ritual interrupts the speed of the world. It brings us back into the body and into the present moment. It reminds us that we are not only reacting to whatever is happening around us. We can choose what we are inviting in. We can choose where we place our attention.

Where our attention goes, our energy follows.

That idea is sometimes called the law of attraction, but for me it is less about magically controlling the universe and more about consciously participating in my life. What am I repeatedly thinking about? What am I feeding? What am I praying for? What am I giving power to? Intention is the magnetic pull.

When I place a prayer inside a Kavacha, I am taking something invisible and giving it a physical home. The prayer may be for protection, healing, courage, remembrance, forgiveness, or love. It may contain the name of God, a mantra, a blessing, a tiny piece of sacred earth, the ashes of someone we love, a flower, or words we are not ready to say aloud. The object becomes connected to a moment of surrender. I do not believe the metal itself is magic. The power is in what we place inside it, the consciousness with which we place it there, and the Divine presence we invite into that exchange.

In Bhakti, an ordinary object can become spiritualized through devotion and offering. The external ritual turns the mind toward an internal truth. We touch the Kavacha resting against our body and remember the prayer inside. We remember who we belong to. We remember what we are trying to live by.

The Kavacha becomes a point of return.

Maybe we touch it before walking into a difficult conversation.

Maybe we hold it before receiving medical news.

Maybe we wear it while building something that scares us.

Maybe it carries the ashes of someone whose physical presence is gone but whose love continues to shape our lives.

Maybe it simply reminds us to breathe, pray, and trust.

I have spent years building Kavacha Designs, but I am beginning to understand that I have also been building a language for something I needed myself.

I have known fear. I have known grief. I have known what it feels like to lose the life I thought I would have and still be asked to keep living. I have known the uncertainty of entrepreneurship the years of creating, investing, showing up, and wondering whether the vision in my heart will ever fully become what I know it can be. I cannot control all of those circumstances. My armor does not guarantee that I will never be hurt, disappointed, abandoned, or afraid. It does not prevent life from being life.

It reminds me that I can meet those experiences without losing my connection to the Divine or betraying what I know in my heart.

Real sacred armor does not make us untouchable.

It makes us remember.

Remember the prayer.

Remember the intention.

Remember our integrity.

Remember that we are souls having a temporary human experience.

Remember that we are being held even when we cannot see how everything will unfold.

Perhaps this is why the ancient idea of Kavacha still matters. The circumstances have changed, but the human heart has not. We still search for protection from what we cannot predict. We still need rituals that help us transform fear into faith. We still need something tangible to remind us of what cannot be seen. Putting on sacred armor is not preparing for war. It is preparing to walk into the world with love.

It is protecting the softness of the heart without surrendering our discernment. It is choosing integrity when fear asks us to compromise. It is carrying our prayer close enough that we can feel it when the world becomes loud.

And then, after we have set the intention, spoken the prayer, and put on our armor, there is one final part of the ritual.

We let go.

We trust.

We allow the prayer to be carried somewhere beyond our own understanding.

That is what Kavacha means to me.

I am sitting in my prayer room chanting out loud. There is something freeing about being alone and allowing the sound of the mantra to fill the room. When I travel or stay in someone else’s home, I often chant quietly. My prayer and meditation have always felt like something to hold close—something intimate between me and God, not something to turn into a spectacle.

And yet here I am, writing about it.

Since beginning this Substack, I have been asking myself how much of my spiritual life I should share. Writing openly about my journey feels counterintuitive to who I am. For more than four decades, Bhakti Yoga has been the private foundation beneath my life. It has carried me through becoming a mother, an artist, an entrepreneur and a widow. It has been there through grief, reinvention, uncertainty and the continual struggle to become a higher version of myself.

But it has never been something I wanted to perform.

This morning, as I sat chanting, I found myself wrestling with that tension. Some things feel as though they belong only between the soul and God. At the same time, I know that sharing our lived experiences can give someone else hope.

When I used to speak in group homes about my childhood—about being an orphan, living in foster care and finding my way forward—I wasn’t sharing those experiences because I wanted attention. I shared them because I knew there might be one young person in the room who needed to see that the circumstances of their beginning did not have to determine the rest of their life.

Perhaps sharing my spiritual journey can come from that same place.

I pray that it does not come from ego. I pray that what I reveal might simply remind someone to return to whatever brings them closer to truth.

My morning practice is not elaborate. I begin with a small puja. I clean the altar, offer fresh water to the Deities, place flowers before them and light incense or frankincense. Then I sit down to chant and pray.

Some mornings, it feels natural. Other mornings, it takes an incredible amount of internal strength just to stop moving.

I tend to do a million things at a mile a minute. There is always something waiting for me: a business decision, an unfinished design, a message to answer, an order to prepare, a family responsibility or another idea asking to be brought into the world. Sitting still can feel harder than doing all of it.

But I have learned that this practice is my daily medicine.

When I do not begin by remembering God, my day unfolds differently. I feel more easily pulled in every direction. My thoughts become louder. I respond instead of listening. I can still accomplish things, but I do not always feel aligned with what I am doing.

When I pray first, the path feels cleaner and clearer.

That does not mean my mind becomes perfectly controlled. This morning, it was especially restless. I was feeling so much—gratitude, uncertainty, responsibility and wonder that God has given me the ability and the circumstances to sit in prayer each morning.

The practice does not remove the noise of being human. It gives me somewhere to bring it.

I think this is part of what I want this Substack to hold: the whole person behind the work.

Jayashri Triolo, the entrepreneur, cannot be separated from Jayashri the artist, the mother, the widow, the truth seeker or the lifelong student of Bhakti Yoga. These are not separate identities that I put on for different occasions. They are all present when I sit at my altar, when I enter my studio and when I make another decision about the future of Kavacha Designs.

Kavacha did not begin as a marketing concept. It grew from my own relationship with prayer, remembrance and sacred objects. It came from understanding that something small enough to wear close to the body can carry something immeasurably important: a prayer, ashes, a flower, a written intention, soil from a sacred place or a reminder of someone we love.

The amulet is an object, but the meaning placed inside it belongs to the person wearing it.

This is where my spiritual life and my life as an entrepreneur meet. I am not trying to tell people what to believe or what spiritual path to follow. I want to create a place of ritual where people can begin opening themselves to their own traditions—or create a daily tradition that resonates honestly within their own heart.

Maybe it is a morning prayer. Maybe it is lighting a candle for someone who has passed. Maybe it is carrying a word of intention close to the heart. Maybe it is sitting quietly for five minutes before entering the demands of the day.

Ritual does not have to be complicated to be transformative. It simply asks us to stop, remember and give our attention to something greater than the noise around us.

Building Kavacha Designs is not separate from my spiritual practice. In many ways, it is one of the places where that practice is being tested and expressed. Entrepreneurship continually confronts me with questions about purpose, patience, humility, perseverance and surrender. It reveals where I am attached, where I am afraid and where I still have work to do.

The business is not only something I am building. It is also something that is building me.

Perhaps that is why I feel called to share more of this part of my life, even when it makes me uncomfortable. I do not have a perfectly controlled mind, a flawless spiritual practice or a finished understanding of God. I am still learning. I am still questioning. I am still trying to discern when to persevere, when to surrender, when to speak and when to keep something sacred and silent.

I may never completely resolve the tension between privacy and sharing.

Maybe I am not supposed to.

Maybe the intention behind the sharing is what matters. If I am writing to prove something, then I need to step back. But if I am sharing honestly, in the hope that someone else might pause, pray, remember or begin again, then perhaps the sharing itself can become an offering.

So this morning I chanted out loud.

And now I am telling you about it.

Those years gave me courage, strength and grit. They also gave me tenacity. When something is difficult, I do not immediately assume it is impossible. I believe there must be a way through, and I am usually willing to stay with it until I find one.

That quality has been essential in building Kavacha Designs.

It takes perseverance to bring an idea into physical form. It takes mental stamina to solve problems that seem unsolvable and a willingness to keep learning when I do not yet have the answers. It takes courage to create something that does not fit neatly into an existing category and to continue believing in it when growth takes far longer than I ever imagined.

I have spent eight years building this brand. There have been moments of recognition and expansion, but there have also been disappointments, expensive lessons, closed doors and long periods when nothing seemed to be moving quickly enough.

Still, I have continued.

I know how to stay.

I know how to figure things out.

I know how to take an idea from a drawing to a finished piece of jewelry that can hold someone’s prayer, ashes, memories or sacred keepsake.

These are important qualities for a founder. But this is also where a complicated inner dialogue begins for me.

When I started college, I met the Hare Krishna devotees and began studying the path of Bhakti Yoga. I was introduced to two principles that would profoundly influence how I understood my life: humility and karma.

I have never thought of myself as a particularly humble person. Humility is something I aspire to, but it is not something I believe I have mastered. I am strong-willed. I have opinions. I can be determined, protective and certain that I know the way forward. Those qualities have helped me survive and build, but they can also make it difficult to step back, listen and consider what a painful experience may be trying to teach me.

What I truly want is to remain open enough to learn from my shortcomings without beating myself up inside.

That distinction matters.

There is a difference between honestly examining myself and turning every difficult experience into evidence that something is wrong with me. There is a difference between humility and self-erasure. Humility asks me to remain teachable. It asks me to consider my part, acknowledge when I have caused harm and make changes when changes are needed. It does not require me to carry all the blame.

Karma presents another difficult question. When something painful happens, when do I accept it as a lesson I am meant to face? When do I recognize that my own choices have brought consequences that I need to understand? And when do I finally say, “No. Enough is enough. This is not my lesson to keep repeating”?

I do not always know.

Sometimes karma may be the lesson of staying, accepting responsibility and growing through discomfort. But sometimes the lesson may be learning to leave. Sometimes the spiritual response is patience and surrender. At other times, it is discernment, self-respect and a clear boundary.

Perhaps karma is not meant to become a justification for suffering. Perhaps it is not a command to tolerate dishonesty, mistreatment or relationships that continually diminish us. Maybe the lesson is not always to endure more. Maybe the lesson is to recognize what is happening, understand what it has revealed and choose differently.

This is especially complicated for someone who learned very young how to survive difficult circumstances. My instinct is to persevere. I can stay with something long after another person might have walked away. That ability has served me well in business, art and life. But tenacity without discernment can become its own trap.

There are times when continuing is courageous. There are also times when continuing is simply repeating an old pattern.

My spiritual life has taught me that I am not this body. I am a spirit soul having a human experience. The body, mind and senses are constantly trying to convince us that our accomplishments, appearance, possessions, talents and recognition are who we are.

Yet spiritual life asks us to remember something deeper.

If I am not this body, then who is striving? Who is the artist? Who is the founder? Who is building this business, and who receives the credit when something succeeds?

This has become one of the great internal struggles of my life: how do I remain strong, courageous and determined while cultivating humility? How do I believe in my abilities without becoming consumed by the identity those abilities create? How do I accept responsibility for my choices without assuming responsibility for everything that happens around me? How do I surrender the outcome without surrendering my voice?

I once thought strength and surrender were opposites. Now I am beginning to understand that I need both.

Humility does not mean making myself small. It does not mean denying my gifts, remaining silent or pretending that I have not worked incredibly hard. It means recognizing where those gifts came from and asking how they can be used in service. It means being willing to learn without making self-punishment part of the lesson.

Tenacity allows me to continue the work. Humility helps me question how I am doing it. Discernment tells me when continuing is no longer the wisest or most loving choice.

Creativity has always been one of the places where I feel most connected to the Creator. When I draw, paint, design or work with my hands, I enter a conversation that began when I was a child. I do not believe creativity belongs to me alone. I believe it moves through me, and my responsibility is to listen carefully enough to give it form.

That understanding lies at the heart of Kavacha Designs.

Kavacha is not simply about making jewelry. The intention has always been to create sacred vessels that help people remember. Remember to pray. Remember the people they love. Remember what they have survived. Remember that there is something eternal within them that cannot be taken away.

In a world constantly pulling our attention outward, ritual brings us back inward. It creates a pause in which we can reconnect with what is sacred. A prayer held close to the body can become part of an ongoing conversation with the Creator. It can remind us that we are being guided even when we cannot yet see where the path is leading.

Perhaps this is the balance I am still learning to live.

I can be tenacious without believing I control everything. I can be proud of what I have built without believing I built it alone. I can acknowledge my shortcomings without turning against myself. I can accept a difficult lesson without deciding that every painful situation is mine to endure.

My childhood taught me how to survive. My spiritual life taught me to examine myself. Building Kavacha Designs is where those lessons continue to meet.

I am still learning when to persevere and when to release. I am still learning how to hold courage and humility in the same hand. Perhaps this is what Sacred Armor® means for me too: not armor that closes my heart or makes me invulnerable, but armor that protects what is sacred while allowing me to remain open, teachable and strong enough to say, when necessary, “I have learned what I can from this. Now, enough is enough.”

JAYASHRI TRIOLO  •  KAVACHA DESIGNS

I have now spent eight years building Kavacha Designs LLC, and lately I’ve been thinking about what it actually means to build something from nothing. Not just a company, but a vision. A body of work. Something that asks you, over and over again, how badly you believe in what you are creating.

I’ve learned so much along the way, but perhaps the most interesting thing I’m learning is that entrepreneurship didn’t begin for me eight years ago. The qualities I’ve needed to build Kavacha were being formed in me long before I knew what an entrepreneur was.

When I look backward, I can see the thread.

I was placed in an orphanage at a very young age with my siblings and spent my early childhood moving in and out of foster care. At eight years old, my sister and I went to live with a foster family who eventually adopted us. That chapter of my life was complicated and difficult in ways I may write about another time, but it also exposed me to a world that profoundly shaped who I became.

That family valued education, culture, sports and the arts. I was taken to museums and the symphony. I had private art lessons. I learned to play musical instruments. There were tennis lessons, field hockey, country clubs and experiences that, looking back, belonged to a very particular upper-middle-class American world.

And somewhere inside of all of that, I discovered something essential about myself:

I am an artist.

Not because I chose art as a career. Not because I went to art school later. I discovered that creating was simply part of the core of my being.

That environment also taught me discipline. It taught me to appreciate education, culture and excellence. It gave me a desire to become a well-educated, well-rounded person and showed me that there was a very big world beyond the circumstances into which I had been born.

But that home was also extremely difficult for me. I was fiercely independent, strong-willed and determined to find my own way. At fifteen, I ran away.

I was eventually taken in and adopted by another family, and during that period I discovered that members of my biological family were living nearby. At seventeen, I made another enormous decision: I emancipated myself and went to live with my biological brother.

I transferred from private school to public school for my senior year, graduated early and launched myself into the working world. I applied to college and began figuring out, mostly on my own, how I was going to create a life.

There was no roadmap.

There were student loans. There were times when I barely had enough money for food or rent. There were odd jobs and long hours and the constant calculation of how to cover school expenses and keep going. I was determined to get through college and make something of my life, even when I had absolutely no idea how I was going to do it.

Self-determination. Resourcefulness. Grit.

I learned those things early, and I learned many of them the hard way.

Now, eight years into building Kavacha Designs, I recognize those same qualities everywhere.

Entrepreneurship has asked me to believe in something before other people could see it. It has required me to learn things I didn’t know, recover from mistakes, survive disappointments, reinvent myself, take risks, ask for help, work without guarantees and keep moving when the outcome was anything but certain.

Sound familiar?

It does to me now.

I don’t romanticize the difficult parts of my childhood or believe that we need to suffer in order to become strong. But I can look at my life from where I stand today and see how certain experiences formed capacities in me that I would eventually need.

And maybe that is one of the gifts of getting older.

We finally get enough distance to see the pattern.

The artist, the runaway, the college student trying to pay her rent, the spiritual seeker, the mother, the widow, the woman building a jewelry company, the entrepreneur trying again after something doesn’t work. They aren’t separate versions of me.

They are one continuous life.

Kavacha means armor.

I created Kavacha Designs around the idea of Sacred Armor®, objects that can hold what is precious and meaningful to us. But after eight years of building this company, I am beginning to understand the word armor differently too.

Maybe some of our armor isn’t something we put on.

Maybe it is something life slowly builds within us.

I want to use this Substack to begin telling more of that story. Not simply the story of building a jewelry brand, but the story underneath it: how creativity, survival, spirituality, loss, determination and entrepreneurship have intersected throughout my life and brought me to where I am now.

There are so many chapters I haven’t told yet.

And for the first time, I feel ready to start connecting the dots.