My best dates and my most sparkly, whirlwind romances - many of which went on to become enduring, beautiful friendships beyond romance - all had one common thread running through them. This thread is very unique to my experience, and a highly subjective one. I’m not encouraging or idealising it, I’m actually only making an observation, one that I find so interesting - We never talked about what I do for work. The best men I’ve ever met never once bothered to be inquisitive about my work. Nor did they care how much money I make.

We were so carried away in banter, jokes, music sharing, and conversations about all of the wonderful things in the world, that not for one moment did I realise that the dude didn’t even ask what I do for a living. Perhaps he did, but many, many months later, and I could tell it comes from a genuine desire to learn more about me rather than something less noble. There was no droning on and on for hours about what he does, what I do, and feeling like we’re in a business interview, pitching ourselves to each other.

Some of the most beautiful times I’ve had connecting with human beings I’ve only just met - especially men, romantically - were times when there was so much to talk about that my career was simply not given a fuck about. Or treated as my identity.

Some of the best men I’ve ever had the privilege of getting to know genuinely didn’t care what I do or how much money I make, they only wanted to get to know me, love me and cherish me for my heart, my soul and my presence in their life.

Do you remember how Emily in Paris taught us that in the French culture, talking about ‘work’ outside of work is frowned upon and considered unnecessary? That is so French, and it’s one of the many things I admire about their culture. They’re not obsessed with making work their entire identity, personality and social worth.

It’s only since the pandemic - when so much pivoting, uncertainty and literally being forced to live one day at a time happened for all of us as a civilization - that it truly hit me how the “What do you do?” question can be so sensitive, sore and icky for so many more people than just me. I’m not the only weirdo who occasionally dreads answering it. Suddenly, I had so many friends who found themselves at crossroads and dead ends in their work life. Asking that question brought up shit. I could feel people starting to become ashamed, uncomfortable or angsty in their energy, when they struggled to come up with a ‘normal’ answer to keep up the performance that we all thought we had to keep up - that the world literally falling apart was no big deal, and everything is normal again now that the lockdowns ended. I decided to stop asking the question altogether.

My own ‘What do you do’ has been a meandering path. I studied something, and then was bitten by severe anxiety, trauma and burn out in that path. I went onto a different path for a while. I took a gap year. I tried things. I started a business. I had my own very non-hustle way of engaging with said business. I refused to participate in anything that required me to perform excessive and unnecessary suffering as a social badge of honour. I refused to over-focus on the ‘hard’ part of my work whenever I sat at tables where it was a competition about whose hard was the hardest, and bonding was based upon commiserating upon how much everything sucks. I am a sensitive woman who likes to talk about what’s good in life, and amplify it by giving it attention. Unfortunately, I tend to be giving Marie Antoinette to people by daring to talk about finding joy instead of participating in the whole difficulty flex competition suckfest.

~

The first source of rest wisdom that I was ever exposed to was the OG rest as resistance account - The Nap Ministry. I am going to be quite generously quoting her words in this piece, and if you haven’t already, I must encourage you to go read, absorb, reflect on and support her work.

I’ve also been a member of The Daily Rest Studio for four years now, and I can’t convince you enough of the medicine this has been for me. For my business, my life, my relationships, my health, and my consciousness. It’s the best investment I’ve made into softening and enhancing every aspect of my reality all at once. You can only know when you actually get a taste of the TDR Studio by joining it. You can also visit TDR’s Instagram for beautiful, beautiful words and wisdom on living a life where we are gentle on ourselves while doing all the hard things we must do. Emmie is also the author of The Salon on Substack, and it’s a balm for the soul to read her pieces here.

I realised at some point, in my Doing journey, that my personality is fundamentally unemployable by late stage patriarchal capitalist grind culture. I have had my successes, fame, noteworthy press features and moments of accomplishment in my journey as a sustainable fashion designer, writer and blogger. I’ve also had life happen - so many times. Traumas, transitions, betrayals, health setbacks, all kinds of things that make me human. That make me incapable of having a continuous, linear, upward graph of a career. In the year 2023, I almost didn’t work at all. I still refuse to bother to explain, justify or advertise the personal dark night of the soul that was behind that.

It’s just one year. Literally just one year. Like I heard in a beautiful conversation in a TDR Studio Soft Business workshop, one bad year in your business is literally just a small blip on the radar. I needed that bird’s eye perspective so much. This workshop was about the art of failing well. Something we don’t do enough, nor talk about enough.

Anyway, why do I have a problem with this very normal, innocent question - So what do you do?

A conversation that is imminent, immediate and inescapable in any interaction with another human being in this world, most of the time?

I am a highly sensitive person, yes. I sense energy and intentions, yes.

I, of course, have my own insecurities, wounds , projections and fears of being ‘not enough’ in a hundred ways that makes me feel icky to answer it.

I have no highbrow analysis or critique of this very natural, normal human curiosity. It’s just, I find it UTTERLY fucking boring.

I can sense people wanting to pigeonhole me into a box, form a label and file me in a category inside their mind, when they place premature importance on finding out what I do. I can sense how so many people want this information to want to decide how they’re going to behave with me based on my answer.

Some of them want to figure out why I look like I come from money (I’m a Venus-ruled fashion girl, I’ve got style and taste baby). And this specific flavour of nosy energy is too loud for a triple water sign woman like me to ignore.

I can feel them itching to tie my entire identity, personhood and worth into what I do for work, because they do that for themselves.

The moment I answer this question, etiquette demands that we launch into a whole conversation about what their job is as well. And honestly, more often than not, I literally do not care. Does everything have to be networking, even when I’m not at a networking event?

I’m so much more interested in who someone is as a person, than what they do for a living. I love when people are honest about their in-between spaces, their lulls, their “I don’t know, I’m still figuring it out,” or their passions beyond moneymaking in life. The flavour of their energy, personality and heart is what decides my relationship with them, or my energetic boundaries around them.

Not too long ago, somebody on a dating app (never again) asked me what I do, after explaining what he does with a whole lot of fancy corporate jargon that felt to me like it’s intended to make one sound more important in the organisation than one actually might be.

This was also right after he mildly mansplained astrology to me, and cited how this was his opinion as someone with ‘ten years in the media industry’ as validation for his commentary. I do not recommend speaking to a witch in this manner.

I, in the spirit of this being a cute non-serious conversation on a romantic platform, gave a rather cheeky yet honest, authentic and heartfelt reply about what I do.

I said that I have a slow fashion brand, and that this energy permeates every aspect of my life because it led me to start practicing slow living too. And I added that I create, curate and design sarees with an intention to seduce modern Indian women into wearing more sarees again.

I was told, “That’s a great pitch.”

I am certain this response was well intentioned.

I was also deeply ick-ed. Pitch?? This is who I am and how I live. It’s not a pitch.

The feminine way of business is devotion, it’s heart-centric creativity. The way that creation and being a creatrix - of a business, an artwork, a meal, a book, a baby - is literally our spiritual essence, is so alien to people who live in the patriarchal-capitalist world of pitches and performances and profitability at any cost.

The feminine way of business is creating something that’s an extension of your own energy. It’s a living, breathing part of you. It’s almost annoying for that to be called a pitch, and I can never find words good enough to explain why. It’s just… felt. The weird women who get it, get it.

One of my favourite long-running social experiments is that whenever I’m asked about what I do and my intuition signals a lack of good intentions, I proceed to give the most vague, ambivalent, curt of replies.

I say, “I’m in fashion.” Or less. Sometimes, I even go full weird and say something like, “I like writing these days,” or “I’m studying ____” (because I’m never not studying something), or “I’ve been learning yoga lately.”

And I get to witness these humans flail about with desperate, thinly veiled counterquestions that sometimes actually arrive to an explicit, “But what do you do to earn money?”

Call me the Downton Abbey grandma, but isn’t it a bit tacky to be so obsessed with figuring out how I make my bread? And being so in my face about it? Especially when you’ve witnessed my vagueness long enough to understand that there’s no invitation to ask further?

What’s it to you, really? Why is it so important to know, why is it impossible to have any conversation with me without knowing this?

There’s very few people, circles and spaces I’ve been in where being asked what I do energetically felt REALLY exciting to talk about. Where it felt safe, fun and GOOD to share. Where there was no ego battles, flexes, envy and lowkey weird vibes of someone wanting to glean how to judge me. A lot of times, I’ve been made to feel like I owe people what I do as an explanation for why I seem to be happy in my life.

I don’t mean to be cocky (maybe just a little) but with the amount of Pisces and Scorpio I have in my chart… I be sensing, and I be knowing things. When I was younger, in typical maiden era naivety, I blamed myself for being the weird one who didn’t like being asked this. Now, I get it. I embrace that I can sense subtle energies that most people don’t realise I’m sensing, and my body always, always protects me by having a certain reaction to a question.

It’s truly, truly crazy how we see someone’s tip of the iceberg Instagram feed, literally just a highlight reel of their lived human experience, and assume that we know everything there is to know about them, or that them sharing a cute picture of an afternoon spent at home means that their entire life must be just them napping on the petals of a flower and eating grapes.

We forget that we are not ever just innocently and objectively watching someone’s life, we are constantly projecting our own unhealed, toxic productivity culture wounds on everything we see and interpreting it all from our lens filtered with our own shadows. We are filling in the blanks with our own assumptions, flavoured by our own reality that is completely different from theirs.

Maybe, it’s not that someone is ‘flaunting their privilege,’ it’s just that you haven’t allowed yourself to take just twenty minutes to simply lay down in six months and your nervous system is fried, trigger-happy and burnt out from scrolling while ignoring what your body is screaming for.

Maybe, everything isn’t an extreme. It’s not either you suffer, struggle, grind, hustle, glorify exhaustion and beat the drum of misery every moment of every day to be seen as worth something, OR you’re a princess laying on her sink-in-bed and never working again.

How does one even in relax in modern life, with all the responsibilities?

Does relaxation only mean four hours at the spa, an international vacation, or not leaving bed for four days?

Can there be no such thing as taking a tiny nap, just because you can? As taking one less responsibility a day because you know you’re on that part of your menstrual cycle where you feel emotionally fragile?

Rest, slow living and relaxation are not just for The Evil Rich. This is a spell of trauma that we’re put under. Of course, the system is to blame for everyone being perpetually fatigued, overworked and resentful. But there is so much in our control, so many really tiny things we can do for ourselves. There is so much power we DO have. Over our bodies, and our lives.

We’re all so fucking angry, bitter, and tired. Fragile as dried out shells. All because of a sick culture where you cannot even, acceptably, talk about joy or choosing the easy path for anything, ever.

Are people sharing the beauty and their joy in their lives on social media to blame? Is bashing social media and the Big, Bad, Evil Influencer who inspired comparison in us always the answer? Are we always the hapless victims?

Or is it also our own unconscious use of social media, our lack of discernment between reel and real, our compliance in being addicted, hypnotized and our lack of awareness that there is so much depth, nuance, grey areas and stories to everything that we see that we’ll never know about?

I feel like we love having someone to blame, so we don’t have to take responsibility for our own feelings, our loose boundaries with social media or our own style of consumption. Influencers are our favourite scapegoat.

These apps are designed to addict us. I would never blame someone for the way social media depletes us. Managing our relationship to social media is one of the biggest shadow work experiments ever handed to humanity. It’s our own journey how it turns out to be for us, honestly. Social media has given me some of the biggest gifts and blessings of my life. It has also taught me so much, everytime I spiralled into an addictive phase with Instagram use. It will always continue to teach me.

Coming back,

What do I even do, anyway?

I am a fashion designer. I am a revivalist, I work only with sustainable, handcrafted, heritage Indian textiles made by artisans from the remotest corners and craft clusters of my country.

I work from home, and sell primarily online.

I have a devoted, regular, beautiful circle of longtime customers that always come back for a repeat purchase and think of me the first when they want to buy a saree. That is my success, and that is enough. For this season of life. For this moment, right now, as I am writing to you.

This, above, is the answer I should be giving, and it’s as honest as ever. It’s the reality and truth.

But there’s more to it. I have more to say about how I really feel about what I do.

I love my sarees, I love inspiring women to drape sarees. I don’t know when this might shapeshift into something new. And I don’t care to explain a plan to anybody right now.

Whether I want it or not, whether I ‘effort’ it or not, it is the way of the Universe that I am always evolving, growing, transforming, shapeshifting, metamorphosizing, energetically dying and rebirthing and then dying and rebirthing some more. It is inevitable. Everything I have ever done, and will ever do, as random as it may have seemed in the moment sometimes, comes together to carry me somewhere beautiful that I’m meant to go. And because my business is an entity that comes from me and is created through me, it will be doing the same.

This is what my entire past has been, up until this moment. I was always growing, evolving, and getting better. Even my shifts, changes and derailments were all perfect, in the end. Whether I speak a solid, laid out ‘plan’ of what I’m going to be doing in the next five or ten years or not, is irrelevant. Do people go home and sleep better at night if they get to find out what my five year plan is?

From 2018-2023, I had been a blogger and sustainable fashion influencer. Most people still identify me as her. I found the people in the social media and influencer sphere in India quite tiresome. I found that the person they were trying to turn me into even more tiresome. I stepped away from paid social media collaborations or doing the work of a ‘content creator’ because I believe that my effort, aesthetics, energy and talent with is worth far more than how it was being honoured. I eventually stopped engaging with prioritising this career path. And yet, it was never wasted time. Every single thing about this journey deeply nourishes all that I am and all that I do as a designer. I pour all of my erstwhile girl blogger energy into my own label and my own collections of clothing now, and that feels the best to me.

This is all of the stuff, and some more, that comes to my mind when someone asks, what do you do? Because it’s a journey, not a sticker label.

And this question often paralyzes me, because I can’t translate all of this into a single sentence.

Nobody in any casual interaction actually even cares enough to hold their attention span for the real answer - an answer this true. They seek a quick fix, neatly bow wrapped answer that they can use to categorise me with as little effort, vulnerability or depth as possible.

So, I stick to saying I’m a designer of sarees.

I design, collect and curate a shop of sarees. “Just” sarees. This is what I do.

And you know why I say that this answer, and this conversation, feels so boring, bleh and lacking to me?

Because… Really, what do I do?

Sure, I’m in fashion. I make sarees.

I also tend to my home, I make the most beautiful dinners for a four person family where every single ingredient is homemade from scratch instead of store bought. My festive spreads are an event in itself. I work from home and I work for the home, in acts of service, labour and nourishment, and both are work. As every woman in the world knows.

I create food timetables and recipes for a household where eating tasty, beautiful and healthy food is an everyday priority and something we don’t take lightly.

I’ve been a ceramic artist for two years. I’ve painted my entire life.

I create the most beautiful ambiences. I am a designer of moods, vibes and environments where life thrives. Just for myself, my home, my family, my cats and all my loved ones. It’s not for money, and it still counts. I can bring together just the candles, the incense, the visual decor, the music and the vibe to create for every activity - reading, exercising, working, cooking. I make life beautiful. That’s what I do. Living with me is living a beautiful life and caring about beauty. That’s what I do.

I make the most beautiful baths.

I make playlists. For every situation and every season.

I make Pinterest boards, and with an uncanny amount of aesthetic devotion, that.

I paint. I draw. I keep books of hand-torn collages, paper and scissor moodboards, and art journal spreads. I am a seasoned expert of having the most beautiful conversations with my long distance friends over texts, making each other our journal entries.

I work with the somatic, I move my body in energetic ways that alter my entire reality and experience of life, every single day. I dance, I meditate, I do embodiment practices, I process emotions and release old stories through the movement of my hips as much as the stillness of Yin. I allow Shakti to come and dance through me.

I practice divination. I commune with oracle cards. I study the tarot, at the slowest snails pace possible. I read birth charts. I study deep astrology. I study art history. I write erotica. I connect to the planetary energies and celestial rhythms of this Universe, and I watch them unfurl and whisper all around me.

I raise cattos. I walk barefoot on grass and interact with the energies of the Earth, the flowers, the sun, the moon, the grass, Venus, bodies of water.

I work with the moon and so much of my life has bloomed with my relationship to practicing rituals for every phase. I manifest with her, I release with her, I tell stories about my life to her, and I witness how gently and beautifully she makes sure everything comes to me exactly when I am meant to receive it. I look back on my moon ritual journals with utter awe for how she gracefully, softly, beautifully blesses the unfolding of my life, my intentions and my desires.

I live in rhythm with my four phases of the menstrual cycle, as well as with the phases of the moon - she rules me.

I design and perform rituals as an act of devotion to myself, my life and the Universe. I do so many rituals. They’re the sacred containers within which I truly get to connect with the unseen worlds that bless me and protect me.

I connect to the archetypes of so many Gods and Goddesses and learn so much from my relationship with them.

I raise plants. I make bread. I make salads. I make little infused oils to rub onto my skin and I charge them under the full moon. I create oil blends for the daytime, and oil blends for the night. I love having white sheets, and I am learning how they are SO incompatible with a person like me who’s marinating in all sorts of oils on her hair and skin all day everyday.

I make little infused extra virgin olive oils to dip bread in. I make the loveliest cheese platters to go with wine, and I can do that on the tiniest budget. I craft little luxuries for myself and my home, every single day, and constantly reinforce to everybody in my life that we deserve this just because we exist.

I energetically cleanse my home and practice acts of devotion to the home spirits within its walls. I speak blessings and intentions into the food I make to specifically heal what requires healing in my home and family.

I connect to women. Sisterhood and feminine healing is something I Be, and Do. I devote time to women’s spaces and women’s circles every single day where I find nurturing, nourishing, medicinal friendships with sisters around the world. Nourishing sisterhoods are like my life’s work and purpose. I learn SO much from communing with women in women-only spaces where we gather to practice, to meditate, to share experiences, to learn from each other, to heal our feminine energy. Every aspect of my life is touched by these sisterhoods. They are a part of everything I do - my relationships, my business, even the way I live my daily life. Everything that I do has been blessed, enhanced, inspired from or somehow touched by a sister, somewhere.

I create homemade brews, potions, medicines and recipes for every ailment.

I write 30 different journals, each with it’s own highly specific flavour of what’s written within.

I make the best essential oil combinations, and I design aromatherapy informed fragrances for different times of the day and different spaces in my home.

I am not just a fashion designer. I am a designer of my life, my pleasure, my relationships, my meals, my tea blends. Prioritising pleasure is my North Star, I infuse it into my work, my play, and everything in between. I landscape design the garden of my mind.

I stock floral petals of all kinds and invent brews like moroccan mint, jasmine, green tea and lemon. Or rose, hibiscus, fennel, lavender and cinnamon. Or ashwagandha, turmeric, ghee and milk. Or cacao, rose, cinnamon, paprika and cacao butter. I make herbal brews of cute little drinks to keep me company all day, as well as to offer to my family for any specific energy I feel like they need at the moment.

I make smoke blends with flowers and herbs all the time, to cleanse and charge my home.

I give my friends permission slips to come to me with their dirtiest, sluttiest, most unhinged confessions and anecdotes any time of the day without any need for disclaimers or apologetic prefaces. I hold safe spaces for the women in my life to speak about their sensuality, their sexuality and their pleasure without hushed tones.

I devote thousands and thousands of hours and words of my writing to women, women’s lives, women’s blossoming, women’s unfolding and women’s experience of reality, every day and every week and every month.

I do all of this, and so much more.

Just like you.

So when you ask me, what do I do, how do I ever answer?

How does *just* my moneymaking job even begin to cover what I do?

How will yours ever encapsulate all that you are?

We are all oceans, and yet we insist on hyper-fixating upon offering only that one shallow tide pool for the other to swim in.

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There is a sacred and wholly insatiable hunger inside every woman I’ve ever encountered. The state of her relationship to it, is the state of her. I can sense it, even and especially if she’s locked it in a casket. It rattles, no matter how deeply buried. This hunger is primal, alive, desiring, wanting, creative, expressive, generous, yearning, longing, gushing, a fire, a flame. It’s a void, the kind that makes ravenous living inevitable. It animates and calls forth all of life to dance.

It’s power is fearsome, and sometimes it may get labelled ‘Desperation’ - a wet blanket designed to extinguish and exile. ‘Too much,’ a milder cousin. Shame distorts the outpouring of expression from these depths, for both the woman and the beholder. It muddies it.

Story time.

All of us doing truly important, meaningful work in the public eye have a ‘getting cancelled’ story. It is the modern initation rite of a creatrix worth her salt. In my capacity and body of work as an erotic writer, I had an interesting taste of this, and it got me thinking about how powerfully activating it is for people to face raw, true feminine desire.

Many moons ago, I wrote something in my alternate space that came from a deep, true place within my heart that I seldom - if ever - share in my writing absolutely anywhere. It described and flirted with the idea of my dream man. It came from depths I had never dared to channel into creative expression before. That’s the blessing of a pen name, an alternative space and a veiled identity, isn’t it? I shared a poetic piece of prose that was an authentic, honest, uninhibited glimpse into a woman’s desires. By woman, I mean me and my truth, of course, and not all women. The honesty of my deepest desires made this work VERY charged.

It was the most viral, polarizing thing I ever wrote. And why?

Because women sharing their true desires is so rare. A woman speaking her actual desire, without sugar, without contortion, without fluff, without ‘but no worries if not,’ without any of that apologetic, minimizing bullshit, is so rare, that people quake and tremble in the face of it.

Women even admitting their desires to themselves is so rare.

When was the last time you shared your unhinged, deep, true fucking desire with another woman, without contorting and censoring your message to sound more likeable and acceptable? To not seem too much? When did you last speak your truth to another woman without being afraid of being cancelled, ridiculed, dismissed, corrected, chastised?

We are so afraid to desire. So when we witness pure, unadulterated, shameless, unapologetic, uncensored, undiluted, raw feminine desire that comes from the deepest currents of a woman’s heart, soul and pussy, it shakes and triggers it’s beholders.

It was actually a little exciting for my Scorpio-ruled ass to get to have tasted this, and to have created such a stir. Because I do believe that if everyone adores you, and you are universally liked, and you never receive pushback ever, it’s because you’re hiding behind the bushes that fence your true potential, and you’re most likely Good Girling, people-pleasing and being a little wimp in your expression.

I received extreme hatred, bitterness and vitriol from women who claim to be feminist in a way I never have before. Just for speaking my desires out loud, for putting words to a dream. Just for daring to put a narrative out there that doesn’t hate all men. It unnerved me, shocked me, hurt me and it taught me a lesson - toxic, extreme, harmful feminism is very much a real thing. Speaking from festering wounds and hiding behind “feminism” when, actually, one just lacks the courage to face and alchemise one’s shadows is a real thing. Hiding behind woke jargon when actually one just refuses to grow from eternal victimhood and is too comfortable in that identity of hating men is a real thing.

It also taught me the fucking power and force of speaking, sharing and writing your truth. How deeply it can move and trigger people.

The practice.

A very simple practice that I have been working with softly since the past many years is this: Write your desires.

In a special, private notebook. In a notes app folder. Everyday, write 5-10 or more things you desire. A freestyle list. Reading Regena Thomashaeur’s Pussy inspired my first experience of such a practice.

You do not have to achieve or ‘get’ them immediately. This is not a goals list, certainly not a to-do list. This is just a conversation. Some of us may enjoy it as a voice from the goddess within, some may flirt with the idea of it as a love letter to a sky daddy who looks out for you, gives you everything you want and spoils you.

Sitting in longing, deeper and deeper and deeper, is sexy medicine for the feminine spirit. Women are eternally hungry creatures, and that is divine about us. Our creative-generative power is our desire, our hunger, our yearning, our longing, our insatiability. Desire lists that have no purpose but to sit with “What do I desire?” and writing it down become a ritual that delivers a tiny dose of our powers under our tongue. These lists are a secret between you and you.

In these lists are tiny desires, big desires, mundane desires, silly desires, random desires, dirty desires, cute desires, all of it. If I said “desire” and you thought that can only mean sexual and partnered, you’re depriving yourself of an entire buffet of everyday sensuality and pleasure in your life that is a biological necessity for you as a woman by default, and that has nothing to do with whether or not you have a lover.

My desire lists can look like absolutely anything from some perfume to something to eat to some course I wanna join to some aspirational luxury I wanna have someday to some mood I want to feel to some colour I want to wear to some recipe I want to make to some workout I crave to some hobby I wanna try to some person I want to make time for... EVERYTHING, all of it at once, together. I am shameless and I am greedy. I am asking for too much, most certainly. That’s the point. This is not an activity to overthink or achieve like homework you’re being graded for. It’s freestyle, stream of consciousness, unhinged, quick and spontaneous.

Desire, and being connected to desire, is nourishing bone broth for women. Desire is the blood and milk of our lives, it’s the wellspring of vitality that we can draw from to feel really, truly juicy and fucking alive. To simply be aware of what you desire, and to connect to it by writing it down every single day as an activity that takes less than five minutes, very quickly becomes a paradigm shift for your entire reality.

Your desires deserve a home. They deserve to be seen, heard and known by you.

It is not my forte to justify, prove or explain the magic of feminine inner work with “Here’s 5 reasons why you should do this, and here’s evidence why it works.” That’s not how I am naturally meant to speak, and it’s not how the Goddess works. I write my desires down everyday now, and I can FEEL stirrings in the dark, wet soil, that I could never explain.

The feminine doesn’t make logical, list-based sense, and she’s not here to prove herself. She is the deep unknown, the mystery, the magic of life. If reading about this practice made you feel something, and moved something within you inexplicably, you will simply try it. That’s it, that’s all. And you will allow it to transform your life.

I’m not necessarily pushing myself to actively “make it happen” for anything on that list every single day, it’s just the act of simply stating to myself what my desires are that in itself is fucking powerful and alters the way I move on a day to day basis. It gently shifts how I take up space in this life, in deep, subconscious ways. I love it. I think it’s a powerful thing for women. To learn to know our desires. To learn to dare to acknowledge to ourselves what our desires are. To learn to speak them. To learn to ask for them. That’s how we someday receive them.

Dear one, as a woman, the medicine is to embrace, accept, romanticise, poeticise, revere and exalt your inherent insatiability. Your desire, your hunger will never cease, and you tend to this flame instead of trying to quash, quench or find its end. Let yourself love that you will always long. Stop fighting it. It’s the first step into a whole different frequency of this life’s vitality and beauty, unlocked.

God, I love it when women long. Without anyone, including ourselves, coming at us being solution-oriented. Without plans, strategies, instructions. Without sensibility. Fuck yes. I love it when women, just for ten minutes, let themselves just be nothing but a mouth. We would be blessed by remembering how to simply savour anticipation with our whole body again. To want and bask in wanting, without ever knowing when, if or how, we will have what we desire. No seduction in human history could ever have existed without our capability to access this state.

These strands of thought make me think of how the jasmine-scented anticipation of the Vasakkasajja nayika in ancient Indian miniatures, awaiting her lover in a moonlit tryst in the forest, no smartphones and no watches. They also evoke the visual cascade of yearning that MAR Chugtai’s muses cast like a spell upon the beholder, in the paintings I’ve attached at the very beginning and the very end of this post. These paintings of women absorbed in their hunger invite a poetic reverence of feminine desire, which is, as all women reading this must know, both delicate and feral at once.

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I am not a Matcha and Pilates girl. I am a pasta, sex and wine woman. I also like my nalli nihari with khamiri roti, stopping by the pani puri stall while on my 10k steps walk, and beers with biryani. You must keep this in mind throughout this article.

I find it increasingly eerie how a lot of predominantly white, western culture (originating and oriented) content in short form video across the internet - even by women, communal creatures by design if there were ever were, methinks - keeps pushing this idea that locking in by isolating yourself, staying in, avoiding people, avoiding dating, avoiding socialising, priding oneself on almost never going out for leisure, cutting yourself off from the social world (and calling it ‘boundaries’) and just focusing on doing the work by yourself is the only way your life is going to feel better. I come across women on social media flexing how they’re not talking to anybody, cutting themselves off from all men, only focused on exercising everyday and being at home alone with their work, and how this makes them more valuable, more desirable, a better woman than everyone else. Whether the work is staring up your own butthole for years and years in self analysis of your psychology, or it is your fitness or your career. Self awareness is our new addiction. Eternal self optimisation is the new drug. I do believe, of course, that the occasional journey into celibacy, distancing oneself to be by oneself, and seasons of being the nun in recluse are golden medicine. However, to me, this retreat is a way of nourishing oneself to re-enter life. To idealise remaining on the outside of human life by cutting oneself off from participating in the fruits and the filth of being in relationship with the world, with all the boredom, discomfort, friction and joys of it all, is juvenile. Not ‘healed.’

There is no such utopian destination called healed. You are allowed to be human, and still be loved, and still desire love, and still have a whole spectrum of experiences within holding this desire. I was conversing with a wise woman I adore only very recently (Naida, the creatrix of ) and enjoying an enriching exchange about the current obsession with virtue signalling oneself by claiming to have decentered men, while also forming clubs where women are Othering women and even witch hunting them by encouraging isolating those who they deem ‘male-centered’ on ambivalent, ever shifting, highly subjective and often highly wounded grounds. While so much of this discourse does come from a well intentioned, healthy place that has empowered so many women who needed it, there is also, as with all online waves, a lot of toxicity. So much of the decentering men discourse is to me dismissive, obsessive and essentially purity culture having hired a cool new GenZ social media team.

Returning to new age ideas of ‘healing’ and ‘self development,’ I so often sense and feel an undercurrent expression in almost all such content that paints the picture that you must exit participating in the spiralling, chaotic, unpredictable ups and downs of living among humans in a human world, go into a metaphorical closed room, ‘heal,’ and then re-emerge as more ‘high value’ in order to have the permission to continue life. You are allowed friendships and relationships only when you have ‘done the work.’

(By the way, for the love of fuck, does nobody see how strange it is to call certain men and women more high value than the others based on almost entirely Abrahamic-colonizer coded ideas of purity, Madonna-Whore binaries and an aesthetic of someone, often the externalised-internal gaze made God, sitting up there passing judgement of your Good Behaviour?)

There is almost always an insinuation, that this differentiating of self by sharp individualising and hyperfocusing on working on the self makes you Better Than Everyone Else. It makes you optimised, infallible, untouchable and insured against life. Insurance against heartbreak, or life leaving it’s lovebites and scratches on you. Much like how we like to fight against our natural ageing.

The more I look, the more I find that literally everyone who wishes to make money online is selling transformation. All of us, myself included, are always trying to buy the idea of transforming. There is nothing more seductive to sell, more quick to convert to cash in this numbed out, sensually disconnected, dopamine-addled, burnt out society than the idea of transformation. Try going out into the world, or into online ads, with this in mind and tell me if you see it too. We are all looking to be transformed, whether our physical selves or our state of mind or our concept of ourselves, and we are sold products that promise this offering at every corner.

Narratives such as, “How to level up so fast that it scares people” abound.

Level-up, disappear and return glowed up. Lock in, become unrecognizable, scare people with your transformation, almost all of the baits and catchphrases of modern day ideas of transformation sell the seductive idea of isolating and then returning more deserving of connection. There is that quintessentially American idea of competing with others and seeing oneself as a product that must differentiate itself from the rest of the batch, striving to alienate everyone else by becoming better than them. There is a strong suggestion of climbing upward in a linear trajectory of improvement. All of these concepts are inherently inhuman, un-woman (for woman will never not be cyclical and spiral, and always, always paradoxical) and disembodied from the friction, musk and sweat of the lived human experience.

They sound very sexy to aspire to, on paper, especially if your brain, your environment and your worldview is intrinsically American-patriarchal-capitalist, but these abstract visions of potential don’t necessarily hold up in the wilderness of an actual living, breathing life. In which there are people. In which you desire to have people who could catch you when you inevitably stumble.

I have seen point by point lists, from favourite podcasters even, that basically tell vulnerable listeners that being out in the world among people or showing up for any socialising is spiking your cortisol (and they have devices attached to their wrist that tell them this), hindering your progress and adding to your anxiety. It genuinely baffles me how little socialising it takes for so many people today, especially GenZs and the people of the western world, to feel so extremely overwhelmed by. It should be studied how fragile people are becoming about the slightest amounts of social exposure, and the friction that comes with.

I think all of the Indian weddings I have attended in my life have vaccinated me against this long, long ago.

Jokes aside, this content both directly and subliminally hyper-exaggerates the glory of staying in your own lane (by literally isolating yourself in many tiny ways) and promises that this - only this - is what will actually change your life. Sure, there are contexts and nuances in which we can cut the fat in our social lives. There are seasons where we all naturally go inward, without being need to be told to. There are phases in all of our creative lives where we may need to turn down an invitation to a dinner. A woman’s luteal and menstrual phase, also, is as though designed by Nature to inspire a gentle redirection of energy into a cocoon of slightly more introversion than usual to rest and restore.

But what I see most of this content online speak lands as a sinister undercurrent to me, every time, where people are being taught in many different words the very same message: stay in, don’t participate in the world, don’t talk to anyone who causes spice or friction and call it boundaries, and better themselves first before deserving to enjoy life, experience love and be some (inevitably flawed, human) version of happy?

I saw something like this preached by a woman’s life coach slash podcaster I have always quite admired, and it frankly scared me a little just how many of her pointers essentially pointed towards “Be alone, avoid relationships, avoid people, isolate in your room, your work and your gym, and fix yourself.”

I get how this is normal in her world and her culture, but as an Indian woman, I cannot relate at all. In my culture, to feel obligated towards others - our immediate family, our extended family, our friends, our cultural community as well as our social networks, is how you live your entire life. Of course this, too, can be messy and annoying sometimes. Many, many times. But we have always lived while carrying everyone else with us and being held by them, and that’s not always a unilaterally Bad Thing that interrupts our life. We show up to things, boring or annoying as they may be, because we do feel like we owe it to the relationships we have with people. We care to maintain connections and relationships, even if it comes with obligations and rituals and events we’d be bored out of our mind at with small talk. Even with acquaintances. When I first had an in-person sale for my small business, the friends of my family members who didn’t even know me also showed up to buy from me and cheer me. Why? Because I am the niece or the cousin of a friend who is important to them. So, they show up.

We show the fuck up, even with faraway connections that a Western, first world mind would never make sense of. In India, family and friends do not become irrelevant, faraway concepts that you only meet when your calendar allows, and pretend things are ‘Good’ because you’re an adult who is supposed to Do, Feel, Regulate and Manage Everything Themselves.

We could be 30, 40 or 50, and we still don’t let family - or anybody we love like family - figure anything out by themselves without stepping in. It is often meddlesome, but it is normal.

We also don’t have this “I will only talk to you if I can be my 20000% authentic self with you and bare my entire soul to you at 3am, and if we don’t have that, you are irrelevant and I cut you off” approach to our real life social network or our friendships, which is something I find quite amusing too. We tolerate, even embrace as natural, that every friend doesn’t have to be someone we ride or die with. We cannot, and do not have to, be able to talk about everything with every friend, and that friendship can still be nourishing and special. As long as they are good people who are not ourightly harming us, they are valuable enough to cherish in whatever capacity they are, and whatever capacity we have for them.

I have friends I wouldn’t necessarily cry for hours about my break up with, nor would I call them to bail me out of jail. But I can talk with them about art on our group chat and show up to go to heritage walks with them and share a lighthearted camarederie with them a few times every month, and that, too, is extremely precious, valuable, cherished, good and worthy of love, regard, effort and attention. I have friends I’d only talk about my art, my practice and my ceramics with. This doesn’t make anybody more or less important than the other. I can count on my immediate and extended family to have my back through almost anything, but I’d never reveal my intimate, romantic troubles to them unless I am literally in danger. It doesn’t make any friendship or relationship better. This is human life.

For very good reason, I have begun to see a lot of women wake up and question these narratives — and let’s face it, they especially come from a specific type of people from specific parts of the world — that you are supposed to pause living as a silly human being who needs an occasional coffee, drink or party, stop participating in the unproductive mundaneness of human life, optimise yourself into perfection, and then return as worthier and better, and proven more deserving of love.

You could be in the middle of an intense work day, and your friend will call you up crying, and you end up in one of your house’s together. You could have two jobs and be studying part-time, and still, on a random Wednesday morning, find the time to send a heartbroken friend four paragraph texts on why she needs to remember she deserves better than a man who claims to be too busy to offer her basic consideration. You could be tired, or really focused on a creative project, and still drive one hour on a random Sunday to a pot luck with people whom you adore, and none of you are going to talk about your traumas and your shadows, and it will still be beautiful to just be out in the world, pottering on about all sorts of funny and delightful things, and remembering how small our problems are when we leave our room and immerse ourselves, however briefly and casually, into lives and worlds outside our own self. You could hate to dance and still show up to a hundred dance practices for a friend’s wedding, because you know how much it means to her.

The overwhelming stream of Western, highly individualistic narratives on self development are not always as healthy as they posture themselves to be. Most of it is content for the sake of putting out content at an industrialised, sloppy, inhuman scale. Most of it is also selling a course that regurgitates what every other course and it’s sister is saying, and it is filling someone’s pockets through your vulnerability to slip into reactive, impulse purchases that hit a pain point.

Courses are great, and getting to make money online is wonderful. I love me an occasional course. My fine print is that I love investing in a course when it is from someone I have observed, studied, talked to, connected with and felt a resonance for months before buying said course.

I recently saw a workshop ad, in my city, about ‘how to be a villager,’ and it made me laugh that such a thing needs to exist in India, of all countries. A culture where we are enmeshed with community, and take for granted the presence of a village around everything we do, for better or for worse, as default. It amused me, and with a touch of sadness. Of course it was happening in a far-Left, GenZ space. Those of us who are millennials and elder come trained in the ways of the village since birth. But of course, the generation most fried by screens and social media from the youngest age, the one that spouts the most Therapyspeak while also having the lowest resilience to the human experience, the one that romanticises ghosting, cutting people off and avoiding every ounce of friction in human life through the boundaries bandaid, is being sold a disturbingly Americanesque workshop that needs to teach them to maintain a village.

I meet only too many people who sound like they are therapists themselves, floating outside both of our bodies and offering analyses, labels, accurate terminology and perfectly articulated intellectual discourses of everything happening inside themselves and between us. But feeling and emotion are absent. They are disembodied. They remain floating in ether, being absolutely right about everything, lacking the tenderness and the flesh necessary for human connection with heart, and then wonder why nobody understands them. It breaks my heart to see a woman suffer in this state who needs to throw ass and dance so much more than she needs another session. It breaks my heart to see a man, who needs to be held tightly at a bosom and cry so much more than he needs to be Right, suffer in glass cages he creates entirely by his own doing.

The way that I am seeing things, all of us could seriously use a lot more being outside with others, doing inconvenient and tiring and fun things. Feeling obligated towards others. Nourishing relationships with others, maintaining connections with others, and designing a life in which time with yourself is a delicious indulgence, solitude as cherished as being in company for the pursuit of lighthearted pleasures. Where being by yourself is not a ‘time out’ you’re punished to until you come back better. Being very frequently outside totally unproductively, and enjoying life with passers by who also happen to be outside.

We are not products that need to isolate ourselves, ‘work on’ ourselves all the time and prove ourselves better than everything else on the aisle. There is nobody we need to market ourselves as better consummables to.

Everybody needs to hear this, but I feel those of us from communal and collective cultures like India especially need to remind ourselves even more, as we find ourselves influenced more and more into behaviours that aren’t even our own. A degree of obligation towards human beings, a degree of tolerance and even dancing in the messy, unoptimised inconvenience of just being a person at the local tavern drinking mead and silly goosing with the villagers, is natural and inherent to a healthy, alive human life. It is essential.

We do not need to lock in and improve ourselves to be worthy of being loved.

If anything, we need to be getting outside and fucking around more. Even and especially in seasons of transformation. Even and especially in seasons where life feels like it has slipped out of our hands and we have no idea what the fuck we’re doing and where we’re heading. Even then, you need to actually have that day out with friends, or that night at a concert.

Something from my art journal,

“I have never, not even once, Done It All, All By Myself, in this life.

I am too human, woman, incorrigibly mycelial,

just by existing,

even if I am told (by the Americanization of Everything ever) to fight and wrestle that,

to “prove” that a thousand helping hands didn’t exist, both human and divine, wherever I’ve ever gone and whatever I’ve ever done.

I am built upon ancestral gifts, community, interconnection.

I’m supposed to be ashamed. lol.”

I am holding myself back from attaching a hundred favourite references that pair with this line of thought, but this particular piece is something I absolutely recommend.

Volupta

Life Does Not Taint You

“I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think. I look at the women in the streets of Saigon, and up-country. Some of them are very beautiful, very white, they take enormous care of their beauty here, especially up-country. They don’t do anything, just save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy, the long six-months’ leaves every three years, when at last they’ll be able to talk about what it’s like here, this peculiar colonial existence, the marvellous domestic service provided by the houseboys, the vegetation, the dances, the white villas, big enough to get lost in, occupied by officials in distant outposts. They wait, these women. They dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves. In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance, they already have huge wardrobes full of more dresses than they know what to do with, added together one by one like time, like the long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are deserted for a young maid who keeps her mouth shut. Ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves…

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a year ago · 65 likes · 4 comments · Naida

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~ The first sip of a chilled beer, and the giggle that pairs with the first sip of the second bottle of wine.

~ Tiptoeing about in tinkling anklets.

~ Listening to this specific version of Gymnopédie No.1 when the blades of grass are backlit by the 8am sun.

~ Spritzing slow distilled, natural jasmine mist from head to toe after a bath.

~ That very specific, tectonic moment when you suddenly discover that someone you’ve only just met is a little dark and twisted too, and your macabre is invited to reveal itself.

~ Reaching the stage where you can feel the ends of your hair tickling your ass and it’s like a goddess initiation.

~ Going to bed with vetiver essence in your cleavage.

~ A home with only and only dark mahogany, teak or cedar wood furniture.

~ When artists exist who still make beautiful songs that are 8-15 minutes long.

~ That moment 90 minutes into a solo dance session in your room where the serpentine hypnosis takes over.

~ When someone who fucking loves food writes about food, and you get to read it.

~ Good morning texts.

~ Workday done, hair wet from a bath, kitchen speaker connected, chopping board laid out, the glug-glug-glug of the first glass of wine being poured, your bestie texts “I have a story” and then proceeds to record a voice note for eight minutes.

~ A cat purring next to you.

~ Meeting a man who makes you feel like a purring cat.

~ The sight of a banana tree hanging lush, full and heavy with bounty.

~ The knowledge that mango trees, the traditional cultivar at least, bloom and bear fruit in generous overflow only every alternate summer, taking a year of creative rest to regain their energy between these fruiting spells. What majestic behaviour. Zero hustle.

~ The way bangles sound when a woman raises her hand to tuck a strand of hair behind the ear.

~ A massage booked without any reason to claim to have ‘earned’ it.

~ Indian sweetmeats dripping rosewater down the wrist as you bite into their soft flesh.

~ Gently, artistically spreading that final layer of caramelised onions on a two hour biryani recipe that feels like an artist completing her motherpiece.

~ Discovering a cafe where people keep really quiet, the music is soft and absolutely nobody plays EDM.

~ When a man does exactly what he said he would do, when he said he would do it, without needing a single reminder, and your heart is suddenly overflowing like the massive chocolate fountain at a bougie breakfast buffet.

~ Drinking the darkest, pepperiest rasam with obscene amounts of tamarind.

~ Hissing for no reason. As an expression of glee.

~ When you go deep into the rabbithole of the history of courtesans and seductresses, and realise that the absolutely terrifying sway that the feminine holds over the psyche of the world explains… everything.

~ Refilling a fountain pen and it drips a wayward spot onto the page.

~ When a woman walks into a room in a fitted dress with that gentle Venusian fupa swell and I forget to breathe a little bit.

~ Smokey, dimly lit spaces when the smoke comes from anything but cigarettes.

~ Painting late into the night.

~ Writing at 4am.

~ Reading Diane Ackerman’s ‘A Natural History of The Senses.’

~ The peak of women ululating at a belly dance hafla, and at a goddess shrine.

~ Doing anything for two hours straight with your phone locked away. Reading. Moving. Sleeping. Cooking. Anything.

~ Stilettos clicking against the floor.

~ Wearing pearls with a tshirt, pearls with a sari, pearls with a silk dress, and most importantly with nothing.

~ Reading in bed at night after a salt soak.

~ Making a bath playlist.

~ Being made a bath playlist for.

~ Baths.

~ Thunderstorms that can be felt in the floors and walls.

~ How it feels to love the way your own sweat smells. How it feels to fall in love with how your lover’s sweat smells.

~ Clicking nudes all the time and sending them to nobody, ever.

~ The phrase “I am exactly who I think I am.”

~ Being a cunt more often than necessary.

~ Chocolate truffles from La Patisserie at the Taj.

~ Chiffon sarees.

~ Edging with doing the thing that feels like it’s too much.

~ Cathartic crying to the most heart wrenching qawwalis.

~ Reaching for someone’s hand when you can tell they’re nervous around you and relishing in what that does to them.

~ Encountering someone that has you becoming the nervous one, for a change.

~ Lipstick marks on letters and perfume in envelopes.

~ “xxxxx credited to your account”

~ Curly hair.

~ Women who wear way too much jewellery all at once. Being. Beholding.

~ Being inappropriately tipsy for the daytime at Mondegar on a Sunday.

~ Encountering mangoes, snakes and pomegranates in art and sculpture.

~ The high tide ocean under a full moon.

~ Watching a man eat a mango as a filter and a test.

~ Whatever is going on here —

The word ‘authentic’ has become quite icky for me to use lately, given my overexposure to it in pop-therapy-spirituality on social media. What even is an authentic self? There is such a thing as a true desire for minimalism or simplicity that is self-sourced and self-serving, and genuinely reflects what feels right for a woman in one season of life, and then there is a far more insidious version that is so subtle that it feels like it’s ‘authentic,’ but it isn’t. It is a learned performance that many, many women are muzzled with. It plays out when one thinks that minimalism makes one more spiritual and better than everyone else, or that dressing ‘simply’ makes one ‘not like the (evil, high maintenance) other girls.’ Even a grown up adult woman can still fall prey to operating under these spells, even though she’d never like to admit it. I am the evil, high maintenance, luxury-loving, make up wearing, dressed up ‘other girls’ myself, btw, and the ways I’ve seen this friction and tension towards woman who do enjoy glamour come up in my encounters with the world all my life ranges from hilarious to ridiculous.

It comes from our conditioning to strive to be the Good Girl to be liked, to be safe, to be desired, to be applauded — by sawing off our edges and taking off our jewels, until we are easily digested and diluted to baseline conformity. Diluting our expression, in words, in posts, in outfits, in everything, so we won’t invite the risk of a reaction that we will have to soothe and harmonize, for we have adopted this lifelong responsibility to ‘manage’ the discomfort of everyone and their aunt. The real feminine spiritual experience opens up for so many of us the day we stop clutching our new agey maalas as we demonize fashion and make up, and start enjoying adornment as creative expression in our own ways again.

A lifetime of wounds, jabs, memories and experiences, that come from our family, our childhood, our friends, some men we meet, all of it run the shadow show in our heads as we adorn ourselves at our dresser everyday, and negotiate how much of ourselves is really ‘allowed’ to be expressed in our appearance.

Fashion is the most intimate product design there is. Fashion is like our first house in astrology. Your rising isn’t just your ‘mask,’ as reductive pop astrology would like you to believe. Your outfits and your enjoyment of playing with the details of your external appearance isn’t just ‘superficial’ materialism, as those threatened by your radiance would like you to believe. Try as we may to trivialise these domains by deeming it as ‘fluff,’ (because of course something of special significance to the feminine is dismissed as fluff) or pretend to be ‘above’ it, adornment will never cease to be as significant a form of personal and cultural expression in this world as it always has been.

So many of us have had this canon event experience of allowing the currents of good old fashioned Masculine Transcendental Dudebro Spirituality™ to convince us that we’re superficial bad girls for caring about dressing up or enjoying adornment. It has been cast as a ‘guilty’ pleasure in so many parts of the modern day spiritual slash wellness world that perform moral superiority while remaining untouched by even the slightest true reverence for the feminine. Fashion is materialistic, evil, mad, bad, wrong. A sin, not just in excess, but almost instantaneously. You can’t be ‘spiritual’ and have an interest in fashion. And if it isn’t that, it’s how so many women have had this uniform collective experience of growing up being subtly trained into operating as though an enjoyment of creative self expression through fashion is a crime against the chill, low maintenance lil bro you were supposed to cosplay to keep some guy you’re dating comfortable.

Fashion and psychology are sneaky lovers that keep their nights together a secret. As a woman, your relationship to fashion and adornment will always reflect how safe you’ve felt - mentally, emotionally, spiritually - to be a woman in this world.

So many women dress less on purpose to pander to the mean external gaze they are bracing against before stepping out. To not intimidate. To not ruffle feathers. To not accidentally offend someone (by being too gorgeous and shining too fully). This especially manifests as a learned response when you have been shamed for shining very early on. So many mainstream narratives that deem for us what looking and acting ‘professional’ means are just a cushy, thinly veiled way to say, “act like a little man, if you’d like to be taken seriously.”

All of our behaviours with dressing are a game of perception, seduction and persuasion. Personal styling is strategic image management, at all times. Sometimes, choosing ‘less’ yields well in certain contexts. It is worth investigating if this move you make comes from intelligence, or guilt. If you’re a woman, nine times out of ten, you’re guilty. We are all trained to make ourselves smaller and smaller, all the time. We’re guilty and moving in shame about things we haven’t yet done, every week. Like Sade beautifully crooned in one of my favourite songs, '“I’m crying everyone’s tears. I have already paid for all my future sins.” That’s womanhood for most of us on a random Tuesday afternoon.

The way that you dress and adorn yourself when you enter a room is a gift to the world. It is an offering of beauty and generosity and creative-generative-yumminess to every space you inhabit. Of course, you’ll receive threatened projections all the time for it. One merely has to exist as a woman to receive those every week, anyway. You might as well be dripped out in as many pearls as you desire, when you’ve reached the age where you already know that that’s a given.

A woman could be in an abaya, head to toe, and post a video on YouTube teaching a recipe of a milkshake, and trigger hundreds. Woman, the feminine essence, is inherently triggering, activating, arousing, and this will never change. She unfortunately begins to believe she must ‘manage’ this effect she has and how she is received, when it will fundamentally never be in her control. She inspires a stirring, merely by existing. As a woman, many of us have had this lifelong hurt where we feel that we could speak the exact thing a man speaks, or do the very things man does, and while he is celebrated for wielding his intelligence and his truth like a sword cutting through the fog, we are more often than not villainised for speaking the very same truths. When we do it, knowingly or unknowingly, suddenly four people are crying and twenty are hurt, and it’s our fault we didn’t harmonize, soothe and take care of every emotion in the the room well enough, like an orchestra conductor. You could soften, soften and soften to within an inch of your life, and yet, receiving anything from a woman that feels like rejection, disapproval or disagreement somehow burns and triggers twice as much. We diminish ourselves from being seen and being heard, from taking up space, because it is difficult for us to accept the inevitability that we will always trigger people a lot more than we’d like to, and very often unfairly, simply by being. One has to walk the earth as woman to understand this. I encounter women through my work as a designer over and over again, for whom this phenomenon begins to express itself through shame and shunning transferred onto their secret desires with adornment, fashion and what they wish they were allowed to dress up like.

To be as dressed up, bejewelled, perfumed, glossy, sparkly, painted, as you fancy, is a gift to the world. The way you dress is a gift to life itself. It’s not your problem that every single person in the room may not have the manners, the taste, or the inclination to receive this gift.

Your being well dressed is a generosity to so many who behold you. Or even to just one person who was meant to be filled up and delighted by the sight of you. Who was meant to feel something, remember something, to be moved and changed by the sight of you that day, in your full potency. You unlock things in people without ever knowing that you do. You are like the sign they were meant to see, when you’re fully expressed in your you-ness.

I have, so many times, passed by women who had me in awe with the way they wore everything they wore. This wasn’t about conventional beauty, youth, or expensive luxury items. It was their juice, their unique self expression. It was their energy, their vibe, their whims, their fancies, their fantasies, expressed through details of their personal style, as though their entire being is a living, breathing, moving journal that speaks about what’s in their heart. So many times in this life, I haven’t had the opportunity, the time or the courage to go up to a woman and compliment her look.

But, without words, just like a work of art does, the spectacle of her has moved me and inspired reflections within me that stay on my mind for days after. I was the audience that was fated to be moved by the sight of these women choosing to be fully themselves, unapologetically embodying their own whimsy. It’s the exact same thing as how you sometimes encounter a painting, a lyric in a song, a few sentences of writing or a photograph that speaks so deeply to you and only you, and it’s like you were meant to receive that message at that moment in time. Walking by a woman dressed a certain way that drips with her heart, soul and spirit, does the exact same thing.

You can feel it when someone’s outfit comes from their own inner wellspring, from the specific concoction of spices that only their brain is. This does not mean loud, performative quirk. This does not mean flashy, big, or Instagrammy. I find it tiresome how so much fashion is now made with a picture in a grid in mind, not a living, breathing, moving body. Celebrity fashion moments seem to exist for the feed, not to centre and elevate the woman who wears it, as it once did. Coco Chanel’s philosophy was to design for the woman in the dress. If the dress consumes the woman, if you look at the dress instead of the woman, that’s a failure.

When I say ‘unapologetic,’ I speak of undiluted expression that comes from their own essence, whether that be eccentric or quiet or soft or sexy or a myriad other flavours. You can feel it. It’s palpably different from the tap water nothingness of dressing for being ‘correct’ about trends, or dressing in fear of what is ‘acceptable.’ It’s the difference between Madagascar bourbon vanilla bean ice cream and synthetic syrup that imitates the real thing. It’s the difference between freshly churned artisanal full fat butter melting on sourdough, and microwave popcorn margarine.

The way that you dress is an offering to the goddess, and an invitation for her to express herself through you in this world, first and foremost. Your adornment is between you, you and the goddess. You need to stop being apologetic about it. You need to stop all this censoring and self-neutering, for fuck’s sake.

What I wore to the temple recently. <3

Gift yourself, and the world, one day this week where you wear whatever you want to wear. As if managing others emotions about it was simply not your problem.

Love and adoration,

O

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One. As Venus day artist date, I took myself to a Mozart & Chopin piano evening at a beautiful, beautiful heritage church. I also ended up coercing my parents into coming with me, although I love a solo date, because I had a feeling that it’s going to be so overwhelmingly fun that I’ll miss them and wish they were there the whole time. This is just the kind of thing they would adore, and that they need a neat shot of in their excessively routined lives. I was right. To be together with people and yet devoid of overhead lighting, noise and chatter is a rare experience. To be in a place with warm, amber candlelight, stained glass and that sparkling feeling of being enveloped in reverence, beauty and majesty that only a heritage site can provide. It was like being soothed from the noise of urban living and swelling to the highest tide of unhurried arousal, all at once. The pianist was wonderful. I was enraptured by him. I will avoid going into the explicit details of that. But I will share something he spoke of between one of these pieces that I kept thinking about the entire night, between sleep and wakefulness.

He played a piece by Chopin called ‘Raindrops,’ that was said to be composed during a long, long thunderstorm. Apparently, Chopin never liked for his music to be given nicknames, titles and labels of this kind, and most of this nomenclature was actually the work of writers who wrote about him. Chopin desired for his music to be experienced simply and purely as music, in it’s untainted abstract form, without attaching words in an instructional pointing of ‘this is what it means’ to it. He felt that this kind of ‘marketing’ by explaining a concept with words reduced the expression of his songs, and flattened what he felt while composing them and wished for others to feel too. As a designer, and even more importantly, a designer with an artist heart, I immediately felt my hand touching my heart in the sweet relief of hearing this feeling being named by one of my most favourite composers.

Music can be, indeed, the most abstract, cerebral and ethereal of all sensual experiences, while also something that we don’t have to understand or learn to be moved by. It deepens and thickens the stew of presence, of existence, of every sensual experience it accompanies. It is more out of tangible ‘touch’ with us, in a way, than any other sensorial entity we experience, and yet as intimate as a language we have known before language, so easy to be completely consumed by. That is perhaps why music and sound is almost essential to cultivating out of body experiences.

Only a day before this evening, I stumbled into an interesting conversation about how fashion brands are going so overboard writing fantastical fluff and slop as ‘story’ to each of their products that there is a burnout and numbness in the minds of the audiences consuming these brands online. People have begun to desire seeing something - a work of art, a garment, a creation - and just feeling the pulse of it, without being drowned in keyword-laden word vomit. Without being told of the quiet ache, quiet power, quiet comfort, quiet whateverthefuckChatGPTslop of it. Actual quiet that doesn’t announce it’s quietness. The seductive, sexy mystery of something felt without being instructed.

In a world of “Here’s five ways you should be existing,” the yearning for having space and silence to be trusted with being able to feel something unspoken makes complete sense. While I am a woman of many words and 15 minute voice notes, and I love writing about the things I create from my heart, and I write love letters that go on for four pages, I felt it too.

I have so often yearned to design sarees that are just beautiful sarees. No concept, no reasoning, no ‘story’ about how they’re saving the world. A beautiful drape to adorn in, for the sake of a beautiful drape to adorn in. To simply wear and feel the way it makes you feel.

I infuse something glowing and golden into what I created, and you feel that infusion when you experience my creation, and we speak nothing of it. I love when a man makes me feel that way, I love the unspoken exchanges that happen so generatively and generously in the presence of a lover, an almost lover even. And, yet, I had long forgotten how sexy it can be to allow myself to have this in my autonomous creative process. The way we love, the way we make love and the way we show up to our creative practice all mirror each other.

You may laugh, but I have sometimes restrained myself from making a painting that I really feel like making, because I don’t understand what meaning to assign to it. I can’t feel a concept, a story, a why. I can’t think of a cohesive collection with a defined moodboard to make it a part of. This is the curse of a formal design school training, lol, where every creative urge had to be justified with concept notes and mind maps. Where you need to market in lowest common denominator depth and make press releases about what it means. Where you need to murder all of the sexy, mysterious whispers of the thing you created, and make an explicit show and tell unpacking of it to get views on Reels. No strip tease. Just a post mortem.

Just making something for the fuck of it because you feel like, letting it take on a life of it’s own, letting it become what it wants to become and letting it tell you about itself using no words whatsoever was something we rarely had the space to do when we were learning to be commercially successful. And something that, I believe, is necessary medicine for creatives. Something that even consumers and audiences are now thirsting for. It moved me deeply, to feel so seen by something Chopin felt in the 19th century.

Like pure emotions, music surges and sighs, rampages or grows quiet, and, in that sense, it behaves so much like our emotions that it seems often to symbolize them, to mirror them, to communicate them to others, and thus frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of words. A musical passage can make us cry, or send our blood pressures soaring. Asked to define the feeling, we say something vague: It made me sad. Or: It thrilled me. Not all composers care for listeners to find such a clear program in their work, but people get so frustrated by the abstractions of music they try to elicit from it landscapes of emotions and events.

- Diane Ackerman, in the chapter ‘Music and Emotion,’ in her lush book: A Natural History of The Senses.

Secondly. I returned to my weekend Pahari art lectures, an invigorating experience with a wonderful teacher and group of aesthetes that I’ve basked in many a times since the past year. This nayika here is forlorn and wistful as she yearns for her lover who is abroad. A problem of womankind that, I am embarrassed to report, remains stubbornly relevant and evergreen, and needs no museum to aid it’s conservation. I remember texting a friend during this lecture who was also in the Zoom class, “We could be skimpily dressed in a soft drape, bejewelled, bangled and lounging about melancholically with our titties out the next time we’re doing that? Why haven’t we been doing this already?” One learns the most unexpected, out-of-syllabus lessons where one least expects it. If you let it, history teaches you to be ceremonial, enchanting and sexy about your misplaced and unnecessary delulu yearnings. No art has ever come from being logical, feeling only as much as necessary and wearing pants about stuff.

Three. I had a perfectly sexy lunch with a very boring arabiatta pasta that taught me that nobody’s got the sauce I’ve got. A friend who went to Cordon Bleu taught me that a good homemade red pasta sauce needs no onions. Just garlic, olive oil, freshly blended tomatoes no store bought purée, some herbs, some freshly torn basil, no overcooking, no overthinking. Simple, succinct and sexy. I’ve been reading Betsy Prioleau’s ‘Seductresses,’ and I cannot recommend it enough. Don’t rush through it to complete your TBR list. Really savour it, and drop all else for it. It’s a life changing, spicy, saucy read.

Four. I went for a walk in the woods with with the wonderful Abhishek Khan of Mumbai Vann, who has such an inimitable way of crafting a storytelling experience and plant propaganda. One of my favourite memories from this forest bathing was a little piece of lore - It is air that becomes wood. Plants take in carbon dioxide, and break that down. The oxygen is gifting us life, the carbon makes timber. All of our ‘sturdy’ surfaces, the scaffolding of human life that so much of our society relies on, essentially comes from air. Everything is alchemy.

I felt so excited to see the biggest, most beautiful banana tree I’ve ever seen. Something about banana trees deeply turn me on. They feel like they transfer so much fizz, abundance, overflow and fecundity to me via osmosis, just by existing. I want to have a home with a private banana grove backyard of my own one day, and have secret lover trysts inside it but with my husband. You’ve got to be a very specific kind of unhinged woman to understand.

Lastly, I rejoined belly dance, and fully received how it expanded my sense of how beautiful this life and this world actually still is, all over again. To simply be in a beautiful, beautiful environment with the perfect colours, textures and glamorous chandeliers heals and soothes so much. I go deep into the medicine of sensual dance in this piece.

You might hear from me with another of these lists of beautiful things next week. Paying attention to and celebrating the beauty in my life is my new fixation, religion, obsession, etc.

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Love,

O

Two fun facts: I hate the gym lol, and a Vedic astrologer reading my kundli recently predicted that my future husband is going to be a total gym bro. Good luck to him finding me because… it’s not going to be at a gym.

I’ve returned to dancing in women-only spaces over and over again all my life. When I rejoined dance classes recently, for the first time since a minor fracture healed, I re-experienced after so long how genuinely magical it is to be in a room full of women. It’s transformative, and it’s got nothing to do with just the ‘techniques.’ It’s about the receiving rather than ‘getting’ something right. And what you receive emotionally, spiritually and mentally goes way beyond the dance we engage in.

To sit in circle with women, sharing, exploring your bodies, moving your hips together.

Not sucking your belly in, in fact doing the far opposite of that.

Leading with the womb, the hips and their subtle magic.

It’s a mind altered trip. One hour feels like three.

It feels like lapping up water at a chilled pond like a hot, thirsty animal after far too long at tables where you’ve been involuntarily signed up to perform how perfect, cool, cerebrally gigantic and mainstream-friendly ‘accomplished’ you are.

To engage earnestly and uncomfortably in a sensual dance form in a room full of women while also being at different levels of relationship to dance, different shapes, sizes, ages, life stages and physical abilities, is inherently so vulnerable an experience.

To be awkward and imperfect together with women in the flesh feels exactly like eating a well buttered toast and a well-rounded, strong, perfectly fucking sweet coffee all without a single calculation after you’ve finally broken up with ‘dieting’ culture.

I’ve seen moments in real life at social events like weddings and parties where women rush to hide other women’s bellies, should they dare to peek out, alerting them of the slip like it’s some embarassing vulgarity to cover up. Like that’s supposed to be ‘help.’ Something about this tic doesn’t feel “girl’s girl” to me as much as it feels like projecting the way you were taught to hate your own body onto others. The casual comments I hear plus sized women speaking to each other in break my heart. We have so deeply normalized making a self deprecating culture around our bodies just being womanly bodies the way they were supposed to be.

I’ve also been in rooms, friendships and romantic relationships where not having a single muscle in your abdomen clenched, where being a soft, loose, open, warm, enveloping woman with her belly exhaled and allowed to be a belly (instead of a flatscreen TV) is how you are loved. How you are instructed to be, even. I will always recommend the latter.

To hear the stories of women, the “why” behind their exploring a dance form, the little breadcrumbs that led them to this room, the obvious desire for more life and more aliveness that throbs inside all of us wildly different women, to sense how we are all so diverse and yet feel that exact same ineffable pull towards the arts, the ways and the mysteries of the goddess, it makes my whole heart explode each time.

I’ve been in such rooms over and over again for long enough, and yet it never stops hitting with the same intoxicating, voluptuous potency.

If you have access to a space where women come together in this way —in any way— but especially a form of movement that is inherently sensual and a deeply feminine domain, especially something that has a touch of ‘taboo’ to it and tickles places where we store shame, you must inconvenience yourself to your very limits to just go be there.

I always sense this very specific shedding of veils and taking off of masks only and only in spaces like belly dance, pole dance, chair and floor work sensual sessions, and such. There’s something especially charged about these rooms. You rediscover that women in this real, earthly, fleshly world are just like you. Their skin has texture, their form has delicious rolls, their hair is never ‘behaving,’ their stomach looks different every day, their skin changes throughout the month, they have scars and white tiger stripes from where life touched, kissed and expanded them, and their nail paint is chipped too. And they are so deeply, viscerally sexy, each one of them, when they’re just fully present in their bodies, doing nothing ‘right.’ Just surrendering to the erotic embarrassment and embodiment of being seen by others trying something new. They have voltage, life force and electricity in their womanness that no polished, glamorous picture on your feed that you’re comparing yourself to will ever have. Just being in the presence of this, as a woman, deeply changes you from inside out.

I saw a girl in my dance class this morning. She had a face full of acne scars, just like I sometimes do. She smiled a lot, and she laughed a lot. She had defined her almond Indian eyes with kohl, and her full, chubby lips with a touch of ruby red gloss. She changed out of her kurti into workout shorts and a tshirt, and she flipped her fluffy, frizzy hair as she walked by me. I had never yet known that acne scars and fluffy, frizzy hair could be so beautiful, and so fucking hot.

- in ‘beauty,’ a piece of poetic prose that ruminates on what beauty really is, and one that I am almost always thinking about.

To be a woman in itself is a trip, you have a lifelong membership to liminal spaces and delicious edges of consciousness without partaking a single substance.

Those who have created and birthed life know this too well.

For those of us who haven’t… Just experience giving deep presence and meditative attention to the states you enter during your period with all tech unplugged one time, and you’ll know. Just start dancing the sexy dances, and you’ll know. Just start being around healthy, loving, soft, emotional, expressive women out in the world who are brave enough to be vulnerable (and be one yourself), and you’ll know. Just start shimmying out of strict regimes and rigid routines all the time, and you’ll slip into a whole different dimension that was waiting for you all along.

I am ‘wasting time’ prioritising home cooked food more than ever. I am becoming softer and softer and yet softer, in spite every memory that claims to be evidence against doing so. I’m sharpening my daggers, I’m making my own idli batter. I am embarrassingly tender. I am uncomfortably earnest. I am putting butter and honey on everything and everyone. I am juicing the juice. I am creating my whole world and designing every detail about my life like someone who savours figs with excruciating devotion. I am drinking broth.

I am starting projects with delusional audacity. I am basking in leisure like a lioness who doesn’t concern herself with proving how she earned it. I’m pretending that everything I touch turns to gold every time I start new work. I am doing things 70-80% Good instead of being trapped in pedantic preparation for four centuries, and letting that be. I am making messy, imperfect action sexy again.

I am being sensual in ways that haven’t even been comprehended before. I am becoming the evil mothermind behind a delicious, fully alive life. I am turning ferally Venusian. I am doing something cringe every single day. I am loving like Gomez and being loved like Morticia. I am being uncool and romantic and silly and dark and villainous and unhinged and inconvenient, in every act of creation and every act of love. I’m eating the six pomegranate seeds and licking fingers as I do.

I’m writing handwritten letters. I’m sending my girlfriends home cooked food and triple texts. I’m getting excited about floral pink nighties and silk robes and reading in bed at night. I’m lighting candles, and bothering to do as much as I can for the people I choose to love and letting people get bothered to show up for me. I am simping and getting simped about. I am girlblogging and I am reading spicy fiction and I am making affogatos. That’s it.

I was recently listening in to one of the artists who inspires me the most, Jessica Durrant, talk about an artist that inspires her. This moment put words to something I’ve always felt and known intimately, but never described. She said, “When I see François Berthoud’s work, I can hear music playing.” An evening ago, I swooned at something in a sumptuous, magical novel. It was a sentence that described turmeric as ‘the colour of a conch-shell sound.’ In similar vein of found treasures, I also stumbled upon and blushed at a question— “Does your tongue taste like the velvet of your voice sounds?”

Sometime recently, I was in reverie as I took a bath, a state I almost always inhabit during time spent in water and adornment. I was daydreaming softly about why exactly I love some songs. I wondered, soaked in my cocoon of jasmine oil and vetiver incense smoke, what is the exact quality to some music that inspires the all-or-nothing, instantaneous way I bond with some songs, intensely or not at all?

If and when I love a song, I love it wholly, all-consumingly or nothing. I never, ever stop listening to it for years and years. I’ve never yet had a favourite song that I stopped listening to from overexposure, or got bored of. For the first few weeks, I’ll listen to it incessantly in a loop, a menace to the loud, argumentative family with a screaming banshee for a child whose apartment window opens right next to where my bath speaker sits. I usually fall in love with a song immediately, all in. I’ve never yet had a song grow on me slowly.

What makes me attach to only a select few songs in the specific way that I have all my life? I think about every song I’ve ever loved. The answer seems to lie not in merely a sonic, technical quality but in a different kind of sensorial, evocative quality altogether. I’ve always fallen in love with songs that have a way of inviting in a sense that isn’t even involved in the act of listening. It’s never just that it sounds appealing, it’s always that it feels like it’s being received in a sense outside of both ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’ altogether.

PS: I’ve linked every song I refer to below at the end of this post.

I loved Sadeness by Enigma all through my childhood from listening to my dad play it around the house, and I replay it to this date, because that song is to me the only way that sparkling sounds.

I once met another song I love, one that moves within my hips like a velvet serpent, and it began to live under my skin from that very first spellbound listen where it invited itself into me.

I love a particular Indian fusion trance track for being my first experience of how right it feels in some kind of ancient cellular memory when the sitar trickles down your spine.

The Czech National Symphony Orchestra’s version of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No 1 is to me exactly the breathing pattern of sitting across someone and falling in love slowly, and then all at once, like John Green famously said. It rises and falls like the heartbeat that knows it’s far too soon and it’s far too late.

The way the piano dances when Riders On The Storm by The Doors begins is a microdose of being gently drenched in the rain every time, and especially during the first shower of the year.

I reminisce sometimes about my first time listening to a beautiful love song, sung and composed by a beautiful musician who happened to be my lover back then, that gave me an out of body experience of awe and rapture so intense that not a single word of his ever poetic lyrics even registered to me at the time. That’s saying a lot, as perhaps the most lyrics-oriented woman there exists.

Everything from June Freedom tastes like a very, very boozy piña colada, french fries, wet skin and coconut slivers dipped in whipped cream, eaten off sweet smiles and big salty hands that taste like the sea breeze.

Everything I’ve ever loved from Naïka feels like candlelight, silk slip dresses, lipstick marks in every kind of red, chili-infused honey and being in love. It’s feasting upon pomegranates, mangoes, guavas, peaches, grapefruits and mandarins with absolutely no cutlery. I love how she keeps referencing to a love that makes her “go dumb.” Only the real lovergirls get it.

I guard every favourite Hozier song with the preciousness of a dark secret, I never allow them to become an ‘our song’ with anybody. I tend to avoid even sharing in detail with anybody, the things I’ve felt about his music. Each one makes me want to hold a book of his songs in my hands published like a manuscript of poems, something to read and re-read. A heavily, ornately illustrated hardcover that smells like a library, mold and moisture and wood.

I have this thing where I can never listen to a song again when it feels ruined by association with or memories attached to someone I don’t speak to anymore, and my secrecy with sharing my Hozier and Hozier-adjacent side whenever I discuss music with someone new is because it’s sacred territory. It almost feels intrusive to let anybody in to that room in the mansion of playlists that makes me.

Wicked Game by Chris Isaak is December. I’ve always had very particular songs that are just December, and I’ve always wondered if anyone else has December songs. Every year that goes by in my life somehow feels like “This is the most beautiful December I’ve ever had.” Not somehow. I make it so. Wicked Game is a portal to drinking the most perfect Old Fashioned I’ve ever tasted, under a chilly, starry open sky overlooking the Gateway of India seaface. My tipsy, red stiletto heels are clicking on the cobblestone, late into the night, later than I ever get to be out, and I’m feeling the safest and vastest I’ve ever felt because of who I had by my side.

Almost all of my dad’s favourites from the 80s feel passed down to me in the same flavour as they exist within him - the innocence, optimism and incandescent delight of young love that he experienced them in. Like feeling radiant in the most dimly lit restaurants, like risking it all with your heart is the most natural and human and alive thing to ever do, so natural you can’t help but sing and dance about it.

It appears to be a mere metaphor used to elevate a description, but it isn’t just decorative fluff. Even though the feeling of seeing a song, tasting a painting, hearing a photograph or smelling a word isn’t something that’s rationally, tangibly occurring, it’s still happening. There’s something special to how my most treasured sensual experiences - a favourite painting, song, sentence, anything - is so often one that tickled an aliveness, a sensation of knowing, in a different sense receptor altogether from the one it was meant to be received in. Maybe that’s the juice, that’s why it lands the way it does. Invoking another sensorial dimension altogether invites and cultivates true enchantment.

I’ve read sentences that felt like silk, I’ve written letters that caressed. I’ve looked across a room at someone in a fleeting, shy glance and felt the red thread of fate tugged taut and electric, straight from my heart.

The most beautiful thing about the unravelling of some experiences is everything but the obvious. Much like women, their full blossoming gently requires to be felt, not understood.

Why start a business when it will increase your stress exponentially?

Why birth a child when you won’t sleep well again for years?

Why become a writer when you could use all that time for much more productive things?

Why fall in love when that person might just break your heart clean in half?

Because that is the point of being alive.

This is what life is.

- , in her beautiful piece — ‘to be a mountain’

List of songs:

Sadeness by Enigma

Gymnopédie No 1

Riders On The Storm by The Doors

June Freedom

Wicked Game

Turns out that if you grew up a “I cannot fully rest and relax in my body and in my home until I energetically scan for tension, ensure that everyone else in the house is also relaxed and in a good mood, and I sense no subtle undercurrent of the next volatile outburst brewing anywhere” — You grow up into a “I cannot sit down to write/paint/create anything until I have cleaned my entire desk, cleaned my room, also cleaned five other areas of the house, folded every piece of laundry, checked in on this and that person and meal prepped for the next three days.”

This is the block for almost every creative woman alive. To me, every woman alive is a creative woman. Professional or not? Irrelevant. Creative expression is necessary medicine for the feminine body and spirit, and the most illness among women comes from the thwarting and choking of creative living due to an excessive amount of perfecting the environment instead of making the art.

Make your art. Make your art and endure the discomfort of sometimes choosing to not soothe, serve and manage the rest of your entire world into order before feeling allowed to make art. You cannot always ‘control’ your life into allowing you to be creative. Sometimes, you just be creative, and the rest of life rearranges itself. Your creative expression is not an indulgence, nor a reward. It is a necessity. Whether or not it is monetised is truly, deeply irrelevant to how much it deserves you sometimes showing up with an unmade bed and an unplanned dinner that you’re ignoring for just a moment.

“I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know it's a funny thing about housecleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she "should" be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”

―Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

A memorable piece of writing I once experienced referenced this, and I’m going to leave you with a tiny excerpt from it.

Beauty is felt. Beauty is in how there exist parts of this world where you can get yourself chunks of raw honey to suck from. Beauty is ancient, it’s what we are all alive for. Beauty is tasted in how I didn’t want to clean my entire room before sitting down to write all of this, because Clarissa Pinkola Estés once wrote the book she did, and everything I want to say about beauty right now was burning under my skin. I shove all the clothes strewn across my bed to a pile in the side, and I sit down at my desk. I change out of my trackpants and tshirt, only two seconds after I wore it, and wear instead a silk Chantilly lace slip and robe, lavender just like Anaïs Nin’s walls. The very set I splurged a mini fortune on that evening at the lingerie store, the one I walked into in red stilettos, perfectly winged eyes, blow dried hair and held back tears of rage. -

Sandalwood Scented Skin

beauty

Everytime I say “beauty,” and I say that word a lot, for it is central to my life, I feel compelled to open with a disclaimer. I feel terribly sad that this is a thing. Here’s how goes my broken tape recorder…

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a year ago · 120 likes · 11 comments · an enchantress

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How often do you dance, by yourself? Not in structure, in choreography, in productivity, in Good Girl workouts, in achievement-oriented endeavours, although all of that is amazing.

How often do you dance for pleasure, to songs you’d not tell anyone you even have saved?

How often do you relish the sight of yourself dancing? How often do you dance naked? How often do you also dance to just feel how it feels, with all the mirrors blocked out, without ‘watching’ yourself, too?

How often do you dare enjoy yourself - your energy, your beauty, your sensuality, your big-ness, your you-ness - in front of others, in dancing and not performing, in a room where everyone else is dancing too? How often do you reframe to tap into ‘I wonder if they can handle me’ over ‘Will they like me?’

The act of dancing brings us in kissing distance with a shadow that almost every woman grew up with. The feminine essence yearns to be seen, cherished, admired and adored, it’s like oxygen to us energetically, and yet, to let ourselves ‘perform’ in any way often lands like red hot shame.

Most women, in a class full of women, or even in a room with nobody but themselves, are more than likely to always stay loyal to the star chokehold of our lives - I’m afraid of looking like a whore.

If I dare to do the sexy move and enjoy it, I will be a whore who *gasp* wants attention. Oh, to want attention. The penultimate of all feminine crimes. A slut, a bad girl, a bad mother, a bad daughter. I will be chased with pitchforks, burnt at the stake. I will malign my entire family. I will no longer be worthy of love. I will no longer be respectable. I will deserve any harm done to me. I will deserve to be abandoned and exiled by everyone who loves me if I allow myself to dare to enjoy being sexy, sensual, embodied, seductive to life itself. I am playing with fire. I am either sacred or profane, I am either sinful or Good.

It sounds so extreme, maybe even laughable, when I speak out loud the above words that form the stream of consciousness in most women’s minds when we encounter moving our bodies in ways deemed alluring to an external gaze. Since my readership here is entirely women, you’re probably not laughing. You know. You’re all too familiar. Inside your mind, this exact narrative is running the show and keeping you small, and it has done so ever since you were a schoolgirl.

I’ve been in and out of many, many dance classes. I’ve been the worst in the class at almost all of them, at first. In the classes I did stay in, for the long haul, I learnt so much about being a woman. How your hips can unlock a whole new life for you. In my dance fitness workouts, I’ve seen so many women come and go. Every age, every shape.

Every week, I observe how almost no woman will ever dare to follow the ‘sensual’ move in a choreography. Their bodies clock out of it by self-preservation instinct. They squirm away from it. We are all moving to the music wordlessly, there is a thread that connects us all. You can feel that thread fraying when the instructor drops it low and flips her hair back up.

We’ve lost the connection with ourselves that makes it feel natural to go with moving our bodies in ways that are sacral, sexy and involve the root - as if our hips, our love handles, our serpentine spine, it wasn’t all designed by Nature herself for us to seduce worlds into being. We tend to feel this kind of dance in our bodies like it is an edgy ‘rebellion,’ something ‘bold,’ something you need to have courage and shame tied to, not a simple, natural enjoyment of life and womanhood.

Sometimes, in the classes I’m in, we twerk, and most women dare not step into it fully. Lest we be caught. Most women that I encounter out in my world are afflicted with being frozen inside their own body. I can’t flip my hair, I can’t smile coyly to the mirror, I can’t reveal to everyone in this room, or perhaps myself, that I’m enjoying this. I can’t dare enjoy my body. I can’t dare be a woman embodied in sensual dance.

There’s very few women I know who didn’t have a big gap of shame, void and zero dancing between two phases of life - phase one being dancing as a little girl with the free abandon of the goddess herself, phase two being acquiring the story that dancing is a skill to excel at and become good at. It’s no longer dance, it’s work that you try to win medals at, or hide in a corner and never dare to dance at all because you’re not professional or talented or ‘beautiful’ enough at it.

Whether you’re a good dancer, a bad dancer, a drunk dancer or not a dancer at all, there’s at least one incident in your life when harsh, unkind energy was spoken into you in a setting where dance was involved, and that scarred you in some way. An irreverent comment from a crush you gave too much attention to, critique from a teacher, chiding from a parent, slut shaming from some random, whatever it was, you’ve most likely heard something that made you stop dancing for a seriously long time. You’ve let yourself have a season of being frozen.

If you’re lucky, then one fine day, you find yourself finally coming back to being audacious enough to dance everyday just because you exist.

When you walk this Earth as a woman, you’re trained pretty well into a small-making spell - How dare you want attention? How dare you do anything that might just be accidentally misconstrued as something adjacent to wanting attention? How dare you be caught appearing to possibly want attention? How dare you step out of the social agreement to always, always perform ‘humility,’ contrived ‘effortlessness,’ calculated ‘not too much' like the Cool Girls must?

Haven’t you heard that shying away from the spotlight, never being seen, and never taking up too much space is the only Good way to exist?

I was the ‘Bad Dancer’ my whole childhood, and I carried that title into my life as a young woman. I’ve been removed from dance performances in school, I’ve chickened out from stage shows for fear of freezing, I’ve lurked in corners at parties and I’ve been in the phase of girlhood where it takes four pegs of whiskey for my inner burlesque queen to come out and play. You drink like you think you need to drink, but what you actually need is just permission to dance.

I am in a beautiful class right now, by the way. My current instructor is the wind beneath my wings, she took me from “I can’t dance” to “I can’t not dance” in the years I’ve had her in my life, she amplifies my strengths and taught me to embrace my dancing form in the mirror like nobody ever has. She celebrates how I can be a little (a lot) saucy with my Latin moves sometimes, and in that tiny little permission slip, she freed me.

Clinking away at my ‘Bad Dancer’ identity gunk and revealing sculpture from within it, slowly and for years, while having the permission to feel sexy while at it, added momentum to unlocking layers of feminine essence healing I didn’t know I’d find in this lifetime.

The kind of indescribable, honeyed healing that can only be felt but never explained, for it can never, ever come from theory, posturing, denial, rigid discipline and holier than thou cerebral spirituality. Women can dance their way into sacred immanence, and that holds elixirs for us that our collective wriggling for performing a very male-body-coded idea of ‘transcendence’ cannot ever provide. It comes from shaking your ass and getting out of your own way. Meeting the goddess isn’t about you, it isn’t about how much you achieve, and it is a waste of energy to believe that you can force your way ‘up’ to her in a purely intellectual, linear, stepwise manner. It’s about getting ‘you’ out of the way entirely so she can come in and possess you.

I remember being in a whole different dance fitness class than the one I am in right now, and I have a story to tell about it.

Before I met my current instructor, I was with a different lady who taught the same dance form, and I experienced something I haven’t forgotten to this date. I attended classes with a big batch of maybe twenty, a room full of only and only women. I danced somewhere in the far row at the back every time, and we all watched ourselves in the mirror, as one does in a fitness class studio like that. I have fun, I am maybe three classes in. After our session was done one evening, the instructor comes to me with a strange air of concern and urgency, singles me out to a corner, as though she wants to talk in private. I am mildly alarmed, I wonder what she could possibly have to say. She asks me if I am wearing a sports bra. Of course I am, there’s no other way a woman with breasts like mine could and should work out. “Oh, your nipples were showing through your tshirt today, so I thought I should inform you that that happened, be careful next time.”

I never went back to her class again.

The shame, the shadow and the opportunities for alchemical gold are so many when you find a safe space where you can move your body as a woman - or create that space for yourself. Where you are seen and celebrated in your womanliness. Nipples and all.

How we do one thing is how we do everything. Some truly interesting rabbitholes of new age Tantra will teach you how you show up in lovemaking is how you say ‘No’ to work that edges beyond your salary. As we are in intimacy, we are everywhere. I do believe this shows up in the way we move our bodies, as women, too. The state of a woman’s feet, to me, always speaks volumes about her relationship to her inner feminine.

A woman can walk into a space, and you can tell from her aura, how much she dances by herself in her room, for dance. Not for mastery. This has nothing to do with skill, whatsoever.

When you show up to a dance class as a non-dancer who was never praised, rewarded or celebrated for Good Girling her way through strict, complex choreographies, you learn something profound very quickly.

I will never do a good job at articulating this, but I’ll make a stab at it.

Your self concept, your connection with your womb, your energetic blockages with your feminine essence and your capacity to inhabit life as a sensual, sensorial being speak louder on a dance floor than your ability to ‘get’ a dance step technically. There is a loosening that will be required from you, and the dance form you engage with is merely a surface level matter.

Someday, you might just drop it low and flip your hair back up, and not fear for your life as you do it. This one shift at the dance class shifts a little something in every realm of our lives. Or, if you’re not in a dance class at all, but you make it a rule to dance to the length of 1-3 songs in a locked room every day until you become a person who does that, not a person who’s ‘making herself’ do it.

There’s an edge that you’re shying away from, when you’re in front of a mirror, or in a class, or dancing anyhow without substances. I’ll be too weird, too much. Slut-shamed. Witch hunted. I can’t dare to take up space. I can’t dare to be caught enjoying my body, my beauty.

This is going to be a tough pill to swallow, but all of us women have within us a side that wants to be sexy, and wants to be absolutely seen and revered in it. That wants to be the stripper, the courtesan, the radiant spectacle. That wants to be adored, admired, desired, cherished, that wants to perform - not as in ‘performative,’ but as a magnanimous act of generously sharing our honey with the world.

This part of us is buried deep within, and very few can dare to access it, let alone embrace and unlock the power it brings forth to our health and vitality as women. For most of us, there is anger, trigger and disgust even being told of this. The key is to choose not to exile it, but to dance with it - in safe spaces where nobody wants to extract from you, in the absence of predatory energy. Where the point is just dancing.

Dance classes, or dance sessions self-hosted, even if you think you can’t dance, are an unadulterated container of time for pure, uninhibited navel gazing. The women of our time, groomed into a bitter, brittle psyop of saddling Goodgirling and Girlbossing all the time, need this.

I don’t always give disclaimers. I don’t always dilute my message by offering comforting platitudes. This is probably a disadvantage for what is considered good online writing in the current world, but it is simply not my forte to be soft, fluffy and sweet on the tongue, or to be cushy with the ‘It’s okay not to be okay’ as I spoonfeed someone with half a baby step they could possibly take while walking on eggshells around the million potential triggers and traumas we have all decided to collectively decorate our psychological frontyards with. Goddess put me on Earth ruled by Scorpio for a reason.

I don’t always handhold beginners into a realm they’re unfamiliar with. This is because I feel that we are diseased by Reels brain and etc into needing and acting entitled to feel seen and heard by everything and everyone.

Relatable people are so fucking boring. I often prefer to invite my readers to practice not needing to be handholded into a new way of thinking, sometimes.

Practice staying in the power of your truth and your version, what you feel, while still being receptive to a new idea. Practice reading something from a life wildly different than yours, and staying grounded in your own energy enough to autonomously discern - at your own leisure - if you could take their truth and alchemize it into a version that fits into your unique style of doing things. Without needing instructions from them on exactly how to do so.

I am not going to tell you, “Even if you can find just x amount of time to do this, it’s enough.” I am going to tell you, however, to practice not needing me to tell you that. Step into the initiations you know you are being called to, with your own two feet, undulate your hips into them.

And start dancing in your room to the sluttiest songs you can think of. Just dive into the deep end. You’re a woman. You can’t help but swim.

Moonjuice Letters are a series of writings devoted to women that I share on Venus days. They narrate stories, anecdotes, thoughts and desires that I want to share with women from my life’s experiences. I want to see you glowing with trust, arousal and buttery ojas again. I write to that sweet, silky, moon-charged juice that women hold within a fountain of - that deep feminine wellspring of nectar that we yearn to taste. The one we were destined to overflow with, and pour out into our life, our art, our creations, our work, our homes, our family, our circle, our children and our lover. Moonjuice, to me, is the elixir women long to drip with and fill back up on. No matter the desertification caused by the modern world, no matter how much of it we lost in a performance of contorting ourselves to be seen as “the same” as men because we thought that’s how we’re supposed to prove ourselves worthy, no matter how much we drained out to vampiric psyops and scams masquerading as noble, we could never lose access to it. We are always only one tiny shift, one pelvic floor breath, one song, one kiss, one orgasm, one beautiful meal, one perfume, one dress, one indulgence, one museum visit, one painting, one dance, one massage, one red lip, one selfish decision, one flap of a butterfly’s wing, one spell away from reconnecting with this reservoir. It will never run out.

Something that dwelves further into what we spoke of here:

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I love the architecture of real food. There's a beauty to it that ultra processed garbage just cannot capture. The aroma & buttery foam when you baste a steak in fresh rosemary. The way raw honey glistens as you drizzle it on your eggs. The sweet, textured crunch of a pineapple. Tearing basil leaves in your hands. Grating nutty parmigiano reggiano over breakfast. The sound of cracking a whole egg. It's Art. - Rocky, The War Kitchen.

Everytime I tell someone my story of discovering how eating for pleasure again is the healthiest ‘diet,’ I get a classic, standard template reaction that is based entirely in fear, punishment-mentality and lack. “Oh, if I stop being strict and eat for pleasure, I’ll just eat 40 McDonald’s burgers a day and make myself sick.”

That’s like saying that only what happens in porn is lovemaking.

The healthiest thing I ever experienced, as well as saw transform so many women in my life, was moving away from the extreme self discipline and Catholic guilt-esque self-denial that comes with being the perfect ‘Clean Girl, Good Girl’ who’s doing all the healthy things. Little by little, I’ve started discovering quiet, soft, beautiful voices, from women who move through the world like they are juicy, well-fed, well-f***ed, and something about the way pleasure rewires our very capacity to be alive and singing with health was undeniable. For me, personally, coming back to being non-vegetarianism again was the best thing I did for my health, even though that’s obviously not for everyone.

I have stumbled into so many worlds the past few years, that were like shimmering portals leading me into an understanding of how eating in a balanced, discerning, intuitive and loving manner that honours pleasure as necessary medicine is the most wholesome, nourishing and life-giving way of living.

There’s too many of us doing All The Healthy Things, and still feeling like shit. Sometimes, looking like it too. We’re still hormonally imbalanced, fried, mentally burnt out, rigid, dried up, anxious, dysregulated and so not a delight to be around.

When we attempt to understand true pleasure, cultivating and pursuing it like it’s an art form, like it’s our life’s work, a seismic shift occurs inside our being. When we expand our capacity and depth for sensuality in every realm of life, when we connect with our bodies and our senses from love instead of a whip of rigid discipline, something significant transforms in our tastes, our movement, our energetic flavour, our very style of living, experiencing and being. It unlocks magnetism.

This is especially true for women’s bodies and spirits. Women are designed for sincere devotion, not severe discipline. They bloom in one and wither in the other. When you unlearn extreme ‘wellness’ culture that makes Good & Evil out of food, the mother of all glow ups ensue. Diet culture the way I’ve encountered it often teaches you a paradigm of ‘diet’ and ‘cheat’ like it’s a scale of morality that comes with jury and judgement. When you are cleansed (funny to use that word here, yes) of living in alternating states of strict suppression and ratchet feral indulgence in your relationship to food, it changes how you eat and how your body digests things.

Being afraid that you’ll drink seven litres of Coca Cola in one sitting and die if you dropped your strict ‘diet’ mindset for one moment, being afraid you’ll fall asleep for fourteen nights and never ever do anything ever again if you dare give yourself one break, one moment of rest or just one slower week, these extremist imaginations are the work of a traumatised mind in a cage.

When we slowly, deftly, patiently and lovingly do the depth work of rewiring ourselves to be in reverent relationship with pleasure, sensuality, aliveness and softer living, we are in rebirth. Chances are, you will honestly not even *feel* like choosing a margarine ridden factory line Domino’s abomination over a wood fired sourdough pizza with real tomatoes for sauce and mozzarella that someone actually bothered to craft. You will have an affogato now and then (sugar!! coffee!!) and you’ll still have radiant, healthy skin. You will probably have ghee again. You’ll fry pakoras at home in the monsoon, and you’ll not eat them like a teacher is going to come around and beat you up with a cane. Maybe, if your cultural environment allows for it, like me, you’ll eat meat again and return to the most alive you have felt in years.

Of course, we all have our health conditions and journeys, and they will often demand varying levels of ‘strictness’ as well as devotion from us in ways that nobody else can figure out on our behalf. It is an addiction to extremity that would make an invitation to softly lean into pleasure sound like you’re being asked to abandon all discernment and jump headlong into hedonism that will bring your downfall.

Maybe you’ll simply learn the art of romancing pleasure, decadence, abundance and abandon again, you’ll figure out how it fits into your life and your specific experience, and in your own unique way you’ll see how the mindset you eat anything with is the frequency your body digests it with.

How we do one thing is how we do everything, isn’t it? When we attune to real pleasure, we no longer chase drug-like ‘fixes’ of processed junk and sneeze-length climaxes. In my experience, that desire for forbidden, ‘dopamine injected straight into my veins’ type of ultraprocessed junk gets out of your system real quick when your body learns that pleasure, pleasurable experiences and real, beautiful food that tastes fucking good is normal, safe and abundant.

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I have a lot of further reading, recommendations and discovery to share with you on this.

~ Mireille Guiliano’s book on the French way of living in wholesome, pleasure-centric health. It’s called French Women Don’t Get Fat. Yes, icky title, but it was written in a time we weren’t offended by literally everything. I highly recommend ignoring that and experiencing the wellspring of nutritional wisdom from French culture that this book offers. It has the loveliest recipes, too.

~ Entering the realm of Emmie Rae’s The Daily Rest Studio and her Substack

~ Peta Kelly’s Honeycomb

~ The War Kitchen, this is the only account on Instagram I ever want to see again.

~ A podcast I heard many moons ago that I may have already recommended quite a few times:

~ Watching these ‘What I eat at my Nonna’s house in Italy’ videos that have just captured my whole heart and given me a glimpse of a truly sumptuous, wholesome way of living.

~ I might as well go out on a limb here and add, Are We Entering a New Romantic Era?

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Love,

O

Create the ambience that makes it inevitable to become something one inch closer to your dream life. We severely overglorify the cerebral and pathetically underestimate the sensorial. Cultivate the environment in which you would go from a tight little bud of potential to a fragrant, decadent rose in biggest, sluttiest bloom.

Shift from constantly imagining transformation to muddying your fingers in the fuckery that is alchemy. Pull yourself out of the etheric dreamworld of ‘manifestation’ and instead plant things in the damp soil of embodiment. Get dirt in your nails. Live a day like the Goddess is watching you. Touch things and let them touch you back. Your dream life isn’t fixed anyway. It’s ever evolving, unfolding, revealing itself in new flavours to you. Texture by texture, thought by thought, desire by desire.

Descend into the tangible, the physical. Write by hand. Cook your own food for a week. Pay deep attention to what clothes feel the best on your skin. Do the manual labour of building a beautiful, delectable existence around yourself. Prioritise pleasure like it’s your religion, not a reward for self-flagellation. Light candles. Give yourself exposure therapy to rejection, embarrassment, decadence, cringe. Create the world in which who you want to create out of yourself lives. Adorn and embellish and style and seduce it into being. <3

~ Cacao, ashwagandha-turmeric-honey milk, bone broth, anything and everything full fat, ghee and butter, and beautiful, artisanal cheese.

~ Being in grass, on earth and among trees/flowers/plants so much more, maybe even as indulgently as twice a day.

~ I trust that you have at least one friend - please have that one friend - that it is safe to be fully cringe with. The one where you’re the sillier one, where you are like the partner who ‘loves them more’ — now, this ‘loving more’ thing in romantic relationships is a funny and questionable concept, but you know what I mean. Please have people in your life you don’t have to be nonchalant with. Text them, call them, meet them. Bring them flowers. Bake a cake for them for no reason. Send them a surprise gesture, some food that they love, because you know they can handle it. Do something spontaneous for or with them. Buy them something cute. Pour your love into them. Pour love into spaces and people who fully receive you and your love, where your energy is never dropped like a hot potato, never awkwardly fumbled, never received with suspicion. Not for anything in return, although you don’t even need to be told this. But just for the enjoyment of giving, loving and being received in doing so. Just because you love being the person who does this, and it’s so exhausting to live in a world full of briney, cynical hard-shells who make you feel guilty and ashamed for being the generous lover and giver that you are. There’s too many people in our world today, and we can’t blame them for their pain and their wounds, who keep giving us energetic papercuts over and over again with their suspicion, their resistance, their skepticism, their cynicism, their pushing us away, their hyperindependence, and whatever the fuck else that most humans have going on.

We talk about self love and self pampering more than enough, I know for a fact that almost nobody who visits my digital spaces needs to hear that again, anymore. It is so healing to just get to unabashedly pour love and nurturing and generosity into people who can actually handle it. Yeah, that’s a thing. It is something of immense value when you find people who can receive your love, your softness, your silliness and your adoration without making you feel like you must carefully measure doses so as to not frighten them. Without resisting you, without rejecting you, without shielding against you, without creating awkward, egotistical, stingy dynamics of ‘owing,’ without making you feel like you’re ‘too much’ or ‘too weird.’

Pour into people who understand trust, who celebrate your loverness - and I say that far beyond just romantically. It feels so nourishing to connect with and do things for and love on people who actually, fully receive your love with a real “Thank you” instead of pushing you away. Instead of making you feel smaller with a “Why/You shouldn’t have/This is unnecessary/This is too much.” It gives so much more to our own heart to simply experience the act of being allowed to fully give to them. It’s such a gift to get to be extra with someone, to spoil them, to nourish them silly. It feels so good. It’s healing, but not in the productive, virtue signalling spirituality way we’re so accustomed to saying ‘healing.’ It’s just bone deep fucking healing, period.

So many women feel starved of getting to fully, unapologetically pour into and share their generous heart with someone, just for love’s sake. Because for a woman, that is an expression of creativity. The way we love is our art form. Someone I love said to me recently, in her inimitably wise way, “To be a woman is to perform. Whether or not someone is watching us is irrelevant.” I won’t explain it, but the ones who know just know. It just is so, and in the best way. Our life is our art performance.

~ Be around someone who does the above for you, who actually pours into and adores you, and treats you with softness.

~ Wear pink.

~ Bring home flowers, especially pink and white roses.

~ Adorn yourself, just to be at home.

~ Take longer baths.

~ Indulge in a beauty ritual, not a skincare routine.

~ Do something indulgent, leisurely, pleasurable and fun, just for the sake of it. Not one of your productive things. Not one of your spiritual supposed to’s. Not your workout.

~ Flirt with life more. Flirt with the whole world.

~ Listen to softer music, wear softer clothes, be in softer environments, maybe this is your theme for the next two days. Soften everything. Soften your thoughts. Speak softer words over the bread you bake, the food you cook, over the corners of your home. Speak softer words, prayers, over every relationship in your life. Speak softness into them, and him, and her. Choose to simply not speak to a few people for a few days whom you know always bring your sharp edges out.

~ Have classical piano in the background for one full entire day.

~ Make soups, bake cakes, make your childhood comfort meal. Make instant ramen. Mash potatoes. Make the best fruit bowl you’ve ever made in your life.

~ Read, watch and listen to softer things, just for a few days. Shut out the news.

~ Read something really fun, and cute, and not ‘productive’ at all.

~ Sign out of your Instagram.

~ Become more extra about your bedtime routine and your first hour after waking up. Cinematic, even.

~ Pray for people, especially the ones who’ve got you harsh and pointy in the first place. Speak kindness into their lives. Speak love into them. Speak softness into them. From a distance. It really works.

~ Dance more, alone in your room.

~ Buy just one really beautiful nightwear set.

~ Be the sensual, indulgent lady of leisure of your dreams.

~ Have really beautiful bedding on your bed.

~ Read a few poems and maybe write one too.

~ Cry as much as you need, and do not stop until it stops on it’s own. If you’re incredibly lucky and you get to have this, cry in the arms of someone who won’t tell you to “Stop crying.”

~ Move like honey. Be a little romantic. You’ve been far too serious, for far too long. It’s getting really boring.

If you’re a self employed woman and working from home, you know what it is to have this day - It’s late afternoon, you’ve forgotten to eat meals on time, you’re distracted and you feel like you haven’t really “done” anything. Maybe you haven’t even showered yet. You slipped into one too many mindless digital conversations and emails that demanded too much energy, and you lost touch with the grounded, fertile-feeling presence that is necessary to birth truly good work. You spiral, you don’t know what to do but you can’t be seen by the audience of your own mind not doing something, you feel a self inflicted pressure to perform empty busyness just to feel like you’re in control of your day and your life, but in your heart you just know, today’s simply not a day that you’re getting any medals for.

You might choose to swirl in this muck of guilt and shame until bedtime, and conduct some hollow admin tasks - sometimes, you invent them into existence, they didn’t even need to be done - even though they don’t satisfy you because, deep down, you know you’re only performing productivity. You might then fall into existential doubt about whether you’re ever going to survive and thrive at all in your work, especially if you’re in that hormonal psychedelic trip of doom and gloom that happens during the deep luteal phase, one week before your period. One slow, confusing, weird or dull day feels like nothing you’ve ever done so far matters and everything might just crumble, because that’s just how toxic productivity culture scams (or, your former gifted child burnt out academic overachiever ways) have distorted your sense of worth.

I’ve finally found what works for me.

It’s called putting your phone away and read for two hours. It feels lush, indulgent, criminal, yes. And no I don’t mean some business book, unless you’re on one that you’re really enjoying right now. I’ve never been one for reading about business, but when I came upon ‘Essentially Mira’ - a book about the life of the founder of one of my most favourite luxury brands, I was hooked. It delighted me, made me laugh, made me weep and I felt truly energised by it. It was a buttery read, it didn’t feel like a “You’re supposed to read this”chore or like making myself do sit-ups. Read whatever you want to read, and tell nobody what that is, if you’re the kind of person who cares about what others think of what you read. Read for pleasure and delight. Fuck self help and constant self optimisation. We’ve had too much of that at this point in time. We could spend a lot less time with our head up our own ass about what within us needs fixing, and live a far healthier, sweeter, sexier life, and the sky won’t fall down, and the love of your life won’t leave you nor pass you by. Read something that lights you up. A series of saved for later articles you haven’t yet gotten to, a re-read of an old favourite something, a delicious story, a magazine, maybe even a lighthearted dip into 3-4 books you’ve been meaning to start in order to decide which one you want to stick with. Just read for two hours. Maybe that’s all you do that day. If you’ve chosen the self employed life, you know the whole point is that we can do this and we get to do this. We won’t stop having a roof over our head if we have one day, once in a while, where we throw ‘efforting’ our work out the window, stop swimming upstream when we know we’re in sticky energy, turn the boat around and just read instead. You know this. Having days like these is inevitable, especially for the life of a creative.

I cannot ever explain it further but this act of creating a big, fat, glorious two hour reading session every once in a while, it shifts everything and compounds to a rich wellspring of inspiration, reset, transformation and alchemy. So does a really long, long walk. So does a long, luxurious bath for the sake of beauty, without having done anything to ‘earn’ it. So does touching yourself. We’ll talk about that another day.

Xoxo 💋

For the past two or so years, I have aspired to be the kind of woman who doesn’t consider it her place at all to have opinions and commentary on how other people choose to use their phones. I may not be her all the time, I am her maybe 80-90% of the time. I orient towards her like a North Star. Saying this felt like the perfect way to begin an elaborate piece that may contain opinions and commentary on how other people choose to use their phones.

Lately, I have been noticing that everywhere I go and every friend I meet - in my particular wild and sexy life that is one hundred percent women - has shown me a phenomenon irresistible and undeniable. You can’t un-see it, especially if you have a lot of women in your life shy of 30-ish or younger. Social media activity and the texting habits of others are a hot, hot subject of gossip and conversation. This invades every discussion of interpersonal relationships, which is no surprise, because our online realms have become a key part of our interpersonal relationships in many contexts. These conversations are happening in the moments where we aren’t actually tapping out in a tic to quickly steal a glance at our phones ourselves. It’s weird, fascinating and very interesting.

We live in a time of a gross, obscene overabundance of access to people at all times.

Which leads to an even more gross, unconscious tendency of seeing living, breathing, complex, multifaceted human beings as ‘options’ that can be summoned at will through a device and it’s algorithms, for the sole purpose of having them feed our hungry ghosts.

If you asked a vampire for help with your love life, they’d remind you of something a lot of us have forgotten - lovers having the opportunity to access each other all day is so recent in human history. When you consider that, it’s actually baffling how much anxiety we have decided to establish over this already, and how many decidedly certain rules and rigid opinions we have come up with about how ours should text us or post on their feeds.

All the lovers that ever existed before our generation - from times ancient to my parents’ dating in the 80s - had space, pause, silence, distance, longing and yearning interwoven intricately and intimately into their experience of romance, as a default.

We’ve had poems for centuries, devoted to the pangs of anticipation being even sweeter than the ripe, juicy peach finally trickling down our wrists. It has always been in the pauses, gaps and spaces between lovers that the true depths of passion, longing and desire were tasted. I burn for you. Now, we tend to have abandonment issues and anxious attachment theory come up so much more than we get to have poetry.

During a typical week in my life, I’ll hear everything: Someone cancelling a potential mate because they never heard back from them in intervals shorter than 12-14h, an aunt in the happiest example of marriage I’ve seen describing how her courtship (very much in the era of texting) included weeks and months of space before they finally felt right about each other, a friend who never texts anybody back before 48-72h telling me how she’s in the most wholesome relationship of her life with a boyfriend who plans beautiful dates for her once a week, another friend distraught over someone she didn’t hear back from in two days after over a month of gently consistent digital communication, and yet another friend who blocked a brand new bud in her garden of suitors for the treason of disappearing from contact for 24h.

Social media too is inundated with manufactured outrage designed to rile one up for profitable clicks and engagement by telling you to draw the most ornate conclusions about a person based on how often - and in what tone - they pick up their colourful, light-emanating glass box to type words to you.

Is it even really our business to microscopically analyse how someone else uses their phone? To dissect it the way that we so earnestly do? Should texting even be a valid parameter of someone’s intentions with you? Of their heart, their character, their capacity for intimacy, their ability to love?

There is no standard template. There is no answer. Everyone is just so wildly different.

I remember once meeting a man at an art auction who immediately launched into a mega hot pursuit of me. Texting constantly, trying to send me gifts, going so far as to be visibly bothered on the days he didn’t hear back from me in our chat and even enquiring of me why I was momentarily unavailable, quite unabashedly.

He did every single thing that checks off the widely agreed upon modern feminine ideas of what ‘Good’ (lol) behaviour from a man who is romantically interested in you is supposed to be like. We love ‘chalant,’ the more the better. I certainly love chalant, I am myself as chalant as it gets when the right kind of person inspires it from me.

Quite soon, I found out that this person is already secretly engaged to be married, and was doing all of this a mere month before his wedding like it’s nothing.

I once had a long distance lover who’d go above and beyond keeping in touch with me through the most polar opposite timezones two people could exist in. Fleeting and whimsical as the whole thing was, there was such beauty to how my days belonged entirely to myself, and my nights belonged to conversation with him, even if only for a precious little window. What I shared with him was something that gently, slowly and surely transformed the rest of my entire life after he happened to me.

I have time and again met beautiful, good, kind, generous men whose ability to text you is sporadic at best, and yet in their own inimitable way they come through and how. They show up to your neighbourhood, they woo you, they deliver action over words like nobody’s business. Their devotion to their curiosity of you is felt in the quality of energy they offer to you, not in the quantity of it. You can’t record it from the frequency of their texting timestamps, you simply feel it in their presence.

You can feel it when presence is generously given to you from someone who respects their own time as well as yours.

You learn to sense ‘consistency’ over the long run, not in the pedantic way of looking at it from day to day. It is an immense kindness to your perception of your own self as well as of others, to measure consistency in a far larger and more generous zoomed out view than the exacting everyday.

To be slow and patient is a dwindling, lost art in a world where everything moves at lightning speed and the ‘normal’ state of being that is quite insidiously encouraged is being reactive over responsive.

Sometimes, a lot of women make the mistake of seeing men as monolithic templates and assuming they’re all operating the exact same way, even though we know how each one of us women is so completely unique in the essence we bring to a partnership. We often forget about that when we encounter men. We speak of and regard men in wet blanket statements, cynical generalisations and boring, defeatist assumptions. Because we’re hurt and we’re scared. Who isn’t?

Every romantic encounter brings to us it’s own flavours and experiences, and our life so far has been a whole buffet. What can be true for one experience, there can be something completely opposite to that happening for us later in life that demonstrates a contrasting truth that is still just as sweet. What can be true and beautiful in one woman’s life can feel like shit for yours, and vice versa.

I often think about the fact that if we were to shift for a moment into a bird’s eye view, it’s fairly easy to see that our ability to have immediate, constant, responsive access to anyone that isn’t within a fleshly hundred metre radius of us is such a newborn phenomenon.

It’s only been a blink of an eye, a tiny speck in all of time, since it became so easy to talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and actually have it mean something. To have such ‘urgency’ attached to it.

I wonder if it is, maybe, far too soon for us to collectively have such strict, exacting, passionate and definitive opinions on what kind of digital availability and texting behaviour is right?

It is all so subjective and anecdotal. Every scenario is possible. There is hardly, if any, actual ‘morality’ to it all, as much as we’d like to believe there is. Every truth we cling to about what it must mean when someone ‘does’ something to us through a text is so deeply flavoured by our own psychological quirks. It often has little to do with their actual experience of us, or of what’s going on in their life.

Chemistry is a dance of desire, it requires both space and closeness. Lightness and intensity. Structure and serpentine, untamed flow. Control and a touch of chaos. Like all of the most delicious things in this life, it blooms when contrast and paradox are not only allowed to exist but also cultivated and tended to like an art form.

There has never, ever existed a seduction that didn’t create space - an emptiness that invites for itself to be filled. The sweetest juice has always been sipped in that tiny, ephemeral gap between invitation and arrival. You can’t have too much of either, it would all go sour. Too much space lands as nonchalance and dismissal, while an helicopter presence threatens and smothers. Magnetism cannot exist without polarity. Nor desire without duality.

And if seduction, desire, chemistry, magnetism and all the patience they softly request and deviously demand were taken away from our lives - even if in love, proximity, cohabitation, commitment, marriage - what the fuck is the point? How do you live without that? What is a life without their ebbing and flowing, their waves and rhythms? Maybe you can, I know many who do. But is that truly a life of vitality, eros and spicy sweetness? I feel like it would be far from it.

There are people in my life who love me, who tell me to stop talking to anybody who doesn’t text me consistently every single day as proof of their interest in me. There’s also my dad, who arguably loves me more than anybody, who will time and again say absolutely hilarious things to me like, “Baby if you’re talking to a boy who texts you all day everyday, he either doesn’t have a Real Job or is incompetent enough to be disposable in his organisation. Stop talking to him.” I often think about an aunt offering one of the most iconic little quips - “If you’re on your phone with a man texting you all day, that’s going to be a husband who’s on his phone in bed with you.”

It’s wild, hilarious and fun how each one of us has our own experiences of digital proximity and what it can mean, there’s just no single truth to pinpoint.

While multiple truths co-exist for everybody, I cannot overstate enough that a man with discipline and boundaries around his phone usage is a man capable of that everywhere else that truly matters in life. One thing you do not want in your life as a woman, whatever your personality type and however different you might be from me, is tying yourself in any way to a man lacking in foundational discipline and boundaries. These qualities about someone speak very clearly in the modern world if you take the time to pause, slow down and observe how he enforces them around his phone and his body.

The nuance here is that that kind of man - when he is true and genuine - is almost never somebody who’s shouting from the rooftops and flexing to you about it in words. It often tends to be someone who’s simply and quietly obvious about it. You don’t need to hear from them all day nor every single day, because the quality of brazen forthrightness, pursuit, initiative, time, effort, action, date-planning and actual showing up that healthy men generously offer to you on their own time and at their own pace is unmistakably present, grounded and delectable. It’s quality over quantity. When you two are in resonance, and inhabit a similar frequency of stability around the way that you spend your attention and energy, you will feel it. Like calls to like.

Almost everyone is more vata aggravated than ever now. Almost everyone relates to concepts like ‘anxiety,’ ‘overthinking’ and it’s iterations, as though they are a personality trait instead of a mere affliction to overcome.

That’s how it begins - an affliction mere and minor, until we allow it to take root and fester. We feed our own stagnation (quickly self-diagnosed as depression), anxiety and overthinking to magnanimous proportions, entirely by our own habits and far more than we might be ready to admit. It’s not cool anymore to speak of the part we play ourselves in our mental health lore. It’s highly encouraged by our mental health culture to always cast oneself as a victim to the world, the past, to everything. It’s triggering for people to handle a conversation about resilience, self-responsibility and autonomy that goes beyond just “Go to therapy.” I too was once someone who thought her anxiety, her mental health issues and her ‘healing’ were almost like her whole identity and personality, who wore therapy speak like a tote bag.

One of the most beautiful men I’ve ever encountered, I won’t say who he is but the ones who know will know, once wrote a song that said “Don’t you ever tame your demons, but always keep them on a leash.”

I don’t think most of us are doing that with the way we spend our energy and attention anymore, and it’s beginning to seep into our ability to connect and form relationships. Everyone’s phone is a problem, a distraction. It is something in their life that needs to be ‘managed.’ This is simply a fact of modern, urban life.

Now that I am on the other side of my anxiety era, and I pepper my sentences with the word ‘anxiety’ maybe once in a month instead of everyday when I speak about my feelings, I feel confident about the fact that so much of my journey (both in and outside of traditional talk therapy) has taught me that we are all being culturally coddled into never leaving our rabbitholes. We might need a touch more of being spanked out of our ruts and our freeze states than we allow ourselves to have.

I have a feeling that everyone in modern life is almost always and by default far more cerebral in their life than they are physical. It is only too easy to be too in the head about everything, to live entire weeks, months and years up in thought spirals, disconnected from the body.

The physical and physicality, on the other hand, which was always an ancient default of humanness, has now become something to cultivate as a kind of special accessory.

When I say so many of us need to be so much more physical than we are, I don’t just mean an elaborate investment into a gym bro life - although I must admit that I now respect gym bros more than ever, and maybe I was wrong to figuratively ‘swipe left’ on them as often as I historically have.

It’s so much more than just that one thing. I mean, walking 10k steps a day as a healthy and able human being not having to be something special that you make yourself do, but normal. I mean more things done with your hands. I mean embodiment, in our sensual and sensorial experiences, outside the bedroom. I mean having time during the day where you stare into space instead of scrolling in every two minutes of quietude.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into my elevator and found someone so lost in their scroll that they forgot to press which floor they wanted to go to and they’re just floating in limbo in there, literally and metaphorically. They didn’t realise they reached the top floor to me because of my calling the lift, and they don’t always look up from their screens either.

Coming back to phones and lovers, I’ve been in that relationship where talking to each other all the time on text isn’t an occasional indulgence but a requirement that comes with serious energetic weight. Evidence and reassurance of love, even. You must explain why you didn’t text them, if you didn’t. It’s all fun and games until you actually have nothing to talk about. You’re not even living together yet, and your conversations feel like a wet sock. There is no necessary, human, sexy gap between one meeting to the next, because you’re updating each other every time you shifted your weight from one buttcheek to the other.

I’ve also been in the relationship where you almost suspiciously never hear from the other person as much as you’d like to, and you turn out to be right about finding out truly shady and upsetting truths about their intentions with you. Was texting a catalyst, even an amplifier, to a lot of problems in these scenarios? Yes. Was texting the real, true determinant of any truth of concrete value at all? Not really.

I often think of a woman who once wrote about how she had a beautiful, shimmering, ethereal experience attending her first college party, at a time when she was in love. She shared with her man the next day how she was thinking of him and wished he was there the whole time. He was cross. He said to her, “If you really thought of me, you would have texted me at least once during the night.” It broke her heart, and it broke mine when I read it. I felt how that pure, beautiful desire of her wanting to devote her full presence to her life and later share that experience with her lover from an overflow, was distorted into a fight that is so typical to our insane modern urge to make everything so much more urgent and immediate than it has to be.

When I was a little girl - well, a hormonal teenager - I had a school crush that I’d wait every morning to get to see, for that one golden minute during the fifth period of the day when he’d pass from outside my class from football practice and we’d exchange a shy glance. We’d look at each other, pretend we weren’t looking at each other and keep looking at each other anyway. The eyes always know to catch another pair looking for them. It’s magic. To my utter surprise, even at my ripe old almost thirty, this little game still happens sometimes, and I still feel just as shy in the presence of someone playing it with me. Humans are adorable.

I was born in the generation that saw Facebook come into existence. I owned phones that didn’t have colours, nor a touch screen. I have cute memories of how a largely offline-feeling life very quickly metamorphosed into a chronically online time in human relationships, and how exciting both of these things were.

When I’d be back home from school and it was time to go downstairs to horse around with my friends at dusk, I had me a scheduled evening crush. A delicious, elder, forbidden Bad Boy who was in the 12th grade (which was the equivalent of lusting after Michael Imperioli for an 8th grader like me) would hang out at his window directly in sight of all of us girls, and he’d send us into a tizzy with his shirtless, chocolatey presence.

The maximum interaction that all of us had with our crushes at that time was a glance or a sentence a day at an arm’s length proximity, but the way that this encounter would fuel us with charge, aliveness, excitement, radiance and delight? Insane.

We’d giggle with our girlfriends, we’d listen to romantic songs while thinking about said boy late into a school night, hidden under the blanket with earphones in. We’d be daydreaming for hours and hours until we saw them again. We were luminous.

We’d go to a special computer desk, switch on the Internet, and then appear as ‘Online’ on Yahoo! Messenger for a specific period of time where we’d fervently hope and pray that he would be online too.

We’d call the girls that we spent all day at school with from a landline on the computer desk, and verbally replay to them our thirty second interaction with the object of our affection for 45 minutes at the least. Having the option or even the freedom to access your friends or your crushes all day simply didn’t exist.

As we grew up, we moved on to Facebook messenger. But our time online and available for interaction with others was still a special container we entered and exited, not a shadow that walks with us all day. Our heart’s entanglements weren’t a spectre that loomed over us all day, in a manner where both engaging or not engaging with them lands like a game being played.

I think of mine and my girlfriends’ school crushes with such fondness because of the tender, erotic innocence of it all. How our hearts soared and delighted in every little drop of a moment shared with someone we were besotted by? Sublime. Did anything smart or wise ever come out of all that? I highly doubt it. Was it so pure, beautiful, full bodied, ecstatic and delightful to even get to remember once feeling such a thing? Absolutely. Outcomes be damned.

Relationships are inherently not a meritocratic matter, nor are they determined in value by whether you ‘gained’ a forever from them. The gift is in the experiencing. From the beautiful men that spoil you silly, make you believe in love again and raise your standards for the rest of your life even if it didn’t work out with them, to the few bad eggs you ugly cry at 4am about and rebirth into a whole new woman from the betrayals of.

This is such an old person thing to say, and I hardly qualify as old, but I’m still going to say it - Every matter of the heart before we had 24x7 internet access devices was so, so much sweeter for existing in space, fleeting moments, memory and 80% delululand. We’re so lucky that we got to taste that we’re even capable of feeling like that. It is quite the contrast to how most of what we call a ‘love life’ nowadays among single women involves so much unnecessary discussion about someone’s texts, calls and general onlineness.

We’re all adults with endless resources and autonomy at our disposal, we can just do things, and so many of us are spending a lot of our energy agonising over someone’s text messages. We prefer communication with the unfailing, routined consistency of an actual robot, and if that is absent, then they’ve managed to trigger abandonment issues and anxious attachment. I swear I hear these phrases thrown around in modern dating parlance more than the word ‘love’ itself. It frightens me how we simply must pathologize everything, even though I’m certain we’re not wrong in our pursuit of all those theories.

I still find it strange how it’s normal and even encouraged for a stranger, someone who isn’t even ‘yours’ yet, to know your routine and expect to hear from you as per that knowledge almost everyday. Even when you do get to have the privilege of calling someone your beloved, should we really get to have a claim upon someone else’s time consistently and almost on a schedule? Can we let our lives belong to us and us alone anymore, even in relation to others? Isn’t that human?

Isn’t it so much sexier, so much more exciting, to not control anybody else’s world, time and presence but yours, to let there exist even a tiny, healthy degree of unpredictability and spontaneity in the way you experience your own life as well as the presence of others in it?

It frightens me how little it takes for us to feel wronged, and how even littler our capacity for offering grace to others has become.

It frightens me that I know far, far too many people who talk to a bunch of people all day everyday that have been arranged to provide them with entertainment for when they don’t hear from someone they’re actually interested in, and they claim they’re practicing ‘detachment,’ when in fact a lot of times this whole hot mess is just about us craving a hit of feeling wanted, desired and worthy, from a questionable source.

We’re expecting full bodied, full spectrum human beings with layered lives to be available for us to outsource our own sense of desirability from, and I come across so many conversations in my life where it’s often demanded that this should play out only and only as per someone’s own highly subjective ideas around how someone else’s communication device should be used.

I remember reading Catherine Shannon’s very popular essay called Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy, and there’s something she said that never left my mind. ‘…We all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.’ We do that with groceries, we do that with connection.

While attachment theory is truly interesting and helpful for so many, there’s such a thing as a hyperfixation with it. I feel that our constant anxiety around needing people to feed us with their attention isn’t because they are triggering our anxiety, it is because we simply exist in constant anxiety about too many things as a norm now.

I remember once deciding to simply not open the Reels and Threads tabs for many months on end, inspired by a conversation I had with the lovely Emmie Rae. I’d only ever watch a Reel if somebody I love sent it to me. One day, when I tried opening that side of Instagram again after so much time away from it, it was unnerving to feel the rage, negativity and extremism of the environment in there. I had a heightened sensitivity to it because of time spent away, and it felt so obvious to me why so many of us are always feeling so miserable about the world, the opposite sex, love, relationships, life, everything. It’s the casual consumption we’re marinating ourselves in.

The pace of modern life is not healthy. The ‘rush’ of everything ever isn’t what human beings can thrive in. The unchecked, unmonitored screen time of most people is causing them to perpetually remain in anxious-freeze states of reactivity. The ratio of creation and consumption is horribly misbalanced in most human lives. The noise of mindless drama, manufactured outrage and rage bait that the apps people spend too much of their time on is fuelling that fire into a shitstorm. Every single thing that anybody can ever do is a ‘problem’ on some post somewhere, no exceptions. Someone’s either lovebombing you, or they’re a Big, Bad Avoidant.

A human being who consumes more than they create in life in general, will almost always be perpetually anxious and assuming the worst of others. I specifically speak of consumption as in mindless information gathering through passive, eyes glazed over, hypnotic digital scrolling, and not a more curated and controlled human enjoyment of consuming whatever media truly inspires, expands, fills and moves you.

To me, this rings true for women especially - who in my experience are the most prone to anxiousness, overthinking and developing anxiously attached behaviours that deplete their radiance, far more than any man I have ever met. Excessively mercurial, over-intellectualised living in a woman’s body always feels to me like the root of all feminine issues of the womb, the head and the heart.

The feminine being has a unique flavour of alive, pulsating, animating, hungry creative fire to her, and when this isn’t channeled into the body and physical movement, as well as into creation of all kinds that matches if not overtakes her consumption, it begins to burn houses down inside her own being.

Women desire, devour, create, consume and wish to be consumed in a manner that is terrifyingly beautiful, and when we don’t pay attention to the physical, the sensual and the creative in our lives, we fall so easily into dysregulation, overthinking, spiralling, anxiety and anxious codependency. More often than not, it’s a woman obsessing insanely over some poor fellow who isn’t even actually as magical as she has made him out to be - because all of our life force has nowhere else to go and we just want a project so bad. Overfeeding a relationship - any relationship - becomes our creative outlet. This can take place in settings beyond just romantic union.

We end up choking our relationships, believing that our ‘overthinking’ is a personality trait we are victims to instead of merely a symptom and consequence of the ambience of our life. We are perpetually freezing, fawning and stagnating. We forget that we have so much more agency and power to shift this than we realise.

Nobody longs and yearns with the exact depth and fervour that women are capable of desiring with, and we all know this. Every song and poem and breathtaking story ever written taps into it. Everyone who has walked the Earth as a woman simply gets it.

Women crave closeness, and women are inherently insatiable, whether we’re ready to admit it to ourselves or not. It’s a beautiful aspect of feminine energy. Our desire and our creative void knows no limit. This is certainly not to shame ourselves about, as much as the world tries to. It is an important knowing to embrace and dance with.

No amount of presence is enough, women will always hunger for more and just a little more, until we are in absolute union with he who is the object of our desire, until we tie him to us with our tresses and receive him into ourselves.

The spicy paradox of the relationship between man and woman is that women crave closeness, and men crave freedom. Women crave being loved, men crave being respected. Needless to say, this isn’t about one or the other. It isn’t to say that women don’t need freedom or respect, or that men don’t care for love and closeness. Everyone wants, needs and deserves all of that and some more, and may they have it all. But there is a subtle energetic flavour to what lands especially beautifully for men and women in their hearts. This difference can create delicious tension, friction, polarity and movement between the masculine and the feminine, when it is played with through a subtle, nuanced understanding of how uniquely we experience love and desire.

Too many women are far louder in their complaints about men’s texting behaviours because they value constant closeness and proximity as a form of reassurance, safety and love. Too many men self-identify as ‘bad texters’ because they’d rather not be entirely engulfed and consumed, their psyche suffers from that kind of weight and they cannot always handle it. It’s a dance. It’s certainly not strict, and there are always exceptions, but it is something that keeps shifting, and it shows up for everybody in a million ways.

It can be interesting for women to consider how most men tend to operate in a singular, hyperfixated style of focus on tasks, in a manner that is completely differently to women. A lot of women multitask by default - we are always carrying our home, family, friends and lover energetically with us, while also carrying our work in our hands, all the time. We pride ourselves for doing this, and we are heavily rewarded for it.

Women are often found at a dinner table unnecessarily and almost excessively attuned to everyone all at once, hyperaware to absolutely anybody among ten different people who might want for a spoon, while the men are mostly only thinking about their next bite. I don’t say that to criticise, it is simply a difference I’ve observed in almost all women everywhere and I am exactly the same.

I can’t say for sure if this is evolutionary, biological, conditioned or cultural, and there are studies that speak for every case, but women do have a tendency of prioritising constant multitasking, relational harmony, interpersonal nurture, emotional caretaking and pouring energy into ‘other people.’ Women prioritise these things at a level of primal-feeling urgency that is unique only and only to women.

We think that dropping everything to prioritise relational nurturing - texting someone, calling someone, checking in with them - is love, and it is. But we sometimes end up hurting ourselves when we believe that men must love us in exactly the same style and manner of operation as how we love them.

Sometimes, not always but sometimes, our panic and mania around what someone else is or isn’t doing for us through their behaviour on their phone can often be a mirror to our own dysregulation around our own energy leaks.

What is the real root of our anxiety when we let ourselves believe that a text message or lack thereof can decide the future of a story we have with someone, or simply be allowed to exist as such a valid disruptor?

What is our version of when a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the conditions it grows in instead of fixing the flower?

At what point is it caution and at what point is it insanity when we let digital behaviours intermingle with our ideas of ‘correct’ romance, love and chemistry?

It’s wonderful to have the security of instant connection with the devices we have. At the same time, there’s always moments when it can turn so depleting to be assumed as always available by default. It’s as though wherever we exist, we’re one leg in our phone.

Sometimes, I’m out with my friends and immersed in a beautiful conversation where I forget the passage of time entirely, and I’ll have this moment of panic for forgetting to check my phone. What if my parents texted me something that I owe it to them to immediately reply to? The guilt! This is a two way street. If I don’t text my parents back fairly immediately when I’m out of the house, they are rather quick to assume that I must be in danger. So often, I can’t seem to shake off sensing this guilty weight of a social contract that’s always implying that I’m the problem if I don’t give my instant digital attention to whoever is seeking it, no matter where I am and what I’m doing.

I have friends whose phone never leaves the table, and whose glances never leave the phone. And I sometimes feel so alone in this flavour of company that I end up not starting certain conversations, because I fear inconveniencing them by bringing up a subject too intense. I feel afraid to take up too much space and time keeping them away from their phone by introducing a topic of conversation that one cannot casually scroll side by side with.

I feel this way because I can sense that someone is already 50% unavailable and closed off from me despite literally being there in the flesh meeting me. I observe with so many people how in a momentary natural pause in the conversation, they’ll rush to pick up their phone and check their notifications with a speed so urgent that it makes me feel like I was quite inconveniently keeping them from their phone this whole time. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve left unsaid with people I dearly love and who love me back, because I hesitated to require too much of their attention between their phone checks while they were sitting with me.

I have had friends who are far more polite in their phone usage and stay present at the table, save for an important phone call. The moment they pick up a call, the way that everyone else on the table immediately rushes to have a quick look at their notifications has an urgency to it almost as though reaching for water after a run. One person picking up a phone call gives out an instant permission slip for everyone else to get a little peek in, and there’s only a few seconds window before we must return to being politely present with each other. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of this, but it does amuse and terrify me to notice it in almost all of us.

Obviously, these are just observations. I am certain that all throughout my life, I too have been afflicted with the same tics at various points in time, in different varieties of company. It’s begun to feel like all of this is supposed to be normal, socially acceptable and Good.

Being always available and accessible to several people at all times, across digital realms, is considered ‘Productive.’ The person sitting across from you in the physical realm being just one among many who demand your instant concern - not the only one - is now the norm. I feel like my taking even the mildest offence at any of this makes me the one who’s unnecessarily sensitive, or too much. I’ve often noticed within myself, quite strangely, that I can so easily overlook it with friends and family, but when it happens with a lover, it pierces and hurts places inside me that are sad and funny at once.

Ironically, because of how frequently online and infused with largesse my brand presence on social media is, a lot of people in real life assume that I, too, must be some kind of dopamine-addled, Reel-brained phubber. Any woman with a public account and a reasonably sized audience on there is familiar with how we’re almost always assumed the worst things about for simply existing, before we’ve spoken one sentence with someone. Oh you’re one of those influencers.

I think how often I have felt hurt by others being on their phones around me has made me far too self conscious of my own phone usage around other people. I love clicking pictures when I feel truly inspired to, especially when I am by myself. I also feel incredibly weird about how every time I meet someone new in my life, they typically assume me to be vapid and mindless because of my enjoyment of sharing visual snippets of my life on a blog. I’ve only too often been energetically cornered into positions where someone acts as though I am required to ‘prove’ to them that I am kinder than the redundant stereotypes they have in mind about what a woman like me with an online presence - who has the audacity to not live her life in hiding - must be like. I’ve been on at least four or five first dates in my life so far that ended with my being told “Wow, I didn’t expect you to be sweet/nice.” Maybe it’s prejudice, maybe it’s my Scorpio-ruled chart, I don’t know.

I am certainly the last person on Earth who could ever justifiably ‘preach’ demonising one’s phone, social media or digital connection as a whole. The entirety of my devoted, regular and deeply adored customers for my online boutique come from social media. They found me because there has been a foundation of years and years in my life spent in almost chronically online brand building. I started blogging when I was still in college, and my brand’s webshop launched on the side with my then ongoing design degree. I still remain in community and connection with patrons who found me all the way back then. I love everything that I get to have. I’d have to be in some kind of boring, life sucking 9-5 if it weren’t for phones, Instagram and an online world.

But I can say from experience that even for someone like me, for whom work mode and social media sharing is deeply enmeshed and being online is an abundance channel, it’s true that you do one day realise that needing beyond 30-60 minutes of daily time spent on Instagram on average is not a necessity, it is simply a lack of systems and organisation. Even if you do open the app to create, share and pour outward more than you do to consume and receive inward.

We are exposed to nefarious digital systems everyday that are designed to cause addiction, made by teams of geniuses who are trained for and paid to create addictive, roulette-like user interfaces that will keep you coming back for more. Being overwhelmed or constantly distracted by your phone is not the failure we might mistakenly paint it to be. It is simply a symptom of modern life that is to be managed, in a sense.

Nothing I ever say about this subject can offer a solution, or preach a position that could possibly benefit any life apart from just my own little self-employed bubble. But, I do feel like it’s beautiful and interesting to ask more questions - to ask better questions, especially to ourselves. To deeply, truly pay attention to where our stories and beliefs are coming from. To form our own opinions about what feels right in our heart and our body.

To recognise just how much of what we think to be true is truly our own, or is actually just being fed to us by content creators that profit from arousing a reactive state of mistrust and fear about the world?

To question if what’s true for someone else could ever feel true for us, no matter how smart they sound. To question if all men really suck and all women really are villains.

To slow down, and unsubscribe from rush - in the mundane, in the ambitious, in the embodied, in the romantic.

To make at least half of our life analogue again - to write by hand, to cook by hand, to go paint a picture, to build a pot, to platonically touch people a lot more than you do, to sit in grass, to create without profiting monetarily from it.

What would shift, if we didn’t demand immediacy and urgency from almost everything?

Being sold the idea that very regular ice plunges all throughout the monthly cycle are healthy for a woman’s body is the most ignorant dumbfuckery I have encountered in the trendy wellness world, especially when the person selling you this service doesn’t even speak to incorporating awareness of how an ice plunge might fit into the four feminine cyclical phases. So many people in the mainstream business that is ‘wellness’ often don’t even consider how freezing cold is an adversary to womb health, nor do they understand how to wisely manage the stress of an ice plunge on women’s hormonal and biological realities.

I feel that it is so important to self-lead yourself through woman-specific research about endeavours that involve freezing cold (as well as all other health trends on social media), and consider the temperatures that it’s ok for a woman’s body to do an ice plunge in. Women are not little men. It upsets me how the mainstream approach to ‘health,’ more often than not, doesn’t even factor the feminine body as a unique system that operates in a completely different frequency from that of men. It breaks my heart to live in a world where I encounter every single day how women contort themselves into male body truths and rhythms as a ‘normal’ idea of what ‘Good, Productive and Healthy’ ought to be, and shame themselves as ‘not enough’ if they cannot function like men.

The ice plunge is not the same experience for men’s and women’s bodies, in absolutely any way.

Women’s stress resilience works completely differently to men. Men benefit from certain amounts of stress in ways that women simply do not. Women may not ‘benefit’ from the stress of an ice plunge, repeatedly, exactly as men do. A woman’s life and a woman’s human experience of reality is highly influenced every single day by the presence of her womb in her body, by her hormonal and cyclical nature.

We were never taught this. We grew up and figured it out on our own, if we’re lucky. Or, we live lives riddled by feminine reproductive disorders as though it is normal. We are so lucky to now live in a time where there is an accessible, increasing return to feminine wisdom.

If someone selling you an ice plunge says that it doesn’t matter if you’re on your period or in the last few days of your luteal phase, or worse, that it will ‘help’ your period, I am even more aghast.

It’s yet another disappointing example of how deeply most of the world simply ignores women’s bodies, women’s cycles and women’s unique systems.

People who want to sell you a trendy experience are not people who will educate you on what’s good for you as a woman.

People who don’t even comprehend how intrinsically different men’s and women’s bodies are should not be relied on for health advice as a woman.

There are a whole lot of things that we were sold and pushed into doing all our lives that are wonderful but not necessarily aligned to a woman’s body in particular, especially not in a rigid, regimented context of ‘consistency.’

We were never even taught that it’s okay to show up in this world as a woman, and to participate in this world from the reality of how women’s bodies work, even though we are women every second of every day.

Our blood, our milk, our 28 day cycles, our desires, our reproductive realities, they were always exiled. Shunned. Veiled. Erased. Diluted. Censored. Not to be spoken of. They shouldn’t dare to interrupt the running of a man’s world. A world in which every ‘normal’ is based on the male body as standard template. I cannot seem to form a sentence that can do justice to the impact with which this disturbing truth needs to be delivered.

In our current world, mainstream health advice simply doesn’t include women. Women are entirely responsible for educating themselves about cycles, hormones, fertility, menstruation and womb health - and these are all highly relevant to your health, mood, energy, creativity, wellbeing and experience of reality irrespective of whether you actually intend to conceive a baby.

Everything doesn’t have to be made into a ‘If men can do it, we can too’ pissing contest, and it’s shockingly juvenile how many people I observe unconsciously bringing this mentality into the realm of our body’s health and wellbeing.

And can we even blame them? Everything about our workforce, our productivity, our ‘normal’ systems, our workweek, our survival, and the expectations that a largely ignorant world has from us is based on the false assumption that women are indeed the same as men. This kind of mentality is sadly normal.

So many women were raised in the orientation of being versus men. We give away so much of our energy, our health and our vitality playing a sad game of proving ‘equality’ with men as though it was ever to be found in sameness.

In the modern world, “equality” between men and women is wrongly taken to mean developing an inhuman, neutered, spayed, sterilized, boring, stagnant, stinking sameness between the sexes, women are encouraged to abandon their delicious womanliness and go against biology in order to become everything that men are. The ‘normal’ world glorifies masculinity and exiles femininity, for all beings, not just for men.

And you know what? In the end, nobody wins. Women, especially, lose.

Our heart, our womb, our sensual aliveness, our capacity for pleasure, our libido, our vitality, our creativity, our sexual health, our feminine intuition, our feminine spirit, our juice, our aliveness, our homes, our relationships, our marriages, our families, all of them lose, from our constantly contorting and pushing ourselves into showing up exactly like men, even competing with them on a standard based entirely on them, in systems that tend to be designed in their favour.

This is not to say that ‘all men’ are evil creatures who are ‘doing this’ to us. I am deeply uninterested in living my life in that narrative, or being pitted against men, or hating men. I think that men and the masculine bring so many gifts to our existence as women, as do we for them. It is simply to state that male body and a male energy orientation is how too many of our ‘normal’ world systems and achievement cultures were built, they are relics of another time, and they have remained unchanged. They are incongruent to the ways in which women’s lives have shifted, as well as wholly incongruent with women’s bodies, women’s cycles and women’s wellbeing.

Our ability as women to work extremely hard, and to be Superwomen who Do it All, is not always a monument to one’s ambition. Sometimes, we lose sight of what we’re doing to ourselves, and we live in constant depletion, burnout and desecration of the sacred feminine.

So far, we can only dream of a society where men and women can honour each other, need each other, depend on each other, love each other as complements to the table and enjoy each other’s unique gifts.

Women’s biological realities are completely different from men’s, and no amount of delusional ‘equality’ chest-thumping will change this.

Not enough people talk about ‘health’ that actually applies to women in particular.

This is the root of most of our modern feminine illnesses. Our acne and our constant inflammation being ‘normal,’ our mental health distortions, our anxiety, our depression, our autoimmune disorders, our hormones weeping in syndromes, our dwindling fertility, our feminine disorders.

This is the root of how horrifyingly intense experiences of PMS every month is being considered ‘normal’ by so many modern women.

The only solution any ‘authority’ cared to give us? Painkillers. The period of menstruation is an energetic and physical detox in a woman’s body, a time during which the liver, too, participates. They tell you to it’s burdens with some paracetamol, instead of addressing the deeper cause of why you have unbearable period pain in the first place.

It is so easy to overcome even extreme cases of imbalance such as PMDD by making natural shifts (as in the example of Leeor Alexandra’s journey, that she generously shares on her YouTube that I’ve linked below). Women’s health blooms by working in slow, deep, holistic, wholesome, sensual and embodied endeavours with your body, instead of medicating against it.

Ancient systems, with their beautiful focus on menstrual wisdom, have always honoured women’s cycles so much more than the modern world of Western medicine that we feverishly worship has ever bothered to. Women now get told to consume birth control pills without a care for their ramifications, and they completely fuck themselves up hormonally for the long term - mentally, emotionally, energetically, intuitively, spiritually and physically - by disrupting the natural internal seasons they were meant to journey in as a woman.

An ice plunge is a wonderful practice to explore, but not if you aren’t informed on the four phases of the menstrual cycle, and not without making a decision coming from being mindful of the health of your womb and hormonal rhythms. It needs to be approached strategically, with what intuitively feels right from a knowledgeable place of being in tune with your cyclical feminine body. At the very least, it should be explored under the advice of wise women - who study, facilitate and work in the sphere of womb health and women’s holistic healing - that can teach you a feminine perspective on caring for the womb’s cycles while incorporating ice plunges.

A cold womb, a lack of warmth and ‘heat’ in the feminine reproductive system, is the root cause of so many feminine disorders, issues and misalignments. Ancient wellness systems across the world, such as TCM, Ayurveda and Daoist practices, always knew this. It was simple, intrinsic feminine wisdom in cultures across the world.

I am sharing below three resources that will offer very interesting insights on the concepts I’ve spoken to here. These are a beautiful toe-dip. I also highly encourage investing into working with women who offer slow, deep dives into women’s wellness at all levels.

Some of the women I have worked with again and again for the past few years - in offerings, memberships, circles, workshops and courses - are Emmie Rae and Miriam Ropschitz.

Simply beginning to eat, move, rest and live cyclically, incorporating even the smallest shifts in what you consume and how you move your body during each of the four cycles, will make a sweet, beautiful difference to your life, health, wellbeing, mood and your experience of menstruation.

You will begin to notice shifts even in just one moon cycle of honouring these phases. I’ve lived this. I used to have the most violent periods ever since I started bleeding. Now, my periods are sacred, aligned and gentle. Mind-altering but never debilitating. Psychedelic, even. In the best way.

I can’t remember the last time I had extreme hormonal acne, or needed to pop a paracetamol for unbearable cramps. I know so many women, my close friends, who have had the same experience, just from eating and exercising in a cyclically-attuned way. Just from exploring research into the four cycles at their own pace, and making their own rules, their own style and their own intuitive decisions as they go.

I wish so much for a world where women’s health and women’s cycles are no longer invisible. At the very least, not to women themselves.

Valerie Ribon

Rules Ancient Women Followed On Their Period

Until recently, I dreaded getting my period. Until I learned that some studies show we actually detox through our menstrual blood- releasing forever chemicals, heavy metals, BPA, pesticides, phthalates, and that ancient cultures understood this. They saw menstruation as a sacred time and utilized deep rest, warm teas, nourishing foods, and other things …

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a year ago · 3069 likes · 1 comment · Valerie Ribon

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If your idea of "therapy' doesn't include rigorous physical exercise, analyzing what you eat, spending time in nature, meditation or breathwork, or giving back, you're not seeking healing - you're seeking affirmation for why life isn't going your way.

- , author of The Psychedelic Blog.

I think about therapy a lot, as I see it become as commonplace and irreverent as a gym membership and a Spotify subscription in the lives around me. I obviously also think about therapy a lot when I honour all of the wisdom, insight, support and tools that therapy did bring to me. I’ve been to therapy a few times over the course of my life, and it was deeply insightful. I’d recommend everyone to experience it. I’ve also bloomed big and beautiful in the seasons where I intentionally chose not to rely on therapy. I haven’t gone to therapy for about two years straight, while navigating huge transformations and becoming unrecognisable to my past selves. I don’t ‘top up’ on a little therapy here and there like a hair colour touch up. And I hope I continue being like this for more years to come. To ‘raw dog’ life, as they say nowadays. That disgusting metaphor is deceptively fun to use.

This is not everyone’s style, and possibly not right for everyone, but I pride myself for it. I enjoy my resilience, my audacity, my weirdness, my old-fashioned willingness to be thrashed about in the dark by stormy seas, letting it shape me and spit me out, without booking textbook ‘help’ at every turn.

I could never speak in black and white about the subject of therapy, that would be incredibly stupid and ignorant. I love it’s contribution in healing me from anxiety, depression, dark traumas, seasons of life where I couldn’t function normally and healthily. I respect the part therapy played in my villain origin story year of severe, dysfunctional burnout.

I have so often felt that it is almost necessarily medicinal (and beautiful) to have a devotional connection to God/Goddess/Cosmos/Higher Power — as anchor, as archetype, as protector to surrender to, as guide, when one wrestles with mental breakdowns. That was a huge part of my personal experience with true healing, the kind which is enhanced but not entirely driven by therapy. I am perhaps one of the lucky few people in the world untouched by religious trauma. I was raised to enjoy my religion (Hinduism) in a manner that was spiritual, soft, fluid and untouched by rigid orthodoxy. Worship has always been an intimate part of my life, and it was always creatively engaged with on my own terms. I feel like it’s a privilege — for I am sure that I would’ve been one of those people who never gets out of therapy, if I was without God and Goddess, without Shiva and Shakti, without the Divine in all it’s expressions.

An over-intellectualisation of one’s personal mythology and human experience is not necessarily always healthy. Without all of the above (especially that which is outlined in Andrew’s observations), traditional talk therapy in a chair at a clinic is merely endless loops to me, it begins to feel dry. It sorely lacks well lubricated, well rounded nourishment.

Therapy gets rife with excessive and unnecessary cerebral spiralling — which never deeply, truly benefits a woman’s journey, for I believe that women’s healing begins through the body rather than always remaining up in the mind like it’s Rapunzel’s ivory tower. Women are not meant for remaining always frozen up in the cerebral, stuck in fixating upon therapeutic analysis of oneself — the soul, spirit and wild feminine consciousness within a woman can never be fully fathomed, and she isn’t meant to be. We aren’t meant to be perfectly understood, as much as we are meant to fully feel and be felt.

A probing endeavour such as the endless tundra of cognitive therapy tends to end up in us feeling like our spirit starts putrefying while we’re still alive, something is always off, not enough, not quite alive, and we can’t tell why it never feels right. The feminine spirit shrinks, withers, shrivels up. Therapy is beautiful for a woman to enjoy a few dates with clarity, but never enough for her to make love with vitality.

Then, we blame ourselves for still not feeling better. We blame, shame and guilt ourselves for everything, as women have done for centuries. We consume and consume some more, and wonder why nothing is ever enough for the hungry ghost, the void, the emptiness within us. A classic feminine canon event happens as if on cue, we find ourselves stumbling upon some kind of transcendental philosophy, yogic path or meditation designed by a male body for the male experience, loudly touted as The Solution. We pretend it works to help us avoid suffering by escaping ourselves through severe self policing.

We shame and shun pleasure and desire like it will scald us, when all we have ever done is avoid the fire we so yearned to slow burn in. As we age, maybe our generation too will walk the well-trodden path of a suffering-addicted herd mindset, and much like most of our elders, we will embrace defeatist platitudes of how life simply, mostly sucks. Wagging our fingers with brittle omens of ‘Just wait…’ whenever we encounter younger women.

While therapy was a very interesting experience for me, I am also absolutely certain that it was journeys, shifts and practices completely different from and outside of traditional talk therapy that actually healed me from the inside out. That even began to carry me into the depths of transformation, rebirthing and experiencing a heroine’s journey.

Some of these things sound too simple to be true. Stuff that somebody from your parents generation may tell you to do and you may scoff at for how cliché it is (less phone, more grass, how you sleep, what you eat, how you exercise, you get it). We love the infinite potential of diving into complex, intricate descriptions of exactly how we were traumatized and victimized by our lives. They make us feel a lot more important. They serve a sacred function in our evolution, our understanding of how to proceed. They also sometimes become addictive lore we attach ourselves to, a rabbithole we’d rather not exit.

I began to sense a few years ago that being dependent on traditional talk therapy after a certain point tends to slip into infinite navel gazing without actual momentum, and ends up in never, ever getting out of perpetually filling the coffers of a therapist’s office. For years. All your life, if you consent to that.

To me, that is a big turn off.

It’s not ‘working’ on your mind, it’s … Something else entirely. Something that often becomes a sinister form of stagnation and eternal victimhood (which GenZ seems to looove) when left unchecked.

“Same goes with our attraction to therapy culture. This is why I find the obsession with self-love and self-reliance deeply sad. There are young women whose families fell apart and who their whole lives dreamed of nothing but a stable, lasting love to depend on, and are now being told that’s pathological, that’s needy, they should love themselves more. If you dream of depending on someone then damn, you’ve got issues. I see in so much of therapy culture young people desperate to be loved and trying to train themselves out of it. I see so much abandonment pain. We are reparenting ourselves. We are self-soothing. We are healing our inner child. Nobody is asking why. Please will somebody step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love, more belief in themselves, but something to belong to.”

- Freya India, in ‘The Age of Abandonment,’ a piece I highly recommend reading, among many other articles from her about our generation’s mental health crisis.

Just “go to therapy” isn’t the slap-on-bandaid that most people like to believe it is. Nor is it a determinant of high value, wisdom or some kind of inherent ‘betterness’ in a person.

It’s so funny to me how we as a society yo-yoed in extremes from judging everyone in therapy as ‘crazy’ weirdos, and then went straight to (subtly) glorifying everyone in therapy as ‘better than everyone else,’ and making therapy-going a form of value signalling, an ego accessory for the (often chronically online) woke.

Going to therapy being made into something Cool and Okay - almost aggressively, lol - is wonderful. “It’s Okay Not To Be Okay” is a wonderful platitude. It’s also a crutch. There was no collective moment of a balanced, wholesome in-between. No discernment. Maybe those who do tap into that sweet spot, do so very quietly. Good for them.

I have to say this. I have never, not even once in my life, experienced people who go to therapy as any more wise, sensitive, brave, kind or ‘better’ at conducting themselves in friendships and relationships than the people I know who do not go to therapy. (Many of my personal experiences have actually been the far opposite of this, but that is too subjective and specific to only my life, and hence unnecessary to unpack here).

Healing only truly began for me when I entered through the path of the body.

“I have anxiety” became “I used to have anxiety” when I went through the primal, ancient tunnel of beginning with the body. All the therapy in the world, and the money to keep funding those sessions, mental acrobatics and analysis of my patterns was great, it was also nothing until I began a transformative journey through the body.

Cacao, nutrition, sleep, food, gut, hormonal balancing, exercise, movement, restorative yoga, deep feminine energy work, feminine-centric healing, diving into ancient systems of feminine wellness wisdom. Being inside a women’s circle that reveres rest, romance, poetry, sensuality and beauty as medicine. Learning true embodiment, tapping into the depths of the womanly medicine of shaking one’s ass on the regular, these were my portals for transformation to actually begin.

All the mental health talk and journaling, the endless ‘get a therapist’ content by those who sell therapy, it’s all well-intentioned, but just telling people to go to therapy as a response to the occasional and inevitable harshness of human life is overrated, overglorified, oversimplified and just not it.

I regularly encounter idiots who go to therapy, who talk all the performative therapy speak in the world, and somehow never actually rise in the way the conduct themselves in communion with the world.

Just going to therapy did wonderful things for my mind, it helped me see my past in new ways, it helped me feel held and heard, and I knew very early on that I wanted to receive that medicine without slipping into normalizing being coddled by therapy.

Therapy simply did not do enough for me, and I only experienced everything about my life shifting so deeply when I included the body. This is well known in wise women’s circles and among healers who help you journey into the feminine somatic. Therapy doesn’t include the body, and will thus never feel nourishing enough for women.

I often marvel at this stunning excerpt from Women Who Run With The Wolves, a book that dives deep, rich and beautiful into the Underworld of the feminine psyche, by writer and Jungian psychoanalyst Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés. I felt this to my very bones. It succinctly expresses everything I felt about therapy, both in and out of the therapist’s chair:

‘Like a trail through a forest which becomes more and more faint and finally seems to diminish to a nothing, traditional psychological theory too soon runs out for the creative, the gifted, the deep woman. Traditional psychology is often sparse or entirely silent about deeper issues important to women: the archetypal, the intuitive, the sexual and the cyclical, the ages of women, a woman’s way, a woman’s knowing, her creative fire. This is what has driven my work on the Wild Woman archetype for over two decades.’

‘A woman’s issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures. Instead, the goal must be the retrieval and succor of women’s beauteous and natural psychic forms. Fairy tales, myths and stories provide understandings which sharpen our sight so that we can pick out and pick up the path left by the wildish nature. The instruction found in story reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing. The tracks we all are following are those of the wild and innate instinctual Self.’

There’s a reason why every woman who has read Women Who Run With The Wolves worships that book, and can never seem to run out of conversations to have about it, whenever she finds a sister who has experienced it too.

I first tasted the honeyed, charred meat of alchemy and transformation when I finally began to include my mystical life, my spirituality and my body (which is the truest spiritual path for a woman, a descent into the temple of womb, flesh, eros and nervous system). When I brought these aspects into the folds of my mental health distortions, I started getting down into the dark, swampy, dense physical roots and depths of mental health. By working through my body in my healing journey, not outside of it. By not treating my body like a cute, silly chore, like some ‘supposed to’ on a girlboss to-do list.

You’ll never hear me say that I am so ‘busy’ worshipping my work every single day that if I get to move and be in my body even just a little, ‘that’s also enough.’ I agree with that sentiment, and I love ever shapeshifting consistency, but I do not squirm away from devotion and intensity. I love the magic of baby steps, but I am no baby. As a woman, the womb and the body is the sacred gate to all healing. Being in and with my body, in movement, in sensuality, in pleasure, in ritual, in restorative practices, in yoga, in embodiment, in dance, in food as medicine, in every way, it is all a reverential and religious matter. I like to give it more than just a half-assed stab.

I feel like a dudebro even saying this, and I shouldn’t even need to offer the example, but even the most successful, busy, high-achieving, truly wealthy and deeply intelligent people you’ll meet will have schedules where they give serious time to their body in their own way, non-negotiably. I focus on women, but this example transcends gender.

If a woman journeyed into her body with as much girlboss fervour as she keeps booking therapy sessions, she will taste a deep resurrection that will show her, not merely tell her, show her how her mental health was never an entity separate from her womanhood, never something to ‘fix’ or ‘work on.’

Most modern women live entire lives only in their head and shoulders, disconnected and numb from sensation in the Earth body - the lower body, the seat of power, the deep feminine wellspring.

As women, our womb is our power centre and our hormonal cycles determine our mood, energetic flavour, emotional and mental state more than anything else. We think certain things are our ‘personality,’ and the whole time we were just disembodied and numbed out from our womanliness in a world where the subtle, significant realities of the feminine body and feminine cycles are largely ignored by those in white lab coats. The state of our womb rules over the state of our entire being, our entire system. The womb is central to feminine existence and every biological, emotional, mental and spiritual spider web of aliveness within a woman’s body.

If women went into the soma, the body, the deep feminine wisdom in flesh, sensuality, heart, womb and pussy, as often and with as much reverence as they sign up for talk therapy, they would experience transformations beyond the beyond.

Most women do this if and when they are ready to receive a life beyond the mediocre. Most women are always found by and touched by the Goddess, at some point in time. They hear her call. They respond to it. They clear off the whole desk and reach towards her.

Timelines, dimensions and the entire experience of our reality changes through descending into our body and our sensual aliveness. The feminine is designed to move life, energy and emotion through her, not stay frozen in her head and shoulders, perpetually dissecting it all. Shakti lives in multidimensional creative motion, and we are all mirrors of the Earth and mirrors of her.

Sitting in a chair and talking, talking and talking to the ends of the Earth about our childhood and our patterns - no matter how brilliant and awesome this world of therapy is - will never be enough for a woman. Those who have tasted the Goddess, the unexplainable truths of the feminine that can only be felt, already know this.

Many of us can admit that we love that capitalism-flavoured idea of ‘buying’ into our healing, having the instantaneous luxury of sitting on our couches and summoning an online therapist, or feeling ‘better’ just for booking and having showed up to sessions we paid for.

For those of us with plenty of money, it’s the easiest thing in the world to just keep buying therapy. A perspective such as ‘No, Not Everyone Needs Therapy’ feels outrageous, offensive, cancellable. Even the suggestion that you’re probably not as much the victim of this world as you may be taught to believe you are, is problematic. You’re triggered.

The passivity of sitting there and being therapized, believing that we’ve already done more than enough through this investment of our resources, can sometimes remain a false spell. Too often, it only reaches the delights of that humble bragging at every table how we go to therapy, making therapy speak outside a therapist’s office our everyday vocabulary, wielding and weaponising therapy speak over our parents, friends and partners, and falling into the rabbithole of seeing all of this wild life through a sanitised, therapized lens. It renders such a neutered, dull way of being human. It’s like there is no spark of life in the eyes, no electricity in the forcefield one emanates anymore.

I love that I got to go to therapy when I did, and I do believe that we all have our own path. Therapy was not the hero of my trajectory, it was more like an irrelevant but memorable side quest in the big picture. Yet, truth is that it has been much more significant and beautiful for so many others, and will always continue to be. There will be so many people in this world who have a completely different and even opposite experience to mine with therapy, they will access deep transformation through it, and I think that’s wonderful.

I feel that the deepest work, the real work, always happens in movement. In creation and creative endeavours. In your food. In shifts beyond the ‘mental’ health - when you start making slow, seismic nudges in the somatic, energetic, emotional and spiritual tectonic plates that make up your world. It happens standing in the muck of your life, it happens in your physical, animal body, it happens in all the hours outside the chair.

I am not an authority for making a step-by-step instruction list, or handholding anybody into what will propel their healing. The path of the feminine, which so much of my writing here focuses on, is not linear, logical, instructional, rule-based, nor a ‘template.’ It has no ‘Here’s 5 Things You Should Do’ reels to it. If you ask me, it simply finds you. And you follow. You are already wise, intuitive and receptive to it.

The teachers, books, sisters and glimmers always find you, the more you unfurl, luxuriate, sensualise, slow down, be present and pay attention to life. The more you romance the idea of giving yourself permission to be a woman and love womanhood. We all receive our journey in fated, beautiful ways.

The writings on Soft Moon Rising are mythic medicine for me, every single day, in co-creating my life erotically, in collaboration with the psyche, with Eros, with Hades and with fate, instead of waiting for dark nights of the soul to arrive and rudely slap me into growth.

The archetypes of femininity and womanhood are so, so beautiful to work with. To study as guiding lights for every phase and initiation in one’s life. Fairytales, myths, ancient archetypes, poetry, folklore, all of these realms teach us depths that psychological study has long honoured. Myth was meant to carry us through life, when therapy and therapists as we know them today didn’t exist. And they are still powerful in a way that nothing else can be.

This kind of psychic nourishment is all the more precious in a world of increasingly Reels-brain behaviours, where everyone is addicted to needing handholding, specific steps and instructions to everything. There are riches upon riches to be found in slowing down enough to begin to scratch the surface of contemplating mythological metaphor and symbolism.

Know that therapy is one beautiful pathway that may be right for you and is available for you to explore, and that there are a million more beautiful pathways that may be right for you and are available for you to explore, and there is no hierarchy to this.

I leave you with words and perspectives below that I found very interesting, which rang true for my unique experience. I end this post with a tiny list of threads to pick up that may lead you to delightful places that sing a similar song, should you desire more.

~ I think about this piece on the downfall of resilience in our (possibly) excessively therapized generation, a lot. I also think about Dr Roger McFillin’s “Is everything a psychiatric disorder now?” a lot.

~ Explore the Substacks of the The Salon, and

~ Please read Pussy by Regena Thomashauer, no matter how much you may want to scream, cry, wrestle, roll on the floor and be triggered about some stuff in there. Being triggered is an everyday opportunity for alchemical pleasure when you walk the path of feminine healing. Women and the feminine trigger, it’s what we’re the best at doing. We merely exist, and we activate and trigger everything and everyone, all the time. We may have triggered the Universe coming into existence.

~ Actually, read more things in life in general, that you do not entirely agree with, that feel outrageous even. Explore the realms of the people that you do not find perfectly relatable, who do not make you feel seen and heard from start to end, without cancelling and ghosting them. We’ve become utterly spoilt, even deranged, by always requiring art to be a mirror of our specific life, to ‘see ourselves’ in every creation, in glorifying only that which is ‘relatable.’ How utterly boring we are making ourselves, really. Edge your way into expanding your tolerance for being able to find tiny drops of gold even within the grey areas that make up all of humanity.

Every floor-mopper at Safeway, every old arthritic coot, every pimple-faced bag boy expects to open a novel and see himself—his smallness, his meaness, his petty virtues and petty vices, his wretched figure, hideous and crooked. If he opens a novel and finds not his own monstrous visage but something fine and fair, a Grecian form full of grace and pride, then his heart fills with immortal hate. As Oscar Wilde once put it, “The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” - Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

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Thank you for being here,

Love,

O

I couldn’t pinpoint the end of my perpetual acne to just one thing. It’s a hundred things I know I do and also I don’t know what it really is at all. I’ve gently oriented towards so many shifts that honour the feminine body, and as a consequence, also happen to make the skin radiant. These range from cyclical living to foods I feed my lips to mystical practices for my pleasure, womb, heart and lymphatic system.

I enjoy meat every single day now, and we were told that’s ‘heaty’ and will aggravate us. Back when I had the most distressed skin of my life, I was a vegetarian.

I’ve eaten alphonso mangoes this summer without ever, ever counting. I was too occupied in orgasmic presence with them. Mangoes are once in a year gifts of the divine. Glasses of wine, lovers and mangoes, we don’t count that. I didn’t have a single moment of guilt or fear that I will now be ridden with pimples for eating a mango - and I wasn’t. Back when I was taught to constantly think about and fear this story, mangoes instantaneously erupted all over my body in inflammation.

I remember the energy of my life when I had the most distressed, painful, acne ridden skin as well as the most distressing, painful periods. Top of the class, always working side by side with studying, taught to glorify never ‘needing’ more than five hours of sleep because design school students aren’t supposed to have normal, human needs.

Taught to exist in perpetual burnout, shaming oneself for wanting to read a book for pleasure or desiring moments of a normal young college life of hanging out with one’s friends.

My entire sense of self worth was based upon how hard I could work and prove myself, how I could ‘justify’ the price of my education. Despite having the privilege of a loving family that never once even asked that of me, and actively tried to prevent me from descending into overachiever mania.

I based my value, as a mere little maiden of 18-23, on how many times I could obtain positive academic validation from the faculty, at any cost. To maintain the reputation that ‘Oorja’s work is always a notch above everyone else’s’ - something that was said about me in a very important jury that I am grateful for, it gave me a shoo-in lateral entry to an advanced level of my degree without having to do first year with the others. And yet, it wasn’t worth bleeding out my qi over, nor the burnout that was coming for me. Never sleeping, even being taught to be ashamed to want to linger at a meal or care about what I am eating. There’s no time for that. One is only supposed to work, work, work, produce, produce, produce.

Then, there was that brief corporate stint with the most toxic mentor of all time, God bless her. I would cross a high speed highway road to my office (this is normal in India), and I would start casually imagining that I wouldn’t really mind if one of these cars rammed into me. Then, I wouldn’t have to go to this office. Maybe I’d get a break, or simply pass away, which felt a little easier. One day, at lunch, my dear friend and colleague says the exact same thing to me. She replayed the same fantasy in her head, crossing that same highway every morning. “You too?!”

We were too young, too accustomed to our sleep deprived hustle, to understand the brevity of what this indulgent maladaptive daydream reflected about the state we are in. We laughed and got on with yet another overtime day. Good Girls were supposed to stay back late in the office AND take work home every single day.

Another aspect of this era of my life was that I had uninspiring lovers who provided only chaos, confusion and instability to my already cortisol soaked body. I don’t blame them, they were lost young boys who hadn’t yet understood what it is to be a man for a woman. I, too, was only a naive maiden, swayed by extremely weird ideas of what was being modelled as ‘modern’ and ‘empowering’ and ‘feminist’ (lol) to my generation. Yet to learn the art of discerning who must even be in my orbit in the first place. We both taught each other valuable lessons, one would hope.

The acne, the hormonal imbalance, the feminine spirit wounds, the creative trauma and the psychosomatic inflammation of these 5ish years stayed in my system for long after I had exited this life and this version of myself.

I compare that to the energy of my life now, as a woman whose wellbeing and gentle flourishing I take complete responsibility to fiercely protect. Intentionally celibate for a year. Finally brave enough to desire what I desire in love, and honour myself enough to quietly hold that standard, instead of loosely giving myself away in every way to be the ‘Cool, Modern Girl’. Easing and edging my way into actually loving men as a whole, finding more examples of enjoying the masculine and his gifts, giving up the constant upstream battle of being ‘versus’ them. Calibrating my energy back into a world where I need to lean on men, and they need to lean on me. Where I am unconcerned with overriding my body’s wisdom to show anybody how I can do all the things men do.

Dancing, embodying, breathing, creating. Devotion over discipline. Trust over detachment. Soft, rounded and jiggly, no more a hardass girlboss. My life now orients towards running on honey instead of fumes. Depth, slowness, sensuality, meaningful work, instead of a performative headless chicken busyness, hustle-for-validation, and artificial-suffering-for-brownie-points. Slowly and surely exiling ‘rush’ from my life, everyday. Rarely, if ever, concerned with ‘proving’ anything to anyone.

Sometimes I suspect that all my years spent obsessing over achieving clear skin was never about policing myself into the perfect diet or the 17 step routine of products at all. Everytime I see one of those skincare routine videos (I do enjoy them), I am a little shocked at how normal it is now to use so many things on our faces at once, multiple times a day. Maybe the actual force that illuminates our visage is something greater than that stuff. Maybe something else altogether determines our skin’s internal atmosphere. Something more long term, overarching, which goes far beyond stressing oneself out over ‘Bad Foods’ and complex arrays of creams.

Maybe sleep, rest, pleasure, hormonal harmony, giving yourself permission to be a woman in a man’s world, a lack of stress, a slow cultivation of joie de vivre inspite it all, that’s what women’s skin was always about. Maybe our skin is a mirror of what our soul and body is feeling about life. It’s how our hormones speak to us. It’s a reflection of the inner feminine, how she feels.

It’s also not that deep. The body is the body, sometimes you get a zit and there’s no reason for it at all, nor does there have to be. You live in a body. Life goes on. It’s never been about always having ‘perfect’ skin. The skin is like a living, breathing artwork. It is always speaking to us, telling stories, and we are in relationship with it.

It helps me to remind myself that there’s actually no rules or no Correct Way at all. Someone could be doing the exact opposite of what I’m doing, and glowing from their salads and green juices. Someone else, at the same time, is drinking and eating pizza, and still glowing.

My ideas around being a wellness ‘Good Girl’ who wants to eat ‘Clean’ have transformed in the past few years, and by that I mean they’ve largely been thrown out the window. And I have better skin than ever.

My periods are the most balanced, healthy and Goddess-like they’ve ever been. I have little to no extreme PMS, ever, unless I am in a month where I repressed a lot of my feelings. Dysmenorrhea? I’ve forgotten how that feels. I rarely, if ever, fall sick. I never feel like I am constantly tired. I never feel like my lower back weighs a ton, anymore. I do not have anxiety anymore.

All of these unpleasant things were normal for me all throughout my twenties, and it seems to me that they are so for everyone around me. And now, in the last few breaths before my thirties begin, for the first time ever, I actually feel younger, more fertile and more alive than I have ever been. And it’s not because of absolutely anything a wellness influencer on a Reel or a TikTok shouted at me about.

I have been incredibly lucky to peek into the depths of true feminine wellness in circle with some of the most beautiful mentors, guides and sisters around the world. I link below a few articles as starting points to dive into this idea of stepping away from rigidly controlling your body, your diet and your ‘wellness’ in this world as a woman, and instead, leaning into experiencing the possibility that you could have pleasure and still live a life that is healthy, well rounded and full of beauty in every realm.

~ This, and everything else by on her Substack, as well as inside The Daily Rest Studio.

The Deep Rest Salon

Wearing perfume to bed

Last year, I started wearing perfume oil to bed…

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4 years ago · 45 likes · 17 comments · Emmie Rae

~ is another author and vitalist whose writings have gently transformed me from Strict Good Girl to well fed woman.

~ If you are a vegetarian who can withstand listening to ideas that may be different from your worldview and still be able to takeaway learning and insight from something that is not 100% resonant with you, this is a beautiful, rich podcast to listen to. It’s called How To Be A Well Fed Woman.

~ French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano. I read it in 8th grade and I keep re-reading it again. It is an absolute joy. Do not be dissuaded if the title feels wrong in our current cultural climate. No, it didn’t make me fat phobic. It made me pleasure centric. I suppose this title is like clickbait, and it was published in a time where saying the word ‘fat’ didn’t feel as charged to do en masse as it does now. I am from the pre-woke generation, we tend to find gold in the weirdest places. We could all use a little bit of a spicy book, you know. We don’t have to be unproblematic to the degree of becoming white tubelit, sanitized and sterilized clinics inside our minds.

~ Everything shares on . It’s a magical trail of cherries to follow into the woods, she takes the reader back into wholesome, deep, delicious, alive womanhood.

~ Pieces I’ve written that elaborate on the threads in this one:

Only could’ve made that perfectly succinct, iconic, erotic.

Nowadays, when friends and lovers and family speak of me, they tend to speak of my heart first. Of what makes me the woman that I be. My wisdom, my love, my softness, my energy, my nurturing, the way it feels to be in relationship with me. “I love her because she works soooo hard” has ceased to be the first thing that comes to someone’s mind when they explain why they love me. Was it ever, though? I can’t remember the last time someone I loved being loved by ever said that.

You’ll never catch me with a man saying he loves me for my work ethic and my ambition. Who I am Being, not what I be Doing, has taken its place. I am so much more than working, and I see that. When my self-gaze shifted, my world’s did too.

When I stopped making my ability to repeatedly crucify myself at the altar of productivity the Thing that defines me most dominantly, it ceased to be that thing.

“Applaud me for how ardently I suffer, reward me for the meals I skip, revere me for my cortisol marinated glory,” a performance where nobody won and I ended up with an IV hooked to my veins.

The more times I have shedded the ‘Good Girl,’ the project to contort a 28 day cyclical being into a 24h cyclical little man who has breasts and hips and bleeds, the more gracefully I slithered into a new timeline. And thank god for that. I fiercely pride myself for this development, and I dare say I take even more pride in it than I do in all the meritocratic achievements I may have accumulated.

I am a woman, a relational being, and the way that I create nourishment, harmony, beauty and energetic dance in relationships, the way I make people feel, the way that I pour into life and lives, that is my life’s art, my life’s work. It is something that is in no way less important than my capitalistic pursuits. There are no certificates for what we do. Too much of it is invisible. None of the magic in this world would exist without it. It appears I am being loved and remembered for my being even more than my doing. God, I love being a woman.

An excerpt below, one that you’ll find earnestly highlighted and annotated with a leaky black fountain pen in my copy of Women Who Run With The Wolves by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés. It brings up for me how women, even wild women, especially wild women, are relational beings. It is in our relating that we find the most beautiful work, wisdom, witchcraft and alchemy of our lives.

It is into this fundamental, elemental and essential relationship that we were born and that in our essence we are also derived from. The Wild Woman archetype sheaths the alpha matrilineal being. There are times when we experience her, even if only fleetingly, and it makes us mad with wanting to continue. For some women, this vitalizing “taste of the wild” comes during pregnancy, during nursing their young, during the miracle of change in oneself as one raises a child, during attending to a love relationship as one would tend to a beloved garden. These transient "tastes of the wild" come during the mystique of inspiration -ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wildish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dream-time, too little time to one's own creative life, one's life work, or one's true loves.

These transient "tastes of the wild" come during the mystique of inspiration -ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wildish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dream-time, too little time to one's own creative life, one's life work, or one's true loves.

Yet it is these fleeting tastes which come both through beauty as well as loss, that cause us to become so bereft, so agitated, so longing that we eventually must pursue the wildish nature. Then we leap into the forest or into the desert or into the snow and run hard, our eyes, scanning the ground, our hearing sharply tuned, searching under, searching over, searching for a clue, a remnant, a sign that she still lives, that we have not lost our chance. And when we pick up her trail, it is typical of women to ride hard to catch up, to clear off the desk, clear off the relationship, clear out one's mind, turn to a new page, insist on a break, break the rules, stop the world, for we are not going on without her any longer.

Once women have lost her and then found her again, they will contend to keep her for good. Once they have regained her, they will fight and fight hard to keep her, for with her their creative lives blossom; their relationships gain meaning and depth and health; their cycles of sexuality, creativity, work, and play are re-established; they are no longer marks for the predations of others; they are entitled equally under the laws of nature to grow and to thrive. Now their end-of-the-day fatigue comes from satisfying work and endeavors, not from being shut up in too small a mind-set, job, or relationship. They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.

I pray for a life of working hard, soft, gentle, obsessive, rhythmic, seasonal, sensual, wholesome, grounded, romantically, beautifully, intensely, erotically and passionately, on the right things that actually light us up and are worth it. For myself, and for every other woman who desires so.

May work and creation nourish and satisfy us deeply the way bone broth, butter and actual meat do. May performative, empty business evade us, may work that acts like over the counter supplements providing a more ‘optimized’ way to avoid eating an actual fruit never hold power over us.

Something I’ve been thinking about, as I see more and more ‘kitchari’ (lol) on this feed, is all the ways in which an ayurvedic consciousness is inherently, intricately and all too intimately woven into our daily lives in India. We take it for granted.

As an Indian woman witnessing the surge in global enchantment with ayurveda, I wonder if you’ve ever noticed in the way that I have how almost everything beautiful ever prescribed by ayurveda is based upon an unspoken foundational assumption that there is a woman whose primary role is nurturing, nourishing and priestessing over the kitchen.

I don’t say that as a Bad Thing or some kind of angry feminist hot take. I love being a woman in the kitchen. I deeply fucking admire, revere and glorify women in the kitchen, who are there by their own free will. To make it luxurious beyond mere free will, I love women in the kitchen being there from heart-led desire. I love giving hours of my day to managing my family’s food, and I am privileged that I get to give it. I am protected and provided for enough for me to be able to do this, as any woman who loves to nurture needs to be.

I feel like it couldn’t be noticed enough. Women’s work and women’s ability to BE in the kitchen is a serious contribution to the quality of life, legacy, health and culinary heritage of entire lineages. Women are usually the beings who bring into everyday execution everything that ayurveda instructs us one must do to live a healthy life. Who is ensuring that every meal is freshly prepared and served warm off the fire, and that the concept of freezing food is nearly irrelevant in India? Sometimes, it’s unnerving how spoiled we are by women in the kitchen that we make their presence and their gifts invisible.

Ayurvedic ideas of what a good diet is, ayurvedic prescriptions of food as medicine and ayurvedic templates for everyday well-being have always rested upon the domestic presence, magic and labour of daughters, wives, mothers, women in the kitchen. Women who take on the role of the nurturers, the keepers of ancestral wisdom and the nourishment medicine witches for their families and their homes.

I was recently published in an anthology called ‘Memories on a Plate: Stories from 100 Indian Kitchens,’ a beautiful collaborative project of The Alipore Post and Nivaala. I share my amuma’s spicy chutney recipe, and an even spicier piece on the metamorphosis of women in the kitchen through generations of cooking in our family. This book is a beautiful, cozy and sacral-kissing collection of recipes, stories, art and poetry from Indian kitchens.

~ This is something beautiful to read, to re-enchant your life, and recalibrate your ideas around what the phrase ‘woman in the kitchen’ brings up for you.

~ Something I read recently on beauty

~ A book that I think every woman should read. A lifesaver. A trigger. Everything.

~ A space that contributed hugely to my unbecoming and rebirthing into the juiciest, most poetic version of life I’ve lived so far.

~ On being asked annoying, arousing, activating, amazing questions like “How do you have the time to rest?” and “What do you do?”

~ My shop, for readers and patrons in India, where you’re welcome to browse handcrafted Indian textile sarees that I create and curate, and find a select few of my handcrafted ceramic works that are available to purchase.