Hi dear ones,

I find that there are two stories humans think about fulfilment, and we usually believe only one of them at a time, and we usually believe it’s the only one there is.

No. ONE: fulfilment is out there

This is the story most of us grew up inside. Fulfilment is something you reach.

It lives one holiday away,

one relationship away,

one number in the bank away,

one renovation away.

You earn it and you arrive at it. There is a finish line and a version of you waiting on the other side who finally feels fulfilled.

But here is the thing. This story is not stupid.

It built cities,

it cures diseases,

it writes books,

raises kids

and crosses oceans.

The hunger to do, to build, to become, is real and its human and its most of the time beautiful. People who feel fulfilled by mastering a craft or showing up for their family or finishing the hard thing are not lying to themselves.

They tapped into something true.

The trap is not the wanting, the trap is the location. We put fulfilment in the future and then we move there to live, and the future keeps doing the one thing the future always does. It stays in front of us.

So, we hit the goal and feel the high for a moment and then the bar quietly slides forward and we are hungry again. Psychologists have a name for this. They call it the hedonic treadmill. You run, the scenery never changes and you mistake the running for progress.

So, this gives us drive, direction and the sweet satisfaction of having done a hard thing well. It also hands us a low background hum, of never quite enough.

Both are true and that’s the deal. 😊

No. TWO: Fulfilment is in here

The other story is older and quieter, and its the one I came to through yoga.

In the yogic path there is a word, Samtosha. Its one of the Niyama’s, the inner practices, and it means contentment. Not the shallow kind. Not the kind that depends on a good day. It points at something steadier. The idea is that fulfilment is not a thing you go and fetch. It’s a thing you stop blocking. Its already here, underneath the wanting and the practice is to notice it rather than to manufacture it.

When I first started practicing this path, I used to say I wanted to be the queen of Samtosha. I meant it as a goal, which is funny now, because contentment is the one thing you cannot really achieve. You can only allow it. You can only put down the argument you are having with your own life.

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This is gorgeous. It says you are not broken and you don’t need the next thing to be okay. It says peace is available right now, in this ordinary moment, with this tea, in this body even with all the open loops. It loosens the grip.

It also has its own trap, by the way. Used lazily, the contentment story becomes an excuse to never grow, to call your comfort zone a spiritual victory, to spiritualize giving up. Contentment is not the same as resignation. One is full. The other is flat. They can look similar from the outside and they feel nothing alike from the inside.

So which side is true

Both. That’s the real answer and its the one we don’t really want, because its not simple. ☺️

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Same cup, same corner, same first sip of tea and same feeding of the cats before the world is allowed to ask anything of me. There is a particular order to my mornings that my body could perform while my mind was still half asleep, and most days it does exactly that.

Some of them are the best part of my life.

We talk about routines like they are all a trap, like the word itself smells faintly of boredom. But I have come to see that I live inside many of them at once, and they are not created equal. Some hold me up. Some are quietly shrinking me. The trick, I think, is learning to tell which is which without lying to myself about either.

The good ones I will defend with my whole heart. My morning meditation. My painting. My gratitude’s. The routines that put me back inside my own body and remind me who I am before the day has its say. I want to be a creature of those forever.

Then there are the other ones, the ruts. The reaching for my phone the second I feel a flicker of bored. The little speech in my head that begins with “I am just the kind of person who” and ends with whatever excuse I needed that morning. The way I can run a whole day on yesterday, and the day before that, and a decade before that, never once choosing it fresh. Those do not hold me up. They eat me. Slowly, politely, one unexamined morning at a time.

There is a Dr. Joe Dispenza meditation I do most weeks. It is one of my favorites. In it he says something that lands in me beautifully every single time. He says

its time to be defined by a vision of the future instead of the memories of the past. To move into a new state of being. ❤️

I sit with that. Defined by a vision of the future instead of the memories of the past.

Because that is exactly what a rut is, once you take the coziness away. A rut is the past, wearing today’s clothes, pretending to be a free choice. It is memory running the show. When I wake up and become the same person, think the same thoughts, feel the same low hum of the same old feelings, do the same things and then somehow hope that today my life will look brand new and different, I’m asking for a magic trick I’m actively sabotaging. I am ordering soup and praying it arrives as cake.

He puts it so plainly. When we do the same thing every single day, the same, the same, and yet we want to see new results in our lives on every level, then we truly do have to be different, do different, and feel different. Not one of the three. All of them. The being, the doing, and the feeling, all rowing in the same direction for once.

There is an old word in the yogic tradition for these worn channels in the mind. Samskara. The impressions we carve through repetition, the ruts worn so smooth that a thought slides down them automatically, without us ever choosing it. The tradition does not tell us to dislike our samskaras. It simply asks us to wake up to them. Because the unexamined rut runs you. The one you can actually see, you get to choose.

And this is where I have to laugh at myself a little, because waking up sounds so dramatic, all golden light and trumpets. In reality it looks like the smallest, least glamorous things. It looks like driving a different road I never take, the one that adds four minutes and shows me something new. It looks like catching myself mid-sentence, about to tell the same old story about my life, and gently choosing not to. It looks like feeling grateful on purpose before I have a single reason to, which my logical mind finds a little outrageous.

That last one is the heart of it, I think. The feeling. I am very good at deciding to do things differently. I am a champion of the to do list. What I am clumsy at is letting myself feel different first, before the evidence shows up. Letting myself feel like the woman whose life already turned the corner, while the corner is still up ahead and out of sight. That is the part that does not fit on any list. That is the new state of being he keeps pointing at, and it cannot be bought, scheduled, or faked. It can only be practised.

So here is where I have landed, with all the lightness I can carry. Im not going to declare war on my routines. Some of them are the best things about my life, and I would be a fool to throw them out. But I am going to start asking each one a single honest question.

Are you carrying me toward the future I can feel, or are you just rehearsing the past because it knows the lines.

The good ones can stay. They can go deeper. The tired ruts get a gentle eviction notice and a kind goodbye.

Tomorrow morning my body will reach for the same cup in the same corner, and maybe I will let it, because some routines are basically neutral. But somewhere in that familiar shape, I am going to do one thing that yesterday’s version of me would never have thought of. Small, kind, exciting and completely new.

That is how the future gets in. Not through the front door with a grand announcement. Through a side window I forgot to keep locked.

So Im loosening my grip on the old story, and trusting that whoever I am becoming knows the way.

Now your turn. Which routine in your life feeds you, and which one is slowly eating you? I want to hear it. 😊

Until next time. Stay grateful and curious.

Light and love,

Kim

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If you have been watching the world shift, quietly losing trust in banks, in systems, in the idea that the old financial order is still working for ordinary people, this one is for you.

Not for the crypto bros. Not for the traders staring at charts at midnight. For the person who has been curious for a while, maybe even for years, but has not known where to safely begin.

This is where you begin.

It happens. No warning, no explanation, just a letter and a locked door. And quietly, steadily, inflation eats at whatever you have saved while the bank pays you almost nothing to hold it.

We were told banks were the safe option. And for a long time most of us did not have another one.

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Bitcoin is not a perfect answer. Nothing is. But it is the first time in most of our lifetimes that genuinely holding your own money, outside a bank, outside a government, outside anyone’s permission, has been possible for ordinary people.

That is worth understanding.

I had been curious about Bitcoin for a long time. Years, actually. I listened to enough conversations, read enough, felt that knowing that something was shifting in how money works in the world. I was not naive about it. I understood the broad strokes.

But every time I actually tried to do something, I froze.

Worried about clicking the wrong button. Of sending money somewhere and having it disappear into the internet and never coming back. Of filling in a form wrong and having my identity stolen. Of the whole thing being one giant trap designed for people smarter and braver than me.

That fear kept me out for years, longer than it should have.

And one day I just did it. Slowly and one step at a time. I wrote down every single thing I did as I did it, because I knew I was not the only person feeling like this.

The thing nobody tells you

The crypto world has a communication problem.

The people inside it are so deep in the jargon that they have forgotten what it felt like not to know any of this. So the information that exists is either hype or incomprehensible.

What nobody seems to say clearly is this: the actual process of buying Bitcoin is not complicated. It is five steps. Each one is straightforward. The technology underneath it is complex, but you do not need to understand the engine to drive the car.

The fear is real. The difficulty is not.

Why I chose Kraken

There are dozens of exchanges. Kraken is one of the oldest, most regulated, and most trusted. It operates in over 190 countries. It supports British Pounds, US Dollars, and Euros. It is not perfect and no exchange is, but for someone starting out it is solid ground.

I am not affiliated with Kraken. I am not paid to say this. I just used it, found it navigable, and am passing that on.

The five steps

The first four are setup. The fifth is the one you have been putting off.

All five are below, in full.

One thing before you continue

You do not need to buy a whole Bitcoin.

I want to say that clearly because it stopped me for longer than I want to admit. Bitcoin is divisible into 100 million tiny units called Satoshis. You can buy twenty pounds worth. You can buy fifty euros/dollars worth. You can buy whatever you can comfortably afford to learn with.

A small start is still a real start.

What follows is the complete easy to understand walkthrough.

I have included:

· screenshots of each screen so you know exactly what you are looking at in Kraken

· a troubleshooting section for the things that can go wrong

· a downloadable 9 page PDF you can keep open on your phone while you do this.

When I started my crypto trip over eight years ago, I would have given anything for something exactly like this.

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