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I don’t keep track of my failures.

Maybe I should, some people do, apparently there are journals for it. But no. And God knows I have a few in my luggage. Some small and easily forgotten, some that took up an entire suitcase of their own for a while. I’ve dragged them through airports, so to speak, wondering why my arms were so tired.

It’s never nice to fail. Let’s just say that out loud before we get all wise about it. But yep, so necessary.

Last week I wrote about seeking discomfort, about doing the thing while the mind screams noooo. And I think these two go hand in hand, really. Because what is that scream mostly about? What is the flutter in the gut actually afraid of?

Failure

That’s the monster under the bed. Not the discomfort itself, but the possibility that we’ll do the scary thing and it won’t work. That we’ll try, in front of everyone or just in front of ourselves, and fall flat. You can’t seek discomfort without inviting the possibility of failure along. They arrive as a package deal, like a plus one you never put on the guest list.

And that fear is real. I know it is, I feel it too. It truly is never fun to fail and realise, wops… this didn’t work out the way I thought.

The bit where it just feels bad

Something I’ve noticed, when failure happens, the circumstances don’t really matter. Whether it failed because of bad timing, bad luck, someone else, the economy, Mercury doing whatever Mercury does, or plain old me getting it wrong… in the moment, it all feels the same.

It feels bad. 🙄

There’s the sting, the hot face. The instant replays the mind insists on running, usually at two in the morning, in high definition, with commentary. There’s the urge to explain it to everyone, or to explain it to no one and quietly pretend the whole thing never happened.

And I want to say this clearly, because I think we skip it too often in our rush to be positive, it’s allowed to feel bad. You don’t have to leap straight to the silver lining like some spiritual gymnast. When something you hoped for, worked for, maybe even told people about, doesn’t work out, there is a small grief in that. Let it be there. Make it a cup of tea. It won’t stay forever.

The chatty mind, at it again

Because of course, the mind has plenty to say about failure. This is where our old friends from last week come back in: the vrittis, the swirls and loops of the mind, the broken record of past programming and conditioning.

When we fail, the record doesn’t just play, it puts on a full concert. See? I told you. You’re not capable. Who did you think you were? Everyone saw. You should never have tried.

Notice something about that voice? It’s never talking about the thing that failed. It’s talking about you. It takes one event, one outcome that didn’t land, and tries to turn it into an identity. The project failed becomes I am a failure. And those are two completely different sentences. One is information. The other is a lie wearing the costume of a fact.

The thing failed. You did not. You are the one still standing there, holding the lessons.

The audit I end up doing

Here’s what happens for me, every single time.

The uncomfortable bad feeling of failure eventually calms down in the chatty mind. It always does, though never as quickly as I’d like. But it’s getting better and better with practise. And when the noise settles, when the two in the morning replays finally get bored of themselves, I look at the whole thing again.

And every time, I’m a little stunned by how much I learned.

Things I could never have learned from a book, a course, or someone else’s cautionary tale. What actually works and what only works in my head. Where my energy goes and where it leaks. Who shows up when things wobble. What I care about enough to try again, and what I only thought I wanted. Failure hands you information about yourself that success simply doesn’t bother to collect.

Success is a lovely teacher, but a vague one. It pats you on the head and says well done, carry on. Failure sits you down, looks you in the eye and says right, let’s go through this properly, shall we?

In yoga philosophy there’s a beautiful thread about this, we’re invited to do our work fully, wholeheartedly, and then loosen our grip on the outcome. Act, but don’t let the result own you. Easier said than done, I know, we covered that last week. But failure is where that teaching stops being a nice idea and becomes practice. Can I have poured myself into something, watched it not work out, and still know that I am fine? That my worth was never sitting inside the outcome in the first place?

Some days, yes. Some days, absolutely not, and I eat some chocolate and try again tomorrow. That’s practice too.

Unpacking the luggage

So no, I don’t keep track of my failures. I don’t have a list. But I’ve stopped dragging them around as dead weight, and that shift changed everything.

Because luggage, it turns out, depends entirely on what you believe is inside it. For a long time I thought mine was full of evidence. Proof of what I couldn’t do, shouldn’t try, had no business attempting. Heavy stuff. But when I actually opened it up and looked, properly looked, it wasn’t evidence at all.

It was equipment

Every failure in there had greatly turned into something useful. A skill, a boundary, a better question, a thicker skin in the right places and a softer heart in the others. The luggage was never holding me back. I just hadn’t unpacked it.


I still don’t like failing. I doubt I ever will, and I don’t trust anyone who claims they do. The sting is real, the fear of it is real, and pretending otherwise is just another way of not being honest.

But I no longer treat failure as a verdict. It’s a receipt. Proof that I actually tried something, that I stepped out of the comfortable seat and had a go while the mind was busy screaming its noooo. You cannot fail at something you never attempted, and truly, that’s the only failure I’d sincerly regret now, the attempt that never happened.

Perhaps the very luggage you’ve been carrying around as evidence is flawed. It’s the weight that still whispers, ‘See, you can’t.’ Let this be your nudge to open the suitcase and look inside. I suspect you’ll find, just as I did, that it ceased being proof a very long time ago.
It’s been equipment all along.

Until next time stay curious and very grateful
Light and joy,

Kim

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This one is for you. Press play and let me go through it with you properly, the failures, the luggage we drag through airports, and the moment you open the suitcase and find equipment in…

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This one is for you, my lovely paid subscriber. Earbuds in, let me talk you through the screaming noooo, the sweaty palms, and the glow that comes after doing the scary thing anyway.

Tha…

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It is so easy to say no.

No to the thing that feels awkward. No to the thing that’s new. No to anything that comes with that little flutter of fear in the mind, the one that whispers, then shouts, noooo… don’t do it. Saying no is comfortable. Saying no means tea on the sofa and everything staying exactly as it is. Lovely, safe and super predictable.

And also, if I’m being honest with myself, a slow kind of shrinking.

Because here’s the thing I keep relearning, over and over, like it’s my first day at school. When I actually challenge that voice and do the thing anyway? Wow...the feeling afterwards. There is nothing quite like it. It’s not just relief that it’s over. It’s this nice glowing I did it. A little more space inside. A little more of me available to myself.

They say we truly grow when we step out of our comfort zone. And yes, yes, we’ve all heard it. We’ve seen it on mugs and Instagram posts and probably a fridge magnet or two. We get it.

But getting it and doing it are two very different things.

The saying I don’t buy

There’s another one that gets thrown around a lot: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Hmm… I’m not so sure about that one.

I can think of plenty of things that don’t kill you but don’t make you stronger either. Things people walk away from carrying trauma, fear, or wounds that take years to soften and heal. Surviving something is not the same as growing from it. Sometimes what doesn’t kill you just… hurts you, and then you have healing to do. Let’s be honest about that instead of slapping a motivational sticker on it.

So no, I’m not talking about throwing ourselves off cliffs (metaphorical or otherwise) in the name of growth. Discomfort is not the same as harm. There’s a difference between the stretch and the snap, and part of growing is learning to feel where that line is for you.

For me, seeking discomfort lives in the small things. The email you’ve been avoiding, the conversation that makes your palms sweaty. Pressing publish. Asking for help. Saying “I don’t know how to do this” out loud. Tiny things from the outside, mountains from the inside. That’s where the real work is, not in the dramatic leaps, but in the small daily choices to move towards the flutter instead of away from it.

Where I am right now

I’m telling you all this because I am, at this very moment, sitting right in the middle of it.
I have two projects on the go, and both of them have that particular flavour of wow, this is overwhelming. New territory and kind of scary. The sort of thing where you open your laptop, look at what needs doing, and briefly consider becoming a person who lives in a cave and owns one bowl. 😊

And right on cue, the doubt sneaks in. Am I capable? Can I actually do this? Who do I think I am? On and on it goes, like an uninvited guest who not only shows up but starts rearranging the furniture.

Vrittis: the mind’s broken record

In yoga, we have a beautiful word for all this mental noise: vrittis. The fluctuations of the mind. The swirls, the loops, the endless commentary. The mind running its broken record of past programming and conditioning. Old fears in new outfits.

Because that’s really what it is, isn’t it? That voice saying you can’t do this is rarely reporting live from the present moment. It’s replaying something old.

A teacher’s comment from decades ago at school.

A time we tried and it went wrong.

A belief we absorbed before we were old enough to question it. The mind, bless it, thinks it’s protecting us. It’s just working from a very outdated instruction manual.

The whole practice of yoga, the real practice, not just the bendy bits, is learning to see the vrittis for what they are. Not truth or prophecy. Just weather, clouds passing through a sky that was never actually damaged by any of them.

And here’s what I find genuinely comforting, I don’t have to silence the doubt to move forward. That was my misunderstanding for years, waiting to feel confident before acting, as if confidence were the entry ticket. It isn’t. The doubt can come along for the ride. It can sit in the back seat with its broken record playing away, while I keep my hands on the wheel and keep driving.

The doubt gets a seat. It doesn’t get the steering wheel.

The gap between the fear and the thing

Have you ever noticed that the fear of the thing is almost always worse than the thing?

The dread of the difficult conversation is heavier than the conversation. The anxiety before pressing publish lasts longer than the pressing. Our minds are extraordinary filmmakers, producing entire disaster movies about events that end up being… just fine. Usually even wonderful.

So lately, when the overwhelm rises with these two projects, I try to catch the moment and ask myself, is this actually hard right now, or is my mind just showing me the trailer for a film that doesn’t exist? Nine times out of ten, it’s the trailer. The actual present moment, this email, this page, this one next step, is nearly always manageable.

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That’s the other secret hiding in plain sight, we never have to do the whole thing. We only ever have to do the next small bit of it. The mind panics about the mountain, the feet only ever need to take one step.

So, here’s where I’ve landed

I’m not going to pretend I’ve made friends with discomfort. We’re more like neighbours who nod at each other over the fence. Some days politely, some days through gritted teeth.

But I do know this, almost every good thing in my life sits on the other side of a moment where my mind screamed noooo… and I did it anyway. And I suspect if you look back at your own life, you’ll find the same.

So, this is me, sitting in the middle of the discomfort, doubts chattering away in the back seat, choosing to keep going with these two scary, new, overwhelming and oh so exciting projects. Not because I’m certain I can do it. But because I’d rather find out than let a broken record from the past make my decisions for me.

Maybe there’s something in your life right now with that same flutter and vrittis in your mind attached to it. Something small, even. Especially something small.

You don’t need to feel ready. You just need to do the next little bit, with the fear riding along.

And oh, that feeling afterwards, when you realise how brave you just were. I promise you, it’s worth it.

Until next time stay grateful and curious.

With love (and slightly sweaty palms),
Kim

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This one comes with a little gift. ❤️ Usually the audio version is reserved for my paid subscribers, it’s how they get every post, my voice in their ear plus the full written piece.

Today it’s free for everyone, so you can hear exactly what they get. Press play, have a listen, and if you like the sound of it, quite literally, come join me.

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Much joy and light,

Kim

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It’s only some years ago I realised the difference between happy and joyful. That they come from completely different places within us. There are entire libraries written about happiness and how to become happy in life. But when I really looked into it, there’s a big difference. I love both, don’t get me wrong. If I can be happy AND joyful at the same time, I’m in a full state of yyiihaaa...

So, the difference is.......

Happiness knocks on your door from the outside. Joy was inside the house all along.

Think about it. Happiness needs a reason. The sun is shining, the mango is perfectly ripe, someone you love says something lovely, your favourite song comes on. Wonderful! I’ll take all of it, thank you very much. But notice what happens when the reason disappears. The clouds roll in, the mango season ends, the song finishes. Poof, poof, there goes the happiness, waving goodbye.

Joy doesn’t do that. Joy doesn’t check the weather first.

Here’s the little comparison that made it click for me.

Where does it come from? Happiness is external, triggered by events, people, or things. Joy is internal, a state of being, a mindset you carry with you like.

How long does it last? Happiness is temporary and fleeting. Lovely while it lasts, but it has a habit of leaving without saying goodbye. Joy is enduring and sustainable. It hangs around even when nothing particularly exciting is happening.

What does it depend on? Happiness depends on circumstances. Joy exists regardless of them. Which is why you can meet people going through genuinely hard times who still radiate something warm from within. That’s not happiness, nobody is happy about hard times. That’s joy.

What its tied to. Happiness is often tied to the ego, to achievements, pleasure, getting what we want. Joy is tied to connection, gratitude, and purpose. Deeper roots.

Chasing happiness is exhausting precisely because it lives outside of you. It’s like trying to keep a beach ball in the air all day. New job! Bounce. New thing! Bounce. Holiday! Bounce. Your arms get tired. Mine certainly did.

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Joy, on the other hand, doesn’t need bouncing. It needs noticing.

Paid subscribers get to listen to me read this whole article to you. Pop your headphones in and let me chat away in your ear. 😊

Because that’s the real secret, and it took me embarrassingly long to figure out. You don’t achieve joy. There’s no five step programme, no course to buy (ironic, I know, given where you’re reading this). Joy is already there. It’s just usually buried under a to do list, three unread messages, and that thing you said in 2019 that you’re still wincing about.

For me, the noticing happens in the small, unglamorous moments. Sitting still in the morning before the day gets its hands on me. Feeling grateful for something so ordinary it almost feels silly to mention. My breath, the geckos arguing on the ceiling, the fact that I’m here at all. That’s when joy peeks out. Not with fireworks. More like a slow, warm hum.

The yogis have known this forever, of course. They talk about ananda, a bliss that isn’t caused by anything, because it’s what’s left when you stop needing everything to be a certain way. It’s not that the ancient sages had better circumstances than we do. Believe me, no air conditioning, no perfectly ripe mangoes on demand. They simply stopped outsourcing their inner state to the outside world.

And that’s the practical takeaway, if you want one. Stop asking what would make me happy quite so often, and start asking what’s blocking my joy. Different question entirely. The first one sends you shopping. The second one sends you inwards. One costs money. The other costs a bit of honesty, which granted, can feel more expensive some days.

Here’s my little experiment for you this week. Next time something makes you happy, a compliment, a good meal, a small win, enjoy it fully. Squeeze every drop out of it. Happiness deserves that. But then, when it fades (and it will, that’s its nature), see if you can find the quieter thing underneath. The thing that was there before the good news arrived and is still there after it leaves.

That’s yours. Nobody gave it to you, so nobody can take it away.

And on the days, you get both at once, happy on the outside, joyful on the inside... well. Yyiihaaa. That’s the good stuff.

Joy an love from my little corner of the world 🙏

Kim

PS. If this landed somewhere warm in you, share it with someone who’s been chasing the beach ball a bit too long lately. Come join me.

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But the looking forward and the loving-it-here aren’t in a fight. They feed each other. Knowing there’s a last page is exactly what makes me read this one so slowly.

The idea is old and embarassingly simple. Take a moment, I take one cross, once a week and use it to remember my body is mortal. There’s no app to download, though there are several, and there’s no certification. You just look at the fact and keep living. People have been doing versions of this forever. Monks ring bells, stoics kept a phrase handy, the Victorians photographed their dead and hung the pictures in the hall. I cross over a week. We’re all doing the same thing, refusing to let the biggest fact of our lives slip quietly into the background.

What a death calendar actually is

A “death calendar” isn’t one thing. It’s a category of small tricks for keeping mortality in view. Pick whichever annoys you least.

The plainest version is a recurring day, the first of the month, your birthday, the anniversary of someone you lost. Something that repeats. On that day you stop and do the numbers. You are this old. The average life is roughly this long. That’s the gap. You don’t have to be grim about it. You just look.

Mine is the whole-life grid, run weekly. You’ve probably seen the grid, a page of little boxes, one per week, four thousand or so if you’re lucky. I don’t shade them, I cross them, one cross each Monday over the week just spent. It’s more confronting than a birthday, because a birthday lets you round up and a grid does not. The crossed-out part is gone. The empty part is a guess. And a week is the right unit for me, a day feels too small to notice losing, a year too big to feel. A week I feel.

An example here from 50-90 years.

Then there’s the daily nudge, the buzz on your phone that says, in effect, don’t forget, this ends. I’ve used one. It’s useful and slightly ridiculous, which is true of most useful things.

The point they all share isn’t the format. It’s the appointment, deciding, in advance, to remember the thing you’re built to forget.

Why I do it

Because forgetting is the default, and the default runs my life whether I notice or not.
I didn’t come to this through a book, though there are good ones. I came to it in Bali, where death is not tucked away. When there’s a cremation a Ngaben it’s not a hushed thing behind closed doors. It’s a procession, a crowd, a tower carried through the street, sometimes a genuine party. The body is burned in the open and the ashes go to the sea. The first time I watched it, I realized how strange my own arrangements were by comparison, how much effort goes, back home, into never quite seeing the thing happen.

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Living near that does something to me. It doesn’t make me morbid, it makes me a little more awake to the calendar I’m already on, the real one, the one that doesn’t reset in January. My cross each Monday is just a way of keeping a little of that openess in a life that would otherwise let me pretend I have unlimited weeks.

And what it gives back isn’t grief. It’s gratitude. When I remember the weeks are counted, I stop skimming the day I’m in. I notice it, I’m slower to waste an afternoon being annoyed, quicker to be thankful for an ordinary one. That’s the trade the cross makes for me: a small drop in the stomach on Monday, in exchange for being genuinely, un-distractedly here for the six days after it.

How to keep one without it becoming a wellness project

I want to head off the version of this that turns into a self-improvement chore, because that’s the version that quietly kills it. If your death calendar sprouts a habit-tracker and a color-coded mood log, you’ve missed the point and built yourself another small anxiety. The practice is supposed to subtract, not add.

So, I keep it light. Here’s what actually works for me.

One mark, one moment, repeating. For me it’s a cross over the past week, every Monday, no words, no journaling, just the cross and the second of noticing it. That’s the entire system. Whatever mark you choose, make it one you can do in seconds, or you won’t do it.

Keep it where you’ll see it, not where you’ll archive it. Mine is on the fridge in the kitchen, so I pass it many times a day. The graveyard of good practices is the beautiful dedicated journal you bought and used twice.

Let it be short. The temptation is to turn it into a whole reflective ritual, and the week I make it a ritual is the week I start dreading it and then skipping it. I draw the cross, feel the small drop in my stomach, and go live. The looking is the practice. The living is the point.

And let it be occasionaly funny. Mortality isn’t only a solemn subject. Half of what I notice when I actually look is how much of my worry is nonsense, I’ll be embarrassed to have carried. A death calendar that never makes me laugh at myself isn’t working. It’s just a fancier way of being scared.

The part I can’t sell you

I’ll stop short of the promise the genre usually makes here, that this will transform you, that you’ll live every day like it’s your last, that you’ll finally become the person you meant to be. I won’t, and neither will you. I forget again by Thursday. I waste afternoons, the calendar doesn’t fix that, nothing fixes that, because forgetting isn’t a flaw in the system, it IS the system, and the practice is just the small repeated act of remembering anyway.

That’s really all a death calendar is. A reminder I get to give myself, over and over, that the weeks are counted even though I don’t get to see the number. Monday comes. I draw the cross. I remember, briefly, that I’m alive and that this won’t last. And then, this is the good part, I go and be grateful for the day I’m actually in.

So no, I’m not afraid of the last cross. I think about it, I talk about it, and in my odd way I’m a little curious about it. But that’s precisely why I’m in no hurry, because loving where you’re going is the surest way I know to fall completely in love with where you already are. The grid on my fridge isn’t counting me down. It’s reminding me, one week at a time, how good it is to still be here in this brutiful life.

Until next time, stay curious and grateful.

Light and joys,

Kim

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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For a long time, the word awakening made me want to leave the room. It had been used to sell me candles, workshops, incents and crystals. Don’t get me wrong, I still love all that, but it stopped being connected to awakening.

Someone was "on a journey."

Another was "doing the work."

A guy I met had just gotten back from retreat and come back changed, for a little while anyway.

It all sounded lovely and felt like nothing.

And yet, underneath all that noise, there’s a real thing the word is pointing at. I know, because I spent a good chunk of my life without it, and I didn’t even notice I was missing it. That’s the strange part about being asleep, you don’t know you’re asleep. You think you’re awake. You’re just dreaming with your eyes open.

The autopilot problem

Here’s the version of asleep nobody shares. It’s not dramatic. It’s mundane.

It’s driving home and arriving with no memory of the drive.

It’s eating a whole meal while staring at a screen and not tasting a bite.

It’s saying “good thanks, you?” on reflex before the other person has even finished asking.

It’s a Monday becoming a year becoming a decade, all of it on a kind of low hum, where you’re technically present for your own life but not really in it.

That’s the sleep I mean. Not unconsciousness, on autopilot. The mind running ahead to the next thing, replaying the last thing, narrating, planning, worrying, scrolling, anywhere and everywhere except the one place you actually exist, which is here. The body shows up. The attention clocks out.

I lived like that for years and called it being busy. Being responsible, even. It felt productive, it was mostly just absent.

What it isn’t

So let me say clearly what waking up is not, because the version we get sold, I think is a scam.

It’s not a destination.

There’s no mountaintop where you arrive, enlightened and stay happily forever.

Anyone selling you a permanent state of bliss in four easy instalments is selling you a story.

It’s not an aesthetic.

It’s not the sunrise photo with the inspirational caption.

You can have all the right props, the meditation cushion, the journal, the playlist and still be completely checked out. I’ve been the most spiritual-looking and the least present I’ve ever been, at the exact same time.

And it’s not pleasant, necessarily. The things that have actually woken me up were rarely the nice ones.

A loss.

A real scare.

A relationship ending.

A moment standing somewhere I’d stood a hundred times before and suddenly actually seeing it.

Real awakening tends to arrive less like a nice warm bath and more like cold water to the face. Which truly is the point of cold water. 😊

A few touches from Bali, where I live

Living where I do has changed how I think about all this, in small ways that snuck up on me.

Every single morning here, all over the island, people place tiny handmade offerings on the ground, a little woven tray of flowers, rice, a stick of incense. By afternoon they’ve been stepped on, rained on, eaten by dogs and birds and the next morning new ones appear. At first, I thought it was about the gods. And it is. But living among it, I started to see something else in it too, it’s a built-in pause. A daily, deliberate act of attention, woven into ordinary life so thoroughly that you can’t sleepwalk past it.

I’m not romanticizing it, it’s a real spiritual practice, not a wellness hack, and it’s not mine to borrow. But it taught me something by example. These small rituals of noticing aren’t a break from life that you take twice a year on a retreat. They’re stitched into it, every day, in the most beautiful moments. The sacred isn’t somewhere else. It’s in the rice on the ground.

Mostly it’s just remembering

Here’s the least glamorous truth I’ve landed on, and the one I’d actually stake something on, waking up is not a one-time event. It's a practice you come back to again and again, never perfectly, and that's exactly as it meant to be.

You wake up. You pay attention. You feel, for a moment, the amazing fact that you exist at all. And then, five minutes later, or maybe only five seconds, you’re back on autopilot, planning dinner, half-listening, gone again. So, you wake up again. That’s it. That’s the whole practice. Not a single heroic enlightenment but ten thousand small returns. Noticing you drifted off, and coming back. Noticing again. Coming back again.

It sounds almost too simple to bother with. But try it for one ordinary day, really be in the shower, taste the coffee, look at the face of the person talking to you instead of through them and tell me your day didn’t have a different length, texture and feel to it by the end of it.

Attention is the rent we owe our own lives, and most of us are decades behind on payments.

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Waking up together

There’s one more piece, and it’s the part I think gets left out of the find-yourself version of all this.

When you’re asleep, you’re alone. Autopilot is a deeply self-centered state, you’re trapped inside your own head, running your own loop, and other people barely register as real. They’re obstacles, or audiences, or background. But the more awake I get, the less the whole project feels like it’s about me at all. It turns out you can’t really see another person while you’re sleepwalking. You have to be present to actually meet someone. Presence is the doorway, and connection is what’s on the other side of it.

So I’ve come to think waking up isn’t a private spa treatment for the soul.

It’s how you finally show up, for the people you love, for strangers, for the world that’s been right in front of you the entire time, patiently waiting for you to look at it.

The gentle part

If you’ve read this far half-expecting me to tell you you’re doing it wrong: I’m not. We’re all asleep most of the time. I still drift off all the time. The goal was never to stay perfectly awake forever, that’s just one more impossible standard to feel bad about. At least for me.

The goal is just to wake up a little more often than yesterday. To catch yourself on autopilot and gently, without drama or judgement come back.

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No retreat required.

No new wardrobe.

No candles and incents.

You can start in the next thirty seconds, right where you are, by doing nothing more than noticing that you’re alive and that this, this ordinary, unrepeatable moment, is the whole thing.

That’s all awakening ever was. Not a place you get to.

Just remembering to be here, while you still are.

Take a deep breath. 🙏

Until next time stay grateful and curious.

Light and joy

Kim

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We plan for almost everything. We plan weddings, holidays, dinners, retirements, what to watch on a Tuesday night. We plan for things that might happen and things that almost certainly won’t. And yet the single event that is guaranteed the one appointment every one of us will absolutely keep, is the one we do not put in the calendar.

Death is the only certainty we’ve got.

Not taxes (people dodge those).

Not love, not success, not even tomorrow.

Death.

It’s coming for all of us, and somehow, we’ve decided it’s rude and awkward to mention. I find that strange. And living where I live, I find it stranger every year.

An island that isn’t afraid

I live in Bali, and one of the first things this place teaches you is that death is not kept in a back room here. It walks down the main road in broad daylight, draped in bright colors, carried on the shoulders of dozens of men, accompanied by a full orchestra.

The first time I got caught in a cremation procession, I didn’t understand what I was seeing.

There was music, bright, clanging, joyful gamelan.

There were towers taller than houses, big statues shaped like bulls, sheets of colour, crowds of people talking and heaving these enormous structures through the streets.

I thought I’d stumbled into a festival. In a way, I had. But it was a funeral.

That gap between what I assumed a funeral should look like and what was actually happening has stayed with me. Back where I come from, death is a hushed thing. Black clothes, lowered voices, the careful avoidance of the word itself. Here it is open, communal and unmistakably a beautiful celebration. Not because no one is sad. People grieve here too. But underneath the grief sits a belief so solid you can almost lean on it: that what is being released is not being destroyed.

Turning into ash

The cremation ceremony is called Ngaben, which roughly means “turning into ash.” But the ash is not the point. The point is the soul.

The body, in this view, is a borrowed thing a temporary vessel made of the same elements as everything else:

earth, water, fire, air, space.

It was never you.

It was the suitcase you travelled in.

And the fire is not an ending; it’s an unlocking.

It frees the soul from the suitcase so it can carry on, toward another life, or, eventually, toward something beyond the whole cycle.

And then comes the part I find most beautiful of all. After the burning, the family gathers what remains, often in a simple coconut shell, and carries it to the water. The ashes are scattered into the sea. The spirit, they believe, returns to the universe it came from given back to the great whole, the way a wave is given back to the ocean it briefly rose out of.

I’ve watched this from a respectful distance more than once and also been invited to a cremation ceremony for one of our teams sister who passed. Each time, something in my chest loosens. There is no fight in it, no clinging, just a beautiful release.

What I actually believe

I will be honest with you where I stand, because this isn’t an article pretending to be neutral. I believe the soul does not die. I believe in reincarnation that this life is one chapter, not the entire book, that we have been here before and will come back again, wearing a different face and learning different lessons.

One idea has stayed with me for years, that the truest part of who we are was never born and will never die, and that nothing happens to it when the body finally falls away. I can’t prove that of course. Nobody can, in either direction. But when I watch the sea take the ashes, it doesn’t feel like a comforting story we tell ourselves. It feels more like a remembering.

The one thing we genuinely know is that the body ends. That part is certain. The soul carrying on that’s my conviction, my faith, the lens I’ve chosen to live through. I hold those two things differently, and I think it’s more honest to say so. The certainty is what makes me pay attention. The faith is what makes me unafraid.

Why I think about it on purpose

People sometimes find it morbid that death is one of my favorite things to think and talk about. I get it. But I’d flip the question back: isn’t it stranger to not think about the one thing you know is coming?

Living close to death, the way you can’t help but do here has not made me gloomy. It’s actually done the opposite. It’s made the colours brighter. When you really let it land that your time is finite, the nonsense in life shrink. The “I’ll do it later” excuses gets less attention. You hug people a little longer. You stop saving the good plates for a special occasion that might not arrive anyway.

Thinking about death is not the same as fearing it.

In fact, I’ve found it’s the cure.

The fear comes from the avoiding, from treating death as the monster under the bed you refuse to look at, so it grows in the dark. The moment you turn on the light and actually look, it shrinks to its real size. Still serious, still mysterious, but no longer a monster.

And preparing for it actually talking about it, with the people you love, while you’re all still healthy enough to laugh through the awkward parts might be one of the kindest things you ever do.

Not the grim paperwork (though do that too). I mean the real conversations. What matters to you. How you’d want to be remembered. What you’d want released into the sea, metaphorically or otherwise.

The Balinese don’t wait until the deathbed to acknowledge that life is on loan. They build it into the rhythm of the year, into the offerings left out every single morning. Death isn’t an interruption of life here. It’s woven into it.

The wave and the ocean

I think that’s one of the real gifts this island has given me. Not a belief I can hand you and tell you to adopt, yours is yours to find. But a different relationship with the inevitable.

We are, all of us, usually a little afraid of letting go. We grip our lives the way a child grips a fistful of sand, certain that holding tighter means keeping it longer. But the sand runs out the side of the fist either way. The only thing the gripping changes is how much it hurts.

So, I’m trying, while I’m still here, to live with an open hand. To love things fully without strangling them. To treat this body as the beautiful borrowed meat suit it is, and to trust that whatever I am underneath it, has been on this ride before and knows the way.

That’s the one appointment I’m no longer afraid to keep. And I think, I really do, that talking about it now, out loud, together, while we still can, is how we make sure that when the sea finally comes for our ashes, we go without regret or fear.

Until next time stay grateful and curious.

Much light and love,

Kim

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A few days ago, I had four teeth removed, FOUR! All in a row, upper jaw. When I smile, the real smile, the one that arrives before I can manage it, there is a black space where teeth used to be.
I will have new ones eventually, when the bone is ready. But the body does not rush, and I have to wait five months before anything new can go in. So this is my smile now. Five months of it.

And I have decided, somewhere between the dentist chair and a few days into being toothless, to treat it as a test to grow my spiritual muscles and grounding myself more in not being attached to the body.
Because here is the teaching I have carried for years, long before any of this. Nalanieji my beautiful spiritual teacher gave it to me, and it runs back through the whole lineage she stands in.

On a still morning and after a peaceful meditation, I believe this completely. Not as a borrowed idea, but as something I have actually touched. The part of me looking out through these eyes is not the eyes. It is the one who sees.

The Sanskrit word my teacher uses is atman, the true Self. And the whole point of the practice, the very second thread Patanjali ties in the entire text, chitta vritti nirodha, is to still the movements of the mind so that this Seer can rest in its own nature.
Sri Swami Satchidananda explains this with such warmth in his commentary on the Sutras. He talks about the mind as a lake. When the water is whipped up into ripples and waves, you cannot see the bottom, and you cannot even see your own reflection clearly. But let the lake settle, let it go still, and the whole thing becomes transparent. You see right down to the depths. You see your true face.

A vritti is one of those ripples. A movement of the mind. And Patanjali is almost cheeky about it. In one short line he says when the lake is calm, the Seer rests as itself. In the very next line he says, and the rest of the time, you mistake yourself for the ripples. You become the wave instead of the water.
Which is exactly what is happening to me in the bathroom mirror at the moment.
Because the thought arrived, fast and loud and very sure of itself.

You look terrible.

You cannot let anyone see this. 😒

Stay home until it is fixed.

And for a moment I was that thought. I was the ripple. I forgot entirely that I am the lake.

I was scared before they got pulled out, in pain after, the body in shock from the extraction and very, very sad about the whole experience. I needed to feel all of that, but not stay there.
Here is the part I want to write about honestly.

The distance between knowing a teaching and living it is enormous.

And missing 4 teeth will measure that distance for you with great precision, for me anyway. I can sit in meditation and dissolve into something vast and quiet, and twenty minutes later catch the gap and actually feel the cool air on my gums where its empty. My stomach drops and my mind runs its inherited programming. Both happen on the same morning.

Patanjali has a name for the deeper trick underneath all this. He calls it asmita. It is one of the five afflictions, and Satchidananda unpacks it so simply. Asmita is when the Seer confuses itself with the instrument it is looking through. When the awareness behind the eyes decides it is the body, is the face, is the smile. The camera mistaking itself for the photograph.

And that is the real conditioning, isn’t it. Not vanity exactly, or not only vanity. It’s something far older. The face was always our passport. It’s how we are received, how we are read, how we belong. That program sits below thought. I did not choose it. I inherited it from every ancestor whose survival depended on the tribe liking their face. Take four teeth, leave a dark gap, and that ancient code lights up the whole control panel. The face must look right. The face is me.

So now I get to find out whether my practice is holding me, or if it’s just a nice idea I keep on a shelf for calm days.
Right now, the training ground is my own home. I am not out in the world yet. I am practicing this new smile at home, with the people who have loved me through far worse than a gap, and I notice my hand keeps drifting up to cover my mouth on its own, like a small animal protecting itself. I let it. Then I notice it. Then I lower the hand, not in triumph just as practice. Just as nirodha, the gentle settling of the ripple, again and again, the way you would calm a restless child rather than shout at it.

And I want to be precise about what the teaching does and does not mean, because this is where a lot of spiritual talk goes soft and useless.

I am not this body does not mean I float above the gap, untouched and beyond it all. That would be a lie, and you would feel the lie. What it does is loosen the grip. It slides a sliver of space between there is a gap in my mouth, which is a fact, and therefore I am less and must hide, which is only a ripple telling a story. The fact is real. The shame is optional. I get to decide whether a dental situation sets the size of my life for the next five months.

The old teachers were very clear about this. I am not this body, the body is my instrument while I am here, so I will care for it. Satchidananda was firm on this. The body is the temple. You do not worship it, but you do not let it fall down either. Non attachment is not neglect.

So no, I am not going to spend five months smiling with my lips sealed and call it acceptance. The implants are coming. This too shall pass is not a comfort I am whispering to myself. It is simply true. The bone is healing on its own schedule and the new teeth have a season.

That, to me, is the grown-up version of the whole thing. You hold both hands open. One hand says, I am the Seer, the atman, the still water, and that has never had a single tooth and has never lost one. The other hand says, and I will tend this temple kindly until it is mended. Neither hand cancels the other. The fear wanted me to grab one and hide behind it. The practice is in holding both, loosely, at the same time.

So this is the little test I have been handed. Five months, one big gap, one mirror, and a question I cannot fake my way out of. How still is the lake, really, when the wind picks up. How much do I actually rest as the one who sees, and how easily do I still mistake myself for the ripple.

I don’t have a success answer yet. Its week one. Most days I am somewhere in the middle, settling the water, watching the hand rise and lowering it again. But I know which one I am, even on the mornings I forget. I am not the gap. I am not the thought about the gap. I am the quiet thing watching all of it from a place that no dentist will ever touch.

Five months. Let the lake go still. I am still here, entirely intact, behind a smile that is simply under repair.

Thank you for being here and letting me rant on about the challenge I’m going through.

Until next time, stay grateful and curious.

Much love and joy,

Kim

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Something is being built. And I want you to know about it.

The last few weeks I have been quieter than usual here. Not because I ran out of things to say. Anyone who knows me knows that is not a problem I have. :)

I have been quiet because hubby Ole and I are building something. Something real, something with soil and early mornings and a vision that has been living in us for a long time.

Let me tell you about Selalu.

What it is

Selalu is a word borrowed from Bahasa Indonesia. It means always. And that is exactly what this place is meant to be. Not a project with a start and an end date. Not a trend, rather something that stays.

We are developing a piece of land in Bali. And over the past months it has been transforming from a dream on paper into a place that is becoming itself.

This is real now. And it is moving on great.

What it is not

We have spent years looking at intentional communities around the world. And we have noticed something. The starting intention is always beautiful, genuine and full of possibility.

And then egos arrive. Then come the community meetings. The arguments about things that dousn’t really matter. Then the community that was supposed to be free, becomes its own kind of trap and complication.

So let me be clear about what Selalu is not.

It is not a resort, its not a hotel. Its not a gated community with a membership committee and a welcome packet. It is not managed, curated, or packaged for consumption.

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It is a private neighbourhood. Built by and for people who see the world a certain way. Who ask different questions, who are done performing normal and ready to just live.

Your home is your home. Your life is your life. And your neighbours just happen to be exactly your kind of people.

Who this is for

Maybe you are someone who has dreamed about a different kind of life but never had a real entry point.

Maybe you want land, or a home, or simply a place to return to.

Maybe you just want to watch something good be built and stay close to it.

All of that belongs here.

What I am asking

Nothing complicated. If Selalu feels like something you want to stay close to, follow along. Subscribe if you have not already. Tell someone who belongs in this conversation.

And if it feels like more than that. If something in you is saying yes, this, finally. Then raise your hand. Reply to this post. Let me know you are here.

The right people always find each other at the right time.

Selalu a neighbourhood for light minded friends.

And this is just the beginning. A short video here Selalu Video

Until next time. Stay grateful and curious.

Light and joy,

Kim

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How loving are you?

I am not talking about how loving you are towards other people, animals, or the world in general. We all know that our lives are better when we do well and have good intentions for others, when we are in selfless service for the community around us. In addition, I find it’s always easier to help and give, rather than receive.

Just look at how you react when someone gives you a compliment. Do you take it to heart and say thank you, or do you make a joke and brush it off? Is it easy for you to receive help from a friend if in need?

Most of us know that self-love is a state of appreciation for oneself, which grows from actions that support our physical, psychological, and spiritual growth. We know that self-love means taking care of our own needs, and not sacrificing our well-being to please others.

I would like to break it down into bite-sized pieces here and really get into this and see what it means, for me at least.

Let’s start with physical love.

To be honest, I still stumble here. It is not often at all that I compliment myself in my mind about my physical appearance. Maybe when I put some effort into getting dressed, putting on some makeup, and doing my hair, I throw a little wink in the mirror and think to myself that I’m doing pretty good.

Physical self-love does not stop with our looks. It’s on many more levels. What do I feed this miracle meat suit that I walk around in? Eating nutritional foods, supporting our bodies so we can be strong and healthy for years to come, is also self-love. Again, easier said than done with all the temptations at our fingertips. These days I try to do what I call 80/20, and that works for me. 80% of what I feed my body is good, and 20% in what I call the naughty stuff.

I like to break down the physical even more.

Our bodies are true miracle machines that we normally take for granted, as long as they function well and without pain. But if we start looking at each part of our bodies, how much self-love do we have and give?

Do you floss your teeth?

Do you ground yourself by walking barefoot?

Do you take care of your eyes by taking breaks from screens?

Do you breathe fresh air?

Do you work out?

There are so many ways to actually give your beautiful body temple self-love. I still forget or don’t do, but being aware and not judging myself for forgetting to give it the attention it deserves, is where I’m at.

Psychological self-love is not about being self-centered, selfish, or narcissistic, but rather about understanding, accepting, and valuing oneself.

I write in my journal each week;

“I love and accept myself just the way I am right now.”

This sentence I got from Louise Hay and her book “You Can Heal Your Life,” which is an amazing book that I had as my “bible” for some years. The impact is even more powerful if you look into your eyes in a mirror and say them.

A part of psychological self-love is acknowledging one’s own worthiness and letting go of self-criticism. For me, doubting myself creeps up in different areas and its constant work to keep it at bay.

Why is it hard to be kind and compassionate to oneself, just like we are to our friends?

Letting go of that nonsense, negative self-talk and doubt that pops up if you don’t guard it, takes practice. We all have imperfections, and I don’t know anyone who is perfect. Again, I try to accept and not judge so harshly, rather seeing my flaws as something I can develop, instead of weaknesses.

Now what about guilt, shame, and forgiveness?

I see them as obstacles that need to be sent away. They do not serve oneself one bit. Let’s make a deal and forgive ourselves and let it go, once and for all.

Spiritual growth came into my life quite late in my 30s. And for me, this is something that has helped me the most in the area of self-love. I did not have a spiritual teacher around me growing up, like most people in Sweden, where my body was born.

I had the questions within me, like; who am I?

Where do I come from?

What am I doing here?

Where do I go when I die? Etc. etc…

These days there are tons of books, podcasts, teachers online, Youtube and retreats to go to, which can share knowledge in the spiritual field, if one is interested.

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I was super lucky to stumble over my spiritual teacher, Nalanie Harilela Chelleram, who lived only 20 minutes from us. She has been and will always be my mentor, teacher and friend. I would not be the same person without her teachings, which are purely through the Yoga philosophy and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (the science of the mind).

I remember the first teacher training I did with her. It was a full year of classes and a couple of weekend retreats. The first assignment she gave us was to make a list of all the things we loved about ourselves, and another with things we did not like. And I remember her words to this very day, even though this is over 20 years ago now.

She said; now take the list with the things that you like and love about yourself, and ONLY focus on them. When you do that, the others will dwindle away by themselves.

So straightforward, and honestly not so hard to do when you set your mind to it.

And asking ourselves; Who am I? Is so very important.

Imagine schools asking kids this question before they get conditioned and programmed into what society wants them to be. I believe this is essential; to know who you are. Then it is so much easier to step into the power of gratitude and appreciate oneself for who we are and what we have accomplished. Acknowledging one’s achievements and positive qualities truly foster self-love.

I think growing self-love is a lifelong journey. I know I am a work in progress and will always be a student of life in this area. These days though I try to have more fun with it and not take myself so seriously.

So now repeat after me, with a smile on your face;

I love and accept myself just the way I am right now!!!

Tomorrow is a new day, and you will be different.

Until next week, stay curious and grateful.

Much loves,

Kim

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