Small things: a decision made under duress, a flight to another continent, the balmy heat that slows everything down, a train that carries a woman through the night, bitter herbs mixed into hot water, a spiritual teacher that guides towards true liberation, a purgation of everything that can’t be carried forward into the future, daily drenching in sesame oil, a living made from creativity and adaptability. It is always the small twists that alter our lives the most profoundly. The beckoning of another way. A prompt from a stranger. An unexpected email. Try as we might to convince ourselves that we control our lives, we make choices on the paths, and we take and harvest the outcomes in the endless stumble towards ourselves.
I open the wooden door to the darkness and step into cool air that feels like silk against my skin. Birds are in full chorus. From somewhere to my left a flute threads through the dawn from the temple down the road. The sky is turning a milky grey that makes everything look suspended between worlds. It’s 5:48 am in Kerala, South India. I am on the 10th day of my Ayurveda retreat.
True to form, I did very little research before arriving. I did not know I would be drinking increasing amounts of ghee on an empty stomach for mornings in a row and mostly fasting with just a little rice porridge to sustain me. I did not know this would be followed by a full day of purging from every angle. I did not know how disorienting it would feel. Nor how holy and good. The containment is medicine. Every day is structured. Wake. Drink. Rest. Treatment. Eat. Walk. Yoga. Philosophy. Silence. My only task is to release what my body has been carrying and allow them else to hold the perimeter.
Something begins to soften. I feel joy, ease and humour flicker again in small, steady ways. I came here to heal. To restore the severe depletion and imbalances caused by the last few years of living in a world that I no longer recognised or felt held by.
It’s working. It’s working!
I go outside and sit in the dark on the wicker chair on my porch, watching the sky lighten. My early morning “medicine” — a concoction of herbs to help with stress, sleep, and hormone balancing, mixed into hot water — will be arrive soon. Through the silvery dawn, I watch a figure walk from room to room delivering each person’s morning elixir. When mine comes, I wait until he leaves and then hold my nose so I don’t gag from the smell and gulp it down in two parts.
We are in the season of imagination. Of letting your dreams reveal themselves to you so that you can put plans and actions in place. If you let yourself lean into the stillness, enough quiet to touch into truth, to dream up what big life you have yet to live.
I love this dreaming phase. It’s hazy and romantic. Not yet rooted, it floats, so I go up to meet it and see which ones I can pull down to myself. Some dissolve. Some thicken. My dreams are not made of things I want to have, but ways I want to feel. I love the dreams that ripen with time, with warmth, with love. Letting something flower from within me, my most private corners, honeyed ideas trickle from my heart into the mind. Eventually, some of them make it past that imagination, to drip from my fingers and into the world.
In between sesame oil massages, herbal treatments, yoga, meditation, philosophy lessons, and simple meals, I find a gentle rhythm. I take a few client calls. I work lightly on what needs attention. I read with focus I haven’t felt in months. I walk through the rice fields and watch water lilies move in the wind. I gather fallen frangipanis and place them in a bowl of water beside my bed. Space brings imagination back online.
None of what I am doing now would be possible without the business that I have built to hold me. Even though I’ve pulled back and am working less for the first two months of 2026, I’ve maintained my income due to the systems I have in place. As I shared recently in running a business as a type-b woman I learned how to do this when I first started through Marie Forleo’s BSchool.
Enrolments open for BSchool today, as of right now, and I’d love you to join me. More information on what that looks like and means (including a $1,427 worth of gifts):
Maybe you are in the same space as me.
I am in the imagination stage of my life. Both in my inward-facing life (personal) and outward-facing life (business). The business side is where I tend to need the most structured systems to hold the flexibility of the work that I do, which is where BSchool comes in. As I reimagine the ways I moved forward, I pair my dreams with practical actions that I continue to source from this course 10 years later. Learn more here.
If you have questions about running an online business that you want answered plainly and well, reply to this email, and I’ll fold my best responses into the next essay.
Most of my energy right now is in my private practice, and I have a few spaces opening in March. I tend to work with women at inflexion points, the kind where something looks fine on paper but feels misaligned in the body, or where a life or business is ready for its next iteration, and you can sense it asking more of you. The work is intimate, strategic, psychological, practical, often all at once. The nature of our sessions is customised for each individual. If you would like to have a call to explore the possibility of working together, get in touch: studio@viendamaria.com
