I like to think I am someone who (mostly) lives without regret, but that tiny suitcase comes very close to the top of my list of things I probably should not have done.

The ability to live without regret is a gift, I believe, that comes along with being a writer (others include a tendency toward both nostalgia and fantasy, as well as neck and shoulder pain).

It was Anis Nin who said:

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

Like so many women who write, who have always written even if they were unsure if they were allowed, or good enough to do so, I read those words and nod deeply, make sounds similar to that first morning stretch in bed. (And then for the 100th time, I melt over her home).

The tiny suitcase is not the point of this story but also it is.

One of the great benefits of being a writer is that you can see the story in things, even when they hurt. One of the great benefits of being a writer is that sometimes, in writing about the thing, you extract the lesson from it and, if you so choose, you can grow.

It’s a fine balance though.

When people say doing it for the plot a very sensible part of me clenches. The way I interpret those words is: I know I shouldn’t do this because it is a very unhealthy pattern and I already know the result is going to be one I will have to recover from. Life is too short to throw yourself into the fire, willingly, knowing you (and your self esteem) will be burned.

And yet, many of the greatest experiences in my life have been the result of releasing the tension of sensibility, of stepping aside from the yearly report card branding: always a pleasure to have in class and doing the thing that is risky, incoherent, audacious - the thing that simply doesn’t make sense.

There’s a difference though, a big one, between doing it for the plot and careful risk taking, the making of tiny steps toward some greater dream, even (and especially) if you don’t yet know exactly what that dream is.

It’s important to remember Life will always come up with a story that is better than one we can reverse engineer.

To write, you must live and let the mistakes come unexpectedly.

Anyway, I regretted the tiny carry on.

I toted that too small a thing from london to lisbon, to the south of france and mallorca and copenhagen, then to paris where, thankfully, I was staying with my friend who despite being younger than me (when we met thirteen years ago our four year gap seemed a chasm even though now it’s hardly worth mentioning) has much better sense (in bringing the appropriate suitcase) and much better taste (in everything, but especially clothes).

Despite the fact she is also at least a head shorter than me, I raided that suitcase like a dog hearing the sound of dinner tipping into the bowl, then trotted around Paris in jeans that hardly even grazed my ankles, loving every moment.

Despite the suitcase being a mistake, like all good mistakes it taught me a few things about myself:

1. I simply and absolutely adore a souvenir. I know it is not fashionable or cool to like stuff, and the word souvenir is usually said with an eye roll, but my heart breaks a little when I am unable to bring at least a taste of the place I travelled back home. My favourite souvenirs are coffee beans, incense and tea leaves, body lotions or oils and small items for the home. I was upset, unable to purchase olive oil or a straw bag from Mallorca, a paperback from a bookshop in France, lest the weight of my luggage deem it contraband. I did manage a tiny hand lotion and two bags of loose leaf tea from Lisbon (a jasmine scented oolong and a smoky, black vanilla I boiled on the stove with soymilk and have thought about ever since).
   

2. The clothes I wear genuinely dictate how I feel. If I do not have the right outfit for the day or the place, I feel as if all my parts are put on back to front and wrong. The five year old version of myself knew this: my parents like to laugh retelling the story of me crying at the wrong colour school backpack, or wanting to wear a specific pair of underwear with my favourite dress. How intelligent that small version of me was, knowing the impact that outer layer had on my mood, and how mean my adult self can be, telling her to just get over it for no reason other than what? I’m still not entirely sure.

Is it a stretch to connect that tiny suitcase with a long held inability to take up space? If a small (but not too small) collection of beautiful things will increase the enjoyment of the experience, why not bring them along?

In what cases is contraction a form of self-harm?

When the voice remains unheard, what do we cut ourselves off from?

That (long suffering, deeply generous) friend of mine and I spent around ten days in total traipsing around the south of France and Paris.

In almost complete opposition to me, her large suitcase was overflowing with what felt like freedom and possibility. Not only clothes, and more than a single pair of shoes, but books, journals, skincare and multiple analogue cameras she carried around in a tote bag each day. All things women are told are frivolous, but make us happy anyway.

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A reminder: the leap between dogmatic minimalism and rabid overconsumption is so much bigger than most of us think. You are not superficial or contributing to the decline of the planet because of your desire to collect beautiful things, to carry them around like amulets.

In France, we spent our days drinking coffee and fresh orange juice and eating too much bread, even though I once believed such a thing could never be true. My friend stopped me multiple times a day to take photos on her film camera. The words you must remember this became the phrase of our time together, her plea for making me stand still and lean further into the discomfort of having my photo taken. A discomfort I am now, of course, very grateful for (if only I could have wiped the obvious-ness of it off my face back then).

We talked about the book we self-published almost ten years earlier, wondering if our next should consist of handwritten letters sent between our new homes, Tokyo and New York. We talked about becoming archivists of our lives. Writing everything down. Collecting cardboard boxes of photos, stored outside of the phone. This was just before the analogue boom took off. Before everyone watched Perfect Days and felt something. Before the surge in popularity of journals and cassette tapes, stickers and fountain pens. Before talking heads on reels popped up and said analogue is just a performance (what isn’t, but anyway), that failing to embrace AI will ensure you are left behind.

I just don’t know about that.

It was after this trip, I began the transition to working by hand more frequently and carrying a notebook in my purse almost all of the time, especially when alone. While of course and obviously I still type on a laptop keyboard and rely on google calendar, while I run a digital studio and post my articles on substack and not in a printed newspaper, I have transitioned the bulk of preparation of my work offline. My job requires a substantial, daily output of creative ideas (and the energy to make them real). Newsletters and articles, trainings and courses, yoga classes, workshops and retreats.

In my experience, I’ve only seen growth and ease in keeping as much of this process as offline, as messy and bulky and inefficient as possible.

In a world in which any and all information is available at a single click, I would be more terrified of losing the ability to have a unique, nuanced thought. More terrified of losing the art of reflection. Of quiet, empty space. Of true creativity. Of a strong, flexible mind. Of that information filtered through a unique and human lens and all its life experiences. Of spending too many precious hours of my life looking into a phone, at things I never even wanted or needed to know.

What is more valuable than a personal story, unique perspective?

What is more valuable than a mind that is actually your own?

I never knew how thrilled I would be, drinking in the typos and grammatical errors of my favourite online writers. How it made me love them even more.

In many (most) cases the pursuit of efficiency and productivity is desperately ugly and leaves us longing.

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It is the difference between a pre-determined workout schedule in a brightly lit gym wearing body conturing plastic leggings, and working out at home, braless by candlelight, moving in unison with a room full of people in a dance class or yoga studio, walking outside at sunset, swimming in a natural body of water, learning how work with your body, rather than against it.

It is the difference between measuring grams of protein and eating a variety of foods that are mostly whole, prepared with care, alongside your favourite people.

Not everyone will agree with me, because we all have different preferences, but doesn’t one scream joy and vitality far louder than the other?

The same is felt in your work, in your home, in the way we travel.

The printed books and the hand scribbled notes scattered all over the floor that become something only you could have written. It’s the texture of a film photo vs one on your phone. It’s a ceramic bowl from the first trip you took with a loved one. It’s a single piece of fabric made by someone who desires to live off their art, one you’ve so far used as a scarf, a skirt, a sleeping mask. Sure, souvenirs might be seen as uncool, but wouldn’t you rather pay the person in a brick and mortar store or a market than another disembodied psycho for more cloud storage?

It might be a stretch, but I see the tiny suitcase as part of the same urge to be hyper-efficient, to be good, to be streamlined and need-less.

A life that is rich and nourishing, a life that feeds satisfaction, inspires stories and poems, a life that has the spirit still alive within it, is one that is mostly, bulky and inefficient.

A life alive with experiences and relationships is one that is very often inconvenient.

Mary Oliver says that she wrote her poems by hand, on paper while walking.

I’m quite sure anyone familiar with her work would agree, you can feel it.

If you are new here, hi! I explore the thoughts of this substack in more depth (and alongside movement, breath and deep rest practices) in the daily rest studio workshops.

A cosy online platform for women doing hard things, gently.

If you wish to receive updates about upcoming japan retreats and online education you can join this newsletter (where I share shorter stories, too)

There are a few days left to join The Elemental Body, a three month immersion into the philosophy and poetics of the five elements and Yin - a rich, multilayered exploration into the body, poetry and the seasons.

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The Daily Rest Studio

May is two feet in the river, the skies wet with streaks of pink at sunset. May is coffee on the balcony and a big glass jar of chamomile steeping before bed. May is watercolour pencils and rosewater baths and candles after dark, tearing up fresh herbs to scatter on everything, when food feels like art.

May is for falling in love: the abundance in the mess on the kitchen bench, the movement of your body to a favourite song, your best friends laugh, the sound of a familiar bird. May is the potential that follows darkness. The clouds that finally part. The hum of new life as we remember we can choose to see beauty again and again and again…

This past weekend was quiet.

It’s a full moon weekend and the biggest holiday of the year in Japan so I felt myself wanting to stay fairly close to the earth. The weather is finally warming to a level I find acceptable as someone who often feels as cold blooded as a lizard stretched out on a hot rock. The wind is still blowing a gale but I am reminding myself, most days, to see the sweetness in it. It is easier lately, as the wind whips through the flowers and often smells anointed in jasmine or rose. I have made a habit of taking my nose to the biggest roses in my neighbourhood and breathing in deeply for all to see.

I saw a substack note yesterday which read I would trade all the billionaires in the world for a single bee and it had so many likes I felt what I can only describe as a pleasurable pulse ripple through my body as a reminder: we are not alone.

Last night, between eating the best part of a baguette for dinner and running a dangerously hot bath, I read this article about botox which made me feel the same way.

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Above was the biggest, brightest rainbow I have ever seen. A technicolour halo over a grey city. I walked slowly, stopping to stare at the rainbow until it faded almost completely out of sight, in awe.

Many of us search for happiness in life, but little can compare to the bone deep nourishment of awe.

Living on a planet like earth, I would place a strong bet on the belief we are hard wired for regular doses of awe and yet, it’s so easy to feel numb to it all, to believe we were not born with the eyes for noticing gratitude, the heart for storing it, and the mind for remembering when it is so much easier to forget.

Thankfully, it is quite easy to retrain ourselves into regular moments of awe and wonder, and it starts with the simple act of paying attention.

Our girl Mary gets it, of course:

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I’ve been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?”

Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

Many years ago, when I was going through a difficult time, I decided that whenever I saw a butterfly I would see it as a blessing, a reminder I was on the right path. Now, I experience an automatic, pure delight at the sight, without a care for how it otherwise relates to my life.

I feel myself awash in joy when I notice new flowers popping up on my daily walk, waiting excitedly to see the progression of my elderly neighbours roses, bursting in peals of petals at a dizzying rate.

I’m sure I was like this as a child, but as a young adult I certainly was not.

This is inherent within us all, but the above experience within me, is re-learned, and self taught. Through meditation and yoga practice. Through training myself to look up and out, rather than down (at the screen)(forever a work in progress, obviously). Through writing it on paper with pen. Through turning it into essays, stories and poems again and again and again.

A chilling thought crossed my mind. If I had been looking at my phone while exiting the supermarket, I may never have known the rainbow was behind me.

How much are we missing in our rush for more?

A note: this is an expanded version of a note I recently shared on this newsletter. If you’re interested in receiving shorter letters and updates about my online studio, trainings and retreats you might like to subscribe!

This morning, a strong wind came careening through my balcony doors. My natural response to wind is to be irritated and annoyed. Which of course, because spring and the wood element does not only bring flowers and baby animals but frustration and overwhelm, movement, chaos and in Japan at least, about 65 different types of wind.

Understanding the relationship between the elements, the seasons and our emotional bodies pulls us into a dance with our own healing. One that is playful and exploratory, rather than critical, drunk with worry.

This understanding opens the door to more wonder, more gratitude, more creative capacity which, of course, directly impacts our physical and emotional health.

While I can’t say I welcome the wind, and probably never will, understanding the imprint it leaves on my body and my emotional state means I can play with it. I can use the rising energy to channel into my work. I can move my body to shift the anxiety it might stir, then bring myself back down to the earth.

On the days the wind blows I cover my neck, my ankles and my lower back. I make sure to drink my beverages warm. In the evening I take a hot, salted bath. I open all the windows and doors and imagine a great cleansing.

I take the wind as a sign to replace the pyramid of salt by my front door, turn off the music and listen to the sound of my chimes — something I miss when the air becomes how I prefer it: thick, humid and still.

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Today, I can feel all around me the pulsing energy of high spring, as the natural world moves from seed to blossom, roots to sprouts. As the snow melts from the mountains and pushes fresh energy into the rivers with a roar, everything grows, multiples, enriches and warms.

This is the same force that animates the bursts of roses, the tiny green plums forming on the abandoned flats near my home, the puffs of jasmine around unexpected corners I stop to bury my face in while I’m taking my daily walk and talk on the phone and of course, the sometimes wild and sometimes fragrant, sometimes rough and sometimes giggly breath of the wind I am (trying) to teach myself to love.

This is the same force that animates our bodies, heightens and dampens our emotions, our tissues and muscles, our digestive system and mental state.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that we also find this force in our creative practice and work.

Are you overwhelmed and whipped up by the wind, by the budding and growing, unable to make a concrete decision, to see things through?

Are your creative rivers icy fresh and rising, stagnant with algae or cracked and dry?

Are you straining under the weight of holding onto old, rotten fruits?

The medicine is not always in more strategy, planning or clarity but understanding and playing with the inner (personal) and outer (seasonal) elemental cycles and shifts.

How to pay attention and gently guide yourself back into a state that is receptive to wonder and awe:

If you are someone who feels constantly in lack, uninspired, experiences envy or addictive patterns of behaviour (stuck in unhelpful thought loops, negative self talk, obsessively checking social media / notifications, unable to be in silence, scrolling when you would rather be reading) re-training your attention is usually the quickest way to break those patterns, rather than shaming yourself for being stuck in them.

1. Begin a practice of doing nothing at all, most days (but I would start by challenging yourself to do this every day for a week). This could be drinking an entire cup of tea staring out the window. It could be a short meditation, a few yin yoga postures or yoga nidra. Set a timer or use a playlist / album to mark the time. I personally do not count listening to a podcast or reading as part of this practice.

2. Create a nature journal and start the habit of writing a few lines every day or so about the natural environment around you, the quality of the air, the way the light changes, the feeling of the sun, the wind, the rain. The act of writing this down will train your brain to notice the beauty of these small moments without effort, over time. If you are a writer or a yoga teacher it will also had a richness and depth to your work.

3. Spend time writing or drawing each day. Even if you are not a writer or an artist. Maybe this is in your nature journal. Maybe this is in your morning pages practice. Maybe this is writing our your dreams or small moments of beauty from your day. Here is an older post on how I journal (do you want to see an updated one, let me know)! The benefits of this could fill an entire article on it’s own. After taking a drawing workshop with Johanna Tagada, I have been inspired to add more colour to my journals, too.

4. As much as possible try to start your day in this state of nothingness (even if you only have a minute or two). I am not one for a strict morning routines and yet, I know I feel significantly worse when I start my day on my phone or computer. After opening all the windows, making the bed and boiling water I might put on a record, write morning pages, sit for meditation, stretch or dance. I try not to listen to podcasts or check social media / emails for an hour but the longer I wait, the better I feel.

5. Read, full stop, but in particular read poetry, fiction and inspiring, nourishing essays. Mary Oliver truly is a teacher of wonder, appreciation and awe, as is John O’Donohue. I also find reading books from different cultures open up new doors and channels of exploration and appreciation. Here are some of my favourites from writers in Japan.

6. Listen. Go for a walk and listen to the sounds around you in the trees or the water. When it rains, go to your window and listen. Put on a song, an album or a playlist and either lay down on the floor in a restorative posture, soak in the bath, or let yourself move and dance to it. This practice will extend that feeling of awe and delight from sight to sound and allow your body to open up and receive it.

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And if you desire to go deeper into the elemental, restful and creative world..

The Elemental Body is a rich and multilayered journey into the physical practice and the poetic philosophy of Yin Yoga where we explore the intersection between the practice, our creativity and the natural world. It is designed not only for yoga teachers, but students, writers, artists, mothers, makers, forever learners — anyone looking to reconnect to the butterflies, the rainbow, the roses, that innate, forgotten and deeply nourishing sensation of awe. We start our journey on May 27th. If you have questions, you can always let me know here in a reply.

The Elemental Body

I was a young yoga teacher and I was madly in love.

I arrived solo.

The moment I stepped out of the airport that day I fell in love harder still. With the heat, the heavy, wet air, the scent of incense, rice, frangipanis and motor oil.

Despite my ancestry likely crawling out of some cold, mossy grove, I feel most like myself when the temperature is high. In my ideal climate, the morning sky is obnoxiously blue, with humidity that rises and rises until the entire atmosphere becomes pregnant with rain by early afternoon, eventually bursting over big, fleshy leaves and down onto hot concrete.

The clouds clear for sunset, of course.

My idea of luxury is to be at cafe while the sun is high, wearing silk, jasmine oil, my favourite jewellery and a good hair day. Either writing or laughing with the people I love, multiple beverages being consumed at once, and later, on my bed, reading, with all the windows open and incense burning when the rain comes and comes and comes.

I remember watching the world out the window during the car ride from Denpasar to Ubud. Back then, what feels like a minute ago, the world was very different. Closer to the one we romanticise now. Nine years ago, I could not just switch onto a local sim card from the car. It was just me and the window.

Thank god.

There is little that comes close to the thrill of a new place to explore. The unfamiliar hum of a language that slips right by, flavours that wake sleeping parts of the tongue, adopting new ways of living via osmosis, if only you can loosen the grip on the ones you already hold.

The immersion into a new culture reminds us there is not only one way to live. Maybe we cannot always do this by physically being in a new place, but it is important to at least attempt to float in it for a stretch of time. Not just through reels of morning routines, but in films and novels and biographies. Through long conversations with people who live on the other side of the world.

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When I arrived again in Ubud this March, the first thing I did was shower outdoors beneath the stars.

On any given day the mere thought of stars has the potential to fill my body with a great well of gratitude, the acknowledgement that life is a gift so incredibly precious and amazing we simply cannot help but forget it over and over and over again.

It is just too good to be remembered all the time.

Perhaps that is the way with most things.

It is too great a miracle to have a warm home, kitchen cupboards with food inside. To experience the sensation of being loved. Laughing until you cry. Animals who await your arrival with excitement. Beds, blankets, books, the ocean, sunrise, a hug, a hot bath. Warm water that comes straight out of the tap. A favourite mug.

With all of this piled into our arms, how is it that we feel we still don’t have enough?

Ubud is an alternate universe to Tokyo.

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Mine is patchouli.

As a teenager, the best way I knew how to escape from the real world and into a safe one of my own creation was through writing, books and most of all, music.

My bedroom was a converted garage with fabric stapled to the ceiling and chunky CD player speakers mounted on the wall. It was here I first started a rest practice, without realising, laying stretched out on my bed, lights off, listening to an album in full.

In my early teens, I loved rock music and Mum’s stories from the 70’s. Her David Bowie obsession, Black Sabbath, bell bottoms, tie dye and patchouli oil as perfume. I found (this exact lol) patchouli incense in a local spiritual shop and burned it regularly while listening to music, hanging out in my room and writing on blogspot.

While I have moved on from hexagonal tubes of cheap incense, scent still remains my most beloved way to curate a space, create memories and shift my mood.

In the rest of today’s letter, you’ll find some of my current and forever scent favourites, including brands and stores here in Japan I think you will love.

Incense

If I am a collector of anything it is of incense (and books) I have a box in my cupboard filled with different incense for different moments and moods (I could easily write a whole substack on this alone).

Over the past decade, Japanese incense has become extremely popular for its delicate scent and low smoke and while many brands make gorgeous blends, my favourite place to source Japanese incense is actually from the temples themselves.

Hasedera temple in Kamakura has some of my favourite incense of all time. In general, I always encourage visiting the temple shops for omamori (amulets), omikuji (fortunes) and okou (incense). In my opinion, they are the best travel gifts and souvenirs you can find in Japan.

The oldest incense maker in Japan (founded in 1594, originally as an apothecary) Kungyokudo is by far my favourite, and not a brand I often see talked about.

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Spring is a cocktail of delight and disappointment. Fragrant, dark and sweet.

Those first Spring days bring a sugary promise of bright blue skies and sun that warms so easily down through clothing, skin, muscle and into the bones, you start to think: oh my goodness it’s finally here and then in a flash, it’s gone. By evening the air has returned to a bitter chill and the next days are heavy with grey clouds and endless rain.

The cycle repeats for weeks.

A longing. A gasp of excitement. Open windows. Bare legs. Fresh flowers. Possibility. Then back to willing your body out of bed in the frigid morning air. Breath turning to steam walking to the supermarket, shivering. Photographing flower petals on the concrete road, covered in rain. The new beginning lingers, just out of reach.

It’s the nature of Spring, but it’s also the nature of everything.

A fresh green shoot lifts up through a thick layer of dirt.

Delight and disappointment, beauty and grief.

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After the very first yoga class I ever taught, a kind and well meaning classmate gave me what she thought was a compliment, but I took as a curse.

She excitedly told me I would make a wonderful yin teacher, which I directly interpreted as: you are so boring and weak what makes you think you could ever teach vinyasa!?

For so much of my life, I saw my gentle nature and the softness of my voice as defective, something to be hidden, overwritten and eventually, fixed.

And yet, everyone around me seemed to view it as a strength.

It took me years (and a lot of wasted energy) to finally catch up. To be honest, sometimes the tendrils of doubt still reach up and try to drag me back down. To honour our own softness in the loudest world is a daily practice, at least.

Having expressed less than zero interest in Yin Yoga, the studio I first trained at offered me a permanent class on the schedule (at the time this was a lottery win) and of course, the class was Yin.

The studio owner, my teacher at the time, offered to be my mentor, and encouraged me to take a ten day Yin Yoga training with a visiting teacher from America, which I did. I admit I enrolled in my first yin training not out of delight and excitement but out of the desire to teach vinyasa, eventually, and a belief that Yin could be a necessary stepping stone along the way.

I was still following what I loved, but the detour became the path.

From the very first time I encountered Yin (swearing under my breath for the entire 90 minute class and side eyeing the door, planning my escape) it has taught me, over and over and over again that both our greatest medicine and our greatest passions aren’t always the ones we think we want, and certainly not always the ones we choose for ourselves.

It is, somehow, my third Spring living in Japan.

I signed my first ever lease for an apartment in Tokyo at the peak of cherry blossom season in 2024.

That year, I wondered if I was going to make it. I cried in banks and supermarkets and on my living room floor as the sakura bloomed in manicured gardens, on busy city streets and in suburban parking lots. My friend told me that in her study of colour psychology, lightest pink is the most violent colour of all. That year, it made a lot of sense to me.

During sakura season the whole city revolves around a single, wayward flower. There are office parties, speciality lattes and every dessert you could possibly imagine made in the lightest pink, a little salty, overly sweet. That year, a massive storm shook almost every petal loose and in a flash, the season was gone. The next year, I cried different, sweeter tears as my sister and her partner were engaged beneath the final few blooms. Thankfully, the storm came later, that year.

There is something about living in a new country that sharpens the gaze dramatically.

When I moved to Japan I was simply following a long held desire. A love at first sight.

What I didn’t realise is that moving to Tokyo would be my greatest teacher. Not just in obvious ways like doing what scares you and learning to surrender control, but also in understanding the philosophy and the energetics of both the yin practice and poetry through my physical body via daily interaction with the very seasonal wheel yin was born from, in a culture that has celebrated it for centuries, or more.

I am often asked how it is I found my path or my purpose and while those words make me feel a bit uncomfortable, because I think our purpose is really just the privilege to live a life that feels like our own, all I know for sure is that it’s almost impossible to get there by thinking about it.

Learn to do what you are afraid of (slowly).

Learn how to actually Rest. Make time for it regularly. Learn to separate the charge of guilt from it. Get quiet enough to really listen.

Stop fearing the unknown and the empty space.

Another thing I know is that our purpose is not always obvious. Sometimes it is the very thing we turn away from and resist that can bring the most fascination, joy and peace.

You have to make the first move, but remember to let life surprise you.

The space between seasons is inherently unsteady, no matter how you look at it.

The space between who you are and who you think you should be is often a place you waste a lot of time and energy.

Maybe your soft voice is the most powerful thing about you. Maybe your wild and chaotic nature never needed to be tamed. Maybe you don’t have to choose just one thing. Maybe your diet is totally fine. Maybe you don’t need to be more organised.

Maybe you’re exactly who you’re supposed to be and the only thing left to do is see yourself as enough, not as a problem to be solved.

To learn to live seasonally, to live yin is not just about eating soup in winter and soothing the fire of the heart in summer.

It is about trust, adaptation, beauty and ceremony. It is about paying attention. It is about both pattern recognition and wildcards. It is about hibernation and ecstatic dancing. It is about knowing when to take a risk and when to stay fallow.

In every winter there exists the hot breath of summer.

In every spring there is the grief of autumn.

In all of our bodies we are craving stillness and quiet. We are craving the altered state of deep, deep Rest and yet our fear of it so often wins.

We are so untrusting of our own nature we cannot conceive of how Rest serves as the most potent fuel. We are so full and busy we only know how to interpret the unknown, the space in-between, the pause as a step backward when it is, usually, a quantum leap into the future.

I cannot emphasise enough — if you think you are behind in life you probably do not need to speed up.

It could be very likely you need to slow down.

To be on the precipice of something new, something big, something unknown, something sweet is a Spring state that can hit at any moment and it is the most intoxicating season of all.

It is the nature of everything that is good and worth living for.

Delight and disappointment, beauty and grief.

Despite teaching yin for over a decade now, it never quite felt like the right time to create and host an immersion until about a year into my time living here in Tokyo.

As many of you may know, the framework that holds the yin practice comes from traditional chinese medicine, closely following the five elements and the seasonal wheel. Japan not only has a very distinct seasonal cycle (maybe you’ve heard of this) but a whole culture, thousands of years old build upon these seasons, that still exists prominently today.

It makes sense to me now — I was waiting for this extra layer of embodied, lived knowing of the elements before bringing this training to life. I was waiting to learn from the earth as much as I had from teaching, reading and practicing yin.

I am truly so excited and inspired to share this immersion, exploring yin yoga (along with meditations, deep rest postures, pranayama and movement) as a creative, poetic and deeply healing practice that connects us back to the earth, the ever-shifting and cyclic terrain of our bodies and the quiet voice within in an increasingly loud world.

This is a training in the style of The Daily Rest — there will be depth, beauty, long workshops , group mentoring / discussion, a treasure chest of resources and a strong community aspect. This is not about ticking off a certification but actually learning to live yin and embrace our ever changing states, both through the practice and out in the world.

˚‧⁺･˖·•.ೃ࿐ Please note, if you are an active member of TDR studio, please reply to this email for a discount code offering $100 off.

The Elemental Body

My partner at the time was travelling for work. The flowers were big and beautiful and when they arrived, I felt so overwhelmed I didn’t know what to do. I was truly elated. I also felt, with horror, the rising heat of guilt and shame.

It was not the first time I wanted so desperately to gratefully and wholly receive something and at the same time, felt a force within my body trying to reject it, completely against my will. This was the result of a lifetime of feeling not enough. A lifetime of deflecting compliments, saying I’m fine when every cell of my body was holding in a scream, pretending I didn’t want for or need anything, pushing my desire down, hoping no one else would ever see.

You are completely within your right to despise Valentine’s Day and want no part in it, for any reason at all.

Especially if for you, romance, sensuality and appreciation is already woven deeply into your everyday. I understand from that place, it might even seem a little silly. Why should we need a day for romance decided by card companies and department stores when it’s something we always aspire to?! Cue everything is romantic.

My own resistance to Valentines Day however, came from a place where this was absolutely not the case.

My own resistance to Valentines Day came from a lack of romance, not only in my romantic relationships, but within my life as a whole. It came from my inability to feel worthy of receiving anything, from anyone, not even myself. It came from a feeling of general dehydration, seeping deep into my bones. For many years, I was cut off from my sensuality at the source.

At the bottom of it all, I believe my resistance came from a deep, internalised misogyny. From growing up as a pink and sparkles loving girl in a patriarchal world.

When I was able to realise that, the shame started to shape shift into anger.

I refuse to let those greedy tentacles steal another second of joy, self expression or power from who I am at my core.

I have been buying myself flowers for years now.

It started as a single strand or two of eucalyptus to hang in the shower, picked up from the farmers market, early morning on the weekends.

At first it felt scandalous, outrageous even, to do something as wild and frivolous as buy myself a few cut leaves or flowers for absolutely no reason (as if joy is not the best investment of all). Over time, it became a little more comfortable, as I stretched out into whatever was cheapest, or in season. I remember golden wattle and lilies, mostly.

I genuinely believe buying myself flowers was the real manifestation practice. I don’t manifest by writing goals, or getting extremely specific on what I’m calling in. I slowly and gently do things that make me uncomfortable, trusting it will lead the way and somehow, it always does.

I wish I could say that big bunch of Valentine’s flowers were a quick catalyst for doing the work on being honest with myself. That I soon became comfortable with my desire for beautiful things without the guilt, shame and unworthiness wrapped, like a suffocating vine, all around my throat.

But healing is never linear and sometimes we take three steps back, first.

In my next relationship (one that was very short term, thankfully) my ex said to me something along the lines of it’s such a relief you don’t expect flowers on valentines day like other girls. It devastates me to remember how I simply half smiled.

For me, and for all the women I was betraying by nodding along.

The rest of this letter will discuss the art and practice of Venus day and suggestions on how to celebrate romance, sensuality, playfulness and fun this Valentines Day, on Fridays and eventually, everyday, as well as the art of the Venusian wishlist (and a few things I’m longing for myself).

I truly believe this is deeply healing work.

It starts with learning how to create and carve out this practice for yourself first. Once we become comfortable holding ourselves in this way, we can then be honest with the people we love about what we desire (even if they cannot always give it to us)(this part is so important)!!

Of course, if you’re craving guidance on how to infuse more romance into your life, if you struggle to receive or (truly) treat yourself, you will find a whole library of support in The Daily Rest Studio, including a new collection, The Art of Romance.

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tdr tokyo

All about Venus Day

A casual chat on Venus Day and how we can engage with it as a practice. This mini class is free and open to all to watch during the month of February. Please do let me know if you relate at all!

🦢 Watch Here 🦢

Valentines / Venus Day Rituals

✩°｡ buy yourself a book and take an hour or two to read it. By candlelight or an open window. While listening to jazz. Write a note to yourself in the cover. Use a cute bookmark. Make a cute bookmark! Buy a romance novel, a book of poetry. Buy something by a small press or John O’Donohue.

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I studied herbalism, just for fun. I baked cakes. I watched hours and hours of youtube videos in an attempt to understand how to film a yoga class that didn’t look like complete shit. I stretched my shoulders out on the floor at night by candlelight after hunching over the back end of squarespace for what felt like an eternity. I saw not a soul aside from my parents for weeks at a time.

When I started the Daily Rest Studio, I genuinely never expected it to become the roots and the bones of all I do. To say that in the most straightforward way possible: I never expected it to make enough money to impact my life in any meaningful way. Not even close.

What I’m trying to say is, you do not need a strategy or a plan to have a wildly successful business (or two).

What I’m also trying to say is, it is not wrong to be driven by love and passion first. It’s not wrong to play, experiment, flail and fail until you find something you adore, and then, figure out how to make it work (for you).

𓆉✩°｡ This piece is a peek into my perspective on running a business in a way that feels very against the grain in the online business world. I actually know many people who run successful businesses this way, but they never talk about it because they have literally no interest in talking about business at all!! It is important to keep in mind that the loudest voices in the room are not always right. And certainly not always for you. Just a reminder if you desire to do things differently, you are so not alone.

tdr tokyo,

the daily rest studio

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It is almost every day, for years now, I see something written or spoken about online that seems to be screaming at me that I’m doing it all wrong.

Gorgeous women tell me I too, could be wearing a tiny bikini on a lounge chair on the Italian coast, working no more than a single hour a week, if only I had enough self belief and discipline to implement her strategy to scale, like, yesterday.

This messaging seems harmless, empowering even, and is difficult to criticise because hell yes, women should be making great money and hell hell yes, not working ourselves to the bone to get there.

But.

Even if the intention is pure, it cannot be ignored how this type of content absolutely reaches in and presses directly against our most tender spots.

When we see this over and over and over again, we start to believe that the reason we are not having immediate, obvious, measurable success is because of some failure within us. Not enough discipline. Not enough consistency. Too many limiting beliefs. A innate repulsion toward short form content and daily posting we should fight to overcome if we ever want to be someone.

We also create a deep, cemented belief that bigger and more is always better and the only path to get there is by having it all figured out first.

Back when I started working for myself, which was over a decade ago now, I had no savings and no experience. I took long term payment plans and invested a lot of time into these types of online business courses because I truly believed it was the smartest thing to do. In reality, all they did was make me feel really terrible about myself, and interestingly, pulled me further away from what ended up being the true magic of my work, my business and my life, as a whole.

When I look back at it now, I see that, like most of us, I just wanted to feel safe during a period of time that is, by nature, completely unpredictable, unable to be controlled.

It’s like prematurely jumping into a relationship before you even know the person, because you can’t stand the uncertainty of it all.

Just as in love and dating, while talking to other people about their experiences is always insightful, and seeking support can set the stage for great change, there is no one strategy or set of rules than will ensure you will get your desired result.

There is no one method to save yourself from being hurt.

To live, fully and deeply is to be, in one way or another, at constant risk of having your heart shattered into a million pieces on the floor.

The nature of true love is the risk of deep heartbreak.

The nature of starting a business is that it could absolutely fail.

Remember: no one can sell you anything to prevent that.

And nor should we desire it. Those very failures are the portals through which we find the most expansion and growth, if only we have the humility and the patience to allow it.

𓆉✩°｡ This piece is open to all, but if you would like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It makes a world of difference in my ability to write these longer pieces for you all!

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I’m writing this substack from my favourite place. A big, dark wood desk in my Tokyo apartment I treated myself to late last year. At 35 years old, I finally outgrew writing from a cushion on the floor.

I’m watching tiny snow flurries swirl and dance outside my window as beeswax candles burn and I switch between sipping coffee and pomegranate juice. Olivia Dean is singing from my record player in the background over the gurgle of the warm steam humidifier keeping my skin soft and moisturised in the bitter cold.

This is only the second time I’ve seen snow from my apartment window.

There is something about it that reminds me just how far I’ve come, carried here to create a life Tokyo, to the most confident and stable version of myself by my work as a practice, a passion and an art form, instead of time blocking, scheduling, outsourcing or reaching for externally celebrated goals.

Over the years, I have had people wanting to invest in The Daily Rest, offer to take on all the stuff I don’t have the skills or time for like digital marketing and design to help me grow. They would say things like you should be making real money without telling me what that even means, or knowing anything about the financial side of my work. I have been asked on podcasts with massive reach. I have been offered collaborations with large businesses. I started working on an app. I was even offered a book deal with my dream publisher.

I turned them all down. One by one.

The reason I share this is not because I’m trying to be cool (I am not cool, we have already established that) but because when I first turned down these opportunities, I felt massive waves of shame. I wondered what was wrong with me. The disembodied voice of the spiritual girl boss ricocheted around in my skull.

You’re afraid to be seen.

You have to work on your limiting beliefs and unworthiness.

Your time management skills suck, girl.

For a time, I genuinely believed this.

When asked why I turned certain opportunities down, especially the book deal, which in theory should have been my greatest dream, I would answer something flimsy like I don’t have time, I don’t want to overwhelm myself and honestly, those answers are perfectly valid on their own, but the real truth was:

I just didn’t want to.

It looked great on paper, perfect even.

But it didn’t feel right.

When I sit with those answers, another small voice appears and says something like, who do you think you are to say no to all of that?

Usually, when that voice appears, I know I’m back on track.

What a relief it is, to realise that success comes in as many different forms as there are people in the world.

How powerful it is, to believe in yourself enough to say no.

I have zero desire to scale.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in attracting more of the right people to my world.

I have zero desire to prioritise profit over the enjoyment I have for my work. I simply cannot get as excited about a dollar amount as I can about finding the best place for a retreat, talking to a group of women for hours about desires and dreams, spending mornings writing in coffee shops or putting together a new program where the final threads come together with magnetic simplicity.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t consider profit at all.

It’s truly possible to have a business that makes money without focusing on money all that much. If money alone is something that excites you, then sure. But if you’re just setting monthly targets because you think you have to in order to reach them, then it’s probably not going to be inspiring enough when things get tough (which they will).

It’s interesting.

One of the ways I feel deeply and truly successful right down into my core is that I actually love my work. I love teaching. I love writing. I love creating programs and retreats, witnessing them come to life. I love the people I get to spend time with through it all.

Yes, sometimes I am completely overwhelmed. Yes, I have worked hard and it has taken a long time to get here (for anyone new I have been writing online since I was a teenager, I am in no way an overnight success). Yes I have made sacrifices and taken risks. But I also feel, most days, like the luckiest woman in the world.

I do not want to ‘batch content’ because I enjoy the art and the practice of writing and creating. I like using pen and paper. I like writing on trains and in coffee shops. I like writing early in the morning while I’m still waking up. I like writing and then starting all over again. This substack has taken me two weeks to finish! But every moment spent was worth it, and I know that, even before I hit send.

I do not want to stop teaching live and turn my work into just an ‘evergreen’ course because teaching live is the best part.

I do not want to write a five year plan because I know when I let go of all, that it becomes more beautiful than I could ever expect.

We are told we should do these things in order to find more growth, more freedom, more success — but if we love what we do, why would we want to rush it, cram it into a colour coded box?

Why on earth would we want to do it less if it is something we love.

The one issue with writing about all this, instead of talking about it with a back and forth exchange (which is what we do in the TDR studio soft business circles) is that of course, there is less space for in the moment nuance and depth that arises via conversation, which is the best way to learn and evolve (and another reason why I never want to stop teaching live!!)

Five year plans, scaling, reel hooks, bombastic profit goals, content schedules, passive income, a why or a mission that lights your soul alive, the ability to not work at all for months at a time — all of it is beautiful.

But it is not for me.

At least not for now, not so far in the 10+ years of working this way.

For so long, I was quietly inwardly cruel and self-critical about the way I work. I berated myself endlessly. I told myself I was wasting opportunities, doing it all wrong. I tried time after time after time to force myself to be like everyone else.

Until slowly, gently, like the first spring buds arising under a light snow, I began to realise that it was embracing my way that led me to where I am right now. I looked around at my life: not what I owned, not what my stats were, but how I lived each day and I realised just how incredibly, deeply successful I was.

I don’t want to build an empire.

I want to live my beautiful and imperfect life.

And I already am.

Soft Business Resources & Inspiration

One of the ways I stay committed to my slow and satisfying way of business building when the noise of the other is so loud, is by making sure to connect with others who are successful without viral reels or social media trends, who dance across multiple mediums and who constantly choose that which cannot scale.

Johanna Tagada is an online friend and true inspiration for me, I have been following her work online since my late teen years! She is an artist, an author, a teacher and the founder of multiple businesses and projects including a publishing house, a magazine and not-for-profit work. I recently attending her drawing workshop in Tokyo, even though I cannot draw because I will sign up for anything she offers.

This is my favourite book on business, written by the former owner of a tiny coffee shop in Tokyo. I have carried a copy around with me since a friend gifted it to me in 2018 and have turned so many people onto it. A must read!

I adore the world of Le Petite 3 a snail mail newspaper and how they mysteriously advertise themselves.

I love love loved this substack on Solange. An example of how you can have wild, mainstream success and still be true to yourself and prioritise art over everything else.

Ichiko Aoba is a musician, artist, author and founder of a record label who inspires me deeply. I’ve written about her here and here. Watching her live always feels like a healing and a transmission. She embodies gentleness (and weirdness) as power.

is the founder of a jewellery brand, writes a substack and has a youtube channel. I adore her whole world and how she expresses herself. Watching her do business as a young woman is wildly inspiring to me. I have this and this on my wishlist, of course.

The Soft Business Circles in The Daily Rest Studio. I know I host these so it might seem a little cringe to write it down here, but these circles are the support groups for creative, self-employed and just women in general livinly gently and wildly in a crazy world. They bring me so much peace, motivation and joy.

I have written extensively on this subject here on substack. You might also enjoy how writing made me confident, how I moved to tokyo to start a business, the clues we have following us all our lives that hint at what we’re supposed to do and how I follow the most days approach.

Most importantly, my greatest inspirations without fail are my friends, my family and the women who engage with my work and make it possible. The conversations I have with these women make more positive impact on my business and work than I think they could ever know.

If you made it this far, thank you.

I would love to know your thoughts on any of this. I am always delighted to receive and read your comments, they always make my day 🦢

The Soft Business Universe

𓆉✩°｡ if any of this speaks to you, I encourage you stay awhile here on this substack, I often talk about self-employment from a poetic lens. You can also join us for a live Soft Business Circle on Feb. 10th with my friend and TDR Tokyo collaborator, Keito Hirakawa.

𓆉✩°｡ we have one spot left for Kokoro a writing and creative living retreat off the coast of Japan this April. This retreat is sooooo special! Is this spot waiting for you?

𓆉✩°｡ I may have turned down appearing on some podcasts, but I’ve spoken on many! Tahnee is one of my favourite women in the yoga world, you might enjoy listening to our conversation here

𓆉✩°｡ if you are craving soft 1:1 business support, you can always reach out in a reply to this email, it is something I offer from time to time, both online and in-person in Tokyo.

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We’re going to Ishigaki island in January to see Ichiko Aoba they say, as I’m putting on my coat to walk out the door. I stop completely. You should come!

It is one of those moments I know I am exactly where I am meant to be.

That night, I meet another friend at a super sento. A super sento is kind of like bathhouse on steroids, but in a chill way. We change into yukata and socked feet. Soak in the bath until our bodies turn bright pink. We laugh immersing ourselves into small, egg shaped steam pods, take a break for dinner and snuggle into oversized puffy vests to rest our feet in the 360 degrees rooftop foot spa.

The city twinkles blue, yellow and red.

There are no stars, no salt on the breeze, but it is still beautiful, somehow.

In early December, mid January feels like a lifetime away. After the holiday season, after the new year turns, after I spend three weeks in Australia drifting between my childhood home on the coast and my sister and brother in laws apartment in the heart of the inner west.

On the coast, my parents are early to bed and early to rise. I only leave the house to take long walks, collect frangipanis or go to the beach. I wear the same clothes for three days straight. I eat the same foods on repeat. One ripe mango cheek, banana with nut butter and cinnamon, tinned fish, salads from the garden, avocado toast. Mum leaves flower arrangements on my desk. I burn incense sticks on the windowsill. I stop everything I’m doing and run outside when I hear the cry of the black cockatoo.

In Sydney, we stay up late, talking and laughing. We eat takeaway pizza and eggplant dumplings and drink coke zero, I fit in a second dinner when my brother in law brings home his mother’s Lebanese food. Green beans, tomato, fragrant rice. I fall into a light sleep beneath the sound of the trains, wake up with the cats tail brushing my face, still tired just after sunrise.

𓆉✩°｡ ⋆ instagram, the daily rest studio, japan retreats

I can smell the salt on the air before I even leave the airport at Sydney. The drive from the airport back to Newtown is always the same. Sydney feels so dark at night now. Quiet, still, a big country town. Sydney’s inner west is as much my home as the south coast. Walking beneath the scorching sun lowering over Enmore road on a summer afternoon. The Jacaranda trees full to bursting on Australia street. The drive from Newtown over to the beach with the windows wound down drinking green juice out of glass jars (always in the passenger seat). The graffiti and the lorikeets, the big, blue skies and the gritty streets.

When you leave a place you lived for so long, coming back is never just a holiday. There is a part of you that naturally slips back into your old rhythm after a day or two. And yet, it’s impossible not to feel the widening difference between who you were, and who you are now.

It’s impossible not to feel the space between the city when you left and how it is today. The the way it is both the same, and eerily, not at all.

Certain streets hold a memory sharply connected to two or three years earlier for me. For the people who still live here, they’ve walked over that same street so many times since, the moment has all but dissolved into dust.

Sometimes I cannot tell if I have romanticised the past, or forgotten how wonderful it actually was.

When I look up Ishigaki on the map it seems almost too tiny, a million miles away from mainland Japan, a grain of sand adrift in a lagoon.

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I cannot begin this list without going on about how happy I am I started dancing again this year. I’m so annoying! I know! But really. I walked into my first bellydance class in March, and in just a few short months it has gifted me more than I can explain (but will of course, write a future essay about).

I cannot emphasise how healing dance is for women (for everyone)!! It was also one of my greatest childhood joys that I gave up for all the wrong reasons. 2025 was the year I realised how those passions and obsessions we had when we were young were absolutely on purpose and it is essential we uncover them from the depths of I don’t have time, I’m not good at it and what’s the point.

But more on that another time.

Books

Fiction: I was obsessed with Elif Shafak this year. I read The Forty Rules of Love, There Are Rivers In The Sky & The Island of Missing Trees and loved them all. The Forty Rules of Love may have been my number one book of the year. I also read a few from Lisa See, my top pick is this one.

Non-fiction: I read a lot of Japanese books to understand on a deeper level the land I am currently living on. My number one was this masterpiece which I know I will read over many times, and has been a huge inspiration for my writing, retreat concepts and our upcoming yin training. I also loved this and this memoir.

Music

My album of the year. Of course I also fell in love with her, this blew me away, and I spent a lot of time writing to this. This was my favourite playlist. I bought this record player just last month and it has filled my home (and my heart) with so much joy!

I also went to see a lot more live music and shows than I have in previous years, and plan to do even more in 2026. More ballet, too!

Writing

I invested in this portfolio and I promise it is worth every cent. I use it for everything (I fill with the slim moleskin inserts). I have never felt more organised. For me and my not-so-typical brain, this approach really is the correct meeting point between structure and flow. Especially when paired with these.

2025 was the year I transitioned big time to working on paper and it has been a game changer for my productivity and mental health. This year I also journaled more consistently than ever before. I can say for a fact, writing is one of the most important tools and practices we have, both in work and business, and as a healing modality.

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A few quick fires:

My go-to 2025 breakfast for gut health and glowy skin (I often omit the chicken and add jobs tears or hatomugi soaked overnight).

Random, but a superior Japanese toothpaste (that apparently you can buy in Australia, too)

My favourite publication on substack.

This perfume and this body oil both making the list, again!

My most-visited category in The Daily Rest Studio. And this one, too.

This year, I prioritised solo trips for working, writing and creative restoration as it was a huge year of holding space for others amidst my own challenges. I’m so happy I did. Travel is always worth every cent.

My favourite phrase was: You Can Just Do Things.

My hairdresser in Tokyo put me onto this (Italian) brand and my hair loves it. This is the only oil serum that doesn’t weigh down my super fine hair (I have tried a million!) and makes it so shiny and soft.

Found the happiest skin of my life at 35!

Found my all time favourite bra, too.

Most importantly,

2025 was the year I finally learned to feel proud of myself.

I can honestly say coming out of 2025, I have a true, rooted confidence I have never felt before in my life.

At times I feel it as if radiating from every pore.

It’s all that I have ever hoped for.

Like so many of us, 2025 pushed up against almost every single fear I held, poked all my wounds, insecurities and anxieties, and forced me to face them and myself, relentlessly.

And yet, in reflecting on all that has passed in the last twelve months I see an incredible amount of beauty too. One one hand it may have been the worst year ever, but on the other… it was the best, by far.

If you haven’t already, I would highly encourage to write your own list of favourites, expanding far beyond what I have shared here. Favourite memories, people, experiences, outfits, songs, meals, moments, coffee shops, practices, choices you had the courage to make (even if you haven’t yet seen the results)… and you might be overwhelmed by how wonderful life actually is and can be.

Thank you for being here.

Have a beautiful in-between season.

Do your best to do nothing at all, if you can.

You deserve it.

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It’s the first thing we notice, my friend Keito and I, as we step out of the bullet train at Toyama, from Tokyo.

We both grew up on the edge of the same ocean. When I realise this, even though it is very obvious and technically I already knew, something like a million synapses connect in my brain, all at once.

The nostalgia and comfort I feel, arriving in small coastal Japanese towns after too many weeks spent without leaving Tokyo immediately makes sense. It feels like a homecoming, because in a way, it is. I am once again breathing the air of the massive ocean I grew up beside, bathing in, watching through my bedroom window.

We talk about our home as a specific land mass. We point to it on a map.

But perhaps for many of us, it’s a little more complex than that.

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You could say I met Keito by pure chance, by a strike of golden luck, but to say that would not be entirely true.

I believe in divine timing for sure, but I also believe our luck is made by the actions we take.

When I say actions I don’t mean those that can be easily trusted, those that are taught in university or school. I mean actions that come from a quiet place within. The ones that scare you. That may not make sense, even to you, until a year later, maybe two.

I suppose it all began when that quiet place told me to speak Japanese to a stranger on the street in 2011.

It was because that stranger had the courage to leave a long term relationship in Tokyo and move to Australia in her late twenties. Because we both decided to build a friendship even though we couldn’t speak the same language, and our life increasingly moved along very different paths.

That stranger is now one of the most important people in my life (and we still cannot shake the habit of speaking in our own version of Japanglish, much to our own language proficiency detriment).

Both synchronicity and divine timing is real, for sure, but it is shaped by the people you meet and the risks you take.

So I met my friend Keito because it was meant to be but also through a friend of a friend of a friend of that stranger I spoke to on the street, fifteen years before.

Toyama smelled like the ocean, but nostalgia free.

It’s The Sea of Japan, right? Keito says. She is right, of course. To me this ocean smells deeper and darker. Definitely colder. I realise above all, it smells mostly, unfamiliar.

In Toyama train station we eat sushi, salmon and buri or mature yellowtail fish, a winter delicacy in Japan. I felt my mouth water in desire for green tea and it makes me laugh. This is not something I was taught, but a physical response that appeared over the last year or so. Like the small bow I make at the person I sit beside in a cafe, or hugging my bag close to my body on the train.

While most of who we are is built from the places and the people we come from, the places we live quickly become a part of us, too.

From Toyama, we board the oldest train I’ve ever seen: a two carriage, rust coloured tin can, with the heaters turned up to a furnace degree to take us further inland to a small town called Nantou, at the foot of the Hida Mountains.

The moment we arrived at our accomodation, we are embraced by our host, Mr. Tonomura and a few piles of snow on the ground. He immediately melts our hearts. He chats to us as if we’ve been friends forever and starts to show us a very important cultural property until he realises the monk from the next door temple is about to pop his head in, at which point he mumbles the polite Japanese equivalent of shit shit shit shit and kindly hustles us out of the way.

After welcome kuromojicha (herbal tea made from the rosewood tree) and a temple shaped monaka (a wafer sweet filled with bean paste) we take photos of every square inch of the guesthouse and then lament how impossible it is to capture the essence of the place in a photo. The usual routine, it seems.

That night for dinner we walk a few steps to the local izakaya, where we eat fresh sashimi, simmered tiny clams, fried tofu, fermented soy beans with raw squid, a big bowl of noodle soup and some of the best sake I’ve ever tasted in my life (though to be fair, I have not tasted a lot).

After bathing and gossiping, we drift off to sleep. Soon after, an earthquake shakes the ground violently up north.

I’ve been sleeping through earthquakes recently. Instead of waking up with my heart in my throat, I dream of the sea.

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When I say, never looked better, I want to emphasise I do not mean flawless.

I do not mean without lines, freckles, redness or scars. I have plenty of those.

I do not mean I look perfect, pore-less or considerably younger than my age.

When you think about it, it’s certifiably insane that ‘good skin’ in the year 2025 has come to mean you must look younger than you did in your high school graduation photo.

Like!?!

When I say never looked better, I mean my skin is not reactive (for the first time in my life). It does not feel tight. It does not peel the second the humidity drops below 70%. I don’t have any eczema or acne. People regularly tell me I’m glowing. Someone I hadn’t seen in person for years said my skin looked so good, I must be in love (lol).

But I guess I am, with the life I have built for myself.

I struggled with skin issues most of my life. In my teens I had eczema so bad and so infected, it would stick to my school clothes and bleed. I also had hormonal acne (I was prescribed the pill for it) and in my mid twenties, when I finally went off the pill, I was blessed with whole new level of cystic acne so terrible I still have the (physical and emotional) scars.

I know intimately what it is like to struggle with skin issues and how debilitating it can be for your self worth, image and esteem.

The worst cystic acne outbreak I ever had coincided with the time I started teaching yoga. I had just secured a job teaching at my dream studio and I was absolutely petrified. Everyone else working at the studio had been teaching for years. I really looked up to them and felt like a total fraud. The massive cyst on the side of my face seemed to support my belief that I wasn’t good enough to be there. To top it all off, I had a crush on the owner of the studio, too.

Great.

It felt at times, excruciating to be seen.

I felt like everyone was judging me, thinking I must be dirty, ugly and unhealthy. It was like anytime someone looked at me, all I could think about was them being grossed out, or pitying me for my skin. It would have been so easy to run away but thank the lord I did not, because I ended up growing into the teacher I am today in that studio (and, I was also in a great and formative relationship with the owner for many years).

So just a reminder if you’re currently dealing with skin stuff — don’t wait until it’s healed to start something new, to go on a date, put your work out into the world for all to see.

This is what I mean by doing hard things, gently.

Being seen, acne and all, was where the healing really started for me.

In the rest of this article, I’ll share how my lifestyle and habits in Japan seem to have influenced my skin for the better, even during one of the hardest periods of my life. You can read part one of this exploration below.

I’ll also share my favourite resources for remembering real beauty when I get too caught up in over-analysing my body, face or skin (or find myself in the reels section of instagram, god forbid).

Japanese Skincare

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In my hazed state before I left Tokyo, I washed my thermal long sleeve shirts and tights, knowing it would be significantly colder on my return. As I walked into the living room, I found them hanging over the tatami mats, forgotten for the past three weeks and for some reason this unlocked a deep wave of gratitude within me. It’s been close to two years since I officially moved to Tokyo, but this was the first moment I felt myself soften in the embrace of my home.

It might have been the first time I felt truly safe in this new life I have been building for myself. The first time I let myself believe it. You did this, and it’s real. It’s okay to feel completely and utterly overjoyed about it.

It was already late, but Tokyo is Tokyo and I had no food, so I went for a walk to my local grocery store, knowing very well I’d want to eat miso soup with fried tofu and daikon as soon as I woke up the next day.

Walking the ten minutes to the supermarket, I noticed the leaves had started to turn. The trees were patterned like camouflage in green, brown, yellow and a hint of red. Despite being in transit all day I felt elated, feather light. I giggled out loud.

Living in Japan has me head over heels with thresholds and transition states. I don’t know if it’s because there is a quiet and eternal transience to creating a life in a country you are not from, and probably can’t stay forever, or because Spring and Autumn are dangerously fleeting here. Two tiny exhales nestled between months of far too hot, or far too cold.

I find myself as if under the influence of a sweet, fermented fruit wine when the weather is in-between seasons. Every day is romantic. I want to spend all the moments I can outside. The natural environment changes rapidly and is celebrated by everyone. There are flower and leaf viewing festivals of every description. Even insects are celebrated. The fireflies in early summer. The bell crickets in autumn.

Thresholds are built into the culture here. Take your shoes off at the entrance. Wash your hands before you enter the temple. Bow at the tori gate. A tree or a waterfall will be marked with a wreath to indicate they are sacred. A crossing point between human and spirit, heaven and earth.

Today’s essay is a small peek into my experience living in Japan, so far. How I feel as if I’m finally stepping past the first threshold, two years in. I’ll also cover why I recommend living abroad to anyone who feels the call, and a few surprising things I learned along the way. The how and why I moved to Japan is a story (or an essay) for another day.

If you’re curious, you can check out the business I started in Japan, too. Find more tokyo stories here, here and here.

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The kinmokusei is here.

Osmanthus, or kinmokusei in Japanese, existed to me before only as a flavoured oolong tea. It wasn’t until last year that the flower became real. In mid to late October, the streets of Tokyo are sweetly laced with perfume. There is no other way to describe the scent of Osmanthus. As if the earth has decided to adorn herself, to dress up in one final flourish before the leaves turn red and eventually, fall. The scent is simultaneously subtle and powerful, depending on the humidity, the direction of the breeze.

The kinmokusei trees are everywhere in residential neighbourhoods and shrines in particular. There is nothing quite like turning a corner and feeling the perfumed air hit your bloodstream.

The next morning, I send a text to my friend to confirm our lunch plans. She immediately replies with a text about the kinmokusei. Women connected by scent feels ancient and perfect, somehow. A language we all knew how to speak, not so long ago.

Like many women I know, I was once a girl who emphatically assured she did not need flowers, that valentines day was just another hallmark holiday.

Even now, I own far less jewellery than I would like, after a lifetime of pretending it held little value or meaning for me, when to be perfectly honest, adornment in all it’s forms means more to me than almost anything else in the world.

I feel sad for the girl who was so influenced by the over-culture she over-wrote who she was, and what she loved.

I feel sad for all the women who continue to do so.

The rest of this article is for paying subscribers. Follow along on instagram, the daily rest studio or join me in japan! For similar themes, you might like to read this interview, re-visit this or this article, or dive into this or this class in the daily rest studio.

Manifestation opened the way to flowers, first

It was 2018, and I lived in a detached split level house with my partner at the time, who was travelling a lot for work.

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I always dreamed of a creative life, one with freedom and spaciousness, one in which my work felt exciting and inspiring and created the correct challenges for me to grow.

When I started working for myself (over a decade ago now) I was told by many women, all of them older and wiser than me, that I would never be able to support myself working as a yoga teacher.

I was told by my creative writing teachers and peers the exact same thing about the written word. I was told by multiple book publishers poetry doesn’t sell. I have been told by real students in real yoga classes that what I’m teaching isn’t yoga at all.

And yet, I continued on.

In fact, it was through poetry, through rest, through writing and sharing stories, through moving in the complete opposite direction to any and all business advice I read or received that I created a thriving business ecosystem that allows me to live a life I had never seen anyone else live.

A life I did not know was possible at all, but especially not for me.

At thirty five years old, the greatest outcome of my business is not that it supports me financially and inspires me creatively, but that I have a deep and unshakable confidence and trust in myself.

As a woman, I cannot tell you what a precious resource this is.

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I am the world’s most unlikely business mentor.

I don’t believe in goals, strategy or fixed long term plans, unless that is something that naturally feels exciting, inspiring and motivating for you (not because someone else told you it’s the only way).

I do not believe it is the content strategy, the colour scheme, the niche or the trending audio that will bring you success. In business and in creativity, resistance can often feel like an ever-present force. There are many forms of resistance that can arise and it’s important to understand the different types, and how they show up for you.

There is resistance that stems from the fear of being seen or trying something new — the fear of not being perfect, the fear of being judged, the fear of learning a new technology or skill you assume you will be bad at is very, very different from resistance that stems from something like this:

Uughhhgh, I have to do this but I really don’t want to.

In this example I am *not* talking about taxes or other facts of life on earth, I am talking about ways of showing up / running your business / sharing your creative work that are perhaps socially expected, maybe even common, but completely optional.

For example, I never had a business plan until I moved to Japan and was required to write and submit one for my visa. In this case it was not optional, so I paid a lawyer to write it for me. On the other hand, you might have it in your mind you have to post ninety second reels, have a clear niche or professional photos to get your message out. All of these could be true, but they are also completely optional.

In building a business, knowing which type of resistance you are coming up against is extremely important.

If you’re afraid to fail or get it wrong, I believe it is a sign to step right in (even if it’s just with your pinky toe).

If you feel a deep sense of dread, trust that it’s maybe not for you right now.

And that is okay.

It may change tomorrow, next week, or never.

If you are approaching sharing your work from a place of UGH to try to force an outcome, maintain control, or because you do not believe in the value of your work begin with, very often you will end up feeling worse, especially if you do not quickly receive your desired result.

You spiral into I did all the right things and I’m *still* not good enough. You feel shame, You wonder why it’s not working for you, assuming it works for everyone else (it doesn’t, I promise).

It’s important in those moment to lovingly and kindly remind yourself you might be feeling like shit because you prioritised someone else’s advice over what you knew in your bones.

It’s important in those moments to remind yourself there is no such thing as a failure on this path.

It’s all experimentation.

It’s all valuable information.

You can’t know unless you try.

When building a business, or sharing your work online

The most important elements to get clear on when deciding to start a business or sharing your work online are: who you are, what you love to do, where you need help and most importantly, how to trust yourself.

You also must be willing to fail. Willing to be judged. Willing to be told what you’re doing won’t work or doesn’t make sense. Willing to be misunderstood. Willing to ignore the advice of others who believe they know more than you (even if they do).

I was not a naturally confident or self-assured young woman.

I spoke in a quiet, high pitched voice. I blushed very easily, often feeling embarrassed or ashamed. I apologised profusely and all the time, even when it wasn’t my fault. I had no idea how to stand up for myself.

I thought I had to develop confidence by speaking louder, by being bolder, by working on my assertiveness. For those who are naturally loud with personalities that crave to fill the whole room, please take up more space, delight in the attention, let us see and admire the fullness of who you are.

But for those who are naturally quieter, please remember your softness is your strength. True confidence will never be found pretending to be someone else. For most of my life, I worked on my confidence as if it were something I could fix. But of course, true confidence is not a performance. It is an inherent internal knowing. It is felt. A force.

What I found arising within me, almost by complete surprise, was after many years of walking through my fears, finishing written pieces and sharing them, building a business and choosing to believe in myself even through deep uncertainty, I had become a deeply confident person.

I had turned into a woman who believed in and could trust herself.

Remember: (almost) none of us are born with self trust, especially in the world of business or entrepreneurship, where it often feels like you’re lost at sea, all alone. But self trust can be built quite quickly over time. We build self trust, and self worth through our choices and our actions. By continually taking small steps, even when there are a million reasons not to. By investing our time, finishing and sharing our creative work, even when nobody cares.

As someone who never dreamed of being a business woman, by following what I am truly passionate about, walking away from what was expected and safe to take a chance on my dreams (and I had to do this over and over again) I have found myself the founder of two businesses that I absolutely love. Yes there are very hard days and weeks. Yes I still make mistakes all the time. Yes I still get scared.

But engaged in work that feels meaningful and impactful.

Work that nourishes other women.

Work that has connected me to my closest friends.

Work that has completely transformed my self worth.

Work that deeply nourishes me.

Work that has taken me to live in my favourite city in the world.

Work that gifts me passion, purpose and also space and softness.

I am so grateful to my younger self. For writing her stories and sharing them with the world, even when there was no one there to read them.

This is where it all started.

This is where I first gained the confidence to do everything else.

I truly believe there is no better time in history to start a business or creative project, to start sharing your art, your stories, your perspective and all you love about this one precious life and earth.

Not only because it is fulfilling and rewarding and confidence building; but these days it is also one of the smartest moves you can make.

But more on that soon.

Your creativity, your passion, your joy and your well-rested body are the most precious assets for your business. It’s time to start pouring into them first. You might not know, but alongside rest practices, lymphatic movement and meditations, we have an entire collection of Soft Business Workshops in The Daily Rest Studio. Join for hours of reminders that poetry can be a marketing strategy, your dreams are valid and your way is okay.

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Previous posts on soft, creative business

While tsukimi is associated with the harvest as in other cultures, it is not a major holiday in Japan. Instead, this celebration began as an aristocratic, fashionable pursuit, in which wealthy people held moon viewing parties. At these events, live music might play and the moon was viewed from a dedicated moon viewing platform (life goal unlocked) reflected in the surface of a pond from a boat, or within a tea bowl. Poetry was written and shared. Full moon shaped dango were consumed. Flowers were arranged accordingly.

If you read this substack often, it will probably come as no surprise to you this festival delights me deeply (I plan to host a retreat in Japan for tsukimi next year, stay tuned). This year, I spent tsukimi bathing in the local bathhouse and arranging my own moon inspired floral arrangement before eating tsukimi dango under the full moon while writing in my journal on the balcony. It was a perfect evening, and I dedicated a full class to it last night in The Daily Rest Studio.

As I’ve been surrounded by moon imagery here in Tokyo this past week, I’ve been feeling very grateful for my connection with the Moon. I have come to run my business, and much of my life in accordance with her cycle. It has not only provided me with a sense of structure I do not rebel against (revolutionary, for me) but is a practice that continues to feed, strengthen and romance me as the months and years pass by.

Today’s essay is about finding consistency by working with the moon, as well as rest and herbal rituals for the full moon, bathing in the moonlight for the menstrual cycle and much more. As always, thank you for reading, and for being here.

Women are ruled by the moon

Through my work over the years mentoring, I have come to realise many, many women have a bone deep resistance to routine and feel extremely guilty about it.

Instead of remembering the five day work week was literally made up by some dude, we have a tendency to instead call ourselves lazy and unmotivated for not fitting neatly within it, and spend an unholy amount of time and energy trying to find a solution, instead of zooming out and considering that consistency can happen over a month (or a year!) instead of a week.

It is a literal scientific fact that women’s hormones change over the course of month(ish), that we are pushed and pulled by the moon just as the tides, and yet for some reason, we take this biological reality less seriously than the modern concept of working 9-5.

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Find true consistency by observing the moon

If you are someone who feels at odds with the standard version of consistency, you may find relief and more long term consistency in working with the energetics of the week days (which I will discuss in more depth in a future post, but you can also learn about them here) and the cycle of the moon.

Following the moon does not mean you will become some meme-ified version of a spiritual person. Remember, an awareness of the moon is very ancient, and very human. It is not about crystals, an unending list of rituals to tick off or knowing exactly what astrological sign the moon is in, unless that interests and excites you.

To begin working with the moon is simply, to look up at the sky more often.

That’s it.

That’s where we begin.

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It’s 7:25am and I am walking to the local shrine with a straw bag under my arm. I live in Tokyo, so the sun has been up for two hours already, beating heavy on the concrete. There is the promise of a storm in the background. I try not to get too excited about the prospect of rain.

Entering sacred grounds, the temperature always drops a few degrees. I rinse my hands and my mouth at the temizuya, not yet filled with local flowers for the day. At the shrine, I sit on an old wooden bench and pull out a travel tea pot, a small tin canister and a flask of freshly boiled water to brew tea. The grounds of the shrine hum with late summer cicadas and quiet activity. One man does a few simple qigong movements. Another smiles and nods at me as he walks past. A few people stop by to pray. A car pulls up and an older man jumps out. Like me, he sits on the bench, but his ritual of choice is chain smoking cigarettes.

I appreciate the quiet, shared moment. I write in my journal. He stares into space.

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Back in April or March or sometime when it was still too cold for me to feel sane and all I could think about was warmth, I started keeping a seasonal journal. A practice I’m sure I did not make up, but one that did seem to appear to me fairly intuitively. What started as innocent note-taking each day about the flowers I saw and the vegetables I noticed at the grocery store became something a lot deeper, fast.

These notes grew into many things: the starting points of my essays here. The Daily Rest Studio class ideas. A way to anchor myself deeply into the local climate that threw my body like a twig off the edge of a waterfall last year. Most importantly, these notes became a source of delight. They sharpened my attention. They gifted me an anchor and a reminder of how much quiet abundance I am (we all are) surrounded by, at all times.

So much is possible, when can teach ourselves to see life emanating from this place, instead of constant worry and fear.

Below, how to keep a nature journal and why I think it’s deeply beneficial for writers, yoga teachers or anyone playing in the creative or healing realms.

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Back in March, it was the sound of birds chirping.

I paused the lecture I was listening to, trying to discern if the sound was coming from my environment, or the one pulsing through my screen.

With the video paused, the sound continued.

I felt close to tears.

It was still cold. Bitingly, desperately cold. It was about to get colder too, I didn’t know it yet, but a day of heavy snow would arrive the following week.

Joy flooded through me. The voice of the birds signalled the end of the first real winter I’d ever experienced as an Australian girl from the coast. One who knew what it was like to wear three pairs of socks to bed due to a complete and utter lack of insulation in old Australian homes — but one who had not yet experienced the confronting depths of a real winter.

Trees without leaves. The warmth of the sun completely unable to break through the bite of the wind. The absence of flowers. No birdsong.

I never thought much about birds until I could no longer hea…

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