It's a mad thing. I wrote before about how sometimes the simplest of things jump up and somehow pull you through, help you keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Well, this morning I was editing the Hope Joy Love Pinterest. Apparently all the craft and nature stuff I have been pinning is confusing the algorithm — making it think I am a craft or nature site. Not showing the pins to the right people.

The thing is, I tried searching for "Reiki" and "Healing" and ran away from all the toxic positivity stuff. I spent years guilting myself out with it all and those things simply don't speak to me anymore. So I gave up ;)

But the algorithm doesn't like my pins. So today I tried again, managed to find some cute and funny yoga stuff. That led me to some trauma informed yoga stuff which looked great. And that led me to some more authentic sounding healing stuff, which I love...

Looking through the art of a little boy riding an elephant blowing stars, funny monsters with quotes like "I woke up like this" and such, one piece of art popped up that for some reason just hit.

A simple pen drawing of a whole bunch of people and "Forgive all of your selves".

Wow.

I normally clump prescriptive, preachy, stuff in with "toxic positivity". It screams to me that I'm not ok as I am so have to buy whatever is being sold in order to "fix" me, or make me "better" or be "my best self". In other words, I think it is another way of saying "you are not enough as you are", which is a fundamental lie. But this one didn't feel like that. This one hit.

Forgive all my selves.

It's so funny isn't it? How one day something you've struggled with for years finally makes sense.

Yes. I do. Yes. I will.

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.

I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you.

And I know, forgiveness is a practice. I used to believe it was some magical thing that I just had to do one day and boom my whole life would change forever. But it isn't. It's a practice.

I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you.

So today I am feeling it and feeling on top of the world as a result. Tomorrow I might be back in the dark again. But...

I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you.

I trust that if I remember this and keep practicing, it will become automatic and, while this sense of freedom, this sense of release, may become covered again, growth never was about staying in one place — or holding on to one thing — was it?

I forgive you. I love you. And I let you go.

With hope, joy and love —

Hare Krishna and Namaste I pray you have a blessed day x

All my life I was taught that justice is about punishment — it's the idea that's promoted everywhere, isn't it?

Then, a couple of years ago, I learned different. I learned that justice is not punishment. Justice is balance.

And, sure, sometimes balance requires punishment. But punishment that is not designed to serve — you might say, create — balance is simply revenge. 

So do I want revenge?

Yes. Where some are concerned — yes. I'll be honest, I really really do. I can dress it up in fancy language, call it "lessons" or "accountability." But the truth is that I just want to see them hurt. I'm hurting. So I want them punished.

But here's the thing: revenge is futile. It doesn't satisfy because all it is is pain trying to pass itself off as purpose.

Revenge doesn't make the pain go away. It doesn't stop the grieving. Why? Because it has nothing to do with what I actually need. What I need is understanding, what I need is acceptance. What I need is care. And it hurts that I'm not receiving that so, the question is, what am I going to do about it?

The fact is that right now I'm not big enough to carry what I've been given. And I'm being presented with a choice: find a way to be big enough, or rot from the inside out.

I have seen what happens to those consumed by the latter. I do not want that to be me.

So I cannot find balance in the past. I likely won't find it in the future. And my present bears the scars of what has gone before. But it also holds the promise of beauty.

I can't meet the needs I had yesterday. But I can make today enough. The air I breathe is enough. The leaves of a tree blowing in the wind is enough. A kiss from my husband is enough. My spiritual practice is enough.

I am enough. My life is enough. The Divine is enough.

Funny how when I feel this way, the hatred just melts away. Which shows it was never about "them." It was about whether I can expand — and that is something I always have power over.

Most days right now I'm playing small. But I keep seeing reminders of what it means to expand — in Etty Hillesum's diaries, in the Bhagavad Gita, in my husband. I don't know if I can ever succeed in being big enough to carry this. But I know there is a Higher Power that Is. And perhaps, if I keep giving it all over, one day I'll find the room inside to forgive.

"Forgiveness is the lack of a punishing mentality."

— Srila Bhaktivedanta Narayana Maharaja

With hope, joy and love —

Hare Krishna and Namaste, I pray you have a blessed day x

I guess I'd forgotten what I learned long ago: when you reach for the stars, sometimes you fall and the higher you managed to fly, the harder you crash to earth.

I won't go into what happened that left me feeling so broken. Needless to say, the last couple of years have been a very jagged pill to swallow, but up until now my husband and my faith have somehow held me together.

Today it felt like the ground was pulled out from under me and I am in that frightening place that I thought I left behind a long time ago.

And then something happened...

Today, just as I thought I was completely loosing my grip — all coping strategies redundant, all strength gone — a little ray of light shone in...

It is a stupid thing. I don't even know how it got in my feed but there it was: a boy standing on a stage and pouring out his heart in a song. And I knew that song was for me.

Have you ever had a moment like that, when something (or Someone) deeper than this world seemed to reach out and say precisely what you needed to hear?

A man halfway across the world got up on a stage and sang, "The rain, it ain't permanent, And soon, we'll be dancin' in the sun, dancin' in the sun...".

How did he know what to say to me?

(The song was 'Better Days' by Dermot Kennedy. If you don't know it already, go find it and let me know if it is also yours :) )

One foot in front of the other

This world is hard and terrifying at times. In the few short years I've been alive, moments of improvement have seemed to be painfully fleeting, followed by something so much worse. But I always try to remember Etty Hillesum, and how she found love and meaning in the absolute worst of circumstances...

I try to remember that I cannot control the externals, I cannot expect them to go my way (although, I am sorry to admit, I frequently do) but I can choose how I respond. I can choose how I react. And when the overwhelm is so intense that I have no idea where to go or what to do, and no capacity left to even think... I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Because, sometimes, that is all it takes.

Just keep swimming. The rain, it ain't permanent and soon we'll be dancing in the sun. Dancing in the sun.

With hope, joy and love
Hare Krishna and Namaste, I pray you have a blessed day x

What is your song?

Have you ever felt completely and utterly stuck? Like the world has you in its grip, and all you can do is hold on?

I know that place. For me, it really began at 19, when my body collapsed after years of declining health. I was trapped in a bed, drinking meals through a straw, with even the slightest sound being physically painful. The nights were long. The darkness seemed total. And I was left alone with nothing but my own mind.

It was in that darkness that I remembered a story I’d once heard in a documentary—the story of Ernest Shackleton and his ship, the Endurance.

A mission that failed before it even started

In 1914, Shackleton set out to be the first person to traverse the Antarctic continent. But before he ever made land, the ship became trapped in the ice. Their mission had failed before it even truly began.

Alone in my bed, I pictured those 28 men — marooned at the bottom of the world, forced to watch and listen as their only hope of survival was first crushed, then swallowed by the ice. Thousands of miles from anyone, with no modern communication or rescue equipment, they had every reason to believe their fate was sealed.

And yet...

A mission changed

In that place of utter hopelessness, Shackleton made a choice. Not exploration anymore, survival. Every. Single. Soul.

After a winter in absolute darkness and a desperate trek across melting spring ice, he and five men made an impossible 800-mile journey across the most treacherous seas in the world. Then he and two others hiked for 36 hours straight across impassable frozen mountains to find rescue.

He then had to rescue the 22 men he’d left stranded on Elephant Island. Three attempts failed, during which time it is said his hair turned completely white. But finally, on 30 August 1916, all 22 were brought home.

The original mission had failed. But the choice to change the mission produced something so remarkable that people are still reading and writing books about it more than a century later.


What the ice teaches

Life doesn’t always give us what we want. Despite what much of personal development world tells us, we are not in control of everything that happens to us. Some things, it seems, are simply meant to be endured.

Shackleton’s family motto was “By Endurance We Conquer.” His ship was named Endurance. That wasn’t coincidence — but it also didn’t mean he was in control of the ice that crushed it along with his dreams.

I was raised an atheist. I believed in nothing and, after being bullied by a friend at 13, I also believed in no one. I was full of rage and self-loathing, which I dealt with through cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. 

The illness at 19 forced a stop. It forced me to see my own responsibility and to have compassion for my own pain. That compassion, slowly, extended outward. The life I have now — my work, my marriage, my faith, my spiritual service, everything — is built on the foundation that those years of illness forced me to lay. 

I would not have chosen any of it. I am grateful for all of it.

Real healing, I have come to believe, isn’t always about fixing what’s broken on the outside. Sometimes it’s about expanding who we are on the inside until we are large enough to carry what we’ve been given. Like Shackleton on the ice, we discover in our darkest times the one freedom that can never be taken away: the power to choose how we respond.

Change the mission. Keep every soul.

With hope, joy and love -
Hare Krishna and Namaste. I pray you have a blessed day.

What’s one small way you’re choosing how to respond right now?

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If something in this spoke to you, I’ve started creating pieces to carry the same feeling—simple reminders for the days we all need them.

You can explore them here.

It’s a strange thing to live through our current times, isn’t it? I see the news and am reminded of events I had only previously read about in history books. For me, the world feels increasingly hard and terrifying, and sometimes just putting one foot in front of the other feels like a monumental task.

Know what I mean?

And so I find myself thinking more and more about Etty Hillesum.

Born into the worst moment

Etty was a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam at the start of the Second World War. As the Nazi occupation closed in around her, she began to write a diary. Not simply a record of the horrors outside — but the chronicle of a remarkable inner journey.

Her early entries show a woman full of turmoil, wrestling with depression and her own chaotic inner life. But instead of being consumed by the growing fear and hatred outside her window, she made a conscious choice to turn inward. "I really see no other solution", she wrote, "than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves".

She began to find a deep, unshakeable connection to what she called God — not a God she petitioned for rescue, but a presence she felt had to be nurtured and protected within herself, no matter what was happening outside.

Walking towards the darkness

In 1942, Etty refused offers to go into hiding. Instead, she voluntarily went to work at Westerbork — a transit camp from which Dutch Jews were sent to their deaths in "the East". Why? She wanted, she said, to be what she called "the thinking heart of the barracks".

In a place designed to strip people of their humanity, Etty found love and moments of impossible joy. She wrote about the beauty of a jasmine flower, the sky, and the strength she found in a simple, quiet moment of prayer. She saw the suffering — she felt it acutely — but refused to let it extinguish her capacity to love. 

"Despite all the suffering and injustice", she wrote, "I cannot hate others." She saw that her true power, the only freedom the Nazis couldn't take, was her ability to choose her response.

What she leaves us

Etty and her family were transported to Auschwitz in September 1943. She did not survive. But her diaries — passed to a friend before returning to the camp for the final time — did.

Her story isn't about ignoring pain or pretending everything is okay. It’s about something much harder and much more honest: accepting that we cannot always control what happens to us, but we can always — always — choose how we respond. We can meet hardship with hatred, or we can choose, as she did, to keep a small corner of the soul unsullied and answer with love.

Every difficulty is an invitation — not a guarantee, just an invitation — to discover something in ourselves that we didn't know was there.

Personally, I constantly fail to meet the standard that Etty set. I haven't gone deep in my spiritual relationship like she did, and so I haven't yet found the riches she did either — the ones that kept her strong in the darkest of times. I'm weak. But I know that is no reason to stop trying. I know that is no reason to give up. She set the standard, and if I can keep trying to meet it then surely that is worth something.

With hope, joy and love -
Hare Krishna and Namaste, I pray you have a blessed day.

What’s one small way you’re choosing love today — even when it’s hard?

The design that started it all

I promised you that all my designs come from the heart. That they are each a piece of me.

So far, this is true of none more than The Angel and The Butterfly.

In all honesty I don't think I'm ready — and I'm not sure I ever will be — to go into this fully in public. But I can say this.


Always on the outside

I always knew I was different. I always knew I wasn't quite like other people, and that horrified me. Growing up, it seemed that something was fundamentally and irrevocably wrong with me. It was my fault I couldn't see the world the way everyone else did. My fault I didn't fit. My fault I didn't understand. Even in adult life, it seems to be my karma to be always on the outside looking in — never quite fitting the mould wherever I go. And I struggle with that.


And then there are the Angels

And then there are the Angels. My Guides.

The only place, other than with my Spiritual Master or with my husband, where I have ever felt truly at home.

They understand me. They show me how they see the world and, finally, I say yes. Yes — this is how I see things. This is how I understand things. This is how I want to live. That is one thing the Angels have given me, and one reason why this image matters so deeply to me.


The butterfly and the beauty of vulnerability

The other is the butterfly.

The butterfly holds my experience of vulnerability. Of being so very fragile. Sometimes it feels like all you need do to break me is to touch me.

And yet I have learned — in part because the pandemic forced me to — that there is nothing wrong with being fragile. More than that: there is power in it.

I've begun to embrace that. To let go of the shame and stand in my vulnerable, fragile nature and love myself in it. To appreciate the beauty that comes with it. Not from it — with it.

The butterfly's beauty doesn't come from its fragility. But it does come with it. That particular type of beauty is not possible in something less delicate.

So I stand in that now. And I say, clearly and without apology: this does not need to be fixed.


What this design really means

I was raised in a world of hyper-aggressive girl power. If you didn't want a career, something was wrong with you. If you wanted a husband and a family, something was wrong with you. If you leaned on someone else — admitted you couldn't do it alone, or simply that life goes easier with a little help — something was wrong with you. I never understood this and trying to beat myself into that mould nearly destroyed me.

The butterfly tells me I don't need any of that. It tells me I am beautiful as I am.

And the Angel tells me that if one of my wings is broken, it's alright. Because Something — or Someone — more powerful has my back. I am not alone and I don't have to do it all alone.

I am whole. I am loved. Exactly as I am.

That is what this design means to me.

With hope, joy and love —
Hare Krishna and Namaste. I pray you have a blessed day x

—--

If something here landed for you, The Angel and The Butterfly is in the shop. Find something that’s yours :)

Every Hope Joy Love purchase provides meals in Vrindavan, India — prepared and shared by volunteers, and offered freely to all. Because small kindness can travel far.