It is Thursday afternoon in Bali. The light is doing that thing it does in the late dry season, where it arrives at an angle through the banana leaves and makes everything look like it was painted rather than real. I am preparing for the weekend. Getting the kitchen in order. Thinking about the week that passed and the one that is coming.

And I keep coming back to something I have been watching play out around us for years.

People come to Robindra and me for advice. Not often as a formal thing, but the way it happens when you have been building something with your whole self in front of others, and they see something working, and they want to understand how. We try to give clear steps. A few levers they might pull. Real things, not vague encouragement.

And then months later, some of them come back and say: it worked. And some come back and say: it didn't.

One person took the advice, verbatim. Took the action. Showed up to it every day with real energy behind it. The other one did something, but the intensity was missing. The passion was missing. They went through the motions of the thing without the full force of themselves behind it.

The Thing That Is Running Is the Thing You Are Working

Look around your life right now. The things that are actually moving, humming, growing, those are the things you are bringing your presence to, regularly, with real intensity. And the things that aren't moving? You know already, if you are honest. They are the things you visit sometimes. You half-show up for. You do enough of to feel like you tried, but not enough for the work to feel you back.

This is not a judgment. It is just a pattern. And patterns, once you can see them, can be changed.

Our teacher and elder Sadhguru says it simply: if things aren't working for you, turn up the intensity in how you show up. Not more hours necessarily. Not more hustle. Intensity. The quality of your presence in what you are already doing.

Designing a Life You Actually Love

A life you love is not found. It is not stumbled upon during the right trip or with the right person or when the timing finally lines up. It is made. Slowly. Through the quality of attention you bring to each piece of it.

When Robindra and I built this brand, we were not following a plan. We were following intensity. Every time something felt alive, we went toward it with more of ourselves. The home-based artisan network we built here in Bali, the Muse-Letter, the philosophy behind the way we make each piece, none of this was strategic in the traditional sense. It was just what happened when two people brought their full presence to something they genuinely believed in.

The brand survived things it had no business surviving, including a global pandemic that collapsed the fashion industry around us, because the thing we were working on was the thing that was truly alive for us. Not a job. Not a project. A practice.

What It Means to Turn Up the Volume

It does not mean doing more. Sometimes it means doing less, but doing it with your whole body in the room.

It means, when you sit down to that thing, the relationship, the creative project, the business, the ritual practice, you are actually there. Not halfway thinking about the email you should have sent or the comment someone left. Present. The full weight of you, in that moment, with that thing.

Before the weekend arrives, I always ask myself: what am I actually giving my real presence to right now? And is that the same as what I say I care about most?

When the answer is yes, things move. When it isn't, I already know why they are not.

That is the art of it. The art of designing a life you love is not in the choosing of things. It is in the quality with which you show up for the things you have already chosen.

Turn up the volume. Not louder. Deeper.

With love from Bali,
Myrah