28/11/25

There’s a building near my place that’s under renovation.

Every morning at 8:30 on the dot, the hammering starts.

Somehow, that’s how I’ve ended up being pushed into becoming a morning person.

To be honest, I’ve actually been a morning person for a while now: a little over a month ago, we separated.

Back then, I was crying myself to sleep almost every single night.

I slept very lightly, often jolting awake from nightmares in the middle of the night or early dawn, my chest tight and hollow.

After he and I separated, that huge pain, the sense of loss and emptiness, just stayed there, lodged firmly in my chest.

And then came those ten days of Vipassana: waking up at 4:30 a.m., a kind of extremely clear, extremely exhausted, extremely heartbroken early morning.

After that, I came back to Rio: looking for a place to stay, moving, visiting friends in another city, doing this and that, still waking up early almost every day.

A few days ago, I suddenly decided: I want to start practicing yoga in the mornings.

Today’s yoga class starts in forty minutes.

These days I’ve really been wanting to write something.

I still don’t quite have the courage to write that short story inspired by the love between Beans and me, but I wanted to write something first.

So I opened my laptop.

Yesterday, Gui came back to Rio.

I call him “Gui” basically because I still can’t pronounce his full name properly, something like Guishermlia…?

Haha, doesn’t matter, Gui!

He took me to have the first açaí I’ve ever had in my life, and then we drove out to the beach in Niterói. The sea was still quite cold, but as soon as I got into the water, I could clearly feel that sentence in my body:

“not about dancing in the ocean, but to allow the water to dance you.”

So I just floated and swam there in the sea, letting the water move me however it wanted.

Only when I came back onto the shore did I realise how scatterbrained I’d been yesterday: I hadn’t prepared anything at all.

I’d forgotten to bring a towel, forgotten the jabuticaba I wanted to share with him, forgotten lip balm, forgotten a jacket, forgotten snacks, forgotten water, and so on and so on.

But somehow, it felt okay.

I didn’t bring them, so I didn’t.

That’s all.

Later we lay under the umbrella and talked.

We talked about the intense dreams we’d had during Vipassana;

about the people in our lives who are so important and so deeply loved, but who are no longer in this world;

about the fears we each carry in intimate relationships, and the ways we doubt ourselves;

about how to find a balance between emotions and the rational mind…

We just drifted through these conversations, and sometimes through quiet, saying nothing at all, until the sun slipped behind the clouds, the wind turned cold, and we slowly got up.

He had prepared a vegan lunch.

When we started eating, I suddenly realised that lately I’ve pretty much been eating vegetarian myself.

It appears that when my mood is quite complicated, or when the weather is extremely hot, I just don't feel like eating meat.

I just quietly remind myself:

I need protein (Brazil has so many different kinds of beans);

I need carbohydrates (I bought wholemeal bread, pasta with spinach in it, and sweet potatoes; maybe I should try the local mandioca);

I need dietary fibre (I’ve been buying lots of local vegetables whose names I can’t even remember);

I need healthy fats to feed my brain and hormones (nuts, avocado, and coconut oil);

I need dark leafy greens to give me iron and folate, and fruits rich in vitamin C to help with absorption;

I need to eat some fermented foods to support my B vitamins;

I need vitamin D (lying in the sun by the sea);

I need to take care of myself: and that’s all.

I still haven’t tried a Brazilian steak house yet.

But it doesn’t really feel urgent anymore.

I keep reminding myself not to force things to happen.

If I don’t feel like eating meat, then I don’t.

It’s okay.

Lately, my small daily practice has been: when an emotion comes up, try not to react to it out of habit right away.

For example, when I’m sad, not immediately hating myself for being sad;

when I’m ecstatic, not clinging desperately to that joy and refusing to let go.

Just noticing it instead, like: “Oh, so you’ve arrived.”

Oh, and yesterday, when I went to meet Gui for açaí, it was also my first time taking the metro here.

Wow.

Public transport here really is well developed, but it’s also definitely not cheap.

He brought some fruit from the meditation centre, something that looks a bit like acerola, and I think it’s called pipaga. It looks like a mix between cherry tomatoes and cherries, but it tastes a bit like grapefruit, bright and full of vitamin C.

In the car, I was the DJ, first playing lots of songs I love, and on the way back I put on the techno I like.

We chased the sunset with the windows rolled down, the wind was strong, and I could feel that wind really blowing away a little bit of my pain, even if only for a short while.

Gui listened to me talk about how much I’ve been tortured by my emotions lately, and suggested we do a yoga practice, something to help me feel more centered, less easily dragged far away by my feelings.

I can’t really say whether it had any immediate effect, but I’m not goal oriented. I don’t want to turn every practice into another task that “has to work” or “has to fix me”.

After that, we went to a place where five of us meditated together for an hour.

When it ended, I was exhausted. I had originally wanted to go to a little bar near my place to dance forró, but I just didn’t have the energy.

I called an Uber home, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and went straight to bed.

Last night, I had my first dream in a long time that didn’t leave me waking up so devastated I could barely breathe.

In the dream, I was in Antarctica.

A colleague asked me,“Shikin, have you got your zodiac licence yet?”

I said, “Not yet, I haven’t really thought about becoming a guide.”

Just then, I suddenly saw a humpback whale and said, “Let’s go that way!”

We drove into a sort of bay, and there were something like thirty or forty humpback whales surrounding us.

In that moment, I felt like I was in heaven.

When I woke up, the pain this morning really did feel a little lighter.

I know this lightness won’t stay forever; it will keep coming and going in waves.

But at least, for the first time in more than a month, there was finally a morning when, at the moment I woke up, I wasn’t drowning in agony and heaviness and depression.

Right now, I’m eating a very simple breakfast that I really love: homemade yogurt (yogurt isn’t cheap in Brazil, but I’m someone who makes her own yogurt, haha), banana, peanut butter, dates, and mango.

Now that My stomach is satisfied, I’m going to get changed and head to my yoga class, today I will try something new, called Kurunta Yoga.

I know the sadness will still return, again and again.

Don’t be afraid, it will come, and it will go.

Try not to fall into habitual reactions to my emotions.

Practice simply watching them: watching them rise, stay for a while, and then slowly fade away.

anicca, anicca, anicca.