The Daily Heart

In a world gone mad we could all use a little heart

Look at us , we got a make over

Aren’t we beautiful?

So are you.

But this isn't really about a prettier newsletter.

It's about what comes next.

It’s about creating something beautiful with enough room to actually say something.

I miss magazines. I mean, I really fucking miss magazines.

In the ’80s, I could have twenty-five magazines show up at my house in a month, and that was just the beginning. I loved magazines in every form—from the familiar ones that arrived month after month to the more exotic fashion editions I would seek out and collect. Twice a year, around Paris Fashion Week, I would get these beautiful collector’s editions that could cost a hundred dollars or more. They were extravagant, oversized, gorgeous things. You didn’t toss them in a pile and forget about them. You kept them. You went back to them.

And let’s be honest, I couldn’t afford to buy most, well anything for that matter, of what was in those magazines. 😂 That wasn’t really the point. They were inspiration.

At the time, I designed and made much of my own clothing. I had seriously contemplated going into fashion design myself. I took design classes. I studied construction, proportion, fabric, line and shape. I would study those pages—the silhouettes, the colors, the styling, the outrageous ideas coming down the runway—and then take that inspiration and make something of my own.

The great designers created clothes that looked as though they could have stepped out of a Renaissance painting—or been painted by Waterhouse. Romeo Gigli, Christian Lacroix, Chanel under Karl Lagerfeld—these weren’t simply clothes. They were extraordinary works of art. Works of beauty. I studied them. I copied several of Romeo Gigli’s dresses myself because I wanted to understand how those beautiful shapes were actually created. So those hundred-dollar Paris editions weren’t shopping catalogs to me. They were an education.

People love to talk about the ’80s as the decade of excess. And yes, it was excessive. But I remember much of that excess as an excess of beauty. There was richness. Fullness. Personality. Fashion was theatrical. Hair was enormous. Makeup had color. Jewelry had weight. Photography was sumptuous. My lips were always a deep sumptuous red gloss. Beauty was allowed to take up space.

They made beauty for beauty’s sake. And they made me understand that beauty itself has value.

Somewhere along the way, though, we decided everything needed to be beige. Beige houses. Beige clothes. Beige rooms. Beige packaging. Beige lives. What the fuck are we doing?

Have you ever looked at Mother Nature? She clearly didn’t get the memo. Go stand in a garden. There are greens against purples against pinks, fifty shades of lavender, yellow crashing into red, flowers growing over one another, vines climbing whatever the hell they please.

Mother Nature is not a minimalist. She is extravagant. I never went in for those succulent kinds of gardens.

She layers. She embellishes. She repeats herself wildly. She puts twelve thousand flowers on a tree when three probably would have gotten the point across. There is abundance in beauty. Richness in beauty. Personality in beauty. Life in beauty.

And maybe that’s what I miss about those magazines. They weren’t afraid of magnificence. They weren’t afraid of fantasy. They weren’t afraid to fill the fucking page. They didn’t just tell me what to buy. They made me want to create.

I loved the photography, the paper, the fashion, the writing—the way an entire world could be built between two covers. You didn’t scroll through a magazine. You sat down with it. You disappeared into it. There were photographs you stared at. Essays you actually finished. Interviews that went somewhere. Profiles that gave a writer enough room to show you a human being rather than a publicity shot and six approved talking points.

There was depth.

And then eventually, I went to work inside that world. I spent years working in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, New York and London as part of the celebrity beauty and fashion machine. I was on shoots. I worked with editors. I worked around photographers, stylists, publicists, celebrities and the people whose job it was to take a story, an image, a moment, and turn it into a page people wanted to linger over.

And I wasn’t only standing there doing nails. The very magazines—the rags—I had grown up devouring were suddenly the magazines I was working on, from Vogue to Vanity Fair to Rolling Stone.

And yes, there is a certain irony in me waxing nostalgic about any of this. I’ve written plenty about why I left Hollywood, and I meant every word of it. But leaving something doesn’t require you to rewrite your history and pretend there was nothing beautiful there.

There was.

I loved the artistry. I loved the clothes. I loved the photographs. I loved watching extraordinarily talented people create something that did not exist the day before.

But maybe what I miss most is the caliber of the room.

And it wasn’t an easy room to get into.

You had to be extraordinarily good at what you did. These were photographers, editors, designers, stylists, hairdressers, makeup artists, manicurists and creatives who had risen to the top of their fields. And this wasn’t simply Los Angeles. It was New York, London, Paris—the room was global. People came into it because they had mastered something.

There was rigor in those rooms. There was intelligence. There was taste. There were enormous personalities and enormous talent. Everybody brought a particular mastery to the table, and you could feel the difference between somebody who knew their craft and somebody who merely wanted to be seen doing it.

I miss being around that level of excellence.

I left in 2010, as the culture around the industry was changing in ways I no longer wanted to participate in. I’ve written about the darker side of that world, and I’m sure I will again. But the darkness doesn’t erase what was extraordinary about it any more than the beauty erases the darkness.

I can be grateful I left and still be grateful I was there.

Maybe that’s part of getting older too: you stop requiring your past to be either a love story or a cautionary tale. Sometimes it was both.

There was something surreal about that. The pages I had once disappeared into were now rooms I was standing inside. I watched how the image got made, how the story got built, what happened before the final photograph landed on the page. I saw how much went into creating those magazines—the conversations, the observations, the tiny details, the human moments, the editing, the photography, the styling, the point of view. Along with my years of spring and fall trips to New York clicking in and out of offices of Condé Nast and the many publications, giving them the scoop on the latest in nail trends, I was an influencer before there was a name for it.

A good magazine was never just a pile of articles. It was a world. You opened it and entered somebody else’s eye. Somebody had decided what mattered enough to photograph, what mattered enough to investigate, what deserved six pages instead of six sentences, what was worth asking another question about.

And maybe that is why this feels so natural to me now. I read the magazines. Then I worked on the magazines. And now, apparently, I’m making one of my own.

Not a glossy magazine in the old sense, but something with that same feeling: beautiful imagery, strong voices, real stories, depth, curiosity, discovery. Something you don’t just skim. Something you sit down with. Something that takes you somewhere.

And somewhere along the way, we lost a lot of that.

The Journalist Got Cut Out

Yes, the internet happened. Social media happened. But something else happened that I don’t think gets talked about enough. The journalist got cut out.

Once celebrities, brands, politicians and anyone else with enough influence could speak directly to millions of people, they no longer needed the journalist in the same way. Hire a publicist. Create the photographs. Craft the message. Feed the story directly into social media. Control the narrative from beginning to end.

Why sit across from a journalist who might ask a question you don’t want asked? Why allow someone else to observe you, investigate you, challenge you, interpret you or write something you didn’t approve? Put up the iron wall. Control access. Control the photographs. Control the interview. Control the narrative.

And eventually, the person standing between the subject and the public asking the uncomfortable questions became increasingly unnecessary. Except I think we needed that person. I think we still do.

I know there are journalists and writers out there who want to write those stories again—who want to spend time with a subject, investigate something beyond the press release, and have enough room to follow an idea somewhere unexpected. And I know there are readers who still want to read.

I’m one of them.

I could never really make social media work for me anyway. I was kicked off Facebook in 2020 and stayed off for a couple of years. Instagram buried my reach. Algorithms are real, and whether we like it or not, they affect all of us in one way or another. They influence what gets seen, what disappears and which narratives get amplified in this supposedly glorious age of information.

There’s some irony in that. But perhaps being pushed toward the edges did me a favor.

Because I sat back. And I waited.

I didn’t spend every stage of my life documenting myself going through it. I actually went through it.

When I was 38 and in the middle of a Kundalini awakening, I didn’t decide I was suddenly an expert on Kundalini and start teaching everybody what it meant. I was in process. And when you are truly in process, sometimes the wisest thing you can do is shut the fuck up, sit your ass down and go through the process.

Observe. Learn. Let life work on you.

Because every time you interrupt an experience to package it, explain it, teach it or perform it for an audience, you risk stepping outside of the very process that is trying to change you. There is a difference between having an experience and having lived with that experience long enough to understand something about it. And that difference matters to me.

I have watched people enter industries, traditions, practices and even my own business absolutely certain they knew how to improve everything before they understood why anything was being done the way it was being done. And sometimes they learned very quickly that they didn’t know nearly as much as they thought they did.

Good intentions aren’t the same thing as understanding. Before you decide something needs improving, understand it. Before you dismantle something, understand why it was built. Before you dismiss a practice as outdated, learn what problem it was solving. Before you announce that you’ve found a better way, spend some time with the old way.

This isn’t an old woman saying, Nothing should ever change. Quite the opposite. Change everything that needs changing. But first, look. Listen. Ask questions. Learn the terrain. Understand the depths of why something is the way it is before you decide you are the person who has arrived to fix it.

And sometimes—and this one can sting—just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean the thing needs to change. Maybe you’re the one being asked to change.

I am still in process. I expect I will be until the day I leave this planet. Hell, as I write this, I have a wisdom tooth giving me hell, and apparently life has decided there is still more fucking processing to do. 😂 But I have also lived long enough to know the difference between something I am merely experiencing and something I have carried, examined, tested, questioned and lived with long enough to offer it to somebody else.

And maybe that is part of why I’m ready to do this now.

I Want a Fucking Magazine

Maybe that’s really what I’m creating here. Something beautiful. Something thoughtful. Something worth sitting down with.

I don’t want The Daily Heart to become another collection of little snippets designed for an attention span somebody decided was eight seconds long. I want a fucking magazine.

Not necessarily one printed on glossy paper and stacked beside the bathtub—although God, I miss those too. I mean the experience of a magazine.

I want beautiful imagery. Columns you recognize. Writers with voices. Long pieces when something deserves a long piece and short pieces when something only needs three paragraphs. Things you save. Things you disagree with. Things that send you wandering somewhere else. Things that occasionally make you stop halfway through and stare out the fucking window for a minute.

I want depth again.

And lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about legacy. Not in the grandiose what will they say about me when I’m gone? I know what they will say. I mean something simpler.

What are we leaving behind?

What did we learn from being here? What did heartbreak teach us? What did beauty teach us—not simply the beauty we put on our faces, but the beauty we found, created, protected and left behind? What did all the mistakes, awakenings, wrong turns, magnificent moments and ordinary Tuesdays teach us?

And did we pass any of it along?

Because legacy isn’t only the books we write or the things we leave behind with our names stamped on them. Legacy is also knowledge passed from one human being to another.

And knowledge requires more than a snippet.

We’re Going Deeper

That is another thing I want to bring back with The Daily Heart: depth.

Especially when it comes to plants. I have spent more time than I care to admit scrolling through herbal groups and reading what gets passed around as botanical knowledge, and the lack of actual understanding can be mind-blowing. Even more concerning to me is the abundance of misinformation—one sentence repeated by another person, who heard it from another person, who saw it on another post, until repetition somehow becomes authority.

Plants deserve better than that. So do you.

I don’t want to give you another three-sentence snippet about an herb that you could find in any scroll. Lavender is calming. Rose is good for the skin. Chamomile helps you relax. Great. Now what?

I want to talk about the plant itself. How it grows. What part we use. Why preparation matters. The differences among a hydrosol, tincture, infusion, oil and essential oil. What traditional use has handed down. What I have learned from growing, harvesting, distilling and formulating with these plants myself. Where I agree. Where I disagree. And why.

I want real conversations about botanical medicine and beauty. And I don’t expect you to simply believe me, either. Think. Question. Read. Experiment. Pay attention. Develop your own relationship with the plants. Knowledge should open a door, not close one.

But this isn’t only about plants. We’re going deeper into everything.

We’re going deeper into the heart. Consciousness. Psychology. Beauty. Botanical medicine. The body. Nature. Astrology. Creativity. Mysticism. Books. Culture. And the strange intersections among all of them.

I’m even working on an entirely different way of looking at astrology. I’m not satisfied with Mercury is retrograde, watch your emails or Venus moved into Taurus, buy yourself something pretty.

I want to know why.

What are these cycles? What are the patterns underneath the patterns? What happens when we begin looking at the planets in relationship to the body, the glands, the chakras, the seasons and the larger cycles of nature? What if astrology isn’t simply something happening to you in the sky, but another language through which we can examine the architecture of being human?

That’s where I want to go. And that’s where I want to go with everything.

Because we have more information available to us than at perhaps any other moment in human history, and somehow we seem to understand less and less about more and more. Everything got shorter. Faster. Louder. More sensational. More digestible. More algorithmically pleasing.

I’m not interested in playing the snippet game. I want to make something you read.

And Apparently, I Write Books Now

For years, much of what I’ve shared with you has come through plants, beauty, botanical medicine and the remedies I make with my own hands. I love that work. It has been part of my life for a very long time.

But another body of work has been growing beside it: my writing, my work with the heart, my years of meditation and mysticism, my relationship with Mother Nature, being an empath, getting knocked on my ass by life, getting back up again, and continuing to ask one enormous question: What does it actually mean to be human and live from the heart?

And apparently some of you don’t even know I wrote a book. 😂 An actual fucking book. Ariella Goldheart.

And perhaps that’s because when Ariella arrived, I hadn’t yet created the world around her that gave the book context.

Now I am.

A serum eventually gets used up. A bottle becomes empty. The flowers I grow return to the earth. But words travel. Stories travel. Teachings travel. They can land in the hands of someone I may never meet.

That is legacy.

And I want to give that part of my work more room.

Maybe this new Daily Heart is really about bringing all of the pieces together: the botanist, the beauty maker, the writer, the mystic, the Crone, and the woman who has lived long enough to have some things she wants to leave behind.

Not simply opinions. Things life actually taught me.

Welcome to The Daily Heart

So The Daily Heart is becoming something more than a newsletter. It’s becoming a publication—a place for beauty, depth, curiosity and ideas. A living world you can step into throughout the week.

You’ll still find the plants here. The beauty. Botanical medicine. The things growing in my garden and bubbling away in my apothecary. But there are going to be more rooms to wander through: Heart Drops. Crone with a Machete. The Beauty Botanist. Bloom Drops. AstroScope. Books. Writing. Meditation. And the deeper work of the heart.

You’ll notice the navigation bar at the top of every issue. Use it. Wander. Go read the Crone. Check the AstroScope. Find the book. Visit the apothecary. Wander through the Living Library. The newsletter and the website are becoming part of the same living world.

And maybe, after all these years, I finally understand the thread that has been running through all of it—the plants, the beauty, the writing, the mysticism, the books, the heart.

Heart is how we know. Beauty is how we create.

Maybe that is the manifesto of Narayan Beauty now.

Not beauty as decoration. Not beauty as perfection. Beauty as a creative force. Beauty as something we participate in. Beauty as something Mother Nature demonstrates extravagantly every single day. And the heart as the place from which we decide what is worth creating in the first place.

And if you’ve somehow been hanging around here all this time and still didn’t know I wrote a book, well… 😂

[MEET ARIELLA GOLDHEART →]

Mark Your Sundays

And here’s the other change I want you to know about: The Daily Heart is becoming your Sunday morning read.

Make the coffee. Make the tea. Take it back to bed. Sit outside. Put your feet up. Hide from everybody for an hour. And read.

Some Sundays we’ll go into the heart. Some Sundays the Crone will pull out her machete. Some Sundays we’ll go deep into a plant you’ve walked past a thousand times without knowing what it was capable of. We’ll explore astrology, consciousness, beauty, culture, nature, books, the body and whatever else deserves more than three fucking sentences.

There will still be Heart Drops during the week. There will be Bloom Drops. There will be shorter things because not every thought needs an eight-page investigation.

But Sunday is different. Sunday is where we have room.

Room to think, question, wander, disagree, discover. Room to go deep.

If you miss the days when opening a magazine meant you might actually discover something, I hope you’ll make The Daily Heart part of your Sunday.

And if something here makes you think, share it. If something makes you mad, share that one too. 😂 Send it to the friend who still reads. Send it to the person who asks questions. Send it to the person who is tired of being fed conclusions and still wants to think.

And if somebody sent The Daily Heart to you, subscribe.

Come back next Sunday.

We’re going deeper.

Because legacy isn’t something we create at the end of our lives. We’re creating it right now. Every time we make something more beautiful than we found it. Every time we tell the truth. Every time we pass along what we’ve learned. Every time we leave a little medicine behind for whoever comes next.

So yes. We got a makeover.

But I think what we really got is more room.

And in a world gone mad, we could all use a little heart.

Welcome to The Daily Heart. I’m very glad you’re here.

Narayan