Lauren has got two years worth of goals to fulfill, five extra kilos to lose and a void where her career used to be.
Time to seriously kick her ass into gear, and get her life back on track.
For good. 

The last diary I published as a book, ended December 2016.
Which means I have two years of diaries waiting to be extracted from my sites, covering 2017 and 2018.
I remember two of them:
Reboot, which I started August 2017, right after I published all my books.
And A Hero’s Journey, which I started Christmas 2017.
A Hero’s Journey was inspired by Rey from Star Wars The Last Jedi.
There was a brief overlap between Reboot and A Hero’s Journey. A Hero’s Journey was to be the designated survivor.
But when early 2018 my cat Max died, who had been sick for a long time, everything started to shift.
I wrote in A Hero’s Journey, for a few more weeks. But the project didn’t come to life again.
Maybe it died with Max.
I remember the first half of 2018 as being so broken, so hurt.
It was the darkest time of my life, not having my tiny fellow around.
To make it worse I now had my yoga business to worry about, and as Rey said in Star Wars, when Finn asks her how the engine is looking:
“If we want to live not good.”
That was the state my yoga business was in.
May to October was spent redesigning my business. In the final phase I didn’t teach any groups, and only offered private yoga.
But it was too late.
I just couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t bring myself to get excited about it.
Ironically, lately I have been thinking about picking up teaching yoga.
But under this name, my pen name, not my real name.
In retrospect it was my real name, and the name it build for itself, that held me hostage.
There was no way I would teach what I wanted to teach, using that name.
I wouldn’t say the name is cursed, but I am never going to use it again for professional purposes. I do not want to put her under any pressure, ever again, of having to be something or someone.
From now on Lauren Harteveld is what everybody will have to deal with, period.
And this new name does give me a lot of confidence, it does feel like the fresh start I was aiming for this year.
That’s when I started toying with the thought of rebooting my yoga studio, and only for privates. Just like I originally intended.
However, I don’t have a business at the moment (no VAT number, Chamber of Commerce registration, insurance for liability) so it’s not something I can explore without investing money.
But there is a second reason I m weary to start teaching again;
Because I stopped practicing it.
Totally.
There are diary entries here in this blog, claiming I will go do yoga afterwards.
Not true.
Never happened.
Even though I do have a new work & exercise schedule, to make my new career as an author a success?
The yoga barely ever happens.
Neither does daylight.
Neither does cycling.
I ve made before and after pictures numerous times, and only got bigger. I have a slide show of me gaining weight.
I ve made resolutions to do more yoga, even when I was still teaching classes.
Yet by now I can almost call myself yoga-free.
What’s with me?
And what do I want for myself?
Do I really want to go publish all those diaries filled with good resolutions to lose weight, get fit, wealthy, on top of my game; And have the story end that I now have no income, no waistline, and no cat?
NO.
It’s time to man the fuck up, and do something about it.
In February the building renovations are over, and I can have a new cat, who can actually go out for fresh air on the balcony, and doesn’t have to hide under the bed all day, frightened by all the banging and slamming.
And it will most likely be my little grey fur-baby M, who stayed over for a few weeks, from August to October.
Actually M is not little at all, but I say that just because she’s so extremely cute and sweet. I always use the word little, as in sweet and soft and totally adorable.
She’s all that.
So I already know I will be having a cat again, 13 months after Max died.
I already know I ve given up my yoga career.
I already know I want to make money selling my books, without starting a business.
There is so much I let go off this year. So much stuff I didn’t know in May, when I started to seriously reorganize my biz.
And it’s okay that A Hero’s Journey and Reboot, didn’t give me the results I wanted. It were the last six months Max lived, and a few weeks after when I made that brave attempt to keep on writing.
Of course I felt like shit.
Of course it wasn’t going to work.
But I m so much further in my process now, and I m about to publish my latest work, including my diaries.
Which I don’t want to end at no income, no exercise, and working way too long hours behind my desk.
So I’m going to write, and live, a new final chapter to my memoirs, which I will call;

Reboot
A Hero’s Journey

And it will be based on my diaries from August 2017 to March 2019.
It is tempting to revisit Reboot, and A Hero’s Journey, to see what I had set out to do, and create a comparable challenge.
But I feel that my life is so different right now, that it’s best to base it on what I currently want to do each day.
And what I need to discipline myself on.
So here’s what I came up with, which I will do from today (Monday December 10) to March 19, 2019.
A hundred days:
1. writing and posting
This is really a soul thing. It always takes up way more time than I plan for it. And practically not a day goes by where I don’t consider to cancel this, in favor of publishing my books.
But it would be the stupidest thing to do, because like I said:
My soul craves it.
My writing will be posted on this blog you’re now reading (Project M on Daily Harteveld), or on one of my three Dutch blogs;
for Books & films,
my business blog about publishing,
and my blog under my real name.
2. cycling or walking during daylight
3. yoga
4. sales and marketing
5. work on publishing my books

For a hundred days, I will post exactly what I do each day, on my Facebook page. So follow me there, and we can travel together!

If you’re unsure what to do yoga-wise, you can check out these yoga channels:
Yoga with Adriene
Yoga with Kassandra
Five parks

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

What can you lose is the forty-fourth chapter from Project M. 

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