Cookies, Chaos & A Call to Joy 🍪

JOY IS RESISTANCE
A dispatch from a tender heart in uncertain times

Today at Our Shared Kitchen, just like last week and the week before, I chopped, measured, and baked — prepping ingredients for peanut butter and jelly cookies with strangers who feel more and more like chosen family. But I didn’t want to go.

Yesterday I cried so hard — about Israel and the U.S.’s escalating threats to Tehran — that my face was still swollen this morning. My throat, still raw. I cry often, like a few emotional tears, but not like I did yesterday. Not since my grandmother passed. And before that, I can’t even remember.

It wasn’t just the threats themselves. It was the potential of Iran, a nation tens of thousands of years old, being turned into rubble — like so many other cities in the Middle East — at the hands of the same powers that be. It was the thought of my aunts and cousins being killed — simple casualties of war. Humans. Culture. History. Gone. Erased. Like a city scrubbed from a map.

And the part I still can’t understand is how so many people — strangers (some of whom feel compelled to DM me) and even people I know — act like that would be okay. Just like they have with Palestine.

There is a grief that lives in my skin. My people have endured so much under the weight of a regime that uses religion as a mask for control. But it isn’t just the regime. Power-hungry serpents slither and hiss — masters of deception, feeding on chaos, control, and the fear they cunningly create. The governments — like Israel and America — who weaponize freedom while quietly backing oppression. The calculated propaganda. The blatant lies. The people — loud and proud online — who cheer them on, even defend their actions. The ones who repeat government talking points like gospel, never questioning why they were given them in the first place. Some, so wounded they can’t see clearly anymore, end up reenacting the very harm they think they’re fighting.

It makes me sick — and it makes me wonder: why do I get this life, while my family in Iran lives something else entirely?

If you’ve read The Art of Sacred Smoke, you know some of the story:
How my family fled Tehran in the middle of the night on horseback.
How we crossed snowy mountains, my mother sobbing beside me, afraid I wouldn’t survive the cold.
How I learned to hold my breath to stay safe.
How even now, some part of me still waits for the people I love to disappear without warning.

So no, I didn’t want to go bake cookies this morning. But I did. I was late but I still showed up.

Because sitting in our pain forever serves no one. Transmuting trauma is how we stop the cycle. We have to calm our nervous systems. We have to find joy — or we're literally perpetuating problems.

There was something sacred in the simplicity of today:
The scent of peanut butter.
The swirls of jam.
The rush of sugar.

Learning to bake 200 cookies in bulk — something I'd never done before today — made me feel lit up again. Because cooking brings me joy. Learning brings me joy. Being in community brings me joy.

Because I remembered something simple and true: that joy — not denial, not bypassing — is a lifeline. Joy is resistance.

How, in the face of chaos, sorrow, and injustice, joy itself is a revolutionary act.

I volunteer to serve — yes. But also to stay connected to myself. To life. To something real and warm in the face of all this madness.
My clients and our House 11 community bring me back to what is sacred, to what is real — to joy.

That is why I show up. Not only to be of service, but to stay connected and alive.

Because in a world that rewards numbness, rhetoric, and divisiveness — tenderness is resistance.
Creating beauty in the face of devastation is resistance.
Choosing rituals, connection, and sacred practice — not because they fix things (even though they oftentimes do), but because they keep us human — is resistance.

This is the heart of the Lakshmi Mantra Process.

It’s not about pretending everything is okay. Not surface-level abundance or mere magical thinking.

But a deep remembering:
That your joy matters.
That your resourcefulness is sacred.
That pleasure and prosperity are not frivolous — they’re fuel.

It's about shifting what we are focusing on mindfully. From powerlessness, lack, and confusion — to choosing beauty, nourishment, and devotion anyway.

It’s about remembering that abundance isn’t about hoarding or having more than others.
It’s about alignment. Receiving. Overflow.
It’s about knowing that support, safety, self-worth, freedom, expansion, and gratitude aren’t luxuries — they’re our birthright.
It means imagining and creating a world where more of us get to thrive — not just survive.

We begin June 25.
This is a daily spiritual practice to anchor yourself in abundance, harmony, and ease as you move through the summer months.

If you’ve felt the pull to move through this 44-day practice with me, this is your invitation.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t care about politics. It’s not about that.
It doesn’t matter if you just want to feel more love, call in a new job, or move through grief without collapsing.

This isn’t 44 days of propaganda.
It’s 44 days of humanness and devotion — of remembering the sacred within and beyond us.

Mantra is an ancient technology — one that’s been practiced across generations and lineages, long before any modern system or structure.

When we chant together, we’re not just repeating words.
We’re anchoring our nervous systems.
We’re strengthening our attitudinal muscles — the muscles that bring us into alignment with prosperity. Because what we focus on expands.
We’re choosing what to water with our energy, again and again.

Let it be a sacred act.
Let it be a stand for life.

No one has ever finished a mantra process with me and said, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”

It’s always the opposite.
People who show up flourish.
Lives shift.
Hearts settle.
Dreams take shape.
And things — real, meaningful things — change.

We only have 11 spots remaining.
I’ll be on IG Live Thursday, June 19th at 3pm PT / 5pm CT / 6pm ET to answer your questions about the process.

If it’s calling to you, come. Let joy lead the way.

With fire, love, and sacred sweetness,
Neelou