About Me
Pull Up a Chair. The Kettle’s Already On.
You’ve spent years caring, teaching, holding things together and becoming who everyone needed you to be.
This is a place to remember who you are underneath all that capable doing.
There’s a kind of tired that sleep doesn’t touch. The tired of holding it all together, of being the one who remembers everything, of doing the next thing and the next until you can’t quite recall what any of it was for.
Somewhere in the middle of all that competent, capable doing, you lost the thread of yourself.
I know, because I did too.
This is a space to find it again. Slowly. Over a cuppa.
There is no fixing, no performing and no pressure to become a better version of yourself. Just an invitation to come home to the person who was always there.
A Montessori Teacher for the Adult Soul
By day, I teach in a Montessori classroom—a room full of children who are trusted to move at their own pace, follow what genuinely interests them, make a mess of things and try again without shame.
Every day, I watch something remarkable: children who already know how to be themselves. Children who haven’t yet been talked out of their curiosity, creativity or inner knowing.
Somewhere along the way, many of us are.
We’re handed a curriculum for who we should become, and we follow it dutifully. We learn to measure ourselves by how useful, productive, agreeable or accomplished we can be. Eventually, we begin to mistake the performance for the person.
Montessori has a phrase for what a good teacher does: follow the child.
Not lead, drive or correct them into shape. Follow. Observe. Prepare the environment. Trust what is already unfolding.
I began to wonder what it might look like to offer grown women that same grace.
What if we followed the woman?
What if we treated our own becoming with the patience we so easily extend to a six-year-old and so rarely extend to ourselves?
That question sits at the heart of Cuppa with Chaali.
It is Montessori, but for the adult soul.
The Cup My Father Poured
Writing was one of my first ways of making sense of the world. I worked with words through media and journalism before setting that part of myself down for a while.
Picking it back up now feels like coming home too.
But the deeper heart of Cuppa with Chaali traces back to an afternoon with my father, over high tea in London.
I was living there while studying for my Montessori diploma, tucked into a hostel in Hampstead near the training centre. It was equal parts wonder and hard work.
My dad came to London on a work trip, and each afternoon, when my studies finished, he would be waiting at a little café on the high street with a small adventure planned. A museum, a gallery or another corner of the city he wanted me to experience. He wanted me to see London, not simply study in it.
One afternoon, instead of visiting a gallery, we travelled across town to Brown’s Hotel and sat down to high tea.
I had never experienced it before. There were fine teapots and silver, cucumber sandwiches, warm scones with jam and tiny cakes—each course arriving as a collection of small, deliberate pleasures intended to be noticed.
Life is short, my father told me. Savour the small pleasures while you can.
I have never forgotten it.
High tea is still my favourite meal—not only for the food, but for the shape of it. The pause. The pouring. The intention behind each little bite. The pot of tea that asks you to sit down and stay a while.
A splash of milk in mine, and I’ll take it at any hour of the day.
Montessori gave me the lens: trust what is already unfolding.
My father gave me the rhythm: slow down long enough to notice and savour it.
Cuppa with Chaali grew where those two lessons met.
It is not a hustle or another self-improvement plan. It is a high tea for your inner life—a table set slowly and on purpose, with nothing to prove and everything to savour.
What I Believe
I believe you are not a problem to be solved.
I believe slow does not mean stuck.
I believe creativity is one of the ways we come home to ourselves.
I believe curiosity deserves to be followed, even when it leads nowhere productive.
I believe rest is part of a meaningful life, not something we must earn after everything else is finished.
I believe small pleasures are not frivolous. They help us remember that we are alive.
And I believe grown women deserve the same patience, trust and freedom we so readily offer children.
What You’ll Find Here
Cuppa with Chaali is a slow, writing-led publication for thoughtful women who have spent years caring for, teaching or holding space for others—and are ready to hear themselves again.
Through Montessori-informed essays, personal reflections, gentle prompts and creative invitations, I help you reconnect with your curiosity, creativity and inner voice without turning your life into another self-improvement project.
Everything I write lives in one of three rooms.
Slow is the invitation underneath it all: permission to move at the pace of something real, choose process over performance and allow things to unfold instead of forcing them into finished.
The Montessori Lens for Grown-Ups takes what I know about how humans learn, grow and come into themselves—and turns that understanding towards you, not only the children in my care.
Coming Home to Yourself is the place the other two rooms are always pointing towards: reconnecting with what is already true in you rather than continually reaching for something you have been told is missing.
None of it will ask you to hurry.
Come and Sit a While
The best place to begin is with the latest writing. Read what speaks to you, leave what does not and come back whenever you need a quieter corner of the internet.
For conversation and gentle connection, you are also welcome in the free Cuppa with Chaali community.
— Chaali
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