The Nail Tech returns to the place before the fall — not a garden, not a lover, but a frequency.
Eden, for her, is the marshland of youth: willow walls, river-light, a love untouched by time.
A place that broke her open and taught her what innocence feels like just before it becomes consciousness.
This entry isn’t nostalgia; it’s alchemy.
She traces the first Eden, the fall from Eden, and the fall through the fall — the descent every soul must walk before it can return to itself.
Eden lives now as symbol, silence, and memory that keeps ripening.
The fish leap and fall, caught only when you’re looking.
The lost thing that returns not as the past, but as understanding.
The Nail Tech knows the real magic doesn’t happen at the table — it happens in the notebook.
She writes everything: sensations, symbols, dreams, the faintest flicker of intuition.
Not to make sense of it, but to catch it before it dissolves.
Her pages aren’t a record of events; they’re a record of consciousness.
A place where headaches become portals, synchronicities become proof, and fantasy reveals its instruction.
The notebook is her discipline, her witness, her quiet evidence
that the inner world is always speaking —
you just have to ink it before it slips away.
Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/dominique-charpentier/la-cave
A small morning ritual that revealed an entire map of self-return.
It begins with a simple choice — turning right toward the café instead of left toward duty — and becomes a reclamation of desire, devotion, and daily aliveness.
The Nail Tech explores how a mocha, a cookie, a doorway held by a woman you adore became a kind of prayer, a calibration, a remembering of the life you once turned away from.
This entry traces how patterns of misdirection, childhood disturbances, and old father-voices are undone by ten consecutive days of choosing your own joy.
How turning right became a metaphysical correction — a refusal to be steered off your map again.
A study in the quiet power of ritual, the re-patterning of instinct, and the exquisite discipline of choosing what you love, every single morning.
The Nail Tech shares about the strange electricity that lives between creation and the one who awakens it.
Not the romantic cliché — the real dynamic: the way muses arrive as people, places, shadows, emotions, disturbances, even strangers who activate something you didn’t want to look at.
It’s about how inspiration uses whoever it must — grief, jealousy, fire, longing, even the dragon — and how the artist learns not to reject any of it but to transmute it.
The Nail Tech speaks to the devotion of art as a discipline, forged in her fine art degree — art as alchemy, art as a lifelong apprenticeship in presence.
The Nail Tech explores what it means to be both the maker and the medium, both the one who is ignited and the one who ignites.
The muse is never owned; it is visited.
And creation is never an accident; it is a devotion.
Most people come into the parlour whispering about money as if it’s a monster under the bed — feared, judged, resented, moralised.
But The Nail Tech doesn't read money that way anymore.
For you, money became a reclamation.
A relationship.
A practice.
This entry traces the journey from being the woman who handed financial power away —
because she’d been taught she couldn’t be trusted with it —
to the woman who now moves money like breath.
It explores money as:
energy, not enemy
grounding, not greed
a mystic’s anchor, not a capitalist chain
Fantasy has been a companion since childhood for The Nail Tech—
not as escape, but as initiation.
Born from an invisible father, sharpened by imagination,
it became the place The Nail Tech learned to see inwardly
long before it could named.
This entry explores the power of fantasy when held with awareness:
how it can expand you, reveal you, steady you,
walk you to the edge of the abyss and back safely.
At the nail table women whisper their fantasies in half-sentences,
afraid of them, ashamed of them —
not knowing imagination is a form of intelligence.
A devotion to the unseen world,
a reclaiming of fantasy as guidance,
and an invitation to walk with imagination
without losing your footing in this one.
A moment in the village becomes a lesson in perception.
A blind woman and her guide dog navigate the road with perfect instinct —
until well-meaning strangers interfere, convinced she needs saving.
This entry asks:
Who is truly blind — the one who trusts her inner sight,
or the ones rushing in without seeing the whole picture?
The Nail Tech has watched this dynamic for years:
people interrupting what they do not understand,
projecting concern where there is competence,
mistaking anxiety for authority.
A meditation on instinct, interference, and the quiet intelligence of those who walk by feel, not fear.
Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/dominique-charpentier/la-cave
In this entry, The Nail Tech who spends her days helping women adorn themselves turns the gaze inward — toward a single dress that unsettled her more than it ever adorned her.
A navy constellation-print dress becomes the portal:
a garment she loved in essence but couldn’t inhabit in body.
What unfolds in therapy is not a conversation about fabric,
but about what clothing reveals —
vulnerability, femininity, exposure, the places where the psyche hesitates.
This entry explores the quiet tension between:
the woman who delights in glamour, colour, embellishment,
and the woman whose body flinches at the rawness a dress can summon.
It’s a meditation on thresholds, embodiment,
and how even a piece of clothing can become a mythic mirror —
inviting us to meet the parts of ourselves we’re not yet fully wearing.
This entry explores a quiet rebellion:
how The Nail Tech, a mystic, a woman who has spent decades unpicking her own patterns with devotion and rigour, refuses the modern rush to diagnosis.
Clients sit at her table and offer labels for themselves like ready-made explanations —
ADHD, OCD, neurodiverse, anxious, inattentive, sensitive —
and some immediately try to hang those same labels on her.
But she won’t wear them.
Not because she rejects people’s experiences,
but because she has spent years doing the slow spiritual work those labels try to shortcut —
discipline, practice, due diligence of the self.
In this entry she speaks about:
how pathologising has become a cultural reflex,
how convenience has replaced curiosity,
how ritual and self-knowledge get mistaken for symptoms,
and how she learned to design a life that suits her nature rather than justify her nature to a system.
It’s a reminder that not every difference needs a diagnosis.
Sometimes it’s simply a soul remembering itself —
and refusing to be named by anything that cannot see it fully.
In the parlour The Nail Tech hears every version of heartbreak — but this entry isn’t about cheating in the way people expect.
It’s about the betrayal that happens quietly, internally, long before anyone else enters the story.
Here The Nail Tech explore the ways one may cheat oneself:
by bending towards someone else's comfort,
by living inside contracts you never signed,
by trying to be two women at once.
This is the anatomy of self-abandonment — and the painstaking devotion of returning home to yourself
What happens when the truth of a woman has nowhere to live in daylight? It speaks at night.
This entry explores the dreams that came during the muted years — the breath in the ear, the shadow in the mirror, the strangled voice, the visitations that weren’t nightmares at all,
but messages.
As a nail tech you learned to listen to women in daylight,
but in your own life the deepest teachings arrived in darkness.
Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/dominique-charpentier/la-cave
In this entry, The Nail Tech unravels what happens when truth must be held in the dark until it is strong enough to stand.
It’s about premature judgement, premature intimacy, and how withholding is not always lying — sometimes it’s devotion.
A body-truth awakening before language.
A marriage unable to hold tension, complexity, or mystery.
A woman learning that incubation is not deceit —
it is sovereignty.
Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/dominique-charpentier/la-cave
A quiet, unflinching look into the secret world of infidelity — not from the outside, not from the headlines, but from the nail table where real women confess with trembling hands and freshly painted nails
This entry doesn’t moralise.
It doesn’t excuse.
It listens.
Here, affairs are not simply sin or salvation — they are portals.
Sometimes destructive, sometimes awakening.
Sometimes the first breath a woman has taken in years.
Sometimes the collapse of a life built on silence.
The Nail Tech speaks as witness — to longing, risk, shame, electricity, hunger, resurrection.
To the moments Emma Thompson-style heartbreak meets the pulse of forbidden aliveness.
To the truth that getting one’s affairs in order often begins by confronting the affair within:
what died, what was starved, what needed oxygen.
This piece sits in the nuance where culture fears to look.
Not to condone, not to condemn —
but to tell the truth beneath the surface story.
Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/dominique-charpentier/la-cave
A quiet, sharp piece about the first moment we betray ourselves — not through scandal, but through subtle conditioning.
It explores how childhood teaches us to dim, to behave, to abandon imagination for practicality, and how that initial compromise becomes a lifelong echo.
Through the Nail Tech’s listening body — twelve years of stories, twelve years of women who sense something missing — The Dupe traces where we first slipped out of our own skin, and how the work of adulthood is not to become, but to un-become the version built to please others.
A tuning-story disguised as chaos.
In This entry The Nail Tech explores two frequencies of disorder —
the first suffocating, cupboard-stuffed, instinct-silencing chaos of a life lived off-key, and the second, the maestro’s anarchic cathedral of vinyl and scores, where disorder wasn’t drowning but resonance.
It’s about how sound matched static before it soothed it,
and how a woman found her pitch not through silence
but through a mad, beautiful orchestra that let her come undone until her own frequency emerged.
A story of noise as medicine.
Of chaos as cavern.
Of tuning by resonance — not by quiet.
In this entry the Nail Tech considers how touch is never just touch. Hands hold memory, history, permission, and power.
This entry moves from birth-hands to death-hands,
from the soft helpers to the ones that steer us somewhere we never asked to go.
Like Sarah in Labyrinth, suspended in a thousand grasping palms, we explore that quiet question beneath the surface of all guidance:
When is help actually interference?
A meditation on the imprint of first touch,
the hands we inherit, the hands we trust too easily,
and the slow, sovereign art of returning to our own.
A reminder that intuition begins in the body,
not in symbols or synchronicities.
This entry turns its face toward the simplest truth:
if we ignore the call of our own bladder,
how can we expect to hear the call of destiny?
A meditation on basic needs as gateway to inner knowing,
on releasing rather than holding,
on the blissful sigh that comes
when we finally listen to ourselves.
From the childhood dressing table overlooking meadows,
to twenty years without a place to face herself,
to the resurrection of ritual in a sunlit cottage.
This entry explores the dressing table as threshold —
where girl becomes woman,
where loss becomes reconstruction,
where reflection becomes conversation.
A story of exile, return, and the quiet magic of getting ready for oneself.
A raw account of leaving with nothing and discovering it was the only way to reclaim everything.
Credit cards inked with permanent marker, the caravan, the fear, the courage, the money-flow ritual, the vow to never again pay for a life that drains you.
An entry about sovereignty, energy, and the strange liberation found in starting from zero.
A quiet descent into the night-world where intuition does its teaching.
An entry about dream-walking, Aboriginal wisdom, nightmare-medicine, Jung’s Red Book, and the tender art of carrying dreams like orbs in a satchel until they’re ready to reveal their meaning.
A reminder that dreaming is not escape — it’s intelligence.