MMS_2025 Retrospective_Audio
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[00:00:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Energy, not time, not talent, not willpower is the thing that determines everything else.
[00:00:13] Take one deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, physician, author, and founder of Personal Awareness Medicine, and this is Mindset Medicine. December has a way of slowing the noise enough for a truth to surface. It's the end of the year portal where hard moments, the beautiful ones and the ones we never saw coming start to make just a little more sense.
[00:00:36] And this month, inside my end game reset series, we're looking at 2025 and how it really shaped us, or maybe even shaped in us, the wisdom, the clarity, the boundaries, maybe deeper self that we met along the way and didn't expect to see. Each episode takes us into a different part of that story where the year taught us what [00:01:00] we're ready to release, and the vision that we're gonna look forward to in 2026.
[00:01:05] What energy are we gonna carry into that? And then we're gonna think about the quiet truths about what success actually means when all the noise falls away. It's not about fixing anything, it's about honoring what's real, letting the lessons land, and stepping into the next season with intention. Instead of exhaustion in this first episode in December, we're gonna start with an honest transition.
[00:01:32] This is where things begin. We're gonna start looking back without shame, pressure, or performance report card, and just looking back at what 2025 came about. It's not about telling the wins or the losses and you're not grading your experience. It's really more a gentler, more grounded look at what 2025 was trying to teach us, especially in the moments when life got real.
[00:01:56] And here's the tricky part. Most of us have kind of a [00:02:00] memory amnesia when it comes to our successes. The human brain has a real talent for hanging onto heavy moments while letting the good ones just fade into the background. We remember hard conversations, the exhaustion, the grief, the messiness, but the breakthroughs, the subtle wins, the days we kept going when we could have collapsed.
[00:02:21] Those just tend to get filed under the no big deal category, even when they were absolutely important or pivotal. So today's conversation is simply about reclaiming the truth, not the distorted version that our stress chemistry and our reflection back tries to sell us. Not the highlighted reel you may have posted online, but the deeper reality maybe of how we actually lived.
[00:02:47] Harried grew and shifted this year because if there's one thing, 2025 taught many of us. It's that meaning doesn't always show up with fanfare. Sometimes it sneaks in during [00:03:00] quiet moments that we barely noticed. And this episode is an invitation to revisit those moments with compassion, to seek quiet courage you may have forgot about, and to acknowledge that the year was more than just its hard parts.
[00:03:15] Even if the hard parts were really, really loud. I can empathize with that. So let's walk back through the year not to relive it. To see it with clearer eyes. Let's start with the truths that surfaced. Even if they were in the background and even when the world kept moving and we were just trying to keep up, we're just gonna go back and we're gonna look at it with clear eyes and no judgment.
[00:03:40] Because there are quiet truths that surface throughout a year. And when we look back at 2025, again, it's not the big cinematic moments that tell the real story. Most of our wisdom comes from the quiet stretches, the in-between hours where there's no one is watching us. No one was grading us, [00:04:00] no one was handing out gold stars or warnings to us.
[00:04:03] They come from small mini recalibrations. We might've made on days when our patience was thin or our heart felt heavy. It comes from the tiny choices. We didn't label as growth, but they were because we kept showing up even when we were tired or uncertain, or maybe even just stretch too thin. And if we're being honest, this year may have revealed more truths in the quiet than in the loud moments.
[00:04:33] Truth about what mattered. Truth about what drained us, truth about what steadied us, truth about what maybe we can no longer pretend doesn't affect us. Those tolerances that we do over and over again just to make things okay, or just to be fine. If you said the words, I'm fine. I'm fine. In that flip and tone, you're not fine.
[00:04:56] You've been pretending this reflection of [00:05:00] 2025 might have a way of stripping us down. Eliminating the noise just long enough for some subtle clarity to break through. I don't expect dramatic declarations here or perfect journal entries, but just the small moments may be inside when you might have whispered to yourself, this isn't working anymore, or This actually feels right, or, I can't keep doing it this way.
[00:05:26] These are truths that usually go unspoken because they're not flashy, they don't announce themselves, they don't arrive with fireworks, but they sit quietly in the background just knocking on us, trying to get our attention and woven through all this is something potentially deeper. A kind of faith that you may not have consciously named that faith may be some meanings that existed even on days when the world felt really chaotic.
[00:05:55] That faith may have been in each step you took, no matter how uncertain or [00:06:00] imperfect, and it was pointing us towards something, the faith that maybe the year was shaping us in ways we couldn't fully understand when we were in the middle of it. But oh goodness, some things changed. This isn't about pretending everything had a purpose in the moment because we can analyze that till the cows come home.
[00:06:20] Where did that saying come from anyway, where the cows come home?
[00:06:23] Hmm.
[00:06:24] Sometimes things are just hard and frustrating and confusing, but even inside that messiness, many people find themselves confronting truths that they've been avoiding, noticing patterns that they've been tolerating, and maybe feeling a little nudge towards a version of themselves that felt more grounded, more real, and more honest.
[00:06:46] Oh, thank goodness for that. So as we move through this 2025 retrospective, let's name the Quiet truths, the ones that didn't make the highlight reels, the ones that we almost forgot or [00:07:00] dismissed, the ones we might actually be the foundation. What comes into next year at 2026? Because growth happens sometimes, even when life doesn't feel like growth.
[00:07:12] And one of the hardest truths about real growth is that it really feels like growth when we're in it. It doesn't awry with fanfare. Like I said, it doesn't give you a certificate saying, here you go, you did it. And it most definitely doesn't ask whether you're in the mood for a personal evolution. Growth usually shows up disguised as everyday life, and in the morning you got up, you kept moving.
[00:07:38] Even if your mind was foggy and your heart was tired, it might have been in the conversation that you handled with more steadiness than you would've in the past. It might be a new boundary that you quietly set without ever making an announcement. Maybe even to yourself. You just did it. It might be in a moment that you told the truth [00:08:00] to yourself or someone else when it would've been easier to just shrug it off and keep the peace.
[00:08:07] Maybe it's how you softened in some places and strengthened in others without realizing you were even doing it. There's a flavor of trust in all that, not the loud cinematic kind, but the quiet kind, the kind that hums beneath the surface when life is chaotic or uncertain, the trust that you actually do have what you need inside of you, even if you're questioning it, the trust that maybe people, resources and moments of clarity that you needed would somehow show up.
[00:08:42] Even if the timing wasn't perfect and the trust, that forward movement doesn't always look clean or like a direct upward line. Most of us underestimate the growth that happens during the just get through the day seasons, but that's where some of the [00:09:00] strongest internal wiring happens. When you're forced to adapt, stabilize, rethink, or recalibrate.
[00:09:09] You might be living one small decision at a time, not because we're weak, because we're evolving one small little thing at a time in real time, and maybe this year didn't feel like a massive transformation story. Maybe it felt like just juggling or surviving or adjusting or improvising, but none of that is stagnant.
[00:09:31] It is all motion. It's all change, and it's all evidence that something in you was reorganizing, maybe sharpening or healing or awakening, but quietly, subtly, but nonetheless powerfully. Even the moments that maybe you held it together when you could have fallen apart, that's growth even in the moments where you fell apart, but you came up for air anyway, man.
[00:09:58] Is that growth too? [00:10:00] Been there, done that. This is the kind of transformation people forget to count, and yet if you look closely, it's the kind that changes the trajectory of our next season. Because when life asks more of us than we've ever expected, we might discover some reserves we didn't know we had.
[00:10:19] We might learn how to pivot with less panic. We might learn how to sit with discomfort without assuming that something's massively wrong with us. We might learn how to trust that something inside of us is trying to guide us forward. And that's the heart of this section. So much changed in 2025 that maybe we didn't celebrate 'cause it didn't look like the kind of change we were taught to praise, but it was growth, solid, grounded, hard, earned growth, and is going to matter more than you know.
[00:10:52] In the year that you're stepping into next.
[00:10:58] Okay, let's take a second and check in [00:11:00] with yourself because December brings a lot. The good, the beautiful, the messy, and the, oh boy. Here we go again. Maybe you love the holidays and maybe you look forward to the lights, the food, the music, and the rituals. And maybe at some time there's a part of you that already feels that the mental juggling act, the emotional whiplash, or maybe even the exhaustion that sneaks up when we're trying to hold everything together is just too much.
[00:11:28] Both can be true. We can have joy and overwhelm, and they often walk hand in hand. This time of year, that's exactly what I created. The second annual pre-holiday. Recalibration retreat. It's a physician led mind body energy reset, designed to help you honor the joy and support yourself through the stress.
[00:11:47] Now you can move through December lighter, clear, and more grounded. We start with a prep call on Tuesday, December 9th, where we are gonna set you up with a clean, emotional baseline. Not because things are bad, [00:12:00] but because things are busy, and your nervous system deserves a moment to catch up. Then on Sunday, December 14th, we go deep into a two and a half hour live workshop where we reset your nervous system, strengthen your boundaries, calm old holiday triggers, and help you create more capacity for the parts of the season you actually want to enjoy.
[00:12:22] You'll also experience a guided hypnotherapy session to help your body exhale and your mind settle. You'll get a full workbook for this experience, a seasonal hypnotherapy track that you can replay at your own will. Over and over again, you'll get the replays and a post-holiday integration call to support your transition into the new year.
[00:12:44] And I want you to hear this clearly. The price is intentional. It's high enough that you'll actually show up for yourself. But low enough that investing in your peace, energy, and wellbeing is still fully within reach. A gift for yourself. This is the kind of investment that just pulls you [00:13:00] forward without overwhelming your wallet or your nervous system.
[00:13:03] The retreat is only $147. The investment and the registration will stay open only until December 13th. Join by December 10th and you'll get the early bird bonus, a December morning reset, hypnotherapy track to help you start your day grounded, centered, and steady throughout the entire holiday season. If you wanna feel lighter, more present, and more in control of your energy.
[00:13:27] If you wanna actually enjoy all the good parts of the holidays without losing yourself in the chaos, this is for you. You can join us by clicking the link below in the show notes signing up now look for the pre-holiday recalibration retreat and save your. We're gonna keep this nice and easy with small numbers so you can get the most out of it.
[00:13:48] So sign up as early as you can because I want you to take a breath, because this season can hold both joy and ease. You don't have to choose one.[00:14:00]
[00:14:01] Why? Because our hard parts become teachers, and if we're honest, most of the lessons that actually stick, they didn't come from smooth and easy moments. They came from places where life got a little sharp around the edges, not because hardship is noble or because people need to struggle. That's not the message I'm trying to say here, but it's because when something cracks us open even slightly.
[00:14:25] While truth has a tendency to seep in in ways that we don't always expect, the hard parts of 2025 might have been fatigue, uncertainty, transitions, unexpected turns. They're not just obstacles, they're mirrors. They might reveal how we've been caring for years, the exposed places where we've been under or over functioning overgiving or under giving, or just plain overcompensating.
[00:14:54] They might show us where our boundaries are leaking and where our energy was being [00:15:00] quietly siphoned off these moments, these hard parts. They force us to look at things that we might be skimming over. Not to punish us, but for clarity, there's something. About difficult seasons that removes the luxury of pretending.
[00:15:21] I'm gonna tell you, I have had to stop pretending in a massive way. I can't, I can't hold it all together with all this shit storm that's going on through my life. Excuse the profanity, but sometimes it's gonna come out. But you know when life tightens, that's when we see what's real. We notice what we can no longer ignore, and we discover what steadies us and what crumbles under pressure.
[00:15:45] And sometimes the hardest moments eliminate the most important truths. Like this morning, I absolutely did not wanna record this podcast because my emotional chaos was just stirred up like a big [00:16:00] fat tornado. I did not sleep well last night for whatever reason. I just kept waking up. Yesterday was Thanksgiving.
[00:16:07] Things within the family didn't go as planned. People drove farther and by themselves. More than we all wanted to. There were concerns about health issues throughout my family, and to be honest, I was just downright depressed. And this morning I was hoping to get up several hours early and really get myself together.
[00:16:28] But instead the wind was blowing, the rain was going, and I just wanted to sit there and stare out the window. So I gave myself the grace and the space. Yesterday I recorded this podcast and I had the microphone on wrong, and I was not gonna put that out there to you. It would've hurt your ears. So here I am doing it again.
[00:16:50] I had to eliminate the guilt of giving myself the grace and the space because it did keep rearing its ugly head and is in those moments for me, maybe even for [00:17:00] you. Those moments help to teach us, each and every one of us maybe, that we can let those moments go. Like we can pivot and shift. It's okay.
[00:17:10] Maybe 2025 also showed that endurance doesn't equal alignment. Just because we can push through doesn't mean we should. That maybe being capable doesn't mean we should carry everything and maybe holding it all together for far too long really can fray the edges of who we are. Maybe we learned that emotional pain doesn't automatically mean that something is wrong with us.
[00:17:36] Maybe it's just a bruise from a boundary we didn't know that we needed to put up. Maybe we learned that grief is in its own way, a teacher of connection. Throughout all this journey with my husband and his cancer, I have connected with more people than I probably ever have on my own. People reaching out and me reaching out because I knew [00:18:00] I needed that support, that scaffolding to hold me up during this.
[00:18:04] Maybe we learned that fatigue can be the body's way of whispering something is out of sync and it's been going on for too long, and it's time to pay attention. And that sometimes, maybe in the midst of chaos, a strange sense of clarity again, emerges and woven into all this amazing stuff is another type of virtue that I really value.
[00:18:25] And that's transcendence. Not the mystical vanishing act that people think it is not the floating above everything, not the pretending that everything is fine or bypassing the human parts. Transcendence. The real version is the moment that you rise above the story of our hardship that it's been written for us.
[00:18:47] It's being above the story we tell ourselves. It's the moment you see that pain didn't shrink you, but sharpened you. It's when you realize that the hard moments wasn't my [00:19:00] identity. It wasn't your identity. It was a doorway to something else. It was the widening of a perspective, the softening of resistance, and maybe the ability to see an event with new eyes without wearing the weight of the story.
[00:19:16] Even in hospice, I have seen people find peace in the middle of pain with no neat reason for it. And I've also seen people feeling tormented even when their symptoms were controlled. It's taught me something that I've carried into every corner of my life. Peace is not a condition, it's a perspective.
[00:19:39] That is what I had to uncover this morning, a different perspective to bring my heart and my nervous system back down to baseline. My perspective didn't change the fact that my husband has terminal cancer, and it didn't change the fact that sometimes he has an over inability to differentiate what he should and shouldn't be doing safely.[00:20:00]
[00:20:00] That new perspective this morning, just watching the sky, looking at the ground, watching the wind. It didn't change the pain that I had yesterday. Witnessing my adult children as they watched their father dying of cancer, trying really hard to interact with everybody at Thanksgiving with the inability to really speak and write on what we wanted to say.
[00:20:25] Watching my husband using a writing board to communicate. When he used to be the most excellent communicator with all his nieces, nephews, and family talking and listening to their stories is so important to him. But we all sat back and had to watch his struggle and you know, truly, we had a wonderful time.
[00:20:47] We did watch everybody, but we wasn't lost on us, that we were watching somebody that we dearly loved, disintegrate in front of our eyes. I'm gonna tell you these hard moments, eliminate [00:21:00] that truth. They certainly force us to stop negotiating with our stories and ask, who am I now? Who do I wanna be? What does this moment reveal about what matters?
[00:21:10] What is this teaching me and how I move forward? And not everything in 2025 is easy. We know that some parts were pretty darn uncomfortable and real, and some parts might have been heavy and maybe felt way too much, but those moments do sharpen our awareness. They invite us to see clearly, and they open a door to an identity that no longer needs to be defined by just surviving.
[00:21:35] And I hope deep in my heart that the hardest parts of 2025 didn't break you, but instead maybe brought you closer to the truth of who you actually are. Maybe they're silently handling you a new blueprint for the year ahead. Because before we go forward, I wanna take a moment, and I want us just to settle into our bodies for a second.[00:22:00]
[00:22:00] Reflection isn't just mental, it's physical, it's emotional, and it's energetic. So if it feels okay for you, just pause for a second and soften your breath. Why take another drink of tea? Let's not force anything here. Let's just try to relax. Just letting the body do what it does, what it already knows how to do.
[00:22:23] Feel your feet on the ground where it meets the floor. Feel the gentle weight of your body where it's resting, and with your next slow exhale, just allow the tension that we've been carrying all day, not the whole year, just today's tension. Let's let it loosen its grip just by a single degree. Now imagine you're standing on the edge of a quiet path.
[00:22:51] Nothing dramatic, just a simple, steady path lined with a soft kind of light that shows up right before the sun rises. [00:23:00] This is the path of your year, not the whole messy story, just the highlights of your nervous system, and as you start walking, the scene comes forward for you. A scene that matters most to you.
[00:23:16] Not the ones that embarrassed you, not the ones that drained you, but the ones that shaped you. You might notice a moment where you were stronger than you realized. A conversation that clarified something, that gave you an incredible aha moment, a boundary you held, that you felt a gentle release of tension that you knew was overdue.
[00:23:45] A truth you finally
[00:23:46] admitted to yourself as well as to somebody around you.
[00:23:55] A moment when you
[00:23:55] softened instead of snapping, and as a [00:24:00] result, felt an incredible surrender
[00:24:02] and release
[00:24:09] a
[00:24:09] moment when you rose. Even when you were tired and realized that you had some tenacity in that soul and spirit of yours, after all, even when
[00:24:21] exhausted,
[00:24:25] or a moment where grief cracked
[00:24:26] something open and light slipped in and you allowed it to unfold, in all its incredible
[00:24:34] beauty and ugly glory.
[00:24:40] You don't have to label anything
[00:24:43] and you don't have to make sense of it. Just let the moments come forward in their own way, quietly,
[00:24:52] gently, and without pressure,[00:25:00]
[00:25:03] and if a harder moment shows up.
[00:25:06] Just step back and observe it in the way you would watch clouds. They're just moving across a beautiful winter sky. Just let them flow. You don't need to fix it. You don't need to relive it. Just
[00:25:21] witness it and let it drift.
[00:25:27] Now notice the
[00:25:28] thread that runs through all of these moments, and I want you to think about a thread of faith. It's a sense that there is meaning in places that you might not
[00:25:39] have seen it at the time.
[00:25:47] Think about the threat of trust, the
[00:25:49] internal knowing that you had more resources inside you than you ever thought,
[00:25:58] and then the threat of [00:26:00] transcendence. That widening of perspective that lets you rise above the old story instead of sinking
[00:26:07] into it.
[00:26:12] And take one more breath here
[00:26:15] and let it be slow. Let it be yours. And when you imagine, really imagine yourself stepping off the path and back into this moment where we are right here, right now in this place and space. Bringing only the insight, the clarity, the steadiness, and leaving the rest behind on the trail where it belongs.
[00:26:38] Becoming more present of your surroundings. And remember, you're not carrying the ear, you're carrying the wisdom. You're not carrying the stories that you
[00:26:51] went through. You're carrying the transcendence.
[00:26:58] Because when we strip [00:27:00] away the noise of the air, everything that we might have planned, everything that blindsided us, everything, we might have navigated a mixture of grit or sheer stubbornness. Three truths do tend to surface. These are the kind of truths that don't shut down. They whisper, but they reroute us all the same.
[00:27:20] Most things weren't failures. There were feedbacks, just data points that were brought to our attention so we can potentially shift. If 2025 showed us anything, it's that life has a way of nudging us, sometimes gently and sometimes sharply smacking us in the rear end towards something that's really real.
[00:27:42] And looking back, we might have had so many little missteps, but these were just information. It was clarity wrapped in discomfort or direction hiding inside of a detour in our lives. And when we look back through the year through that lens, the painful edges [00:28:00] can soften just a little bit. It becomes less about what went wrong and more about what we learned about our limits, our thresholds, our needs, and the places that we've been living out of old patterns that no longer match where we are becoming.
[00:28:18] Here's a quiet steadiness and recognizing that that feedback is just a compass. And next is that energy is the real currency, where it went and everything that followed one thing, 2025, made painfully clear for me, and maybe you, is that energy, not time, not talent, not willpower is the thing that determines everything else.
[00:28:45] Where energy flowed things grew, where energy drained, things frayed and the year had a way of highlighting the relationships, habits, environments, obligations that repeatedly siphoned [00:29:00] vitality without giving much back. But it also revealed places where energy felt alive, where maybe you felt grounded, purposeful, connected, and creatively lit up.
[00:29:11] You may not have always acted on those insights at the real time, and that's okay. The importance is maybe you just noticed it, maybe your body, your spirit noticed, and that noticing is going to matter when you decide what you wanna take with you into 2026. Because moments of truth matter more than moments of perfection.
[00:29:32] And if you think back, it's not the polished moments that shape us, it's the emotionally honest ones. It's the times that we admit when we're tired. It's the times we say no. Even if the world is saying yes to us, it's the times we reach out for support and we soften and we stood up taller or straighter.
[00:29:52] The times we finally told the truth to ourselves and others and everything shifted just a tiny [00:30:00] degree. We know perfection does not move us forward. Presence does, honesty does, and even one moment of clarity that cracks open, sometimes those are the real scaffolding of who we're becoming. So let's look back without self attack, right?
[00:30:18] Let's look back and think about this because this is the point where our brain loves to turn reflection into self-critique. Our inner critic really loves to show up. People start rewriting history like we're supposed to be superhuman. We have unlimited energy, or You're perfect. And that's just not how real life is, or real life grows or it even works.
[00:30:41] So let's pause here and call out the pattern gently. Most people don't struggle seeing the truth. They struggle with weaponizing the truth against ourselves. We attack ourselves for our failures instead of our opportunities of growth. It's so easy [00:31:00] to look at choices from 10 months ago with the clarity that we have right now.
[00:31:04] It's so easy to forget the exhaustion that we were navigating or the pressures that we were under, or the emotions we were holding for other people, or the lack of information that we were working with at the time, and then sit back and judge yourselves on the decisions that we made. Now, looking back in hindsight, right?
[00:31:25] Looking back on the here doesn't require you to use a magnifying glass or a guilt trip. I'm really asking you just use your humanity requiring you know, the specific context. Remember what you're going through at the time. You know, I want us to be honest without the sting of accusation. And here's a moment I wanna offer you one that I've used with patients, coaching clients and frankly myself.
[00:31:50] What if nothing in 2025 was a mistake? Simply a moment where we did the best we could with the internal resources we had at the [00:32:00] time. Let's let that sink in. It's not an excuse, but it's the truth. What if we weren't lazy, weren't careless, weren't not enough? What if we were navigating year? That demanded a lot of us physically, emotionally, spiritually, logistically, and maybe you did what people do in seasons like that.
[00:32:21] You responded moment by moment, doing the right thing with whatever clarity and energy you had available to you at that moment. And here's another grounding question that I want to slip in. If you had a front row seat to your own year watching yourself go through it every high, every low, every messy middle, would you judge yourself or would you finally offer yourself the compassion that you might have needed in those moments?
[00:32:50] That question also has a way of softening the internal walls. I will never forget the moment that I realized that I had finally become the woman [00:33:00] that I needed years ago when I was struggling.
[00:33:05] That's what I'm asking you to realize. And
[00:33:08] here's something else, something slightly daring, but it's really true.
[00:33:12] You don't have to, like every chapter of every year. It still shapes you in powerful ways because growth doesn't require approval. It just requires awareness. So before we move on, I just wanna anchor this moment with a few simple reflections, not to analyze, but to honor. What was real first, where did you show up this year in ways that you forgot to
[00:33:40] acknowledge what drained you?
[00:33:46] What did that teach you about your limits?
[00:33:51] What
[00:33:51] quiet shift did you make that you haven't celebrated at all? And what truth did you [00:34:00] learn about yourself that you can actually use going forward? This might be a good time to hit pause. I'm gonna say those questions back to you and. Maybe you can mark this somehow. The point that you're listening, the timestamp.
[00:34:16] Where did you show up this year in ways you forgot to acknowledge what drained you and what did that teach you about your limits? What quiet shift did you make that you haven't celebrated at all? And what truth did you learn about yourself that you can actually use going forward? This isn't about correcting the past, it's about reclaiming parts of it that revealed who you're becoming.
[00:34:45] And now that we've talked about releasing and softening that self-judgment and opening the door to clarity, you might be ready well in now that we've softened the self-judgment and opened the [00:35:00] door to a little bit of clarity. You might be ready for the next part of the story because the natural next step after understanding a year is deciding from what that year in the past, what do you want to bring it with you?
[00:35:14] So next episode is entitled Reset Your Base Camp. So Reset Your base Camp is just the quiet insights, the unexpected growth and the hard moments that sharpened us are great. Now we need to reflect. What we wanna take with us, and the choice is where the power is. 'cause once you see specifically what 2025 taught you, the next is very, very specific.
[00:35:40] What parts of the year actually deserve to come with us into 2026 and what parts need to be laid down? That's the heart of our next episode. Because every ascent, every chapter, every reinvention and every season of becoming starts with a base camp reset. A moment where we look at everything that we've been carrying [00:36:00] and ask ourselves with honesty and compassion, is this still mine to hold?
[00:36:07] Is this still aligned with who I'm becoming? Or is this draining me or strengthening me? And did this chapter serve its purpose? And is it complete? Now, you don't have to purge everything. You don't have to bulldoze your life. You simply just have to recognize what has reached its natural endpoint and what still has life meaning and purpose for you.
[00:36:38] In, in episode two in December, this is where this beginning happens. We're gonna talk about what stays, what goes, what gets rewritten before the new year begins. It's not about stripping our life clean, it's about curating it with intention. We're gonna hold onto lessons and clarity and truths that matter while releasing the roles, [00:37:00] expectations, and habits, and the emotional weight that no longer are part of our next level in 2026.
[00:37:06] So if you leave today's episode and you'd like it, just allow this question to sit with you, not to solve it, but to soften it. What from 2025 feels complete and what feels like it's calling you forward. We're gonna pick this up in my next episode. Reset your Basecamp, and I promise it's going to meet you exactly where you are.
[00:37:31] Before we close though, I want you to take one deep breath, not to erase everything or even anything, not to force calm, but just to simply meet you where you are right now. Let the breath settle into your body and land. This month is all about the end game reset. It's not about rushing into resolutions or pretending that the year was something it wasn't.
[00:37:54] It's about pausing long enough to honor what this year revealed, softened, and [00:38:00] stretched or awakened in you. Each episode in December is a layer of that work, a gentle clearing, a deeper understanding, a chance to step into the next season with clarity instead of exhaustion. And if something stirred inside you today, let that be enough.
[00:38:18] Awareness is forward movement. Clarity is forward movement, and one honest moment with yourself is forward movement. You don't have to do anything with it. Just acknowledge it. Just hold it lightly and let it inform what comes next. If you want to lean a little deeper into today's reflection, check the show notes for the downloadable worksheet that's waiting for you.
[00:38:41] It's just a simple link. I usually create one that's pertinent for every month. It's your space to process what surfaces and to prepare for the next part of the season, but is taking learning into action, and that's where the gold is, folks. Learning is a fabulous, but if we don't take action, we're not moving forward.[00:39:00]
[00:39:00] Next week we continue the December arc as we explore, reset your Basecamp and build on the foundation that we created today. Until then, be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
[00:39:18] Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about mindset medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life.
