MMS_JuneEp04 - What Enough Actually Feels Like_Audio
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Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:00:00] We're gonna be joyful because you just finished your medical practice, and we're gonna be sad because we just found out the cancer came back, and we can be in both places
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you are listening to Mindset Medicine. This is your weekly dose of personal awareness medicine, so I want you to just take one deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are. My daughter is 30. A few months ago, she said something to me, not even dramatically, but just kinda tossed it out, "Well, if you don't spend too much, you don't need to make too much.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You could also say, if you don't spend much, you don't need much." And I kinda laughed at the time because, well, sure, obviously, that's just math, but it sat with me longer than I expected it to, because somewhere underneath that very simple sentence was a [00:01:00] question I realized I'd never really asked myself.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not, how much do I need to make? But, what is enough, actually? Not as a number, not as a goal I'd hit and then move, you know, the goal post over and over and over again, no. But as something I could feel, something I could recognize if it showed up. Then I started to wonder, what if enough isn't a finish line at all?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: What if it's not something that we calculate or earn or finally just qualify after years of doing everything right with work? What if it's just something we arrived at? There's a moment I keep coming back to. It was a moment I was sitting on my porch one Monday morning with my coffee in hand, and the sun had just come up, that I think captures this better than any explanation I could give, and I'll get to that in a bit, but I wanna plant this question first.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because I think this is the real one underneath [00:02:00] this whole month. Not, do I have enough? But would I know it if I did? So this porch thing, it was a Monday morning, early June, July, that kind of light that hasn't decided yet how the hot the day is going to get. I had coffee, black, the way I always have it, and he, my husband, had it with cream and sugar, which is something he never used to do.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: He had spent years watching his weight and watching his fat and sugar. He would count it. But, but once he had cancer, he just looked at me one day and said, "Screw it. I'm having cream and sugar every day." And I tell you, he genuinely loved it. He lit up over a cup of coffee in the morning in the way I hadn't seen in years.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Even as his weight kept falling off of him, it had nothing to do with, to do with the diet. It had everything to do with the cancer. But he just loved that cup of [00:03:00] coffee. So we're sitting out there together, his hand in mine, and we're just watching the sun as it changed and came up over our lawn. And I want to be honest about what that morning was, because it was a lot of things all at once.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: For one, it was the first Monday in thirty-five years that I intentionally didn't have to go in and see patients. Thirty-five years. You know, there's times I was at a conference, but not during a normal, quote, "work week," right? I had just stepped away from my family medicine practice, closed that chapter on purpose and with a plan.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I was taking a month before starting hospice and palliative care work, and in that moment, on that porch, I could just start to feel my nervous system actually slowly settling. And I felt a little guilty and a little shamed. It was like something that has been humming [00:04:00] low in my system for three and a half decades.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It just slowly started to turn down, and I didn't know how loud it had been until I felt that quiet. That part was pure joy, pure relief, and I remember just sitting there thinking, "Oh, so this is what stillness feels like." 'Cause I'd forgotten. And here's the part that makes me shake my head a little bit.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That same morning, we were waiting for the scan results for my husband on his cancer and asking ourselves, "Did it come back?" Because we had a suspicion that it already had. And here's the thing. We knew the scan results were sitting there waiting for us to look at them, and we could've looked at them first thing, and we didn't.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: We sat with our coffee, his cream and sugar, mine black, [00:05:00] and we just stayed on the porch for about an hour on purpose. We wanted that hour. We wanted the sunrise and the quiet and each other's hands before we opened anything that might take it away. And then after that hour, still sitting right there, coffee in hand, we opened the results.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And it was there, and the cancer had come back. And I remember sitting with that for a minute, and then I looked at him and I asked, "How are we going to do this?" And he just looked at me calm and said, "Easy. We're gonna be joyful because you just finished your medical practice, and we're gonna be sad because we just found out the cancer came back.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And we can be in both places. Depending on the moment, it's okay to feel all of it." And I think about that sentence more than almost anything else he ever said to me, [00:06:00] because he gave me permission in the midst of such chaos of his health for me to feel joy and still be present with him during this awful, awful experience.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because we just spent an hour protecting a feeling, choosing it on purpose before the world got to weigh in, and then the world weighed in, and somehow both things were still true. The hour was still real. The diagnosis was still real. He wasn't trying to resolve all of that into one feeling. He was just letting it all be there at the same time, on the same porch.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So that's the porch. Both coffees, an hour we chose before the news we couldn't choose. Thirty-five years of me doing, doing, doing had just gone quiet, and I didn't know it yet, but a much bigger kind of being [00:07:00] present was about to ask everything of me right there on that same porch in that same hour. And I think about that hour a lot.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Has there ever been a moment for you where two completely different truths were sitting in the room at the same time? A good thing on one hand, and a hard thing or sad thing on the other. Both real, both happening, and somehow neither one canceled the other out. By that Friday, four days later, we were already in it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Scans, labs, pre-treatment visits, first appointments in Cincinnati, and from there it became a rhythm. Three or four times a week, sometimes more, back and forth. Treatment days, follow-up days, lab days. The kind of days where you leave before the light has even come up and you get back sometimes after dark.[00:08:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And somewhere in that first week, I genuinely don't remember which day, I realized I hadn't taken a shower. I hadn't gone to the grocery store. I hadn't left the house except to take him to Cincinnati. And almost a week had gone by, and the only things that happened were driving there, coming back, driving back, sitting with him So has that ever happened where a few days go by and suddenly the basics for you just kind of fell away?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it wasn't a shower, maybe it was dinner, or, you know, several nights forgetting dinner, or whatever was in the fridge, you just didn't clean it out, or the laundry, or the email just sat there, and afterwards there might be a little voice that said, "Hmm, I kinda really let things go this week." Now, here's where I wanna be honest about something, because I do think this matters.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The old me, the me who spent 35 years measuring a day by what [00:09:00] got done, would have gone back and looked at that week and felt like a failure. No shower? No groceries? Nothing checked off? By every metric that I used to use, that was a terrible week. Except it wasn't. It was the most enough week I think I'd had in years.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because for the first time in a long time, there was nothing I was supposed to be doing other than the thing I was doing. I wasn't behind on anything. I wasn't failing at anything. I was just there with him. And somehow that, not the showers, not the groceries, not the big-ass to-do list, that's what the week actually needed from me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I had the energy to give, because for once, nothing else was competing for it. In the past, my energy was just splayed between a thousand [00:10:00] different things, and I didn't even have the language for it at the time, but I did just start remember noticing, almost with a surprise, that I wasn't anxious about what I wasn't getting done anymore.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And that was new. That was very new. So maybe the question is this. If there's been a week like that for you, where the shoulds kinda fell away, did it actually feel as bad as our voice in our head said it was? Or did it just kind of melt away and we were like, "Okay, we can do this"? So if that week wasn't measured by what got done, what was it measured by?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I thought a lot about this, and the closest I can get to it is that week, enough wasn't a number. It wasn't a balance in an account or a box checked or even a goal that got hit. Enough [00:11:00] was being where I was fully without also being in three different places in my head at the same time. There was quiet in my brain, and that's different from what I-- how I used to think about it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because for most of my life, enough was always out there, a little further along, a little more saved, a little more accomplished, a little more earned, and then I could rest. Then I could just be present. Then it would be okay to slow down. Enough was a finish line I kept moving farther away. But that week, there was no finish line.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: There was just the next drive to Cincinnati, and the next hour with him, and the next cup of coffee. And in his case, the next piece of lemon sliced, I don't know if you call it bread at Starbucks, that he would just eat the icing off the top. I'd have to get two and three of them just so he could get the icing off the top, 'cause [00:12:00] that's what tasted good to him.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And somehow, inside all of that, even though nothing was checked off, nothing accomplished in a way that I used to count it, I felt more like I had enough more than I ever had in years. Which means enough was never really, really about having more or doing more or even getting somewhere. It was about whether I could actually be where I already was, with what I already had, without my mind running ahead to check whether it was sufficient.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And once I felt that, even once, I couldn't go back to not knowing it. It didn't change everything overnight, but it planted something, a kind of permission, the sense that maybe I had enough love, presence, purpose for a lot longer than I'd let [00:13:00] myself notice. And I share that story not because everyone's version of this looks like a cancer diagnosis or a porch or a week without a shower.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It almost certainly doesn't. But it is their version of it, even a small one, even something that didn't come with a label on it, where for a little while, the question for you, is this enough? I ask you that not because it got answered or should be answered, because just for a moment, maybe we don't ask that enough
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I just want you to sit with that for a second. Do we ask ourselves often enough, is this enough? And are we happy with where we are, or are we constantly moving the line forward to try to find out what is enough? And I want to slow down here for a moment, because there's a reason this [00:14:00] stuck the way it did for me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: If that moment on the porch or that week without a shower left some kind of mark, that's not just a nice memory. Something actually happened in the brain. Here's the normalized part first. If it felt strange that one moment could shift everything, well, that's not unusual. Most of us assume that change happens through hard work and effort, through trying harder, differently, thinking differently, or willing ourselves into a new way of being.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And sometimes that's not actually how it works. Because the brain is built on something called neuroplasticity, its ability to physically reorganize itself based upon our experiences. And every time we have an experience, especially one with strong emotions attached to it, the brain takes note. It's not just remembering that something happened, it's [00:15:00] adjusting slightly what it expects, what it's primed to notice, what feels familiar going forward.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So repeated experiences carve deeper grooves, but sometimes it doesn't take repetition. Sometimes one experience, intense enough, emotionally significant enough, can start carving a new groove all on its own. And that's what I think happened on that porch and in that week. My brain had spent thirty-five years building a very deep groove about what was enough and what it meant.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: More done, more earned, more checked off. And then in the space of about a week, I had an experience so different, so emotionally loaded, that it didn't just pass through. It left a new mark, a new groove, right alongside the old one. And [00:16:00] here's the thing about new grooves. They don't erase the old ones. The old grooves about earning and doing didn't disappear overnight, and it's still there even now, some days louder than others.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But now there's also this other path, this other enough, and how it can feel. And once that path exists, the brain can find it again. Maybe not every time, but it's there now. It's possible now. It wasn't possible before. So if there's ever been a moment for you, big or small, that left some kind of mark, a moment after which something felt slightly different, even if it's hard to explain, that might be exactly this.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not a lesson learned, but a new groove laid down. And maybe the smallest awareness shift is just this. That mark doesn't [00:17:00] have to be dramatic to be real. It doesn't need a diagnosis or a porch or a thirty-five-year buildup behind it. Any experience, if it's emotionally real enough, can lay down a new path, which means the next win might already be closer than it seems.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This isn't who any of us are. It's the brain doing what brains do, building paths based upon what we live through. And once a new path exists, even faintly, it doesn't have to be forced. It's already there, waiting to be walked again. So here's what I want to bring this back around to something practical, but not in a, like, five steps to feeling more grateful, you know?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because I don't think this is about gratitude exactly, or at least not the bumper sticker version of it. Here's what I mean. For most of my life, when something [00:18:00] good happened, a quiet moment, an easy hour, or a day where nothing went wrong, my sister's favorite words are, "Well, the day didn't go too badly."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That means she survived, right? But here's the thing. The internal dialogue is something like this. "Okay, that was nice. Now I gotta get back to it." Good things got acknowledged the way you just glance at something through a car window. We just noticed it, gone, filed it away, because there was always something else to go.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Enough was always still out there waiting just past the horizon. What started to shift slowly, not all at once, was a different kind of internal sentencing going on in my own head, and hopefully for you too. Something close to, "Well, this is it. This right here might already be the thing." Not, "This is good, and I should be doing more."[00:19:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just, "This might already be enough." No asterisks, no but, dot, dot, dot. And I want to be careful here because that's not the same thing as settling or giving up on wanting things or pretending everything is fine when it isn't. It's something quieter than that. It's letting a moment be complete, even a small one.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Even something as simple as the first sip of a coffee, actually tasting something instead of going through the ritual, feeling the richness, the warmth, maybe a little bitter in the best way. Instead of just being fuel to get the morning started. Even if there's more to do after, even if the bigger picture is genuinely hard and genuinely soft, both at once.[00:20:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I think the internal dialogue we get in our head, it can really, really, really just shorten the gap. The gap between when something good happens and then when the mind decides whether it counts as being good. For a long time, that gap was huge for me. Almost nothing counted until something larger was met, and it's gotten shorter, not gone, shorter.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And maybe that's the practice, if there is one. Not forcing gratitude, not manufacturing a feeling, but just noticing when something lands as good, even briefly, even something as ordinary as the warm sun on our skin, or the particular blue of a sky in the morning, or a soft chair that is worn out and comfortable.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That all can just land, and that can be enough, too. Just for that moment, [00:21:00] without immediately reaching past it for the next thing it needs to get done. And I want to leave a little room here, not for an answer necessarily, just for a question I want you to sit with, the way you might let tea steep a little longer.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But I just want you to sit here because this is what I want. Somewhere, maybe today, maybe this week, maybe, hell, further back than that, there might have been a moment that was quietly just enough. Maybe not a big moment, not a huge milestone. Maybe it didn't even register as good at the time, but just ordinary.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The way the light might come through a window. A few extra quiet moments in the morning before anybody else was awake. Or the weight of a warm beverage in both of your hands. Maybe a laugh that came out before there was time to [00:22:00] even think about it. So here's the question, and there's no rush to answer it, and no right answer waiting on the other side.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: If I look back gently, without grading it, without deciding whether it counts Do you have a moment like that, that's something small, something that looking at it now might have already been completely full at the time, even if nothing about it seemed to ask for attention at the time? But you go back and you see it, and you reflect on it, and go, "Yeah, that was a good moment."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And that's it. Just let it surface. Find it if it wants to, 'cause some moments take their time showing up. Others don't show up at all, and that's fine, too. Either way, there's nothing to find here, just somewhere to look if it feels right. So I'd like to take you to the unicity moment for this episode, and before we begin, I want to offer a gentle [00:23:00] note.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: What we're about to do is a guided experience, an invitation to slow down and to turn inward. You are always in control. You can open your eyes at any time, adjust your position, or simply listen without participating. There is nothing you have to do. Just receive what's useful and leave the rest. And if you are driving or operating machinery right now, please don't close your eyes, right?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You're welcome to stay present on the road and just listen or come back when you can do it yourself where you're safe and can be somewhere still. And if it feels right, just let your eyes close now. Just breathing in and out. Nothing to change, just the breath doing what it already knows how to do. And maybe letting the shoulders soften a little, just a little.[00:24:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And a picture might begin to form. You might see it or hear it or feel it. All the senses are available. You're gently awake somewhere, maybe warm. Maybe there's a soft light there, the kind just makes everything feel cozy and safe and maybe just a little delicious Maybe there's something warm to hold, a beverage?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Something good. Just makes the whole place feel warmer and cozier Maybe there's some gentle sounds nearby, or maybe it's just quiet
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And in this place, nothing is asking anything
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just a sense of [00:25:00] peace and quiet. The mind is easy. No decisions to make Just being present here, fully here
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Nothing is waiting A peaceful heart, a quiet kind of joy just from being present in this warm space
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's all welcome here.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And whenever it feels right, slowly becoming a little more aware of the room, maybe more aware of your breath
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe take a sip of that beverage, [00:26:00] if there is one. You're more aware of the surface underneath you, stretching perhaps in whatever way feels good. Ah
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This moment, just as it was, was enough And if you haven't already, you can gently open your eyes when you're ready
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This episode was really about what it feels like when enough stops being a number and starts being something you can actually feel in your body, in your day, in a way you let yourself rest. That feeling doesn't arrive all at once. It shows up in moments, and then there are more moments until one day it's just there, and you're capable of being present, [00:27:00] and enough has already arrived.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But here's something I've been sitting with. Once that shift starts to happen, once enough stops being tied to what you have earned or accumulated, a different question tends to surface. Not, "Do I have enough?" But, "Who am I underneath all of this?" Hmm. And that's where we're heading next. So for now, thank you for spending this time with me.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
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. [00:28:00] 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.
