144 ~ Revisiting Your Life With New Eyes

Some experiences don’t “process” just because time passes. Processing requires us to be willing to meet them again, and again with new eyes. We’ve been exploring digestion as a spiritual and practical practice: how we receive life, integrate it, and expand our capacity without getting overwhelmed or stuck in the (old) stories.

We start with a simple, repeatable framework for emotional digestion that you can use after a fight, a breakup, a diagnosis, a parenting moment, or any turning point. 

We ask: 

• What actually happened (the facts)? 
• What did I make it mean then, and what do I want it to mean now? 
• What did I feel at the time?
• What do I feel today? 
• What is still living in my body? 

That embodiment piece is important, because your nervous system often holds what your mind tries to skip.

Then we go deeper into how perspective evolves across the years. Brenda shares the layered reality of a 21-year marriage and divorce, including the delayed arrival of grief and the wisdom that comes from revisiting the past without getting trapped there. We also talk about the seductive comfort of blame and “rightness,” and what becomes possible when we choose responsibility without righteousness: more softness, more compassion, and a truer connection to our heart.

We have been slowing down the idea of “digesting life”. We want to make digestion tangible by walking through the facts, meanings, feelings, and what the body still carries. 

Episode Bullet points:
• why reception requires digestion and presence  
• starting with what happened and separating fact from story  
• choosing the meaning you give an experience over time  
• tracking feelings then versus now and noticing what lingers in the body  
• how growth changes perspective and keeps digestion ongoing  
• Brenda’s long marriage and the grief that arrives years later  
• how blame and “being right” can keep you stuck  
• taking responsibility with compassion and turning experience into wisdom  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome

Welcome And Host Introductions

SPEAKER_00 0:08

to Desire is Medicine. We are two very different women living a life led by desire, inviting you into our world.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

I'm Brenda. I'm a devoted practitioner to being my fully expressed true self in my daily life, motherhood, relationships, and my business. Desire has taken me on quite a ride, and every day I practice listening to and following the voice within. I'm a middle school teacher, turned coach and guide of the feminine.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

And I'm Catherine, devoted to living my life as the truest and hopefully the highest version of me. I don't have children, I've never been married, I've spent equal parts of my life in corporate as in some down and low shady spaces. I was the epitome of Tired and Wired, and my path led me to explore desire. I'm a coach, guide, energy worker, and a forever student.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Even after decades of inner work, we are humble beginners, on the mat, still exploring, always curious. We believe that listening to and following the nudge of desire is a deep spiritual practice that helps us grow.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

On the Desire is Medicine podcast, we talk to each other, we interview people we know and love about the practice of desire, bringing in a very important piece that is often overlooked: being responsible for our desire. Welcome back, family, friends, listeners.

Why Digestion Matters For Growth

SPEAKER_00 1:30

So happy for you to be here. My lovely co-host is here as well. We have been really massaging this idea of digestion, of how we process our life, how we receive life, how we integrate. And in addition to that, I have been wanting to not go so deep, but to go wider for the audience listening. I want to be mindful that potentially the conversations, some of the conversations that Brenda and I are having are fairly nuanced. So bear with me as I balance that. I'm like on the balance beam, really wanting to give you depth at the same time making it really simple language. And I want it to be tangible. And I'm sort of failing forward in real time with you guys. That's really what's happening. So I've been feeling into what else is there to talk about in the realm of digestion? One of the things that Brenda and I were toying with was this idea that reception, in order to really receive, you have to digest. And then what else is there when you want full reception of life, of new things, increase your capacity? You also want to have intention and be present to it. We did a toolbox that shows you how we digest episode. And still, I'm like, there's more to say here about digesting and processing life. So what am I talking? What am I talking about? Really

A Simple Framework For Processing

SPEAKER_00 3:12

simply, when you're going to digest something that happened in your life, whether it is a family member, somebody you love, one of your children, um, a friend, a sibling, when you're sort of digesting an experience or a relationship, anything, where do we start? We start with what happened. Like what was the actual experience? What are the facts? And as I sit with this digesting piece, it reminds me a lot of an episode we did when we talked about how to separate story from fact. We want to look at what happened, but in this case, we're also asking ourselves, what did I make it mean? Because unlike separating story from fact, when we're digesting our life, we are intentionally sort of giving it meaning. What did it mean? And am I good with that? Or do I want it to mean something else? And like, what did I feel at that time? What was happening for me then? What's happening for me now when I think back to then? And what is still happening to me in regards to that in my body? What am I choosing to carry forward? And what's leaking into the future anyway, like that I may not want to be there. Is there a change in my identity due to this? Did this experience give me a specific change of life? I'm thinking of something. I'll give a personal example before I hand it over to Brenda, see where we go with this.

Catherine’s Story Of Control

SPEAKER_00 4:56

As a teenager, after my mom passed and I lived away, I had come back to New York. I was living with a friend. I remember feeling so deeply in my body like there was just no room for error. Any failure felt so big at that time that I was really bracing at that time to not make any mistakes. That really had me become a lot more controlling, have a lot less surrender, potentially touch a lot more rage. And the unwinding of that continues to this day. I do my best to remind myself, failure is part of the process. And there is room for failure. Failure is needed. I need to actually fail fast. Like the goal is to fail fast, to do new things and to fail fast so that I can learn faster from them. What comes up for you, Brenda, when we talk about just like digestion, digesting life, processing it.

Brenda’s Divorce Grief Arrives Later

SPEAKER_01 6:04

This series is so much deeper and wider than we really thought. And one of the things that Catherine and I are doing here intentionally is really parsing out some of these little branches of the digestion topic so it can be digestible to you. So we're actually doing this in real time because we could probably talk about digestion for an hour and move on. But there is, but that actually becomes undigestible. It's like too much at once. So I'm just loving this slowing down on this topic. What's coming up for me is that as we grow and change, if we're interested in growth and we're willing to look at ourselves and look at a situation that we had in our life with some curiosity and different perspective as we grow and evolve, our perspective on a particular situation does change because we could see more. We can't always see it. We see it for what it is in the moment, but we can't see the full picture. We can't really see it fully in the rear view mirror until more time has passed, especially with some of these bigger things. So the example I would give would be my 21-year marriage and divorce. When we first got divorced, people would say to me, I'm so sorry. And I would look at them like they were nuts. Why are you sorry? I was the happiest clam in town. I had my freedom. I was having the best time. I was dating new people. I was having a sexual awakening. I had was experiencing things in my life that I had never experienced before. But it wasn't until many years later when some of those things actually crashed that I had a new perspective. My divorce became final nine years ago, 2017. And we separated in 2012. And now we're in 2026. So I'm just giving you a perspective that we haven't actually been together for 14 years, but we were together for about 21 before that. So this is a long soul-mate relationship that I have with this person. It wasn't until a few years ago that I was actually able to tap into the grief of my divorce. And that's not to say that I never felt sad or angry. I definitely did. But that was more of me moving through and digesting some of the difficult things that happened. But many years later, it was like a knife in my heart. Oh my God. I married this man because I loved him. We had dreams and desires and visions and plans. And we did those things. We created a home and two beautiful children together and a whole lot of other things on the spectrum. We had an absolutely beautiful life together. Until we reached some points that we couldn't come back from. And I was able to tap into the grief of that. The grief of, oh my God, this man that I loved. Look how I hurt him. And look how hurt I was by him. So I'm just slowing this down a little bit to give a transmission of the feeling that I was able to feel that there's no way I could have felt right away when I was out there having the best time. So with some of these bigger things in our lives, it is valuable to go back and look at them again and feel what's there for us now because it evolves. Our relationship to these big things in our lives evolves as we evolve. And it's a continued digestion. If you're available and present for it, which I am. I'm in I'm invested in this because it's my children's father. And it's definitely a soulmate relationship for me in my life. So it matters to me. Do you hear the vacuuming? So if you're hearing some noise, that is we are just in reality here. Usually it's Catherine having some kind of drilling or ambulances in the background. Today it's me.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

We don't really have a way to noise proof ourselves at this time. So it's the real, real. It's like you're listening in like you're listening to our a phone call. Thank you so much, Brenda, for sharing that story and talking about I hear you're talking about digesting and processing life in layers. Like when we're looking back to something that happened, and we're looking at it from potentially 2014 eyes, 2004 eyes, 1994 eyes for the X's in the room, generation X's in the room, to the 2024 eyes and like beyond. When we're digesting life, it doesn't have to be one and done. Actually, Brenda and I really encourage you to pause often and be with certain things. Sometimes a lesson just doesn't land, it requires some time. And I don't want to sound naive and innocent in and say to you, things will change as you get older. Some things may not change, and perspective may not shift. Perspective does change with growth. And growth doesn't necessarily come just because years came, but I would bet you money that if you can be with, and I'm not a gambler, but if you could be with different things that have happened at different points of your life, like pivotal things that happened for you at different times in your life, you will continue to reap benefits from that experience and continue to process that life and lived experience for as long as you're here, if you're willing, and that digestion is just turning experience into wisdom. What did I learn from that? And going back to the questions of like what happened? What did I make it mean? What did it mean to me in 1994, 2004, 2014, 2024? How did the meaning change? What did I feel at that time? What did I feel after post that time? What do I feel today? What's still sitting from that experience in my body?

SPEAKER_01 13:27

This is a great topic and not one that we could have anticipated five episodes ago. So here's the thing: if you don't do that, if you're not looking at things at different perspectives with some curiosity, being in the moment, what is here for me now? Who am I now today? And how do I look at this experience from back then? How do I look at it now, which is different than five or 10 years ago? Just using,

Letting Go Of Blame And Rightness

SPEAKER_01 13:56

say, my example of my marriage and divorce. You will be stuck. You're just stuck. You're stuck in the same old perspective. Imagine I didn't look at any of this with curiosity over the years or allow new perspectives in, truths, new truths in. I was able to see more. I would have been one of those typical women who are stuck thinking that their husband was a complete XYZ, fill in the blank. I would have been stuck in blame how wrong he was, how right I was. And that is a very safe place to be. Right. And you can see as you walk through the world people who are stuck in their story of how they believe it is. And I had a phase where I thought he was completely wrong and I was completely right. And that is a very natural stage. But I wouldn't want to get stuck there because it's actually not the truth. The truth is that we both had responsibility. We both were not our best selves. We were both scared. We were both in our patterns. We were both repeating things from the past that we saw in our family. And we brought that all to the table, and we did not show our best selves. It would be unfair of me and wrong to blame him completely. So as someone who wants to grow and evolve in my life, it requires me to take a deeper responsibility. That requires courage. It requires courage and it requires this willingness to be like, oh, I messed that up. I wasn't my best self, which requires the ability to sit with maybe a period where I blame myself or I'm willing to look at how I was in ways that I swore I would never be. And I did things that I never thought possible for myself. Oh my God, who was I? That is hard to see. It's way easier to sit and blame at another person instead of having the courage to take responsibility for your part and then learn how to have compassion and like you said, turn it into wisdom. That process took me many years. And it the benefit is that it gets you into your heart. I just had an experience the other day about an old artifact that I found from this time in my life when I was getting divorced. I just found it in my mother's basement, this old journal, and I opened it up. It brought out all these feelings. I was like, oh my God, here it is again, this thing I need to look at and process. And the whole thing just brought me into my heart. And I could see the perspective and how it changed. And it brings me into a life well lived. I am having a life well lived, and it is messy, and it is like imperfect, and I have not been my best self.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

And from it, I am now a woman with embodiment and wisdom. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's such a great example of being able to look back at different times and run through like what happened, what did you make it mean? How did you feel at the time? What's still in your body now that you may want to move through? And I love how you brought in what's behind when we are blaming and we are in rightness. It can feel really good though. Definitely feels like we've landed somewhere. There's like so much fire in your body. And then I love how you brought what's available for you when you're not in blame and you're not in rightness. And you can look at what you brought to a situation and what they brought to the situation, and you can bring in some responsibility without, I guess, responsibility without righteousness. Like, yes, this is true for me, and this is true for this other person, and how that can potentially really help you go back to your heart space and have you drop in and be soft and receiving with a circumstance where you can attend, you would be able to just be hardened, and nobody would find fault in that.

Digesting The Hard Stuff Too

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Nobody would fault you for it. They would applaud you. I love how you said that you get to have a life well lived that's messy and imperfect. And I think life is messy and imperfect. It's not always great. I love what processing our life and digesting our lives can give us. Like processing it and digesting it is sort of mucky. It's not really comfortable all the time, and it's not the best. Yes, processing a great experience is like, oh my goodness, I went here and I did this, and you know, it was great. And the sunsets and sunrises. It doesn't feel as joyful when I'm saying, so then this diagnosis came, and then I went to the doctor, and then I was waiting for those exams. And I woke up and everything hurts now. And I'm asking myself, what else could possibly go wrong? Digesting that isn't as much fun. It's a lot harder to do that, but the payoff is the same. Like the payoff of being able to look at different life experiences and look at what wisdom is there for me today? Where have I placed blame or where do I feel righteous that potentially I could let that go? Can I surrender potentially to a new reality? Is there more responsibility I can take here for that experience? Can I drop into my heart more? Can I just lean into living a more well-lived, messy, and imperfect life? Friends, family,

Reflection Questions And Closing

SPEAKER_00 20:29

listeners, Brenda and I really invite you to pause and ask yourself what big life event or small life event, what part of life do I want to pause and look at? What happened? What did I make it mean? What did I feel at the time? And what's still sitting with me? Is there anywhere where I can let go of blame or righteousness? Is there a place where I can step into more responsibility? Can I drop into my heart more? Can I receive more from that experience? Let us know how it goes. Until next time. Bye for now.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Thank you for joining us on the Desire is Medicine podcast.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Desire invites us to be honest, loving, and deeply intimate with ourselves and others. You can find our handles in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.