147 ~ 5 Questions To Digest Any Experience (Tool Box Edition)

Some experiences end, but they don’t actually feel over. The relationship is done, the job is finished, the course is complete and yet your body still feels full, reactive, foggy, or strangely tender. We call that “undigested life,” and it can quietly run your choices until you slow down long enough to process what happened.

We share a toolbox-style practice for emotional digestion that you can do on your own or with a trusted partner or friend. We talk about why intention matters more than the perfect method, and how digestion can happen through movement, stillness, journaling, voice notes, or a simple witnessing container where you hold sacred space for each other. If you tend to overthink, bypass, or “just move on,” this framework brings you back to sensation, truth, and integration.

Brenda teaches her go-to five-question ritual for closure and completion, built for big endings like breakups, divorce, job transitions, grief and loss, and even positive chapters like travel or a meaningful program. 

The questions are below:

1) What are your Favorite Frames? (moments that stood out)

2) What will you miss?

3) What will you not miss?

4) What lessons are you taking forward?

5) What are you grateful for from this experience?

These five questions you can use alone or with a trusted person to create clarity, gratitude, and real completion.

Episode Nuggets:
• why we treat “digestion” as a practice of desire and responsibility  
• how undigested life shows up as emotional backlog, bloaty feelings, and stuckness  
• ways to digest through movement, stillness, journaling, voice notes, or being witnessed  
• how to do the practice with another person without turning it into a conversation  
• Brenda’s five-question framework for endings: favorite frames, what you’ll miss, what you won’t miss, lessons learned, and gratitude  
• examples of when to use it: breakups, divorce, job endings, death, trips, courses, coaching containers  

Transcript

Welcome And Host Introductions

SPEAKER_00 0:07

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

SPEAKER_02 0:17

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_02 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 as 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.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Welcome back, family, friends, listeners to another episode of Desire as Medicine Podcasts.

Toolbox Focus On Digestion

SPEAKER_01 1:32

I am joined with the lovely Brenda Fredericks. We are here today to bring you a toolbox episode. Toolbox episodes are episodes to help you play with desire. They come, they usually have a white cover. Actually, they have a white cover. I don't even have to say usually, they have a white cover, as opposed to our other episodes that have the more gold-toned yellow. The gold-toned yellow lets you know that we are dropping some gems, wisdom, philosophies, frameworks. The toolbox is you come, you're like, what's gonna help me, X, Y, or Z? Oh, there's a toolbox, let me go there. So that's what today is. And today's toolbox is on digestion. Brenda and I have been diving deep into digestion, trying to also not go too deep and stay wide and sort of just give you the concepts around what happens when we have undigested life and what is actually available for us when we digest it. We've had some conversations around it, and we've also talked about like what are some ways of digesting undigested life from whether you're doing it single, as in just by yourself, or you want to do it coupled, whether with a partner or a friend. We've talked about ways of digesting, whether it be movement, movement involved, where it involves movement, where the digestion involves movement. I got tongue-tied, where the digestion will involve conversation, where you're speaking either to yourself potentially, or a voice note, a voice journal, or another human, or is it where you're just still with your own talk, like your own thoughts and not moving your body at all? So you could feel all the sensations that are coming. There are so many ways to digest intention. The intention that we bring to the action is probably more important than how you choose, and how you choose will depend on what you're feeling, right? We've talked about digestion from the perspective of what happened. What did we make it mean? How did it feel? And is it somewhere still in the body? Like, do we have any sort of emotional backlog, reactivity, confusion? Are we seeking clarity, or do we just feel that like full bloaty feeling that can happen when we haven't really sat with something or been with something? And the truth is that we could give you frameworks or digestion tools for days, days and days, because there are so many options that we decided we're just going to give you a quick and dirty. So hopefully you're listening, and this is hopefully music to your ears. Brenda's gonna walk you through, and it's gonna be something that you can make your own or something that you're going to follow verbatim. It's really up to you, whatever feels good and that you use. Like if you're if you have your own digestion and it works well, great. If you're excited to try something new, then we've got something for you. Brenda. Thank you, Catherine. I love a quick and dirty.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

I love it quick and dirty, people. Ready? Here we go.

Five Questions For Closure

SPEAKER_02 5:05

All right. So this is one of my go-to tools for digestion, specifically for big things in our lives, things that may have ended. Now, it could be a relationship ended. It could be from something a long time ago that you didn't really digest. A job ending, maybe there's a death in the family, death of someone close to you. It could also be a vacation that you went on or a course that you took, or you worked for a year with your coach, and now that's complete. You're digesting that. So this could be used for all of those, plus so much more. So these are five questions, and we will put them in the show notes for you. And hopefully I will remember at the end to say them again. You could do these by yourself, writing them down. You could do them with another person. If you're doing with it with another person, I recommend not turning it into conversation, turning it, you know, having it be holding space for each other, and at the end of each response saying thank you. You can always go out to lunch and talk about it later. But during the actual practice, it's meant to be sacred space, intentional for digestion. Here we go. Question number one What are your favorite frames of your experience or of the person? So imagine your experience was like a movie film and you have all these little clips on a movie film, right? I'm talking old school film people. What are your favorite moments? They could be things that just stood out to you. So it could be your actual favorite moments or things that stood out to you that are very loud. So favorite moments, that's number one, favorite frames. Number two, what will you miss about that experience? When something ends, there's a loss. Even if it's something that you're glad that you never have to do again, there's still a loss, there's an ending there. What will you miss about it? This is the moment to kind of go into maybe the grief or maybe the anger. What are the things that you might miss? Question number three. You're gonna love this one. What will you not miss? This is your time to be like, oh yeah, this is why I'm so glad that this relationship ended, or I'm not in this job anymore, or that trip is done because of all the things that didn't go the way I wanted them to go. This is your chance to list them all. What will you not miss? And if you're really honest, even in relationships, even with someone that you love dearly, there might still be things that you won't miss, right? Question number four What are the lessons that you learned from this experience? There's always something to learn. I'm not saying that you have to like the lesson. Maybe the lesson came hard. Maybe it was difficult, maybe it was painful, maybe you had some self-blame in there somewhere. All of it is welcome. The bottom line is what are your lessons learned? What are your takeaways that you can now bring into the rest of your life? And question number five. Gratitude. What are you grateful for for this experience? This might be a place you might repeat something that you've already said in the first four questions. It might be a place to bring in something that you didn't didn't quite fit into any of those categories. Whatever it is, what are your gratitudes? Okay, so I'm going to repeat them like I promised I would. Number one, what are your favorite frames, favorite moments, or moments that stood out? Number two, what will you miss? Number three, what will you not miss? Number four, what are the lessons learned? And number five, are your gratitudes? Try this out. I've done this with relationship endings and job endings. I did this with after my divorce. It's really powerful. It really gives space, the amount of space and time that this experience that you had actually needs to digest. It's like saying, I value this experience. Maybe I didn't love it, but it was an experience that I had. And I'm giving it the time and space it needs to digest. And I've had beautiful heart openings and realizations and feelings of completion from these five questions. So try it out. Let Catherine and I know how it goes. We love to hear from you. Here's to you digesting. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for joining us on the Desire as Medicine podcast.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

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.