Mapping the Emotional Weather of Your Year (A Kinder Way to Begin January) - Podcast Transcript

Want to listen along?  Listen to the Mapping Emotional Weather Episode Here

About this episode:

If New Year’s resolutions feel intrusive, overwhelming, or disconnected from your real life, this episode offers a different way to reflect. Instead of asking What should I change? or What should I do next?, Blaze invites you to look at your year as an emotional landscape: a series of weather patterns you lived inside of.

This reflection helps you understand your emotional patterns, energy, and capacity without judgment. By mapping the conditions you were moving through - grief, recovery, connection, depletion, and renewal - you can begin to see why certain choices made sense, why motivation came and went, and what your life structure has been asking of you.

This episode is for anyone feeling burnt out by New Year pressure, tired of self-optimization, or unsure what they actually want right now. You don’t need a new version of yourself. You may simply need a clearer picture of where you’ve been and where you are.

You’ll hear:

• A reflective alternative to traditional New Year’s resolutions

• How emotional “weather patterns” shape your energy, memory, and capacity

• Why motivation can’t be separated from environment and life structure

• How reflection can create clarity without pushing you into action

• Permission to honor where you are before deciding what’s next

✨ Looking for support as you navigate this season?

Explore the Emotional Alignment Starter Kit: a grounded, supportive guide to help you name what you’re feeling, steady your nervous system, and reconnect with what actually matters to you.

👉 Get your free kit here

Have you ever thought about your year as a weather pattern or as an ecosystem that you're inhabiting and that you're a part of and that you're experiencing?

I started to look at my life that way this year and it felt like a much kinder way to begin the new year rather than demanding of myself, you know, where do I want to go next and what do I want to accomplish and who do I want to be?

That felt so invasive and overly demanding and not really acknowledging where I've been and what has already grown of its own accord and what I might need.

So I wanted to start this new year by taking a nice reflection on what happened? And not just actual events of what happened, but what did it really feel like to inhabit that life over the course of the year. And I don't think it's a question I've ever been asked before.

And I thought I would share it here because I think it might be really helpful for you as well, to ask yourself, "Gosh, if I looked at my last year, what would I identify as the major weather systems that moved through?"

Was it a year of plentiful sunshine and nourishing rains or was it stormy all the way through and earthquakes and just crazy things happening?

When you're able to kind of describe it with a little bit, I guess, of humor, but kind of a zoomed out perspective, right? To be able to go, "Okay, if I was going to map the landscape of last year, what might I do?"

It felt like such a fun creative process, and it took some of the emotional gravity out of some situations but let me see it a little bit more clearly and understand why I might have moved the way I did and why certain events unfolded the way they did, and my choices happened, how they did.

Because I realize I'm not completely autonomous. I mean, I am. I get to make my own decisions. I have a lot of authority over my own life. But I'm also a person living in a world with relationships with other people, to places, to events, and all of you are too.

And all of that really forms who we are, it forms our experiences, and you can't remove yourself from it.

Sometimes I think when we look at popular culture and the new year stuff... "What are you going to commit yourself to this year?"

That feels to me so premature if you haven't looked at yourself as this whole human being and understood where you actually are and where you've been and what space you're occupying in your own landscape, and what conditions you're living in and under.

So for me mapping out the weather was this beautiful way of slowing down and being able to be creative with it and illustrate for myself how the year started out and how it was heavy and cloudy for me.

Maybe it was in real life too. I don't remember all of that. I just have blips of memories here and there of specific days.

But I know that for so much of my year, it just blended in to the one before and losing my brother.

And I was really heavily mourning him and trying to figure out what life meant to me again at the beginning of the year. So I described it as this really gray period of time where it was heavy cloud cover, very foggy, hard to see, very far ahead.

Cold, still, damp, like not very encouraging of... you know, life and vibrancy. But then I asked, you know, well, what did that want from me? What was it like experiencing that and what was that weather encouraging me to do?

And did I honor that or not? And I think I did. It was if I was to remember it, it was asking me to slow down and to not try to look so far ahead and to not try to do so much because it was...

You know, if I was actually out in nature and it was that foggy and cold and wet and dark and damp, I wouldn't be trying to scramble over rocks like that. That's dangerous territory.

And if that's the reality that I had, which is what I feel it was, then responding appropriately was being still and not taking on much and being very introspective and winding down and responding to that in a way that made sense. And as I started to map out my year, I noticed that, you know, for me it was a very late spring.

And when it started to crack for me and sunshine was coming in, it felt like it was spotty.

So everything was still icy and it was still a little, you know, be slow with things, but your visibility is improving and there's signs of brightness and warmth ahead and there's something to move towards, but you know, don't rush because you don't want to slip and fall on ice and that was my metaphor for that.

And that feels really real and it's interesting because I look back on that time of my year and think, okay, I was starting to engage again and I was prioritizing my own health and working on reconnecting with people but cautiously and for short periods of time.

Not really having a direction that I wanted to move forward or realizing that I was ready to move forward but I didn't know what it was yet, and going, "Okay, well did I respond to that appropriately?" And I would jot down all of the actual events that did happen in that time frame.

And it was so interesting because I got excited about mapping out and then there was like the summer and the actual warm winds, right, of change coming in and feeling like there was finally sunshine on my face and... calm and it was encouraging and I wanted to do stuff and I felt like I was capable of it and the landscape cleared and it was great and I started really diving into my work and engaging with people and having a vision for where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.

And simultaneously preparing a future year for my daughter and another level of school, helping her with her friendships and people moving and all of the things that compose a summer, I guess, for me.

So summer camps and more summer camps and commuting and a lot more interaction, gaming groups, a lot more socialization.

actually being able to hold onto my memories of games and things that we played in that time, whereas I know some of these things were actually throughout the whole year, but I don't hold very strong memories for the whole year.

And I think that might be, again, because of just where I was at and how I was feeling.

And I looked at all this without so much judgment. I want to share that with you because I think it's important when we look at a year, no matter how good or hard it was, to not use our reflection time as judgment time to not look at it and go,

"What didn't I do that I hoped I would do or why haven't I done more?" But to be able to honestly take a look and go, "Okay, a lot of things did happen, probably more than you even can remember in one go." Certainly for me it was that way, but also that the things that we don't remember or the things that we didn't expend energy on.

There was purpose and meaning in that. And for me pairing up my imaginary weather patterns really helped me understand and have words and meaning for what was going on and why sometimes it was a lot easier to engage and have memory and why other times I didn't have a lot or I didn't have as much to give after having more energy pour in and having creative outlets and wanting to work really hard, through the summer, into the fall, into the harvest.

For me, it felt like the clouds started descending again towards the holidays, and I had anticipated that pairing it with just normal weather, right?

And my normal slowdown, but also realizing that everything has changed in my life and I'm still reordering meaning and I'm still recreating or not even recreating, just creating new structures and new habits and new ideas of what it means to have holidays when the architecture of my relationships has altered so much and who am I within that and what do I need now?

What I really looked at and witnessed in myself was this really stripped down capacity.

My capacity for bullshit is very small currently.

I know I took on a lot and I haven't had enough chance to recharge yet. That's what the reality of January is for me in looking back over my year and everything that happened and then witnessing again the weather pattern and the actual events of September, October, November, December, and realizing that many things happened that create a structure in my life that isn't as conducive to me recharging as other structures.

So over time, I've noticed that I require a lot of solitude and time to think about things and digest them and complete my thought processes, and when I have that time and space, I can recover pretty fast.

But because being truly alone and without input is so rare, it's so hard to get. And I know you know this because we're constantly inundated with the news and with TV and social media and did you catch up with this and then the things that you want to like things like your friendships and your relationships and all of that stuff.

It adds up and there's a constant input happening and some people really thrive and regain energy in that hubbub and with all of the people. And I unfortunately fall in the half that really doesn't. And I fall into, I think, an even smaller minority that requires true relational neutrality where there's nothing demanded of me and no vigilance required in order to truly shut down.

And you know, when you're parenting, you don't get that a lot.

And when you live with multi-generational families, you don't get that a lot. So I really treasure it when it happens.

And I noticed that structurally, we just had a lot more people going on for the last several months and a lot more turmoil going on in everyone's emotional environment.

It's been hard for me to shut down and hard for me to get back to routines. So I'm sharing that to say that when you lay out all of these experiences, sometimes what you reveal is the structure of your life.

And it's really good to know what that is because then you can actually assess and make decisions about that structure and make choices that can nourish you or sustain you through difficult times or realize like what's so out of alignment that it could never help you regain your capacity or be able to behave differently.

I think a lot of what my work centers on is understanding structures, understanding the systems that we build.

And instead of settling for a system that's always going to continuously drain you, to be able to identify and make the structural changes that change that equation for you. I love doing that stuff and I'm actually really proud of how much work I've done myself in my own life and how remarkably functional it is despite really difficult things. I'm really proud of that work and I'm so glad to be able to share it.

And I think when we start our new year, rather than asking or demanding of ourselves what next, we go, "Well, what now? What's actually happening now?" And to understand that, sometimes you look backwards and go, "Okay, what happened then?"

Where was I? What happened? What were the environments? What were the people? What were the emotional demands?

What were all of the things that were swirling around me that, you know, nourished me or made me crazy? What made me angry?

What made me sad? Were there any sections of time where I was so depleted that I couldn't do anything, and what's like the continual frustration that comes up that's nudging me to do something, and do I even know what that is?

Starting there is so powerful and it's such a kind way to begin your new year, to give yourself that information and to pair that with, "This is great. To know this information means I haven't done anything wrong. It's just me realizing what's happening."

And now I have the ability to do something about it. And to be with myself and go, actually, I've done great. I think that was the message that I gave myself this year.

mapping out the landscape, mapping out just the storylines and the plot twists that happened in my year.

To go, "My goodness, so much happened, and so much has been accomplished, and so many nourishing things exist and are there that I'm so grateful for."

That allows me to power myself down, to reach this week where everyone's gone back to their normal routines.

And I'm being honest, I don't think we've had a normal routine here since, I don't know, probably June. Maybe like a fleeting month of, no, not even, not even. I don't think we've had like a real steady schedule for half of this year. So, it's making sense to me in that context to go, "Well no wonder you're kind of confused about where you want to go, like you haven't had a routine. You've been craving having a little bit of predictability. So how can I create that for myself?"

That's an exciting question to ask. So that's where I'm looking at building spaces in this coming year. So how does this translate to the people that are feeling stressed and like they have no control, and they want more control?

I think that's when I've always wanted to build these resolutions for myself or decide I'm going to change something is when I feel like I've been out of control and I just want something back.

I think it's important to realize that you don't need to become a different person to feel better. I think the really important thing to realize is that you're just fine, like you're great as you are, and when you understand who you are and how you operate, you can then start to understand, well, am I trying to occupy a space in a system that isn't built for me?

Or am I continuing to recreate a structure in my life that doesn't support what I actually need and what I actually want?

So if you're continually frustrated or feeling like, "Oh, I wish that...You know, I had more space or time to exercise." Like, think about, well, why do you want that? Is it because you actually want the movement and that would make you feel good and what's limiting you from that?

Or is it because you feel like something needs to change about you and you need to care about something more that you actually don't?

I definitely am going through a reckoning this year with myself around body image and exercise and what I actually want to do and feel like I'm...

Okay, I know I'm capable of a lot, but what am I actually willing to do and what is sustainable for me? I think those are the questions that I'm asking now, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

I think lots of women my age who are hitting that perimenopausal...

Oh my god, I don't even know what to call it craziness. I'm wondering why is everything different? Why does everything I do not make a difference or not do the thing that it's supposed to do?

And then why is my feed constantly full of things telling me how to fix that?

And to me, I just get so mad. I'm like, I don't want anyone telling me more.

More techniques or fix it fast kind of things showing me women. Okay, this is my feed:

It's showing me women getting bloated and fat and then like, look at how I'm now down to my teenage weight and it's so easy. I just eat like...cow organs now. I'm like, what? And then there's the other ones. Oh, well, you just need to exercise this way because we're not like men. I'm like, well, we've known that our whole lives. We've always not been like men.

What happens though, if you're the person who's always been taking care of yourself and then suddenly things shift or change?

That's where I think we get frustrated and I've been hitting this point of going, well, what if I'm not bad?

What if I'm okay? And what would actually make me feel better? And can I actually trust myself, my own body enough to follow that and not second guess it with every advertisement that comes my way that tells me there might be a different way to solve a problem.

Here's my litmus test is if it makes me feel alarmed and I'm upset and I feel pressured to like, "Oh no, if I don't do this, maybe something's going to go horribly awry." To me, that's now a signal to just turn it off back away, don't buy the thing.

It's really just alarming me and probably not going to fix any problem. It's just telling me I have a problem that I didn't have until I saw the advertisement.

And that's happened a lot this last year. So I think perhaps for me, like the gift of having a really depleted year where perhaps I didn't go out of my shell as much or interact as much as I could and maybe even this year is going to be kind of like that.

The gift of that is recognizing where the leaks are and where I just don't have time or energy or capacity at all for anything that makes me alarmed or gives me another problem.

I don't want any new problems. I have enough of my problems. Oh my gosh, and I'm sure we all do.

So you imagine that you're happy and you're walking along on a trail and then suddenly a sign comes up that says, "Oh my god, look out for snakes!" And there's no snakes around, but you start looking because you're like, "Oh my god, they said there might be snakes!" And you're now really vigilant and you spend the next two miles of your hike looking at every rock and every shadow that goes by, you're like, "Oh my god, it might be a snake!"

But then it's like you get to the end of the trail and someone's laughing at the end of the trail and they're like, "Oh, I just put that sign up there. Like, there's no snakes on this trail." And you're like, "Oh my God, are you kidding me?"

That's what it feels like now when I see all of these advertisements. And it's a relief to me to just turn off the feed and back away.

Here's something else that I wanted to mention. It feels somewhat unrelated, but I think you'll appreciate it. Have any of you noticed that all of a sudden Instagram now has like feedback for you every week about your post reach and how far, like how many people outside of your network have seen your posts and all of this stuff?

And for a hot minute, I was like, am I losing my mind? Do I have a business account that I didn't think I had? Why am I getting metrics and why are they pushing this? And then I found out it's just that they're doing this to everyone now. So even if you have a private account, like they're giving you the comparisonitis that, again, wasn't a problem, or it was, but now it's even more of a problem because they've made it one - that now you're aware of how many people saw or shared or maybe your stuff went somewhere. And do you want to pay money to boost your posts?

That kind of crap just makes me so mad. I just wish people could just be themselves and...

you know, look at pretty things that they want to look at without being pestered. Like I just, you know, when I go on Instagram, I want to look at... crows and fawns and cute little animals running through the woods and birds and art by real people. I enjoy that. I don't want anything else. I definitely don't want advertisements and I don't want metrics that I don't care. Maybe I'm just weird that way, but that's why I'm not.

So a personal decision that I made being nice to myself this year is saying it's completely okay if I just either kill my social media entirely or retire it from my phone and forget that I even have it because it seems like a healthier, happier decision for me. I think that's another thing that you can do when you're looking at your year in review or the state of where I am now is instead of going, "Well, what do I need to do to change?" to go "What would be really supportive of the feelings and experiences I want to have on a more ongoing basis?"

And for me, the first thing I said was, "Well, let's just...forget ever trying to be on social media or posting" because I find I'll want to cram myself into a box or make my personal account about my podcast or business.

Which seems on the surface like a nice idea and might help people find this podcast, which is cool.

But honestly, if I look at what it costs me emotionally and mentally, it's not even worth it. And no matter how much I've tried in the past, I don't think it freaking matters. People are going to find it or they're not. I don't think having social media really makes a difference. I don't know that it makes a difference for very many people anymore unless you already were an influencer or you have a million dollars, and I am neither of those. So I'm gonna live my life happily and not worry about that crap.

And maybe if you heard that today, it'll give you permission to do the same or just make it into what you enjoy and not stress about it so much.

So here's what I also want to say. If you're doing things that you actually really like and that give you joy and that make you happy, for me it's video games and sometimes, you know, watching cat TV with my cat and just watching little birds and squirrels eat seeds.

I crave the simple things, very quiet simple things. If those bring you joy,

Don't judge yourself for that. Don't try to remove it. Don't wonder how can I be more productive or change who I really am at my core.

Instead, embrace that stuff and go, "Great, I love doing this. How can I do that without feeling bad about it without making it something to be guilty about?" Is there, again, a structure or a system I can put in place that supports that and allows it to happen without all of the things I'm worried about?

So if I'm worried about, oh, I don't want to play a video game so much that it takes over my life, what do I need to do to prevent myself from forgetting to ever cook a meal or something like that, that's fine. Intervene in those ways.

But if you're actually genuinely happy with stuff that you're doing, please, please, please just enjoy that. Enjoy yourself. Realize that you're an awesome person and we're not all meant to love the same things or do the same things or maximize ourselves or become this optimal freaking version of ourselves.

What if who you are is great? You can't be anyone other than who you are anyway. So be yourself.

Make it easier to be yourself. Enjoy yourself. I mean, don't be self-destructive. I don't think that's great. We all know that instinctively. But if there's things about you that are gonna happen anyway, why not use that to its best advantage, or at least enjoy the things that make you happy? That is what I really hope for everyone.

Everyone, just be you. Be happy. Enjoy yourself. When you're happy and I meet you and you're happy, I'm happy too. So that's what I'm going for more in this world.

Okay, I really enjoyed sharing that with you. Thank you so much for taking that in for thinking about your year and for being with me as I kind of recounted some of the emotional weather that I went through over the past 12 months. I know that it's almost a time of wanting to take things in.

But it's not there yet for me. And if it's not there yet for you either, I think next week we're going to talk more about how to be present when there isn't a need of rising or a desire arising yet.

Because I think that's the danger of January, right? Is everybody thinking that there's something wrong with us for not really having a deep abiding desire to do stuff yet, and sometimes guilt for still being in recovery mode, so I want to talk about that too and how to embrace that in this season, it's not the same as it was in November. It's not the same as it was around the holidays in December.

January is a different beast, so we're gonna meet it where it is and talk about it realistically.

And I'm looking forward to sharing that with you. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend. And thank you so much for being here. I'll talk to you next week.