#17: Past Year Review (PYR) and Setting Intentions for Beginner's Mind, Questioning Assumptions, and Consilience in 2025.

01/12/25 • 33 min

This episode invites listeners to engage in a meaningful past year review, turning away from traditional resolutions toward a more insightful approach to personal growth. By exploring the themes of beginner's mind, questioning assumptions, and the importance of consilience, Dr. Dirk Winter provides a framework for navigating mental health and self-discovery in 2025.
• Dissecting the concept of a past year review
• Sharing personal peaks and lows from 2024
• Introducing guiding themes for 2025: beginner's mind, questioning assumptions, and consilience
• Exploring the significance of various healing modalities
• Challenging traditional mental health assumptions
• Encouraging listeners to conduct their own past year review and set meaningful intentions
Go ahead, do your past year review, get yourself maybe into some beginner's mind question patterns, look for areas of consilience, or come up with your own ideas or mantras for the coming year.
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Produced by Dirk Winter

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Previous Episode

#16: Jory Agate - Unitarian Minister and Internal Family Systems (IFS) Lead Trainer on Meaning, Kindness, and How IFS Heals Trauma.

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The Internal Family Systems (IFS) Level I training is an experiential group learning process that teaches us how to identify and heal traumatized parts of ourselves and others. In October 2023 I began this training after having recently received a prostate cancer diagnosis. This episode begins a multi - part series in which I introduce you to fascinating healers I met during my Level I training, beginning with Jory Agate my Lead Trainer.
Jory is a minister, IFS lead trainer, a kind and gifted healer, and so much more. In this episode she offers a compelling narrative of how IFS therapy reaches beyond conventional boundaries, touching the lives of clergy, trans and queer communities, and trauma survivors. Together, we explore connections between faith and therapeutic healing. Join me as I begin my journey into the land of IFS and begin to transform into an IFS therapist myself.
Timestamps
00:17 Introducing Jory Agate.
07:30 What is IFS?
12:40 Spirituality and IFS.
15:00 How Jory became a healer.
21:00 How Jory found IFS and healed her trauma.
32:00 Jory describes her professional practice.
36:00 What does a session with Jory look like?
39:00 Connecting IFS, Meaning, and Healing.
47:00 Connecting through shared Exiles, and wrap up.

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This podcast is NOT MEDICAL ADVICE and is NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY INSTITUTIONS.

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#18: Ridghaus Follows the Golden Threads - A Story of Adoption, Grief and Meaning.

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Can you imagine learning at 35 that you were adopted? In this episode Ridghaus, my friend and Level I IFS Program Assistant, shares how this discovery transformed his sense of identity and led him to advocate for adoptee rights and communities.

We also explore the profound loss of his 18-year-old son and how he has grieved. Through our conversation, Ridghaus reflects on the "golden threads" that have guided him—moments of insight, connection, and healing. We discuss how Internal Family Systems (IFS) has played a role in his process, helping him hold space for his parts and for others in their own healing journeys.

This episode is part of a series on my Level I IFS training experience, in which I introduce the IFS model (#16), introduce my Lead Trainer Jory Agate (#17). Upcoming episodes will introduce another trainer Margaret Conley (#19), who is an expert in complex trauma and legacy burdens, and then an audiodiary (#20) will follow. My intention in this series is to share this exciting new model of healing with classically trained therapists and anyone else curious about mental health and meaning.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Introduction to Developing Meaning and Ridgehouse
00:05:42 - Early Life: A Misfit in Kansas
00:17:28 - Discovering Adoption at Age 35
00:30:49 - Facing Unimaginable Loss and Grief
00:43:02 - First Encounter with Internal Family Systems
01:00:34 - Becoming a Healer: IFS and Identity Work
01:11:27 - Plateaus and Valleys of Meaning
01:15:33 - Final Reflections on Intention and Starting Over

Developing Meaning is NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY INSTITUTIONS, and is NOT MENTAL HEALTH ADVICE.

Theme Music by The Thrashing Skumz.

This episode was produced by Dirk Winter, Fariha Fawziah and Caroline Hinton and is brought to you by Consilient Mind LLC.

Developing Meaning - #17: Past Year Review (PYR) and Setting Intentions for Beginner's Mind, Questioning Assumptions, and Consilience in 2025.

Transcript

Dirk00:00:00.160

Welcome to Developing Meaning , a podcast where we seek to understand mental health from a perspective of meaning rather than psychopathology . I'm your host , dr Dirk Winter , board-certified adult and child psychiatrist . I work in community mental health and in private practice in New York City and am on the psychiatry faculty at Columbia . I am a mainstream psychiatrist who has recently