Developing Meaning

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

• Dirk Winter • Episode 17

Share episode

Send us a text

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.

Them Music by The Thrashing Skumz
Produced by Dirk Winter

Dirk:

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 become fascinated with alternative healing approaches and want to take you along as I participate in experiential trainings, learn new models of the mind and interview fascinating healers I meet along the way about how they create meaning in their own lives and in the lives of their clients. This is a show for mental health professionals, clients and anyone seeking to build more meaning and purpose into our lives. This show is intended to explore serious topics in a fun and playful and informative manner, but is not affiliated with any institutions and is not intended to be mental health advice. Hello, happy new year. Welcome to 2025, meaning Seekers.

Dirk:

It is a brand new year, which means it is time to do a past year review and if you didn't listen to last year's episode or are not familiar with it, this is an idea that I got from Tim Ferriss. I don't know where he got it, but he's popularized it. He's written blogs about it and the idea is, at the end of a year, at the beginning of a new year, instead of New Year's resolutions, what might be great to do is to look back at the past year, look at all of our photos, our calendars, our bank accounts and see what are the peak positive and peak negative experiences and reflect back and see what were the best and worst parts of our year, and by doing that, it will become apparent what might be good to prioritize and deprioritize in the new year. So I've done that and I will share a bit of this process with you. I will share with you my past year review most meaningful, least meaningful things, and also how I plan to optimize and prioritize in the new year. And then doing that process also led me to come up with a personal set of three themes or mantras for 2025. These are things that popped into my head, and maybe this was influenced by my interview with Dr Beata Lewis earlier this year. She has these guiding mantras or principles that she comes up with, I think, every year, and she's an amazingly effective person. So I'm going to try that this year and we'll see how that goes.

Dirk:

So, for 2025, the personal mantras that popped into my head were beginner's mind, so one beginner's mind, two questioning assumptions and three, consilience. I feel like those are kind of obvious. You know, I didn't come up with the idea of bigotter's mind or any of these really, but for some reason these are meaningful to me in this year and I will explain why. And as you listen, you may notice that these three themes were a big part of my past year and are not just brand new intentions that I'm taking forward into 2025. And I think this, for me, is a big benefit. In doing this past year review, I have made kind of a weird series of decisions, and reflecting back allows me to put them into a coherent narrative that made sense, that makes sense to me. I now feel like I have a better understanding of my own internal motivations and this will give me more focus as I move forward. So reflecting back and doing this past year review is a way to put our life and our motivations into a coherent narrative, which can be extremely useful. And as this year progresses, I hope you will join me and see how these intentions unfold and play out, and I hope this episode will motivate you to do your own past year review and intentions and see how these play out in your own life. So in order to explain why these three intentions beginner's mind, questioning assumptions and consilience are important and meaningful to me, I think it is helpful to briefly reflect back on the story of this podcast and tell you what mindset I was in, what prompted me to start the podcast and what I have learned so far, especially what I've learned this year.

Dirk:

So when I reflect back on where I was when I started this podcast, I was coming out of the pandemic, moving back to New York City. My mental health wasn't great. There were all kinds of mental health challenges in the air for just about everyone. I was feeling and I had this felt sense of somehow our current modern model of mental health is not working as well as it should be. And I also had this feeling of what, if I could kind of start over and reinterpret what we know about mental health and maybe come at it from some kind of a different angle, maybe that would somehow work better for me and maybe I could come up with something that would work better for other people too. So I wanted to look at my life and career with fresh eyes, with a beginner's mind, and I was reading a bunch.

Dirk:

I was talking to colleagues and what I came up with was the idea of starting with Viktor Frankl's idea that meaning is the central driving force. And if you remember, viktor Frankl is the original the OG, the meaning OG that's original gangsta. For those of you unfamiliar with 1990s rap lingo. He was born in 1905 and was a brilliant neuropsychiatrist who survived many concentration camps three or four, including Auschwitz and then wrote this hugely influential book called Man's Search for Meaning and created a psychotherapy approach that basically said the central human drive is a drive towards meaning, not, as Freud had said before him, a drive towards pleasure and away from pain. So then what I did was I began talking to the smartest people that I knew, the not just IQ smart but also life smart, so people who I respected, who were kind and had had positive impact on me as mentors, and I started to talk to them about what had they figured out about meaning, and those interviews are some of those I presented on this podcast the Richard Brockman and David Merrill podcasts come to mind here from my old group of mentors and colleagues.

Dirk:

And then I started to also begin doing trainings and I had been influenced by another mentor, dr Tony Tran-Gooch, who is a psychiatrist with expertise in trauma, and he said, dirk, go learn EMDR. This is a really different model of the mind than what you've been taught so far. And he had also told me to learn hypnosis. So this really started me down a rabbit hole of trainings that I'm going to tell you first, why I did them and what I did. So why did I start doing trainings? One I wanted tools to help myself and patients. I had the idea that there were probably better tools out there than the ones I had, even though the ones I had were okay. And then, two, I like the idea of getting back into beginner's mind, of entering a new group of healers who have a new, different model of the mind and how healing works and a different culture and a different healing energy. And I wanted to get out of the bubble of New York City academic psychiatry, where MDs and psychoanalysts seem to have the most cachet, and look at my own troubles with fresh eyes by joining new and different healing communities who have other models of the mind and of healing from what I had been used to and had been acculturated into. And I feel like this really resonated with me personally, because I was born in Germany. I moved to Western Massachusetts when I was eight and we moved back and forth a lot, and I've also spent time living in Puerto Rico and done immersive cultural experiences where I've learned other languages and just feel like moving into a different culture is really a great way for me to understand myself better. And so I not consciously but unconsciously, I think was drawn to this model of traveling to different healing communities and doing immersive trainings where I heal myself and I enter a different community and I learn a new set of tools.

Dirk:

So now I am going to give you a list of the trainings that I did and this might sound nuts, I'm going to just list 10 of them. There were more, but these were the 10 main ones. These were the 10 main ones. I did the basic training all the way to full certification, even though I didn't apply to full certification for EMDR, eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, which is a way to change trauma memories while moving eyes and maintaining a dual attention on the present and the trauma memories. Number two I did hypnosis training, which I had done before, but I did two other hypnosis trainings and I'm going to present to you some interesting interviews from world expert hypnotists. I did neurofeedback training with an amazing neurofeedback expert. Neurofeedback is when you put electrodes on your skull and then use a video feedback kind of like a video game to change the electrical patterns in different parts of our brain and this can be a very healing, non-medication-based approach that can be extremely helpful. I did ketamine-assisted therapy training, which is an experiential training and you can listen to my audio diary of that experience. It's pretty wild for somebody to suddenly take psychedelics at 50 something or whatever years old I was and that had a huge impact on me and I've incorporated this into my practice and that connects me with all of these ancient healing techniques where people have been using psychedelics for thousands of years and now there's a huge level of interest in psychedelics and healing.

Dirk:

Number five I did training in IFS internal family systems therapy. I did the level one training. I did a level two couples therapy training. I did drawing my parts two couples therapy training. I did drawing my parts, ifs art therapy training and IFS internal family systems therapy is for me a totally different community and healing approach and model of the mind that we're immersed in in this podcast right now. I presented to you the model in episode 15, and now I'm taking you through a series of interviews with a really interesting group of healers that I met. In my level one training I did a training in breath, body, mind that's number six. And this is also a training that connects ancient breathing techniques with modern neuroscience and is used to treat trauma all over the world. That's the episode with Dr Richard Brown. I did training in Bruce Hersey's Syzygy Institute model of therapy, which combines shared principles from EMDR, eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing and IFS and this other modality called coherence therapy, which is really exciting, and I've done trainings in that as well.

Dirk:

Number eight I did training in EFT, tapping the emotional freedom technique, where you tap on Chinese acupuncture points while saying, even though I have this anger or sadness or whatever feeling, I deeply and truly accept myself, and then you let go of emotions that are overwhelming us. And then I did a training in focusing, which is a peer-to-peer therapy approach created by Dr Richard Gendlin in the 1970s. Gendlin coined the term felt sense. I did that with Annette DeBroyle. That's the first interview of this podcast series. And then I did a training in interpersonal neurobiology, which is the healing modality that was created by Dr Dan Siegel, the amazing neuropsychiatrist who has written many books on attachment theory, integrating attachment theory with new understanding of consciousness, and has an amazing understanding of the mind. And so those are just 10, that was a six-month online training. So those are just 10 of the trainings that I have done in the last few years.

Dirk:

And so why did I do all these trainings? Am I insane? People are experts in and devote themselves to just one of these approaches, and so why am I doing one after the other? What's wrong with me? For me, I think it is a combination of this getting myself into beginner's mind, feeling which is just so positive for me, and then also getting helpful tools that I then bring home, bring to myself and bring to my patients and am able to make much more positive impacts more quickly. So beginner's mind. I just told you about how this training is bringing me into a beginner's mind. Now I want you about how these trainings bring me into a beginner's mind. Now I want to mention how they have led me to question assumptions that were foundational assumptions in my medical and post-medical residency training that were both implicitly and explicitly instilled on me, and now I really don't believe anymore. Let me give you a list of the top nine of these assumptions. There's more, but I'm just going to give you nine that jump out at me at first glance.

Dirk:

Number one from EMDR. So EMDR really challenged the assumption that we need to talk about our problems and get some kind of intellectual understanding in order to get better. Emdr works by creating a dual attention where we are grounded in the present, part of our mind is grounded in the present and then we toggle into the intense trauma memories which are felt right brain memories. And you do that in a way that is not verbal, that you just sort of see what comes up. You say go with that. The client is moving, we're moving eyes and we're present together and there's a supportive interaction. But there's no, it's not an intellectually based understanding process, it's not a verbal talking process. So powerful therapy can happen quickly without words. That's number one. Number two is that the therapist is the expert and that the client is coming to the expert for some sort of advice. And IFS and many modalities that I've recently come across have much more of a healing model where the client is the expert of their own system and the therapist just sort of guides the client to internally learn how to shift their system in a positive way. This may seem subtle, but it is actually quite a big difference.

Dirk:

Number three the therapist should be anonymous, should be a blank slate. People shouldn't know about me on social media. I shouldn't be talking on a podcast right now. There were all kinds of very powerful messages that I got in my residency training that I just don't believe anymore. I don't think those are necessary or helpful. Number four is the assumption that therapy should happen between one client and one therapist in a room, preferably multiple times a week the more the better and over years and years in order to make deep and meaningful change. I feel like what I've learned from EMDR, from hypnosis, from ketamine-assisted therapy, from IFS has really called that into question. I think there is a lot of powerful therapy that can happen online, that can happen in a way that's spaced out in different patterns and can happen very quickly. So I think often more deep healing can happen much more quickly than happened in the models that I was using, based on these more traditional CBT and dynamic approaches that I was learning in psychiatry residency.

Dirk:

Number five is that we have one mind. I don't believe that anymore. I feel like we are a system of multiple minds and I think in retrospect this is obvious. If we have an internal conflict, then there's one conscious part of us that wants one thing that's locking horns with another part of us that wants the opposite or something different. And also, if we take learning from math and AI, if you want to build a powerful computing system, you need to have multiple parallel computing systems working at the same time, and that will generate a much more flexible and powerful system, and our mind is organized like that. And this understanding really for me came from IFS, which is a therapy model that is based on this inner multiplicity. I don't want to minimize that. That's a revolutionary different perspective that is exploding in popularity and has had a big impact for me personally and for some of my patients as well.

Dirk:

Number six is that healthy early attachments are completely necessary for having healthy relationships as an adult. In the worst prisoners, who've had the most horrible childhoods and done the most horrible things and really do not have any kind of positive attachment story, there's a way to generate a positive inner attachment to their self, and I'll explain what that is capitalist self, which can be powerfully healing and help people have massive positive shifts that I wouldn't have thought possible before I heard these stories and learned these through the trainings that I've done and the IFS conference that I was just at. Virtually Number seven is that the mind is created by our brain, that there is some sort of a linear relationship between our brain and our mind that can be understood using reductionistic principles. I really like Dan Siegel's work that describes our mind as embodied interrelational energy, as embodied interrelational energy, which is to say I still love science and the scientific approach, but I'm excited about how our approaches to understanding the mind are becoming less reductionistic and moving more towards complexity, theory and science, non-linearity and principles of emergent property and systems, thinking and non-duality, and so in terms of questioning assumptions and models of the mind, I'm much more open to wonder and mystery than I was in the past.

Dirk:

Number eight is the assumption that connecting with our body and touch is a different domain of healing and that we mainstream healers shouldn't really pay that much attention to our body and shouldn't really use touch. I don't use touch in therapy myself, but I am much more open to healers who do use touch. I am interested in exploring those modalities much more. I feel like this is a powerful domain of healing that many of us just sort of ruled out, and it makes sense why we would be cautious. But I feel like a lot of healing happens through touch, and also having a felt sense of what's happening in our body is critically important, and so I have gotten that impression from focusing, from EMDR, from breath-body-mind, from many approaches that tell me that moving into the right brain and body-based felt sense knowing is really important for healing, and so we need to get a good handle on that.

Dirk:

Number nine is the idea that spirituality and religion should not really be part of the healing process, and I think Richard Schwartz's work with the concept of self, which I'm going to talk a bit more and I've talked a bunch about, has changed this for me, and I feel like getting a sense of a person's core spiritual worth can be very powerfully incorporated into healing. So those are nine ways that I'm questioning things that I have been taught. There are a bunch more areas that I'm questioning. I really feel like incorporating nature into healing music, art, animals. There's a lot that's happening in those areas. I'm fascinated by those. Those are things that I want to be open to and learn about. Haven't done much in those areas yet, but I'm headed there.

Dirk:

So I'm thinking and maybe you're thinking, what am I doing taking all this stuff apart? Why do I need to sort of re-examine all these assumptions? Am I not just creating a big mess doing all these different trainings? How do we put it all back together? Put it all back together and the answer for me is consilience. And consilience is a word that I got from my favorite biologist, eo Wilson. Edmund Wilson, the biologist who studied ants all over the world and wrote books on sociobiology and testified in Congress about the value of biodiversity and just an amazing Southern gentlemanly scientist and writer and had an amazing life. He is no longer with us, but he wrote this book called Consilience in the 1990s, which is a term that he used to talk about multiple areas of knowledge coming together science, humanities, ancient philosophy, mathematics and that our knowledge can move towards understanding using this concept of consilience. And so I've talked about a few of these on our podcast. For example, the Richard Brown Breath-Body-Mind Healing Approach is using ancient Qigong, yoga, breath practices that have been modernized and secularized a bit, and he's studying them and publishing papers and this has become a powerful healing approach that brings together creates a consilience between the ancient and the new.

Dirk:

I'll give you two more examples from this past year's podcast episodes. Another example of consilience is a consilience between the ventral vagal state that Deb Dana talks about, and if you haven't heard that episode, that's quite a good episode and it's really important to understand how our internal polyvagal system works. So I would encourage you to check out Deb Dana or listen to my interview of her. She's an amazing person and she created this therapy model using neuroscience from Dr Stephen Porges, who found that there is this one branch of our autonomic nervous system, the ventral vagal branch, which connects all of our social muscles, muscles in our face, our voice, our inner ear, our heart. It is the inner system of connection and connectedness and when we are in this state, it is a low-stress state with high cognitive capacity. It is sort of an optimal internal state and I feel like there's a consilience between that state which exists and I think that's convincingly shown using hard science principles and the idea of self, big capital S self in IFS, internal family systems therapy, that there is this one brain state compassion, confidence, creativity, clear-mindedness, perspective, playfulness. There is sort of this optimal inner director state and there's a conciliance between this state and also interpersonal neurobiology. Dan Siegel describes a state of maximal flexibility and integration.

Dirk:

This is an area where I have learned that there's sort of this very helpful concept of self or ventral vagal state, and I think in the new year I'm constantly working with it. How much of this state do I have on board? And I think in the new year I'm constantly working with it, how much of this state do I have on board? And I feel like this can be a really helpful thing for all of us. Also. Richard Brown's Breath, body, mind. Using breath we can shift our system into this ventral vagal state. Psychedelics correlates because when we turn off the default mode network, the ego network, that's sort of always self-referencing. I feel like there's many areas of consilience around ventral vagal state, capitalist self, turning off default mode network using meditation, psychedelics, yoga.

Dirk:

The third and last area of consilience that I'm going to mention today is the concept of dual attention in psychotherapy, splitting our mind into dual attention systems. That exists in EMDR, where we have one part of our brain focused on the traumatic memory and one part of our brain grounded in sort of a calm present state. Dual attention is very important in IFS, in internal family systems therapy, creating interrelationship between capitalist, self-state and traumatized parts or protective parts. There's other modalities where this dual attention and maintaining dual attention I think is a consilient principle that's important for healing. So I talked about these three guiding principles that I am choosing as my intentions for 2025.

Dirk:

Beginner's mind, questioning assumptions and consilience, and I've talked to you about how I'm applying them to my professional life. But I'm also applying them to my personal life and I'm not going to talk about that now. But I think there are assumptions that I make that sometimes are not helpful and I think it can be very helpful to sort of shift out of routines, question our assumptions and shift towards a more conciliant mind and way of being in the world. So what will I be doing more of and less of in the coming year? I am going to continue doing more trainings. I'm going to do a breath-body-mind level 2 teacher's training. I'm going to do a level 2 IFS child therapy training. I'm going to be learning more about couples work, more about group work. I'm going to be learning more about psychedelics. I am also going to be signing up for a Jack Kornfeld year-long mindfulness meditation training.

Dirk:

I want to learn how to get into nature and do camping. That's something I don't know how to do, so I'm considering signing up for a Knowles Wilderness Survival Training, where I learn how to get out into the wilderness and disconnect. So, like probably many of us, I want less screens, less busy work, less boring, mundane tasks and more presence with the people that I love and more connection with nature, more creative projects. I want to set up my life in a way where I have more freedom to get off the grid and also more ways to use creativity, both professionally and personally. I want to build a clinic around the theme of consilience, where I bring together healers from different perspectives around a theme of finding the most impactful, creative ways of being helpful in a therapeutic way.

Dirk:

So, despite many problems in the world, I am entering 2025 with quite a hopeful state of mind, and so I'm curious about you. What are you going to do? 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. I'm already starting to play with the idea of sort of the opposite of beginner's mind, and how can I become more of an expert at some point? Maybe that will be a theme or a mantra for next year or some year down the road. So thank you for listening. Are down the road. So thank you for listening. Happy New Year again. I wish you a restorative time that refocuses and re-energizes you, and until next time I wish you a meaningful and meaning-filled month. And if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know. Thank you, and what she did? She says, as she turned from campus, no particular tone or voice. So on and on and on. They spoke. No discernible goal. Thank you.