There is a Season for Healing and a Season for Moving Forward

There is a season for healing and a season for moving forward. Sitting on a mountaintop along Skyline Drive, listening to the wind move through the trees, l find myself reflecting on life, loss,healing, and what it truly means to move forward.
In this deeply personal episode, I share lessons from a year of counseling, heartbreak grief, faith, and self-discovery. We explore the difference between reflection and rumination, why some wounds need our attention before they can heal, and how carrying wisdom is different from carrying pain.
I also share a conversation with a dear friend who challenged me to ask an important question: Why am I willing to create beautiful experiences for everyone else but not for myself?

If you’ve ever struggled with loss,regret,guilt,heartbreak,or feeling stuck in your past, this episode is for you.

There is a season for healing. There is a season for reflection. And there is a season for moving forward. Take the wisdom. Leave the wound. Take the lesson. Leave the shame.
Join me as I share why I believe our past shape us, but it does not define our future.

Transcript

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Welcome to Stand Up and Redo with Petra Demuse, the podcast where transformation isn't just possible, it's inevitable. If you've ever felt stuck weighed down by past choices, or like life's chapters have been written in ink, think again. Here we believe every day is a fresh page, and you hold the pen. We're diving deep into real stories, bold insights, and life-shifting strategies to help you stand up, shake off the old, and rewrite your narrative with power and purpose. Ready to rise? Let's get started. I'm sitting on top of a mountain, somewhere along Skyline Drive. Honestly, I don't even know what mountain it is. I'm 55 years old, sleeping in the back of my truck, and as I sit here tonight, I can hear the wind circling up the mountain. My side windows are open, and every once in a while a gust comes through and rustles everything around me. It's one of those sounds that most people never hear. You don't hear it when you're driving through the mountains. You don't hear it when you're hiking. You don't even hear it when you're stopping at an overlock. You hear it when you're sleeping on top of a mountain. You hear it when you're laying in a tent or sitting in the back of your truck with the windows open and nowhere else to be. And as I listened to that wind tonight, suddenly I wasn't 55 years old anymore. I was 30. I was on top of the North and South mountains in the Catskills with my second husband and my three children, sleeping in a tent in the snow. But I was listening to that wind coming swirling up the mountain. And then just as quickly I remember being 15 years old, camping with a church youth group and hearing the same powerful sound of the wind just whipping around and coming up the mountain. And it made me realize something. We're not different people when we get older. We're still us. We still have dreams, we still have fears, and we still have things we're trying to learn. We still have wounds we're trying to heal. And sometimes we still have mountains we're trying to climb. Today I want to talk about two things rumination and moving forward. Because I think there's a season for both. And I think I've spent the last year learning a difference. One of the things I've learned recently is that there's actually a difference between reflection and rumination. Reflection helps us learn and rumination keeps us stuck. Researchers have studied rumination for years, and they found that when we repeatedly replay our painful experiences, losses, regrets, betrayals, or mistakes without moving toward acceptance or action, our brains can stay trapped in a stress response. That is mortifying. In other words, our minds can keep reliving the injury long after the event itself has passed. The brain continues activating many of the same emotional pathways that were activated when the for her very first what happened. That's why sometimes we can think about something that happened years ago and we can still feel it in our chest. We still feel the sadness, we still feel the anger, we still feel the loss. And sometimes they don't know the difference between remembering a wound and reopening a wound. But reflection says this. Reflection says, what can I learn from this? But rumination stays with this thought. Why did this happen to me? Reflection, on the other hand, gathers wisdom, but rumination keeps picking at the scar. And I think there are seasons in life when we both definitely need both because healing isn't always immediate. Sometimes we have to stop, sometimes we have to look backward, and sometimes we have to understand what happened before we can even consider moving forward. That was the year of 2025 for me. 2025 was a healing year. I had a heartbreak that forced me into counseling, and that heartbreak opened doors to wounds I didn't even realize were still there. Wounds that had connected me to loss, wounds that had connected me to guilt, and wounds that connected me to a horrible grief. My father died, my ex-husband had died, and relationships I thought might become something meaningful, meaningful ended painfully. And as I sat in counseling, I realized I wasn't just grieving one thing. I was grieving many things. Some of them were decades old. For the first time, I gave myself permission to look at those wounds, to acknowledge them, to understand them, to stop pretending that these wounds didn't hurt. And honestly, it was one of the most important years of my life. Not because it was easy, but because it was necessary. Sometimes healing requires us to stop running. Sometimes healing requires us to sit quietly in the truth. But eventually something else has to happen. Eventually the wound needs to close. You don't heal a cut by reopening it every day. Ouch. You don't heal a scar by scratching it forever. Ooh, no. At some point you let the healing happen. You carry that lesson. And then you can move forward. A few weeks ago, I spent a week working in from my friend's home in Knoxville. She's one of those friends who truly loves me. The kind of friend who sees you, well, who sees me clearly, but you know the friend that sees you clearly. The kind of friend who isn't impressed by a story that I might tell or a story that you might tell. The kind of friend who tells you the truth. And since she said this to me that week, it stopped me dead in my tracks. She pointed out how often I talk about doing things for other people and how often my goals revolve around helping someone else. How often I make major life decisions based on another person's desires, needs, or interests. And how often I spend money on other people, and how often I make sacrifices for other people. And these aren't bad things. But I think if you don't do the same things for yourself that you do for other people, that's when it's not so great. She reminded me specifically about a trip I took a while ago when I was with a person who was um someone I wanted to impress. Got this amazing, expensive um place in Napa and spent a lot of money on a room that maybe I wouldn't have spent that much money on myself. But because that person was with me, I just wanted to make everything so special for them. I wouldn't have normally spent that much money on me at all. But I wanted the experience to be wonderful for that person. I wanted that person to feel very loved, and I wanted that person to feel very special. And then she looked at me and she said, Oh, Petra, why are you willing to do that for that person, but not for yourself? And I didn't have an answer because she was right. I realized I had spent years creating or trying to create a very nice experience or a good experience for another person, for people who I loved. But I wasn't working on creating beautiful experiences for Petra. I realized I had become very comfortable giving myself the leftovers and feeling guilt if I spent too much money or did too much stuff for myself. So I spent it on someone else. I hesitate often to spend it on myself. But I would encourage someone else to do what they needed to do for themselves. And I criticize myself all the time. I would extend grace to someone else, but I hold grace away from myself. And that realization changed something in me because moving forward isn't just about letting go of the past, it's about embracing the person you are becoming. This year I told my boss something during one of our one-on-one meetings. In 2025, I told her my goal was managing my time. In 2026, my goal is becoming forward thinking. And I want to do that forward thinking at work and relationships and my faith with Christ in my personal life. I want to stop asking what happened and start asking what's next. I want to stop defining myself by my wounds. Oh, and what's healing and what I'm scratching and what I'm keeping open. But I want to stop that and I want to start building my future from wisdom. And the goal isn't that you forget your past forever. The goal is to stop living in the past. And maybe that's where you are, where you are right now. Maybe you're 25, maybe you're 55, maybe you're 75, maybe life knocked you down. Maybe you're grieving, or maybe your heart is broken, maybe you are confused, or carrying guilt, maybe you're carrying regret. If that's you, I want you to hear give, I want you to hear this and give yourself a grace. There is something that you need to hear, and this is it. A season is for healing for you. There's a season for reflection for you. This is the season for understanding what happened. But there is also a season for moving forward. So take the wisdom, but leave your wound behind. Take the lesson with you, but leave your shame behind. Take the growth, but leave the guilt behind. And if you don't know how to do that, start where I started. Bring it to God. There were many moments over the last year when I simply looked up and said, Lord, this is so much bigger than me. I don't know how to carry this anymore. And somehow, little by little, he carried it for me. It didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen magically, not even instantly, but faithfully, slowly and patiently, like a surgeon stitching together a wound, like cocoa butter on my scar, like healing that happens one day at a time. And tonight, sitting on this mountain, listening to this wind, I feel something I haven't felt in a long time. I feel ready. I don't feel perfect, and I do not feel finished. I don't even feel healed from everything, but I certainly am ready. I am ready to move forward, ready to love me the way I've always loved other people, and ready to create beautiful experiences for myself, ready to stop apologizing for taking care of myself. I'm ready to brace the next chapter. So if you see a little less of me for a while, don't worry. I'm not disappearing, I'm living, I'm healing, and I'm traveling. I'm listening to the wind on the mountainside. I'm finding joy in simple things. I'm learning how to love myself with the same kindness I've spent years giving away. And when I come back to this microphone, I want to come back with something meaningful, meaningful to say. So until then, keep moving forward one step, one day, and one scar healed at a time. Your past may have shaped you, but it does not have to define your future. This is Petra Demuse, and this is Stand Up and Redo. And I feel really good about you moving forward in your life. And appreciate that you can let me step away from the podcast a little bit for a little while, and I will be here doing this much less, but still here, still posting, but not every week. And I thank you for giving me that time. And I thank you for listening to this podcast. And I thank you for listening to all my podcasts. And this podcast is a work based on the personal experiences, reflections, and memories of the speaker. The events described are true to the best of the speaker's knowledge and recollection. Some names, locations, identifying characteristics, and timelines have been changed or altered to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. In some cases, composite characters have been created or dialogue has been reconstructed based on memory. The intention of this podcast is not to defame, malign, or harm any individual or entity. Rather, it is to share the speaker's journey with honesty, vulnerability, and integrity. Any opinions expressed are solely those of the speaker and are not intended as statements of fact regarding any person, group, or organization. Listeners should keep in mind that human memory is inherently subjective and selective, and while every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, this podcast reflects the speaker's perspective and truths. Thank you.