I decided to try something a little different this week with a short podcast on how our brains support us in moving toward more goodness. Wishing you lots of gentle moments as we wrap us this year and look toward 2024. Thanks for joining me here - and please see the transcript below for those of you who don’t prefer an audio medium. For all of my Michigan readers (or elsewhere who don’t mind traveling!), I hope you’ll join me at blossom, my retreat to gently greet the new year and connect to our vision. We’ll have the opportunity to go on a quest together to connect with our values and our vision - finding what we uniquely want for ourselves. Along the way, we’ll pause and find moments to strengthen our internal resilience. At the end of our journey, you’ll be in the flow of your authenticity, able to swim around any obstacles that may arise as you float down the current gently, welcoming 2024 with ease. I would love to see you there. I was baking cookies this week leading up to Christmas and just having a low key Christmas this year where it's just me and my husband and my dog, our first year in our new house. And I normally do cookie boxes every year where I bake a bunch of different varieties and mail them to everybody that I know and love. But I felt overwhelmed this year moving into a new house and all that goes along with that, that it just felt like too much. But I still wanted to mark the season with some cookies. So I decided to make a few small batches just for us to have. And immediately, as I started making the dough, putting them into the oven, smelling the different scents, I started thinking about all the different times that I've made cookies in my life with my grandma, all my family there, with my mom, with my dad, all the different houses that I've baked cookies and decorated cookies in. Cut Out Cookies and Smelled Cookies. And it made me think how I talk a lot on here about the difficult parts of nervous system regulation, but I also wanted to talk about some of the ways that our brain does help us to access nervous system regulation. And one of those ways is through this idea of memory templates. If you've ever created a resume from Microsoft Word. Then I think, you know what I mean when I say a template where it's sort of like a prebuilt wireframe and something really cool about our brain is that it creates these templates as well in our memory. And it's part of our memory working together to help our brain be more efficient and hold on to things that are important. We can't possibly hold on to every single thing that ever happens to us. but when something is meaningful or impactful or hard or difficult, our brain wants to make it so we can respond faster next time. So this part of our brain called the hippocampus creates a little template to say, okay, I know what's happening here. When this happens, then this comes next. And then it can send messages to our amygdala, which is a part of our brain that feels emotions and also where our survival system lives. I got to thinking about this with the way my body immediately felt this really warm, regulating connection just through this simple act of making cookies. I started thinking about that memory template in my brain around the scent of cookies and Christmas and family and connection and there wasn't anything I had to do in that moment to try to make myself feel regulated or to make myself feel good. I didn't even consciously try to think about all the times I'd made cookies in the past but my brain my sweet little brain had that little template filed away. But even though this year I didn't get to bake cookies with my mom or my dad or my friends or my grandma or my great grandma, even though I didn't get to do that, my brain said, I remember this scent. I remember this experiment. I remember this time spent with others. And it was as if it was happening right in that moment. just a warmth, a sweetness, and just an overall softening in