Hi, I'm Joanne Cary. Welcome back to the Embodied Soul podcast, a multidimensional space intended to support you in living, being, and remembering the embodied soul you are.
This week I want to meet you in a very particular place. The space between years, the space between stories, and the space between meanings that are ready to soften.
This is a threshold moment.
A pause between one year closing and another year not fully formed.
And it's often here, right here, that we feel that subtle pressure to decide, what did this year mean?
What is the next year going to be about?
Who am I now?
Where am I going?
So before we rush to name anything, before we collapse this moment into a conclusion or a plan, I want to invite you into a different kind of listening.
So wherever you are, you might invite yourself to settle in. Perhaps take a deep breath, invite your soul a little closer, and allow yourself to receive whatever wants to meet you here.
What I'm sharing today came through very quickly for me in the days surrounding the December Solstice. It arrived faster than language, through my dreams, through my body, and then very clearly while walking on this beach.
In fact, it came through so quickly that my mouth could barely keep up with what was receiving and processing in that moment. And what you're hearing now isn't that 1st rush of insight. This is what settled after it, what clarified once the energy had time to land.
And as you listen, I invite you not to track every idea. You don't need to figure anything out. Let this be something you receive rather than something you need to interpret.
Over the last few days, my dreams have been getting clearer and clearer. Not just in their imagery, but in what I can only describe as the mechanics underneath them.
It felt like I was being shown how meaning forms, how interpretation happens. How quickly we move from experience into story. And the insight that kept repeating itself was this:
The only meaning that exists is the meaning we give things.
The only meaning that exists is the meaning we give things.
Experience itself is neutral.
Images are neutral.
Sensations are neutral.
Even spiritual experiences are neutral.
Meaning doesn't live in the experience.
Meaning is something we place onto it.
And the moment we do that, the moment we assign meaning, we collapse possibility into a story.
Not because meaning is wrong, but because meaning is creative.
It shapes reality.
This matters deeply right now, especially as more of us are learning how to live as embodied, multidimensional beings.
Meaning-making has been one of the primary ways humans have kept themselves safe.
We observe something.
We interpret it.
We decide what it means.
And then we build beliefs and expectations around that meaning.
That strategy has served us a very long time. But as more of our soul becomes present in the body, as perception widens, as we begin to sense beyond the linear layer of life… Those old meaning-making habits can begin to feel constricting.
And again, not because they're incorrect, but because they're incomplete.
Every interpretation that once felt spiritual, accurate, or true may no longer be able to hold the fulness of what we're perceiving now.
And as consciousness shifts, the meanings we've placed on things often need to soften… or dissolve completely.
I noticed this very clearly as we approach the end of the year. I've been seeing a lot about this year being framed as a 9 year,
a year of shedding,
a year of the snake.
And next year being framed as the year of the Fire Horse, movement, action, momentum, forward drive.
And I felt how easy it was to take that in.
To let it define what's coming, to let it collapse an entire year into a single meaning.
And it was at that point that this question landed for me:
What happens when we decide too quickly what a year is?
What happens to possibility?
To nuance?
To multidimensionality?
When we assign one story to something that hasn't lived yet.
Maybe the invitation isn't to reject frameworks, but to hold them lightly,
to let them be lenses and not limits.
Now, I can already hear some of you saying, “But what about astrology? What about planetary alignments and cosmic cycles?”
Yes. Those energies are real. They carry information. They create conditions.
And they are still lenses.
Not instructions, not inevitables.
They describe the weather of the field, but they don't remove our capacity to meet that field consciously.
A new year, like any moment, hasn't decided what it will become yet.
And neither have we.
A few nights ago, in a dream like state, that liminal space, I was interrupted by the presence of a young boy. Someone I've encountered many times before, and this time I heard the words:
“Time for the bubble to break.”
At first, I was taken a bit aback. I didn't. At first, I was taken a bit aback. I did what I've always done. I interpreted it. I assumed it meant something very specific.
And then the clarity arrived.
The bubble wasn't about any one experience that I was having in that very moment that I heard those words.
The bubble was my idea or my ideas about reality.
Including my spiritual ideas,
including my interpretations,
including the meanings I thought I needed in order to understand what was happening.
Even those had become part of the illusion, and in order to perceive them from a new level of consciousness, that bubble had to soften…Or pop.
So the invitation that came through very clearly was not to stop making meaning altogether, it was to stop rushing meaning.
To notice the impulse to explain,
to define,
to decide.
And instead, to ask gentler questions:
What if this means something different than I think?
What if I don't need to decide yet?
What if there is more here than I can currently see?
Curiosity, rather than certainty.
Because certainty closes, and curiosity keeps the field open.
As we learn to live with more soul in the body, more awareness, more perception, more multidimensional input, we're being invited to trust something deeper than our old safety strategies.
Okay, so let's land this in the body.
Take a slow, deep breath in.
And then a longer breath out.
Feel your body where it meets the surface beneath you.
Notice any softening, any settling.
If you're listening with the sounds of the ocean around me or the wind or the world around you, let those sounds help carry this through your system.
You don't need to do anything with this. Just let it sift through in its own time.
As we cross this threshold between years, you might simply notice where you're tempted to rush to meaning.
And what happens when you allow a little more space instead?
Before the story forms, before the year is named, before possibility has collapsed.
It’s only getting better, and there is so much more available to us than we've been taught to believe. And that's pretty amazing.
If this episode of Embodied Soul resonated with you, you're welcome to like it, share it, or subscribe. It truly does help this work find the people it's meant to reach.
And whenever this moment finds you, I look forward to being with you again on the next episode of Embodied Soul.
