Welcome to Unfuck Your Brain. The only podcast that teaches you how to use psychology, feminism,

and coaching to rewire your brain and get what you want in life. And now here's your

host, Harvard Law School grad, feminist rock star, and master coach, Carla Lohanthile.

Hello, my chickens. So I am recording this podcast the day before my 41st birthday, and my

birthday also comes exactly a month after my anniversary and my relationship. And so I

want to talk a little bit about how to use thought work to kind of commemorate anniversaries

or how to use it to mark the passage of time. I think that one of the reasons that religion

provides such grounding and structure for people apart, like regardless of what you believe

about God or deities or anything else, is that it provides ritual and structure. I think

that we have a pretty deep desire to kind of mark the passage of time to create meaning

and narrative out of our lives. And ritual is one of the ways that we help do that, right?

We celebrate the same thing year after year, and it gives us a touch point through our lives

and through the seasons. It gives us a way to measure time to think about our experience

to categorize it. And so I really like to use anniversaries or well, they're always called

an anniversary, I guess, but an up-birthday and anniversary relationship or of the end

of a relationship or of someone passing away or of starting your business or kind of whatever

else, right? To use those anniversaries as a way to create an opportunity for ritual and

reflection. And you can always use the preset opportunities. I always think during the

Jewish New Year holidays that I think one of the reasons it feels a little less meaningful

to me is that so much of the liturgy is like setting aside this time for people to reflect

on like what they did the year before, what's coming in the next year, right? And Jewish

tradition between Rosh Hashanah, which is the New Year and Yom Kippur, which is the day

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