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Welcome to the Delicious Dignity Podcast. Let's settle in securely and ever so nicely into the brilliance of our own dignity. Hello, lovelies. Welcome back to the second part of a four-part series where we end your 2025 with clarity, with crystal clear clarity, so that we can step into your 2026 with potency, with yeah, just potency, just gumption with grit, with integrity. This series is for those of you who like to get that juice out of life, who, like I said in a previous episode, to stitch yourself back in to the fabric of your life. And what I mean by that is things happen without your say-so, without outside your control all the time. And sometimes when that happens, we tend to pop out of our life. We stop acting as a co-creator of our life, and instead we either distance ourselves from the events in our life, or we get pushed around. Neither of those places is a nice place to be. So we choose the end of the year as an opportunity to reflect and move into the next year, wiser and clearer. Basically, you get to be reborn every year. And as with every episode, I will first introduce a concept I'd like you to keep in mind and then give you a story, and then we'll get into the ritual, which will be the meat of this episode. And the reason we do that is because we want to dip our toes in little by little before we take the full dive. That's the respectful thing to do, right? We don't want to dive in without any guardrails, without any handrails. So with that in mind, I want to introduce you to this concept called repetition compulsion. I think it was a concept introduced by Freud, but that's irrelevant. What I really want you to know is that repetition compulsion is exactly what it sounds like. We are compelled to repeat things, especially if it's a traumatic or a negative event or it's circumstances, and it's an unconscious tendency to do this. Not everyone has it, but quite a few of us have it. It might take the form of literally reenacting of in an event, or you put yourself in the circumstances or situations where the event that happened to you is likely to occur again. And so with repetition compulsion, the key here is the unconscious tendency of people to do this, which means when it's made conscious, it's very unlikely that you will repeat these events. And that's a concept I want to introduce you today, introduce to you today, which is awareness is half the healing. And sometimes it's all the healing you need. And that is why we do ritual. That is why we do these end-of-the-year rituals specifically, because it brings awareness, it brings processing into your life so that you don't have to work so hard at life. That it somehow, when you're aware of what is going on, you become a co-creator and you don't become a pusher of experiences. You become a co-creator, you partner with the universe, you partner with all there is, you partner with your ancestors, your friends, your community, life itself to bring about the beauty of your life that you want. And so you know how they say hindsight is 2020. This is you really working that hindsight is 2020 muscle. You might as well make a ritual out of it, right? And that's what we're doing today. Now I really recommend that you start with part one of this series because that lays the foundation and each part builds on the previous part. Each ritual will build on the previous ritual. And besides, we really need stamina to go into this second part. And the way we build that stamina and that foundation is by going through part one. So this is the second in the series, and in this episode, we're making sure that we're acknowledging the hurt, the disappointments, the meh of this year, and we're letting it go. This is the fall or autumn season of our ritual. This is where we're letting things go to make space for the new. So we're cooling down a little bit from the heat of the summer episode that we just did, and now we're into fall and autumn. In a way, we become bare. We change our colors like a chameleon and we become bare. There was one year where I did this ritual and I only did this ritual. I just took myself to a remote cabin by the ocean, and all I did for an entire day was let go and let go. There was a wood-burning stove in the cabin that kept my room warm, and I used the ritual that we're about to do as fuel to keep my room warm. Something poetic about that, no? And that ritual I'll remember for the rest of my life because that was the first time I physically felt something leave me. It's actually one of the reasons why I started holding up the torch for release work, energy release work, and just yeah, just letting things go. I'm a big fan of that now because of that ritual. It's one thing to believe in energy work, it's another thing to actually feel it. Feel something let go of you and leave your body and leave your energy field that it I'll remember that forever. And as you might have seen throughout these episodes, I won't shut up about release work. It was so intensely liberating. You know how people say light and love, and they usually mean light as in the light of the sun. But in this ritual, we're meaning light and love as light as in weightlessness, as in the opposite of heavy. And so that's what you have to look forward to, that lightness of being through this ritual. And so what we're doing here is we're need we're releasing so we don't repeat. We're releasing so we feel relief. We're releasing so we feel light and easy and breezy, and we don't carry too much baggage into 2026. We carry the wisdom, but we don't carry the baggage. And we don't just need to say goodbye, right? We need to know exactly what we're saying goodbye to. And this is the ritual where we make space for the new, because in part three and part four, we'll be bringing in the new. And in order to do that, we have to make space for it. So we'll begin our ritual now that we have a foundation to rest our feet on. We'll first start with an awareness ritual, a discovery ritual, where we're going to introspect on our year. And for those of you with a harsh inner critic or just an inner critic that won't shut up, we're gonna let it have its day with the in this ritual, but we're gonna let it have its day with dignity. And remember, this ritual is out also outlined in the ritual guide in the description. So you can check the description for the link with all the questions and everything we talk about. The audio will just help you process the information as we go through it. So, first we'll start with five key questions. Okay, this is the awareness part. The first question is what disappointed you this year? Even the childish things. What were your losses or what you perceived to be your failures, your eels or your gross? What were those things that happened this year that you just didn't give space to acknowledge that? Don't just ignore that or feel like, oh, it's silly, or it doesn't matter, so I'm just gonna ignore it and pass it over. We're not gonna do that. We're gonna give space for that. What disappointed you? List those things down as many as you like. The second question is what let go of me that worked for me? What happened that you initially perceived as a loss that ended up being really good for you? So you're really celebrating the things that were not for you and where rejection was probably a good thing. For example, there was a guy that I was talking to this year, and I talked to him for maybe one or two times, and then by the third time, we just stopped talking to each other completely. And the moment it really hurt because I was like, oh, I thought we had a connection, and it wasn't necessarily a romantic connection, it was just a connection. And I was starving for friends this year, but later on, as I had time to think about it, I realized how perfect that was, that it happened the way it did, because I wouldn't have let it go that easily or that quickly. So I'm really glad it let go of me. The other, the other thing that happened was my first two podcast editors. I'm so glad they didn't work out because the third one that I ended up working with actually worked just fine for me. And we both have a good working relationship, and I really enjoy the way he his professionalism and the way he does his work. And if he's listening to this, that's awkward. But hi, thank you for being a great podcast editor. But that's the first two needed to let go of me so that I could find someone who actually worked for the sound I wanted for my podcast. And I kept trying and trying so hard to make the first two work, and it just didn't work. And I spent quite a bit of money trying to make it work too, and so much time and energy trying to help them do the work I paid them to do. And they let go of me. They said, no, this is not what we do, or that I don't think that I can help you here. And in the moment, I was so confused and I was so irritated and I was so dumbfounded with, Am I asking for too much? What's going on here? And then when I found my third podcast editor, it ended up working for me just fine. And I didn't have to explain and I didn't have to do all the work, and it's just so much easier. Um, and then the other thing that could you could talk about that let go of you that worked for you is any mindsets or emotions or chronic patterns or thinking that let go of you that you can talk about that. For example, one of the mindsets that sort of let go of me this year is working hard, that concept of struggle and pushing and just yeah, work hard, play hard, that kind of energy that just completely let go of me this year, especially in my business. And so, even though we think of things that let go of us or things that ended as losses, this is a question where we go into what might we have lost that actually ended up being good for us. The third question is what tested my integrity? Or where did I bend my integrity just a little bit? The reason we go into this question is things always test our integrity. The world is always testing our integrity, and we just need to be aware of it when it's happening and catch it before it has a snowball effect into 2026 and beyond. So we want to catch it. Okay, and this is where if you want to go deeper into this question, I recommend episode 27 where I talk about the prostitute archetype. It that is a beautiful thing to listen to so that you can catch all those little moments in 2025 that ended up being something that tested your integrity or where you bent your integrity a little bit so that you can stop or redirect that energy into 2026 and beyond. I'm reminded of a situation, and I only tell you these stories so that it can jog some of your memories or help you really see, help you identify certain situations in your life. So I'll talk, I'll give you this small story, and I'm gonna try to say it as specifically but as vaguely as I possibly can because it involves other people and I don't want to give specifics. Okay. So I'll just be I'll give you the meat of the story without giving you the specifics, basically. There was a situation where there was a group of people, and there were some not so great people in this group of people, and I was in this situation, that's what I signed up for. I just didn't know that this was what the situation was going to be. I apologize for being so vague. I'm just trying to give you the essence of this. So I found myself in a situation that I did not anticipate, that I did not bring about. And there were these people that were in this situation that had I kept talking to, I would have made a lot of connections. I would have had a lot of success, if you will. I would have gotten a lot of rewards from that interaction. However, these people, they were extremely creepy. They were just not good people. And for a second, I remember asking myself, is it just me who thinks that they're a little bit creepy? Because everyone else seems to think that they're not. And I ended up leaving that situation because I just couldn't take it anymore. But there was that moment where I thought to myself, I was like, oh, Dilshad, you can just let it go. You're being too, what's the word? Too sensitive. Basically, other people's words in my head. You're being too sensitive. They're not that creepy. Just talk to them and get it done, whatever. But I ended up leaving and later on finding out that was exactly the right move. And very often, actually, before I go into that, I find it hilarious that as I'm talking to you right now, the trash is coming up to pick up the trash, like the trash truck, and I can hear it picking up the trash. And I think it's so funny that as I'm talking to you about this story and this whole ritual, which is about letting go and releasing, there's a trash truck coming and picking up the trash. This is really funny. Anyway, what going back to the story? I want you to know that sometimes I was lucky in this situation, right? I was lucky to get confirmation that my decision was the right decision. But a lot of times when things test your integrity, you might not get that validation or feedback. So we do these end-of-the-year rituals so that you can give yourself that validation and feedback. Because even though you don't know, a part of you knows, and you can acknowledge that part in this ritual. Okay. So that was question three. Question four. What took a lot of my energy to deal with? Now, this is an odd question because you might think, Dilshab, what has that got to do with anything? Things that take up a lot of your energy can either be just what they are, things that take up energy, or things that you maybe have wasted your energy on. And for this question, we just want to just analyze what took a lot of your energy to deal with. Because that could also be things that are important to you, but it could also be things that were unnecessary. And we want to just bring awareness to that so that when we go into 2026, we can schedule our time better, we can organize our life better around the things that matter to us, but also let go of the things or rework the things that took a lot of energy that shouldn't have taken a lot of energy. So, what took a lot of my energy to deal with in 2025? And this is a lot of where you will notice that the things that really mean a lot to you will often give you energy. Not all the time, but most of the time they give you energy. So you would think that, for example, this podcast, there's a lot of work that goes into it, but it doesn't take a lot of my energy. It actually gives me energy. So this gets you thinking about the expense or the price you pay for something in terms of your energy, and maybe how you will tweak that in 2026 and going forward. So, for example, for me this year, what took a lot of my energy to deal with is a situation that happened at the end of last year in 2024 that was not ideal and it was actually really shocking. And it took me a few months to process that shock. And it had to do with how I was being treated. I was treated very unfairly, extremely harshly, and with great bias. And I just did not deserve the way I was treated. And when I look back on that, and when I did this ritual for myself and I look back on it and I see that, what I see is someone that needs better tools on how to handle bad people, on how to handle cruel people, on how to handle people who are just so much in their own dysfunction that they hurt other people. And I needed better tools to handle that. And so I came up with a plan, which will be a whole episode later on. But that awareness being brought into my life was really crucial because I shouldn't take weeks or months to get over something like that. I know that everyone has their process and you can't rush these things, and you can't really tell how long it takes you to get over something. That's all well and good, and I fully acknowledge that. However, I don't want to be doing that. I don't want to be spending my precious time, my precious life force just dealing with the after-effects of being somebody else's punching bag. And so I ended up creating this plan, this care plan for what to do when I am really disrespected and being that kind of the at the receiving end of somebody's cruelty. And everything that worked that I went through in 2025, I put that all into a care plan. And now I have a care plan to fall back on when that does happen. And I discovered from this ritual and reflecting on this is that I have this tendency when I am treated really unfairly, when it's so unfair that I can't even understand why I'm being treated that way. When I see that happen, I automatically just assume that if it's that unfair, then it means that there's something wrong with me, that I truly did something wrong. And that's my tendency. I don't see, at least when it concerns my business and my work and the world and when I'm working with other people, I don't see how being treated unfairly has anything to do with the other person. I see it as all me and my fault. And I realize that is what took a long time for me to understand. And that is something that I put together a care plan for how to determine the difference between what was really my responsibility and what wasn't my responsibility. And I came up with this beautiful framework. It was awesome. I will share it in an episode in the future. But this is why we do these rituals, right? This is why we reflect. Okay. The fifth and the last question for the awareness piece. What needs to die? What needs to die? Is it a mindset that you have, like a mindset that I just talked about right now? What needs to simply just die? Is it a mindset? Is it a pattern? Is it a belief? Is it a habit? Is it is it an object in your home? Is it a chore that you keep avoiding? What is it that needs to die? I would recommend listing at least 10 things. 10 things. Because we like to think that nothing needs to die, but it could be something as small as that there is an Expired box of rice in the fridge that you need to throw out. You have to let it die. You have to let it go. If the question what needs to die is too intense, what needs to be let go? What needs to change? But I really recommend sticking to the what needs to die because it's got some gumption to it, it's got some oomph to it. And we want to tune into that energy to identify at least 10 things that need to go. Remember, you don't actually have to do it. Just be aware of it. Because, like I said in the beginning of this episode, awareness is half the battle. It will work on you as opposed to you trying to work on it. Yeah? Okay. Now the second part is what can you forgive yourself for? Now, this might sound like an awareness thing, but it's not because we're we're done with the awareness thing. We need to now acknowledge what we can forgive ourselves for. Maybe you look at the list that you just came up with. Maybe you just have other things that you want to talk about that you can just forgive yourself for. And I want you to understand that forgiveness is more of a declaration than anything else. This is my secret. Okay. If you want to release anything, forgiveness is the key. Forgiveness is the key to release anything. If, for example, let's say that you failed at something this year, per your perception, you failed at something. You can say, I forgive myself for the failure, even if I cannot forgive it. I can try to forgive myself for blank, even if I cannot forgive it. Or simply, I forgive myself for blank. I can learn to forgive myself for blank. The point is that you write it down and that you see all the things that you want to or can or are trying to forgive yourself for. And you want to write down at least 20 to 30 such statements. And I'm not going to tell you what's going to happen at the end after you're done, but you're going to see. You will see it and you will feel it. There is just something about the word forgiveness and forgiving and forgive and the desire to write down what it is that you would like to forgive that ends up letting go of you. And I'm so excited for you to experience that. If this ritual seems like it's a lot, that's because it's designed that way. You are very free to take parts of it and do those, but not do the others. I'm giving you all of it so that you can go through all of it when you have the capacity to. But if all you can do is just one or two or three things, that's good enough. Okay. We don't want any perfectionism here. My role in this podcast is to give you everything that I can that's related to the topic at hand. It is not to hold back, right? It's your job and it's your responsibility to pick and choose what it is that you can do and what you can go through. Put your perfectionism and your desire to overachieve on the side because that's just a way for you to feel bad about yourself for no good reason. Okay. So now the third part of this ritual. So you've gone through the awareness, you've gone through the forgiveness, and now we go through the third part of this, which is writing a letter to the you that was you on January 1st, 2025. What would you say to this person? Knowing everything that they went through, knowing everything that happened, what would you say to them? What advice would you give them? What can you thank them for what they're about to do? Isn't that amazing? I just want you to pause and just feel the impact of that. What can you thank her for? What can you thank them for? What they're about to do, what they didn't do, what they felt, what they did, what habits they did or didn't do? What can you thank them for? And any advice that you give to them, once you write it down, write it down and then come back to this audio. Because after you write it down, what I want you to do is take that advice now, before the end of the year. Whatever advice you gave to that self in the beginning of the year, take that advice again now, before the end of the year. And just anything else you want to say to this person, anything you know that they want to hear. I have written a few words to myself, and I thought maybe I'll share it with you so that it can trigger something for you. So here is just a part of what I wrote for myself. The letter was very long. I'm just picking up a few pieces so that you can get a sense for what I said. Okay, so here it is. This is me now telling myself January 1st, 2025, everything I wanted to say. I don't think you get told this enough, Dilshad. So please let me say it to you. You're impossibly kind. Somewhere along the line, you got told this, you got told that you're strong, independent, and God knows you wanted to be her, and you believed it. And somewhere along the line, you thought you needed to be tough, and you were. But being tough gave you the protection you needed, but not the heart warmth you wanted. Your kindness will be taken advantage of. That's just the nature of the world, and it's not a fault on your part. You're not stupid just because you didn't immediately correct all your mistakes. I can see you want more. I can see you beginning to want a life that's softer, gentler, without losing any of its potency or power. Somewhere along the line you thought you had to choose between love or power, because you misunderstood the nature of love and you knew what feeling powerless felt like. So you chose power. But power had this way of always nipping at your ankles as you kept trying to outrun its grip while still keeping yourself upright. This year you will come to understand the wisdom of love as the most supreme power. I'm sorry you felt lonely. I know making friends has always been difficult for you. I would love if you didn't make it a problem. Everyone has their thing that they struggle with. You're just not very relationship-oriented, but you're learning to be safe in them and finally it's safe in them finally instead of eliminating them altogether. Thank you for the work you're about to do because it's led me to stop being such a perfectionist. I do bad art now, and it makes me happy. Thank you for the work you're about to do, because the podcast you started has given you an outlet, has given me an outlet for all the wisdom I've kept buckled inside me to pour out. Thank you for who you are because you're about to have a major revelation that will drop all your defenses. Thank you for everything because this year you finally healed the parts of yourself that kept yourself distant from your family. Thank you for always saving your money in such a big way that I'm actually considering retirement as an option. Thank you, thank you. Okay. So that was a piece of the letter that I wrote myself. I hope the energy of that can light a fire inside of you. So now we come to the fourth part. And this is where we give your year, the year that just passed, year 2025. You give your year a name. Let it come to you. What is the first thing that came to you when I said give your year a name? Whatever came to you, just write it down. Like a big word vomit. Just write it down. And then once you're done, come back to this audio. After you've written down some of those words, you can also get inspiration by rereading everything you've written from part one and part two. Reread everything you've written and see what you can name or label your year. For example, you can write down a year of blank, or this was the year of blank. 2025, the year of blank. You can write this however you want, but the point is to give your year a name or a label. The year, the name that I came up with, I didn't even really know or fully understand what the word meant, is the year of defrag, which is so funny because it's a computer terminology, it's a technology term for the way you rearrange disk space on a computer. And it's basically about rearranging, consolidating, um, being synchronistic, like where the border of one piece of data touches the other piece of data, so it's continuous in that way. I think the word they use is contiguous. I think that's how you pronounce it. And it's about being faster and more responsive. And that's the result and more efficient, and that's the result of defragging. And when I looked into the meaning of all of it, I was like, oh wow, this is actually perfect. So the name I gave my year was this was Dilshad's year of defrag, defragmenting. And that's really interesting because in shamanism, you have this idea of the fact that you dropped pieces of your soul or soul fragments along the way and or soul facets along the way. And you have this concept called soul retrieval, which where you go back and you pick up those pieces of your soul, pieces of your energy field to form a more cohesive unit. And that's exactly what defragging does. It's about stopping the fragmentation, defragmenting and making everything more cohesive, which I thought was just perfect for how this year went. It's like everything that needed to be let go, everything that was fragmented just came together in a more cohesive way. So now, now that you've done all of the awareness work, the forgiveness, the letter, and giving your year a name, now we go into the ritual, the more traditional ritual stuff that people expect. All of this was a ritual, but let's go into something that you can do with everything that you've written down. So the things that you've written down about forgiveness, about all the awareness stuff and even your giving your year a name, on the top of the page where you've written everything down, just write the name of your year. So this was the year of blank. Now, if you didn't write it down and you typed it down, that's fine too. You can always print it out, or you can just write down on a piece of paper year of blank, whatever your name was. And I highly recommend that no matter what, everything you've written down, you still have a record of it somewhere. So if you've already written it down on a piece of paper, maybe you take pictures of it. So you have a record of it and store them somewhere, or you photocopy it or whatever it is that you need to do. Because now we're gonna take everything that you've written down and the name of your year and we're gonna burn it. We're basically the intention, the reason why we're burning it, okay, is we're burning it to say that I'm done with this and I am, and you can even be a little bit funny and cheeky with it. This is part of being a playmate with God. This is you being cheeky and saying, return to sender. You can put it in an envelope, you can burn it, and you can write on the envelope front saying return to sender and burn it, and you're returning it back to God. I think it's whenever you can bring humor into a ritual, it makes it that much more potent. Not a lot of people talk about that. So that's my top tip here. And after you've burnt it, you collect the ashes and maybe you bury it or you just scatter them in the wind. Now, when you do this ritual, just make sure that you're doing the burning in a fire-safe pot. Usually stainless steel works or ceramic works, but mostly stainless steel and you're burning it outside. Just be mindful, right? Be mindful when you're doing this burning. And when you're actually doing the burning, just make sure that you have that intention of letting it go. And you can even say a short prayer of I let go of this or I forgive this or thank you so much. It is done. There are different ways you could say it, but you're just, but intention matters more than anything else. Your desire matters more than anything else. So you're just letting it all go. Okay. And again, be cheeky, be funny, be goofy. You're totally allowed to do that. It's even necessary that you do. And as with the previous episode where I talked about water, earth, wind, and fire rituals, for this particular episode that we're in, I would highly recommend this fire ritual. However, if you are a water baby and you also want to do a fire, a water ritual, or you want to do it in place of the fire ritual, what you can do is you can float in water. And as you're floating in the water, you just have this intention of letting it go. Maybe you're reading whatever you wrote down and you're just letting it go. You're imagining the parts of your 2025 or whatever year you're in, pull out of you and go into the water. You can do a ritual bath in the same way. Um, but I highly recommend the fire ritual if you can do it. You can say, thank you for this year of blank. Thank you. I release this year of blank, I let go of blank, and you just you just let it go. Like you can imagine it coming out of you. So the you know what you can do? You pick one or two or three things that you really want to forgive yourself for, let go of, and you imagine where each of these things are located in your body. So, for example, now I can't feel it in my body because it's gone, but I do remember when when I was going through that incident, I was talking to you about where I was treated very unfairly. I had a lot of activation and tightness in my lower back. And that's where that feeling was, and even in my arm and the top of my right arm. So if I were to be in this ritual bath or in this pool or in the ocean, wherever you are floating, I would imagine that that thing coming out of me. I I would imagine, first I would imagine what does it feel like inside of my body? So back then it just felt like jaws clamping down on my lower back, like these canine jaws clamping down on my lower back. So, what I would do is I would imagine if I were you and I was having a similar thing or whatever it is you're feeling, I would imagine that thing, in my case, it was jaws. So I would imagine it pulling out of my body, and then if it needs to clamp, it clamps outside of my body, and I just let it go in the water, or I let it go as I burn the paper. So, step one, imagine where the thing is that you are disappointed about or you want to let go of in your body. Give it a shape, a color, a visual, whatever it is you need to do, to give it some kind of form that you can understand, or and then ask it to, or with your willpower, make it leave you, and then just say return to sender or let it dissolve in the water. So you can choose how you want to do this, with what energy you want to do this, but you're you have full power and full sovereignty over how you want to do this in your way. You can make the thing leave you and make it turn into bubbles in the water, you can make it leave you and turn into light, you can make it leave you, put it in an envelope and say return to sender. Use your imagination, your playful willpower to do this ritual. It does not have to be hard, it does not have to be very regimented, it does not have to be um culturally appropriate, as in when I say that the patriarchal culture appropriate, you can do it your way. It doesn't have to be religious appropriate, is what I was trying to say, but I completely messed that up. It doesn't have to abide by any particular religion. There is no proper way to do this. This is from your soul, your intuition, your joy, your anger, your grief, whatever it is. You get to have full power on how you do this. And I've given you some examples for how you can. Personally, I will be doing the whole put it in an envelope and say return to sender, because I'm a cheeky kind of girl when I do my rituals. So, yes, my darlings. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. I think that it's a really powerful one, whether you do all of it or some of it. I really hope you get the benefit that I'm imagining for you. And I know you will. I know you will. Now, I also want to say if there's stuff from other years that you haven't released or let go, feel free to bring it into this year to let go and make this your year of letting go. It doesn't have to have happened only in this year for you to do this ritual. I just wanted to say that before we end. All right, my lovelies. I think I really like the blessing from the previous episode, so I think I'll continue it for the next two episodes as well, and this one. So, may you see the dignity of your 2025, may you deepen it, may you learn from it, and may you turn it into fertilizer for all your years to come. Until next time, much love to you. Bye.