Inward with Katie Edmonds

There's a line you've probably never heard, and it's the truest thing I know about time: the last time is usually just a Tuesday.

You almost never get a warning. The last time your kid reaches for your hand. The last time you sit at a table with someone who's humming a song they don't know they're humming. The last time you sleep in a house that means something. It happens quietly, in the middle of an ordinary day, and it's gone before you can thank it.

In this episode, I talk about the rocking chair where four generations of women held each other — and what it taught me about how love moves through us, one going out and one coming in. About the summers in Virginia I didn't know were ending. About my uncle's diagnosis landing on the same week his daughter learned she was carrying a boy. About grief and gratitude being the same thing, felt at the same time.

And I ask you the question I keep asking myself: which part of your life are you in the last time of, right now, without knowing?

Stop watching someone else's life. See what's right in front of you. Because once it becomes a memory, you'll come back to it over and over.

Life is today only. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow may never come.

I thought I was the most patient person I know. Patient with my kids, patient with people, patient with the timing of my life — until the universe decided to test me. Two ordinary days of travel took me apart: a flight that went from delayed to boarding while I wasn't even at the airport, a spilled cup of coffee I'd waited too long for, and finally, a plane TV screen that wouldn't turn on — until it lit up with two words that stopped me cold: PLEASE WAIT.

In this episode, I walk through what actually happened on that trip, why the small, petty inconveniences get us more than the big ones ever do, and what I realized about the difference between patience with situations, patience with other people, and patience with yourself — the one most of us fail at the most. I talk about the real cost of impatience: not irritability, but settling. The job that's fine instead of right. The relationship that's convenient instead of aligned. The decisions we make early, out of discomfort, instead of true, out of alignment.

This one is a reminder that patience isn't passive — it's active trust. And that the people you love, and the person you are, are not behind schedule. You're exactly where you are.

In this episode:

• The travel disaster that tested every ounce of my patience
• Why small inconveniences break us faster than big crises
• The three types of patience — with situations, with others, and with yourself
• How impatience quietly leads us to settle for convenience instead of alignment
• What "active trust" actually means, and how to practice it
• The two words on a screen that changed how I see waiting

Catchphrase to sit with: Life is today only. Yesterday's gone. Tomorrow may never come.

You always, always have a seat at my table. Until next time, I'm Katie Edmonds. Keep going inward.

It was a hundred degrees. We'd been in line for three hours. And when my eight-year-old looked at the ride, panicked, and ran — I said something I cannot take back.

In this episode, I'm getting honest about the moment my word got ahead of me, and why it still haunts me even after the apology. Because here's the hard truth: the apology matters. It is necessary. And it is not the same as not having said it.

I've spent years thinking carefully about my word. I decided young that if I said something, I would mean it. And then I stood at the front of a line in a hundred degrees and broke that promise to myself in about four seconds. Because I forgot to pause.

Today we're talking about what it actually takes to build a real pause — not the kind you nod along to, but the kind that holds up in the heat. You'll hear:

• Why your word is either your greatest tool or your greatest enemy
• The two things a real pause actually requires: intention and practice
• Why my best advice for learning to pause is to go take a walk — yes, even in the middle of a conversation
• How changing your physiology changes your psychology (and why you can't think your way out of a flooded nervous system)
• The quieter pauses that protect you too — the decision pause, the conversational pause, the stillness pause
• And why, for some of us, learning to pause is really grief work

I want to be clear: I am good at this work. I've done real, sustained work on my word. And I still got it wrong. Because the pause is not a destination you arrive at — it's a practice. And practices require practicing.

You are not broken. You are not too much. You may just be moving so fast your word is getting ahead of you.

Your word is a choice. Every time. The pause is how you actually make it.

If this episode landed for you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do for someone we love is hand them something that names what they haven't been able to say out loud.

New episodes every week. I'm Katie Edmonds — keep going inward.

I spent most of my life being embarrassed by my own emotions. I didn't know that about myself until I was 36, sitting in a hospital room, covering my face while I cried.

In this episode, I share the story that cracked everything open — the loss of my brother Darmarcus's son Jailen, a 12-year-old who passed unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm, and what I noticed about myself in that room. Even in the one of the hardest moments of my life, I was hiding.

This episode is about emotional suppression — how most of us learned early that what we feel is too much, too messy, too visible. How we got so good at folding it up and moving on that we forgot we were doing it. And what it costs to keep covering your face.

I talk about the question that came to me on the flight home. I talk about grief, divorce, Spartan races in the mud, and what it actually felt like to let myself feel for the first time — messy and all.

If you have ever hidden how you actually feel — from others, from yourself — this one is for you.

Life is today only. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow may never come.

Stop covering your face.

You're scrolling. Someone you barely know just posted their new house, their new body, their relationship, their view from somewhere you've never been — and in four seconds, without deciding to, you've built an entire case against your own life.

This episode is about that moment. Not how to stop it — because that advice has never once worked on a real person at 11pm with a phone in their hand. But what to do the second it happens, before it turns into a whole story about how you're behind.

Comparison isn't a character flaw. It's not evidence that you're insecure or ungrateful or not doing the work on yourself. It's one of the oldest survival programs your brain runs — and it was never designed for a feed that never closes.

In this episode, I walk you through the five questions I ask myself when comparison starts to spiral. Questions that don't just interrupt the feeling — they actually tell you something true about yourself.

The five questions:

1. What am I actually envying — the thing, or what I think the thing means?
2. Am I comparing my behind-the-scenes to their highlight reel?
3. Is this comparison pointing me toward something I actually want to build?
4. What does this say about what I'm not giving myself credit for?
5. What's one true, specific thing about my own life I can anchor to right now?

You are not behind. You are not losing. You've just been holding your real, unfiltered life up against someone else's best four seconds — and calling that a fair fight.

It was never a fair fight.

A few weeks ago, I visited my aunt in Vermont. She's selling the house she's lived in for 48 years — the house her husband built before he passed, where she raised her kids, where our whole family has gathered for decades. When I walked through those rooms and saw the bare walls where pictures used to hang, I felt it.

And when I asked her about it, she said something simple: She was ready for the next thing.

That's it. No drama. No crisis. Just a woman who knew.

This episode is about that knowing. The one you've been talking yourself out of. The one you've dressed up as "not being a quitter" or "needing more time" or "owing it to someone to stay." In this episode, we get into what attachment actually is and how it keeps you tethered to things that are done — jobs, relationships, places, identities — not because they're still right for you, but because you've built yourself around them. And leaving feels like losing yourself.

We also talk about why departing from something isn't quitting. It's courage. And the difference between those two things is everything.

If you've been sitting on a decision you already know the answer to — this one's for you.

In this episode:

• What attachment really is and how it shows up in your decisions
• The difference between leaving and quitting
• The one question that cuts through every excuse you've made
• Why no one else will ever be able to tell you when it's time — only you will

Inward is hosted by certified life coach Katie Edmonds. New episodes every week.

Fifteen months ago, I made a decision. Not because I hit rock bottom. Not because I had a problem. Because alcohol didn't align with who I was becoming — and I was done letting it cost me the one thing I wanted most: clarity.

In this episode, I get personal about why I stopped drinking, what I was actually afraid of losing, and what I gained when I got to the other side. This isn't a lecture. It's an honest conversation about a cultural shift that's already underway — and an invitation to get curious about your own relationship with alcohol, wherever you are on that spectrum.

In this episode:

• The moment I realized that almost every bad or traumatic thing in my life had alcohol in the background — from me or from other people — and the question I finally asked myself: is this worth it anymore?
• Why I wanted to give my kids the healthiest, clearest version of myself I could
• How my Reiki One certification and energy work deepened my need for total clarity — and how even one glass of wine was robbing me of that
• The WHO's landmark statement: there is no safe amount of alcohol. Alcohol is a Group 1 carcinogen — the same category as asbestos and tobacco — and causes at least seven types of cancer
• Gallup data showing adults under 35 who drink dropped from 72% to 62% in two decades — and why an entire generation is walking away from alcohol not because of rock bottom, but by choice
• Gen Z is 20x more likely to abstain from alcohol than Baby Boomers
• My plan for getting through social settings early in sobriety (Athletic Brewing NA beers, and why I eventually stopped needing even that)
• The mindset shift from "what am I missing out on?" to "God, I'm so glad I'm not hungover"
• My hangover history — the kind that was debilitating — and the moment I got the flu and thought, I can't believe how many times I self-inflicted this feeling on myself
• The workout cycle that was silently holding me back: drinking on weekends, spending the first half of every week detoxing, finally feeling strong by Thursday — and then doing it all over again
• What I actually gained: sleep, presence, emotional access, athletic gains, and the version of myself I'd been burying every Friday night

A note from me:

This episode is not about judgment. It's not a call for everyone to quit drinking. Maybe you're curious. Maybe you want to cut back. Maybe you just want to understand why so many people are quietly stepping away from something that used to be a given. Whatever brought you here, you have a seat at this table.

You slept eight hours. You ate your protein. You got your steps in. You did everything right — and you're still standing in your kitchen at 9 AM completely depleted.

In this episode, I'm getting honest about the kind of exhaustion that no supplement, sleep schedule, or morning routine can touch. The kind that lives in your bones. The kind that comes not from what you're not doing — but from what you're not allowing.

We talk about the daily performance of looking like you have your life together, what constant stimulation is doing to your nervous system, and why the answer to this kind of tired isn't more information. It's less of it. I share the practices that have helped me and the people I coach with soul-level exhaustion — Reiki, yoga, movement, silence, just lying on the floor with no agenda — and why the healing is always in the subtraction, not the addition.

You already know what you need. Not Instagram. Not another reel. You. This episode is about learning to trust that again.

If you've been running on empty and can't figure out why, this one's for you.

When was the last time you tried something you'd never tried before? Not a variation of something you already know — something genuinely new.

If you can't remember, you're not alone. And it's not because you're boring or lazy or small-minded. It's because somewhere between building a life that works and protecting the one you built, you stopped being a student of your own existence. You started deciding what you think before you've experienced it. You started calling your fear a personality trait. And you started calling that living.

In this episode, I'm talking about the boxes we inherit — the routines, preferences, identities, and self-narratives that were never actually chosen. They were handed to us. And we've been carrying them so long we forgot they weren't ours.

This isn't about throwing everything out. It's about knowing what's yours and what's not. It's about learning the difference between your intuition and your fear. And it's about burning the boxes that were never built for you in the first place.

You don't have to have it figured out. You just have to stay willing to be surprised by yourself.

Be a student in this life. Always. Stay curious. Stay open. Stay compassionate. Stay yours.

What if the thing you are working the hardest to prevent is the exact thing your mind is quietly helping to build?

In this episode of Inward, Katie Edmonds gets into one of the most important — and most misunderstood — truths about the human mind. The brain does not distinguish between a fear you rehearse in your head and a reality you are living in. Whatever you consistently give your energy to, your nervous system begins to treat as home. And for a lot of high achievers, that home has been built out of worry, vigilance, and a deep belief that if you think about the worst-case scenario hard enough, you can keep it from happening.

You can't. And this episode is going to show you exactly why.

Katie walks through the neuroscience of neuroplasticity — how the brain physically rewires itself based on what you repeatedly think and feel — and what that means for the patterns you've been running on autopilot. She breaks down two real and raw examples: the person who is so afraid of being cheated on that their fear slowly dismantles the very relationship they're trying to protect, and the person so consumed by fear of illness that chronic stress begins to suppress the immune system they're trying to keep safe. Fear, it turns out, is not a shield. It is a blueprint.

But this episode isn't just about what's going wrong. Katie also walks through the reverse — what it actually looks like when someone builds their life from a place of consistent, practiced gratitude. Same circumstances. Completely different world.

Because that's what a real gratitude practice does. Not the check-the-box, write-three-things-and-close-the-journal version. The kind that drops into your body. The kind that actually changes your biology, rewires your prefrontal cortex, dials down your threat response, and begins to shift what you create in your life.

This episode also sits with one of the most powerful things ever said about the human mind — a line from the Buddha that reframes everything:

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world."

You are already making a world every single day. The only question is — are you building what you want, or what you're afraid of?

In this episode:

• The neuroscience of neuroplasticity and how your brain rewires itself through repeated thought and feeling
• Why chronic worry doesn't protect you — and what it costs your body and your relationships
• The fear-creates-fear cycle: jealousy, health anxiety, and what they actually build
• The reverse example — what consistent positive thinking looks like in a real life, over real time
• What the Buddha's words mean for the life you are creating right now
• What a genuine gratitude practice actually looks like — and why feeling it matters more than listing it
• How to start small when life feels hard and positivity feels fake

If this episode lands for you, share it with someone who needs it. And if Inward has meant something to you, leaving a review is one of the most powerful ways to help this show reach the people who are quietly looking for something real.

You always have a seat at my table.