It is the last episode of the year, and the recording space is busy. Kat John apologizes in advance for the interruptions: three dogs share the room, including Daisy's boyfriend Teddy, who is staying for three weeks over the holidays. Between the dog updates and a cheerful run through the usual year-end questions (what did you learn, what surprised you, what didn't work out but turned out to be a blessing), she gets to the real subject. Twelve months earlier she had picked a word to lean into, "Nature's Way," and she spends the rest of the episode describing how that word kept working on her in places she had not been paying attention to. The result is a candid account of a practice many people half-attempt: set an intention, then loosen your grip on how it has to turn out. Her video description frames the year as "cracking, openings and widenings," and the episode is worth a close look for anyone who has set a theme and watched it rearrange their life.
Kat John's practice is simple to state. Each year she chooses "a word or a question or something to lean into," and she has done so long enough that her listeners know the routine. The trouble, as she tells it, is that the words rarely do what she expected. The year before this one, her theme was "flourish," and she had finances in mind. What arrived instead was a flourishing in her femininity, and only after that did her finances start to shift, through a new sense of balance. She put the pattern plainly:
"It turns out that I learned something and it's completely different."
— Kat John, final podcast episode of 2023 (2:23)
The pattern matters because it changes what a theme is for. If you treat a word as a target, a year that delivers something else looks like failure. If you treat it as a lens, the unexpected result becomes information. The theme did not fail to flourish; it pointed somewhere she had not planned to look, and the planning was the thing that needed adjusting.
The video description makes the same observation in tighter language. In earlier years, she writes, she "had hopes for the word and theme I set, often having in mind what I wanted it to do for me." What she found was that the theme "worked its way into other areas of my life that I'd left unattended and didn't give much attention to."
There is a useful idea buried here. A theme that is chosen with an outcome already fixed tends to stay inside the outcome. You pick "abundance," picture a bank balance, and work the problem you already know about. A theme held more loosely can go looking for the things you have been avoiding, and those are often the things that matter most. Kat John's year did not stay in her finances or her work. It moved into her body, her family, and the way she speaks, which are areas she had, by her own account, left unattended.
This is the center of the episode, and it is easy to misread. "Nature's Way" was not a plan with a deadline. The description says the aim was "placing greater trust and faith in the great force and allowing it to crack me open where necessary." Within the episode, she describes what that looked like in practice: she stopped specifying the outcome and started asking.
"Show me the way, show me the way, show me the way, show me what you'd like for me to see... bring to me what I'm ready to meet and face and release."
— Kat John, final podcast episode of 2023 (7:28)
She is explicit that she did not name what she wanted to release. Instead she "parked what I thought I wanted" and stayed in what she calls communication with the natural force. Her description puts the stance in a single sentence: "you do what you gotta do and what is necessary for me to open my eyes and heart."
It would be a mistake to hear this as passivity. Asking to be shown is an active form of attention. It means reviewing your life for what is asking for your notice, then being willing to act on what surfaces, even when it is not what you had scheduled. The surrender is not of effort. It is of the script. For a reader who has tried to control the outcome of a goal and felt the goal slip away, the distinction is practical: you keep the intention and let go of the particular route you had mapped out to reach it.
One of the most concrete moments in the episode is not about spiritual philosophy at all. It is about shorts. Kat John describes avoiding shorts at the gym or in fitness classes, because she watches the other people's legs and starts comparing her own, imagining they can see the cellulite she is worried about. Then, at a dance class on a hot night, she decided to wear them.
"Last night I was like nah I'm wearing shorts... didn't give a [expletive], afro beats, chucking my booty up in the air and just loving it."
— Kat John, final podcast episode of 2023 (6:19)
She is candid that this may sound small. She says it felt like a big deal for her, and she connects it directly to the larger shift she was noticing that year: "I'm done giving a [expletive] about how my body looks." The shift is not that she stopped noticing other people. It is that the noticing lost its authority over what she chose to do. That is a useful test for any theme. Growth often shows up first in the small, embarrassing daily decisions, the ones where an old story makes the choice for you.
Across the episode, she lists the stories she has decided to stop carrying. She names the belief that she must "work like super freaking hard in order to earn money." She names the sense that she is separate from her family. The second one carries the most weight. She talks about her bonus daughters, Ali and Mia, and admits that her ego loves to keep her apart from the family. "This year," she says, "has really shown me that I have such great capacity to love my self, to love my body, to love my life, to yeah love my family like even call them my family."
"My ego loves to battle that one out in trying to keep myself separate from the family."
— Kat John, final podcast episode of 2023 (5:18)
This is where the theme's "cracking open" becomes concrete. A story of separateness is a kind of protective shell, and the shell is often defended more fiercely than the wound it was built for. Naming the story out loud, to the audience and to yourself, is how the shell begins to give. Kat John does not present the change as tidy. She speaks of tears, of getting emotional mid-sentence, and of needing to pause. The emotion is part of the evidence that something is moving.
The episode's most vivid image is financial, and it is worth quoting at length because it captures something many people feel after a long release. Kat John describes the sensation of "free" energy as if she had won the lottery:
"It's like I've won the lottery and I've collected my winnings and I've got all my [expletive] here and I'm just holding them for a little bit. Don't want to spend them right away on, all right, let's spend them on this, let's spend them on that, and then I'm broke again."
— Kat John, final podcast episode of 2023 (9:45)
She then lists what she means by winnings: "time, energy, life force, head space, heart space, freedom." The image is useful because it names the risk. Freed-up capacity is easy to lose by immediately committing it to the next obligation, the next project, the next demand on your attention. Her approach is to hold it for a while before deciding how to use it. For a reader, that suggests a practical question to ask after any release: where does the energy I've just recovered want to go, and am I rushing to refill the space before I know?
Kat John is clear that the end of the year is a natural moment for reflection, and she places it inside a larger collective rhythm. "Depending upon your religion or your culture," she says, people around the world tend to look back and then ask what they want to do differently in the new year. She describes this as "a collective energy," and she links it to shared moments of sadness and grief she has seen in the world. "There is this potency in collectiveness," she says.
"Please know that you can reflect at any time of your life, right? It can be in January, October, mid-year, and you might be like, I don't like the theme of this year, I'm going to change it."
— Kat John, final podcast episode of 2023 (3:56)
That permission matters. A theme does not have to wait for January, and it does not have to survive the calendar once it stops being useful. The collective calendar gives a shared moment of attention, but your own timing is the one that counts for your life. Kat John's own year is a case study: a theme that began as a financial hope became a lesson in femininity, family and love, and she was willing to follow it there.
The episode does not offer a method with steps, and it would be wrong to pretend it does. What it offers is a set of questions Kat John answered for herself across a year, and they are useful to anyone who wants to try her approach. Consider working through them with a notebook or during a quiet walk:
- What area of my life have I left unattended that a theme might be asking me to look at?
- If I wrote down the outcome I am gripping, what would I be willing to let go of to make room for something I have not planned?
- Which small, everyday choice is my body, my schedule or my habits still making for me out of an old story?
- Which story about who I am, or who belongs to my life, am I ready to stop defending?
- When I free up energy, where am I tempted to spend it immediately, and what would happen if I held it for a while?
Kat John's episode is also a reminder that a year's theme is not a contract. It is closer to an invitation, and the invitation can be answered at any time. If you want to hear the full reflection in her own voice, including the moments where she stops to collect herself, the episode is the best place to start. Her closing line, as she signs off to her listeners, is an encouragement to keep doing the work at your own pace, and to take the year's surprises as part of the lesson rather than an interruption to it.
