238. When the unexpected happens

Unexpected things happen in life, often. How does your naturally sober self show up? How can you decide ahead of time who you will be in light of challenging situations? Today we will explore the power of deciding ahead of time and how to handle the unexpected in a way that aligns with the version of the woman you are awakening to on the other side of alcohol. 

1. The Birthright of Sobriety: Your birthright is the path of living fully aligned with your true self. Understand that the conditioned behavior of drinking is merely a learned response. You're naturally designed for sobriety, and the addictive aspects of alcohol are just learned patterns. Alcohol's impact lies beyond its social implications and resides in its addictive chemistry.
2. Boundaries Aligned with Values: Just as you set boundaries in relationships based on values, consider alcohol as something that can be outside of your personal boundaries. Recognize that regardless of how you rationalize or negotiate with it, alcohol remains an addictive chemical that stimulates pleasure responses in your body.
3. Building Emotional Resilience: We explore the process of building emotional resilience, especially during unexpected and challenging moments. Instead of turning to alcohol to numb or escape, allow yourself to experience the full spectrum of emotions that arise. By tuning into your body and emotions, you create a foundation of strength and inner stability.
4. The Power of Intent and Alignment: Decide ahead of time how you want to respond when the unexpected occurs. Align with your core values and self-concept to determine who you want to be in those moments. Embrace your sovereignty and create a conscious commitment to your emotional well-being, anchoring yourself in alignment.
5. Embracing the Human Experience: Dive into the profound wisdom of fully embracing your human experience. Reject the distractions and noise of the external world by centering yourself in the present moment and your personal growth journey. Explore your emotions, learn from your reactions, and evolve as a beautifully intuitive individual.

As we navigate through various perspectives and life situations, remember that this podcast is a safe space for exploring different opinions. Open your mind to diverse viewpoints and contemplate how they resonate with your own journey. Always come back to the importance of feeling, understanding, and embracing your emotions, so you can show up fully present, aligned with your values, and resilient in the face of the unexpected.

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This time of year can be full of joy, but it can also come with extra stress and temptations around alcohol. So, I thought, why not offer something to help bring in a bit more ease and peace?
I'd love to spend this time together with you. I miss you! 
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Transcript

Mary Wagstaff: 1:12

Do you ever feel like you're outgrowing alcohol, that you are longing for a deeper connection to life? If alcohol is keeping you playing small and feels like the one area, you just can't figure out you are in the right place. Hi, my name is Mary Wagstaff. I'm a Holistic alcohol coach who ended a 20 year relationship to alcohol without labels, counting days or ever making excuses. Now I help powerful women just like you eliminate their desire to drink on their own terms. In this podcast, we will explore the revolutionary approach of my proven five shifts process that gets alcohol out of your way by breaking all of the rules and the profound experience that it is to rediscover who you are on the other side of alcohol. I am so thrilled to be your guide. Welcome to your journey of awakening. Welcome back to the show my beautiful listeners, thank you so much for being here. Hope you're having a beautiful day, it is my honor to be here with you. If you're new to the show, welcome. I know we have a lot of new listeners over the last few months. And it is so awesome to have you here you are going to find and explore new parts of yourself that you haven't met yet. And I just wanted to let you know I am here for you. And I believe in you, I believe in everyone that listens to this show that eliminating your desire to drink and living a really fulfilling life on the other side of alcohol is not only possible, but is your birthright, it is your the way that you were born and the conditioned. The conditions behavior of drinking is simply just that it's a learned behavior. The only unfortunate the biggest unfortunate piece about it has is less of the any of the social implications, because those can all be solved with your thoughts are the is the the energetic imprint, you know of alcohol itself, which is out of our control the the chemical, addictive piece of alcohol, right, it's like, you can think all of the thoughts you want to about alcohol, that is not a problem or that it is a problem or whatever. But you can't change what it does. Just like you can be in a relationship with someone and you know, have change your expectations and, you know, create a conscious partnering. But if someone's just yelling all the time, like you can't, there's nothing you can do with that. And that is that in alignment with your boundaries of your values, right. So we always want to think about boundaries, in terms of values, right, like the, that that is what we represent. And so I just think it's such a better way to look at alcohol being outside of your boundary, the impact of alcohol being outside of your boundary, just like, you know, living with someone if they're screaming all the time at you, or they demand things of you. And that is out of your control, and you can scream and yell back, but you don't get anywhere with it, right. And it's the same with alcohol, where you can bargain with it, you can decide to have one drink, you can only drink on the weekends, you can do all these things. But at the end of the day, it is still what it is, which is an addictive chemical, it's a drug that creates this pleasure response in your body. So you get to decide who do I want to be in the world do what is my unconditional commitment to myself, right as much as possible. And we don't beat ourselves up when we work out. I mean, I yell sometimes I don't like it. But you know, it's I, when we I do like the retro retrospective planning and see where that's not in service to myself or my family or you know, whatever, whatever human experience I'm having, then that time in between of, of reactions, and checking in with where I'm at gets shorter. And so one of the and I'm you know, this is some people or everyone that's listening to the show, or in very different places, some people are just kind of, in their curious phase. Some people many of you have quit drinking many, many times, some of you have been sober and alcohol free for years, and maybe have had kind of on and off relationship. And you might be sober now and using this podcast as an opportunity to support that journey for you. Right. But one of the biggest kind of, you know, we want to live in the moment and we want to meet the moment where it's at and we don't want to hypothetically plan too much ahead of time. However, it's for your service and in your honor of really asking yourself what is the unconditional commitment that I have to To not not drinking, but it to living in alignment with my values. And when the unexpected happens, how do I want to show up for that in alignment with my values, right. So when the unexpected happen, it's happened, it's something out of your day to day. That typically creates a not great feeling, right, a feeling of loss or sadness or tragedy, and it can be triggering. If there's a very, you know, a tragic event, there's, you know, we can look at the news all the time, and there's world events. And these are people's firsthand lives and experiences that they're having to go through loss and suffering. And really, any of us at any moment can experience something like that we really, we really just don't know, in the journey that you're taking of sobriety and really learning how to build your emotional resilience and trust your and refine your intuition is going to prepare you better for those moments. But you can also decide ahead of time, in light of your values and the self concept that you're creating as a full sovereign, grown mature, beautifully intuitive woman who honors her cycles and rhythms, who honors her emotional needs, who honors her human Earth walk as the most spiritual thing that she can do by honoring it. And going deeper into the experience of being human going deeper into the experience of being human is the most spiritual thing we can do. I believe that with all of my heart, it really quiets the noise of all of the things that we kind of thought were important, and all of the headlines that pull you here, there and everywhere, that in the end all have some agenda of just really making money. And they're you know, there's, there's some, there's some narrative that someone wants to create for you, and, and all of that, it doesn't mean that you bypass it, it doesn't mean that you don't care, but you can quiet it and choose from a place that's in alignment with your values from a place that's in alignment with the self concept of the woman that you are the net, you're naturally sober self concept of how does she show up in service and in useful, the most useful to herself and to others, right, during a time of tragedy, right? It's something that can be really shocking to the nervous system. And you heard it here before friends. You know, I find that even you know, I've been in the self help in the holistic health world for so long, that the more I do this work, I'm more interested in, in, I'm interested in like, my close people, right, like, and I want to know different opinions about things. And, you know, I, I look at every side of the spectrum, right. And like, if I, I don't really follow a lot of people on Instagram, but I definitely look at all perspectives I and so I can see them and see what triggers me and see what doesn't and what I might be curious about. So I don't I never just want to look at the one side that supports my current beliefs. Because when I changed my relationship to alcohol, I realized there was so much I didn't know. And there was so much that I didn't know that I didn't know. And if I only listen to commentary that supports my beliefs, that I never get an opportunity to grow or to question or to understand someone else's perspective. However, I find that, you know, a lot of self help books are essentially saying the same thing. And I'm less interested in people's stories that I don't know. And this is just me personally. So I find myself kind of reading less of like nonfiction, and not really watching the news. And if I listened to an audiobook, I usually listen to something very fantastical that can just take me on a journey and for me far, far away. I absolutely love fairy tales. You know, and usually there's some metaphor or allegory for our for our own life, of course, but it's really important to understand what you believe, and I have said this on the show before that, if there was no one else to have an opinion or tell you what to do. If you kind of went into a neutral place in your mind, what would you choose, right? So when it comes to the unexpected, and when the unexpected happens, the first place is to go into the body Absolutely. 100% to always go into the body, you have to stop at the emotion, you have to observe, where am I at and my nervous system and hold space for that, or you're not going to be able to hold space for anything else. And if our first response is to get a drink, and to try to settle the nervous system, by Re by an imbalancing it even further than what we do after that, what we have access to after that is going to be greatly impacted. So I always, always, always, always, always, and this is the thing that people have the most resistance to, because it's something that we're not taught. And it's something that we don't practice. But we have to go into the emotion. And this is the sensation versus the story, right? Not the story of what has happened, and really why. But the sensations of letting your body and like I talked about a couple weeks ago with transitions, giving your body time to process something to fully understand what happened to ask body, what do you need right now to rest to, to let that come up and come through you. And this is you know, and there's never I've got a lot of opinions here. And I know I don't know anything, frankly, this is basically what I've seen happen from a firsthand experience, right. But I still have such a small chunk of understanding from my own little perspective. And then, you know, the women that I've worked with, it's like there's consistency, of course, but this is never a judgment. This is just always an observation and my beautiful. My beautiful sister friend Bor Osman, who is my hula hoop instructor and dance instructor and just sister friend for life. She always says in her classes, this is an invitation, never an obligation. So when you're here listening to the show this as a side note, I just always want you to be here with an open mind. And I'm going to say stuff that you're not going to believe. And I'm going to say stuff that doesn't make sense to you, or that's different than what you do. But notice your reactions, right. And notice where there might be some resistance notice where there's an aha, notice all of that, and be willing to ask the questions to go deeper. Why does that bother me? Why do I connect with that? Right? What inside of me does that open up, but I just am, you know, know that. I don't really know anything, I'm just here, figuring it out, as well. I do know how to help women eliminate their desire to drink. And this process works. But as far as just, you know, my observations, I'm missing a huge part of the story of everyone's story. So this is an observation when the unexpected happens. So at our old house, we had this Airbnb, and this person rented the Airbnb, and it was a young cop, younger couple with a baby. And when they were messaging me before, there was already a little bit of like, what I'm going to call a drama. So that's already a little bit of a judgment, but there was something happening at work, and they couldn't be there. And they just wanted to get out of the smoke where things were and then this person stayed. And the next day, they had found out that someone that they worked with had died that they had been murdered. Tragic, like, I don't know if it was tragically, but they had been murdered on vacation. Right. So that sounds pretty tragic, someone that they knew that they had worked with, and then it was like one of the bosses and this is all you know, this is what this person is telling me, and that their jobs were now potentially being compromised. And they decided they needed to go they needed to go back home. And I don't know why. Right? So I thought about this a lot. And I talked to Matthew about it. And you know, and I have complete sympathy for them. And of course, like they were, they were the they did what they wanted to do. From through the lens of observation. It really appeared as though there wasn't that opportunity to take the time to regroup to just be and even use the support of the sanctuary where they were to give themselves that opportunity to let the information kind of settle in first before they made the decision. Right. And now going back to their home, I understand could be very comforting. But it's not going to change the circumstance, right? It's not going to change the fact that this person had died or, you know, being able like human being able to talk to their company like they had access to doing all of those things on the property. And then I kind of just look at things through the lens of my perspective and I think unless it was a family member I needed to leave and go be with or, you know, I needed to go comfort someone or something. I probably wouldn't leave a place where I was, if I had found out just someone that I knew had died, right, I would probably take that opportunity to actually be with my emotions in this space. And that's because there's nothing you can do at that point, right? So when the unexpected happens, are you giving yourself that space to feel all of the big feels right? And this is just an example of kind of a fight flight freeze moment, where the this person just completely like, did a flee moment, right? They they were. So in all of the story and less in the body. And there is no judgment, people do whatever they need to do to figure things out. But this is the way to support yourself through the unexpected. Right now, we don't always know that we're doing this trauma responses happen outside of our control. But what we do know is that there's a moment in between the, the circumstance happening, and our action, right, we have this moment, this pause moment of our body sending us a signal. And so that is the opportunity to give yourself space to feel from a place of, of course, this is hard, right? Let's just be here with this for a moment. And this is kind of manifestation 1012. If you are familiar with Abraham Hicks at all. They talk about getting inside of the vortex you have to manifest from the vortex if you're manifesting from a place of panic and scarcity, you're just gonna get more panic and scarcity. And you're gonna manifest that what we manifest positive, and we manifest what we want, and we manifest what we don't want, depending on the vibration. And so there was this kind of this, there's this opportunity to, to self soothe right to be in alignment with your values when the unexpected happens. And this is, you know, we talked about retrospective planning, but this is planning ahead of time, this is kind of that worst case scenario of how do I want to show up? Who is the type of person that I want to be in alignment with this? With this event that is happening? And how will that be the most useful? To me and to others? Where do I have the most control? When things seem out of control when things seem uncertain, right? Because oftentimes, what we do and with our media driven world is we exacerbate, right like this couple, for example, like they were on the phone, they were talking to other people. And you know, a lot of times when tragedy happens, it's like we go down the rabbit hole of social media, and we talk and we really amp up the the story, right, the story of what has been created, or the different theories of things, or we instead of starting the process of of healing, right. And I understand there's so many ways and so many different circumstances, this is obviously a very, you know, just like kind of one perspective of it. And of course, sometimes it can be very comforting to talk to people about what happened in your life when there is an unexpected event, especially when there's a community event that's unexpected, and you can get perspective and riff and reflection, right. But my invitation to you is to give yourself the space to be willing to honor yourself first and know ahead of time, what value do you want to live into when the unexpected happens? The value for me that I want to live into is leadership. I want to be fully available as much as possible for those who may not right and like this is what I'm saying if you have the capacity, right? If you have the capacity and a lot of times, people will, will use the unexpected that they're not even a part of to kind of reinforce sometimes these states of of overwhelm right there. They're like a close participant maybe but it wasn't directly like a direct impact, right? So say if there's like a fire and your house is Isn't burned down, but your neighbor's house burns down, like that's gonna affect you, obviously. But who do you want to be in that moment when you have the opportunity to support others. And so I just want you to think about what value really stands out for you just pick one, that is a boundary for you, when it comes to when the unexpected happens, what is the value of the way that you want to see yourself showing up, when you have the capacity, right? When you're in your full, like, you're not injured, you don't have to necessarily like maybe tend to a child or even you do have to attend to a child and you want to show up for that person and is incapacitating yourself when other people are incapacitated, the way that you want to show up or if you if it is a very personal event, and something very tragic happens. And we use alcohol as a form of numbing, right? Is that and these are just questions to ask is that in honor of, you know, say someone that you do know dies, is that in honor of, of being able to feel all of the things right, I just sent this message to this little chat group chat that I'm on have, like, it's been some big heavy hearted days, and I wouldn't have it any other way, I wouldn't have it any other way. Right? Because that's the depth of my human experience. And I get to really feel the gravity of what that impact meant to me. And when you can fully feel something, then you can know what you can handle. And as you know, every unexpected event is going to have a different kind of number on the scale right of how it impacts you that the this the seriousness of it, how you need to show up for that. But if you're, if the unexpected happened, or tragedy happens, or or, you know, even going back to just transitions that you are planning for happen, you lose the opportunity to build your resilience. So who do you want to be in the face of the unexpected? How do you want to show up? How do you want to honor? Who? Your emotions how that part of you responds? And what value? Do you want to be your boundary for how you show up? Because when the unexpected happens, and we always turn towards a drink as I can, the message that it sends is I can't handle this. And it reinforces that again, and again and again. And it completely invalidates how powerful and how strong you actually are to handle emotions and to show up, right? Because you do have the capacity. And a lot of times I'll say on the flip side of this, I know for me and I see this actually with a lot of women, it's like that mom, you know, like we always hear like the story of the mom who like lifts the car and her adrenaline kicks in. And I actually find when the unexpected happens that women, a lot of women that I know and this is how I show up is I don't freak out at all. I'm like if I show up, I start making plans, I take it I can stand in a very neutral place. If something happens. And I'm not talking about huge tragedy, but especially with my family, like if something goes weird or wrong. I'm like, nope, let's fix it. I got this, I'm on it. And then maybe on the other side, I'll have to kind of decompress for myself but I often can step into that role of leadership very quickly because I've been practicing building my resilience and not crumbling around, change. Okay, so plan ahead of time for yourself. And then there was a really great interview that I did with mega Gluckman, one of my colleagues about planning for the worst case scenario. And that would be another great episode to go back to if you find yourself thinking about this, or if you want to show up for the unexpected, and a new way that feels like it's in alignment with your values and create the boundary for your self Have an amazing week. As much as I know you would love to you cannot wish yourself alcohol free. You have to take action to do something different. So what I want you to do is head on over to my website, Mary Wagstaff coach.com Where You can download the free training of the five shifts of intuitive drinking, along with a free guide of questions that you can ask yourself every single day. When you have an urge. When you have a craving when you wake up in the morning, you can make it a ritual practice to start to observe yourself in a new way, and it will guide you through the process of learning to tap into your own deeper knowing so that you can develop a new relationship to yourself, which will in turn and your relationship to alcohol. Mary Wagstaff coach.com To register for the free On Demand training right now.