Recommit with Conviction

Whether you began this year with a resolution or you're seeking fresh inspiration to reignite your commitment, this episode will offer you the insights and encouragement to continue moving forward.

Have you ever wondered what it means to truly commit to your own transformation, especially when it comes to reshaping your relationship with alcohol? Today I share the power of intentional action and the magic of aligning with life's rhythms to foster sustainable personal growth.

Let's peel away the layers of superficial fixes like Dry January and instead, observe  the  significance of continuous self-discovery.

This episode questions the delicate balance of embracing life's natural ebb and flow while maintaining a steady course toward our goals. Using the tender act of self-compassion during those inevitable low-energy dips, and I share how implementing just one small daily practice can subtly yet significantly keep you on track with your intentions.

My private coaching program, which combines a feminine  with holistic perspective, guides you towards a easeful and sustainable sobriety so you can make alcohol unimportant. Schedule a discovery call here. 

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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You have everything you need right now to find alcohol freedom with The Stop Drinking & Start Living Course. Join 100's of Women who have successfully eliminated alcohol from their lives using The Five Shifts Processes. Click here to learn more and join.

Chapters

• 1:12 Recommitting With Conviction
• 18:15 Finding Spiritual Alignment in Cycles

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:12

Do you ever feel like you're out growing 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 what is going on. Welcome back to the show. My beautiful listeners, thanks so much for being here. I hope that you enjoyed that three-part series and I became aware that the part two of the series, for a short period of time maybe for a week had been a repeat of part one, and that was not intentional. So if you started listening to part two and you're like, oh, this is the same as part one, go back and listen to it, because they all tie together and it has been replaced. So thank you so much for bringing that to my attention, my beautiful listener and friend. Today's episode is all about recommitting with conviction. I recently received a letter from a listener who had said I want to get back to that passion and that energy that I had when I first started listening to the show about my commitment to self, and I think that this time, if you're listening in real time after the new year we're into the middle of February the waning phase of the fire and the collective energy of that renewal may be showing up in your life. Where you felt really convicted, there was like a dry January moment and so on and so forth, and I've talked about this on the show before and the reason that I don't necessarily promote dry January and the reason I did a 40-day alcohol transformation challenge and started it before the new year is because it's just a point in time. There is collective energy. However, the truth is, if you follow the wheel of the year and in cycles and rhythms, the beginning of January is not really the time to start new things. The beginning of January is more of a time of really grounding into your intention. And then we just celebrated in bulk, which is that cross-quarter holy day, which was that's when there's a little bit of movement, when there's a little bit of the thawing of the earth, and we had a sister circle live. That was amazing. We had almost 200 people register and it was just so beautiful to witness the transformation that is available to people when women are just in energetic space with one another, with the same intention of connecting to the part of themselves that is beyond the conditioning, that is beyond the label. And one of the pieces and this is really the first piece that I really want you to understand about recommitting with conviction is that we have to accept that we do not live in a linear way. We are always evolving, so we have to look in, in, set forth on a journey, and especially one as big as changing your relationship to alcohol, with the understanding ahead of time that is going to be a cyclical process, right, my relationship to sobriety and to alcohol at this stage is very different than it was a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, five years ago, right, so it's a constantly evolving process where you know, at this point a I don't really think about alcohol except when I come to go to work every day and be like it's not, as is interesting to me right, like I don't Need to spend my time talking about sobriety. I'm in the embodied living of the results of returning to my coldness. Reclaiming my coldness is just a sovereign person, and that is in light of other conditioned beliefs and other constructs that I may have picked up along the way, right, and that I have more clarity now to see what those are, with alcohol out of the way. And I wanted to share with you another Little story that one of the women who signed up has signed up for the reconnection retreat in april, which we still have a few spaces available. If you've been on the fence, I want to encourage you to really take this in, this inspiration in. She said after being absorbed in a relationship, work and caring for my dog, I was really looking for a reset and to reconnect with myself. I also want to discover what my spiritual practices look like now at this particular crossroads in my life. So much of that can feel like heavy lifting in the day today, right, like carving out that space to really do the inner work, which is why you come to this podcast is to carve out the space to focus your, your intentions with your attention. I saw this retreat as an opportunity to utilize the beautiful container that Mary and you are creating, as well as a powerful energy of sisterhood. I'm so excited to show up for myself and I know, whatever happens, the feeling of safety and intentionality that Mary and you bring to everything they do will be so integral to this period of reclamation. So what this person is saying Is that the commitment to self is always there, right, but there are periods in our life where we are absorbed in other things. Other things are taking our attention and you know wherever she was at that stage in her spiritual relationship, she was applying those things to that part of her life, to her relationship, to her work, to caring for her dog, and I spoke to this person, so I know that that piece of bringing an animal into her life and caring for was a huge part of her journey, and so it's really meeting yourself where you're at that next spiral, so making the intentional space to do it, and that was what the 40 day alcohol transformation challenge was about. So first step is just dropping your expectations that you should always be excited, that it should always be easy, that you're not going to have to come back, regroup and refocus your intention. You got to drop that, because it's always going to happen. The next step is to make space for it. When in your day can you spend a little bit of time with yourself? When can you look at what was my intention for where I started and do a little bit of retrospective evaluation, which was also something that I offered to the participants of the 40 day alcohol transformation challenge? And really what the retreat is all about is about this condensed, immersive experience of really being able to set the time aside, where we're not distracted by screens and phones and people, to go inward to really make that intentional, immersive experience. And then, during the eclipse portal, nura always says that whatever happens during the eclipse portal lasts us for the next six months, lasts us for the next year. It's integrated into who we are. And then the next year we have a new version of ourselves, and it's not that we're always in this healing journey. There's this amazing song by a woman named Toni Jones that says healing is not my purpose. And I always say stop at the vista. So you do this work, this intentional work, and then you live it and then you are the embodiment of it. I listen and take in very little self-help right now in my life. I don't listen to podcasts anymore. I haven't been taking in any self-help books or anything like that. I'm really in the embodied living of what do I know, and then I'll meet myself with a next challenge. I mean, that's not 100% true, because I am in this DJ school program that is very much about the inner journey, our inner hero's journey. So it's like the both and and. There's coaches and mentors when stuff comes up for us. But that to me is like the embodied expression of it. Right, I'm actually participating in where I'm at right now in my life. So you have to evaluate, but you have to also start with what has changed. So if you started a dry January moment, or if you participated in a 40-day alcohol transformation challenge, what has changed that's integrated, even if you have had a drink since then, even if you don't have that same fire underneath you. You have to look at what thoughts and beliefs have changed that have been integrated into your life and then, when you have that evidence, you apply that to the areas that you are struggling with. For example, one of the women that was pretty active in the alcohol transformation challenge that I already also work with in my one-on-one private coaching program. She really was able to shift her reactions to other people's processing. So when other people were having an emotional reaction, instead of taking it personal, instead of making it mean anything about her, she was able to really take a step back and hold the space of this is their process, right? But now her work is how do I show up for myself to understand that maybe I do have an initial trigger that I want To some external validation? So how do I show up for myself in my my own emotional process, right? So there's always some nuggets of transformation that you need to Look at to see, okay, how can I apply that, using my intention, using my life intention and my values, to what feels hard and what's not working? And the invitation to create a sustainable relationship to your spiritual alignment is Available to you in every moment, so that you don't feel like you were completely absorbed and lost from your Spiritual practice. And the best way to do that is to be in rhythm with the cycles of nature, right, following the phases of the moon and even just looking at the moon. Now, for me, I've had such a deep reverence and communion with the lunar cycles and with the moon herself that now, when I see the moon, it's just like this wink back at me of remembrance, of connection to the divine feminine, of connection to myself as part of nature, to part of life and Another practice that I have started. So there's that, there's a pause and a deep breath Every time you see the moon and tuning into the cycles and rhythms of that. And if you don't see the moon, you can, you know, chart the moon phase. You can download an app on your phone. I have this beautiful book called the we moon. It's a calendar and just chart it, checking into where you are in relationship to the phases of the moon. Another beautiful invitation to Really can bring your Spiritual connection into your everyday practice or bring your intention for yourself. Because that's what why you want to quit drinking in the first place right is because you feel out of alignment with the truth of who you are. Right and like. I just know this after four years of doing this show, coaching hundreds of women one-on-one, there is no doubt in my mind that the bridge between where you are and where you want to go with alcohol in your life is spiritual alignment, and that means looking at yourself from a holistic perspective, understanding your needs mind, body, heart and soul and that takes presence. That takes the practice of mindfulness and the practice of mindset, work Shifting and examining our beliefs, always questioning you know what, don't I know. So what is the thing that you do every single day that you can just bring presence to? So the place where I'm currently staying has a little coffee grinder and an espresso machine, and I had kind of gotten away from coffee for a while, but the invitation of like a latte in the morning is pretty desirable to me and it's just like a nice practice too, because it kind of has you slow down. So anyway, as I'm sitting there foaming the milk and this is just one example I've been doing this breath work practice of inhaling through the mouth and exhaling through the mouth. It's also an immune boosting way to use the breath to boost your immune system, but it really brings me into presence with myself. So what is something that you can do every day? Because there's there's times for me where I wake up every single morning and I sit and I met journal and I meditate for an hour, right, but that doesn't happen every single day all the time. It's not a non-negotiable for me because I am as a yoga practitioner. I have discovered that my practices are cyclical, that my best yoga sometimes is not is not going to. Yoga is is honoring where I'm at. So I think being super rigid and strict about your practices is what can keep you out of alignment. You have to meet yourself where you're at. But a way to come into presence is by picking one thing that you do every day you brush your teeth every single day right and really bringing your full awareness to that, gazing in your own eyes, having a little wink and a smile and having a word or a phrase that you say to yourself. Because the truth is is that nothing has gone wrong, and maybe that's the invitation that you offer to yourself today. Nothing has gone wrong. One of my favorite thoughts about recommitting with conviction is I can turn this around right. Sometimes I get super distracted. I have a day where I've been surfing for information on the internet, or maybe I want to buy something, and I look at all these things and I don't make a decision, instead of being upset about the way that I spent my day. I tell myself I can turn this around. Just to recap, how to recommit with conviction is to drop the expectations that everything is just going to be linear and you're going to go from A to B. No, this is not how nature works and you are nature and really honoring that. If I get good at living in cycles and rhythms, with the way that I show up cyclically, like that is the work, right, I need to know how to meet myself when I'm not have that spark and that fire and that super excitement, how do you want to meet yourself there again next time? The second thing was evaluate what has changed. Look for, even if it's one little teeny, tiny thing, what has changed since January. What's a belief, what's a way that you're showing up differently? What is one thing that is working really well that you're doing differently and how can you apply that to the areas that you're struggling with? And then three is to pick one small thing that you do every day and I invited you to just even notice the phases of the moon and the moon but pick one small thing that you do every single day where you start to connect your intention with that task so that it doesn't have to be one more thing that you have to add to your list. And, of course, if it feels good, you know, by all means like sit and journal and meditate, but one small thing where you can connect with yourself, you can meet your own gaze, you can pause, take a few breaths and you can really connect with your intention. And, like I shared earlier in the share about the woman that's coming on the retreat with us, creating intentional space on purpose whether it's through one-on-one coaching with me or if you are ready to say yes to coming on this reconnection retreat, creating intentional space to dive deeper and to tune inward is how to create sustainability and accountability right. So when you have it blocked off in your calendar and you've made a sacred investment in yourself and there's a signal to your brain, this moment matters. This is what creates the biggest impact, so that you're not stopping and starting all of the time and you learn more efficiently how to work with your cycles. So I can't wait to connect with you and I hope you have an amazing, amazing week. I'll talk to you soon. The bridge between where you are and where you want to go with alcohol is spiritual alignment. That is what makes my private coaching program so unique and effective. It meets the needs of all parts of you through a feminine lens, so that sobriety can become a sustainable part of your life, while alcohol becomes unimportant. Take your commitment to self to the next level by scheduling a private discovery call with me. Follow the link in the show notes to pick the best time that works for you and I will take care of the rest. I can't wait to connect with you in real life.