What Happens In Vegas...The Short Cut To Sobriety

Today I share with you a personal experience of spending three days in a Las Vegas night club dancing with strangers. It was an integrative journey that anchored my knowing in the ONLY SHORT CUT to sobriety.  Today I share with you my take aways.

Takeaways:

• Sobriety is more than just abstaining from alcohol; it's a journey of self-discovery and authenticity.
• Why integration is so important.
• Embrace the edges of your comfort zones to go beyond resistance with success.
• How to create sustainable sobriety quicker and with greater ease. 
• Why you are confused about alcohol.

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 Awaken to a Deeper Connection
• 13:02 Embodied Leadership Retreat Invitation
• 21:56 Holistic Approach to Sobriety Coaching

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. Welcome back to the show. My beautiful listeners, it's so wonderful to be here with you. You have no idea how much I think about you. I have so many notebooks, so many open documents, so many notes in my phone. Every yoga class I watch or go to, or I just was in a training that I'm going to share about this weekend. I'm constantly like, how does this apply? How does this apply? How does this apply? So every lesson I learned in my own life. I'm always bringing to you, and I wanted to share a beautiful email that I got as just a shout out to this listener, because it means so much and hopefully you can take something away with it away from it. She wrote in just to share about her experience and I thought it was really sweet, so I listened to your podcast for some times and also the 40-day challenge sessions, which was the free offering that I had at the beginning of the year. If you want access to that, email me, I'm going to put that together as a free offering on my website, but it just hasn't happened yet. It is still very potent. People are using it. I have clients that didn't join then and they're joining now, so it's all on replay. I want to thank you for sharing your knowledge for free. It has really helped me grow as a person. It's very generous of you and I'm so grateful and happy to gently share what I've learned with others. I want to thank you for your attention and focus on that, not the alcohol Hell. Yes, I am at the start of my stop drinking, start living journey and alcohol is slowly becoming smaller in my life. Sincere thanks again and wish you all the very best. This is the magic, right, and I'm going to do a podcast just about sober curiosity. But sober curiosity isn't just like a fun experiment. Sober curiosity is literally the five shift. Sober curiosity is a way to quit drinking, right, because it so it can become slowly smaller in your life. It doesn't happen overnight. We don't just not drink and then everything's better, right, we have to actually unlearn it and learn a new skill set, and this person gave me full permission to share her words and then also said that she left me a review on Apple podcasts, and so I would encourage you to follow her lead and if you've taken anything away from the show, please go over to Apple podcasts and leave a rating and a review and share with your loved ones, because, as you know, this, this is so much more than about alcohol. I have people write to me all the time that don't they apply this to other areas of their life. We're really learning together as women, how to reconnect, how to step into our power, how to remember the essence of who we are in our birthright, and that's really what this episode is about today. I have one more caveat I wanted to share with you Last week's show, which was amazing if you didn't listen to it, jacqueline. I had meant to put this at the beginning of the show because I knew it was going to come up and someone had already said something to me about it. Jacqueline talks about using plant medicine as an opportunity for her to awaken to a new reality. Plant medicine and I think she would agree with this 100% is not a cure-all right. It is not a fix to like. People have amazing, wonderful experiences with plant medicine, but what plant medicine does is it opens different channels of your brain so that you can see a new perspective that you've never seen before. So you have this really dramatic aha moment of wow reality. Isn't this prescribed formula of going from A to Z right? That I have to be these certain ways, that I'm in this box and like this is life isn't just about external achievement. That was the awakening moment that Jacqueline had, and there was probably so many more and there was rememberings of who she was, all of these things right. But she says also, as a caveat in that same in the episode she says coaching was the integration right. And I actually just spoke over the weekend at a retreat. I was out with a ketamine facility therapist and I've known people that have taken ketamine and have have really amazing results on it. But it's the integration, they're also in therapy, they're also in coaching and she said this ketamine therapist? She said yes, without integration this awakening can actually make people go the other direction because they have these awareness of holy crap, I've been living my life like kind of under a lie essentially, and now how do I show up when I know that you know there's like this other way to live, and so that is like in a chintilla talked about this in the in the episodes about the priestess path right, the priestess path and what Jacqueline and I did was about how do I be in my consciousness, showing up for myself and my truth and alignment with my spirituality in the fullest expression of who I am, and then go out into the world and I think that the drinking or the depression or whatever is, you know there's lots of reasons. So just know that, I know that, but is also not knowing how to integrate the inner and the outer right, like you have this inside experience but you don't know how to be that in the world, and that was something Jacqueline and I really worked on a lot, you know, and she had had several plant medicine journeys, but it wasn't just that right. That doesn't just flip the switch and now you don't want to ever drink again. So I want to say that as a caveat, because for many people, the plant medicine you're already out of state of awakening that you don't even necessarily need that right and in my personal experience it's not sustainable. It is like we can have these big aha moments and I've worked and talked to, worked with and talked to many other spiritual mentors and coaches and, like you know, wellness practitioners that have had the same experience. So it was part of their journey, they experienced it. But in a day to day you're still using something from the external to create the internal and that and even with Jacqueline, that was something. She had come to a point where, like she, she didn't need that anymore. She had come to a place of awakening where she was really ready to integrate from the inside out and not need an external resource to to have these deeper, more profound experiences inside and just in life, with her eyes wide open, without, you know, this altered state of consciousness like we can create an altered state of consciousness just by being right, and it takes effort, but there are practices and then it's just really a lot of it is perspective, right, and it's about showing up in ritual and showing up in ceremony for your life and then remembering the times where you don't see that right. I have many times in my life where I like forget that it's magic and miracle, and I know that now, like I trust in my own cycles and rhythms, and that's also the opportunity of this retreat is to experience an altered state of this really transformational experience that you don't have in your everyday life. And then the integration piece of how do I now integrate this into, into my life and into the world? So I really want to, you know, impress upon people, if they're ever interested in experiencing something like this, that they really incorporate it with an integrative approach for continued therapy, continued coaching, continued working with a spiritual mentor. And you know, obviously the work that we do here is really in alignment with the awakening and these big shifts of perspective that people had. Well, lots has changed since I last spoke to you. Well, at least more of an embodied awareness of everything that I teach. So if I sound a little different, there's a reason why everything that I've been expressing to you over the recent well, probably since the beginning of the show, but really in the last, I would say, six months, since I've been promoting the retreat that I'm doing and don't worry if you're listening to this after the retreat that we're hosting in Mexico in April Is really this, is this podcast will apply to your life because it's all about. It's all about our birth, right? It's all about living from our bodies and a gift that an innate gift and innate talent and innate skill set that we have as humans, that we really moved away from. That has made the need for alcohol To become stronger, to become more like the dissociation that we experience with alcohol is has become a means to experience, to actually just not even experience life, but to make it through life. Right. But because we have so much information coming at us at such a fast rate and we're not doing physical jobs with our senses as much anymore, the need to utilize our senses for survival, I would say, is just as high or even more important, but it exists in a different way, where we were using our biological clock to grow food and to have to actually understand soil and light and composition, where now we really need it more to understand our emotional responses to life, to understand that really subtle knowing, the intuition, right. And this is something that takes us we get taken so far away from with alcohol. And I really would love for you to go back, if you haven't, to listen to the last podcast with Jacqueline with her interview about her experience of A awareness right, which is the first shift. So Jacqueline pretty much took us through the five shifts in her story. Now, she didn't really know she was saying it that way, but it was true. It's awareness is the first shift, right? Like she became aware of her experience as a human that was different from the story that she had been telling herself for all of the years, or that the story she believed, the way that she thought she needed to live her life. So she became aware that there was a different perspective, right, and she started to ask the questions what else don't I know and that's where you are when you start to awaken from alcohol the fact that this isn't resonating. There's not a resonance, there's a dissonance with the alignment and the way you wanna live. There's a disconnect, but you're just not sure how to get there because all of the solutions that have been presented to you have become problems. They also are disconnected and we'll go into more of that on a later date. But essentially you wouldn't be here if the solutions worked right, like in. Jacqueline said that I didn't resonate with what I was being offered. Right, it didn't make sense to me, I didn't fit into it. But being that it was the solution, it was the norm. Then she questioned is there something wrong with me because this doesn't work for me, right? And I think this happens in other institutions as well, and I would say recovery and recovery and sobriety have become their own institutions. And that's really something else I'm trying to make you aware of as well is that we have to understand and become aware first, that it's just one perspective, just like with school, like people shame themselves around school and not being able to be good in school, when traditional schooling models really only work for about 12% of human brains. Like, 12% of human brains thrive in that environment. Now, that doesn't mean those human brains are better, they just happen to thrive in that type of learning environment in a traditional school setting. That's a pretty small amount, right? So now everyone is like neurodivergent because they don't fit into that model when really like, maybe those are the people that are neurodivergent, right Like? That's just another conversation. So, as I've gone on my journey beyond alcohol, I have intentionally well, I've been doing this my entire life but I've intentionally put myself in new environments where I will meet resistance to myself, where I will feel vulnerable, where I will feel scared, where I will feel intimidated, where I will feel shy, where I won't want to do something. But there's a calling inside of me to go deeper, right Like I. My favorite thing about my life I just shared this with some friends last night my favorite thing about my life is putting myself in experiences where I can be blown away by what I don't know about what it means to be human, that I and these experiences are living from my body and I enter with the intention of, like this is gonna feel uncomfortable, and I think I shared about the 12 or about the 15 or 18 second hug. A couple weeks ago I went to this really intensive Kundalini class. I was like two and a half hours long and Kundalini really pushes you to your edge physically and emotionally, and we had to do these long hugs. There's no better way to slow time down than to have to be present with someone else that you don't know and physically connect with them. But I had already made the decision, the mindset in my head that I like I just gonna drop my expectations and really go for it, like, really, just like have this catharsic, cathartic experience and really be present for someone and just like not make it weird. And so I did that, and the same thing happened with this last weekend and it's kind of soon to share. But I feel like I integrated the last five years which have been the last five years that I have been not alcohol free into this last weekend and there will be a process of integration after this. So some of you may know that I talk about being a DJ. I'm doing this DJ training. Well, it's more than just, like you know, playing the chicken dance at a wedding Like this is not actually what I'm doing at all. The program is a seven month program, it's called PhDJ and it is an immersive embodied leadership experience. Right, and I have been an embodiment practitioner for the most of my adult life, as a yoga instructor, as a fitness instructor, as a mindfulness educator and now as a holistic alcohol coach. I take my clients into their body and I say that the gap between where you are with alcohol and where you want to go is spiritual alignment. But spiritual alignment can only happen through the body. It's not something you can experience outside of yourself, and that's kind of one of my stories is like I went seeking spiritual enlightenment by traveling around the world right or whatever, like looking outside of myself but it only happens in your body, like that's how we connect. We connect to the essence of who we are truly by going where there's resistance and doing it intentionally. And that's really the invitation with this Mexico retreat is. It is a transformative experience because you're intentionally putting yourself into a space to experience something new in your body and I really just whether it's working with me and coaching, whether it's going to an ecstatic dance, whether it's going to a yoga class for the first time, whether it's going to a sister's giving someone an 18 second hug, whether it's coming to Mexico with me, I want to invite you to go, find something to do that is like way outside of your comfort zone in relationship to other people. Right, this is what's important Putting yourself to be seen and witnessed. And, like so many of you right now, are probably really scared and like I'm not going to ask, I don't. This is all about consent to right. So the people that are coming to the retreat, like they are intentionally putting themselves into a new experience that's pretty much their intention of everyone that's coming, and there will be really gently guided practices where you will be held and guided in a really loving way with your full consent. But the invitation is going to be to stay when you want to run away, like stay longer. That's why you're here and like no one's looking, we're all doing the same thing, right? So part of this DJ training, this embodied leadership training, is that we get to create. We know music makes us move, right. It invokes something inside of us. We can feel the music on our skin. We respond to music through emotion, through body, and there's different music, as everyone knows. It is the universal language that responds differently to different parts of us and it invites us into relating to ourselves, right, and then also relating to the other. In the end, your body knows, your body knows how to take care of you and you have to become better at listening. You have to become better at slowing down. One of the other things we learned was to find our voice this weekend and to remember that I have time. I have time and what do I want to do with that time? How do I want to To utilize my time? What energy do I want to be in? Do I want to be frantic? Do I want to be guarded? Do I want to be protected or do I want to be here, right here, with my two feet right underneath me, making decisions that might be challenging and learning how to trust myself? So, as you move into your own journey this week, know that you're not alone, know that I'm here to support you. But there is a call, there is an invitation here to go deeper and it can seem kind of scary and daunting and elusive and, you know, weird, but that's okay. That is why we're here. The human experience is kind of strange, right, but you won't die Right. There are a lot of other things that you could put yourself into threat, into harms way, alcohol being one of them. I don't really like to harp on the negative impact of alcohol because it doesn't feel good in the body, but there are a lot of dangers associated with alcohol, but there really aren't any dangers associated with feeling resistance in your body and the more I dance, the more I explore my body, the depth of the story that my body has to tell and its wisdom is profound. So I am bringing this to you and this is my experience. I really trust that it was the experience of everyone else I was dancing with and I trust it's been the experience of my clients. And it is part of my Vision to create opportunities for for me to engage with people who also have the call that are, you know, in alignment with this, offering To be in the body more. And that's really what this experience of this embodied leadership is about, because I've just seen the profound impact that it has. It's actually already integrated, integrative in and of itself. Right where I was earlier talking about the plant medicine journey Needs this, this longer approach, and I and I do believe that there is minds, that the mindset and uncovering beliefs and using your voice is super important as well, but without going into the body, into a deeper expression, and I think the actually being able to move it. And I do that with my one on one clients to some degree and we do emotional processing, but I really want the space to be able to move. I really want the space to be able to move, and that can happen in an online space as well, but we are doing it in Mexico and less and like just a month's time. So there's only just a couple of spots left and I'm telling you, girl, get on it, let's do this. If you have any questions, reach out and thank you for being here. Have an amazing, amazing, transformative 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.