Stop Drinking and Start Living

Your Desires Are The Key To Your Sober Success

• Mary Wagstaff

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You might know what you don't want, but knowing what your deepest desires are and tapping into them, mind, body heart and soul, will create your inevitable success in sobriety.  Today we dive into the depths of our desires, showing that sobriety empowers us to manifest a life beyond imagination. Let's uncover your truest yearnings, fostering a lifestyle of authenticity and fulfillment. 

Key takeaways:

  • Sobriety is a stepping stone to a life filled with vision and dreams.
  • Mindfulness and somatic practices are invaluable in transcending cravings and anchoring in genuine aspirations.
  • Embodying desires while releasing alcohol's  grip requires courage and commitment.
  • The journey to becoming Naturally Sober is within reach with the five-shift process.
  • Embrace your desires and chart a course for a life of true pleasure and alignment.

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! 
Pre Registration is required. For more information and to register, Click Here

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.

Speaker 1:

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, I am so thrilled to be here with you In real time. I am on the other side of the retreat that you've been hearing so much about.

Speaker 1:

It went off without a hitch. It was truly, truly so much more magical and fulfilling and impactful that I could have ever dreamed of on my own, and just I wanted to say so much gratitude to all of the women, and what we kept saying was this unique constellation, this unique mandala that we were making together, truly wouldn't have been the same without each and every single soul there? And there's going to be more to come, because there was such a big takeaway from my own personal journey and what it meant and Nura and I working together and how we showed up to make it the best possible experience, but also the place that we had to take ourselves right, that point where we, you know you kind of stop fighting and how something like that really doesn't work if you're micromanaging right. There were the elements, there were so many things, but I don't want to give too much away. Just know that there's going to be several series to come about, not only the impact on the women, but how the journey beyond sobriety is really the bridge to creating and manifesting your dreams, and not just any old sobriety right, but your naturally sober self, tapping in and reconnecting, reclaiming right.

Speaker 1:

We were calling this a reconnection retreat to ignite your vision, and that is what I really want to talk about today. Which is one of the very obvious things to me in the retreat was Nura kept saying the person with the biggest vision wins, and what she was meaning by that is that your vision for yourself has to be bigger than the conditioned beliefs that you have right, than anyone else's vision for you, than anything that you were taught you, than anything that you were taught. And how I really interpret that too is desire, our innate desires of what we want out of life, our dreams, our vision, what we see for ourselves has to be bigger, and this is the process of coaching, is getting out of our way of observing the objections right, observing the mind, observing the parts of us that say we can't, observing those adages that you've heard time and time again from your grandparents or your mother. Like it gets harder as you get older, right, like that thought no, that's just a thought, right? So the women that showed up to the Ignite your Vision retreat had a desire, had the desire inside of them bigger right than that comfort of staying stuck right. Their desire was big enough to say yes to something new, and this is also true in sobriety. It was a completely sober, fully present retreat. So everyone there, many of them, you know sober living, sober lifestyles that I've worked with.

Speaker 1:

But that wasn't the emphasis, that wasn't the thing that we were talking about. We didn't talk about alcohol at all. I mean, we kind of joked about it at some point, but we weren't talking about that. We were talking about what else? How do you need to get out of your way, own way, so that you can ignite your vision, so that you can continue to build this desire and we talk about, sometimes like the urge to drink, as a desire.

Speaker 1:

But I really want to not use desire anymore when I talk about alcohol, a desire for alcohol right Now, because that is not to me. Desire is something that's innate inside of you, right, and our desires as we grow change, like my desire for the way I want to interact with the world, especially after this retreat. Oh my gosh, is so much different now than it was five years ago, right and um, like just in this embodied expression way, and how I want to help move people through the women, through their own embodied desire. And so the definition of desire is a strong feeling, or wanting to have something, or wishing for something to happen. And the definition they give in the dictionary, which I love on, like whatever is on my computer, says a desire to work in the dirt with your bare hands. And I'm like I couldn't say I had to say it because I couldn't think of a more fitting, you know, example of what these women wanted. They want to connect with the embodied expression of self and the desire for a drink. It doesn't say this in the dictionary. It also says a strong sexual feeling or appetite, a strong wish or want sexually and express a wish to someone, a request, and so to me, these are all natural.

Speaker 1:

Your desire to drink alcohol is not natural. It was something that you had to acquire. You had to drink enough for long enough, enough times, frequently, right? I always say with frequency and duration, to create a want right, a yearn or a desire. So I don't even want to use that word, I'm just going to say a craving or an urge, right Like an urge. You want the urge to drink or a craving, and to me, I just want to really distinguish those two words. And so what I want you to take away from this and I'll just give really briefly, like my own personal journey, five years ago or six years ago, seven years ago, I was like I need alcohol, needs to be gone, because my desire for the life that I wanted to live, the vision that I had for my life, was so big, there was a yearning. I could feel it inside of me. Right, it was an inclination and I was hungry for it, and it was so big that I was willing to do whatever it took.

Speaker 1:

But it wasn't until I really started doing a embodiment work, which it was me being closer to the sensations in my body, feeling the expression of emotion moving through me, that I was able to do that and um so, and then also doing coaching, getting clear on my mind, the part of me that said I couldn't, because until you're, if you're, if you have this kind of like underlying desire, right, it's there. And then, like the mind just says to you like oh, but that's just not how it goes. Or as you get older, things get harder, or you don't have enough resources or enough time, or there's not space, or all the things that your brain says to you, then it becomes impossible and so you just stay the same and then that yearning for alcohol or the craving for alcohol just kind of overrides that and the other, like caveat, with alcohol, with this, like learned craving, and then your innate desire is in so many ways and this is really the thesis of my book and the thesis of my teaching through holistic alcohol coaching and with women, is that in so many ways, alcohol has been the bridge for you to have access to some of the things that you've desired. You know, as a younger woman, right, some of those sexual impulses, some of the ways that you desire to be free, that you didn't think you could just do on your own.

Speaker 1:

I recently coached someone who was saying, you know, like I've talked about this before, like my time is not my own, or you know, I don't want this to end. Right, like they're, they're out on their own, having a day to, and they don't want this to end. So they go have a drink to kind of try to continue that feeling of autonomy, when I don't want this to end or this is going to end. This feeling of autonomy and independence is going to end when I get home with my family, with my children is just a thought. And so if we never move beyond that because when I coached this person I was like, well, why does it have to end? What? What are some of your other options? So we look at it from this really neutral perspective and it's like, well, I could just call and say I'm not coming home, I'm going to go to the bookstore, I'm going to go to a yoga class, like what are the consequences? What's possible? Or how do you create a different circumstance for yourself?

Speaker 1:

So the process of mindset work and then mindfulness, which I really think of somatic embodiment as a mindfulness practice are the two ways that you really need to tap into getting access to manifesting your desire. But alcohol takes you further away from that because it reinforces the story that you can't and then it reinforces your craving for it, which is where you're getting some sense of pleasure. But accessing your innate desire and having it manifest, like the pleasure that I experienced and I worked harder than I have ever worked right On this retreat I asked myself to show up in a way that had not yet been humanly possible for me and that is a very personal experience. But the space and the container and the energy like we had to hold, like the space for all these women's nervous systems, essentially, but the pleasure I was able to experience, because my desire was so strong, even through some resistance or some discomfort, was so much more available to me because I was willing to let go, I was willing to actually stop fighting anything of what I thought it should be and I'll get into that more in another episode because it's really really powerful and it really shows me the potential of the manifesting powers that are available to us as women when we're tuned in to refining our intuition, to our deep knowing, to our trust through sobriety. It just wouldn't have been possible.

Speaker 1:

But for you, today, what I really want to make clear is just very simple that we move beyond alcohol into an authentic alignment with the truth of who you are, when you have a really clear picture of your desire. And this doesn't just have to mean, like I want to, you know, host a retreat in Mexico, which is literally something that I've always wanted to do, but it doesn't have to mean that it could be a feeling of freedom. I don't want to live the life that my parents thought that I should live. I want to feel free, I want to feel connected, right. So, even if you have some resistance to that, there is an energy you can tap into and my invitation is like pick something right, like even if because what's going to happen is your brain is going to create parameters of desire, right. And that's why it's like go beyond what you even think possible, what you've even ever dreamed of right Like. What's the most fantastical thing that you can think of right Like? For me, it's having an open air, beautiful Spanish colonial style beach house with like outdoor alfresco dining and open air living and a beautiful yoga shala on the beach with hammocks and places for people to rest and delight in a lap pool and there's just friends that come by and there's fruit growing. What is the most fantastical desire? Because then that's going to invoke sensation inside of you. That's going to be more in an authentic alignment of what you do want, where you're going for.

Speaker 1:

And a lot of times when we're stuck in a rut, you're really bogged down with what's not working, what doesn't feel good, and yes, you could use that as motivation in a year from now if I still feel like this, what is that going to be like? But shift number two in the five shift process is moving from shame and judgment to compassion, understanding and validation, and really we're moving towards pleasure, because compassion is pleasure, right, it's what helps you find relief, naturally on your own. So I think it's a whole new paradigm to release even the piece of like well, I know what I don't want and to tap into that and move towards making decisions and alignment and really honing in on your desire for what you do want and asking yourself the questions what does it feel like? Why is it important? How will it impact my life and the life around me? You've heard me say it before and I'll say it again the reason you think you can't is the reason that you need to and recognize what shows up for you when you start to dream that big, when you start to really tap into your natural desires. Is there fear? Is there resistance?

Speaker 1:

When I do these exercises with my clients, oftentimes they want to go back in to the story of the practicalities and I invite them to stay with the part of you that already has the result that you want and create from that space. Create from the part of you that already has a result you want, because if you can feel it and you can see it, I really believe that you can have it. And the more you can tap into that and tune up your senses and use your embodied imagination, the easier it's going to be for you to stop fighting the resistance of the story that has you trapped around alcohol, the easier it is going to be for you to tap into sobriety and love it and, like I say I've always said this about my yoga practice that it keeps getting better. Even in the challenge, even in the shaking, even in the struggle, I'm like, oh yes, because the relief on the other side of it feels so good. So the lesson this week is to turn up and to spend some time really thinking about your desires and don't just like walk around thinking about them. Give yourself tomorrow morning when you sit down, wake up, set your alarm for 15 minutes earlier, wake up with your cup of tea or whatever your ritual is, or tonight, before you go to bed, and just write some stuff out, or close your eyes and really dream and manifest. Manifest it and know, like you already know, why that's not capable with alcohol in the way, because so much of your energy, your cognitive ability, your body, you know your physical energy, your mental energy, your emotional energy, your spiritual energy none of is all going towards alcohol and it's completely out of alignment. So we want to move away from the conversation being about alcohol to the conversation being about alignment to your desires. Your desires are innate inside of you and they're going to keep changing and this is why so many people have issues in relationships because they don't take a step back to think like, wow, we're evolving, we're changing. This is different and work with the evolution of who you are. The same with alcohol? Alcohol maybe didn't once work for you.

Speaker 1:

The first year that I met Matthew and we were partying like there was no tomorrow was fun. Was it amazing? I mean not that I would. I mean I got addicted to alcohol and drugs because of it, but like I still had a really good time. I was like literally having a time of my life. It doesn't work for me anymore. I stayed up till one o'clock in the morning. The other day I went to. I took Emmett and a couple of my girlfriends to see a really amazing band guy that I love. We've talked about on the show. He hosts a really early show. It's completely sober and I was like so spent the next day because of the way the sensitivity of you know and it's fine, but like I'm so tuned in in alignment with my desires, but even staying up later and having to drive and I ate later than I normally would have and all those things um created some discomfort inside of me.

Speaker 1:

Have fun this week tuning into your desire and just remember the bigger the desire, the easier it's going to be to move through resistance. The bigger the desire, the more willing you're going to be and the more in love you are going to fall into sobriety. The bigger the desire, the bigger the win, right? So enjoy, delight and have so much fun. Stay tuned for all the magical lessons that I'm going to bring to you and some new interviews, and if you're not already signed up for the Naturally Sober Woman self-study course of desire, get in there. It is available for you right now to really start to tap into this work and get crystal clear about the relationship that you want to have with yourself. Have a great week.

Speaker 1:

You know how you keep trying the same thing with alcohol to try to moderate, to make excuses, to make rules, and it's still not sticking. And really every time you try to quit drinking, it almost seems to make things worse. That is because you are looking through a black and white lens, either on or off, and what my method, the five shifts process, does is it helps you take a step back and to open your perspective, where you start to really look at the relationship you have with yourself and learn how to do all the things that you think alcohol is doing for you on your own. All of this information is available to you right now in a really short and concise free training on my website, marywagstaffcoachcom. So get on over there, sign up. It'll take you about 10 seconds and I will see you on the inside. It's going to change your life forever.