Stop Drinking and Start Living

Stepping Into Trust

• Mary Wagstaff

Share episode

Send us a text

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT on today's episode. 

There is no better way to strengthen your sense of self-trust than through Awakened Sobriety and alcohol freedom. In this episode, I emphasize the importance of trust, flexibility, and mindfulness in navigating life's challenges, discussing the value of simplicity in reducing multitasking and unintentional habits. Trust, safety, and intuition are crucial in creating the life of your dreams, allowing us to embrace uncertainty and cultivate a sustainable lifestyle that aligns with our values and desires.

Key Takeaways

  1. Trust and Flexibility: Emphasize trust and flexibility as vital tools for navigating life's challenges.
  2. Mindfulness and Simplicity: Highlight the importance of mindfulness and simplicity in reducing multitasking and unintentional habits.
  3. Intuition and Safety: Trusting your intuition and prioritizing safety are essential in creating the life you want.
  4. Observing Resources and Emotions: Encourages observing your resources and emotions to make positive changes.
  5. Personal Growth: Personal growth involves discernment, evolving rather than quitting, and taking responsibility for your journey.

Action Items

Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let's continue to grow, trust, and embrace the beauty of life together.


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.

Mary Wagstaff:

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. How are you doing with your urge tracking something that I've been working on for myself is this idea of one breath, one movement, and kind of dropping the the unintentional, you know, just kind of habitual way of multitasking, trying to do so many things at once, instead of doing one thing, completing that task and then moving on to another thing, and How I actually get more done in that way. So just like I encouraged you with the urge tracking to be simple and to simply just notice when you're doing it and not shaming yourself for it, when you catch yourself in the act of it, like when I find myself bringing my lunch into my office and sitting at my computer just simply shifting and then going out to the table and eating, and I hadn't had that for a while. We were kind of like everything. I didn't even have an office, like, this entire year, so, so I'm kind of taking the time to to reset, you know? And I think that that's one of the other things when it comes to our journey of awakening, as is giving ourselves the grace of transitions, giving ourselves the grace of you know that things are always like. We have to be flexible. We have to be able to go with life. This morning, we just tried to take Emmett to camp, and no one was there, and he was so sad. But, you know, we can't even find any like the person didn't even call us back, so we had to be flexible with our schedule and what that was gonna look like. And, you know, and at the end of the day, like we're still okay, because what's the most important thing? We're healthy, we're together, we have the resources like and, you know, if we, if some, if we both had to go off to an office, that would be a different circumstance. But even then, it's like, where are we gonna trust? Because that's what I want to talk about today, trust that everything's still working out in our favor. Trust that that that there, you know, I kind of feel like that they're the timing of things is always a blessing for in some way, and we have to be able to look at that. And sometimes in the moment, it doesn't really help to look at the world's kind of greater problems, but it really helps me to put myself in perspective of gratitude, of the resources I have. And, you know, if we were both leaving to go to an office where we were, where one of us had to be late, or, you know, typically in this world, where other people have families and there's we're sharing a common thread, like they're people have grace. And I think what was, what's portrayed in media and in marketing is this really narrow version of how kind people really are, and how much, how willing people are really will are to help one another. And I think if we don't see it, oftentimes, it's because we're we're also not willing, right? If we're willing to to stop and help someone or open a door or put ourselves out there to a stranger, oftentimes we are will. We will get and receive what we're willing to put out in the world. And you know that idea of being able to give freely without expectation I talked a little bit about on last week's episode. And so, yeah, this, this idea of of being able to do one thing at a time and trusting that, that there is, that it will all get done, and at the end of the day, what's the real results that I'm looking for? You know, what's the real result that I am wanting? Is really an emotion, and how can I have that? Now, if I think that the sad, I'm going to have satisfaction by completing all that tasks, all those tasks, can I have? Satisfaction by really focusing and putting my phone down and reading a book with Emmett or playing a game with him and being absorbed in that and it and I do. The truth is, is that I do So trust is a requirement of creating the life that we want. We have to be able to trust ourselves. But I think we also have to be able to trust that deeper knowing and that calling that we have that keeps turning us in to another direction, like this idea of what would be possible, what if, and a lot of that, and I've talked about this on the show, comes from a sense of safety. We have to feel safe first and grounded before we can create change, right? Safety is required in change so that just can be the same inventory of like this, the simple place of observation, what are my resources? How am I safe? Even if I'm experiencing fear, and I've talked a lot about this on the show as well. But really following the discernment between, you know, something's hard, and like, oh, I don't want to do this anymore. This isn't working. And, no, I'm being called in a new direction. And what I want you to know. And I think that there's a little bit of a shadow side of even the feminist movement, of like, you know, I can do what you can do, and getting it all done, and achievement and climbing the ladder is it doesn't necessarily leave room for creativity, but I do think there's this discernment between, like, quitting because something's hard and not seeing it through to the end result, and like desire and letting our desires change and letting them evolve and blossom into something new, which is something that I am currently doing and working on it. And if you've been following my journey a little bit this year, you know, I've been sharing a little bit kind of as a metaphor, as an anecdotal, you know, inspiration for you all too, to see what is possible, not just through alcohol freedom, but when, when you really take personal responsibility for your life and for being a human because we can be sober all day and still not take personal responsibility for our lives, and that's why I talk about awakened sobriety. What I want you to know is right now in this moment, not only do you have everything you need inside of you to create the life of your dreams and to have satisfaction in this moment, even with or without alcohol, freedom like you have everything you need because you are whole and holy. It is just things that are in the way blocking you of distortions of conditioning and these habitual objections, right? These like habitual ways that we move to create a sense of safety for ourselves, so we have to really understand what, what is the safety that we need to be grounded in so that we can create the change that we desire. But you also have everything that you need in this podcast to help you uncover the truth of who you are, and in the stop drinking and start living course, the stop drinking and start living course is both uncovering the truth about your relationship to alcohol and uncovering the truth about your relationship to yourself, which are both kind of one in the same, helping you explore the layers of who you are in light of alcohol, but also just Like your conditioning, because it is interwoven into everything. And so for a little while right now, for a little while right now, for a little while now, I have been feeling the call to pivot my work in a new area, into more in person, forward facing and what, while at the same time, like meeting my own personal needs and desire. So I consider myself a priestess, and a priestess in for my priestess scene is one that works with the cycles and rhythms of nature, connecting to the elements within and without, and some of that has taken a back seat for me to a degree in, like, the actual day to day life of practice, but it is one of the reasons that we purchased this farm that we bought. And so if you know, you know that we've been kind of nomadic for the last year, my family and I, but in that time, I had said yes, like a big hell yes to all of these other things in my life. I'm in my DJ program, my embodiment Leadership Program. As a DJ, I hosted an international retreat. I'm, you know, running this coaching practice, doing the podcast, started my book, writing my book. Which is going to be, you know, I will finish the, at least the first draft of the book by the end of the year, as in addition to my mothering, my, you know, being in my relationship, my movement practice, so on and so forth. It sounds exhausting just saying it out loud, but I do pride myself on being able to hold space for a lot of things, but in the end, if I'm being really honest with myself, it was way too much. I don't know if it was too much for everyone, but it was way too much for me to get everything done because my book has kind of taken a backseat. Of course, we need a place to live, and my mothering is probably the most important thing to me. And Matthew and I didn't have a sense of urgency and rushing because we were in a place of trust. We didn't want to just move into a place because we felt like we needed to. We wanted, we wanted to create and make an investment into not only our future for finances, but into our future for the big vision that we've been holding for ourselves, which was kind of where, when we were living in on the mountain, and we had some land there, we couldn't grow there. And one of our big visions is to be sustainable. And we really trust that life and being beings of the earth, that we can, that life wants, that for us too, that we can create an opportunity for ourselves to be sustainable, and by more sustainable, and what I mean by that is to grow our own food, have access to our own food, and to live more off of the land that we are residing in, but our bigger vision is to also create space, and this is one of my soul missions, and you've heard me talk about this with a retreat, is to create opportunities for people to come together, for to create opportunities for people to step like uncover that trust inside of themselves, and cultivate that experience and create opportunities for community that slowing down the one breath, one movement, and being in this place like where, wow, I can take a break, I can slow down and still get everything done. And in fact, when I do that, and I refine my nerve and I settle my nervous system, regulate my nervous system, and refine my intuition. That I'm actually more focused, I'm less stressed, right? But in order for me to offer that to people, I need to be able to do that for myself first. And so I cannot hold the vision. I mean, maybe I can, but I don't want to. I can't hold the vision. I don't want to hold the vision for the space that I want to create while my brain is in so many different areas of my life, and a lot of that just takes time, management skills and organization, but my nervous system is definitely at a place, if I'm very honest, that where I need to hit a reset button. I've been suffering a little bit from some digestive issues, like no big health concerns, but stuff that I just I really want to, like, nip in the bud. I really want to complete the things that I started out right. I really want to graduate from my it's called phdj, from phdj, and finish that with my full integrity. I want to finish my book The this year. So I want to complete the things that I've started, and I want to make space to take the work that I've cultivated over the last four and a half, five years in honor of my sobriety, in honor of my awakened sobriety, and I want to make space to to create the next iteration of that. And right now I'm not sure how to do that, while I'm still kind of functioning in the same way I have been, and I'm not, you know, actively taking on new clients right now. There may be another offering for that in the fall, but I'm, I'm, I'm on a wait list. I haven't been taking on brand new one on one clients to stop drinking and start living. Courses available and is really has a huge impact on people's lives. So what I want you to know is that there is, there are the resources for you to be able to cultivate this trust inside of yourself, through everything that has been said on this podcast and through the stop drinking and start living course and finding opportunities in your local community to connect with people in a new way. And I can't emphasize that enough, so creating safety is going to help you step into trust, and we create and cultivate safety by coming closer to our bodies, by really listening to our desires. And I. What I am trusting is whenever I have had a calling for something, and I followed through on that, even when it was scary, the it, it turned out better than I could have ever have dreamed of when I allowed my co creation with the universe and then other people and asking for help, like with the retreat, and I shared this in a podcast episode. It was so much better than like I ever even dreamed of. And I was excited about it because I had been dreaming about it for a long time, but I had to take that step back. I had to allow to I had to loosen my grip on some of it, and so that is what I'm doing now in my life, as I'm loosening my grip on the way of how I've been, you know, marketing myself and and my like funnel to to create a business, and pivoting by letting go and making space for something new to come in. And so this is me telling you I'm taking a break from the podcast, and it has been on. It's been top of mind for a very long time. But one of the one of the biggest reason is me following my guidance of my higher self and spirit and trusting that my intuition is guiding me to something new. My other reason is that I only live once, and I want to experience all life has to offer, and I want to make space in my brain to be really present with this new opportunity that we have of purchasing this farm, and we are going to be creating a for profit experience here, of creating we're going to be growing cut flowers and renovating the barn to have community gatherings and workshops and farm tours and a farm stand, and I will hopefully be hosting ecstatic dances and private retreats so that I can still continue to do this work, one On one with people, but in a different capacity. But for me to do that right now, I really need to hit the pause button. I really need to take a step back, reset. I just moved into a brand new community. I need to really, I want to really organize my priorities and then and create some time management for myself. So whether that's just through the summer, while thing like things are a little up in the air with Emmett schedule, or for longer, I'm not sure, but you have everything you need right here, and I'm in so much gratitude to your presence, to your support and helping me cultivate what has been such a transformative experience. The podcast has really shown me the the impact of consistency, of cultivating my voice, of stepping into the unknown and stepping into fear, and the impact that that can have. And that's kind of what I'm doing now in this other experience, I'm stepping into the unknown, but from a grounded place of trust. How can I step into uncertainty and become more risk averse? Well, it's it's knowing what my resources are and knowing that if I set something down and I can always pick it back up, right? I get to give myself permission to change my desires, to fulfill my needs in a new way. And you know, and really trust that, that there's just a new opportunity for me and for for you know, as a person that is interested in creating an impact in the world through through supporting people and helping them find more joy and peace in their lives. That I'm get to do that and in a way that maybe will be even more impactful by being, you know, hand to hand and heart to heart. So this is me saying, you know, goodbye for now and but there is an opportunity to continue to connect, which is through our new newsletter and through our Instagram, Skyline farms The Gorge, where you can come and watch our outtakes and our bloopers of the farm experience, and seeing Matthew and I grow together and using this farm as an opportunity to really deepen our relationship to one another, to ourselves, and to take more responsibility, personal responsibility, for how we show up In the world and to connect more with nature and how, you know, sobriety and alcohol freedom awakened sobriety has really been the catalyst for that, and how none of this would be possible. We wouldn't be able to take the sleep of faith, and we wouldn't be able to collaborate in such a. Sure intentional way, if there was alcohol involved, or if there was, you know, substance use involved, and being able to really still see our habits and our tendencies and take that step back to really look at them and both of us, you know, coming together with the intention of growth, you know, because it's not just me, it's him too. We're like, okay, how can we use this as an opportunity to take our relationship deeper? Have a space to create this, like where the where family and emic, and it's just like more time together, more time gathering our resources together, instead of having to leave the house and be separate and just have this experience like, what is this like? And knowing that nothing's permanent, we can always change. And I really feel like what is for me will be there waiting for me if it really, truly is. So if by the end of the summer, I want to come back. The podcast will be here, and I know that you will be there with open arms waiting for me. But there will be some, of course, offerings in the line of sacred this sacred soul work that we're doing here together in gatherings. So make sure, if you're not on my newsletter, Mary Wagstaff coach, that you go and get on there, because I will be sending out any updates for offerings that I'll be doing online, some dance experiences, some body embodiment experiences. And Nura and I are probably going to be offering this year, in the fall, more opportunities to connect in sacred sisterhood. And there will probably be another retreat happening. We're thinking in the states in 2025 so we would love to make sure that you're hooked up with that. And you just if, once you sign up for the free the free training you're added to the newsletter, but I have a farm fresh playlist for our skyline farms the gorge website, where you can go on and grab this really fun playlist to help you create more magic in the mundane. Because let's face it, we all have chores, and we all have to get stuff done right. We want to we want our nervous systems to be relaxed by having a nice environment to live in. And this is one of the things that really helps Matthew and I do that. So go grab your playlist, and I will make sure to put all the links here in the show notes. So I will leave you with this. What can you do in your life to feel more safe and secure, so that you can trust, so that you can find a little bit of freedom in the unknown, and that is a really sweet spot to be in. I love you so much. I believe in you, and know that through this podcast and through the stop drinking and start living, course, you have everything you need to just continue to connect with yourself and find alcohol freedom. It has been such a pleasure and such a joy, and I cannot wait until we meet again. None of this would be possible without you. I wanted to say thank you so much for being here. And as a special gift, I want to give you access to a masterclass that I created called fearless sobriety. It is going to walk you step by step through my five shifts process that is going to help you really gain a new perspective on an old habit. And once you sign up and you're registered, it'll take you only about 15 seconds, and you'll be rated. It's on demand. You will receive a bonus guided meditation that's going to help you learn how to experience sensations in your body, essentially from urges, from emotions, without freaking out. It's going to help you learn to regulate your nervous system so that you can be in any situation anywhere and feel grounded and feel safe. So head on over to my website, Mary Wagstaff, coach.com it'll prompt you to click the link for the free training, and I will see you on the inside. You.