Stop Drinking and Start Living- The Feminine Way
What kind of Woman do you want to be? The answer holds the key to releasing alcohol and reclaiming what you’ve lost on the road to empowerment.
Stop Drinking and Start Living – The Feminine Way helps women effortlessly release alcohol by reconnecting with their feminine energy and stepping fully into leadership.
Hosted by Mary Wagstaff, holistic alcohol coach and embodiment facilitator, this show goes beyond sobriety to explore how feminine wisdom and embodied practices make you a more intuitive, empowered, and magnetic leader—in your work, family, and life.
Mary knows firsthand what it takes to outgrow alcohol and reclaim the energy, clarity, and confidence to lead with ease. Because you’re not quitting drinking—you’ve simply outgrown it.
Each week, you’ll uncover what’s keeping you disconnected and stuck in cycles of numbing—and learn to replace it with pleasure, presence, and purpose.
The feminine way is an invitation to lead differently. Tune in every Wednesday and step into the woman you were meant to be.
Want to drink less without deprivation? Learn the six cheat phrases to calm your urges and end the inner battle. Grab your free guide here: https://marywagstaffcoach.com/urgetracking
Background Music Savannah Sultana Graciously Provided by The Exceptional Talent of Scott Nice : https://www.scottnice.com
Stop Drinking and Start Living- The Feminine Way
Is Not Drinking a Form of Punishment? The Feminine Way to True Freedom
You get to decide what sobriety means for you.
Today’s episode is inspired by a listener question:
“How do we ensure we're not using not drinking alcohol as a form of punishment or deprivation?”
This question is huge, because how you think about alcohol—and about quitting it—determines your experience of sobriety. The feminine way to releasing alcohol isn’t about willpower or restriction; it’s about embodying a new way of being—one where not drinking becomes an act of self-honor, not self-denial.
- What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why the belief that sobriety is punishment is just that—a belief
- How to shift your mindset so that quitting drinking feels like a gift, not a loss
- The role of safety in the feminine way of transformation
- How to explore and rewrite your beliefs about alcohol
- Why your body is already designed to generate real pleasure—without alcohol
This Is Not Deprivation—It’s Awakening
Sobriety is not about taking something away. It’s about waking up to the truth of who you are. It’s about stepping into an embodied experience of peace, power, and pleasure.
Listen and Apply
- What do you believe about alcohol?
- How does that belief shape your experience?
- What if quitting drinking was the most loving thing you could do for yourself?
This is your invitation to step back, create space, and start questioning everything you thought was true.
- 🎧 Tune in now, and if this episode resonates, send me a message with your own reflections and questions for coaching. Let’s keep this conversation going!
- Ready to quit drinking without feeling like you’re missing out? Book a free call here.
It's time to GLOW-UP and just in time for the warm weather. Shake off the stagnant, stuck energy and activate your aliveness. Book a Sober Glow-Up Activation Session HERE. You can turn your story around with ONE decision.
DISCLAIMER: This podcast and its contents are not a substitute for rehabilitation, medical treatment or advice. It is for educational and inspirational purposes. I am not a therapist or doctor. The views here are expressed a personal opinion and based on first hand experience. Please consult a doctor if your mental or physical health is at risk.
Music. Welcome to stop drinking and start living the feminine way. I'm your hostess. Mary Wagstaff, holistic alcohol coach and feminine embodiment guide here to help you effortlessly release alcohol by reclaiming your feminine essence. Sobriety isn't just about quitting drinking, it's about removing the distortions that keep you disconnected, overwhelmed and stuck in cycles of numbing. Each week, I'll share powerful tools, new perspectives that transform and deeply relatable stories to help you step into the power pleasure and purpose that it is to be a woman. This is your next evolution of awakened empowerment. Welcome to the feminine way. Welcome back to the show. My beautiful listeners, thank you so much for being here. We're back, and what I want you to know about the feminine way is that you are going to learn a new perspective, a new way to live that I did not emphasize in the last round of stop drinking and start living, because I wasn't embodying the feminine way, and I didn't have the embodied experience and like I shared briefly in our Last episode, to fully know something, we have to live it. And I won't say I'm an expert at it, but I will say I understand it deeply, because I've had these beautiful glit, not even just glimpses, but a stark contrast, a stark contrast, just like we can experience with alcohol, something that feels so far away from what we know the life we want to live is, but yet we are so conditioned and identify with this one set of beliefs and this one set of thoughts that we don't really like. Have that embodied experience yet, right? So the feminine way is an embodied way. It is an embodied experience of truly finding enough safety to be able to let go of the need to control everything. And this is why it relates so deeply to alcohol. This is why this is the process to releasing alcohol with grace, and we will get more in to all of that as we continue our show. But for today, I want to remind you, please send in your message. Please text me. Go to the show notes. Follow the link at the very top that says, Send Mary a text, and we received some some feedback, some fan mail, as it's called. But what I want this to be is your short stories, your takeaways, and also your questions for coaching. So this fan mail or inquiry comes from Chico California, and just so you know how it shows up for me, unless you put it in the message, I will not know who it is. It just says where it comes from, and the last four digits of the phone number, because it is essentially a text message that you send that then shows up for me on a website. So it does come directly to me. No one else sees it. So if you want to say hi and tell me who you are, you can. Otherwise, I just know Chico California. So this question, of course, I don't have the ability to have a conversation with this person, so I'm going to do my best. From a coaching perspective, this person asks, How do we ensure we're not using not drinking alcohol as a form of punishment or deprivation. So this is a really, really interesting question. So is withholding alcohol a way of punishing ourselves? And really, what this comes down to is your own beliefs, right? What does it feel like for you? What are the thoughts that you have when you're saying you can't drink? You can't drink because you've been bad. You can't drink because you're not a good person, right? So so we really don't know, but for this listener, and for anyone else who thinks that not drinking is a form of punishment or deprivation? Now, the reason one might feel deprivated, right is because they have associated alcohol with pleasure, and that's very obvious, right? But as an intentional form of punishment or deprivation, because it all depends on your beliefs. If you ask me, I would say it's the opposite. I believe not drinking is a form of honoring yourself as a form of celebrating. Yourself, right? But when you are in the mindset and the self concept of the version of you that has developed all of these beliefs and a strong habit or an addiction around alcohol, for many people, it feels like deprivation, but it's only intentional if you believe that it is, if you only believe that it's a form of punishment. And so one of the things that I work with, with myself, with my clients, is we create something called a belief goal. And a belief goal is a belief that you're working towards. And we've talked about this so much on the show is, what do I want to believe? Because we know that beliefs aren't facts. Beliefs are just the thoughts in your brain that you've thought so many times you can't even see that they're not facts. You just see them as truth, right? And so we get so overwhelmed by our thinking that we create a state of panic and a state of worry that then we need to use alcohol to calm, because you don't have any other tools right now. So part of the approach that I take is taking this big step back and with the feminine way, it's an even bigger step back to a first establish safety, because if not drinking feels like punishment and deprivation, well that doesn't feel very safe. So we have to create a sense of safety where you can be vulnerable enough to explore my beliefs. Because I will say, as one awakens, which, to me, is awakening to the truth that your beliefs are not facts. Your beliefs are subjective interpretations of the world, and you have a willingness to be wrong, right? What else am I wrong about? I thought alcohol was the end all be all. I thought it was like the best thing ever, right? And so would you have that willingness to be wrong, that can be can be very vulnerable. And since I have awakened from alcohol, which means I've awakened from the distortions of what I thought was true for me. And of course, everything I share on this show is from my first hand experience, observing my clients and my embodied experience. It is just my opinion, but I would like to teach you in a neutral way, so that you can explore it yourself. So anything that I share, I try to share from a neutral perspective, a beat of it being my opinion for me, but since I have awakened from thinking alcohol was the best version of my life to thinking that it's such an honor to myself to not drink, and it allows me connect deeper, to to God, to my higher power, to my higher self, to alignment with my values, Right? I have also since started to awaken to other truths in my life that just wasn't available to me because I was growing, because I was still learning, because I didn't have that sense of safety. And what I find is that this kind of inquiry can be done intentionally, but it does feel more available, the willingness and the availability to take a step back as we get older, because we have established a sense of a foundation of who we are. And a lot of times we do have a sense of safety, like our basic needs are being met. You have a job, you have a partner, you have a family, you have a home, you know, you kind of know what your day to day is going to be like. And we're going to get more and more into that, because this is huge. So in order for you to examine this, dear listener, Chico, you are going to really need to take a step back and just first, from a really neutral perspective, uncover, well, what are my beliefs and why? Why would it be a form of punishment or deprivation? How is that true? How is it true that it's the opposite of that? So we want to ask some new questions to really draw out the answer. Now, I have an opinion, which I think not drinking is never a form of deprivation or punishment, you know? And I've got a lot of reasons why, but you need to believe that for yourself, right? And of course, if you on a physical level, if your body is used to something and you're taking in a chemical that creates a. Wrong pleasure response well, and you don't, and you have the absence of that in that definition is a deprivation, right? You are depriving yourself of something that you your body was regularly expecting or regularly relying on, but we know that it is synthetic, right? It's a synthetic form of the way that we would naturally release those feel good chemicals in the body, and you are capable. I have the first hand experience, as well as my clients, of rebalancing the body. Those chemicals exist in our body because we can create them naturally, right? That is how we procreate. That is how we have created gotten to this point in the evolutionary chain as a species, is because we have these chemicals that continue to push us forward, that help us, you know, find partners, find mates, make babies, inspire us, motivate us, right? We have these drivers inside of the body, and I won't get into it today, but we do see a bit of a mental health crisis in our not a bit a lot of a mental health crisis in our in our world today, because these chemicals are so out of whack, because we are creating this rapid influx of different sources that are synthetic, whether it's a chemical From drugs or a screen or, you know, the varying wild, you know, number of things that we put on our to do list. It's like we're all over the place. So, dear listener, that's where I would start, is to really examine your beliefs and ask yourself the question, why would this be a form of punishment. And then why isn't it a form of punishment? And that would be the first place to start. And then guess what? You get to believe whatever you want, and you start to generate evidence, to have that embodied experience, to intentionally step out into the world and say, I'm going to go prove this is the belief that I want to believe, and I'm going to go prove it to myself that it's true, right? Because if you want to believe that not drinking is a form of punishment, then that's what it will be. If you want to believe that not drinking is the highest honor that you could give to your life, that's what it will be. But that's also part of the feminine way that takes it takes time and it takes intentional intentionality. Well, my sweet friends, thank you so much for being here. I believe that is going to be our episode for today. It was my intention for this relaunch of the show to keep our episodes under 20 minutes, and so I won't be able to get into you'll probably be hearing this after what my intention was for the show today, but I want to be able to teach and coach from the perspective of what you want. Okay, so it's it's really important, and it really means a lot to me and everyone else listening. And of course, if it's a story and I can share and I can read it out loud, then that can be part of the show itself. But if it has a real teaching component, then I want to honor that and give you a takeaway, because this is huge, right? We think that we're we are deprived, and one of the the methods of the five shifts in the feminine way is to be able to quit drinking without feeling like something's missing, right? And that takes a certain system, and it takes intention, and it takes an approach. But what I will leave you with is just the understanding to remember that with anything that you're changing, there is a before, a during and an after, right? And this is the process that I think so many people miss, and what I have the honor of doing in my private coaching practice is that it's not just a one and done thing. I'm quitting drinking on Monday morning, or I'm getting in shape, or I'm never going to yell at my kids again. We really have to start with the feminine way, which is safety, luxurious space and exquisite care. And that is everything that I have woven in to my private practice, and everything I hope to intend and intend to weave in to our time together here. So please send in your questions and please send in your stories, sending you so much love. Have a beautiful week if you are ready to embrace the feminine way in your life and release alcohol effortlessly, I want to teach you how to talk to yourself when you are alone. This is the hardest yet most impactful piece of the process. Download my free guide, the six cheap, free. Phases to calm the urge to drink and end the inner battle, you'll discover how to find relief for any urge or emotion without deprivation. Visit Mary Wagstaff coach.com/urge tracking to get your free guide today, or follow the link right here in the show notes you.