Feminine Sobriety Part 1 Finding Safety Within

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Last week, we talked about silent sobriety—not as a way to hide, but as a practice of deepening your relationship with yourself. This week, we’re taking that a step further and exploring how to create safety from within—because the first principle of the feminine way is knowing that true safety isn’t something we find outside of ourselves.

We’ve been so conditioned to push, prove, and hustle that we’ve lost touch with the pleasure of receiving—whether it’s in our businesses, our relationships, or even in motherhood. But the feminine doesn’t operate on force; she flows, she softens, she trusts.

In this episode, I share how shifting the financial dynamic in my marriage completely changed the energy in our home, allowing both Matthew and me to step more fully into our natural strengths. I also talk about how I’ve been reworking my relationship with coffee (yes, again!) and why loosening the grip—whether on money, alcohol, or expectations—is where real expansion begins.

Key Takeaways:

🌿 You don’t have to “figure it out.” You can just find out.
🌿 Resistance is a sign of growth—on the other side of it is expansion.
🌿 True giving is free of expectation. If it’s not, it’s not really giving.
🌿 Creating safety in your life starts with assessing your actual resources and challenging scarcity thinking.
🌿 When you soften and trust, you allow more pleasure, ease, and abundance to come in.

I’d love to hear what’s resonating for you—where in your life do you need to create more safety and ease? Send me a DM on Instagram and let’s chat!

Accountability is the key to lasting change. I’m here to not only help you eliminate the desire to drink but to fall in love with your alcohol-free life. Ready to make it real? Book a private connection call now! 💫

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.

Transcript

Mary Wagstaff: 0:02

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. The show my beautiful listeners, okay, so last week, we talked about Silent sobriety, and this isn't about shame. This isn't about hiding. This is about devotion, developing a deeper relationship to yourself, and really the first principle of the feminine way, which is creating safety, right? And we can't create safety from without. We have to create safety from within. So I've been alluding to some of these ideas of the feminine, and I think it's really important for you to ask yourself, why is it even important for me to be in my feminine. What does that mean to me? And have I been functioning in my feminine? Have I been functioning in my masculine? And the reason that I bring any of this up is because we are energy beings, and there are in all of philosophy and probably religion, we see these opposing or these, I shouldn't say necessarily opposing, but polarities, right? There are these polarities. There is not light and dark, day and night, the ebb and the flow, the wax and the Wain, the masculine and the feminine. There's the creativity and the structure. There's the idea and abilities, which is what Matthew and I call ourselves. He had another name for it. Was like inspiration and execution right there. And inside of us, we do have both of these qualities. But what I have found, and what I've explored through the lens of sobriety, is that we have had to fight. We've thought we had to fight so much to you know, leave the quote, unquote, cages of the home to establish a sense of freedom for ourselves, establish a name for ourselves, prove that we were worthy, prove that we could do it all. But along the way, we've lost something. We've lost access to, what I believe is more of the pleasured state when, when as women, we are in our feminine and it doesn't mean we don't act from from our masculine sometimes, and it doesn't mean we aren't entrepreneurs and have businesses. But there is a different way of doing it, there is a different way of having a feminine led and run business was which isn't always just about structures and systems and strategies and, you know, profit and loss and margin. But can it be in your creativity? Can you inspire through emotion? Can you connect deeply to your people and to your audience through you know, and even if you're if you're not an entrepreneur, and can you be in the pleasure of of your mothering, of being a wife, of this idea of service that doesn't come from so much resentment, and that we're actually receiving pleasure from it, and that it's not just about an expectation. Because just as much as I was talking about the silent sobriety or the silent activism, if we give of ourselves, but it's not free, then I don't believe we should do it. I don't believe we should give with expectation, because that's not truly giving right, and if we are, then the other person better well know about it, they better have signed up for it as well. So to create safety, we have to establish that place of surrendered solitude inside of ourselves, to be comfortable not knowing, to be comfortable with ourselves, to be able to say, I'm here, in the journey of finding out versus figuring it out, and I'm not going anywhere. And that energy alone, that energy of finding out versus figuring it out, does create safety for the feminine. In because you don't have to know you can be courageous and brave in in the figuring it, in the finding out, right? That it's not that you have to muscle your way through and and shove, you know, a square peg into a circle, right? That's not what we're doing here. We're letting life unfold. It's like, spring time doesn't try, doesn't, like, have to, like, figure it out, right? There's a natural unfolding. It's like, oh, maybe we have this fall spring, and it's 60 degrees, and then we get a snowstorm, and then it happens again, and it's different every year, the the blooms are going to be different, the the leaves on the trees are different every year based on what happened the time before. There's not a foreseen that it's supposed to look a certain way, because figuring it out has with it expectation, and finding out has it with has with it intention. So if you're leading from the feminine, and you're leading from just an intention to to know yourself, to be in the the unfolding of the mystery of life, to allow your emotions to be deeply pleasurable, because you're there's not this constricted sensation, this constricted and contracted feeling. But there's an expansion, and this expansion does require safety, and it does require trust, but this is something that you get to decide on ahead of time, and it is 100% required in sobriety, and it is required when you're changing your relationship to anything, when I'm stepping into this new identity, right as a farmer, when Matthew and I are stepping into a new place in our relationship. And so I want to give you an example of the the feminine in action and safety. So I would say I had, I had a father growing up, but, and I don't want to get too much into my backstory, but I never really had a masculine figure like lead me that really, you know, kind of gave me advice or showed me the way. And I did have some guidance from my dad, but it wasn't in this, you know, he didn't like tell me what to do. No one told me what to do, frankly, which I'm not saying is a bad thing. But I also grew up in some scarcity with money and things like this. And I started working when I was 12, and I started making money. And I knew I never wanted, I always wanted to be able to be able to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. And this, I am not a materialistic person. I'm my tour in nature is not of like beauty and material things. My tourist nature is more of experiences and delight and like ambience right like the right lighting and the right mood and the romance of of life in that way. So I've never spent money on things. I've always spent money on experiences. And I always wanted to be able to do that. I traveled when I was younger. I lived at the, you know, at the yoga ashram. I just did all of these things that gave me these new experiences, to experience myself in a new light. So I was very, you know, responsible with money from a young age, and I never had credit card debt. And when I met Matthew, Matthew didn't really have any credit at all. He didn't have bad credit, he just didn't have any and when we bought our first home, it was actually me who purchased the home. I got this down payment assistance program. I had the job with the w2 and the good, the amazing credit, and so on and so forth. And then when we had Emmett, I put him on the deed. And of course, we were paying financially for we were sharing the finances together. But I kind of unintentionally or naturally took over the finances, and I would pay the bills, and I just had access to, you know, his paycheck and his income. And there was never really like, there was a conversation about it, but I always just just did it so he didn't have this real sense of it being a priority, because he couldn't see it right? And all of the best financial people will tell you, like, look at your money. Often have a relationship with your money because you don't want to just be like, Oh. Like, think about in a partnership. You're like, I'm just going to ignore you for the month and hope that it's there, right? It doesn't. It doesn't cultivate this sense of like a deeper relationship with more intimacy. And I do believe money is an energy that we have to have a relationship with. But what it did for me as we were transitioning into a brand new community, Matthew had all of his business is completely referral based. And he left his referral based community where we were living, and we moved to this brand new community. And so he's having to engage in business in a brand new way. My business was shifting, and there was some scarcity there. There was some scarcity around money. There was fear of letting go like what I've shared in the last few episodes, of letting go of the way I had been doing business, and really trusting more of the being able to go into the farm, being able to grow more of an in person business, because I'm like, I've been seeing the money. Where's it coming from? Where's it going and there is a woman named Laura Doyle who is a relationship coach, and she definitely pushes the button of feminism, right? So if you engage with her work, do it with an open mind, and it can be very triggering, but there is a lot of truth in there around the male female dynamic, and what is available for men in a relationship when they are held, when they have sole responsibility of the finances. Now for me, this doesn't mean I don't make my own money. This doesn't mean I have to ever, like, ask for spending or anything like that, and like, you get to make up your own rules. So Matthew and I had this conversation about it, and he told me that he is 100% financial, financially responsible for our household expenses, and that he wants to and is willing to take over the finances. And I was so afraid of, what if he screws it up? What if there's late fees and he doesn't call because I've seen, I've had some evidence of this, right? But at the end, I had to ask myself, what's the worst case scenario? Like, what happens if he has to pay a $40 fee? And like, what if I don't even know? So he gets all the information. I kind of show him what I've been doing, and he gets all of the information for paying the bills, and that's it. It was done, right? And I just trusted that. Now, of course, I know what his jobs look like. I know the business he's getting. I know what all of that looks like. So in my mind, I'm like, okay, like, you know, is this working for you? But what it has allowed him to do is show up in the world in ways that I've never seen him show up. He has gone out on his own, and he's a very social, personable like he's such an easy person to get along with, but he's gone out to community meetings. He joined the archery club. He joined, like the car club. He has been engaging with this archery community, something that's been bringing him a lot of pleasure. And with his son, with my stepson, Oz, and just doing all of these things wet and, you know, volunteered to make the set for emmett's play, and met some people there, and like making all these connections, right? And so this was another kind of missing piece of his personal life. And for me, I was able to decompress my nervous system. I was able to focus on my creative pursuits, my creative pleasure and power. And I understand that not everyone has this experience, but I could at least soften my nervous system enough to allow for whatever transition is presenting itself for me to let go. So I created a sense of safety just by switching the dynamic of a couple of things. Now this doesn't mean I don't contribute to the finances. This doesn't mean, you know, there's a lot of other nuances to it, but in general, it's like, what do I need to create safety for my nervous system right now? Because Matthew's hair wasn't falling out and he wasn't having these digestive issues, the other thing that actually, we both started doing was drinking magic mind. And so I've never had any sort of sponsorships on the podcast. Literally, I've never run one ad except for myself, because my coaching business does sponsor this podcast. But when magic mind reached out to me, I knew it was a sign from the Divine. I knew that this was going to be the thing to help me drinking less coffee every day, which is something that I've been wanting to do for a very long time. It's been calling me, and it's been calling me because I know that it's not sustainable energy and magic. Mine has so many amazing other ingredients and stuff that I'm actually was taking in other supplements, and my energy feels so focused. So I would love for you to give it a try. They've given us 20% off of your first order. It's magic, mine.com/mary. W 20. Let me know how it goes for you, because I'm actually really, really enjoying the effects of this product. Now, this is my own stuff to work on, but in a relationship and in a partnership, he wanted to support me with that, right? So if you're not in a partnership, say, um. What I would want to do for myself in this situation, because being an entrepreneur, it's like it's all on you all the time. And if I was feeling a scarcity of resources, maybe I would go find a more consistent way to create resources for myself, where if I didn't want to show up, say to do marketing, to engage in the podcast, or to go to try to sell flowers. I just knew that I was going to have this stability of a certain amount of money every month, we'll say, or I would go do some networking, like I would look at my resources, and I would look at myself and my resourcefulness. So finding safety in is an inside job, and it requires you taking inventory of your resources and really finding out where is their potential, untapped potential. What do I need to soften and regulate my nervous system enough so that I can receive, so that I can expand? And what you'll find is, initially, there's resistance, but the other side, the resistance to softening right, is expansion, the resistance to surrender is pleasure on the other side of it, the resistance to letting go is receiving. I would love for you to take this out into your life and ask yourself, Where can I create safety, where there is none, and sometimes this is just the just looking at it, how is it not true? And so another thing I had to do was an assessment of my own finances. Because something that we'll do often is say I can't afford it, or I don't have the money, or whatever it is, I'm broke, right? Is that true? And for some of you, some people, it very well meet may be true, but for me, that wasn't 100% true. I have investments, I have some savings, I have these other areas, right? I have money coming in from clients, like there's actually things happening, even though it looked different than it did. Maybe, you know, 12 months ago, and that's okay, because it is a moment in time. And if I resist this moment in time, this opportunity, what am I selling myself short on? So we're going to explore more of the feminine way in the next couple of episodes, because I really want you to dive in to this feeling of expansion, pleasure and receiving Have an amazing week. If something in today's episode spoke to you deeply you are ready for your next level of awakening, and I want to invite you to book a sober glow up activation session with me where we can rewrite your alcohol story. Right now, we'll remove the energetic blocks that are keeping you stuck and stagnant to activate it and alive, to book a session and to learn more, just follow the link right here in the show notes, or head on over to my website, Mary Wagstaff coach.com and find out what it means to truly live life from your most authentic self. I will See you over there.

Unknown: 18:42

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