Exquisite Care – The Feminine Way to Sobriety, Deep Nourishment & Expansion Part 3

This week, we’re diving into Exquisite Care, the third principle of The Feminine Way. And no, I’m not just talking about bubble baths and spa days—this is about deep, soul-level nourishment that actually supports your body, your nervous system, and your expansion.

We’re still in the vibe of finding out instead of figuring it out, and sometimes, that means letting go of control, asking for support, and allowing yourself to truly receive. I share how exquisite care has shown up in my life, from checking in with my inner child to rethinking what relaxation really means. Plus, I walk through examples of how my clients have transformed by shifting from control and micromanagement into ease, joy, and presence.

Key Takeaways:

🌿 Exquisite care is about giving yourself what you actually need—not what you think you should need.
🌿 You’re already supporting your inner child in some way—how can you do it with more love and intention?
🌿 Control is a false sense of safety. Real safety comes from trust and resourcing yourself deeply.
🌿 There’s no rush—soften, listen, and see what happens when you stop forcing.
🌿 Pleasure is not an indulgence. It’s a way of life.

If this resonates with you, let’s take it deeper. Book a Sober Glow Up Activation Session, where we’ll work through a heart altar activation, rewrite your story, and create a new vision of what’s possible.

🔗 Try Magic Mind with 20% off: magicmind.com/maryW20

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. Beautiful listeners. Have you checked out my sober glow up activation offering. This is such a powerful, powerful opportunity for you to make a big shift. Now we're still in the vibe of finding out, but in order to find out, oftentimes, we need this catalyst to help us activate something inside that we just couldn't see. So I created these sober activation sessions as an opportunity to do a two hour deep dive with you that you can get a taste, a first hand taste, of a lot of the stuff that I talk about on the podcast, where I will walk you through a heart altar activation. We will really look at your visionary story in alignment with your values and an identity. Reframe this one session is going to really bring to light the places where you've felt stuck and give you a lot to not work with, but to explore, right? So that you have some material to really place your intention on and your attention on, so you don't just feel like you're kind of like floundering, like, when will I know, right? And we're gonna also really look at the areas of strength where you already are doing it, but you just can't see it. And the one thing where you can place all of your attention that's going to help carry you through to get to the other side of whether you're sober, curious, and you're just starting your journey, or if you're really interested in living more in the feminine way in an alcohol free life, because you deserve to wake up every day just feeling proud of yourself and excited for possibility, even when you're not feeling amazing. So the link is right here. In the show notes, there's spaces available for you to come and jump in, and I just love being able to connect with my listeners on the other side here, it's just such an awesome opportunity for us to create the sacred experience together. So the third piece of the feminine way, and there's many, many pieces, but is exquisite care? What does exquisite care mean? Exquisite is of the highest caliber, right? This isn't just getting your nails done. This isn't just a massage, and it's that too, but it is a holistic perspective, and for me, oftentimes it is asking for help. It is asking for support. It is letting setting down my burdens, not like putting my burdens on someone else. But you know, there's an invitation, especially with the work I do, or with any other healing modality or healing practitioner, to say, Hey, I'm here to support you, lighten your load, right? Because if as a coach, as a coach and a mentor, I'm not taking on my client's energy, I am helping them release it right. I'm here to witness and to hold space and guide into a new perspective of release, of reclamation, of a wild, new way of reclaiming their their own sovereignty in life so exquisite care is kind of gathering more resources, where with with something that maybe you you haven't looked into yet, right? And that could be going to the chiropractor for a nervous system reset. That could be making sure that you schedule in 1020 minutes of a day after everyone goes to bed, where you just have time to be in that silent place of solitude, creating whatever feels like a devotional practice for yourself and honoring that without judgment, without pressure, without shame, but finding out so this exquisite. It care is also nurturing your inner child, the part of you that in a lot of ways, you've been supporting, and I know this is backwards. It's kind of inverted, and this is why we have to look at it. You've been supporting with alcohol, you've been supporting with some of these unintentional ways that you protect yourself. We think we're supporting ourselves by controlling everything, and this is what the last two conversations were like, actually, the last three right, controlling our environment, micromanaging everything, when really we've been creating so much restriction on ourselves and kind of dampening the voice of the inner child, and unintentionally and with good intention, right? Subconsciously and with good intention, we think we're practicing, practicing and protecting ourselves from being hurt again, from being in a situation where maybe these methods did work before, but they're not working because they're stunting our growth. And so there's this opportunity to take exquisite care of yourself by Re parenting yourself and really checking in with your inner child. And you can even do that right now of just saying, you know, sweet, sweet little inner child, reveal yourself. And I'd love to I'd love to share. I'd love to talk to you and placing your hand on your body and just saying, Where are you? Where are you living? Where are you hiding out. And she might be teeny, tiny, like an inch, or she might my inner child is quite big, and she she lives in the lower parts of my body, kind of in my womb space and in my pelvic floor. And when she's expansive and she's feeling really good, she gets bigger, she loves she's always just asking, and I probably don't do this nearly enough, but she always just wants to play with Emmett. She always wants to play with my son. She's like, that's when I have the most fun when we're playing with Emmett. She always tells me that. And of course, I play with my son, but I get in my daily, like, adult life, and so I have to remember that, and I check in with her often when I'm in confusion, when I'm in worry, when I'm in and sometimes I forget, you know, when I'm really just wrapping my mind going around something again and again and again, and sitting in my thoughts versus getting in my body. So exquisite care does it mean making a list of the book benefits and the negatives and the positives? No? Exquisite care means being in the present moment with your with your body, with your nervous system, with your emotions. Because emotions as humans and especially as women, are our gifts. Think about the vastness of experiences that they offer us. It's such a pleasure. And

Unknown: 7:45

the more you remove alcohol, you can

Mary Wagstaff: 7:49

and then step into the feminine way, it's not just the removal of alcohol, right? You will feel emotions, but if you decide that there are problems, and without stepping into the feminine way, that there's actually this opportunity of deep pleasure, of deep embodied pleasure of the want, like being in the wanting is feels better than in the having, right or what's delighting you, what's turning you on. And there is a lot of work that has to be done here, because our nervous systems have to be able to be regulated by pleasure. And this is the craziest part of it, right? This is the craziest part of it that it's not that we're feeling so stressed out and we can't handle that, because I know you can handle stress. It's that we find the discomfort in relaxation, and that's what our episode was all about last week. So we have to go deeper into experiencing exquisite care for ourselves and practicing what that means. And so for me, something that I love to do, my favorite thing to do is for is go for a walk. And I don't like walk. I keep a good pace. If you walked with me, you'd probably be like, Mary, you walk really fast. But, you know, I like to move. So I have to remember when I'm walking with a dog or walking with Emmett, like it's I'm here to be in the pleasure of it. But I love to walk, and a lot of the times, I don't listen to anything. I don't bring my phone with me. I really try to be in the sounds, the sights, the the sensation, the feelings, all of the things. And just to be, just to kind of notice what my mind is rattle what's rattling around in my mind. That is exquisite care for me, fitting that in and not, you know, crunching it in like it's something to check off my to do list, but letting it be something that can be really just for me, something else that feels really pleasurable to me, and sometimes I always Matthew probably thinks I'm such a jerk. I'll be like, Isn't it weird that adults have to share a room and kids get their own bedroom? And I love nothing more than to sleep with Matthew. But sometimes I want my own bed, you know? Sometimes I want to get up in the morning and just not talk and but I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to go sit on the couch and I want to sit up and I say my prayers or just be quiet, or maybe even sometimes I listen to a meditation. But I love nothing more than to have a morning warm beverage in bed, do some journaling, do some reading and just hang out. That is, like my favorite thing. And I actually really like to do it alone, and that's just being honest. So that's the other thing about exquisite care, is there's times where I like to snuggle up and hang out and chit chat, and then there's times where I really want to be by myself, and that this is another piece of your exquisite care is. What is that? And then there's times where I really want to be with my girlfriends, where I really want to have just that hangout space where we get to talk and share and see what's coming up. And this is why I intentionally have Sister Circles and women's gatherings that brings a lot of exquisite care and pleasure to my life. So the things you know really fill you up, and what are the excuses that you're making for yourself, something that I believe every woman that I've ever worked with in sobriety, I can think of so many examples. So there's a woman that I have worked with, that I coached, who would take these trips all by herself, married woman, grown children, take all take these trips by herself across the country, and she would go stay at this cabin by herself. And you know, she had to overcome some objections around that. And like people are like, you know, are you crazy, right? Whatever, and so. But she loved it. But one of the things that she would do often when she was there and kind of engaging with this new community, is she would drink to connect well. When we started working together, and we talked about being in the feminine and being her, in her pleasure and opening her senses, and what exquisite care is like, and her finding out versus having to figure it out. And she was able to really be honest with herself. She started creating connections in a brand new way. And she had a whole different experience of what this experience of being by herself for, you know, several weeks at a time that it ended up being so much richer and so much deeper, because she learned how to be with herself, unaltered, right? There's another woman who her husband traveled a lot for work, and she had been she's a stay at home mom, but her kids were, you know, kind of older, and she had this guilt of not like being busy and like feeling like she always needed to be doing something if she had some time in the afternoon or in the evenings by herself. And you know, we coached on if you were to step into your feminine what would what would happen? What would be the perspective shift there? And so the more she started doing that, she realized that she was the one judging herself. No one else was judging her for having these afternoons and these evenings alone. And if she wasn't, you know, busying herself out and she would be home, she would drink. And after our time together, she started really just, oh my gosh, like studying history and just delighting in new books and resting and, you know, engaging in things in the past that she thought may have been these like frivolous indulgences, but they created so much pleasure for her that she didn't need the alcohol. The alcohol actually took away from it, and she started engaging with her family, not needing to control and micromanage them, and telling them, like, Hey, this is on you guys, right? And but she was in such a better place, and she was so much more joyful, and she showed up for her responsibilities in a way that just made her feel so good and receptive versus that it needed to look a certain way that she was responsible for the outcome of everyone else's emotions, right? So there is this real impact on doing the things that you are already doing, but from this perspective of this feminine way. And this is why solitude and practicing being in yourself and softening and just finding out what happens what's happening in my body. So we worked on embodiment. We worked on the heart altar activation that I offer to all my clients, and inside of the sober glow up activation sessions, we worked on the vision she was creating. For herself, for all of my clients. So I would love to invite you to come and spend some time with me, so that you can actually experience embodied in your body versus just a concept, because you can take in all the information you want, but nothing changes it until you actually decide to apply it from a place of finding out, from a place of curiosity and expansion, right and and magnetism and what if? What if pleasure was your priority versus your to do list, everything you need is in the show notes. I can't wait to talk to you next week. Have a beautiful day. 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. You