From Darkness to Light: How the Solstice Inspires Feminine Healing and True Sober Living

Sobriety and feminine living meet the magic of the winter solstice in this episode. I’m diving into what the solstice really means for those of us longing to live through the lens of love, and how this dark, quiet time of year in the northern hemisphere is actually the perfect invitation to slow down, reflect, and reconnect with ourselves.

I’ll share how I use the solstice as a portal for deep inner exploration—tapping into the cycles of nature, the phases of the moon, and the wisdom of my own body. We’ll talk about why I stopped using alcohol as a shortcut to relaxation and creativity, and how embracing my feminine rhythms has brought more freedom and clarity than any drink ever could.

If you’re curious about living in sync with the seasons, finding your own rituals for rest and renewal, or just want to feel a little less alone as the days get shorter, this episode is for you. Let’s honor the solstice together and see what’s waiting to be birthed in the dark.

Imagine having weekly breakthroughs — and celebrating them without alcohol.

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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

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the show, warriors of Love. If, for those of you that don't know if you're new here, I always used to start the show saying, welcome back to the show, my beautiful listeners, but I decided to change it because you are not mine and. What I've experienced through this work is that every woman that comes to me has this deep longing to live through the lens of love, to let her heart shine, to remove the distortions of whatever's keeping her back until the only thing left is love.

Because I feel that truly is the only real truth of the essence of who we are. And as a warrior of love, you are fighting for that fighting. Fighting for that by taking control where you can, by not giving up on yourself, by allowing the calling of your heart to start to take lead a little bit here.

And if you are tuning into this [00:01:00] in real time, we are entering the. Waning hours of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere, but it is also the waxing hours of to the, to the winter solstice, which takes place on December 21st, and it's a really potent, beautiful time of deep inner exploration. I've talked a lot on the show of the necessity to tap into the cycles and the rhythms that we live in.

We often, as humans separate ourselves from the natural world, but we are of the natural world, and as a woman, especially a menstruating woman, you actually go through an entire year in a month. you have a winter, a spring. A summer and a fall all through your menstrual cycle, and that's what it represents.

And then [00:02:00] there's also the phases of the moon. we literally are a living calendar. We are the embodiment. We used to tell time humans by the moon, women used to keep time. We are the time. Keepers and there is nothing more important on your journey of sobriety, both through the absence of alcohol and through the reclamation of connecting and refining your intuition of the truth.

the removal of the distortions of all of our learned behavior, and it's no judgment, it's how we learn as humans. We are, we take in information and then we believe it's true and we create an identity around that. But there's something that happens when you take this approach, this awakened, embodied approach to, to sobriety that you.

You start to see the distortions of other things. And one of the things that has come through in my journey of [00:03:00] reclaiming the feminine, and it's connecting to my cyclical nature as a woman first, understanding the moon mysteries and how the, the phases of the moon really are.

in alignment with what we go through hormonally and how I can track my own needs that way, and how I can track and understand what my urges and cravings were for alcohol during my hormonal cycle and what I needed instead, and how that would come out and how those needs were different.

Embodiment of the feminine architecture and the feminine archetypes and how alcohol was a. Permission, be it a inverted truth, to allow myself to be in my feminine in a way that I hadn't practiced, and I didn't know how, but there was always a deep longing inside of me. The playful, sexy, wild, fun, relaxed, receptive, creative part of me that I used alcohol to tap into.

Sure you are as [00:04:00] well, because I've never met a woman who didn't use alcohol to relax. I'd never met a woman who didn't use alcohol to give herself permission to be more in her playful feminine. And this is the work that I do, is I help guide you to learn how to do that work on your own 

there's so much freedom in it, and that's what the permission protocol is all about. It's that the process of getting there is freedom. It is a deep catharsis of, oh my God, I don't need to use this external thing anymore. I can use my own mind and look at all of the. The rules and the labels that I've, I've told myself were true and were necessary, but I created, and these were self-imposed.

And now maybe there was societal implications and things that you learned and things that you were taught, but what I've uncovered is no one's keeping track of you. And even if they are, you still are grown and you still have [00:05:00] free will. The, the consequence of being in this radical place of permission to be in your feminine, to be able to sit down and relax and not need a drink so that you can relax, but keep going is available to you and no one cares but of course there's children and there's demands, and there's, 

Priorities that you have and things that you've committed yourself to, and you wanna be in alignment with your commitments. But there's other ways to go about it. We don't have to be on 24 7 and in fact, we can get more done when we're taking care and we're resting. my. I grew up in a Catholic, in the Catholic church, but I never learned anything, honestly.

But I loved it and I've shared about this on the show. I loved the ritual. I loved everything about the praying and the, the ceremony of it and the, the tradition of it and going to, to my grandmother's after church and having [00:06:00] coffee and toast and there was getting dressed up and. I, there was something missing because my education around it was poor.

It was oh, here you go. And even through, religious ed and I didn't go all the way, I never did, I never was confirmed. and there, there is a huge admiration of, of our Lady, of the Divine mother. And I always did feel very connected to Mother Mary, being that that is my name too.

As a little girl, I felt that was special. My paternal grandmother's name is Margaret and her twin sister's name was Mary, not related to my name. Mary Margaret. Was on my mother's side of the family, my great-grandmother. So I always felt that connection though, to that name, to that, Irish Catholic name felt special to have that on both sides of my family.

And it, the, my, my paternal side of the family, is they're such good people. They are [00:07:00] amazing. Giving, loving, open. awesome, awesome people. So the church felt good to me, but My chart is part of my mission here on the planet is to find spiritual success.

That is something that I was born with. It's something I'm very interested in. Is it being a seeker of the truth of God? And I think we all are in some way, but for me it's very present. It's how can I become, how can I come closer to God? How can I surrender? My desires in some ways and my thoughts and know that I am always provided for, and spirituality is a very, very personal journey.

So I fast forward, I start studying yoga at a young age of 18. I'm traveling, I'm on a mission. And this is when I start drinking. 'cause I'm seeking, seeking, seeking and not knowing how to connect to God and I could connect to the divine through my breath. That made a lot of sense to me. I could find these places of stillness, but there was always something missing until [00:08:00] I.

I found my spiritual teacher who taught me about the divine feminine in all of her forms, in all of her ways, and how she exists throughout history and the layers of her and the archetypal energy. And she is me and she is the earth. And there was this, gates opening, angel singing moment when I heard the word priestess uttered.

And I've talked about this on the show, and I think that that was. The part of the, the dogma of religion, of,Catholicism that I, I don't resonate with, is where are the priestesses? And I know for, I believe for a fact with all my heart, that there's a lot of distortion and a lot that's missing from the story.

And part of me wants to. Be Catholic, but there's this deep part of me that knows there's this, this other truth that has saved and changed my life that I can't ignore through my relationship to the feminine. however I can appreciate, and I think this is this part of the clear [00:09:00] seeing of the removal of distortion is how it is all so symbolically perfect.

And so through this time of year. We are in a phase where we are ready the, to essentially birth the sun, right? We are coming back around to a time in the Northern Hemisphere where. The sun will be birthed again and there will be more sun. The sunlight will start to whack wax, it will start to increase, in the days, but we are in still in this dark time.

So if you think about the relationship to the divine mother, to our lady in the form of the Virgin Mary, this is when. during her time of gestation. And there is a point to this for your journey here, and it's a nice thing to think about during this time of year, how we can connect to all these rituals and stay in our truth.

And it doesn't have to be this or that, and it doesn't have to be dogmatic. And you [00:10:00] get to decide on what you wanna believe in your own heart I've had a deep practice of praying the rosary lately in the most traditional Catholic way that there is. And for long I had a hard time saying certain words and my spiritual evolution Through this journey of awakening, through my, my acceptance and desire to be more in my feminine, there's been this welcoming of the energy that it feels to me, very Intentionally and immediate in a way that my faith has become unflinching that there's a deeper connection that I'm in communication with. I would, I've been listening to the story of the advent stories, because I've never learned them. And I'm what is what? Where did I grow up?

What is that all about? And what this beautiful family that I was raised in who are amazing people. what do they believe? And I'm listening to the advent story on the App Hollow and they do a 25 day challenge where you listen and the, the way they [00:11:00] weave the stories together is beautiful.

they talk about this moment when Mary, our lady, has to consent. To her conception and she's this young woman and she has to consent to something that she doesn't even know is true or not true, but she does willingly in that moment because of her devotion and her faith. She says, yes. To something that could be a burden that is, she has to give of her body and give of her plans.

She's in the premarital moment, with her husband or with Joseph, and they're not even living together. there's the scrutiny that's available or potential scrutiny, and she's a young, young girl, and she has to consent to her divine mission. Holy. Whole and holy and completely surrender.

And my invitation to you is to know that in this portal of darkness, there [00:12:00] is always something in front of us. That we have to consent to. That is our divine mission. That might, that you could choose, that could be a burden or you could surrender to it knowing it is my divine mission and birth, the unimaginable birth, the miraculous on the other side of what has to gestate, what has to grow in the dark because.

Nothing is birthed from the light. Everything is birthed from the darkness. We have to be willing to go into that portal from womb to tomb. We go, we enter back to the place we came from. So we have to be able to go into that portal of conception of birth, to go into the seed and know that you're creating life.

It's not the ending of something. It's not fear. It is this miraculous invitation. For you to consent to the work that [00:13:00] is right in front of you as your divine mission and whatever is showing up for you right now. Something that you could easily shift a perspective and thi think this is a burden. Why is this happening to me?

I di I didn't consent to this. You could say that I've probably, I probably said that once this year and then I surrendered to a really s. dramatic moment that I said I didn't consent to, I did consent to because I was in deep relationship to the higher mind, We have this little S in the big S, the little s being our ego self, and the big S being source.

So you get to connect to that source consciousness and. This is the invitation to go deeper in this journey. So you could not drink or you could, continue to be in a relationship or take on this hard thing. may, who knows? I, the first thing that came to my mind was maybe you [00:14:00] ended up with a child and for some reason, maybe there's a loved one, a family member that can't take care of a child.

I have a brother and sister-in-law who had fostered, a couple of children. Because of a, A woman they knew that couldn't care for their children and they ended up adopting and now they have this big, beautiful family of five. It makes me wanna cry because they consented to their divine mission in something that could have been a burden.

And this is how you figure it out. And you can't turn away any longer because it's going to keep knocking at your door. And when you are given a divine mission and you deny it, it will be given to someone else. And you. Then we suffer, We suffer because we, we can, we miss the mark and then it has to come up again and again, and again and again.

So if it is alcohol that you are struggling with, this is your divine mission, and there might, there's gonna be layers of it. There's gonna be something bigger, Maybe you're drinking [00:15:00] because of, because there was, Uh, an event with your spouse because of a trauma with your children, because of a loss of a job, because of financial hardship, 

So you get to, in this time, say, yes, this is the li, this is life presenting this to me. And I can choose to fight back and go kicking and screaming and say, I didn't consent to this. Or with Grace and feminine receptivity, you can soften and receive it as a gift. This is your opportunity. And I know some ways, some tools that I use, 

And some ways that I guide my clients through this, To let it not be dramatic and traumatic, to not let it. Not let you have you not go in with everything clenched and tight and holding on for a dear life, [00:16:00] that through change and through resistance and the catharsis of surrender, there is pleasure available, and that is the freedom and the permission protocol, and that is the freedom of embracing the feminine that.

alcohol has been robbing you of, or whatever distortion that you've been functioning in your masculine. You are not in communion with the, with your higher self. And part of you is because your intuition has you here, but we refine that intuition when we remove the layers of distortion. So during the solstice time, and if you're, if you're in the southern hemisphere, you can apply it, when the time is right.

But of course there's always, we're always in a cyclical nature, and you can think about this even in a waning moon time too. So being in this gestation portal, and then when we come out of it after the solstice, when the sun is [00:17:00] birthed to new. It's, think about the preciousness of a newborn babe.

Right? You're not sending them off on their own running. Those, those mo, those early days are the most precious. They are everyone. Everything is soft and slow and cuddly and awe inspiring, and you when you first have your baby in your home and your arms, you, all you do is stare at it. You're like, oh my gosh, this baby.

And that's what you need to do to yourself. You have to treat yourself like the most precious. Birth right, that you are birthing a new version of yourself and you need to stare at yourself, and you need to be slow and snuggly and cuddly because there's no rush. We plant the seeds at the beginning of the year.

We don't come out of the gate on New Year's swinging. This time right now is a time for reflection. This consent. Then we renew. We renew in the darkness. We build our [00:18:00] energy. We build our strength by resting, by being, by reviewing the year. And then we rise come spring, equinox time. Now we start to rise and we're, we're out and we're tending to things and cleaning things up, and we're preparing for new growth, new life.

But it is not the time to do that right now. So wherever your heart is, wherever your spirit is connecting you to go deeper, my invitation is for you to find that without judgment. Because for me, I. I have been on such a journey of spirituality and now studying theology and it's fascinating.

It's comforting. I love it. It has been the best thing that I've ever done through what's been a pretty challenging time in my adult life and, in a way that I definitely wasn't planning on, but I. Am doing it with, with consent, and I had to make that [00:19:00] conscious choice. one of the ways that I started connecting with Divine Mind and, and, and God, and I didn't use that word for a long time, and I always wanted to say Goddess, but I really changed my perception of what that means for myself.

And again, it's very, very individual. The, one of the things that I used to do early on was, and I still do, is use Oracle cards. Oracle cards are this beautiful opportunity to gain a new perspective, to ask a question and see where they guide you, and you can use them with friends and loved ones, and it's a fun. Way to take a present moment, pause, and there's so many different types of oracle decks from the traditional tarot, to right on my desk, I have a Mother Mary Oracle deck, and I have many, many decks, goddess decks.

My, one of my best friends sent me a, woodland warden's deck with animals and plant allies [00:20:00] together. And so if you're looking to deepen into your spiritual practice, I always think that's a beautiful way. And of course, being in nature, being with your senses, being with the elements, there's nothing more spiritual than connecting with your human self.

And that is why alcohol has to go because it is in the way of your humanity. Which the ultimate expression of your humanity is the most divine thing we can do. I hope you have a blessed solstice and I will talk to you soon.