Ep #266 - Be impeccable with your words, and do not take things personally. Sounds easy enough, and then life creeps in - you know, that thing that happens while you are busy making plans and doing things. When you strive to live by the four agreements, you offer yourself a roadmap to navigate. There will be detours, speed bumps, and emergency pitstops, but they are not meant to deter you from your path - they are signs along your highway alerting you to pay attention and increase your...

Ep #265 - Self-awareness connects us to what we are doing and why we are doing it, and I don't mean the obvious why - I mean the profound reason related to a past anchor. In the depths of our subconscious lies the answers to the questions we seek. The first step is to recognize that you are not thinking, feeling, or acting the way you desire, and evaluating your motivations as to when, where, and why is some next-level introspection. Corrections are meant to align you with your highest self....

Ep #264 - Addiction isolates. Maybe not in the beginning, when our socialization is kicked up because of the introduction to substances, but in time, when we aren't paying well enough attention, our drug or booze of choice begins to shrink our world smaller and smaller. Then, one day, we look around, and the reasons we started to use aren't as prevalent, and in their place is isolation with our addiction. Connection opportunities are all around us. They are created in our minds and our...

Ep #263 - Your words have power. They have meaning. What you repeat in your head about yourself becomes your identity statement. Choose wisely what you say to yourself. This year, choose your power words with the internal desire to live toward them; those power statements fuel your life's inferno! Listen to #164 and #193 for past episodes on this topic. Just hit play, and let's dive in with our open minds, hearts, and energies, bringing everyone into the fold - you are in the right place, at...

Ep #262 - Life throws curve balls, or is it hail the size of a baseball? Living our lives through our past is killing us. You see it everywhere in our world. Old grudges, past misdeeds, a lack of acceptance and forgiveness - all these and more eat away at our souls. Today, let us choose a different response. Let's all decide to seek a higher sense of ourselves. I live my life through the exaltations of these seven principles, which empower me each and every day.  Merry Christmas to those who...

Ep #261 - Triggered, activated, tripped - whatever you call it, you have emotional anchors set all around you. They can be in your external world where other people do things around you, to you, or with you. Additionally, there are infinite anchors in your mind just waiting for that turn down an old worn-down path, and then the anchor triggers/activates and trips the old behavioral pattern loop - and it is REACTION TIME! It is crucial to create space between the stimuli and your next action....

Ep #260 - Focusing on what we are doing, where we are, and when we are is such an important habit, yet often tossed aside in a world where a thousand things are vying for our attention every day of our lives. Pull yourself back into the moment, realize that multitasking isn't a real thing, and utilize your five senses. These are excellent ways to bring you back into focus on the task at hand. After all, we start things wanting to finish them. Let's not stay in the loop and trance out into the...

Ep #259 - Part two of the expectations walks you through an in-depth adventure around why knowing where you place expectations is crucial in identifying areas in your life when you can release your predeterminations and ground into the moment. There are many aspects of your life where what you expect to happen won't, and right behind that disappointment is anger, sadness, depression, and all their friends. I'll explain ways to recognize these expectations and some key ways to let them sail...

Ep #258 - The holidays trigger anchors in our lives set down by unfulfilled expectations from past holiday experiences. We have expectations set all over our lives. Some are real and pertinent, like fidelity in a romantic relationship or trust in a friend, and others' expectations are not warranted, let alone discussed and agreed upon. You want to live a life running over with disappointment - expect thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors from others, and then don't tell them. The same...

Ep #257 - Your emotions are valid, and your expression is unique to you. Accepting others for who they are and how they choose to heal is empowering to everyone involved as judging and criticizing alienates and ostracises - and if anyone knows what it feels like to be alienated and ostracized, it is us in the addiction and recovery community. The beauty in the grief pattern inventory is that we can harness the power of how we express our emotions and validate our uniqueness.  We all feel loss...

Ep #256 - Grief, sadness, loss, and all the other emotions we express and feel are deeply personal processes for us to navigate. The Grief Pattern Inventory is a system that helps us identify how we process grief - and I now notice how it is useful in regard to many emotions that we feel that are not pleasant. Intuitive grievers and instrumental grievers will display and process their emotions very differently. Both are valid. Both matter. Neither is preferred over the other, as that would...

Ep #255 - It is okay to be sad about something ending that matters to you. It is okay to have anxiety about something important to you. Feelings and emotions are a wonderment to the human experience. How we choose to process these emotions makes our human-ness simultaneously magnificent and tragic. I embrace my sadness. My confusion. My anxiety. Because on the other side of all, that is something I clearly want and desire - and I will only get to savor the taste of that accomplishment when I...

Ep #254 - People are awesome. People are rude. People are friendly. People are cruel. We do not control how people treat or behave around us. We are in control of how we react and respond - and sometimes, it doesn't even feel like we are in control of that. A key I have reasoned is that I will treat others how I want to be treated as much as I can. I have bandwidth issues. I overload my plate. I do not think I am infallible or above the human condition of misjudging others and the...

Ep #253 - Imagine your life as a towering skyscraper, each floor constructed upon the foundations of past experiences, some wonderous and joyful, others painful and traumatic. These lower floors are often hidden in the shadows of the unconscious mind, unseen yet foundational to everything that rises above. We understand that to reach the pinnacle of our personal mountain of accomplishment, we must first acknowledge and strengthen the underlying structures of our skyscraper of life. As we...

Ep #252 - Events in sobriety may feel, sound, and look much differently than similar experiences from your addiction days. Celebrate these changes. Celebrate the differences because we once prayed for a new life and when it arrives understand there will be some internal blocks around whether it was fun or blah. When we decide to undertake sobriety, it comes from a burning desire to make a change, and those changes come from clear and specific action. These actions will have a cost to them....

Ep #251 - The parallels between working out or yoga to the journey from sobriety to recovery are so noticeable I must share this perspective with you. I learned a lot from my first yoga session in years today. I will not repair years of shortening my muscles in one session. I am not going to benefit myself by pushing into a stretch so deeply that I injure myself. I am in this for the long haul. I want the benefits of stretching. I want to release the tightness in my shoulders, back, legs, and...

Ep #250 - Crisis moments. What are these to you? Every day, things that are out of our control are happening around us, and yet we survive. We live to face the next day's challenges. In the world of addiction and survival, living on the edge of our sanity might have worked for months, years - and probably decades. Now we desire to dedicate ourselves to the ultimate challenge - to break years of programmed behaviors and forge a new trail away from our herd mentality. The kicker is... you are...

Ep #249 - The fear of the unknown is part of the reason you stay the same and avoid taking the plunge to make massive changes in your life. Deciding to be courageous doesn't mean you don't feel fear - it means you choose to ignore it and take action anyway. Sorta like in the Game of Thrones when Arya's "dancing teacher" said to her, "not today death, not today." Say 'not today' to your fear of the unknown and choose to behave differently today. Stack enough of those kinda days together, and...

Ep #248 - Many people will feel stress and anxiety about whether their world is going to shrink when they decide to get sober. Others think the chance to explore life through a more transparent lens will allow them to see the vastness of their life from an uplifting perspective. Truth is...it is all subjective to your perspective. No one can determine how big or small your life is - only you can do that for yourself. What makes one person's life feel small can make another's feel huge. What...

Ep #247 - Often, you are not comfortable in your body. Yet, there is an unwillingness to get uncomfortable to achieve the comfort you seek in your skin. I have my body dysmorphia issues to contend with - and in this day and age, with social media alerting us to our flaws through the lens of thousands and thousands of people - it is of the utmost importance for each of you to realize that your opinion of you is the opinion that matters most. It is the only opinion that matters because you can...

Ep #246 - Ever caught yourself saying, "that person doesn't support me." Let's get into some self-introspection and ask ourselves, is it that they are not supporting us at all, or are they not supporting us in the way we want them to support us? When you say someone doesn't support you, you are negating all the support they are bringing you - or perhaps the challenges they are presenting you (because we can't always get what we want, but sometimes we get what we need.) Today I'll cover asking...

Ep #245 - Your mind is an iceberg. Very little is experienced above the surface of the water consciously. A majority of your thoughts and feelings that drive your behaviors and actions are underneath the water's surface, in the unconscious mind. When we peel back the layers of our unhealed trauma, gathered through our many years of life, we will find that the more we heal, the more we reveal what else desires to heal. Within this realm are our conscious intentions and our unconscious...

Ep #244 - My mom was an amazing woman. She lived over 23 years with Crohn's disease with many of those years battling her own addictions and she stood by me throughout a majority of my hardest addiction years - even when I wouldn't stand by her. I honor her today, and every day, by living my best life - and even on those bad days I know they are better than my best day wasted.  I love you Mom and miss you every day. Just hit play and let's dive in with our open minds, hearts, and energies...

Ep #243 - We are choking ourselves. We are defeating ourselves before we even start. We are holding ourselves back in life, and the worst part is that we know we're doing it. You can choose to choose differently any time you make a different choice. Is it acceptance, hope, faith, belief, love, forgiveness - or any of the other 1017 emotions that exist - that you are searching for? In today's episode, I talk about quitting in your 20s [or any age really] and how Michael J. Fox and a boy...

Ep #241 - We all have our own unique way of picturing things in our minds. Hearing things in our head. Feeling things in our body. Our five senses send us information; our mind does what it is programmed to do with it. When a negative, undesirable thought triggers undesirable feelings, you have the power to shift and change these mental thoughts and feelings utilizing the submodalities of your modalities [modalities are your five senses in this discussion]. Let's discuss how to shift these...