This entire day has been spent sitting right here at the computer, trying to play catch-up on lessons and assignments before tonight's group coaching call. (If that doesn't make sense, check out the previous day's post. The Cliff Notes: School has been in session since April 27 and it's May 4 and I'm only on Day 2. I'm way behind but I'm coming up the backstretch.)
So today's message said to look over the past week and give ourselves a little pat on the back for everything we did right. That's a very short list (again, check out yesterday's post.) Thank God we can also talk about what we learned.
1. Big tasks turn me into a compulsive, overworking machine that doesn't see or hear anything else. The entire world stops.
2. As someone who believes that we create our own reality, this over-the-top level of unconscious, self-sabotaging Resistance tells me that this program is a hell of a game-changer. We're in a powerful playing field. Some part of me is going fucking bananas: I'm usually a very strong starter.
3. From now through June 25, one of my priorities is balance. (Yeah, I know, it's a lifetime work, especially my lifetime!) Fortunately, all my labor-intensive freelance writing projects are now over and I can devote nearly 100% of my time to this work, yoga, meditation, exercising, preparing healthy meals, creativity (my personal playground), and pampering myself. This massive blessing comes along with Medicare, cataracts, loads of puckering and sagging skin, and joints that get sore if they aren't taken out for a spin regularly. Life's little compromises.
4. My relationship with my husband and our patterns together is going to be a "thing" to deal with. In my first sober incarnation with AA, he responded by asking me every time we went out, "Want to split a bottle of wine?" He doesn't even like wine, he drinks Jack Daniels, this was all-new behavior based on my announcement that I never wanted to drink again. My daughters wanted to drop-kick him over the Arctic Circle. "WTF, mom?" I told them he just wants a drinking buddy and it's an adjustment and indeed, he got over it. That lasted three years, but fast-forward through the past four years when he's heard me say, "I don't want to drink anymore" so many times it's ludicrous. It's time for me to shut up about my intention and just walk the walk. I did it before and I can do it again. He'll get the idea.
5. Annie Grace's book The Naked Mind is phenomenal. Just hit the chapter on what alcohol does to our magnificent, intelligent, miraculous bodies and it is one horrific, terrifying, sobering read. I always thought it was the sugar that alcohol metabolizes into that woke me up at 2 AM (with or without sweats) feeling like a piece of shit with a tire tread running through it. Now I discover it's something else entirely: Precious bits of my dying liver and the toxins created by that breakdown are worse than ethanol itself. And that's only one tiny window into the big picture. Annie says she didn't add that chapter until final edits were over because we aren't motivated by negatives, but my health has always been my number one driver to step away from the poison and it is affecting me.
6. I'm blown away so far by all the things we are already working on and what we are going to be doing. What a far-reaching, life-changing, journey of transformation we have begun. I have to get back to work now, I'm just a bit less than an hour from the 5 PM kick-off of Week 1 and I have a map to create. Live long and prosper and may The Force be with us all.
P.S. How could this not have been number one on this list? I had one delightfully, very conscious, very successful sober evening and woke up the next morning feeling like a million bucks. Small wins, small wins!
