Hello, everybody, happy Christmas, Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat, and all that. Anyway, this is what the episode is about this week, and I hope it's helpful to you.
I am talking about Christmas, expectations, the pressure that we put on ourselves, how we are conditioned to be responsible for everybody else's experience, and how often our conditioning from childhood makes us feel that unless everything is perfect, that we have not done a good job and that we as human beings are not everything we should be, and I say no to that, that is not true.
That your beautiful, beautiful essence of self, the reason that you're here, the reason that you are listening to this podcast is because you are on a journey, you're a seeker, and you want things to change. You know there's something not right, and you want to feel alive, you want to feel something spectacular. You know that you were born for something more than living the way that you have been. And that's why you're here. And I'm saying to you, Christmas is tough in this world that's created to keep us all working hard and producing. And we don't have to buy into that and our little essence of self which we're now nurturing and trying to discover who that really is. They need us not to buy into that too. And so all the harm and hurt that might have happened to us in our growing up that made us build these barriers to keep us safe. These protective mechanisms: perfectionism, alcohol, shopping, whatever it is, whatever ways we use to help us cope in a world that's hard to cope in.
This Christmas, you have a choice.
This Christmas, you have a choice to stay with yourself to create a Christmas period where you get to breathe, where you get to have space. You have a choice. And I want to offer you that this Christmas. I know it's a tough time so if anyone needs to reach out after they've listened to the podcast, please do. I'm in the DMS, I'm on email. You know where to get me. All right, my lovelies You take care. I'll see you soon. Over to me, in the podcast.
Welcome to this week's episode of midlife, if it's the Christmas episode.
And, you know, I wanted to talk about a few different things today. I wanted to talk about the pressure on us often coming from ourselves, but sometimes coming from external places as well. The pressure to be all things over Christmas, to give out, to be perfect, to have our house beautiful, have everyone gifted, wrapped, to have a beautiful Christmas dinner, to look after everybody. And I think particularly for women, we feel that pressure very hard because that's how we've been conditioned to believe that our value is in what we do. And then our ability to make everybody else feel comfortable and okay is often very heavily to our own detriment.
And so I want to talk about that today. Because I see women suffer at this time of year. And I see women get to the end of their tether, and then wonder why they had to drink, why they felt the need their unconscious drive, to pick up a drink, because they were absolutely
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at the end of their ability to cope. And I think when we're in midlife as well, with our estrogen declining, we can also find that what used to be a much longer rope has got a lot shorter. And so we need to put a lot of things in place in order to look after ourselves.
I talk about this a lot in my groups, but this journey with alcohol, wherever you are, whether you're sober-curious, mindful drinking, whether you're just thinking of taking a break, whether you're already alcohol free, or taking a longer break, wherever you are. And I know I say this all the time, but it's never about the booze. It's never about the booze. The booze is just a coping mechanism, like any other coping mechanism, like food, like work like sex, like social media, shopping, gambling, whatever. It's a coping mechanism. It's not the problem. The problem isn't, isn't drinking. I mean, it becomes problematic, but it's not the problem.
The problem is this culture, in these lives that we've created that means it's very hard for us to thrive. And I think this is particularly true for women, and particularly true for women in midlife. And so I was listening to a great podcast, actually, which I love, Glennon Doyle, one: We Can Do Hard Things. And they were talking about Christmas, and they were talking about, you know, Christmas being a person who doesn't drink. Christmas with all of its stresses, I always remember, Christmas, growing up being a place where there was a lot of family, and there was a lot of love and care. But it was also very stressful. And yeah, I can feel the stress now. And I think about it. So many expectations that things have to be a certain way. You know. And, as I say, you know, with the fact that women get indoctrinated from birth with the idea that they are recognized for what they do. They are validated by what they achieve. And I think this is the same for men as well, but particularly for women, they are expected to make everybody else be okay at the expense of their own well being.
And I often find this with clients, clients who might be a longer term client who might have almost completely stopped drinking, apart from the odd drink here or there, and that or drink here or there, nine times out of 10 where they're like, “oh my goodness, this happened. And just suddenly, somehow or other, I ended up with a drink in my hand. I don't know how it happened”.
That unconscious drive often is relative to not wanting to create a fuss, not wanting to stand out, not listening to our needs. Doing things to make other people feel comfortable when we're abandoning our own needs, our own self. So I guess the theme of this podcast is just to say that we've got you, I have you. We as a community hold you and recognize how tough the holiday season can be. And also how much choice you have in how things play out and how you get to experience your holiday period. And that can be very hard.
I remember doing this course with the wonderful Lisa Cordoff who I love and adore. Which was her signature course back in the day. I think it’s called “ready for change”. That's right. And I remember her saying, you know, you have a choice in everything you do. And I remember her telling the story about her kids and moaning about the situation that she was in with them. But she had a choice. You know, she could put them up for adoption, it was an extreme example. But you know, in everything we have, we do have a choice. We had and we have so much more choice than we think we do. So much. And again, I was listening to the “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast, and she was talking about families, and how triggering they can be, and particularly if you're not drinking, and how important it is to carve out time for ourselves. Create space. I think space is even more important than time. Space is time to breathe. Time to put our feet on the floor. And I think grounding is so important in this as well.
I remember Jolene talking on one of my earlier podcasts about how when we ground ourselves, often that is what the body is looking for. So you know that feeling when you go when you have a glass of wine, and you can feel that sort of like I described as the “ah” moment. But that really is the body looking for groundedness.
So if you guys don't know what grounding practices are, I can talk you through one. So basically, I do this at the beginning of pretty much all my client group client workshops. But basically put your feet on the floor. This is the way I do it, you can do it any other way. But it's really about remembering that you're a human being, remembering you're not your thoughts, you're the thinker of your thoughts, you know, connecting with your body, and how it connects with the earth. You know, so for me, I put my hand on my chest, my hand on my tummy, because that's kind of like a centering move. And it lets me know I'm here. Because this journey for me is all about coming back to the essence of self. And knowing that the essence of self is good. And understanding that the world that we live in has not been created for us to thrive. But we can thrive. And then we can try and change as much as we can of how the world is and what we accept and what we don't accept to be true. And how we continue to thrive and journey and look for our light and let that light shine. Then I focus on my feet and I wiggle my toes. And I focus on what my feet are on. Now you can do this with any other part of your body. It's really just about the surface of your body connecting so it might be your waistband with your waist. It might be your trousers with your legs, your slippers, your socks, your floor. And then we do some breaths. So first, I should do short breath in, long breath out and I like to sigh out because it's really good for the nervous system, vocal cords and everything. So just a breath in and along so read that and then three more of those. And then I asked us to really reflect on how our feet feel.
Are they hot, are they cold? Can you feel any tingling and then plant the feet firmly on the ground, big toe little toe back for arch. And then I asked you to imagine that you have a root going down from the arch of your foot down down to the ground, all the way down and imagine it burrowing through there. Really connecting it to the earth, connecting you to humankind. Knowing that we are all the same, yeah, we all go through the same stuff. It's very normal, it's very human. We're going to be okay. And that we've got ourselves. And then we'll do some more breaths. So, breathe in, and then long breath, out, sighing if you can.
This is what the body is looking for. When the body is agitated. There's so many of us living in fight or flight. And that comes from so many different things. neurodiversity trauma, just the way this world works is that we are often stuck, that's our home away from home. And then all we have to do is add some more stuff in there, like going to stay with our families, being responsible for gifting, being responsible for packing, being responsible for everybody else's emotional well being. And there we go, we are absolutely flying off the charts, off the charts.
And so our responsibility in this journey is to ourselves. Our responsibility is this precious little essence of self. This precious part of us, that was born into this world full of capability full of extraordinary potential, this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful essence. That, you know, got knocked around a bit by life. And we started to hide. For me, like I was shy, and I was geeky, I didn't really like hanging out with people, I just wanted to stay dreaming. And that was, you know, I got the message from the world that that was wrong. And so, and I've talked about this before, but this is what happens to us, we get told that was wrong. We get told something else. And as these different people, other people's opinions and thoughts and society and culture, we start to build these walls, and we create this person. And this person has all these coping mechanisms of which alcohol, or any of the other coping mechanisms can become part of that.
They seem to work for me, for me as a 12 year old, it meant I could be different to how I was because I got the message that how I was wasn't what was acceptable. And so our job now as evolving human beings who are investigating our relationship with our power, is that we keep coming back to that precious out. We keep understanding what it is that we're seeking, and why we're seeking it. So a lot of us are wanting to escape from ourselves, escape from our pain. And that's something that we've done for years, that's our coping mechanism, our coping mechanism is to escape from the pain. What we really need is compassion for ourselves. And for us to turn around to our precious little darling self. Who took all this stuff on board and made themselves bad.
It's that we say to them, “Hey, I see you. I'm not going to abandon you. I'm going to keep you safe. What do you need?”
So what I'd like to offer you guys is a short journaling session for you guys to just think about what is it that you need this Christmas? Yeah. What do you need this holiday? What keeps you grounded? What helps you not abandon yourself? Because every time we run away from this pain, the anxiety doesn't go away. It gets worse. Our coping mechanisms, which generally make things worse, not better, even though we think they are and what if instead of running into that coping mechanism, we decided to stay by ourselves and actually, you know, not abandon ourselves and say, you know, what, it's too much for me this year, don't want to do that, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not going to do that this year, we're not going to do that kind of presence, we're not going to go and see 10 million people, we're just going to keep myself safe and do what I want to do. And that might be that you want to go and see 10 million people, I don't know.
But make sure that you have the escape routes that you need the space that you need, and make a plan for it. Don't expect it to happen without a plan.If you are alcohol free, make a plan for having nice drinks, having nice glasses, having timeout, having time to do the things that keep you sane. For me, it's swimming, and walking and if I can't get out on the paddleboard, those are the things that keep me sane, they keep me grounded
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some yoga, some meditation. But it's about keeping our nervous system, okay. And part of that is doing, you know, doing stuff with our body, like moving our body physically and connecting with our body. And that can be really hard for us, particularly neurodiverse people, and particularly people who struggled with trauma. And so there's some really nice techniques about how we do that, but one of them and one of the things that I teach in my Be the lighthouse program is this use of grounding, orienting and centering. And, if you join my I've got a, I'm just launching actually a new alcohol experiment, self paced, which I'll talk a bit more about at the end. But if you join that, you get a free grounding, orienting and centering video. And it's what I was taught by my favorite teacher, Jay Fields. It is about how we sit with ourselves because this is the thing that we find, often people who drink we find so hard is being with the difficult emotions, being with the big emotions.
And so the way that Jay and somatic experiencing coaching works is about, it's about you just don't go straight into these things. It's like anything sort of understanding of felt sense. So understanding, you know, you as yourself as a human being so you know, being able to touch your feet, feel your feet in your shoes, recognize your human being, hold your chest and your tummy and recognize that you are solid mass. And recognize that you're not your thoughts.
And orienting is like, you know, finding yourself in your space. So looking around your room, and what you can see and one of the really important things about orienting what you can hear, taste orienting yourself as a human, like form objects, organic matter. It sounds gross. But one of the really big things from an evolutionary perspective is checking behind you. Because obviously, when we're because when we're in fight or flight, we're activated, right? So we're in our primitive brain. So we're in survival mode. And survival mode is not the place for rational thinking. And, you know, so one of the things that's really good is when you are orienting yourself in your spaces to look behind you. Yeah, so you know, you're safe, because that's like, a primitive thing. Somebody's coming up behind me.
But yes, I think looking after yourself this Christmas, remembering you have a choice. You don't have to do all this stuff. I'm totally not doing anything this Christmas. Not going anywhere. I was, at the moment, investigating paying for Christmas day to go out for Christmas lunch to take that off my husband because he gets really stressed about doing Christmas lunch. I'm not really socializing at all. And that's okay. No, we have this like, it “should be this way”, “we should be doing this”. Not to me. There's no shoulds. This is our life. This is our precious little essence. How are we going to help it thrive? The world, it's not made for it to thrive. It's our job. We can help it thrive. And we can do that by not abandoning. We do that by saying “You don't need to be scared. I'm a grown up, I can stand next to you. And we can do this together and take your little hand, it's going to be okay. It's okay that you don't want to socialize with people all the time, and it's okay that you don't like parties”.
I’m talking to myself, but all of our stuff is okay. And we'll work on this more over the podcast, because it's actually interesting work and finding out who we actually are. This is why I find this journey so exciting. And this is why I recommend it to so many people, it's not about the booze, it's about once you get rid of the substance that you're used to keeping your little self hidden. Then you get to see who she is. And you get the opportunity to allow her to develop, achieve her potential, whatever that might be. And you get stuck following your intuition and know what your intuition is.
And so for all of you guys who are still sober-curious, I totally get that I didn't stop until January 2020. And that was because I wanted to do Christmas and New Year, still drinking, because of all the, you know, beliefs that we have about that. And sometimes, you know, it's good to have a date. So, you know, this is a time for mindful drinking, don't be mean to yourself, don't beat yourself up. Start being the awareness, start bringing all the visibility to it.
When do you start thinking about drinking? What does it taste like when you're drinking? How do you feel after the first drink?
This is gonna set you up so well for January. And I've got an awareness worksheet as well that you can download, which I'll put in the show notes too. But that's what I did in one month to stop drinking for a year in 2020. I did what I say in the awareness worksheets. I worked through religion and understanding and I worked to take away this is so important, the shame, blame and judgment because alcohol is an addictive substance. The reason you drink more than you should or you want more than you went out to do is because of the way it works with you chemically in your brain, no fault of you. Nothing to do with you as a human being, no reflection on your morals, no reflection on your weakness or strength. It just is. And so let it go. Stop making your bed, start observing, stop being aware. And that will give you everything you need to hit the ground running in January with whatever you want that to look like.
But I highly encourage you to take a 30 day break. I'd love you to do my self paced alcohol experiment. It's a great little course. But whatever you do, just do the observation. Don't give yourself a hard time. And for those of you who are alcohol free, W\well done my darlings if you're not already, you know this is going to be one of the best Christmases you've ever had. You’re present. You get up in the morning and you're present with everybody. I used to drink mimosas from the minute I got up. We were all absolutely shattered by the middle of the day and nothing good really happened. It was just a messy kind of gluttonous feeding frenzy.
Now I'm not saying it's gonna be any different. But I will be compos mentis throughout it. And there's something lovely about actually being present, enjoying a day together with a family. And yeah, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. It really doesn't. And if people around you are triggering to you and if you're going to be in company with some of those people it's gonna make you drink then protect your alcohol free baby. Just like a little baby - when you're first alcohol free, protect it with your life. It's important.
I'm wishing you all a very very merry Merry Christmas, may you spread love and laughter. I'm here if any of you need to connect either on Facebook or Instagram. If you want to book a one to one with me, I'm doing one to one coaching in the new year, one to one coaching. I've got two spots left for January. So if anyone wants to do some really in depth work with me, then do it. It's a great experience. So I love working with people in this area and we'll talk about New Year in my next podcast. All right, my lovelies, take care. Bye
