Emma Gilmour 0:03
Welcome to this week's episode of midlife A F coming to you from my car in a car park, outside my kids drama class. This week we are going to be talking about the power of intention. This is such a powerful tool in our armory armory that sounds very aggressive in our backpack, Dora the Explorer that's much more relatable so
Speaker 1 0:38
in a backpack for alcohol freedom in midlife, so join me in a sec. After acknowledgement of country I'll see you soon.
Emma Gilmour 0:55
You're a woman in midlife whose intuition is telling you that giving booze the elbow might be the next right move. Then midlife AF is the podcast for you. Join counselor psychotherapist this naked mind and gray area drinking alcohol coach Emma Gilmour for a weekly natter about parenting quirky teens, menopause relationships and navigating this thing called midlife alcohol free. If you're feeling that life could be so much more that you're sick and tired of doing all the things for everyone else. If your intuition is waving her arms manically at you saying it could all be so much easier if we didn't have to keep drinking. Come with me. Together we'll find our group without booze
Emma Gilmour 1:45
I lovingly acknowledge the boomerang people of the Kulin nation as a custodians of current Baroque. I share my admiration for the Aboriginal culture I witnessed the connection that they have for each other and the land and their community. As I swim in the waters and walk on the land, I feel the power of this place. I'm grateful for the Aboriginal peoples amazing custodianship, the power, beauty and the healing potential of this place. I wish to pay special respects to the elders of the Buena, wrong people. Their wisdom, guidance and support are exceptional and felt well beyond the Aboriginal community. I honor that this is Aboriginal land, and that it has never been ceded. I am committed to listening to the Aboriginal community and learning how I can be an active ally in their journey to justice. Rallo glorious human Scott, it's been a few weeks, it really has. I have finished on Wednesday, I finished the amazing, great Ozzy alcohol experiment live. And at this stage that is the very last one I am doing for this year as I'm going to spend a little bit of time pulling together a bit of strategy, I have an intention to write a book. I am wanting to serve my membership community be the lighthouse and a more prison ye so I just need a little bit of time. I'm also planning to go on retreat with my naturopath and acupuncturist, learn more about what they do in Bali and get some time to really kind of pull my intention together for the year ahead. And you know, I've just finished reading the secrets, which funnily enough, I never read and it just makes me laugh because my brother in law sent me the secrets. Back when I was living in London, I was just so not ready to read it. And Nick I have some issues with it. In terms of you know, it's it's quite diet coach, it still got nice, got a lot of diet culture in there. But of its time, like it's an old book, but I you know, I've been following a lot of teachers and leaders in the world of personal development for a long time. And you know, everyone References The Law of Attraction and this is kind of like one of those seminal books that sort of brought the Law of Attraction into more commonplace work and my brain just switched off that I'm like, What am I talking about? Midlife doing it? Really? Oh? Yeah, so I've been reading that and, you know, while I was going through it, funnily enough, I've been working in my group on a visualization tool All meditation that people can get from me, but also that I use in my groups a lot around visioning. And the reason that I'm so passionate about it is because back in 2019, when everything went to the head to her head with my career, and was in a really, really tough place. I did this little course, and I always mentioned her, I always referenced her because she was transformational for me. And this is why, for me, the sort of area that I work in is internet, kind of based training and coaching, and course creation is. So it's such a big deal, because it's something we can do in the busyness of our lives. And it acknowledges how, which is what you know, for me, when I was training to be a counselor, like a therapist, when I was doing my alcohol training, we were in COVID. And the whole world like my uni was like, and the, the organization that I'm licensed with Packfile. You know, everyone was like breaking their brains, because, you know, previously counseling and stuff hadn't really been online that much. And it wasn't really considered proper counseling and proper coaching by the powers that be. And so during COVID, everything had to change, or they had to, like rechange, allowing, you know, counseling hours on, zoom, to count towards the hours that you had done as a counselor of when you are getting a qualification, so you'd like the world changed. And for me, this cause that I did with this record off was called ready for change. She doesn't have it anymore, but she has other things that are equally as amazing. But she did this visualization, meditation with a lady called Fleur. I can't remember her surname. And it was magical. And for me, I for the first time imagined what my life could be like, if I was living a life that I wanted to live, what did I want? What what what could I have a vision of. And I imagined myself working in my office as I have it set up now. And many of you who've worked with me or who've been on zooms with me know, the start of my office with the blue wall, the mirror. And I imagined all of that. And I imagined it regularly. And once I'd imagined it, I could start to take take steps to make it happen. But without having that Northstar that imagination or intuition being released. It's very hard for us to get excited about where we're going. And so this particular tool, which I'll put in the links here, is called your North Star. And it's a visioning exercise to accompany the self paced 30 Day alcohol experiment. But it could be about anything. And I think wherever you are on your journey with alcohol, it's a really useful tool. Because what it's about is is about imagining what workday and a weekend day would be like, if you had achieved your goals with alcohol, and how that would make you feel. And what was really interesting about the secret was there was a lot of talk about you know, how important it is to not make our goals about you know, kind of like smart goals like in the corporate world, but to make our goals be about how we're going to feel at the end of them. And funnily enough, this is one of the key kind of components of the this naked mind training in alcohol because, you know, one of the things that's so amazing about Annie grace, and I highly encourage you if you haven't to read her book to listen to her podcast, her programs are fantastic. That's how I found my sobriety which I don't know why I'm calling sobriety that's not where they usually use, but how I found my freedom from alcohol and and then I went on to train to be a coach in her programs and the her coaching training is phenomenal. So I say any coach who's been through that, I would say I would recommend them because I know that that I have had that foundation. For me, I've added that to a counseling and psychotherapy qualification. And now I'm also training as an A lot of my clients are parents of kids, and often their parents or kids who are struggling because they're neurodiverse. Their kids are neurodiverse, that neurodiverse undiagnosed or diagnosed often. So I also have emotionally intelligent parenting in my backpack backpack. And in addition to that, I'm training under Gabor Ma Tei. Because I thoroughly believe that his way of working people with the body being present with the body, learning how to bring ourselves back to the body, when we are being overwhelmed and working with trauma, big T, little T, often the symptoms of neurodiversity present, like trauma. And often we've heard trauma as neurodivergent human beings. And it's just a beautiful, kind and compassionate way to work with people around alcohol. But it's not just about alcohol, none of this is about alcohol. You know, alcohol is just the coping mechanism, right? So sticking plaster, it's actually about the reasons why we drink. And getting, you know, learning that we're not these personalities that we believe we are, you know, this organized, always on time, whatever it is that we've created in our head to keep us safe.
Emma Gilmour 11:41
That's stopping us from being with ourselves, that's stopping us from feeling our feelings that's stopping us that makes us feel like when we're alone, when we're not doing, we want to rip the skin off. Because the idea of being with ourselves is so completely horrendous and scary. Because no one's ever taught us to do it. And that's one of the things that I add to this naked mind experience is that learning about interoceptive awareness, learning how to be in our skin, learning how to
Emma Gilmour 12:28
learning how to be with ourselves safely, so we don't feel overwhelmed. And also, you know, starting to understand that our one goal here in life is to understand this power that we have, that we've been born with this incredible power to create so much that's been stamped out of us by society that scared of what might happen if women are actually able to hold on to to recognize the extraordinary power that they have, and bring that to, to leash on the world. You know, I was talking with one of my clients who is an amazing human being and she was he's been doing a lot of work with Jane Hardwick, Collins and you know, perimenopause, and menopause and talks about how you know, all of these things that we've been taught to be ashamed of, and to hide, as women are often the source of our power. And, you know, there's a lot to be said, for looking at why system decide that, you know, certain things are acceptable, and certain things are not a lot of the time when you look into it, it's to do with power control. And, you know, to me, and I hope this comes through in all of the work that I do the the underlying difficulty with alcohol is that it keeps us stuck. It keeps us stuck. And it keeps us small. And getting intentional is really, really a huge benefit. So in my be the lighthouse group, we set our intention every every month, we set our intention for the month. There's like an overarching intention, and then we do how are we going to nourish ourselves? How are we going to move our body what's what spiritual, what mindfulness work are we going to do? And what thought work are we going to do because you know, we create our world by the things that we think and what's really interesting when you stop drinking and you start doing what you know people call the work is you realize that you Ah, you're creating the situation that you're in. And I'm not saying that are entirely preset, I like one of the issues that I have with a lot of this is, you know, women drink a lot of the time because they're in unhappy marriages, and their marriages aren't working for them. And my marriage wasn't working for me. And I'm still really working to see if I can get it where I needed to be, in order for it to be okay for me to stay. And the reason I'm being really honest about that, because you know, we can be really harsh with people, it's like, you know, why aren't you Why aren't you? Well, women don't do well, when they separate from men. As a rule, they are financially disadvantaged, it's very rare that a man pays what he's supposed to pay in terms of childcare, and support care. And it's never from what I understand on the stats, it's never a financially advantageous move for a woman. Now, some, there are some exceptions to that rule, I have the most amazing friend called Becca, who you've heard on my podcast, she runs a business called do DeVos do divorce right phenomenon. Now, she is a magic manifester. And she, she and I were on a call last night and she was talking about you know, manifesting fast and getting intentional. And she's really bloody good at it. And she's the main breadwinner in her family. She stood out and she's she's, she's got what she wanted. At, you know, so, you know, it's not always the case, but I think it's worth like, I often when I'm, when I was keeping drinking, I kept drinking for a really long time, because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have the financial security myself, to feel like I could really be free to make, you know, some, you know, hard decision. And now me and hubby are we're trying to work it through. But it means that whenever he kind of loses his shit, and gets really financially anxious, and gets, you know, because he goes into fight or flight. And you know, the way that he speaks and the way that the tone of voice and the sort of anger and, and the way that there's a potential that my children can get their feelings hurt, and their sense of self hurt. And I've seen as grown up you know what it's like to have your sense of self hurt that you know, it's how do you work with that, like, we have to keep having the grown up conversations, but when's enough Sinha?
Emma Gilmour 18:06
And I think many women are in that situation very, very clever, very bright. Women are in that situation. Because we've been, we've been letting you know, we've been fed a lie on we find that we have bought into this whole marriage children thing. And you speak you know, listen to Clem Ford's new book is amazing. I went to that amazing evening that she did with a few other really great speakers, Claire Pickering, I think was one of them. And she's talks about sort of like the lie of marriage, and our generation still bought into all of that. But I like I love my husband, and I want to be with him. And I want to make our marriage work. But not at the expense of myself and not at the expense of my children. And those kinds of conversations are really scary. Because we've got a lot to lose. So I never ever, ever am harsh or judge anybody who is staying in drinking because their sense of self has been so badly damage. And it's the only way we can cope with it. Because it's not an unusual thing. I would say it's incredibly usual. It's very, very usual. So if you're in that situation, don't feel you're alone. Because you're really not. It's very common. And you have to go through some really tough stuff. It's like a really big decision and when you're already depleted and overwhelmed by A lie. You know, it's how do you keep choosing you? And then what does that mean for everything else does everything else go out the window? Anyway, that's a subject for another day. But the reason why I think it's so important is to imagine what you want your future to be. And midlife is time, like Bernie Brown says, where you get the opportunity to kind of go
Emma Gilmour 20:33
okay, we're halfway. What do we want to call it? I realize now that all these things that I was using to keep myself safe drinking, suppressing myself, people pleasing, making work everything, making tidying everything, making control everything, I realize that this is harming me. More than it's helping me now. And so now I have the opportunity if I choose to accept it, to create. And you know, our creation comes from our room area. And when we're feeling unsafe in our marital homes, it's difficult for us to have that creativity that I felt I went to ecstatic dance this week. So we're talking a bit about you know, cool things that we get to do as an alcohol free person. And there's obviously going to be public, no booze on next Sunday. But I went to ecstatic dance last Friday, and I felt so much energy and power there.
Emma Gilmour 21:55
Something released for me, I saw myself as I think my precious dad saw me when I was 16 to 18, I really spent some time with myself when I was dancing. And this is a drug and alcohol free environment, ecstatic dance, it's very much a somatic practice. And I kind of burst this idea of, and just working with women in the alcohol experiment over the last month, it's just so clear that we have so much power and energy as human beings. But we don't know how to harness it. Like we feel things so hugely, and we're terrified by our enormousness. And, for me, part of this journey is, let's get intentional. Because if we could create a life that was everything that we wanted it to be. And we imagined how that would feel in our souls in our body. And we really, really, really sit with that and vision it. And then we build a intentional practice on a daily basis of doing the things that are going to help us get to the place, we suddenly got a North Star, we've suddenly got a direction. And once we open, which is such a huge part, we need to have a whole nother podcast on scarcity and abundance. But once we open up rather than constrict and restrict, which is what we do when we're in resistance when we're willpower. When we're in control when we're in anxiety, we're trying to control everything, but if we can sort of make friends with those parts of us that are trying to keep us safe and open up to the possibility that we have infinite extraordinaire, extraordinary potential. And all you need to do is start getting intentional about it. opening ourselves up to the possibility stop fighting the powerfulness of our feelings learn how to harness our awesomeness and I mean that in the true sense of the word. artifact and powerful they sound like that British comedian I can't revert back. Anyway, I'm gonna leave you on that note but I will be Sharing my true north, your true north, the audio download and I highly encourage you to download it and also give me your feedback on it. And if there's anything else like that that you'd like, that's totally cool. I'm happy to provide that for you. Have an amazing week. I hope I'll see some of you at the pub with no booze next Sunday and huge love. Peace out
Emma Gilmour 25:29
thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of midlife AF with Emma Gilmour. If you enjoyed it, please share on Instagram for your friends and tag me at hoperisingcoaching. If you want to help me grow the podcast please review the episodes for me on Apple podcast that really helps. If you would like to work further with me please go to my website www.hoperising.coaching.com for my free and paid programs or email me at Emma@Hoperising coaching.com sending a massive cuddle to you and yours for me and mine and remember to keep choosing you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
