stop drinking and start living
We all know those big-huge projects that somehow end up in our laps from time to time. They may be work-related projects our boss demands, or they can be goals we set for ourselves – like losing 15 pounds, finishing a degree, or writing our memoir. A recent one of mine was getting new gravel …
Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You just had a soothing, tranquil experience with a pal, your life coach, at a Reiki share, or some other place and you feel calm, cool, collected and in love with the whole world and everything in it. Then you get behind the wheel of your …
When you’re tired, you sleep. When you’re hungry, you eat. When your fingers and toes get pruny and wrinkled from being in the water, you get you out of the pool. While it’s often easy to change certain situations and circumstances by taking an obvious action, it may be a bit tougher to change how …
Sure, we humans need things like oxygen, food, water and pictures of puppies to survive. But there’s a deeper layer of things we need to thrive. My recovery coach training emphasizes 10 of those needs, and I put them all on a Human Needs Monster as an art therapy project on the topic of support. …
When you’re in the throngs of alcohol addiction, things that seem totally abnormal are suddenly normal. Or at least you tell yourself that so you don’t feel freaked out about drinking so much. But when you look back on your drinking history, hindsight can give you tons of clues that your drinking had definitely crossed …
When you leave mounds of clothes and accessories alone in the dark long enough, a strange thing happens. They breed. Some split like amoebas to produce duplicate shirts and pants, while others give birth to litters of new skirts, scarves, hats and shorts you swear you’ve never seen before. It’s a pretty scary thing, which …
I never really knew true agony until my dog Sawyer died. Sure, I had known a variety of pain, various modes of depression, and even different sorts of suffering. But the death of my beloved dog in 2014 pierced my heart with a level of agony that I never knew existed. It actually DID feel …
So a pal and I were having an exchange on Facebook about a particular issue. The pal was on one side, while I had a different point of view. I was explaining that I agreed with half of what the person was saying, but not the other half. The next thing I know, the person …
I take recovery meetings into the local jail as one way of giving back, and one time the whole room was howling so loud with laughter that a corrections officer actually came running down the hall to make sure there wasn’t a riot in progress. Yes, recovery can be fun. You may have even heard …
Not once, but twice this week I heard people telling themselves they sucked. One person said she sucked at a specific task, while another proclaimed she sucked in general. As someone who spent years and years telling myself how sucky I was, I tend to notice these things. I also know the kind of damage …