Big Dreams Wild Imaginations
🪐 Early bird for EVOLVE ends tonight 🪐
SO MANY WAYS TO BE TOGETHER:
✍🏽 December Writing Workshop: Grab your spot here (Sunday, December 18, 10am - 12pm PST). This is our last workshop of 2022 and I hope to see you!
💖 Ritual and Reflection: A Winter Solstice Workshop. Overjoyed to again be in collaboration with Anne Marie Cribbin for this very special end-of-year wind down. You'll have the opportunity to both reflect on 2022 as well as be guided through a process to discover your "word" for 2023. Sliding scale!
🤝 1:1 COACHING: Sign up for an Alignment Session.
If you’re curious about what working with me is like; if you’re longing for additional support in your practice; if you’re curious about going deeper into yourself and your day-to-day life, I invite you to sign up to chat. It’s free, and a way for us to check in and explore what’s possible.
Schedule an Alignment Session with Dani.
🤘Apply to EVOLVE - a 12-week online course, community, and coaching program. This is a hybrid group and individual coaching program that kicks off on January 1st, 2023. To learn more click here, and check out the application here.
➡ A reminder that if you register BY December 1st (TOMORROW!), it’s $250 off and you get an additional 60-minute coaching session with me before we kickoff in January. Read details here or check out the application here.
🫶🏽 Join the community! If you've been considering joining, I invite you to click the button 👇🏽 below to subscribe to our SELF MADE community and/or you can read more about what we’re up to here. Membership is $30/month and you have full say over your subscription and there is SO MUCH GOOD STUFF. Check us out.
"The environment in SELF MADE is one of the most welcoming, encouraging and supportive spaces I've ever been a part of. I have been able to explore and grow parts of myself that were so deeply underdeveloped and neglected, thanks to the wisdom and example of the other participant's, and Dani's guidance. This community is what allowed me to truly cement my status as a non-drinker and I am forever grateful."
F.D., SELF MADE community member
❓Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
Hi friends. I’m sending you this newsletter a day early because today is the last day to apply for EVOLVE to get $250 off tuition and an extra December 1:1 kickoff session with me before we begin in January.
Before I share all the ways I stand behind this work, I want to say something that might sound weird, considering I’m, ahem, trying to sell you on joining the program.
But first, a vibe:
Ok cool. Now here’s the thing I want to say:
You can recover on your own.
Most of us can absolutely remove alcohol from our lives and live as nondrinkers without outside intervention. People do it all the time, every day. It’s absolutely possible. You don’t need therapy, you don’t need a recovery community, you don’t even need to tell anyone, and you certainly don’t need a coach, or like, a group program.
And. Even though it’s absolutely possible to become a non-drinker, or to renegotiate your relationship to alcohol, on your own, what I want to say is that without at least a couple of those aforementioned things, it’s just a lot harder than it has to be.
It’s hard no matter what, don’t get me wrong. It would be weird if changing one’s life was easy. And. It’s making it through hard things—a courageous journey where you accumulate evidence that you are indeed a person who can have a say in their life—that so much becomes possible. As you gather this evidence, you develop self-esteem, confidence, self-worth and—dare I say it—self-compassion. You become more available to the world around you. You expand your capacity for joy, and pleasure. You begin to trust yourself, becoming a person who shows up, who keeps their word, who behaves in ways that are in alignment with what you determine are your highest values, and who can stay engaged in the world and take care of themselves at the same time.
My job—and my aim with EVOLVE—is to help lighten the load. Life is still be life-y, even though you no longer drink. Inside the container of this program, we’ll be walking alongside each other, sharing tools, suggestions, care, resources, listening, and accountability. As a coach, I can be a mirror, reflecting back to you your goodness, worthiness, pointing out things you might not have noticed on your own. A coach is a peer, someone who gets it, a reminder that you are not alone. Never, ever alone.
You step on this path, and slowly, slowly, over time, as long as it takes, by way of small, sustainable adjustments, one day, you’ll look around, and your life will be utterly unrecognizable to who you were when you started.
Stepping into this program, you might even have some fun along the way.
🪐
I spent so much of my life struggling. I had become so accustomed to feeling low-grade shitty all the time, that sometimes it’s still surprising to me when I catch myself in moments of ease or contentment.
Within the first eighteen months of getting sober from alcohol, I had changed a lot of external factors in my life. My outer world was transforming, in so many necessary ways. But my inner experience was mostly the same: I still tended more often than not toward melancholy. I was still achingly hard on myself, still at the mercy of persistent trains-of-thought that insisted that sure, I may have stopped drinking, but I was still a piece of shit most of the time, that there was still something inherently wrong with me, and, one wrong move, and I was sure to be kicked out of “the club” for real, never to belong anywhere.
Inside, my soul was still a shriveled mess. Then came the lightbulb moment I’ve written about so many times: There I was, washing my hair in the shower, when it hit me: What was the point of being a non-drinker if I still hated myself?
It is this part of you that I am speaking to today. The part of you that knows there is more to life than what you’ve experienced up to now. The part of you that wakes you up in the middle of the night, clamoring for your care and attention. The part of you that is reaching, that yearns for joy, and self-expression, and a sense of freedom, even inside the challenges of being a human alive at this time in history.
So many of us were trained to handle everything on our own. To never burden anyone with our struggle. To hide our reality.
I’m saying it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m saying you can lay this belief down. We can come into care for each other. We can flip the bird to this outdated, holdover programming from the patriarchy.
I talk about the early days of becoming a non-drinker a lot because even from where I sit, over five years free, it’s still scratch-my-head-damn-near-impossible-to-understand how this one choice had such a ripple effect into every other arena of my life. Participating in this program won’t make your dreams come true overnight (if it did, I’d be retired by now). But I can say that it will help you move in the direction of what that precious, tender, reaching, most gorgeous soul-part of you desires most.
I don’t want to “sell” you on EVOLVE, at least not in the traditional sense of me sitting here using certain sweaty tactics to convince or persuade you. Rather, this is an invitation to turn inward and listen to yourself. If there is something in you that is curious, you can always email me with questions. Or go ahead and check out the obligation-free application, which I created as a way for me to get to know you so I can further curate the program to serve the needs and desires of the group (so it’s an information gathering thing, not an exclusivity thing).
Quitting drinking was the end of a story. It’s also the beginning of a new one.
If you long to deepen into yourself and your practice (which is to say—your life); if you desire the richness of community and the magic that can happen inside a safe container; if you have big dreams and a wild imagination but feel scattered and unsure how the fuck to get started, EVOLVE will offer new ground for you to stand on—and then launch off. We’ll be learning, adapting, growing. We’ll be HAVING FUN. We’ll be accountable to each other. We’ll be making friends. We’ll be fucking up the status quo. We’ll be creating beauty and joy and delight.
SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, coach, and recovery advocate based in San Francisco, CA.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber👇🏽
You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter helps you.
Thank you.