Making space for 🦋 transformation 🦋
AND: Italy retreat commences *one month* from today (and there's still time to join!)!
Good morning everyone. It’s September! My favorite month.
With Pleasure! begins one month from today. It’s not too late to join! Click the button below to sign up. And remember you can always book a call with me if you want to chat before committing!
This retreat is called With Pleasure! not only because we'll be immersed in a culture that prioritizes pleasure, but also because we'll be examining how to rewire our brain's habitual patterning from a negativity bias toward one that fosters a sense of goodness and wellbeing more often than not, no matter the circumstances.
Our time will be balanced between cultural activities and time spent in nature, with built-in downtime and plenty of opportunities to connect with each other.
You will be invited to retreat fully into the experience and to give over to the allure of Tuscany.
Join us!
Sending all my good everything,
Dani
💥 Events 💥
INTERNATIONAL EVENT: SELF MADE presents With Pleasure! —a seven-day alcohol-free retreat in Tuscany happening this October 7-14. I’ve partnered with Carol Sicbaldi, founder of Carol’s Moveable Feast, with the intention that you reclaim joy and pleasure, relish in your five senses, and soak in the richness of your surroundings. To learn more and make a deposit, click here. FOUR WEEKS AWAY!
VIRTUAL EVENT: October Writing Workshop is open for registration! Join us Sunday, 10/22, from 10am-12pm PST. Workshops feature two writing prompts, and a (zero-obligation) option to read aloud and receive non-critical feedback. This workshop is appropriate for all levels. For more information and to register, click here.
❓Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
Last weekend I worked out and then went on a walk with a gym buddy who I’ve connected with over our alcohol-free-ness. He’s about two years in, and wanted to chat about something new he’d been experiencing. He shared with me that he isn’t afraid he’s going to drink, but he doesn’t know what the release valve is. He named how, two years in, things feel harder than ever.
This is a more common experience than I can say, and one I don’t see talked about often.
Here’s a typical trajectory I’ve seen more times than I can count at this point, having worked with *literally* hundreds of individuals who are renegotiating their relationship to alcohol and figuring out how to create a life that feels good more often than not (not to mention that this trajectory also consistent with my personal experience):
You quit drinking, finally. Maybe you even get a pink-cloud experience. You feel an uncanny sense that things are different this time. You are cautiously optimistic, more curious than you’ve ever been before. That tangled knot you’ve been harboring deep in your chest for so long loosens a few degrees.
You begin shoring up your support. You might join a group, or community. You put together a toolkit. You incorporate some kind of contemplative practice—meditation, maybe, or possibly journaling, or perhaps you start your day with a coffee in peace and quiet, no distractions. You’re drinking water regularly, getting some consistent exercise. You’re reading the books, listening to the podcasts, and you’re no longer glossing over articles about the dangers of alcohol. You have drinking dreams (nightmares?) more often than you would like, which, though they are awful, are also followed immediately by the most delicious relief when you wake up and realize you didn’t actually do the thing you don’t do anymore.
You start to stabilize. You get some traction—this shit is working!—and the successes, however humble, are motivating enough to keep you going. You have sober “firsts,” which aren’t so much firsts, as returns: first holiday party; first time attending a wedding; first first date; first time having sex with a new person; first airplane ride; first time on retreat to Europe (😉). The wins and successes come fast and furious and you’re astonished by how different you feel simply from having removed one substance from your life. Your behavior is increasingly aligned with your word and for the first time, you taste what it feels like to trust your life rather than to be constantly managing it.
At some point, which could take years, or a few weeks, there’s a confrontation. All at once, you’re being called to face all those things you used to run from—all those things that had you turn to alcohol as a coping mechanism in the first place. After a period of relief, you’re just as uncomfortable as ever. The tools that had been working up to this moment are sort of falling flat. You worry that this is how it is now, and that the idea of a “release valve” is just that—an idea, a myth. There’s a frustration: What’s the point of quitting drinking if I still feel awful most of the time?
A moment comes when you recognize that are more resourced than you’ve ever been, and your skills are solid enough that you have the strength and capacity to swim into deeper water.
Ding ding ding! What’s that sound? Aha—you’ve just unlocked the next layer of…<drumroll 🥁>
🧅 The Onion of Transformation™ 🧅
It’s a metaphor you can take pretty far.
When you first step into a big change, the outer layers fly off quickly. You start getting traction with new habits. You’re experiencing illuminating aha’s and surprising breakthroughs. You’re feeling an uptick in confidence and self-expression. There’s a momentum that’s exhilarating and self-generating.
At some point (and this happens to us all), you move from those outer layers and closer to the core, and something unexpected happens. What’s next for you starts to feel more challenging. Those deeper layers are denser, and far harder to peel back.
And of course, there are often tears involved. The onion stinks, the way only an onion does.
This is the place where you are most vulnerable to slinking back to old patterns. The path that had been feeling so easy breezy, so promising, transforms. You look around and you find yourself in a dark wood.
🧅
Something I occasionally notice with new clients is that they want the transformation to just sort of…lay on top of what they’re already doing. They want to keep going the way they’ve been going, and for sobriety to simply fold in to currently established routines and ways of being. There can be resistance. There’s usually a significant propensity toward magical thinking. Or, they might truly be beholden to enough spinning plates that the idea of, say, waking up thirty minutes earlier than usual to experiment with a gentle morning routine is legitimately laughable.
All of this to say, there can be a gap between expectation and reality.
As a coach, it’s my job to help close that gap. It’s not my style to prescribe or make demands of my clients—everything is a collaboration—but what is required for change to occur is that a person set aside time and space to devote to practice. It can be as simple as ten minutes/day, for real. Ten minutes gives you something to build on. Ten minutes a day, with some consistency, is enough to give you data and information that might point to what’s next. Ten minutes a day can offer ten minutes of relief, or curiosity, or hope, and these qualities are evidence enough to convince you to keep showing up.
If you keep showing up and practicing, your life will transform, and this is something I promise.
But back to the onion.
As a human being, you are wired to create narratives around your experience. This is how you make sense of what you’ve been through—and where you’re heading—and it’s also a way you create meaning, another deep longing for (most) people. Anchoring onto images can be a grounding tool during frustrating, low, confusing moments, and everything in between. When you’re going through a challenge, you can think of the onion, which reminds you that whatever discomfort you’re feeling is inherent to a commitment to change, instead of an indication that something is wrong with what you’re doing. The Onion of Transformation™ reminds you of your humanity, and that whatever you’re experiencing is part of the human experience, rather than evidence that you as an individual are uniquely fucked up. You gain perspective. You reset expectations, looking at your life *exactly as it is* with your eyes open. Things might still be hard and painful, but there’s an honesty present that is fresh and spacious and comforting. From this place of honesty, you can grow in ways that are authentic to you, and that have nothing to do with cultural/familial/social expectations. Freedom, ease, lightness begin to walk alongside the mucky muck.
A window cracks open; a tender breeze blows through.
An important note: you don’t have to force the layers back. You can wait until you’re ready; you can trust that you’ll know when it’s time to go deeper.
When you peel back a layer of the onion, what you are doing is expanding your comfort zone. You are expanding your capacity to be with whatever comes your way.
Just past the comfort zone is your learning zone. You’ve probably been here before—you might think of a time you were trying something new, and you felt that sense of nervousness, but also an excited readiness. The learning zone is where you continue your development as a human being, and it’s your job to pay close attention to how it feels when you nose your comfort zone a little further into learning zone territory.
This is a beautiful, painstaking process that takes as long as it takes. Your job is not to rush, but to stay present and allow. However, if you rush the process, and try to push past the learning zone too quickly, you enter the panic zone. In the panic zone, no learning can occur. You catch yourself in old habits, or in full nervous system activation.
So you call upon the onion. You remember that you are right on time. You give yourself some space and grace; you float on your back a little longer.
🧅
Some good news: you don’t have to do any of this alone.
A coach is a companion through the dark wood. In our work together, I collect a whole lot of information about your current circumstance, and then create a development program that I present to you. After I get your buy-in (remember: this is a collaboration), we begin working toward concrete outcomes that move you in the direction you desire.
The dark wood could be sobriety—or sobercuriosity. It could also be that subterranean sense that whispers to you during quiet moments, that intuition you get that perhaps something is not quite right with your relationships, or your job, or how you feel about yourself and your life. Or maybe there is something you deeply desire, and the path forward feels murky, or even impossible.
The onion has infinite layers. What happens is you become more adept at the peeling-back-process. As your comfort zone expands, you gain access to a richer experience of yourself, your humanity, your relationships—to other humans and animals, to beauty, to nature and the whole world.
I’m accepting two new clients for this fall~click here or the button below to book some time.
Let’s throw the book at it, let’s experiment with every last release valve. It’s time for you to get to where you want to go~
🧅
Are you living into your own questions? Are you ready to expand into a more grounded, engaged way of being in your life? Is your unique 🧅 Onion of Transformation™ 🧅 a little…stinkier than you would like?
If you’re curious/ready, I’d love to chat.
SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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