Holly Whitaker Quotes

Disappoint other people with your no; don’t disappoint yourself with a yes you’ll later resent.

Sobriety, if it is anything, is paying attention, seeing the wonder and the beauty around us that we so easily sprint by on our way to the next thing. And this is more than fun; this is actually living.

Real power doesn’t come from having a million followers, good hair, a Louis Vuitton purse, a new car, a new home, a title, a partner, or anything that can be weighed, measured, or acquired. Real power is the thing you’ve always had inside you. Real power doesn’t need to be demonstrated or boasted. Real power is the ability to be in your skin, to know who you are, to know you will always be okay. Real power comes from your gut and your heart and your courage and your bravery and your love. Real power can never be taken away from you and never lost once it’s found.

Spending a night out drinking is akin to dismantling every piece of protection we have—our cognition, our decision making, our reaction time, our memory, our standards, our voice. If we thought about alcohol in this way—as something that undermines our collective momentum and personal agency and vitality and self-worth—what would that mean for us? What if we all rejected the poison—then what? I’ll tell you what: world domination, bitches.

There is the life that most of us live, and then there is the life we have buried deep inside us, the life we know we’re supposed to be living.

Alcohol is the only drug in the world where, when you stop taking it, you are seen as having a disease.

As Mark Twain said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

The goal here is to create a situation you no longer have to escape, or a life you don’t have to numb. The achievement of sobriety is not the point; it’s a by-product of the work. The work is the point. Addiction is the hook that gets you in the door, and quitting is the catalyst to heal deeper wounds.

We go from being able to naturally act like kids to thinking the only time we get to access this state is when we’re a few drinks in.

Finally, my hope, because here is the part of your dating life where you no longer date to find someone to fill the emptiness. You look for someone to share the fullness that you both already are.

Guilt is always preferable to the thing that might give you brownie points for being a good person but ruin your mental health. Choose guilt over resentment, because guilt is a natural part of life, a thing we can work with and absolve ourselves of, while resentment is something that we heap on other people who weren’t asking for it anyway.

Today my toolbox consists of breathing techniques, hot lemon water, herbal tea, hot baths, cold showers (this is called “hydrotherapy” and it’s so, so good), coffee, essential oils, yoga, meditation, kirtan, autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), massage, French pastries, emotional freedom technique (EFT), and many other things.

To summarize, the morning ritual is as follows: (1) wake up at the same time, (2) don’t check your phone, (3) boil some water and squeeze a quarter of a lemon into it, (4) meditate for five minutes, (5) read a positive affirmation that you’ve written on a Post-it note and repeat a few times throughout the day. Spending ten to fifteen minutes in the morning sets you up for an entirely different way of being and prevents cravings later in the day. Do the same thing every day for thirty to forty days to make this process automatic.

Guilt is always preferable to the thing that might give you brownie points for being a good person but ruin your mental health.

There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.

Creating is more than fun—it is total and complete absorption.

Here is the time in my life when: I walk out on bad sex, I ask for what I need, and his ego does not hold more value than my comfort, or what I’m willing to put up with. This

Women don’t need to be groomed to apologize further. They need to be groomed to be worthy of their own apologies to themselves.

We love to protect alcohol and our right to consume it, and to vilify people who can’t handle it. We venerate the substance; we demonize those who get sick from using it.

Is alcohol getting in the way of my happiness, my life, my self-esteem? Is it getting in the way of my dreams, or maybe just not working for me? Does it cost more than it gives, does it shrink more than it expands, does it cut pieces out of me I can’t reclaim? Does it make me hate myself, even just a little bit?

finally, someone had put into words the thing that had been screaming in me since I was first told that my failure to submit to AA was really my ego run amok. Finally, what I read was: It makes sense that a woman might entirely refuse a program that asked her to give up something she’s not only never had, but was finally just grasping: a sense of self, a voice, a sense of her own desires, freedom in a world not made for her.

When you find yourself in that place where someone else’s truth makes you fearful of trusting your own, remember this: Only you got yourself here, and it is safe to trust that you can take yourself the rest of the way.

As a white woman, part of my awakening has included a growing awareness of my privilege and an active education in dismantling the ways I contribute to the oppression of black, brown, and indigenous people. It’s the job of white women (and white men) to undo this discrimination, the same way it’s the job of men to undo toxic masculinity

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

We are supposed to be able to tolerate it, and when we can’t, when it doesn’t feel good or things start going to hell for us, it’s not the substance that’s the problem—it’s us. We are damaged, weak-willed, defective, and totally fucked.

Today I don’t think of myself as being in recovery from illness. I think of myself as being on a mission to recover the truest version of myself, and as being in recovery from long exposure to a sick society that actively wants to destroy all that is good about me. Consequently, I get to do a bunch of rad things to manage life better, so I don’t need to escape.

Saying no to people who want you to say yes, and upholding your boundaries with people who were used to having none, will at first feel terrible. Like a death. And it is a death of sorts. The death of the part of you that thinks you have to violate yourself to make it in life or be valued. You most likely will surrounded by people who are used to being accommodating or passive. At first, they feel threatened by you asserting your boundaries. This is ok. And in time they will get used to it. Just like in time you'll get used to understanding, that when people act like assholes when you say now, isn't about you. It's about them.

Because alcohol is primarily a depressant, we reach for it to take the edge off. Which it does, initially. However, the counteractive process (or the B process) to the depressant nature of alcohol is a release of cortisol and adrenaline into the body. If you drink one glass of wine, you might have about twenty minutes of the desired “relaxed” effect before the drug (A process) wears off, and you’re left with increased amounts of cortisol and adrenaline, which fuel anxiety. This means alcohol causes anxiety; it doesn’t manage it.

We’ve now established three things. First, we don’t need willpower when we don’t desire to do something, and it isn’t a thing some of us have in excess and some of us don’t have at all. It’s a cognitive function, like deciding what to eat or solving a math equation or remembering your dad’s birthday. Willpower is also a limited resource; we have more of it at the beginning of the day and lose it throughout the day as we use it to write emails or not eat cookies. When you automate some decisions or processes (through forming habits), you free up more brain power. Second, for us to make and change a habit, we need a cue, a routine, and a reward, and enough repetition must occur for the process to move from something we have to think about consciously (“I need to brush my teeth,” “I don’t want to drink wine”) to something we do naturally, automatically. Third, throughout the day, we must manage our energy so that we don’t blow out and end up in the place of no return—a hyperaroused state where the only thing that can bring us down is a glass (or a bottle) of wine. Maybe

RASINS, or Recognize, Allow, set aside the Story, Investigate what is happening in your body, Name the sensations, and Surf. The goal is to learn to relax into the craving rather than distract ourselves from it; using the practice, we learn to stay in discomfort and witness our suffering, instead of creating more suffering.

And the shocker? I actually like what I found buried down there. I like myself. I like my tastes, style, preferences, opinions, movements, and peculiarities. I like the books I read, the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, my dry wit, my big hearty man-laugh, my maniacal drive, my deformed big toe, my big messy heart, my big messy life. All of it. And because I’m the person I spend the most time with, this means I get to spend a lot of time with a person I dig. As you can imagine, this is fun.

What this Life Practice has meant for me is better relationships, a better sense of self, better sex, better boundaries, better skin, more money, more time, more joy, more love. It’s given me purpose and fullness, and it means I have a lifetime ahead of me to evolve. I am ripe with possibility because I cracked open, and that is thrilling.

Addiction begins with the hope that something “out there” can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. —JEAN KILBOURNE

...we've reached a tipping point--more [women] are aware of the terms of our own oppression and of our complicity in the oppression of others.

If you feel moved to stand up or give back, do something about it.

finally understood that to exist as a woman isn’t an invitation

For me, going home sober at the end of the night and waking up without a hangover felt like the most wonderfully delicious thing I’d ever experienced.

I’d accidentally built an approach to healing that raised up every single corner of my life.

Second, almost everything you do in the name of detoxification is entirely canceled out by the ingestion of alcohol.

You want a moment.

What I am saying is, alcohol is addictive to everyone. Yet we’ve created a separate disease called alcoholism and forced it upon the minority of the population who are willing to admit they can’t control their drinking, and because of that, we’ve focused on what’s wrong with those few humans rather than on what’s wrong with our alcohol-centric culture or the substance itself.

know the difference between the things that take me down into a hole—the things that would destroy me—and the things that might not be great for me but I do anyway. Because there is a difference.

Addiction and recovery and sobriety are nothing more than your call to adventure, your ticket to everything you’ve ever told yourself you can’t be, and every dream you’ve ever had. This is your great adventure.

I didn’t say “maybe tonight” or debate it at all. I didn’t question whether I’d made the right decision; I fiercely honored the one I’d made. I had a unified mind, not a split one, so I didn’t need to call on my willpower.

go for a run, or make a pot of coffee, or do some breathing exercises instead. Whatever it is, the new, healthier routine needs to provide a similar reward so you are motivated to replicate it in the future. If it doesn’t get you off, it won’t work.

According to Flinders, all religious and spiritual traditions and specifically meditative practices—because they were built by men and for men—promote the following: self-silencing; self-naughting (destruction of the ego); resisting desire; and enclosure (turning inward, sealing off from the world). As a feminist, naming these four requirements of transcendence troubled her. “I realized that however ancient and universal these disciplines may be, they are not gender neutral at all. Formulated for the most part within monastic contexts, they cancel the basic freedoms—to say what one wants, go where one likes, enjoy whatever pleasures one can afford, and most of all, to be somebody—that have normally defined male privilege” (emphasis mine).

I use my voice, even if it is shaky, even if it is sometimes too angry. I don’t let people convince me that I’m not kind because I am holding a ground that so many women before me were murdered or tortured or imprisoned for holding, or trying to hold.

The reason you are turning to a substance to cope is as complicated as you are, and the only way you can get at what is causing you to need to numb out and escape is to look at the things that are driving that discomfort and to start adding solutions there.

soul awakens, you begin to truly inherit your life. You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces, repetitive talk, and weary roles and slip deeper into the true adventure of who you are and who you are called to become.” Sobriety, for me, was exactly as he wrote—I truly inherited my life. I slipped deeper into the adventure of who I felt called to become, and the tired roles I had played forever became obsolete as I moved forward into a world where I was finally naming the terms of who I would be, and who I wouldn’t be.

My work and my career trajectory were suffocating and inescapable, and they simultaneously became my escape. Work became the only place in the world where I knew how to be the worthy, together version of myself, and so work became the central force in my life.

My passage into sobriety was both slow and fast. Slow, in that it took me seventeen years to realize alcohol had never done me any favors, seventeen years of trying to control it and master it and make it work for me like I imagined it worked for all the other people.

hardly anyone I tell about my decision can get past what my not drinking means about their drinking. For the next two months, the same scenario will repeat itself over and over again. People not only aren’t happy for me, they are confused and threatened. They want me to drink.

Healing means breaking this cycle of thought, and we don’t change how we think about ourselves by wishing it different; we change by actively engaging with different words, phrases, and beliefs, and repeating these mantras to ourselves until they interrupt the old hateful story and make a new loving one.

We are supposed to consume alcohol and enjoy it, but we're not supposed to become alcoholics. Imagine if this were the same with cocaine. Imagine we grew up watching our parents snort lines at dinner, celebrations, sporting events, brunches, and funerals. We'd sometimes (or often) see our parents coked out of our minds the way we sometimes (or often) see them drunk. We'd witness them coming down after a cocaine binge the way we see them recovering from a hangover. Kiosks at Disneyland would see it so our parents could make it through a day of fun, our mom's book club would be one big blow-fest and instead of "mommy juice" it would be called "mommy powder" There'd be coke-tasting parties in Napa and cocaine cellars in fancy people's homes, and everyone we know (including our pastors, nurses, teachers, coaches, bosses) would snort it. The message we'd pick up as kids could be Cocaine is great, and one day you'll get to try it, too! Just don't become addicted to it or take it too far. Try it; use it responsibly. Don't become a cocaine-oholic though. Now, I'm sure you're thinking. That's insane, everyone knows cocaine is far more addicting than alcohol and far more dangerous. Except, it's not...The point is not that alcohol is worse than cocaine. The point is that we have a really clear understanding that cocaine is toxic and addictive. We know there's no safe amount of it, no such thing as "moderate" cocaine use; we know it can hook us and rob us of everything we care about...We know we are better off not tangling with it at all.

Americans aren't stupid. We are, however, preternaturally disposed to herd behavior (FOMO), with a strong desire to preserve a sense of individuality and maintain control over our decision making. We're joiners and don't want to be left out of fads; we're also fiercely independent and don't want to be told what to do.

Things like quitting my job with no real plan eons before I was ready, blogging to the world the most private parts of my existence, starting a company with zero clue, having opinions that are decidedly in the margins of popular opinion, traveling with no itinerary, hopping on motorcycles with strange men in foreign countries, asking for things I’m afraid to ask for, dancing terribly in front of people. I live from a place of “Why not?” and this newfound sense of right-minded risk-taking—as in risk-taking I am fully in control and aware of—has led to some of the more fantastic moments of my life and given me major courage and freedom.

Ultimately, what helped me understand addiction and how I came to be ensnared was first realizing that we all suffer some degree of addiction. While not all of us give our lives over to it as much as I did, or get tangled up in chemical addictions, the fact remains that all humans suffer, all look outside themselves to manage that suffering, and all get stuck in feedback loops that run through the same wiring in our brain that alcohol addiction runs through. The second thing that helped me pull apart my own addiction, and thus understand how to approach it and overcome it, was breaking it up into two distinct parts: the root causes, or the things that drive us out of ourselves to cope, and the cycle of addiction, or what happens to us biologically, spiritually, socially, and psychologically over time when we use an effective but addictive substance or behavior in an attempt to regulate ourselves. I call it the Two-Part Problem, and in order to heal, we need to address both parts.

short term always leaves us in a place worse off than when we started. — To properly heal from addiction, we need a holistic approach. We need to create a life we don’t need to escape. We need to address the root causes that made us turn outside ourselves in the first place. This means getting our physical health back, finding a good therapist, ending or leaving abusive relationships, learning to reinhabit our bodies, changing our negative thought patterns, building support networks, finding meaning and connecting to something greater than ourselves, and so on. To break the cycle of addiction, we need to learn to deal with cravings, break old habits, and create new ones. To address all of this is an overwhelming task, but there is a sane, empowering, and balanced approach. But before we discuss how to implement solutions to the Two-Part Problem, we need to address one of the bigger issues that women and other historically oppressed folks need to consider, which is how patriarchal structures affect the root causes of addiction, how they dominate the recovery landscape, and what that means for how we experience recovery. If we are sick from sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, microaggressions, misogyny, ableism, American capitalism, and so on—and we are—then we need to understand how recovery frameworks that were never built with us in mind can actually work against us, further pathologizing characteristics, attributes, and behaviors that have been used to keep us out of our power for millennia. We need to examine what it means for us individually and collectively when a structure built by and for upper-class white men in the early twentieth century dominates the treatment landscape.

My belief that addiction was an issue of social injustice stemmed from my most basic understanding of things like the lack of treatment options for those suffering from addiction, or the way we are dehumanized. Listening to a mother talk about her “junkie daughter,” or my own relative talk about her friend’s “addict grandson”—in that way we are conditioned to talk about the sickest, most vulnerable people in our orbit as problems to be fixed or liabilities to be handled or criminals to be locked up—ripped something in me. I started out with a complete and heartbreaking rage over how we treat (and don’t treat) people suffering with addiction, and only because I was one of them.

The term “act like a log” comes from the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, or The Way of the Bodhisattva, an eighth-century Mahayana Buddhist text, written by the Buddhist monk Shantideva. The verse: “When the urge arises in your mind / To feelings of desire or angry hate / Do not act! Be silent, do not speak! / And like a log of wood be sure to stay.

Because AA is the pervasive model, and because most people—with or without direct experience—understand AA is what you do when you have a problem with the drink, society expects you to participate in AA. To a degree, a drinking problem implies you are subject to its rules. It also implies you have lost the capacity, or even the right, to know what’s best for you.

After that, I started to tell men I was sober before we met, and while I want to say that of course the sobriety factor thinned my options and made some of them run for the hills, I also want to say: good, because what women need more of from men is for them to show what pieces of shits they can be before we give them any of our time. Sobriety has been a filter, not a defect.

Today I don’t think of myself as being in recovery from illness. I think of myself as being on a mission to recover the truest version of myself, and as being in recovery from long exposure to a sick society that actively wants to destroy all that is good about me. Consequently, I get to do a bunch of rad things to manage life better, so I don’t need to escape. The weirdest twist to my story is that I don’t want the work to end, I don’t want to stop this process.

I also realized I no longer had to put up with people who made me feel less than, or react to people who provoked me. I didn’t have to be the mean one or the intolerant one or the nice one or the one who settles or the one no one respects. I didn’t have to hang around with people I couldn’t be myself with, or people who didn’t like me, or people I didn’t like, or people who cratered parts of me. I didn’t have to compete for love, or earn love, or manipulate for love. If sobriety

When we drink alcohol, artificially high levels of dopamine are released into the brain—a glass of wine will release more dopamine than good sex, good chocolate, or good coffee. The above-normal level of dopamine tells our brain that alcohol is really good at keeping us alive, and so the brain sends out higher levels of glutamate to lock in the experience. We remember the experience of drinking a cold glass of Chardonnay on a hot summer day more than we remember eating a slice of apple pie, or drinking a kale smoothie, because of this neurobiological process. If we drink enough alcohol over a long enough period of time, this cycle locks in, and our brains identify alcohol as necessary for survival. When the midbrain is working properly, it will normally prioritize fighting, procreating, and eating. But over time and with enough exposure, the midbrain will begin to identify alcohol as necessary for survival. If we drink enough alcohol, our midbrain will eventually elevate drinking alcohol above other survival

Ten minutes into our conversation he put his hand in my lap and suggested we go to dinner. I thought about how nervous I was, how polite I was, how much care I took to not embarrass him or make him feel uncomfortable; it never occurred to me that I wasn’t the one responsible for bearing that weight, but women are trained to do just this. We are polite and kind and soft, and we smile as we are violated hundreds of different ways; his comfort is always our responsibility, and ours doesn’t quite matter. He harms us, and we manage the embarrassment. It’s our duty.

As Jen Sincero wrote in her book You Are a Badass, “We’re on a planet that somehow knows how to rotate on its axis and follow a defined path while it hurtles through space! Our hearts beat! We can see! We have love, laughter, language, living rooms, computers, compassion, cars, fire, fingernails, flowers, music, medicine, mountains, muffins! We live in a limitless Universe overflowing with miracles! The fact that we aren’t stumbling around in an inconsolable state of sobbing awe is appalling. The Universe must be like, ‘What more do I have to do to wake these bitches up?’ ” One

OK,” he said. “I have a question. I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but if you don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, what the hell do you do for fun?” “This,” I said. “This.” I understand this question more than i understand most questions about sobriety. I understand it because I know exactly where it comes from and exactly why people ask. And I understand why it seems so incomprehensible. I understand it because it was my question. How do you vacation in Mexico without tequila, eat dinner without wine, brunch without champagne, party without shots? How do you live without the distinct pleasure of being silly drunk? Prior to October 2012, if you would have asked me what sobriety looked like, I would have said something that sounded like a fart noise while pointing two thumbs down. A life without alcohol might as well have been a death sentence of boring. A life half lived, with half smiles, that smelled like Clorox bleach. What I have discovered on this side of the bar scene is the exact opposite. Instead of the boring life I had anticipated before quitting booze, my life without alcohol is where my actual living began. Nothing was as half lived, forced, sad, or redundant as an existence that required alcohol to have fun.

I once heard Pema Chodron explain that no emotion lasts longer than 90 seconds. You heard that right: no emotion we feel lasts longer than a minute and a half if we let it run its course without interference. Emotions, the result of chemical response to a thought, appear, intensify, de-intensify, and subside: and they do this in less time than it takes to microwave a frozen burrito. What prolongs them isn’t emotional wiring gone awry but the stories we lay on top of them that keep our brains dumping more of those chemicals into our system. A prolonged emotional experience is the result of the stories we keep alive in our heads.

2. Weaken and Break the Cycle of Addiction Instead of quitting cold turkey (or hyperfocusing on abstinence), we focus on understanding, weakening, and eventually breaking the cycle of addiction. This means we engage with and reevaluate our concepts of will, work with our willpower, manage our energy, and develop new habits, routines, and rituals. Breaking the cycle of addiction also means facing cravings head on and learning to ride them out and eventually burn through them. Some of the things we do to weaken the addiction will be the same as what we do to weaken the root causes (such as meditation), while other practices are specifically geared toward breaking up the addiction (developing new rituals and habits).

Real power doesn’t come from having a million followers, good hair, a Louis Vuitton purse, a new car, a new home, a title, a partner, or anything that can be weighed, measured, or acquired. Real power is the thing you’ve always had inside you. Real power doesn’t need to be demonstrated or boasted. Real power is the ability to be in your skin, to know who you are, to know you will always be okay. Real power comes from your gut and your heart and your courage and your bravery and your love. Real power can never be taken away from you and never lost once it’s found. It’s the kind of power that people like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks and the Dalai Lama all had or have—a quality within unaffected by outer circumstances, an eternal flame that cannot be touched.

at first, it was the sotry of a dead woman walking, of all the women in this world who try to conform to a life they are told they should want- one that looks good on paper. I drank green juice and I made the right sounds when I fucked men I didn't really like and I crushed it in the boardroom and traveled to Central America all by myself and my ass was yoga tight. I did all the right things until all the right things became so suffocating I would up prostrate, drunk, on the floor of my apartment. It then became the journey of a woman waking up to the world and all its possibilities and wonder, her own power and voice and unique identity, the bigness that a life can be when we center it on ourtrue desires, compared to the smallness of one we accept when we center it on the desires we're supposed to have.

Do you know what I did with that broken girl? The one who had been attempting to destroy every single defect of character for as long as she could remember, the one who was already in advanced talks with a God she didn’t believe in to “just take it away,” the one who had no idea of self beyond what was wrapped into the life she thought presented well, men who abused her, friends she didn’t like, and a career that ate her? The one who couldn’t look at herself in a mirror? I started to love her. I began telling her she was okay, that she was loved and that nothing was wrong with her. I told her she wasn’t fucked up beyond repair. I let her know we had lost our way a little bit, that we’d shut some doors along the way, and that I was going to stand next to her while we went around the house and reclaimed those disowned parts. “Especially the ugly ones,” I said.

This meant that I went from being the person who responded to everyone all the time, to being a person who doesn’t respond to hardly anyone, at all. At first, it was hard. My text inbox went from typically ten unread messages to over four hundred. I would read letters from readers, and instead of responding with a novel-length letter, I began saving them to a folder and sending out energetic blessings instead. If an email landed in my inbox, I would let it sit sometimes for up to seven days before even opening it. I got to things when I got to things. At first, some people were super annoyed, but after a few years of this practice, people came to understand I don’t respond to things immediately, and sometimes I don’t respond at all. To me, this is the only sane way to live. I’m not chained to my phone or to other people’s expectations of responsiveness. I don’t prove my love by texting back in two minutes.

when we taste discomfort and want to run is when the actual work starts. Most of the time we show up like I do in a yoga class, full of our own ideas and judgments. Sometimes we are so full, we can’t hear some of the more profound lessons and teachings. To find what works for you or to learn new things on a path of recovery, you have to empty yourself of the things you think you know. You have to be willing to try things you normally wouldn’t try, and you also have to allow yourself to experience them and make decisions based on those experiences. You have to create the space for change to occur and allow yourself to be changed. You don’t have to like everything you try, or fill yourself up with shit that, upon investigation, is just totally not for you. Discernment should come from experience, not just judgment or what your friend Sally said about Kundalini awakenings or what your uncle Ken said about The Fellowship.

becomes more powerful. It believes alcohol is necessary for survival (again, more than food, more than sex), and it’s on a mission to get it. If you’ve ever woken up hungover and resolved to never drink again, and at five p.m. found yourself standing in line with a bottle of red in your hand, this is the flip. Your top-down controls—which made promises to not drink, which are horrified by your perceived weakness, which know that alcohol does you no favors, which want a social life and a future and a sober night with your kids—are weakened, and the part of you that thinks in terms of the next fifteen seconds, which is concerned only with your survival, is running the show and telling you to fuck it, the wine is what matters. This is the cycle of addiction. It doesn’t matter how much we want to quit or hate that we haven’t; we feel compelled to ingest a substance or engage in a behavior we think will provide relief, or make us feel good, and whatever relief or goodness we get in the

Add Healthy Coping Mechanisms Regardless of how much work we do to heal our root issues, we will always need to deal with life, people, our family, assholes, emotions, pain, disappointment, anxiety, depression, loss, grief, and stress. So we need to not only work on the root causes and break the cycle of addiction, but also to replace our crappy coping mechanisms with healthy and constructive ones. Some examples of healthy coping mechanisms are: breathing techniques, spiritual practices, essential oils, chants and sound therapies, supplements, meditations, positive affirmations, and so on. We need to learn how to incorporate these healthy substitutes—not just know what we “should do.” We need to create an existence where we naturally and impulsively reach for something that builds us up or reinforces us or heals us (a poem or mantra, a meditation, a cup of hot water with lemon) instead of something that just takes us down further (a cigarette, a text to an abusive ex-lover, a bottle of wine, a new pair of shoes we can’t afford).

behaviors. Alcohol becomes more important because drinking it excessively tricks a primitive, unconscious part of our brain into believing it’s more critical to our survival than it actually is. The artificially high levels of dopamine that flood the brain when we ingest alcohol begin a cascade of other reactions and responses. The brain has a hedonic set point (a term coined by Dr. Kevin McCauley), which means that it both needs a certain amount of dopamine to register pleasure, and is programmed to downgrade levels of dopamine when we receive too much pleasure. Our bodies are constantly trying to find stasis, or balance, and the hedonic set point is an example of that. When high levels of dopamine are regularly released into the system from chronic use of alcohol, the dopamine is down-regulated (or balanced) by something called corticotropin-releasing factor, or CRF—a hormone that makes us feel anxious or stressed. If we flood our system with higher-than-normal levels of dopamine, we also flood our system with higher-than-normal levels of CRF, or anxiety. Over time, when our system is assaulted by surges of dopamine, our hedonic set point goes up (requiring more dopamine to feel good), and things that used to register as pleasurable (like warm hugs or our children’s laughter) don’t release enough dopamine to hit that raised baseline. To boot, activities that normally relieve stress, like a bath or a brisk walk, also lose their effectiveness. Alcohol becomes the quickest way our body learns to handle anxiety (which begets more anxiety because alcohol is a depressant, and the body reacts to it by releasing cortisol and adrenaline, which means the net effect of a glass of wine is more stress, not less). Our bodies are adaptive, and they adapt to an environment that expects the effects of alcohol. So here we are: we start using alcohol because it gives us more pleasure than sex and does more for stress management than chamomile tea. Over time it gets wrapped up in our survival response, so we are motivated to drink with the same force that motivates us to eat—only the force is stronger than the desire to eat because our midbrain, which ranks everything based on dopamine, thinks we need alcohol more than food. That seems like enough fuckery to contend with, but there’s more to the story.

So let’s say you get home, and maybe you do your evening ritual, but out of nowhere the desire to drink smacks you across your face, possibly due to stress, or emptiness, or boredom, or even happiness. Maybe you think, I can start quitting again tomorrow, or some other allowing thought, even though you don’t want to drink. Here’s how it works: First, you recognize what is happening—you are experiencing a craving to drink alcohol. Say it to yourself: I am experiencing a craving for alcohol. The next step might seem counterintuitive, but it’s not: Allow the sensations to build, allow yourself to crave a drink. This allows you to conserve energy by giving space to the craving; instead of expending energy trying to resist the feeling by telling yourself it’s wrong or terrifying or shouldn’t be happening, you let nature take its course. In the third step, you set aside the story, which means you don’t tell yourself that you are miserable, that the craving is a sign of some eternal and endless struggle, or something more powerful than you. Instead, you spend that energy doing the fourth step, which is investigating the sensations in your body. What does it feel like? Is your throat closing up? Are your fists clenching? Are your legs full of energy? Is your heart tight? The fifth step is to name those sensations out loud, or better yet, write them down. And the final step is to ride or surf the physical sensations as they intensify, peak, and then dissipate.

The Cycle of Addiction (What Keeps Us Stuck) The cycle of addiction, the second part of the Two-Part Problem, is a response to what’s happening at the root—that brings with it its own set of problems. Addiction is essentially a symptom of those root issues that becomes its own “disease”—when we use any substance or behavior to manage our underlying pain, and use it repeatedly, we enter into a cycle, or a feedback loop. To understand what the cycle of addiction is, or in the case of alcohol what would be classified as Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), we need to look at how alcohol dependence is formed. When we consume alcohol, our body reacts to the substance by releasing artificially high levels of dopamine. Dopamine is the neurochemical of wanting and motivation, and it lives in the midbrain—the part of our brain that is tasked with ensuring our survival. Typically, our midbrain releases dopamine when we encounter something that keeps us alive or that aids in procreation, like when we eat a piece of chocolate or have good sex. Dopamine is released in order to tell our brain that some activity or substance is good for survival, and the higher the levels of dopamine that are released, the more we are programmed to repeat the activity. When dopamine floods into the brain, it sends a signal that the activity is good for survival, and in order to make sure we repeat the behavior, our brain releases another neurochemical called glutamate to lock in the memory of the event, so that we are wired to do it again.

It then became the journey of a woman waking up to the world and all its possibilities and wonder, her own power and voice and unique identity, the bigness that a life can be when we center it on our true desires, compared to the smallness of the one we accept when we center it on the desires we’re supposed to have.

My definition of addiction is any behavior that a person finds pleasure or relief in and craves, but suffers negative consequences and can’t give up.

We’ve got some reserve willpower left because we’ve been careful about how we use our brain juice by creating habits, cutting out unnecessary decision making, and limiting distractions.

The Morning Ritual: Planning for It PLAN AHEAD The first thing you can do is plan your morning the night before. This means making sure you have lemons for your hot lemon water, getting the coffee ready to brew, and setting your alarm to allow ten to fifteen minutes to center yourself. You can go a step further by making any decisions you might need to make the next morning, like choosing an outfit, looking at your calendar to mentally construct what lies ahead so you can adjust for it, or picking which guided meditation you are going to use. COMMIT TO YOUR ROUTINE Stick with the plan. Make a commitment for the next thirty to forty days that no matter how shitty you feel, you’ll carry out your morning routine. When I set out to train myself to brush my teeth every night, it took some brain power. I had to make the decision to do it and debate myself almost every single time. But without fail, I made myself brush my teeth until it became automatic, something I did without much fuss. You don’t have to keep up this practice forever, and chances are it will fall off at some point, but right now you’re in training to not drink. DESIGNATE A PLACE TO MEDITATE This might sound frivolous but it is terribly important: create a place where you will meditate every morning. You don’t have to build an altar or buy a meditation cushion, although you can. It might even just be your bed (I meditate mostly in my bed, though I have a space set up in my basement). Remember you are investing in your healing, and understand that the more intention you put into something or the more special you make it, the more likely you are to do it. You can, if you want, go

You Are Allowed to Change

We think we have so little control over how people treat us, and to a degree, that’s true. We can’t make others do our bidding or like us or accept us, and we for certain can’t change other people. But we underestimate our power to create and uphold boundaries.

Not long after I quit my corporate job, I started working with a career coach, and she had me do a “future-self meditation.” It’s exactly as it sounds: you close your eyes and imagine yourself at some point in the future, and this focused meditation reveals the things you need to know now about where it is you’re going.

We need to address the root causes that made us turn outside ourselves in the first place. This means getting our physical health back, finding a good therapist, ending or leaving abusive relationships, learning to reinhabit our bodies, changing our negative thought patterns, building support networks, finding meaning and connecting to something greater than ourselves, and so on. To break the cycle of addiction, we need to learn to deal with cravings, break old habits, and create new ones.

alcohol getting in the way of my happiness, my life, my self-esteem? Is it getting in the way of my dreams, or maybe just not working for me? Does it cost more than it gives, does it shrink more than it expands,

A quote I found at the time by Brendan Francis was key: “At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.

I went around the house that is Holli, and closed off all the doors to the places in me that were wrong. Soon enough there were so many closed doors so many places I couldn't go or let other people see. There was nowhere to live. So, I left I went somewhere else. The home that was me, was no longer habitable.

I didn't have a god size hole. I just had a hole that was the size of everything, I was told not to be.

I told her to save her life at all costs. To put on her own oxygen mask and to put it on first. When other people told her she was wrong, that she couldn't trust herself, that she was selfish and deluded. I told her, f*k them.

We are not only expected to be mothers, but we are also expected to mother. And not just children. Everyone. Which is another way of saying, you are skilled at putting everyone else's needs first. Because our society subtlety and unsubtly tells you to.

For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction. —CYNTHIA OCCELLI

Calling myself sober, and not ingesting ethanol on the regular, led to greater clarity, and also a mad desire to break through all the limitations I had accepted for my life. Sobriety from alcohol led me to want more sobriety. Or rather, freedom led me to want more freedom.

After sobriety, I learned that only people who truly know themselves can be with themselves in solitude.

radical self-awareness is the root of our collective liberation.

Now, if I’m judging some woman for being full of herself, I dig into whether it’s because I’m too full of myself or—more likely—because I’m feeling like I’m not allowed to be that self-assured and proud.

all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.