A day at a time…

Hmmm…just for today I choose to be clean.

Just for this moment I choose peace over chaos…

Just in this moment I choose to be totally present, to “feel” my body- to step out of my head and all the thoughts that make me crazy and suffering drama, fear, and suffering…

Just for this one moment I take a deep breath and feel my body relax and the tenseness leave as I release the air….

And now another moment…I am faced with again the choice to breath in the moment, and to engage in the moment…

And again, I choose to step out of the chatter of my mind and listen to my breath, and feel it move through my nostrils….

Moment by moment I make it through another day, day by day I make it through another week, week by week I make it through another month, and then a year and then two…. this is one part of recovery…. this is the begining of recovery to live without picking up…

Unlike other support methods and systems!

The Unexpected Path Your child is Walking is quite unlike other support groups out there for parents.

It takes a great deal of courage to support another person, to not buy into their victim story that keeps them suffering.  It also takes a great deal of courage for parents to be willing to move out of suffering.  For many, this story of suffering has become comfortable and safe.  The Unexpected Path Your Child is Walking is a courageously innovative step forward in how we support parents to move beyond suffering, and find happiness again in life.

We work with parents who are ready and want to stop their inner pain and suffering.  We do not work with parents who want to hold onto their pain, and relive it over and over and over.  That is the BIG difference.  Helping our parents process their story, and then leave it go, and get on with living their lives.

We appeal well with persons who have already had experiences with conventional support groups, and are sick of feeling like crap still years later.

Coaching is generally short term, in fact, around three months, and we suggest parents take a break and allow themselves to process all the information they have received.  Allowing them time to experience and play with their new way of being!  As things begin to peculate and bubble to the surface, we may often will have a recharge  session or two. That is all that is generally needed by the parent so they can continue moving forward.

Unconditional Love and Addiction Recovery

~Expanding Your Capacity To Love Unconditionally~

When you are “in” love are you happy? I am talking about that “being-ness”, or the “state of” that wonderful, exciting, exuberant “feeling” of the being-ness of love. Love is an awesome and powerful energy that is available to all of us! Who would you be if you loved your life?

You may be wondering and asking, “what’s love got to do with recovery?”

Love has everything to do with recovery, it determines the quality of your recovery, as well as the longevity of your recovery. Truth is you can be sober, and miserable! It is a choice, it is always a choice.

Love creates a space where all things are possible, where opportunities open up, where joy and happiness exist. When we can tap into that space of love we are in a realm of possibilities and energy that thrusts us forward with ease, we are no longer struggling and resisting, and fighting with life and people. When we are in that space of love- we flow with life, not against it. Things that were a struggle and hard for us, simply become effortless.

How do we love our selves, many of us have done horrible things in our past. We feel we failed miserably at life. Right? Some of us failed repeatedly! Some of us feel we shouldn’t have to love others around us who hurt us, who did rotten, horrible things to us, and sometimes to people we loved. As a coach I am trained to support you in breaking the vicious cycles of self hatred.

What would your life look like if you had no more resentments? What would it be like if all that just disappeared, simply was not there any longer for you. As though it simply did not exist, never did, and is gone. Imagine it, ask yourself, What would my life look like if I were free of all of that crap? What would it feel like? What would the possibilities be for my life if there were nothing standing in my way any longer?

You can find out! Life coaching helps you tap into the possibilities that exist for everyone!

What is Life Coaching?

So, what is Life Coaching?

Coaching originated with top-achieving corporate individuals and sports athletes. It has now become a wide-spread phenomenon with successful individuals in all walks of life. Coaching has become more and more specialized. Meaning you can find a life coach who works specifically with the type of person you are, or the specific challenges you might be experiencing. Coaching has become mainstream, no longer is it a service available only to the million dollar athletes and top executives.

Coaching is a unique skill set that has been honed from various philosophers and positive thinkers over the centuries. These go as far back as Socrates, Lao Tzu and spiritual leaders.

Coaching is a new profession that combines the best skills of a positive outlook, listening, questioning and challenging, enabling people to find their own happiness and success.

Coaching helps you to take responsibility for your life, let go of what others think and take action to create the self and life you want. It’s about you creating the happiness in life that you want and deserve.

Simply put, a life coach will help you change the thinking that keeps you recycling in the same old-same thoughts with the same old – same old results! In Life Coaching you can redesign yourself, your environment and your life. Then take action to implement it, and have a coach as your partner challenging and cheering you all the way to your goals!

Your life coach becomes your working advocate and partner for the inner personal change and life change you decide you wish to make!

honesty-dishonesty

I remember thinking I was one of the most honest people I knew. I liked honesty and looked for it in others. Friends and family, they had to be honest in order to have my attention and friendship. Lie, and you may have a second chance, but never a third, you were gone from my life.
That was until I had a life coaching session with this marvelous kick butt coach who literally picked me up and whacked me across the head with a stick and set me back down via the telephone. It was beautiful, she did what no one was able to do in my twelve years of recovery, in a few moments.
Think back to a moment sometime in your life when you saw someone across the room, give you a “look”. Now think about how your mind attempts to make sense of it based entirely on your own story of you. Mine went something like this, “Whats she looking at? What wrong with her, she’s got a problem, i wonder if my hair got messed up, what is she looking at, she looks pissed off, why is she pissed at me, do I know her, why does she keep starring at me, what a b*t^h! …”
The mind is always busy making up stories. Think about illness, the body does not make up stories, but the mind will certainly make up great stories when you are ill. Stories that include the most deadly diseases known to man as a sure possibility. Stories of how no loves us, stories of how no one cares.
We are fearful creatures, with an inner motivation to survive, and the mind works almost non stop in an effort to help us survive. The mind uses everything and anything it can to help us in that effort, and it tells a lot of stories that are not necessarily true at all!
Today when I hear someone talk about honesty, I think about the day my veil was ripped off, that veil that kept me believing I was honest.

Listening to my higher self today

I was speaking with a counselor/therapist, and she was asking me about my coaching at The Unexpected Path, and when I left I realized that I hadn’t really told her anything. I gave away nothing.
It could of been helpful to let her know that I am a certified SmartRecovery facilitator, or that I am fluent in the 12 step program, or that I am a certified recovery coach, and that I know my way around motivational interviewing, and Prochaska’s model of change.
It might of been beneficial that I mentioned the importance I place of nutrition as part of my own support model in coaching. I did mention thoughts and beliefs, and spiritual, as the other two support systems I work in, but I completely left out parts, major points in my own coaching program.
If I had taken a few minutes to listen to my inner self this morning as I was deciding to leave my brochures home, and not take them with me – I would of known before I left home, that I am not sure yet if I know where I would fit into a program with counselors and therapists. I feel like we clash to harshly and I can’t yet see how we would fit together into some well rounded model of true support for a client. I left wondering why I had done what I had done today, yet I knew it as I began to write this post.
What I knew when I left and did not want to believe is that my experience years ago as a parent with a child addicted to drugs was what I needed to become a life coach who stops and questions the popular thought, and way of doing things when it comes to parents and kids. This treatment of that precious relationship is violent and doesn’t work, in building a loving relationship between parent and child.
My higher self was saying NO, there is a greater purpose for my experience, and training, it is to be a conduit of healing and love, bringing together vs. separation.

Gods message is simple and complete

To love thy God and have no false idols, to love thy neighbor as you love yourself.

The most important message from the bible, yet it appears to become a lost message within the churches. Perhaps it is so simple that it can not give the church enough to speak about from week to week, month to month, and year to year.

We are to love God, which translates into loving and caring for ourselves. We needn’t continue looking to heaven, looking to the future for a miracle, it is within our mist right here on earth. We are the miracle. We are what we have been waiting for.

Love our neighbor, our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters, they too have the holy spirit within, we are told to love our neighbor. When we fight and go to war, we are fighting God, we are at war with God. We were told to love God, not to hate God.

The message about God, and about love is so simple we miss it. The message is clear, and honest. The message is complete.

All the other commandments are simple measurements that tell us if we are off somewhere with loving God and loving others. For example, if we are coveting our neighbors wife, then we are not aligned with loving god and our neighbor. If we are lying, stealing, cheating offending others, then we are not in alignment with loving God.

Love is an experience, it is a state of being, it is an openness, and acceptance, it is a place where we do not judge and see the wrongs of another, it is a place where we are not looking at our defects, we are fully accepting of ourselves and those around us. When we are there, we experience pure joy.

National Conference on Holistic Addiction Treatment, April 17-19, 2009 in Sacramento

Brain Repair for Addictive Disorders: Cost-Effective, Successful, Drug-Free Therapies, A National Conference on Holistic Addiction Treatment brings together top clinicians in the country who have successfully treated alcohol and drug addictions as well as mental health conditions with targeted nutritional supplements, nutritious food, acupuncture, acupressure, and other drug-free methods to correct brain chemistry.

These techniques have previously been ignored even though controlled studies exist in the medical literature proving their cost effectiveness. One conference speaker, Stephen Schoenthaler, PhD, Professor of Criminal Justice at California State University, Stanislaus, in 1999 discovered $1 invested in a multivitamin-mineral for incarcerated young men reduced prison rule infractions and violence so dramatically that it returned $1,000 to the budget of the California Department of Corrections in one month.

Other nationally renown experts in addiction nutrition and mind-body integration will discuss how food addictions can be eliminated with proper supplementation, sugar as a trigger for alcoholism, group acupuncture and acupressure for post traumatic stress relief, food’s influence on mental health, and over a dozen other immediately useful topics.
a href=”http://pr-usa.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=194011&Itemid=96″>Read more

Believe the body…the mind lies.

When ever I am faced with a difficult decision in recovery today, I pause.
I have learned through years in recovery that my mind lies. It lies a whole lot and it likes to lie to me about anything and nearly everything.
I have learned that while my mind is apt to lie to me, I can pay attention to my body. My body NEVER lies to me. If I take the time to pay attention to my body, I can find my path around, and through things. I begin to trust myself by listening to what my body has to say to me.

Compassion

Oooh remembering to have compassion with ourselves today. We can be so fragile, we have witnessed a great deal, we have survived the storm, and now we are learning how to be with life, without drugs or alcohol…
Practicing being compassionate with ourselves and others can make a difference.

Relapse Prevention and Investing in Changing your thoughts

The only effective relapse prevention that I know of in existence today takes place in the mind.
It has to do with changing ones thoughts and beliefs. We first have to align ourselves with a belief that supports relapse in order to follow through with using. Humans tend towards making beliefs- truth. Like the belief that earth was flat, that was in some peoples mind, absolute truth…until it was proven false.
As a life coach I know that with enough curiosity and questioning, most beliefs are not true at all. If we shed enough light into those tightly held beliefs we can prove them wrong, and go deeper for the truth, go deeper for a truer belief that supports freedom from using.
Beliefs that support reasoning to remain sober, than we prevent relapse from ever occurring.
There is a belief for many in recovery that it is something to get for free, or $1.00 in a hat, or something that comes through insurance, and many are unwilling to invest in their own sobriety. Yet this belief is not supported in actual truth or statistics, in fact it can be proven wrong some 75-95% of the time. The people we witness around the tables are generally the few exceptions to proving that going to meetings, calling your sponsor, and simply not picking up will be enough to prevent relapse in the majority of the addict population.
Hiring a Life Coach and making that investment in changing your thoughts to support your recovery is a very wise decision to prevent relapse! Investing in freedom is worth investing in.