Alcohol is NOT The Problem!

(soft music) - SDC, what is up? I am Barti Rez, the stop drinking coach, and I'm finally back with another episode. I know it's been, wow, almost six or seven months since my last episode on here, and I know so many of you have been reaching out and asking me, "Hey, what's going on with the podcast?" You're still recording it. And yeah, I'm back, and it feels so good to be back. You know, the last six, seven months of my life have been quite interesting, and wow, then we'll get into the episode here in just a second, but I figure I give you guys a little background on just kind of what I've been up to. I think after I recorded my last podcast episode, I kind of got into a place where I just felt like I needed a bit of a break. I felt like I needed to take a step back from content, because I just kind of had my own personal things that I was working through in a lot of different ways. And yeah, you know, over this last six months, my life has kind of grown and evolved and changed in so many different ways. I mean, one, between June and July, I traveled to five different countries in Europe and Asia with a friend of mine, and that was an incredibly beautiful experience. If you guys follow me on TikTok, you probably saw a couple of the TikToks that I put out during that time, but yeah, I traveled to five different countries, totally alcohol-free, enjoyed every second of it, and didn't even have a desire or urge to drink alcohol. You know, a couple months ago, I just crossed the four years alcohol-free mark, which has just been such a blessing in my life. You know, as I share all these things with you on my podcast, it's all truth, it's all coming from my heart, it's all coming from my soul, and in fact, when I record my podcast episodes, I kind of just feel like I'm channeling, you know? I just kind of open myself up, and things just come through, and I'm just the conduit to share this information that oftentimes goes on to change and transform so many of your lives. And so it's been a wild kind of journey. Last month I was in Nashville for a buddy of mine's Bachelor Party, then I went to Italy, and then I went to this profound retreat that really changed my life. And I'm gonna be going to Costa Rica in the end of December, and then there's a good chance that when my lease is up at the end of March, I'm gonna be moving to Costa Rica for two to three months. But don't worry, stop drinking coach, and everything that I have, and then I'm building, and creating for you guys is only gonna continue to get better. I've just felt a deep, deep call to go out there, and to do some deeper work on myself, which I'm very, very excited about, because as you guys know, healing, growth, mental, emotional, and spiritual development is really at the core of who I am. And so this is kind of what looks like the next chapter in my personal journey. But yeah, I just want to jump on here and let you guys know that number one, the podcast is not done. I'm gonna be continuing the podcast. I want to eventually have hundreds of episodes. And so I appreciate all of you guys so much for continuing to just listen to the same episodes over and over again, to get the information and the value and the support that you need on your journey. And so on today's episode, well, with that being said, before I dive in, I also do want to mention that the group program that I've been talking about for the last year is finally getting ready to launch the first week of January. So if you have not still down application yet, I highly, highly recommend you do so, so that you're on my email list, so that in December when I start sending out emails regarding details of the program, I'm completely redesigning my website. I'm gonna have a 45 minute video presentation that goes into me, my story, the details of the program, and you'll be able to actually buy the program and join the program straight through my website. I've also lowered the price to make it much more affordable and accessible for virtually anybody who is looking to work with me and to get the support that they need to finally find freedom from alcohol. And so I'm not gonna go into all the details of that program yet, that'll be on some upcoming episodes here, but I just wanted to drop that, not gonna let you know that everything is finally in place. I'm just buttoning up a couple more things, but it is absolutely set to launch the first week of January and initially I'm gonna be taking on 25 to 50 people in that. So if you're interested in joining that, if you've been waiting for an opportunity, if 2025 is finally the time and year where you wanna put alcohol behind you, this is the time to do it, because you're gonna be getting a discounted rate into that program and it's gonna be so robust, it's gonna be radically different from anything else out there. I mean, my program is already different from anything else out there, but the group program and everything that I'm gonna be pumping into it as far as courses, videos, resources, meditations, guides, healing assets, tools. I mean, it's gonna be, it's gonna be wild. Stop drinking, coach is gonna be the number one sobriety and life coaching program in existence over the coming year. And so, very, very excited about that launch. I also just added 12 video testimonials to my website. So if you go to www.thus.drinkingcoach.com, scroll down, you'll find 12 video testimonials of my clients. And I encourage you to really just block out 10 or 15 minutes and just sit down and watch them. And don't just watch them, but really try to feel them. See if he can connect with them compassionately and really drop into a level of empathy, to look at them and see them just like you. You've heard me say this before when it comes to alcohol, we're the same person living in a different body. Meaning, well, some people might drink because they're anxious, while some people might drink because they're bored or stressed out or overwhelmed or my co-verlacentive challenges or whatever else it might be. At the end of the day, when we all go to quit drinking alcohol, we all are experiencing the same fears, the same challenges, the same points of resistance. Oh, am I gonna be judged? Oh, how am I gonna go on vacation? Life is gonna be boring. What's gonna happen to my social life? All of those sort of fears, anxieties and points of resistance are the exact ones that I have felt are the exact ones that every person who's come into my program has felt and every person who's ever gone through any other recovery program in existence or as experience addiction feels. And so I say that to remind you that you're not alone. And while you feel like your relationship with alcohol is unique or that the reason why you're drinking is somehow unique, it's really not. At the end of the day, we're a lot more similar than you think, we're all one sort of consciousness experiencing itself in different bodies. And yeah, so go take a few minutes to watch those video testimonials. Don't take it for me, take it from people who have come through my program. And just listen to what they have to say. And so beyond that shameless plug there, let's jump into today's episode, which is called Alcohol is Not the Problem, right? And this is a reoccurring theme that I've talked about in so many of my TikToks and so many of my podcasts, right? When we develop a problematic relationship with alcohol, we think I just got to put the bottle down and I just got to stop drinking. But you do that, right? You get a day, you get three days, you get five days, you get a week, you get a month, maybe a few months, some people go six months, some people go eight months, a year. And then inevitably they fall right back into the vicious cycle because they rationalize and justify and say, hey, look, all my problems have gone away, life is so much better. I've been meditating and things are just going to be different this time. And then, boom, right back into the vicious cycle. And within days or weeks, they find themselves drinking just as much as they were before. If not more because what we do is we make up for lost time and then ends up just becoming this huge challenge and cluster and it's filled with shame and guilt and how could I let go of so much time and a hundred percent of the time you realize it wasn't worth it. You never have anybody get a measurable degree of time away from alcohol only to go back and say, oh man, this is great. A hundred percent of the time, it's always followed by shame, guilt, regret and confusion as to how could I have let that happen. And so when it comes down to it, alcohol is not the problem. And if you just put the bottle down and you don't do anything else, right, you can white knuckle a few weeks or a few months, but you're gonna go back, right? Alcohol is not the problem. Alcohol is the solution to something deeper, right? We don't drink alcohol just for the sake of it, right? We're drinking alcohol to change the state of our mind or to change the state of the sensations flowing in our body, aka feelings and emotions. We're drinking to change something. We're drinking to avoid something. We're drinking to push something inside of us away or to numb it out. And if you try drinking, or if you've tried quitting drinking over the last years or decades or several months, as you've kind of woken up and have realized that alcohol is toxic and destructive and poisonous to your mind, to your body, to your spirit, to your relationships, to your health, to your everything, to your bank account, to your career. And you always end up finding yourself going back. It's because you're not doing anything to dig a little deeper into begin addressing the underlying issues. I started this off by saying some of us shrink because it takes the edge off in social situations. Some of us shrink because we feel like we deserve it after a long work week or we close the deal at work. Some of us shrink because we've got so many different responsibilities and we've got employees or we've got all these people that we're responsible for, our family, we're paying bills, we've got a mortgage, we've got all these things that we're putting energy and effort into. And when it gets down to the end of the day or to the end of the week, we have tricked ourselves into believing that alcohol is some sort of reprieve. It's our time to finally sit back and relax and just none out all of the pain and challenge and stress and responsibility of day and day life. But you have to understand that what you have to understand about alcohol is that it's a jaylor, it's a jaylor, right? It promises you, hey, I'll give you 15, 30 minutes an hour of relief, but it does that. It does that at the expense of taking your soul. It does that at the expense of creating obsession around alcohol and it does that at the expense of your entire physiological system, right? There's no free lunch in nature, right? Every time you drink alcohol, you're digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole, neurochemically, mentally, neurologically, emotionally, right? So it's, and I've got this other podcast episode, it's like alcohol is death, alcohol is death, right? Like if you do not have the tools to manage your mind in your emotional operating system, right? You did it learn how to cope, you didn't learn how to manage stress, you did it learn how to self-regulate, you never had an opportunity to work through your past or your trauma or the experiences of your childhood or your adolescence that cause a lot of pain, which then caused psychological and emotional and behavioral patterns as a way to compensate for that pain, right? Now you're an adult and you're trying to figure out how to navigate and get through life, but you realize that it doesn't work with alcohol. It's a jaylor. It makes you believe that you have to have alcohol to have fun, that you have to have alcohol to relax, that you have to have alcohol to have a great time, that you have to have alcohol to eat steak, that you have to have alcohol to play golf, that you have to have alcohol to go on vacation. And it's just nonsense because it's numbing you out. And it's not allowing you to actually begin working on all of the things inside of you that you need to address to evolve and become a bigger, fuller, more beautiful, authentic expression of who you truly are, right? You've heard me say this time and time again, alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution, right? And you have to think back, think back to when you were 10, 12, 13, 14 years old before you started drinking alcohol, right? Think about the dreams that you have, the goals that you have, the vision that you had for your life, right? I'm sure it didn't involve getting fucked up all the time. I'm sure it didn't involve living this hamster wheel of existence where you're literally reliving the same week of your life over and over and over again, right? I'm sure it didn't involve like, shying away, encountering away from the things that you know you need to do in the ways that you need to step up as an adult for your family, for your kids, for your career, for yourself. You've got to remember that like, we've only got one shot at this thing, right? The universe has been around billions and billions, maybe even trillions of years. You didn't ask to be born, but now you're here. And we get a small blip of a window to be alive and to be able to experience this beautiful reality. And I know if you're going through a lot of pain or struggle right now, it maybe doesn't seem so beautiful to you, but it really is. It really is. Every day is a miracle. Every day that you wake up and have an opportunity to have your five senses open, receiving information, eating food, drinking water, you know, tasting pizza, being with your partner, being with your friends, like, dude, this is a gift and it's not going to be here forever. So you have to play the tape forward always in everything that you do because if you don't, life is just going to, it's just going to go by and you're going to spend years and years and years or decades of your life as a shell of yourself. I would say most of my clients are between the age of, of, let's say, 38 and 65, but really the average being in their 40s and 50s and in some in their 60s. Then I can't tell you 100% of them once they, once they get to the other side of this thing, 100%, not 99%, 100% says, man, I can't believe I wasted so much time and I just wish I did this sooner. And you've got to understand that you're no different from them. And there's this thing that we have when we drink alcohol, where, you know, when our pain is present and we feel like a victim and we feel justified and the people who have heard us or take advantage of us and and have caused this pain that we've had to live with and carry, right? We think we're so unique, we're so justified. And but, Barty, you don't understand my pain, you don't understand my anxiety, you don't understand, I get really overwhelmed, you don't understand. And it's like, listen, maybe I don't understand 100%, but I understand it enough, you know, I grew up in an environment and a family that was completely dysfunctional and broken, you know, I experienced all the pain, all the trauma from emotional neglect to constant fighting and cops coming to the door three days a week, you know, because my dad was raging, you know, and angry when he was drinking alcohol to, you know, constantly moving, changing schools every two years, not having the stability of being able to just, you know, move through a stable environment that that felt safe and then losing my dad to alcohol poisoning when I was 14 years old, he drank himself to death. I mean, the guy was 57 years old and, you know, they found him with a point four for blood alcohol level and it's sad, it's sad, you know, and I didn't necessarily deserve that and, you know, your children and the children of this world don't deserve that, right? If you go out and you make a commitment to your partner that, hey, we're going to have kids and we're going to raise kids, like there's a responsibility that you have to create a set, a safe, healthy, functional environment for those children to grow up because they're innocent, they're innocent. And, you know, it's like, as I look back on my life, while all those things were hard and painful and challenging and led me into my own alcoholism of binge drinking for 14 years, which then led to drinking four to six bottles of wine every single day. That's 20 to 30 drinks a day, that's 175 drinks a week during COVID before I hit rock bottom, you know, by the grace of God or the universe or whatever, I've always had this insatiable level of curiosity inside of me to try to figure out the nature of existence and to try to just evolve and become better. And as I look back on my life, I mean, for me at least, and this has been my own spiritual work, is I've been able to look back and completely forgive everything in my past and look at my past as not this detriment and not as this pain, you know, this family, this life, all the challenges, the struggles, not having money and and all the things, right? Like, I've been able to make peace with it. And now I see that it was part of my spiritual curriculum. I would not be here, Barty Arraz, as a stop drinking coach, talking to you and speaking to you and sharing these messages if I had not had the courage to put the bottle down and begin doing the inner work. And so for me, when I look back at my life, it was perfect. It was perfect. I had to have the exact mom that I did with the exact high anxiety, OCD. I had to have the exact dad that I did who had, you know, pains and struggles with addiction. I had to have the exact type of family unit in the way that I grew up and what they taught me, what they didn't teach me and all the lessons that came in between in order for me to become the person that I am, to think the way that I do, to have the perspectives that I do, to have the heart that I do, to have the tenacity and the drive forward that I do. It was all perfect. But while I was going through it and in my teens and into my 20s, there was a lot of resentment. There was a lot of pain and there was a lot of anger and there was a lot of hurt. And I felt justified in that. I felt it was irrational to do what I was doing and to feel the way that I was feeling. I felt validated in that and I was. I was. I was hurt. But when I came to discover and realize after I finally hit rock bottom and I played the deep thing. forward is I realize that, okay, once I put the bottle down, now I've got to figure out how to do this sustainably. How do I do this sustainably? In order to do that, I had to start digging in deeper. I had to start digging in deeper because when you put the bottle down, it doesn't make all of your problems go away. Make some of your problems go away. You stop blacking out, you stop causing crazy arguments with your partner and saying things or doing things that you don't mean that are reprehensible that you have shame and guilt over. I started saving some money. My health got better. But at the end of the day, there was deeper wounds there. There was fear. There was self-doubt. There was self-judgment. There was anxiety. There was insecurity. There was fear of being my authentic self. There was fear of expressing my truth. There was fear of expressing my voice because what if I myself, what if I put boundaries into my life, what if I actually express who I am, what if I get rejected, what if people laugh at me, what if people don't like me, what if I put all this time and energy and effort and take a bet on myself and I fail? Then my deepest, deepest fear that we all have, then that becomes true. It's like, "Oh, see, you weren't shit anyway." All that mental chatter about how you could do this or how you could go out and be that. It was all nonsense. See, you failed. That's all of our makeup spheres. That's why we don't try. That's why we don't put the effort and that's why we don't make this sacrifice. That's why we're afraid to start. Because what if I try, what if I put my best in and it's still not good enough? The feeling of not being good enough is probably the number one most sort of ubiquitous fear that all humans carry. Because of our childhood, because love was conditional. Because if we did good and we got A's, we got praise and love and if we didn't, we got reprimanded. We don't just drink alcohol out of a vacuum. It's not just this random occurrence. We're doing it to cope. We're doing it to manage something. We're doing it because deep down, there's parts of ourselves that we've denied, that we've rejected, that we've been afraid to meet in confront. But what you have to understand, man, is that on this journey of life, that is what we're here to do. That is what we're here to do. We all somehow, through the cultural models of this matrix, this conditioning between news, media television, friends, family, we were led to believe that, hey, you're human. So go through this schooling system, get a good job, get a good degree, and then now you can work and make some good money and have a decent living. And then go find a partner and then pop out a few kids and then just be a cog in the machine. And that's what it is. And that's what we feel like we're doing. But that's why so many of us are in so much pain and have so much anxiety and feel so disconnected. Because that's not what life is. All that shit is made up. It's made up. You weren't born. You weren't incarnated into becoming a human so that you could learn basic skills, get a job, and work. And then that's it. That's it. Right? But that's what so many of us are doing. And that's why we feel so toxic and life is so disconnected. And we have depression and we have anxiety and we have all these things that make it uncomfortable for us to just be in our body. So let me share with you what I have discovered is why we're here on earth. Life is a school. Being a human, right? This 80 year, 100 year existence we have, this is a school. This is a curriculum and your whatever you want to call it, however you want to label it, regardless of creed or spiritual doctrine or religion or whatever, right? Your consciousness, your soul incarnates into the body. And from the moment you're born up until the moment you die, you are experiencing lessons for you to evolve spiritually. That is the journey. And dealing with addiction is just a rung on this ladder, right? You look at it through the lens of alcohol, but anybody can become addicted. I don't care if you grow up in a perfect family and a wealthy family with a white picket fence. Picket fence. It doesn't matter. Everybody with the way this physiological system or brain or nervous system is designed, anybody can experience addiction, right? So almost every human experience is addiction to something throughout their journey, whether it's phones, foods, sex, porn, alcohol, weed, gambling, like it doesn't matter. It's all kind of the same thing. You're taxing your neurochemistry. You're going through the sickle of pain and pleasure cycles. And you're becoming disconnected from your true self. You're becoming disconnected from your values, from your beliefs, from your personal truth, right? And if we never had an opportunity to really dig in and figure out and identify what those things are, and we just get hurted through the K through 12 system, and then we go into college, and we all basically get a first-class seat on developing alcohol use disorder. And now you've got to pay bills, and now you've got to manage a life in a relationship and kit. Dude, you never learned these things. And so you just, you wire your system into becoming dependent on alcohol because it seems like it provides this illusory short-term relief, but it does that at the expense of making you a slave. But you have to think back. You have to think back. Before you started drinking, you weren't living in a deficit. You didn't crave alcohol. You weren't, you know, going through school and completing your homework so that you can get home and drink. Like, no, it didn't exist. So inside of each and every one of us, even if you're an alcoholic, you're on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder, you have a problematic relationship with alcohol, all of us have an imprint energetically that we could tap into if we really, really tried to remember a time where we experienced total freedom. Alcohol wasn't even a thing. We weren't living in a deficit. We weren't thinking about it. We were going to school, we were playing our sports, we were coming home, doing our homework, we were hanging out with our friends, we were playing outside, you know, hanging out with our family. And it just did not exist. And I promise you, I promise you that this journey of learning how to overcome your addictions and get to the other side of this thing has that same level of freedom. I mean, I had cravings on and off from time to time for the first year. When I say early recovery, I'm talking the first year because most people, many people don't necessarily make it to a year. And that's just the world of addiction. It doesn't matter what rehab or program that you go through, like this is an entirely a spiritual journey. And it's a deeply personal journey, right? And I want you to learn to develop the courage and self-awareness and resilience and commitment and fortitude and strength to begin looking at yourself at it in a deeper way that maybe many of you haven't done before, that I hadn't done before until I worked the program and was given the tools to actually expand my map of reality and to start connecting all the dots. You know, that program changed my life. It changed in transform my life. My life has 10xed in every way since I've quit drinking. And that can happen to anybody. It can happen to anybody, you know? And the program that I now run is the same model. It's the same program that I went through and I've helped hundreds, thousands of people quit drinking through my program, through my podcast, just by listening to me, right? Just by listening to me, people are able to overcome alcoholism. Like how do you explain that to the medical professionals? How do you explain that to all the people in the old school recovery community? They're like, yeah, Bordia, that sounds good, but it doesn't work for the true alcoholic nonsense. Nonsense. And how do you explain that? You know? What we're doing here, what we're doing here on Earth is we're just, we're learning how to reconnect to our authentic self, right? We're learning how to reconnect to our truth, right? Imagine, imagine who you could be if you were able to work through the fear. If you were able to work through and get rid of the anxiety, if you're able to work through the shame and the guilt in the self-judgment and the judgment of other people, what would it feel like if you were just safe and comfortable and present in your body and felt like you could use your voice in your hands and you had all of your energy available to be able to go out and create the life that you want? That is what is available to you on the other side of quitting drinking. Because what you have to understand is that quitting drinking or overcoming an addiction, it's like the ultimate, it is the ultimate spiritual battleground. It is the ultimate mental, emotional, spiritual, and even physical. go battleground. Because underneath your relationship with alcohol, underneath the reason why you drink is contained within it, your fear, your anxiety, your self-doubt, your judgment, your guilt, and your shame. Right? That's what's underneath it. Otherwise, why would we go out and just systematically poison ourselves and destroy our life if there wasn't other things underneath it? If there wasn't pain that we were pushing away or numbing out, right? And that's why you go a week, two weeks, a month, a few months, but then you always return back to the bottle, right? Because there's something inside of you that you have not learned how to resolve or regulate. And I'm also speaking to the people that are like, "Body, my life is great." You know, a percentage of my clients are like, "Listen, I don't have any major trauma. Like life is pretty good. I've still got a great relationship with the parents. You know, I've got to get job, I've got to get family, I've got a good relationship with the wife. But I just love getting fucked up. I just love the dopamine rush. I love the high. I love taking things to the next level. I love the party. I love the celebration." And it's like, "Okay, fine. Whether it's pain or this part of yourself that's always trying to take things to the next level, it's kind of the same deal, right? The person who's experiencing anxiety or loneliness has to develop the courage and the presence to be with that pain and to dig into the root cause of where that started and to begin that healing process and to learn how to give themselves love and to learn how to regulate themselves through that anxiety, right? And the person who has seen to have it all figured out on the outside, but just loves to party, right? They then, too, on Friday at 5 p.m., when they get that desire to drink, has to learn how to remain present to that part of themselves that wants to take themselves from an 8 to a 15. And it's the same deal. It's pins and needles inside of your body. That is the game, my friends. It doesn't matter if it's anxiety, it doesn't matter if it's loneliness, it doesn't matter if it's a heavy heart, it doesn't matter if it's boredom. Listen, it's pins and needles in your body that's vibrating at this level that doesn't feel good. That's it. And as a human being, we come equipped, we become, we come born into this body with the tools necessary to be able to regulate any thought, any sensation, any feeling, any emotion, but we never learned how to. Or maybe we did, but we just got sidetracked and we got off track without the home, we developed a neurochemical addiction to it. And that's the truth. That's the truth, right? Like one of the questions I ask a lot of people is like, you know, could you point to any pain or challenge in your life? Or would you say that no, like life is pretty good? I just, I love getting fucked up. I love the head change. I love altered states of consciousness. Right? And many people will be like, no, it's like things are okay, but it's the second piece. And it's like, okay, well, that's the neurochemical addiction. Anybody can develop an addiction to anything based off of neurochemistry, right? If you understand dopamine, if you understand serotonin, if you understand these things, if you understand what your brain is doing when you're exposed to certain types of information or behaviors, you'll begin to be able to understand this thing from a much more logical input output perspective. It just makes sense. It just makes sense. Go read dopamine nation. If you have not by Dr. Annell Mcky, it breaks it all down. It helps you understand the neuroscience of addiction. And once you understand it, it just, it doesn't become this baffling thing anymore. The traditional recovery community loves cunning and baffling. And like, yeah, it is cunning and baffling because when you're still wired into addiction, that voice inside of your head says, oh, it's going to be different. It'll be fine. And then, boom, all of a sudden you have a drink and you're like, wait, what the fuck just happened? You give into it. It's cunning. It's baffling. But at the same time, it's not really. It's not. If you develop enough self awareness, if you practice enough mindfulness and you learn how to take a step back and become the witness and observer of the thoughts, you learn how to take a step back and become the witness and observer of the sensations that flow through you, you're not going to get bamboozled over and over and over again. These are skills that you must learn. Mindfulness is a skill. It's one of the most powerful, potent and profound skills that will transform every area of your life, every like every successful, like entrepreneur, every successful, like many successful, like sports athletes, they all meditate. They all meditate. And it's not just this thing that like, oh, I'm just going to sit there and close my eyes, but I've got to check emails. And this is a waste of time. Like, no, no, that's not what it is. Meditation and mindfulness is a kin to going to the gym for your muscles, but it's for your mental and emotional operating system. And if you've tried before and you've struggled with it, there is a certain type of meditation that I teach that is profoundly, profoundly life transforming. And it's about learning how to become the observer. When you learn how to become the observer, this is step one to learning mental and emotional regulation. Right? What is mental and emotional regulation? Mental and emotional regulation. It is your ability to regulate and manage your thoughts and your emotions. Right? And what are thoughts and emotions? The thoughts that you have now in the present moment and the emotions that you experience now in the present moment are programmed and patterned and have been practiced over and over again for years or decades of your life. You think the same thoughts repeatedly, they say, on average, people think that 90% that the thoughts that you have today are 90% the same as yesterday or more. The emotions that you experience are 90% the same as you have experience. So you have to understand that the two modes of reality of being human are thoughts and emotions. Everything is filtered and calibrated through these two domains. Of course, you've got your five senses, but everything ultimately comes down to a thought or an emotion. And your thoughts and your emotions have been patterned and programmed. So if you're listening closely and you're starting to visually build a map in your mind, how are you supposed to learn how to mentally and emotionally regulate if what is appearing is a pattern in a program? You can't, especially if you are identified with your mind and you are identified with your sensations, aka feelings and emotions. How are you supposed to regulate those things if you are the voice inside of your head? And how are you supposed to regulate your emotions that just pop up out of nowhere through triggers if you identify as I am anxious right now? I'm an anxious person. I'm depressed. I'm lonely. How are you supposed to change and regulate those if you're identified with them? You can't. The basis of mental and emotional regulation, the basis of learning how to evolve your consciousness, the basis of true self-awareness, the basis of learning how to mature as an adult and to gain agency and personal sovereignty over this vehicle that you inhabit that you're a conscious witness to, is by learning how to step back and become the witness and observer so that you can watch the mind and watch the sensations and begin to create distance between them and notice them as distinct separate phenomenon from you, your true self, the witness and the observer. And this is what I help and I teach people. And it is wildly profound. I mean, I would go on to say that until you learn this, your whole life has been autopilot. And this doesn't mean that you haven't been able to become a millionaire or be successful or raise a family or do all the good things in life. It just means that once you truly discover this as an experiential fact of reality, your capacity and ability to skyrocket in so many different areas of your life finally opens up. This is the basis of learning how to truly evolve and in my understanding, overcome addiction. Because until we learn this, until we develop the capacity to become the observer and witness of our life, we are going to be identified with our mind and we are going to be identified with our emotions. And these two modalities of existence are programmed and patterned. You didn't get to choose all of your thoughts. You didn't get to choose, you know, how you're managing the voice inside of your head. It just happens. It just happens, right? If I were to ask you, what's your next thought going to be in three minutes? You couldn't tell me, even if I was like, I'm going to give you $10 billion. Tell me in exactly three minutes from now what your thought is going to be. You don't know. Thoughts just appear out of the void. This is the mystery of our life. This is where we start getting into free will and things start to get really dicey here, so I'm not going to go there. But, same thing with our emotions. If you're just sitting in your kitchen, cooking food, you don't necessarily know what the next sensation is going to be that's going to flow through your body. They just happen. Our consciousness is the last one to the party. Our witness is the last one to the party. There's programs that have been running in your life that have been instilled through your childhood, through your adolescence, through school, through bullies on the playground, through your first breakup, through friends, through family, through news, through asshole people on social media, saying mean comments, through videos you watch, through movies you watch, through Hollywood, that are conditioning your operating system, through marketing, through commercials, teaching you, telling you how to think, how to behave, how to operate, how to be in line, what to believe. And, and, and, while all this might kind of seem left field and you're like, "Barty, what does this have to do with alcohol?" It's like, it has everything to do with it. Has everything to do with it? Because once you put the bottle down and you're not drinking, this is everything that rises. You are now forced to take a, a, in, in honest and transparent look at your entire being. Who am I? What are my thoughts? How do I think? What are my values? What are my beliefs? Right? I'm worried that I tell myself about everything. Am I constantly in resistance? Or am I open? Am I constantly fearful of taking risk? Or am I willing to take risk so that I can expand my life? Am I constantly judging other people? Therefore, judging myself? Or am I allowing other people to be who they are and finding ways that I can love and honor them? Right? Taking everything personally and taking it as a shot to my ego, or am I present and recognize that everybody is having their own unique individual infinite human experience just as I am. Right? These are the things that were forced to begin to audit. These are the things that take up energy in our mind and in our body that begin to dysregulate us, that create steam and pressure, that if we don't know how to manage, if we don't know how to regulate, if we don't know how to let the steam out, it builds and builds and builds and builds and builds and then we blow up and then we drink. Right? These are the basic fundamental skills of learning how to manage your human operating system that were not taught. Right? Nobody is sitting there with a magnifying glass to your mind in a little recorder auditing all your thoughts all day to say, "Hey, you should not be so anxious here," or "Hey, you should look at the bright side," or "Hey, let's consider some alternatives," or "Hey, this is probably not something to take personal." That person is just experiencing their own deal. Nobody's doing that. So you are living inside of your own being with thousands and thousands of thoughts and fluctuating sensations per day. If you haven't learned how to manage your operating system, then dude, what do you expect? Yeah, of course life is hard. Of course life is challenging. Of course you feel stuck. Of course you're pointing fingers and blaming everybody. You haven't learned how to manage your operating system. You haven't learned how to evolve. You haven't learned how to mature, how to step up, how to take personal responsibility and ownership over your mind, over your decisions, over your actions, over your feelings and emotions. These aren't other people's responsibilities. These are your responsibilities. This is why we're here on earth. Your work is just a way to make money. Your work is just a way to pay bills and keep food in your fridge and to buy whatever you want from Amazon. That's it. That's it. Otherwise, why you're here on earth is this. And if you're struggling with alcohol, this is the most important thing in your life. And I've said this to many people I've onboarded. It's like, listen, when you get to this stage in your life and you're listening to this podcast and you have recognized that alcohol has become problematic, right? You have alcohol use disorder, alcoholism, whatever label or judge, you know, no judgements, whatever label you want to apply. I'm not a huge fan of these things because at the end of the day, whether you have a problematic relationship where you're on the extreme end of alcoholism or whatever it is, like getting to the other side is the same. We have to apply the same tools, the same principles, the same strategies, you know, it's so whatever. But when you get to this place in your life where you recognize that alcohol has become problematic, everything in your life, everything hinges upon whether you're alcohol free or not. It is the most important thing in your life because if you continue drinking alcohol with 110% airtight, not an atom can fit through with 110% certainty, everything in your life is going to continue to get worse. Your health, your relationships, your bank account, your mental health, your emotional health, your weight, how you look, you're going to be bloated, your energy levels, brain fog. I mean, everything is going to deteriorate. You're on a track to a slow, systematic suicide, death by a thousand cuts every time you drink. There's no way around it. Alcohol is poison. It's literal poison. When it gets ingested into your body, it gets converted to acetyl aldehyde. If you don't know what acetyl aldehyde is, go to YouTube, look up Dr. Andrew Huberman Alcohol. It's a video he put out like a year and a half, two years ago. And he breaks down all of the medical science, all the latest research, all the bullshit about it's good for your heart has been bumped, nonsense, nonsense. Acetyl aldehyde is a class one carcinogen that's linked to dozens of different types of cancer and disease. It destroys yourselves. Okay, we're not just saying, oh, it's poison because it sounds cool or like it's a way to be like, oh, come to the sober side like, no, it's poison. You are ingesting a poison when you're drunk and you're seeing everything blurry and you're losing your balance. You are in a state of being poisoned, my friend. It's not like you're ingesting something and getting poisoned. And as a byproduct, the poison just also secretes some dopamine. So you're like, oh, this is great. It's nonsense. It's nonsense. You're killing yourself. Okay. So whether your alcohol free or not is the most important thing in your life, all of your reality, all of your entire universe and existence hinges upon whether your alcohol free or not. So if you're not alcohol free, you can 110% assume that everything is going to trend in the worst direction over time and you have to play the tape forward, right? Look at how challenging your life is now. Look at, look at the problems you're experiencing with alcohol now. And imagine what's going to happen six months from now, a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, if you don't stop this thing. Imagine and they say this is a progressive disease. So it's going to get worse. You're going to keep drinking more and you're going to build more tolerance and it just gets bad news. Now on the other hand, on the other hand, with that same level of certainty, that same level of certainty, 110% airtight. If you quit drinking alcohol, everything in your life is going to get better. Your mental health, your emotional health, your physical health, your energy, your mental clarity, your motivation, the quality and depth of your relationships. And your career, your professional life, your ability to move up the ladder, save more money, build more money, increase your earning capacity. And on top of that, you actually finally begin the work that you were born here to do. You finally begin your mental, emotional and spiritual healing journey of returning back home to your authentic self so that you can stop being afraid all the time. So that you can stop being anxious all the time so that you can stop relying on a crutch to have to go hang out and talk to other human beings. Because when you were eight years old or 12 years old, your coach reprimanded you in front of everybody. You know, your teacher called on you and everybody laughed at you. And so now you're afraid of people and you have social anxiety. Thank you. There's nothing to be afraid of. Nobody's going to laugh at you. Nobody's here judging you. Everybody's caught up in their own world, trying to figure out their life. The social anxiety piece is the worst of them all. It's nonsense. It's nonsense. It's not very hard to overcome social anxiety. And so many people are like, you know, death be gripped to alcohol because they're like, all the social anxiety. that takes the edge off, that makes it easier to talk to other people. Dude, you don't need it. It's super easy. Read how to win friends and influence people. Okay. And you basically recognize and understand and learn that in order to talk to other people and to make friends and to be a social person, all you have to do is be present and ask questions. Put all the attention and focus on the other person and find it within yourself to have a genuine interest or curiosity about that other person. And if you can do that for five or 10 minutes with somebody, dude, you get a few reps at that and the social anxiety disappears. You recognize that people are chill, they're open, they're just like you. They go to work, they put on their pants, they're hanging out. If you're in a networking event, they're here for the same reason to try to meet some people or get a phone number, whatever it is, whatever it is. Make a business contact. So everything, everything in your life, hinges upon whether you're alcohol free or not. And I really want you to sit with this. I really want you to sit with this. And just play the tape forward, play the tape forward. Play the tape forward if you don't stop drinking. What's going to happen? It's going to happen to your partnership or marriage. What's going to happen to your kids who are watching and modeling your behavior? What's going to happen to your work and your career? What's going to happen to your bank account? What's going to happen to your health? How many years do you have left on planet Earth? If you're 50 years old, you've got 40, 50 years left at best. OK? Like really consider these things. How much longer do you want to fucking party? How much longer do you want to go to all inclusives? How much longer do you want to keep drinking and then waking up with the same fucking problems? Like, dude, at some point we have to wake up. We have to wake up to the nonsense of this game. And I know you have fear. I know it's bubardia. Life's going to be boring. No, it's not going to be boring. You think it's going to be boring because for 10 or 20 or 30 years you've been drinking in all these environments. So you've taught yourself that you think you need it, but you never needed it in the first place. Coming out with friends, going golfing, watching a movie, going on a vacation, doing all these things is enjoyable and pleasurable. But because you're in such a neurochemical deficit, you've caused so much damage to your brain that can recover. OK? That can recover. You don't feel like going to a restaurant or hanging out with your friends or going golfing or going to a vacation or whatever feels fun. You don't think it feels fun because you've taxed your brain. Every time you've been in those environments, dude, it's just like Pavlov's dog. Every time you go to those environments, you ring a bell, you start salivating. And you're like, OK, well, where is it? I'm salivating. And this is it fun. But due to gets better, you have to remember that this physiological system that you're a conscious witness to. And by the way, you barely understand how it works. Like not to take a shot at you. It's like, I barely understand how it works. I'm not a doctor. You know, very, very few things that allow me to survive, overcome alcoholism and create a beautiful life. But I don't understand how this thing works. This thing is always healing in the background. Remember, you don't have to digest your food with your will. You don't have to repair your body and muscles while you sleep. And when you cut your arm by accident, you don't have to mend the wound. It just does it for you. So you have to trust in yourself. You have to trust in the universe. You have to trust in this thing that supports and harbors 8 billion people. Like that this universal energy, it's got an intelligence to it. It's working in the background. All you need, all you need to know that you're healing is that when you cut your arm, it mends by itself. Unless you have a rare disease, like you're healing. Your system is healing, but you have to be patient. If you've been drinking for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, you have to be patient. You have to have compassion with yourself. You've been systematically poisoning yourself and taxing your neurochemistry and your mind and your body and your organs in an attempt to mask or numb out some level of pain that you otherwise didn't know how to manage. You know, that's our spiritual journey here. Until we get to a place where we evolve and start living in a utopia and develop some blueprint for the human operating system that says, hey, in order to have kids, you have to pass tests and you have to be equipped and you have to understand childhood development and trauma and you have to learn healthy, nonviolent communication skills and you have to learn how to teach basic little children skills of mental and emotional regulation. We start teaching, you know, our children mindfulness and, you know, we just start to develop this other society that sort of can alleviate us from these pains. We're currently in a in a in a timeline of the world where we basically got none of it. We got none of it. And so now it's part of our journey. It's part of our curriculum to develop the courage to begin doing the work. Remember, you didn't come here to just get a job and to be a consultant, you know, or whatever. Like, you came here, your 80 year existence is primarily like if you want to get to a place where you feel on purpose, connected to your authentic self, feel like life is meaningful, feel like you have a sense of personal sovereignty and agency over your life in all the ways that are meaningful to you, your health, your relationships, your career, your finance, all that stuff. Then this is the work. This is how you get there. And it's like the perfect excuse, right? Overcoming addiction and alcoholism is your perfect opportunity. This is the chapter in your book. This is the hero's journey, my friend. What is the hero's journey? The hero's journey is the main arc, the main underlying theme of every movie in existence. This is the arc of the human experience. We go through life, we experience challenges, we get lost, and then all of a sudden we get an opportunity. And the opportunity becomes, hey, what are you going to do? Are you going to open yourself up to this opportunity and go in and face and fight and slay the dragon so that you may come out on the other side? 10X, 100X, a version of yourself? Or are you going to allow the demons of our past and the snakes and the pains of our past to derail and destroy you? Destroy us. This is it. There's no other reason why we're alive. You're here to learn how to manage your operating system. Because once you learn how to manage your operating system, everything else becomes available. Once you learn how to heal the anxiety, heal the pain, heal the anger, heal the resentment, heal all of these, what's called like energy faucets, right? All of the pain, the anger, the frustration, loneliness, the sadness, all the things that you're holding onto that you feel challenged by, these are siphoning your energy. They're either siphoning the energy out of your body or your system requires so much energy to hold onto those like hot potatoes that you, your core true authentic self, doesn't have energy to go out and live and create and be authentic and express and build and expand. Because it's using up all this energy to hold onto the paths. You know? That's why you look at my life, look at the arc of my journey, right? I experience all this trauma, all this pain, unresolved, didn't know what to do with it, didn't know where to start, didn't know the first thing about inner child healing, didn't know the first thing about childhood development, didn't know the first thing about trauma. And I experience addiction for 15 years in my life and it drove me into the ground, my friends like four to 15 years of weekend been drinking 30 drinks a weekend or more to drinking every day during COVID, to drinking four to six bottles of wine a day, 20 to 30 drinks a day. When I was having in a weekend, I was now having in a day to the point where I severely injured my left shoulder and was in the most excruciating pain of my of my life. That was my rock bottom. That was when I had to wake up and I just had a moment of clarity, I played the take forward. I was like, okay, I'm 29 years old. I'm drinking four to six bottles of wine a day. What's going to happen if I go back to drinking? Well, I'm already at 46 bottles of wine a day. I can't river back to one bottle a day. There's no fucking way. That's not how it works. And if you're on this train and you're like, man, I just want to moderate, I just want to manage it. Dude, you're fucking lying to yourself. You're deluding yourself, you're wasting time because you're afraid of starting. You're wasting time. You're going to discover eventually that it does not work. You're not an exception to the rule. Once it's like once you keep moving forward on this alcohol journey, when you're drinking, you can't rewind. You can't rewind. And you're going to try everything in the book. I'm not going to have it in the house. I'm only going to drink at night. I'm only going to drink with my friends. I'm only going to drink when I travel. I'm going to switch from this to that. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. You have to understand this from a 10,000-foot-view spiritual level. You came in, you incarnate into this body, and you holding onto alcohol is procrastination against your spiritual evolution. It's a thorn in your side that's not allowing your soul to evolve, to heal, to move up into higher levels of consciousness. So you're saying, "Stop." And fear and guilt and shame and apathy and regret and pride and jealousy and hate and vengefulness and resentment, whatever it is, overwhelmed. These lower-dense energies. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. How do you define consciousness? You can't. But it's real. And we have feelings and emotions. And we feel like there's a God. And some of us have had the opportunity to connect with the divine and have experiences that seem profound. There's a spiritual component here. We're in a curriculum. We're moving through this journey. And alcohol is its addiction. It's a rung on the ladder. There are so many more ladders as you go up. And don't be intimidated by that. It's beautiful. It's more beautiful. If you think life is great now and awesome now, when you get sober, when you go alcohol free and get a measurable time, while working a good system that's actually having you dig in and do the real work, dude, life becomes so much better. Again, look at anybody who's quit drinking for a measurable period of time. You never hear anybody say, "Man, I wish I was drinking again." Every single person, all of them, say it was the best decision of their life. So who are you fully? You're fully yourself to think that you're different. Yeah, but it works for all these other people, but they don't understand. It's like, "Dude, they were just like you. You're no different. Drop the ego. Humble yourself. We all have challenge. We all have pains. We all have problems. We all have parents that came short. We all have stressors. We all have bills. We all have jobs. We all live in the same United States with the same government and acting the same laws. Like, dude, it's about developing courage. It's about developing the resilience. It's about saying, "Enough is enough. I'm tired of playing the same fucking games. Gonna change it up. And I don't know what's on the other side. Because I haven't done it before. I haven't explored that part of the territory. And that can seem scary. What if I fall? What if I fail? What if I'm not strong enough? What if I can't do it? That's why you do it with community. That's why you have accountability. That's why you follow a system in a process for your sobriety. Right? When you don't know, when you, like, listen, if, if, if, let's, let's compare this to repairing the car. I know nothing about cars. Okay? If I list up the hood of a car right now, all I can point to you is probably the engine, the radiator, the battery, and, uh, that's probably it. And probably where you put, like, the fluid, the washer fluid or the coolant. That's it. Everything else is alien. Everything else is like looking at Chinese symbols. I have no idea. If you're to pay me a million dollars and point to a sympar and say, what's that? I wouldn't know. Right? And so for all of us starting on this alcohol journey, you think that in order to become alcohol free and do the sustainably, all I need to do is put the bottle down. But that's step one. If we're talking eight a z, that's, let's letter A. You now have to embark on a journey of completing B to Z. Okay? And if you don't know what B to Z is, if B to Z looks like Chinese symbols, if once you put the bottle down, you're like, fucking, I don't know what to do next. And it's akin to you lifting up your personal hood and not knowing where to begin or what to start with. That's why you keep relapsing. But if you follow a good program, a structure, a system that provides you the videos, resources, tools, timelines, okay, you're at this stage in the journey, here's what to start considering. Here's what to start looking at. Here's the map. Here's the education. Here's the knowledge. Here's the value. Here's the reflection prompt. And move at your own pace. And if you need supporter help, you reach out to a community member, myself or your co-coach or whatever else. Right? Like, that's what I did. I'm just like, I went from who I was the worst of the worst. So now, the stop drinking coach and have dedicated my life to turning around and helping pull people towards where I'm now. And this is what I did. So I'm not, I'm not like speaking some other language. Like, this is what I know because this is what I did. And this is what helped me heal and evolve and get through to the other side where my life is 10x in every way. And it's beautiful and it's beautiful. I haven't had an urge or craving in over three years. It's beautiful. And before, if you would have told me at 29 years old, I would have told you that you're insane. You know? But of course, I felt that way. I had been drinking for 15 years. I had all this pain and dysregulation that I was so unconscious too. I didn't even know where to begin. And all I knew was drinking and parting and fucking around and having fun and working and trying to make money. Like, that's it. That's all I knew. You know, 25, 29 years old. So when I played the tape forward and I thought, wow, I'm getting rid of the only thing that seems to alleviate me from my discomfort psychologically and emotionally. And now I'm losing that. Well, I'm fucked. Life is going to suck. But it's not true. It got so much better. It's like it's like a child having to go to their first day of school. Right. Imagine a child that, you know, I don't know, is going to first grade. Doesn't know how to read. Doesn't know how to write. Doesn't know how to drive a car. Hasn't tasted all the best foods. You know, hasn't traveled. Has an experience love. Hasn't experienced being with with a partner. Pat like. But education. Is the path to do that yet they're trying about going to school. Because they're afraid to leave their parents. And they're afraid to to leave their stuff. The animals at home. That's what that's what we're doing here. Right. You're you're grieving a past that is familiar and felt safe. Not knowing that what is actually available and waiting for you on the other side is so much better. And you have to find a way to connect to that. You have to you have to develop hope. You have to find a way to believe that even if the circumstances that you see in your environment now. And the sensations that flow through you now are telling you otherwise. You have to because what's the alternative. You have two options here. You stay stuck in the same familiar hellhole. Or you develop the courage, which is the capacity to act and move forward despite. Despite the fear despite the not knowing despite the anxiety despite the uncertainty despite thinking that you might be for despite thinking that you're not going to have fun. Whatever the nonsense story is that's not true. By the way. It's just not true. Right. You're thinking and feeling and perceiving and telling stories from the state of your patterns and programs. And your patterns and programs have been sold with alcohol for decades. So of course alcohol is a low dense poisonous demonic spirit. And I don't say demonic because I'm religious or any of that like it really is. It's a fucking demon dude. Look at someone's eyes when they're 10 14 drinks deep. They're a shell of themselves. They can't even look at you straight. Dude, that is that is not cool. It's not sophisticated. It's not wealthy. It's not luxurious. And I don't care if that came from a $10,000 bottle of wine. Gross. It's not good. It's damaging. It's siphoning your soul, your spirit. That's just look at how you feel the next day. It's really system. It's really simple. If you just look at everything really objectively and just like take your stories out of it. Look, we're we're we are a we are a biological organism that can consume energy and excrete the excrete energy. Look at what happens to you after after you consume alcohol. It's destruction. You feel shame. You feel and experience the lowest densest vibrating energies of reality and everything is energy. What I'm doing for an hour and 10 minutes here so far into this podcast is I'm transferring vibrations of energy within certain frequencies and patterns that hold symbols. and truths into you through your, your, your drums into your body. And it makes you feel a certain way. And it rattles you and it shakes you and it, it, it, it awakens you. And you connect dots, right? Because there's an energy inside of me that is authentic and genuine and pure that is speaking the truth of, of our existence. And what happens after you drink alcohol? It's dark, it's dense, it's literally, if you look at the scales of consciousness by David Hawkins, it, you literally feel the bottom of the lowest levels of energy. Shame, guilt, apathy, regret, anger. So when you're consuming something like that, like, what do you think it's doing? Dude, it's destroying everything. It's destroying everything. And so you have to get to a place where you believe that it can be better. You deserve that. Your family deserves that. Your children deserves that. Your husband or wife or your partner deserves that. Your friends deserve that. Your employer deserves that. And honestly, your mom and dad deserve that. Your grandparents deserve that. Your lineage, your ancestors deserve that. Think about the hundreds and thousands of people that lived before you that had to come together and endure the wildest, roughest conditions. And the sacrifices they had to make to raise generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation for you to be born. It's like, what are you doing? Where's the honor? Where's the respect? Where's the honor? To your family, to your parents, to your grandparents, to all the people that fucking fought tooth and nail in order to procreate and to take care of families and to put food on the table and to have resources and to pass down information and resources and lineage to you. You didn't ask to be born, but now you're here and what are you doing? You got to wake up. You got to wake up. There isn't that much time left. There isn't. How fast did this year go by? You know, think about all your dreams or goals or things that you aspire to do. Okay, all the money that you want to make. How much time do you have left? A good 10 years, a good 20 years to strap in and go in and build that business? A good 10 years, 20 years, 30 years maybe to really go in and start the family and raise like time, time, time, time. And I want to continually wrap this around and remind you that there's so much light at the end of the tunnel. You're, you are transforming from a caterpillar to a butterfly. What's waiting for you on this, on the other side of this thing is better than you can begin to imagine, my friend. I'm saying that from personal experience. I can't say anything that I have an experience. If there's anything that I have an experience, I would provide that context. I don't know. People ask me, they say, well, what do you think about Antibus? And I'm like, well, I haven't tried it to be so I don't have really an opinion on it. And I don't know. They're like, well, what about Nathropson? I've tried Nathropson and here's my experience. The journey of being alive is learning how to drive your car. And right now you're running it off dirt roads constantly, constantly. It's like if you were in a car that was constantly pulling right really hard, don't you think it would be wise to take it to the mechanic or to pull up a bunch of YouTube videos and figure this thing out. Take it to the mechanic and see that okay, the steering wheel or some mechanism inside the car is faulty. That's what we're doing with alcohol. We're not following a straight line towards our goals, towards our dreams, towards our vision of love and safety and connection and expansion and personal growth and prosperity and authenticity and evolution. We're being pulled off to the side because it feels fun for 30 minutes. Dude, alcohol is such a poor trade-off. It's such a poor trade-off. You feel, you know, loopy for 30 minutes an hour and then you're just chasing that with more and more alcohol poisoning and destroying your system and then you wake up the next day and say, "Well, the fuck did I do that?" And then you feel better and then you do it again. You have to develop the courage to remain present to the fact that okay, I'm not going to experience a 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 anymore. The best I can get is an 8 or a 9 or a 10 when I earn it. And an 8 or a 9 or a 10 is plenty fulfilling. It's plenty fulfilling. But when you're used to having a 15 out of 10 in terms of pleasure and reward, you think 8 out of 10 sucks. It doesn't suck. It doesn't suck. 8 out of 10 is what you felt when you were a kid. Having a great time, having a ball. You know, the body heals itself. The mind heals itself. It all recovers, but you have to be patient. Right? Well, this human operating system oftentimes is very similar to a computer, especially your mind. You've been being able to go in and replace parts and upgrade it and do things like that. It's not like a computer that you can just unplug the GPU and put a new one in. You can't just unplug the motherboard and then just replace it. This biological system that we inhabit, it takes a little bit longer to heal. And you have to be patient with yourself. You have to believe that it can get better. And it does. It does. When you start taking your life into your own hands, what do you think happens? What do you think happens in 6 to 12 to 18 months when 80% of your anxiety is reduced? When you have way more energy, when you're sleeping better, when you've gained back 20 to 40 hours a week, when your wife and partner and husband and relationship is happier with you, when your kids are happier that they got their mom and dad back and finally present hanging out with them, when you've got way more money in your bank account saved, when you've gotten a promotion network, what do you think happens? This is what happens when you quit drinking. Life gets better. Don't judge quitting drinking by how you feel the first week, the first month. Don't judge it by that. It's the way that you feel in early sobriety is not reflective of how you're going to feel in the future. And it's up to you how you feel. You get to choose how you feel about things, right? Our feelings and emotions aren't these just random occurrences that we're victim to. Once you start expanding your map of reality and connecting all the dots from the moment you were born until now and you understand how all that stuff works and how it affects you psychologically, emotionally, and be eagerly, when you better understand trauma and how to begin healing and different tools and techniques to regulate, you start learning how to drive your vehicle. So then you can start putting your energy and your attention and consciousness and intentions into what you want. You want to get in great shape. You want to get into the best shape of your life. You want to lose weight. You want to improve your relationship. You want more love, more intimacy, more chemistry. You want to start spending more time with your kids and being a better role model. You want to strap down at work and you want to double your income or you want to go start a side business. You can finally do all those things. And my friend, when you learn how to move through an overcome addiction, all of those skills are transferable. Learning how to mentally and emotionally regulate. Learning how to develop discipline. Learning how to increase your tolerance, distress. Learning how to become more resilient. Learning how to, you know, reframe thoughts. Learning how to move through different sensations that don't feel good. These are the most transferable skills in every area of life. So when you want to go and start a business and you're like, shit, I don't know where to start. Or, you know, this seems risky. It's like, boom, you've been here before with sobriety. You know, you'll know how to navigate it. And being in a community, community like mine, you'll have plenty of people, tools and resources that can provide you support along the way in any endeavor. Relationships, work, health, business, whatever it is. It's not just the sobriety coaching program. It's a stop drinking coach, sobriety and life coaching program. Because once you discover what you discover is that man, once you put the bottle down, it's not really about alcohol that much anymore. It's about life. So how do we become the best version of ourselves? How do we eliminate all the different points of resistance in our life that's keeping us playing small and stuck? How do we find the courage to be more of our authentic self? How do we find the courage to go out and do the things that we are once afraid to do? That's the beautiful journey of life. That's the continual journey of expansion. And man, don't you want to feel proud of yourself? Don't you want to feel like like, you know, you did it. Don't you wanna look back on your life and say, man, I was maybe dealt to a hand of cards that was pretty fucking shitty. But look at me now, I did that. I did that with the help and support of a lot of beautiful, amazing people who I give credit to all the time. But I did it, I walked the path. They stood there with the sign and said, okay, you've got this option or this option, which one are you gonna choose? And then I chose it. They stood there and they gave me a video that explained this and then I went in and I did the work. Dude, it feels so good. There's no better feeling to build your life and to get into a place where you feel secure, where you feel like you have more control while at the same time so incredibly surrendered and have so much trust in the universe. I mean, what a beautiful place. Like, I just feel like I'm in, where I feel like I have the ability to make so many choices while at the same time so humbled and so surrendered to the flow of life, allowing it to pass through me and honoring it because I trust it, because I look back and I say, look at what my life was. And look at all the people that were just divinely placed into my life. Maybe I'm divinely placed into your life as you're listening to me. Look at all the little relationships, look at all the little jobs, look at all the little opportunities, look at all the times when my back was against the wall and something always came through. Look at that and look at it now. And I was part of it and I made choices and I put in the work and I stayed disciplined and I stayed commitment and I made the sacrifices and look at it now. How can I not trust that if I'm operating from that same frequency, that same honesty, that same authenticity, that same true desire to better my life and to better the lives of other people and to deepen my spiritual connection to God and life in the universe? How could it not follow that same path? And was there challenges and ups and downs along the way? 100% absolutely. But look at where I am now. How could I not trust with such reverence and respect that it's gonna be the same moving forward? I do. And so I'm surrendered and I open myself up to what comes and flows while at the same time being as proactive as I can be in the best way possible. That is harmony. That is harmony. I wasn't living in harmony for so much of my life. I was completely disconnected from my authentic self operating from fear and judgment and shame and self-doubt. And now I'm in harmony. I use my energy, I use my knowledge, I use my resources, I use my tools to spread that energy out into the world to do something good and to help other people. And then that comes back to me. And it's just this beautiful cyclical cycle and we can all discover that in our journey through our own unique ways. And it's beautiful. I mean, that is the true essence of life is finding harmony where everything is flowing and operating in a way that feeds and nourishes itself. And it's possible for you. It's possible for you. Remember the fears, the anxieties, all those things that you have, they're the same. I felt them, every person who's ever gone through any recovery program feels them as well. And so this is your journey. This is your spiritual curriculum to learn how to move through those, to learn how to surrender to those things, to learn how to accept those things, to learn how to regulate those things. Remember, overcoming addiction or alcoholism, you know, it's, you just gotta learn how to get through one or two cravings a day. And you just take this thing one day at a time. So in order for you to find freedom, five years from now, now don't even wanna say five years because it's implying a timeline. But if you wanna be totally free from alcohol, the way that you do that is by today and only today. Your only relationship with alcohols that you're just not gonna drink today. Forget about tomorrow. When you wake up tomorrow, that version of you will handle it. You don't have to worry about that now. You just gotta get through one or two cravings today. That's it. If you can break your life down into the super tiny boxes where you're just handling the present moment and getting through the next point of discomfort or resistance one or two times a day, that is the lifeblood of four years of alcohol free. That is the lifeblood of my life. Is I went from 15 years of been drinking to 20 to 30 drinks a day to quitting, to taking my life in a 24 hour increment and managing the boredom at 6 p.m. for an hour or two hours and finding a way to distract myself. And then the 7 p.m. craving I got through that. That was 30 minutes. And then I made another day. That's how you gotta think about it. If you future pace too far, anything fuck, how am I gonna do 90 days? How am I gonna do six months of year, five years? How am I gonna do this thing for the rest of my life? But I'd like to maybe introduce it drink some point down the line. I love that fucking dopamine. Wipe all that out. Wipe all that out. Your only relationship with alcohol from today till the day you die and I don't even wanna say day you die because again, it's implying the timeline. Your only relationship with alcohol is that you're just not drinking today. We'll see what happens tomorrow. I don't know. Maybe it's gonna be World War Three. Who knows? Maybe we'll be dead a year from now. I don't know. It's a waste of time thinking about the future because you're infinitely connected to the present moment. Everywhere you go, there you are. There is no tomorrow because tomorrow when you wake up it's gonna be right now again. You can't escape now. And I've said this before the most life-changing quote I heard in my early sobriety process was by my coach who you will meet. If you joined my program, his name is Julian. He said, "Life is one long experience of the present moment." So if you wanna live a good life, you have to learn how to make peace with the present moment. Life is one long experience of the present moment. So if you wanna live a good life, you have to learn how to make peace with the present moment. And that's the journey. Learning how to make peace with the present moment. And it's possible. There's so many tools, there's so many strategies. When you begin to expand your map of reality and learn how to connect all the dots, how this machinery works, how the human operating system works, what trauma is, how to work through this energy, how to move it out of our body, how to begin forgiving, how to begin healing, how to begin doing all these things, how to begin taking a proactive approach to our operating system. Your life becomes so beautiful. And so remember, remember alcohol is not the problem. Sure, it's causing a lot of problems now. But once you put the bottle down, it's not about the alcohol anymore. It's about you. And if you've tried quitting over and over and over and over again, you've been at this thing for years and years and years and you keep going back. It's because when you lift up the hood, there's some faulty machinery somewhere that you haven't fully addressed. That's all the relapses. People are like, oh, what do you think about relapse? Dude, I look at relapse very objectively and there isn't any emotion involved. In the beginning, there was. And when we relapse personally, there's so much emotion involved. But at this point, it's an input output process. There it's not complex. If you get weeks or months of sobriety and then you go back to drinking, the first thing is you're always gonna tell yourself, like, oh, I don't know what happened. So you know exactly what happened. You know exactly what happened. You're not being honest with yourself and that's the problem that we all have. We're not being fully honest with ourselves when it comes to our drinking. You got bored or you justified it and said it's gonna be different this time or you said one won't hurt or you're out with friends you probably shouldn't have been with or you were on a vacation that you weren't ready for or your partner was gone and you were alone or you got stressed out or triggered or overwhelmed and so you went to the store and you got out called. That's why. And so the journey of quitting drinking, right? Or the journey of eliminating relapse is about looking at those things and saying, what caused me to relapse? Oh, I rationalize it and justified it. Okay, well that led to a relapse. I drank, I felt like shit and I wish I didn't do it. So boom, there you go. So now you understand or you will begin to understand in your own journey. Sometimes you have to do it a thousand fucking times for us to get figured out as I did. You understand that that voice inside of your head is lying 100% at the time. There will never be a time when you have alcohol used to sort of alcoholism or problematic relationship with alcohol, whether you're a day alcohol free, a year alcohol free or 10 years alcohol free, there will never be a moment that that voice is truthful, saying one won't hurt or it'll be different this time. There is nothing that you can do. This is the heart till the swallow. There is nothing you can do that will change the way alcohol interacts with your brain chemistry. There's no amount of meditation, planet medicine, there's no way to do it. psychotherapy, psychotherapy, it just doesn't work. So part of what gets us to cause us people to go back to drinking is they say, "Oh, look, I'm three months alcohol, I'm three months, nine months a year, two years, five years." Look, life is so much better, I know how to regulate. Things are going to be different this time. And they judge whether they can control their alcohol based off of the time they've had in between drinks. They're using the wrong criteria to determine whether they have a problematic relationship with alcohol or not. They think, "Oh, I can control it because I stopped drinking." But that's the wrong criteria. The way that you assess it is by saying, "What was my relationship with alcohol while I was drinking?" And if you look at that, boom, you've got your answer. When I was drinking, well, I had to stop because shit was problematic. It's causing issues. So if you've got a year sober, two years sober, six months sober, and there's a part of you saying, "Oh, maybe I can reintroduce it. It's going to be different." Rather than looking at the time in between drinks and using that as the basis to make your decision, just say, "Okay, we'll hold on. Hold on a second. Let me think this through." What was my relationship with alcohol while I was drinking? Oh, yeah. I was obsessed. I was drinking all the time. I couldn't manage it. I couldn't moderate it. I couldn't control it. It was causing all these problems in my health and my relationship, my work and my kids. Oh, so if I drink again, it's just going to go right back to that. As if no time passed. Sure, maybe the first week or month, you'll seem like you have control, but eventually it's going to lead back in the same thing. And this is the vicious cycle of drinking alcohol, my friends. So it's been a little while since I put out an episode. I appreciate it. I appreciate all you guys listening so much. All you guys reaching out and I'm so excited to be back. I can't wait to launch my new group coaching program. It is going to be amazing. Amazing. And I can't wait to meet so many of you and help so many of you. Yeah, I've got a lot of things coming up. So I'm going to be going to Costa Rica in December from like the 23rd to the 5th. And then I think I'm going to be moving to Costa Rica here at the end of March. This is a pretty big, pretty big move. If you would have asked me this a month ago, I don't know if I would have been on board, but I had some really profound downloads and things that came through on my last retreat. And so I'm incredibly excited for what the future holds in so many ways. And I'm looking forward to helping so many of you find freedom from alcohol. Because man, four years alcohol free, I'm so far pushed away kind of from this thing in the sense that I don't have cravings and urges. And if I go to a bar with friends and I'm out in an environment, it's just not even a question anymore. That you just realize, there is true freedom available for this thing. And so yeah, I appreciate you listening. I'm glad I made this one a little bit longer because I know many of you have been waiting for an episode to drop. But yeah, I'll plan on coming up with another episode here pretty soon. And yeah, go to my website, www.thustockdrinkingcoach.com. Fill out an application if you would like to work with me one-on-one or join my group program. Up until the group program, I'm going to be taking on one-on-one clients. And then once the group program launches, the group program will kind of be the main program. It'll be priced a little bit lower and my one-on-one pricing is going to increase as well. So also on the website, make sure you check out those 12 video testimonials. If you've been listening to my podcast for any measurable period of time, a few episodes or more, just go to the website and just watch those testimonials. Even if you're not entirely sure that you want to work with me or join my program yet to get alcohol-free, I think it would be just good to watch other people who are literally just like you see what they have to say. See what they have to say about their just personal journey of working through an overcoming addiction. Of course, it talks a little bit about me and my program, but just see what other people who are just like you, what they have to say and what their experience is and it might provide a lot of hope or inspiration for yourself. So thank you so much. If you have not yet left a five-star review on Spotify and Apple, I would deeply, deeply appreciate if you would do so. And yeah, stop drinking, coach out. I will see you in my next episode. [Music]