Mindful Sobriety

Jane Ballard (00:00.622)
talk a little bit about just how we met because we haven't known each other that long. I think we met in May of this year. So like seven months ago. Yeah. Crazy. Which is crazy. I feel like I've known you so long. Yeah, it's insane. Like I it's I love those friendships where you meet someone and then it's like you feel like you've known them forever.

and you're just like so aligned on so many different levels. But yeah, we met through the Mindful Life Practice, which is super amazing. Yes, Alex, through the Mindful Life Practice with my yoga teacher in Bali. I went on a yoga retreat in April of 2023 and met her. She was our yoga teacher. And then,

she had just started an online yoga teacher training. And she let me join a few weeks late. And so I joined that and I got to continue to be connected with her. And you were one of the participants in the yoga teacher training. Even though you were already a yoga teacher, you were just there for connection and learning and. Yeah. Crazy story about that is Alex, she led a

Jane Ballard (01:29.798)
She posted something last year where if you like and share a post or something like that, you get entered into this drawing to win a free trip to Bali for a yoga retreat. And I swear to you, my intuition has not always been what it is, but my intuition told me a million percent I was going to win that competition.

I did. I won the trip to Bali. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go because of a for medical reason but still I mean, it's amazing that I actually won something like that and then, you know, just kind of... Seriously. Uh-huh. And then it led me to be in that group with you because since I couldn't go to Bali, she gifted me that yoga teacher training which was amazing as well. Yeah.

Yeah, so maybe that is just a sign that you are supposed to go to Bollie next April, April 2024 on my Bollie retreat. I know I want to go so bad. I know. If there's any way for me to go, then I'll definitely go. I just kind of, if you know me, I'm very last minute. So if I do sign up, it will be like within 30 days of retreat. Yes.

And with my retreat being the weekend before, I know. It really depends. Yes, absolutely. So we'll see how it goes. Hopefully I'll get to go. I'm definitely gonna be going to Bali sometime in 2024. I just don't know. At some point. Yeah. With who or in what capacity. Yeah. Yeah, that's another thing is like, I go on a lot of women's yoga retreats, like you.

and host a lot of retreats. And I want to either go on a couple retreats as well, like so my husband can get to be a part of things like this also. Yeah. Just because I thought about that too. Actually, Alex, I think is leading a retreat in Spain in July, and I believe it's men and women. And I mentioned it to my husband actually just the other day.

Jane Ballard (03:49.634)
It's like, I'm kind of sane, but I don't know if I want to go to yoga retreat. And I'm like, but it would make me happy. I mean, we could stay and do some other stuff afterwards. Yeah. He, unfortunately I haven't converted him into being a yogi quite yet, but I haven't given up. Same. I haven't converted my husband either, but my thoughts on it are like, everybody could use some healing, you know?

Yeah, exactly. And just like being present and doing mindfulness and meditation and breathwork and, you know, moving with your breath can be so healing. You don't have to do a downward dog or a warrior pose, you know, just being there and being present is what it's all about. So many people and I think even me like before I ever one of my first yoga retreat, I think that we think that

a yoga retreat is about doing yoga. And while it is a part, you know, of the retreat, like we do a practice, you know, but the majority of the time in a retreat is, is not doing a yoga practice, a physical yoga practice. It's right, you know, setting intention, then releasing old ways of being and calling in new ways and new intentions. And so

Right. And connecting with people who are also interested in healing themselves and, you know, continuing to strive to reach their full potential in life. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we met through the mindful life practice and then you knew Cindy, who is kind of the leader of Sober in Dallas, the Sober Cities movement. So yeah, Sober in the Cities movement. Yeah.

And so then, and we both realized, oh, we live in the DFW area so we could get together. Yeah. Sober in Dallas had a yoga event downtown at Clyde Warren Park and we, we got to meet up for the first time. Yeah. Which was so much fun. Yes. If there are, if there's anyone listening that is in the Dallas area and is looking for a community like Sober in Dallas is a great way to connect with other.

Jane Ballard (06:10.646)
people that are embracing an alcohol-free lifestyle. Absolutely. Yeah, just on that topic is, the first thing that comes to my mind is, when I first did remove alcohol from my life, it felt like a little bit of a punishment to myself. And what I've realized and embraced is that like it's not a punishment at all. It's...

the best gift you could possibly give to yourself. And especially when you get to be in relationship with other women who are goal oriented and like have dreams about the future and are thought leaders and world changers. And we just wanna be the best versions of ourselves and like help as many people as we possibly can.

Right. I think it's about getting off of autopilot and living with intention, like making intentional choices rather than just kind of riding the tide of whatever's happening in your corner of the world. And for me, giving up alcohol was about like, it was a little bit of an act of rebellion, to be honest. Like, absolutely. This way of being, this way of socializing, this way of living life

not serving me anymore. You know, it's not moving me towards my goals and towards the things that are truly, truly important to me in my life, which are, you know, basically people, the relationships, my husband, my three children, my career, my relationship with myself. I think we forget that we have a relationship with ourselves. And, you know, we are parenting ourselves all day, every day. And are we being kind to ourselves or are we being

harsh with ourselves. And I think, you know, waking up after a couple glasses of wine with a headache and feeling dehydrated and having not slept well, that wasn't setting me up to be very kind to myself. And so I think I just realized like, hey, I have to let go of kind of these worst case scenario fears that are going through my mind about what life will be like without alcohol and what people will think about me if I live alcohol-free.

Jane Ballard (08:38.538)
I have to let go of that because this is the only life I get here. I don't get a chance to redo this. I don't get to look back on it and say, oh, I don't want to do it this way. I'm going to try it this way. This is it. And so it's just not worth impacting my health physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. And so you're right.

You know, we hear the phrases like giving up alcohol and I don't know, even the phrase in a lot of 12-step meetings, you hear the phrase, what you abuse, you lose. But giving up alcohol isn't really about losing something. It's about gaining freedom and clarity and being truly awake to just...

how miraculous it is that we get to have a life on this earth, you know? Yeah. And, you know, we're we as women are we were created as these emotional creatures that are loving and kind and nurturing. And I feel like when we begin to go through life,

raw and vulnerable without any kind of wine or whatever alcohol or then I have whatever you can anything that you're do work that I was doing to help myself to feel less when we begin to go through life without all of that stuff it's like all of those things that we were created to be

easily just become who we are and we become this beautiful emotional creature again that we were always supposed to be. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, yeah, you bring up a really good point that a lot of these uncomfortable emotions that we feel as humans that are totally normal and necessary and adaptive, maybe we had gotten in the habit of numbing.

Jane Ballard (11:03.09)
of getting rid of those things. And then once you do quit drinking and start living in sobriety, you're missing one of the tools that was in your toolbox for managing that emotion. And so there is a little bit of a relearning process and a little bit of developing a tolerance to uncomfortable emotions. And then there's the realization that every emotion, it's like a bell curve, like,

It goes up, it peaks, and then it gradually trends down. And I think that with alcohol, that emotion goes up, it begins to peak, we drink, and it just goes straight down. And so we begin to learn like, oh, when I drink, I just get rid of it immediately. But then we prevent ourselves from having the opportunity to let the emotion gradually go down on its own. We never get to see the flip side, that emotion's gonna pass, and we're gonna recover without.

any chemical, you know? And so just saying to myself like, hey, right now I'm really irritated or I'm really, you know, feeling ashamed or sad or whatever it is. But every single emotion has a beginning, a middle and an end. And it will come and go, you know, it will end. That doesn't mean it's never going to come back, you know, like grief comes in waves.

it's going to come back. But if you can just kind of ride that current wave, you'll get through it. And then when it comes back, you'll just ride that wave again. And so the more practice we have with that, the easier it gets. And the more it's almost like this, this is what life is supposed to be. There's beauty in that of experiencing the full range of human emotion and human existence and, and being able to connect with others through that.

Yeah, for sure. I feel like I was a lot of times, and it wasn't always like this, like for many, many years, I just drink occasionally, like every once a month or every couple months or on the holidays, it was just not a thing. But the last couple of years before I quit drinking, I had really like...

Jane Ballard (13:27.458)
come into wine culture and just was drinking, you know, three or four days a week. If, if some, maybe some weeks I drink five days a week and

I was so emotional when I would drink. Like I had, I would cry. Like at the end of the night, I would always end up crying and it would be over things that happened a long time ago and just really crazy stuff that I don't even really feel that sad about normally. But it, I was, alcohol made me lose control of my emotions.

whether it was sadness or I was never like an angry drunk or anything like that. But whenever I wasn't drinking.

any situation that would have caused me a lot of pain. For example, like my relationship with my biological mom, I would end up feeling so angry about that situation. Now give me, it's been quite a while since I've drank now. And it's just so much easier to realize she's a human. She makes mistakes and have compassion.

for her instead of anger. And just being able to really absorb my emotions and go inward and realize like.

Jane Ballard (15:02.23)
Um, just there's other people. It's not just about me. This is about everyone else and yeah, really being able to take a good.

Jane Ballard (15:15.862)
uh, intelligent look at everything going on around me instead of just thinking like, how is this affecting me? I'm able to think about like, how is this affecting everyone? Right. Like with our parents, they're not just this one dimensional, they were put on this earth to be our parents, you know, like my dad is not just my dad. Like he's a human with this whole context and who's

also experience the full range of human emotion and hurts and triumphs and setbacks. And I think when we take that into account, when we zoom out and we can view our parents as any other human, it's so much easier to have compassion and realize like they're doing the best they can with the resources they have at hand, you know, and sometimes they haven't had the resources to do their own healing or for whatever reason they haven't done it and...

And then the hurt kind of trickles down to us through that, but they're not doing it to maliciously harm us. Yeah. And I think when you're in a really emotionally vulnerable place, it's really easy to forget that, like that other people, you know, are going through their own issues.

Jane Ballard (16:44.258)
So yeah, being substance free gives us the opportunity and the space, the emotional space, the brain space to.

just sit with all of it and then make decisions that we can be really proud of. Right. Yeah, it's kind of like we can give ourselves space to feel and experience our emotions and we can use our rational mind to choose to behave in ways that align with our values. And a lot of times our emotions are...

you know, our first impulse and response to an emotion isn't necessarily something that aligns to our values. You know, like lashing out at someone or firing off a message to somebody that maybe we regret later or, or whatever the case may be. Yeah, for sure. So, and then I wonder, oh, go ahead. I was just thinking, like, I also think it's so important that we embrace all of the parts of ourselves, like,

I would say most of my life I would have said like, I'm not an angry person. But the truth is like we have, we are all of the emotions, you know, like it's like there's anger and sadness and joy and happiness and contentment and all of the different things. And we like there is a part of us that, you know, we can be all of those things in different times and like accepting all of the different parts of ourselves.

and not thinking that it's bad or good. It's just a part of the human experience. It's a part of being human. Right, right. When we think, oh, I'm not an angry person, you know, we kind of have this idea about what an angry person is. And then when we do experience anger, we tend to shove it down and internalize it. And then it may end up coming out in some other way, you know, it may turn into depression or.

Jane Ballard (18:58.182)
or who knows just depressed thoughts and feelings about whatever the issue is that we're feeling anger about. And you know, like what is an angry person anyway? Like what does that mean? Like we can feel anger and show anger and make mistakes and how we show our anger and still not be angry people. You know, we're just people who have the emotion of anger. Yeah. Last weekend.

We were at this Christmas show and my youngest son, he was 12, he was, he pointed, he whispered in my ear and told me he saw a kid and he was like, mom, that kid's depressed. And I was like, okay. I was like, what do you mean? He was like, well, he tells us all that he's depressed. He's got depression. And I was like, well, then, I mean, that just means he's a little sad sometimes and.

I was like, we're all a little sad sometimes, so we may feel depressed occasionally. It's not unusual. And I just thought that it was such a good example of this label that we put on ourselves and other people of like, they've got depression, or it's like this mental health issue, but I mean, the healthy thing to do is to address all of our mental health.

For sure. Yeah. And you know, like labels are a tricky thing. Like for some people, there can be a lot of relief and validation and getting a diagnosis, but other times it's not. And also we, it's not healthy for us to label others as like, oh, well they have narcissistic personality disorder or they're depressed or whatever. You know, it's like.

That's not necessarily for us to determine. But I do think it's interesting for 12 year old boys that there's even a discussion about that. I think that's amazing that like that, talking about mental health is part of what's going on these days among kids. Right. And like on what you just said about the label of, say narcissism, like who...

Jane Ballard (21:21.11)
What true benefit would we get from constantly going around and labeling others? I mean, that really does nothing for us. The only benefit we could possibly get from the label is if we're using it for ourselves and to benefit ourselves in some way for healing. Yeah, typically telling somebody else that they're a narcissist is not gonna be helpful to that relationship, you know?

And most of us have some narcissistic traits, you know, like we all have a variety of personality traits. It doesn't mean we have a personality disorder.

So I think we need, we've got to be careful with that. And, you know, I think that people do that because it feels very validating to be able to say, oh, this is what I'm experiencing. This is why they've been treating me this way. And so sometimes that can help people in some ways with their healing, but it, it's got to be, it's got to be done with like,

care and intention and respect for, you know, there's gotta be respect and love and compassion for the other person. Yeah, that's really important thing. I think that we, I don't always do this, but it would be helpful to always think about like what is my intention here? Like and then if your intention is not completely coming from a really heartfelt.

heart-centered place, then maybe we don't need to do what we're doing. Yeah. Is this for my own ego or pride or is this coming from a place of love and compassion and desire for healing? Yeah. That can be a really hard thing to do because if you're not like, I mean,

Jane Ballard (23:27.758)
There's probably been days this week that I've gone into conversations and

not been in the best place. And so therefore I would just say something because I just felt like saying it rather than like taking a moment and asking myself like.

Who am I benefiting by saying this? Mm-hmm. Or who am I helping?

Like what purpose will this serve? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, on a daily basis, I fail at this. You know, I think we all do because we're humans and that's where the self-compassion comes in of realizing that like, this is a lifelong process and we're gonna fail and we're also gonna do it really well sometimes. And...

just remembering to keep going and keep trying. And, you know, the most important thing when we do fail is to go back and repair if there was any hurt done to other people. Like there's so much healing that can come from just like saying, hey, I don't like how I handled that situation. I'm really sorry. I wish I had said X, Y, and Z instead. Will you forgive me? Yeah. And then like for me,

Jane Ballard (24:55.754)
I feel like the best way to be in a good mind space and heart space to make sure that I am coming from, you know, wanting to help rather than ego is meditation for sure. Like I, you hear this all the time, like meditation, meditating five minutes a day will change your life. Like, I truly believe that.

Yeah. Because it's such a busy world. And, you know, especially with the phones that were always on and the computers, and then our families and our friends and just a busy world. And so like allowing ourselves, loving ourselves enough to just give our give five minutes to sit still and breathe and connect with your breath.

and allow the thoughts to just pass and connect with God or the universe, I do truly believe that will change our lives. And I'm not imperfect at that. Like I don't do that every day, but when I do, it definitely like makes all the difference. Yeah, yeah. You can tell the difference for sure. Yeah, I go through phases where I'm really good about it and then I follow up the wagon and then get back on. But when I'm on the wagon,

Just that general sense of being centered and having a broader perspective is there for sure. And there's actual evidence-based, you know, there's lots of randomized controlled trials that will tell us that three to five minutes of meditation daily will be helpful for mental health and stress level and anxiety and probably physical health too. There's probably some studies showing that it benefits heart health and brain health. And. Yeah.

And it only takes a few minutes a day. Yeah. I think I can speak for both of us when I say, I think that is our lifestyle, this alcohol-free lifestyle. It's different for everyone, but I think for both of us, yoga and meditation and mindfulness, these are our tools. Yeah. And so it can look so different for everybody. Like maybe...

Jane Ballard (27:22.442)
Maybe a 12 step program does work really, really well for some people and we honor that for sure. But you know, my intention, part of my intention with this podcast is just like you said earlier, Jane, like you get to make your own roles if you if you choose this route. Yes, I mean, I'm all for 12 step programs for people who want to participate in them. I

I've recommended them to clients for decades, the last two decades, and I've seen so much healing and transformation come from those. I think they're wonderful. It's not the path that I've chosen for myself, but I do think there's a place for it for people and it's been just a tremendous contribution to the, you know, to easing suffering to go back to kind of my initial.

comment about purpose is that so much connection and just healing has come from 12 step programs and not just for people with an active addiction, but for family members of people with an active addiction or people who are in recovery and just are healing from generational trauma or family dynamics that have been painful. And so yeah, I definitely am grateful for 12 step programs. Yeah.

And if you really were to take a good look at like, you know this, but like the eight limbs of yoga, there's a recovery program called recovery Dharma. And it's totally different than, than like an AA meeting or an NA meeting, but in the sense of community, it's the same. And I don't know that they follow the eight limbs of yoga, but a lot of what they're doing is, um, meditation. Yeah.

Jane Ballard (29:22.786)
like bliss, which is not a stage you stay in all the time. It's just what we're working towards. It's fleeting for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's an interesting point that spirituality seems to be a huge component of giving up substances for people. And I think that could encompass any faith or lack thereof. I think that.

even atheists, like one of the most well-known atheists in the world, Sam Harris, wrote a book called Spirituality Without Religion that's just phenomenal and talks about kind of his path. And a lot of it is through meditation and mindfulness and exploring what consciousness is and like ourselves related to our consciousness. And so I like one of my, I think, talks about

top recommendations for people who are interested in living alcohol-free would be to figure out a way to practice spirituality, even if you don't believe in a higher power.