Sober Yoga Girl Podcast Season 2, Episode 1

Exciting news, Episode 1, Season 2 (The Rebirth) of Sober Yoga Girl has dropped today!

What makes it different?

I now have an amazing videographer helping me behind the scenes record & upload the episodes in the studio at my house in Bali!

I took this opportunity for the first episode to tell an updated version of my story that includes two changes since I started recording the show in 2021: my move to Bali and me speaking openly about Bipolar.

Tune into this episode to hear about:

- some of the Cultural struggles of living in the Middle East - why drinking alcohol was such a bad idea for my mental health - how getting sober helped me recover from bipolar disorder - why yoga is so important to me in my recovery.

Please make sure to subscribe to us on Youtube and give us a review or comment! If you're interested in meeting me, get the free 7 day trial to the Sober Girls Yoga Community and see what it is all about! www.themindfullifepractice.com/sober-girls-yoga.

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Hi friend, this is Alex McRobs founder of the Mindful Life Practice. And you're listening to the Sober Yoga Girl podcast. I'm a Canadian who moved across the world to the Middle East at age 23. And I never went back. I got sober in 2019, and I now live full time in Bali in Indonesia. I've made it my mission to help other women around the world. Stop drinking, start yoga and change their lives through my online Sober Girls Yoga community. You're not alone. And a sober life can be fun and fulfilling. Let me show you how

Speaker 1 (00:35):

Drinking alcohol is like pouring gasoline on your anxiety. And I think it's true, but for myself, so much of my adult life was associated with drinking alcohol. So I just couldn't imagine a life without it. And I also didn't realize that what I was drinking was directly correlating to my mental health. So I read in a psychology textbook about bipolar disorder. I read about manic episodes. I was like, this is what I have. Like, I have these highs where my mind is racing and moving so quickly and I have all these thoughts and epiphanies and insights. And then I would just hit a wall and crash and burn and hit a mental health low, and one counselor that I went to recommended that I tried yoga. And so I was around 18 at this time. She said, you know, you should try yoga. It's probably gonna really help you with your stress and anxiety and your mental health.

Speaker 1 (01:27):

And so I had tried yoga as a young kid. So funny thing about me, I actually did yoga when I was 10 years old. And I wrote a news article that my sister found that said breaking news, Alex wants to be a yoga teacher when she grows up. So I had tried yoga as a kid. I really, really loved it. And this time when I tried it as an 18 or 19 year old, it stuck. So I did this 30 day yoga challenge at this yoga studio in downtown Kingston, which is where I lived Kingston, Ontario. It was Queens university. And from the moment I started it, I just knew that this was what I was meant to do with my life. Like I was just so connected to yoga. It helped me and heal me so much. And I started working at the studio, cleaning the studio in exchange for free classes, which was like the most hilarious thing, because I had no clue like what a mop was, how to clean a toilet, but I became the cleaner at the studio.

Speaker 1 (02:24):

And then I started working at the front desk of the studio. And what I loved about the front desk was all of the admin tasks related to the studio. So people would come in, I check them in sell 'em their passes. I learned their names and just really felt like I played an important role in my community. So the thing was that my parents were very traditionally minded. The way a lot of parents were in this generation of thinking like, you know, you need to go to university, you need to get a proper job. You need to get a house. You need to get a family, a car, and have a kid and get married. And this was kind of like their vision for how they wanted my life to go. And they really wanted me to get a real job. And so I was in school at university at this point to become a school teacher.

Speaker 1 (03:11):

And I loved teaching, but being with children all day in a classroom was just like highly stressful for me. And I sat on an Instagram live couple weeks ago. It was like almost like a trauma in itself because you're managing 26 kids, their emotions, their struggles, their suffering, their pain, you are managing their parents' stress. You are managing the stress and the drama of the actual school. Like you just have so many different people's lives and issues and things going on that are so out of your control. And for me, that was why teaching was a problem for me. It wasn't the actual act of teaching itself. Like the active teaching itself. I loved, it was just the managing all of the people, which was just too much for me for a highly sensitive person who gets really triggered by stress, into depression and mania.

Speaker 1 (04:01):

Being a teacher was like, not the answer for me, but I really wanted to be a yoga teacher. So my parents were not supporting this dream at all. They didn't want me to do yoga teacher training. So I ended up saving up all my money. I got a scholarship, I got some money from someone in my family and I traveled to Mexico for my yoga teacher training and fun fact. I'm actually hosting a yoga retreat at this exact center in June. So in about six weeks, I haven't been back since back then in 2014. And it was just like the most magical time of my life. And I'm really excited because I'm gonna be meeting a lot of mindful life practice, community members, a lot of teachers, a lot of yoga students, even some people I haven't met before, but I've seen on, uh, Facebook and Instagram.

Speaker 1 (04:44):

They're all gonna be coming to meet me in Mexico. So we do have a couple spots left. If you do wanna come on the Mexico retreat, come on down. It's gonna be awesome. So I went to Mexico, did my yoga teacher training. And when I returned, I got back to Canada and I just stepped naturally into teaching every different kind of yoga. Like even the styles that I hadn't done training for. I started teaching them and I was not interested in being a school teacher at all. I told my parents, I'm just gonna stay in Canada. I'm gonna do yoga full time and work at this yoga studio, which absolutely delighted them. <laugh> um, they wanted me to become a teacher. So around this time I was finishing out my five year degree at Queens university. It was concurrent education. I think it's a six year program now, but when I was there, it was five and I did one student teacher placement, and I had this amazing mentor.

Speaker 1 (05:39):

And he had taught abroad for two years at the start of his career in Egypt. And he said to me, you know, Alex, you should just go abroad. You should teach abroad. You're not gonna regret it. And if you don't like it, you can always quit. You can leave. So I started to look into this idea of teaching abroad. I really wanted to go to south America or the Caribbean. I wanted to live in a location where I could be near the beach and where I could party on the beach basically, but the pay and the packages weren't great in south America. And I ended up buying what I call the Facebook poke upgrades. So if anyone's listening, who's around my age 30, they would remember when Facebook first came out, there was this upgrade called Facebook poke. And what Facebook poke could do was you could just poke people.

Speaker 1 (06:26):

And like you just like poke people back and forth. Like there was virtually no point of it except poking. Um, but I always call it the, the Facebook poke upgrade because I bought this $25 thing. And what it meant is I could just like poke schools. So I didn't have to like put in effort to write a letter or apply or anything. I could just go, boom, boom, boom. I'm interested. I'm interested in interested. So I poked private schools all over the world. <laugh> and that's when I started to get contacted by principles in countries all over. So I remember getting contacted and doing interviews for places like Bangladesh Sur the Marshall Islands and the most amazing thing about this was that it was like more tangible learning than if you just read about a textbook, cuz I have to really, really read about a country and say, is this somewhere where I could live?

Speaker 1 (07:15):

Right. So I'm reading about, I'm watching videos about countries, I'm reading about what they have there. I'm looking at like them on Google maps. And I remember I did a few interviews in the Marshall Islands and I, you know, I went to my teacher Simon and he said, you know, this is probably not a great place for you because you're, there's nowhere you can travel to. And I'm like, that's a good point. You know, if I go overseas, I'm gonna wanna travel and do trips. And so did all these interviews in Skype learned all these countries that I had never heard of before learning about the cultural norms, which countries were land locks, different religions. It was absolutely amazing. And I was never really interested in these traditional geography lessons in school, but this was so fascinating because it was real purposeful learning about the globe.

Speaker 1 (08:03):

And during this time I got scouted by a principal in Kuwait. I had never heard of Kuwait before. Uh, I think I got up at 6:00 AM to do the interview. I had done no research. I Googled it for about two minutes before I got on the call, found out that Kuwait was in between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It's super conservative and alcohol is illegal <laugh>. And the principal that I interviewed with ended up being from my neighborhood in Toronto and we just really connected. And I had this gut feeling that this was the place for me. So that was it. I was moving to Kuwait. I hadn't even gotten the job offer, but I was like, this is it. This is where I'm going. You know, sometimes you just know in your intuition or your gut, what is right for you? And when I told all of my family and friends that I was moving to Kuwait, they looked at me like I had completely lost my mind probably because it's so conservative.

Speaker 1 (09:00):

There's so many stereotypes about the middle east being violent or dangerous or unsafe for women. And everyone knew that in Kuwait, alcohol was illegal and I had this huge party girl reputation. So everyone kept saying to me like, Alex, you're gonna get arrested. If you go to Kuwait, there's no way that you're not gonna get arrested. So I had this gut feeling despite all of that, the stereotypes, the beliefs, the people thinking that I was gonna get arrested. I had this gut feeling that Kuwait was the right place for me. And so six months later I moved Towa <laugh>. And when I look back on this time in my life, I'm, I'm honestly shocked that I went there all alone as a 23 year old. So I had never even been to Asia before, let alone the middle east. And when you move overseas, there is the experience of culture shock.

Speaker 1 (09:51):

So from the very beginning, I was experiencing this honeymoon phase of culture shock where everything's amazing roses. Beautiful. You know, I was like, I'm Carrie Bradshaw on, you know, sex in the city too, where she goes to the middle east and it was all amazing. And then all of a sudden I just hit this wall where things got extremely challenging. And the thing about Kuwait is that the norms are just so different from, you know, the ones that I grew up in, in Canada. And there had to be a huge realization that my way is not necessarily the right way. And I had to kind of open up my heart and my mind. And I wanna give you one example. So when I was in Kuwait, it was super common to see children playing out on playgrounds at midnight. And when I got there, I was like really judging the whole experience, judging the parents.

Speaker 1 (10:45):

Why are they not enforcing a bedtime? Like what is the problem here? <laugh> and it took me a really long time, like genuinely years to wrap my mind around and understand that they do this for a few reasons. First of all, the climate. So it's like 50 degrees Celsius during the daytime in the summer. And that's like way too hot for children to play outside. So they might play out at night instead. And I actually grew to love this because it meant that I felt so safe as a woman at night alone because there were always children and families out at night. And when I first moved there, it was something that I just could not understand. I couldn't understand this cultural difference. And what it meant is that children were often late to school or they came into school tired, but this isn't them being disrespectful.

Speaker 1 (11:30):

This is just a different way of life. And so this is one of my biggest takeaways from my time in Kuwait is that when I grew up in Canada, I had a very narrow view of what was right and what was wrong based on my culture and the way my family did things. And when coming abroad, I had to learn to step into other perspectives and see how everyone does everything a little bit differently. So I spent two years in Kuwait. It was extremely, extremely challenging. I've talked about this in different podcast episodes, but Kuwait is a tiny country smaller than the city of Toronto. Both the borders were countries that I couldn't travel to. Right. I couldn't go to Iraq. I couldn't go to Saudi Arabia. Alcohol was illegal and I was already struggling with my drinking. So then I became obsessed with like making wine, um, scraping the mold off of wine, drinking boot, like alcohol going on dates with people that could get me alcohol at embasies and traveling.

Speaker 1 (12:28):

So leaving the countries, going to nearby countries where I could drink like Dubai. Um, and in this time I got to see countries I had never even heard of before and also countries that I never would've imagined that I would visit in this lifetime. So I got to see the great pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India. I went to the Ciara, a in Spain, and during this time I actually was also still teaching part-time yoga. So I was teaching, uh, grade three at this school, which was like a nightmare. Um <laugh> but I was also teaching yoga part-time and I actually even got a job opportunity to teach yoga full time at a studio in Kuwait. And I almost took it. And then I got too scared about the risk and backed out. And my parents were not totally crazy about this idea.

Speaker 1 (13:14):

Again, they tried to talk me out of it. And so at this point in my life, things were kind of falling apart. So my drinking was out of control. I also had gotten married, was getting a divorce, was experiencing so much career on fulfillment. I hated being a teacher. My mental health was in its worth worth space. And I actually spiraled so much that I was having suicidal thoughts and really thinking about ending my life and, and contemplating and thinking over and over again about jumping off the, the building that I lived in Kuwait in mobile. And I got really, really lucky to go home to Canada. And I was already on mental health. I was already on mood stabilizers for bipolar disorder, but my meds got increased and I got to spend time in my country and, and with doctors and I was taken care of, and I got back into yoga and I received medical treatment.

Speaker 1 (14:07):

Um, I was doing a lot, a lot better. And so at the same time, I also got an opportunity to come to Bali Indonesia. So I was planning on doing my 300 hour advanced yoga teacher training, supposed to be my honeymoon, big trip in 2017. Me and my ex break up the night before the flight. I end up, you know, having this spiral of suicidal thoughts, thinking I'm a bad person wanting to jump off the building, go back to Canada. And then I could not get a refund on my yoga teacher training in Bali. So I was like, okay, well I guess I have to go to Bali, cuz I like spent so many, so much money on this training. So I came to Bali and this month was like this life changing month for me. Like I can't describe to you what it's like to go through a period where you wanna end your life and your feelings suicidal and everything feels so sad and so dark and so gray and then coming to a place like Bali and like stepping my feet in like soft soil and smelling incense and tasting fresh fruit and hugging people and like looking people in the eye and, and speaking my truth, like it was just the most incredible month of my life.

Speaker 1 (15:21):

And I just wanted to live here for the rest of my life. And the funny thing is, so I ended up getting a job in Abu Dhabi. And I remember I met one person the morning that I arrived in Abu Dhabi and I came straight from Bali to Abu Dhabi. And she said to me, you know, from that moment you were talking about living in Bali and that was five years ago. Um, and obviously I live in Bali now. Um, but this was a dream of mine to live here, but it's like, how do you, when you're taught your whole life that you just need to like, you know, go to university, get a job, get a house, um, get a pension, get healthcare and then get married and have a kid and then die. Like you're told this is the life that you're supposed to follow.

Speaker 1 (16:03):

How do you conceptualize something different? Like how do you imagine something different than the norm? And so I went back to my version of the norm, which was, you know, working at an international school and I got this opportunity to teach at a school in Abu Dhabi. So Abu Dhabi's the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. And it's a lot more modern and busy and organized than Kuwait. And it was more liberal than Kuwait to so, you know, alcohol was legal. I could drink, I could party. And there's also so much incredible stuff to do in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. So I highly recommend going there visiting, you know, the shake eye grand mosque, the BIR Khalifa. They even had concert venues in Abu Dhabi in Dubai, which they didn't have in Kuwait. So I could see Sam Smith do Ali guns and roses and concert.

Speaker 1 (16:52):

And I just felt so at home and so happy in Abu Dhabi. And the funny thing is that people would always say to me, you know, what are you excited about, about moving from Kuwait to Abu Dhabi? And I would say like, I'm so excited to drink. I'm so excited to have alcohol. I'm so excited to party. And then when I got there and I started partying, like I thought that alcohol would make everything better, but it made it a thousand times worse. So I'm drinking every night, drinking every weekend started to drink at noon on the weekend, drinking on weeknights, hung over drunk and just falling back into this downward spiral of depression. So it hit a point in April of 2019 where I started to realize, you know, I have a great life. I have a great job live in a beautiful city.

Speaker 1 (17:38):

I eat healthy. I do yoga. I exercise, but why am I still so unhappy? And it began to Dawn on me. It must be the alcohol, but I didn't wanna quit drinking. I was afraid of quitting drinking and I truly didn't know what my life would be like without it. So I've shared this story. I feel a thousand times on podcast, but I was with my mom in Morocco and I realized that my entire experience of this vacation was shaped around whether I had access to booze. Right? So in Muslim countries you're gonna come across villages and towns where they don't have any alcohol and this whole trip, I was obsessed with like having wine in my backpack. Um, you know, making sure that I was always prepared so I could always get drunk. And there was one night, well, there were two nights in a four month period.

Speaker 1 (18:29):

One was, I was in Lao, backpacking around Southeast Asia and I got on a slow boat to travel up the Mekong river and stay in a Laosian village on new year's. And this should have been the best new years of my life, right? The most incredible new years of my life. But I was mad about it because I couldn't drink alcohol. And the same thing happened in 2019 April when I was in Morocco. So this should have been the most incredible thing. It was my birthday. I was gonna be on the high Atlas mountains, like a once in a lifetime thing, but I was pissed off and said, my birthday was ruined, cuz I couldn't drink alcohol. And this was the pivotal moment for me when I was like, if my birthday is ruined because I can't have alcohol, this means that it's time for me to quit drinking.

Speaker 1 (19:16):

And at the same time I had been seeing all these targeted ads for this online program called one year, no beer. And I always like to say about this, you know, we think social media like algorithms are so creepy and weird. But the thing is like, if I didn't have these algorithms sending me these ads of people, changing their life, getting sober, I don't think I ever would've quit drinking. And so this program called one year of beer. What was super powerful about it was that it was, they were targeting to normal people who just wanted to take a break from drinking and you didn't have to give up forever. You didn't have to say you were an alcoholic. So I just did 28 days in the beginning. And this was a powerful period of time for me because all this time I thought that there was something wrong with me, right?

Speaker 1 (20:00):

I thought if I couldn't stop drinking alcohol, there was something wrong with me. But there were 20,000 people on this Facebook group. <laugh> and I began to realize that there are actually a lot of people out there that struggle with alcohol. And the reason why is because alcohol is an addictive drug, it's an addictive drug, right? It's like anything. If you smoke too many cigarettes, you are going to become addicted. If you drink too much coffee, you are going to become addicted. And if you drink too much alcohol, you are going to be addicted to that too. No one ever starts drinking alcohol saying, I wanna have a problem drinking. We all started partying as teenagers or young adults. We all just did it for fun. And then our drinking got worse and worse. And then we began to get addicted and feel stuck. And so joining this community made me realize that there was nothing wrong with me. The problem is alcohol. The problem is the way we normalize alcohol. The problem is the lack of education and awareness about alcohol. The problem is that the government is profiting so much money from alcohol. That they're not gonna wanna make us stop drinking because they're, this is funding the government, right? Like the, the us government and the Canadian government makes so much money on alcohol sales a year. And so they're not gonna tell you that it's addictive. They're not gonna tell you it's harmful because they want you to keep drinking.

Speaker 1 (21:24):

So during the time that I was quitting alcohol, I went through a very tough withdrawal period. Everyone's experience of this is different. But for me, because I had bipolar disorder, I ended up experiencing pretty big depressive swings where I again was having suicidal thoughts and something that I wanna point out about my withdrawal period is that I was a very high functioning person, right? I had a job, I was highly productive. I was even acknowledged by my school as being an outstanding teacher. My drinking never interfered with my ability to do my job. And I still had a withdrawal from it. And I wanna point that out because I think we stereotype alcoholics or we stereotype people with drinking issues to think that, you know, they're getting up in the morning and drinking vodka when they wake up. But that was not the case for me. So I was a normal person. I was a grade one teacher, no one would know I was struggling. And once I got through this withdrawal, so it was about 11 days. I began to realize, you know, I can never ever go through that again. I never wanna go through that again. And that thought alone was enough to motivate me to stay sober.

Speaker 1 (22:35):

So when I was quitting drinking, I realized that people who have problems with drinking typically have this problem because they're using alcohol to cope with what's happening in their lives. Whether it's an unhappy marriage, an unhappy job, an unhappy country. Usually there is some reason that you're drinking and it's often a greater symptom of a problem. So for myself, there was a ton of stuff going on, you know, trauma from my childhood trauma, from my teenagehood trauma, from even my experience, living in Kuwait and also alcohol was numbing me from the truth, which was that all along, I was never meant to be a grade one teacher. I was never meant to be a school teacher. I was always meant to do this. I was always meant to be a yoga teacher. And as soon as I quit drinking, I started to wake up to this.

Speaker 1 (23:29):

Now, something that was pivotal for me in this time was that I met a psychic Dan and many of you know, Dan, he's been a guest on several of my podcast episodes. We've done lots of retreats together, lots of online collaborations. He's actually popping into my sober girls, yoga circle, this coming weekend, the sober girls club. So if you are a sober girls yoga member, you're gonna get to meet him this weekend and ask him questions. But the amazing thing about Dan is that he looked at me, sat down, closed the eyes, counted down from 21 to one, opened the eyes. And he said to me, you were never meant to be a school teacher. You were meant to be a healer. And I just remembered that sentence because I, it was true. And I knew it right? And so Dan was not making up random things.

Speaker 1 (24:13):

Dan was not, you know, putting ideas in my head that weren't authentic. Dan was telling me that what I had always dreamed about was possible and he was putting it in a visualization and manifestation. And so this is what I say all the time. If you are seeking a change in your life, visualize it, manifest it, make a vision board, write about it, speak it into existence. Talk about it. If you cannot talk about it, if you cannot speak it into existent, if you can't believe in it, maybe get someone that's gonna help you do that. Like it could be a psychic, it could be a coach. It could be an anything. It could be coming on a manifestation retreat. Actually the Mexico retreat is manifestation theme. So if you're really struggling with this, come on, the Mexico manifestation retreat, and we are gonna speak your dreams into existence <laugh> but that was the changing moment for me.

Speaker 1 (25:03):

It was when Dan helped me realize, like, I am worthy of a life of my dreams. I am capable of it. I can do it. And so he told me, this is all gonna start happening around my 30th birthday. And I just turned 30 about a month ago. And, and here I am. So once I stopped drinking, I realized that drinking was low self worth behavior, right. And when I was drinking beer and wine with dinner every night, and I was going out partying on the weekend, I was keeping myself in that low self worth. And as soon as I quit, I realized, you know, I'm worthy of following my dreams. I'm worthy of this career that I love. Right. I can do it.

Speaker 1 (25:43):

And so I started to put all my time, all my energy, all my money into growing, the mindful life practice, I did further trainings. I became a spin instructor, a bar instructor, a life coach. And I became obsessed with building the mindful life practice. So I was doing some online coaching, um, working for some cities and working for some gyms and studios around the city in Abu Dhabi. And I began teaching my yoga classes in a new form, which was on zoom. And this was like the pivotal thing happened at the start of the pandemic and the community quickly grew. So we've now had about 4,000 people join us for classes or programs over the course of two years. Um, we've probably had like at, at our maximum, we had 40 different yoga teachers working for us. I think we've probably had like maybe 80 yoga teachers overall teach for us.

Speaker 1 (26:33):

We have, I think we had like four or 5,000 class recordings on our, on demand archives. So it just grew massively. And we became this huge international community. And, um, meanwhile, I was also doing life coaching. And so basically life coaching is about goal setting. And the biggest thing that I explain it to people is that counseling leans into the past. Consulting is more advice giving and coaching is what gets you where you wanna be further and faster than you would on your own. So in this time I ended up coaching someone through 90 days sober and at the end of our coaching period, he wrote me this letter. And at the end, he said, thank you for saving my life. And that was when I realized, like I got shivers reading it. I think I cried reading the letter. And that's when I realized that I was meant to be a sober coach.

Speaker 1 (27:27):

And so as soon as I identified as a sober coach, I evolved into sober yoga girl. That is when the ball got really rolling. And it's funny, I think our purpose, sometimes we don't even choose it, it's handed to us. Right? And so this role was handed to me. And so I developed the sober girls, yoga 30 day challenge. Um, and we now have this incredible on-demand sober girls, yoga platform. We have all this, all these women that gather together weekly to have circles, to connect to chat. Um, and the challenge basically looks at every part of a person's life from their wealth to their health, to their creativity, their joy, their work, we're basically systematically working on and improving everything about your whole self bit by bit until you figure out why you're drinking so much and create a life where you don't need alcohol, um, anymore.

Speaker 1 (28:19):

So I officially opened a business in Dubai and I had full intentions to stay there long term. And then my life kind of changed when I ended up moving to Bali. So I had gotten a new apartment. I was planning on staying in Dubai. That was the plan. And then things were really, really hard for my first few months, once I quit my job. So it was hard for me to get a residence visa. It was hard for me to secure the correct department, hard for me to move in. There were so many roadblocks and at the same time, again, targeted ads, I was seeing targeted ads for Bali visas. So you could get a visa, a business visa come down to Bali. And my psychic, Dan kept saying, Alex, you're gonna go to Bali. You're gonna go to an island. You're just gonna pack everything up, get rid of all your stuff, put your stuff in storage.

Speaker 1 (29:06):

And the thing is that we're often like afraid of these risks, right? We're afraid of letting go because we don't know how it's gonna turn out. But what we receive from letting go can be beautiful if we open our minds to it. So me moving to Bali was like the final pivotal step, right? So now I have a team helping me produce my yoga classes, helping me run, run retreats and yoga teacher trainings and the sober girls, yoga platform has become amazing. And all of these things would've never happened if I just stayed in Dubai, right? So right now, what I do, I have the sober girls yoga platform on demand yoga classes. I'm actually running the first sober girls, yoga teacher training 200 hour teacher training this summer and this fall, I basically run this really rich and busy online community for women that are quitting drinking or already sober.

Speaker 1 (30:02):

And I just can't believe that I'm actually doing what I love. Like I never ever would've thought that this is what I would be doing with my life. But I, um, so I wanna share with you before we wrap up today, a few of my biggest life lessons that I've learned so far. So the first thing I wanna share is that the journey in life is not gonna make sense while it's happening, but it's gonna make sense. Later when you look back, you are gonna encounter times in your life when you're lost, when you don't know what you're doing next. But trust that when you look back on your life, every step along the way is going to make sense. In retrospect, take risks, try new things. Be open-minded many people. When I said I was moving to the middle east, had negative stereotypes. You know, people would say that it was war torn, that women were badly mistreated.

Speaker 1 (30:59):

That air conditioning didn't exist, but I fell in love with the middle east and it opened my heart. And my mind now, I, I almost never wanted to leave. So just don't believe everything you read on the media and stereotypes about different parts of the world and life is an adventure. So be open to it, take risks, try new things. The third thing I wanna share is that you should make decisions in life based on what is right for you, because ultimately you are the one who's going to live with them. So I don't regret becoming a school teacher as it opened up the whole world to me. But I had this inner knowing all along that yoga was my career. And I ignored this inner knowing. And I followed a career that was more traditional because I wanted to please my parents or fit into society's expectations of me. And as soon as I got courageous enough to ignore this and to follow my own soul, that's when I became truly happy.

Speaker 1 (31:56):

The fourth thing I wanna share is that when I was growing up, I saw my granddad struggle with an addiction to cigarettes and he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. And he eventually died of lung cancer. And my parents taught me that cigarettes were an addictive drug and that I should not smoke them. And we calculated how much money we, he spent on cigarettes in his life. And it was actually enough money to even buy himself a house. And I wish that I was taught about alcohol in the same way that I was taught about cigarettes. Right? I got addicted to alcohol. It took my time. It took my money. It took my energy and it really impacted my mental health for 12 years. All the chaos, all the drama, all the negativity, all of that from my life was from alcohol. And once I removed it, I was a thousand times happier.

Speaker 1 (32:47):

And so if I could go back in time to when I was a teenager, I wish I could was just be more mindful and more aware about the downward spiral that alcohol would take me on. And I think more awareness needs to be raised about the dangers of drinking and it has to be taught. And the fifth and final thing I wanna share is that it is okay. It is okay to have failures. It is okay to make mistakes. It is okay to have mess up. One of my podcast, guests, his name was Andy Ramich. He's one of the first guests I have on the show. He actually was one of the original creators of one year, no beer. And he said, your mess is your message. And I actually don't even know if he made this up. Like it might have been someone else who said it, but I truly believe this to be true, right?

Speaker 1 (33:35):

My greatest mess. And my greatest mistake was my partying years and my challenge to get sober and quit drinking. But had I not been through this, the mindful life practice and sober girls, yoga and the sober girls, yoga, Y T T and all of these things wouldn't exist. Right? My greatest mess is my greatest message. And now I've made it my mission in life to support other people in quitting drinking too. So know that it is okay to fall. It is okay to make mistakes because life is not about who you are in the past and what mistakes you've made. It's who you are now that matters.

Speaker 1 (34:19):

Thank you so much for tuning into today's podcast episode. Please make sure you subscribe to the show, subscribe to the Mindful Life Practice on YouTube. We're gonna be posting these episodes once a week regularly. And let me know if you have any questions, any feedback, join the sober, curious yoga Facebook group so that you can connect with all of us on social media and I'll chat with you soon. Bye. Hi friend. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Sober Yoga Girl podcast. This community wouldn't exist without you here. So thank you. It would be massively helpful if you could subscribe leave a review and share this podcast so it can reach more people. If we haven't met yet in real life, please come get your one week free trial of the Sober Girls Yoga membership, and see what we're all about. Sending you love and light wherever you are in the world.