✨Weekly Insight
Sobriety asks something of you every day.
There is no finish line. No moment where the work stops and you just coast. The challenges show up. The hard days show up. You meet them anyway.
But here is what you never have to earn:
The morning.
When nothing is in the way, it just arrives. Clear. The same way it did yesterday. The same way it will tomorrow.
Most people are calculating the cost of sobriety. The social awkwardness, the explanations, the thing you’re giving up. Nobody tells you to add up the other side of the ledger. Not the years or the dollars. The first five minutes of your own day, fully yours, every single day.
That return compounds.
And at some point you stop being surprised by it — but you never stop being grateful.
🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety
My guest this week on Episode 049 is with Shelly on April 23 at 3:00p EDT
What does it look like when someone builds a life they don’t want to escape from?
This week I’m sitting down with Shelly, the writer behind Cozy Clarity on Substack. She spent years as a mechanic in an industry that didn’t always make room for her, turned that experience into something, and eventually walked away from a job without a plan — just a blank page and a decision to finally fill it in on her own terms.
Shelly writes about burnout, mental health, and the kind of personal development that asks something of you. Her work doesn’t let you stay comfortable in awareness alone. She’s interested in what happens when you stop waiting and actually move.
We’re talking about building something real, showing up for your own life, and what it means to create from a clear head.
📖 What I’m Reading
The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer is a book that has been sitting on my shelf for some time now.
Michael presents the idea that your true self is the awareness behind your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves, and that most suffering comes from identifying with and resisting the constant inner dialogue. It outlines how stored emotional experiences create patterns that shape reactions and limit freedom, and argues that by relaxing resistance, letting go of these stored energies, and observing thoughts without attachment, you can access a state of inner openness and sustained peace. The core framework is less about changing external circumstances and more about shifting your relationship to your mind—moving from control and suppression toward observation and release.
I’ve come to find that being sober, reading is different; the knowledge feels and provides a much deeper experience. I tend to gravitate toward books that extend not only knowledge for my own experiences, but also knowledge that I can apply toward helping the clients I work with.
🎨 What I’m Creating
Yesterday, I attended an annual event here locally in Raleigh. Yoga, NA drinks, picking up litter, it was restorative, energizing and community-driven.
I’m in the process of drafting a new audio series. The tentative title is “From Thinking To Drinking - Creating space to choose differently.” So much of this work we do for ourselves is around our thinking. One could argue it’s the work. How do we manage to be with the thousands of thoughts that we have no control over each day? Before we make a choice, there is a thought that appears before that.
And so this series will explore what that looks like in action. This will live under the Guided Practices section for paid members. I believe it’s going to provide a lot of value. The first one will be coming soon!
🌀 The Sober Creative Collective News
A few things the Collective is creating right now: Melinda Lloyd spent a day leading mindfulness sessions with twelve young women, weaving Native Hawaiian values — aloha as presence, ha as breath — into breath work and a simple art activity. She called it a reconnection with the part of herself that knows how to hold space without forcing anything.
Elsewhere in the Collective, members are exploring creative ways to have non-alcoholic drinks, building and sharing music playlists, and Noelle Richards recently made custom t-shirts for a family redwood trip.
The group has also decided to work through The Artist's Way together in bi-weekly meetings, using it as a shared monthly practice. I’m excited we are doing this because I’ve not personally taken the course and it seems very fitting for all of us to learn more about our creative selves.
If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.
Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.
If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.
The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.
ALL OF THIS! Congratulations to Shelly on her upcoming podcast with you. Congratulations to Melinda Lloyd and Noelle Richards for joining your Collective! Congratulations to you on cleaning Mother Earth up for Earth Day! And The Untethered Soul is a great book.🩷
The first five minutes of your day, fully yours — that's something you don't understand until you experience it. For years I woke up with one question: what did I do last night? Today I wake up and the question simply isn't there. Nothing to reconstruct, nothing to be ashamed of. Just morning. And that audio series on the thought-to-drink connection — that sounds exactly like something my clients need. Looking forward to it.