Big Talk: Sobriety and Intuition with Anneka Reece

Every Friday, members of The Mindful Life Practice App are able to tune into a live Big Talk on the monthly theme! The theme of this month is Intuition. Join Alex and Anneka Reece for this Big Talk, where Anneka shares how sobriety can support our intuition! If you join The Mindful Life Practice as a member, you can join us for live conversations each Friday. Join the membership here. https://www.themindfullifepractice.com/practice-yoga-online To join Anneka's offerings: Sign up for the next round of Sober and SoulFULL:
​
⁠https://coachingbyanneka.co.uk/sign-up-for-an-immersive-6-week-course/?_gl=1*1ahpwrv*_ga*MjA2NDk5ODQ3My4xNjc4NjQ0MDcy*_up*MQ..⁠
​
Book a Discovery Call to discuss my One to One Coaching and Mentoring Packages:
​
⁠https://coachingbyanneka.co.uk/coaching/?_gl=1*uq2ply*_ga*MjA2NDk5ODQ3My4xNjc4NjQ0MDcy*_up*MQ..⁠
​
Follow me on TikTok: @coachingbyanneka_official
​
​
Follow me on Insta: @coachingbyanneka

Transcript

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, 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.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Sober Yoga Girl Podcast. And I'm so excited on this episode to have Anneka Reece with us again. She's been on a few different podcast episodes so far along the way talking about her sobriety journey. And in this particular episode, we're actually recording it live as part of the Mindful Life Practice membership. And these are our talks that we do every single Friday where we're bringing in guests on a different theme to share about something in particular that they're an expert in. And so if you join our membership, you can actually join us live, be part of the live conversation, and then ask any questions at the end.

But if you're listening in, that is what we're doing today. And Anneka has been invited today because she is an alcohol-free manifestation coach, and she's going to be sharing a little bit with us about sobriety and intuition and how our sober journey can help us become more intuitive. Welcome, Anneka. How are you?

I'm good. Thank you. It's so good to be here.

Good to have you.

So good.

All right. I'm going to lead us through a little grounding practice, a little grounding meditation, and then I'm going to switch it over to Anneka. Let's come into a comfortable shape, wherever you are, maybe closing the eyes or settling the gaze. Just take some deep breaths in and out as you're breathing in and breathing out. Notice some of the things that you can hear, the things you can feel, the things you can sense in your space. Just establish what your intention is for being in this session, this conversation. Then when you're ready, you can just gently open the eyes again. Right. Fabulous. I'm going to pass the microphone over to Anneka.

Hello, everybody. Thanks for my introduction, Alex. Just to repeat, my name is Anneka. I'm a health and and I'm a sick coach and I specialize in alcohol free living and manifestation. It is my mission to show the world that alcohol is a manifestation block. One of the many reasons why alcohol is a manifestation block is because it blocks our relationship with our intuition. Notice I say it blocks our relationship with our intuition. Our intuition doesn't go anywhere. You're not blocked, you don't not have it, you're not broken. You are just as psychic as the most psychic people in the world. It's your relationship with that voice that you might not have developed yet, and alcohol really, really, really held us back from that. What do we mean by the word intuition? Well, our intuition is basically our relationship with our divine intelligence or our higher self or our relationship with God. Some people might like to use that language, our relationship with the universe. Really, it's our inner compass. Our inner compass, which is guiding us where to go and how to get towards our manifestations. Our inner compass is always showing us the way to go.

But the problem is that in modern society, and actually, when I say modern society, I mean that very extravagantly. In the modern world, i. E, after prehistoric caveman times where we became quote-unquote, civilized, we have been trained and brainwashed to disregard our intuition, to call it silly, to block it out, and to shut it down. One of the reasons that that's happened is because we've been in a system of patriarchy, a system where the masculine... And when I say masculine, I'm not actually necessarily talking about gender. I'm talking about the Yang and Yang energy. So the Yang, masculine, and energy has been put on a pedestal. We've been brainwashed that we need to be in this energy all the time. So many women I work with are so in the masculine. I have been as well, and I still... We should be in both, neither is good nor bad. But when we put one above the other, that's where we're creating balances. If we're going to boil down masculine and feminine energy to really simple terms, and of course, they're much more complex than this. But you could put to oppose them against each other.

We could say that the masculine is the logical part of us and the feminine is the intuitive part of us. Now, of course, when we're in perfect symbiosis and balance, and both of these work together beautifully and they support each other. We don't want to get rid of our masculine side, but we want it to work with our feminine side rather than shut our feminine side down. We've been trained and brainwashed to use our logic to shut down our intuition and to go, No, I'm not going to listen to that. That's nonsense. One of my teachers, my Reiki teacher, actually explained masculine and feminine energy really well when she said, Really? Are two sides of the same coin? They should be working together. It's like they're both sat in a car and the masculine energy is driving it and the feminine energy is reading the map. They're both necessary. They need to work together, not against each other. In this Aquarian age that we're now in, we are in what many are calling, The Great Awakening. Everyone listening to this podcast, you can consider yourself amongst those that are waking up, have woken up. I think we're always in a process of waking up.

There's always more waking up to do. But there is a mass awakening going on. I mean, if we turn the clock back five years, half the staff that we engage with and talk about really, without even thinking about it now, we're talking about inner child healing, the Great Ascension, masculine and feminine energy, all of this stuff. I don't know about you, but five years ago, I'd have been like, what? Now it's just everyone's like, yeah, I know about that. My parents know about that, I mean, partly because I've taught them it. But people are waking up, and so many of us are coming more in line with our feminine energies, men included, and starting to value our intuition again and not to shut it down and seeing it as being actually quite powerful. Yeah, the fact that we're in an Aquarian age, everything's connected. This is no accident. This is a part of the order of things that should be happening right now. Let me think about that relationship then between our masculine and our feminine energy. We can also look at it from the aspect of our ego voice and our voice of our intuition.

So our ego voice is quite a masculine voice, and it's quite loud, and it also often comes from the energy of fear and catastrophe. Our ego is in our sense of self and our human form, and it's often looking at protecting us, protecting us, keeping us safe. Actually, it's the main thing that makes us get in our own way. Like, don't do that. People might laugh at you. Keep yourself safe. Don't do this. So if you think about manifestation purposes and our inner compass and moving towards that what we want to manifest, our ego actually puts the brakes on a lot of the time because it's like, Oh, that's unfamiliar. That's not safe. Don't do that. Whereas our intuition doesn't use logic. It's like, Yeah, let's just party on down over there. I have no reason. I just know that that's the place to go. It's a place to be. The more we trust our intuition, the quicker we manifest, the quicker we get there. But the ego, always, love, not always, a lot of the time, it loves to talk us out of our intuitive hits. We'll have an intuitive hit and be like, Yeah, I'm going to do that thing, that random thing that's popped into my head.

By the time I usually get these in the shower, by the time I'm out of the shower and I'm ready to write it down on my phone, my ego is like, Oh, you can't afford to do that. We don't have time for that. No, no, no. That's a silly idea, and it tries to talk you out of it. One of the reasons alcohol affects our intuition so much is because our ego voice becomes a lot louder when we're drinking every day. Because if our ego voice is fueled by the energy of fear and catastrophe, alcohol fuels that energy so so much. I mean, anyone who's had a hangover can vouch for that, right? Fear and catastrophe are very loud when we're hungover. We feel very anxious. Everything feels very overwhelming. Actually, we get used to shutting our inner compass down when we're hungover because we have so many synthetic feelings of fear and catastrophe and anxiety that we know always come when we're hungover, that we learn how to ignore ourselves. Alcohol, for me, is such a big act of self-ignoring. We ignore ourselves when we drink every day, when we go, Oh, I don't want to feel that feeling.

Let me pour some wine on it and go away. We do that all the time. We don't feel things. We don't listen to our inner fire alarms. Then we also further train ourselves from all the synthetic anxiety and fear that's created in a hangover. Oh, I'm just going to ignore all of these feelings because they're not real. We're just getting this habit of ignoring ourselves all the time. Again, that's the opposite of being intuitive. To be intuitive is to listen, is to tune into ourselves and to notice hunches, changes in feelings, changes in emotional state, and to trust them and go, Well, that's really interesting. I'm picking up a different energy now. Where's that come from? When we're continually inebriating ourselves, of course, we can't trust those subtle shifts in energy. We're like, Is that me or is that just because I'm hungover? Is that me or is it because I want to drink? It really throws us out of whack. Really, our intuition is such a soft, subtle voice. If you think of your ego, it's like a big foghorn. I often talk about washing machine brain. I'm sure everyone listening can relate to this.

You know when you're feeling anxious about something and you can't let it go and it's going around and around and around your head and you're like, Oh, my God, I'm still worried about that thing. It's like a loop, a thought loop that just keeps going, washing machine brain. Let me tell you now, if you ever try to separate the difference between your intuition and your ego, let me reassure you, if something's goinground and round and round and round around your brain, it is not your intuition, it's your ego. That's just such a great thing to remember. Oh, it's probably not true. If it's going round and round, it's probably really not true. Whereas if your intuition, it drops in very softly, subtly, very neutral. There's no alarm, there's no panic. You might have a feeling of being uncomfortable if it's asking you to move away from something, but you won't feel dysregulated from your intuition. You'll just be like, oh, I just know I need to not go in that building. I don't know why. I just know I mustn't or I don't want to talk to that person. Just something telling me not to.

But our intuition drops in and then it drops out again. It's so easy to ignore for this reason because it's so subtle, it's so neutral, it drops in. If you don't want to listen to it, it flies off straight away anyway and it's gone and you can just forget about it. And again, that's another reason why when we're drinking, it's so easy to ignore. It's like we've got this is a soft, dripping tap. The dripping tap never goes anywhere, which is your voice of intuition. It's always there. But when we're playing, let's imagine really loud drum and bass and we've got a massive subwoodfer, which is our ego, you ain't going to hear the dripping tap. The dripping tap's got no chance. It might be giving you absolute gold dust of how to manifest and where to go next. But if you're playing, you drum and bass that loud, you're not going to get that info. So when we move into our sober journey, we give ourselves the gift of we can connecting with our intuition. And we basically start a process of learning to trust ourselves and trust our feelings again. And before, when we were creating the synthetic feelings of anxiety and stress, and we were ignoring ourselves all the time by drinking.

Really, for me, becoming sober is a process of listening to ourselves again. It's a process of, okay, I'm not going to shut myself down anymore. I'm here. I'm ready. And really thinking about the work that we do on ourselves, it's where we really step into authentic re-parenting, isn't it? It's like our inner child has been crying from nightmares. And when we've been drinking, we've just been shutting the door and telling it to go back to bed. And when we stop drinking, we're like, Hey, it's okay. What happened? What did you dream about? It's okay. It's not real. Let's have a hot cup of cocoa and then I'll put you back to bed. That's what we do to ourselves when we stop drinking, right? We let ourselves feel those feelings. At the beginning of sobriety, I mean, at any point, but certainly at the beginning, many of us have some difficult stuff to work through because it's like all of those nightmares that we've been shoving back under the bed for so many years. Yeah, they come out and we actually look at them and we sit with ourselves and we let ourselves be our inner child and tell ourselves what the nightmare is about, but we get to then not be scared of it anymore, right?

It's this beautiful process that we go through. As we start to listen to ourselves, we begin to build a trust muscle with ourselves again where we know we can trust what we're thinking or feeling. Now I know that if I'm in a really bad mood, it's for a reason, and it's okay for me to look at it and to honor and value why I'm in a bad mood. Now, I won't add a caveat to this, because I have noticed something that us women do a lot, and that is we like to gaslight ourselves when we're on our periods. How many clients and friends have I heard say, Oh, I'm really upset about this thing. To be honest, I'm like, Do my periods, so maybe I'm overreacting. I'm like, Whoa there. If you are feeling upset by something, you have every right to honor the fact that that thing is upsetting you. Stop gaslighting yourself. Sometimes we feel things more strongly, right, when we're on our period, of course. We might be like, Maybe I need to regulate before I act on it. But it doesn't mean our feelings are not valid, no. Really, it's all about now knowing if I feel a certain way, if there's a reason, and I get to look at that now and I get to not shut myself down.

Here is like a process that I like to go through when I am working with my inner guidance system and not shutting myself down. Because now I see, when I feel something uncomfortable, I see it is really, really helpful. If you think about like, when we are manifesting, of course, we want to raise our vibration. We want to feel as good as possible. We all like feeling joy and euphoria. If you think about it, in our like Satnav, our internal Satnav, our destination is always joy and euphoria. We are programmed to move towards those feelings, and that is your birthright to do so. It does not mean that when you are feeling uncomfortable feelings, and note I do not call them bad feelings or negative, they're just uncomfortable. These are uncomfortable because you are meant to list into them. The universe is shaking you by the shoulders, and it knows how to get your attention by making you feel uncomfortable. These uncomfortable feelings are like road signs, and they're basically saying, You need to turn left here. You need to turn right here, et cetera. Now, divine intelligence is very clever, because it knows if it didn't make you feel uncomfortable, your ego would probably just override it and be like, No, I'm not going to do that.

In order to manage the ego, it's going to make us feel uncomfortable and it gets the ego to pipe down a little bit, overrides it. Really, these uncomfortable feelings are corrective experiences or corrective navigation forcing us to take action to heal some things, to let go of something, to move in a different direction to help us move towards joy and euphoria. I want you to start seeing these uncomfortable feelings as just helpful, loving, nudges from the universe. What we're doing is we are using the feeling that comes up as energy and we're alchemising it. Really, all emotion is just an energetic gift. Emotion is energy, okay? Think about anger, anger. Anger is such a powerful energy. I love anger. Don't start to paint pictures of me because I've said that. Isn't it interesting that, especially women in Western society, as soon as we hear the word anger, we're like, Oh, I'm not an angry person, because that would make me a bad person and I'm not angry. Yeah, we've been trained to shame ourselves for feeling anger. Anger is nothing but cement for boundary setting. If we are feeling angry, our inner guidance system is saying, You need to set a boundary here.

Here's some oomph to do so. If we never felt angry, we would just be doormats. We would let people walk all over us. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent here. So, we when we feel something, we allow it. We allow ourselves to feel it. We're like, Okay, fine. Let me just feel this feeling. As we move through this feeling, we want to then focus on regulating ourselves. And, Alex, I know, supports you with loads of different tools that you can use to regulate. Yoga and meditation are incredible. Any movement, to be honest, is amazing for regulating yourself when you're feeling something uncomfortable: walking, running, yoga, anything, any movement, shaking. If you haven't got time to do a full exercise session, just standing up and down, jumping up and down and shaking is really helpful. Then once we've regulated, then we get to connect in with our intuition. When we do this, we can make sense of ourselves and we can receive guidance as to how to alchemise our feelings and take aligned action. Sometimes we might connect with intuition and be like, All right, I'm feeling angry because that person's taking advantage of me and I need to...

I need to tell them, No. I need to tell them no. I need to tell them I don't want to do that. And everyone hates setting boundaries right, so if we didn't have that of anger, we would never bother. We would never stick to it either. We get to listen to ourselves. Okay, so it sounds easy, right? Oh, yeah, you know. Just feel the feelings, like connecting with your intuition, and then you'll know what to do. And I bet you're all like, Yeah, but how do you do that? So let's talk about how we receive intuitive hits. So first of all, you are not blocked. You get intuitive hits every day, all day, all the time. You've just taught yourself to disregard them and think that they're silly. Your subconscious mind is a bridge to divine intelligence. So whenever you're really relaxed, your, you get your subconscious mind talk to you through the universe talks you through it. So when I say relax, like anything that makes us go onto that autopilot mode, you've gone onto a Theta, a brain wave, and you do that. So when you're in the shower, when you're driving long distances, when you're just doing things where you're moving but switched off, I find I go on to Theta a lot.

Also like when we put ourselves into a really deep meditative state, we go into a Theta brain wave. And I also find I get so many intuitive hits when I do exercise, especially the more intense, the better, like things just like drop in and I'm like, Oh, my God! I know a lot of people have a similar experience. So first of all, just know that you're already getting intuitive here. Your ego is so used to brushing them aside. Know that there are so many different parts of you and every random thought that comes into your head is parts of you talking to you. It's spirit guides. It's your higher self. Sometimes it's your wounded in a child. So you start to get curious as to where thoughts come from. I'm sure you can all relate to... Sometimes we have what I call my mummy voice. You know when you're really, really, really sad and you've really just had a good cry and you're feeling a bit hopeless, sometimes it kicks in and it's like, Right, come on now. Let's get up. We're going to do this. Have a bath. And you start to look after yourself.

It's like that voice comes in and it starts to care for you. We all have spirit guides and parts of ourselves that do that. So you start tuning into them and trusting them and knowing that they are all there to give you divine intelligence. And something else to just reassure you that you're channeling divine intelligence all the time. There's so many things in this world that are based on the same foundational philosophy that people channeled without realizing they were channeling them, and they're like the same. An example I love to give is if you look at the chakra system and then you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they're like the same thing, but they haven't influenced each other in the 3D. Both origins of those things would say, No, we thought of that on our own. Well, yeah, you did, but you were downloading it from Source Energy, so it is actually the same thing, isn't it? There's so many examples of things like that. If you think about the Stone Age, for example, and the Iron Age, there was no communication. There was not really any communication between tribes. They were all fighting each other.

How do they all work out how to do the same things at the same time and make fires and things? Because they were downloading it. When you want to start working with your intuition, start just writing down things that come into your mind. If you've ever got really into journaling, sometimes you'll be journaling and you're like, Oh, this is making me feel so nice, and I'm coming up with some really wise things. You're channeling, you're receiving downloads. When you are giving a friend advice, when you're in full flow, you're giving your friend advice, and as you're speaking, you're like, Oh, my God, this is gold dust. Where is this even coming from? God, I'm good. I should do this. You don't really know where it's coming from. It's because we're channeling. Start to lean into those, write them down more. Another way that we receive intuitive hits is through signs and synchronicities. If you start noticing like, I don't know why, but I keep seeing this number everywhere, or I keep seeing sunflowers everywhere, start to get curious as to like, What do those things mean to me? You don't need to look them up and see what they mean to someone else.

Start to think about what they mean to you and what your brain is trying to tell you. Say, for example, if you're seeing sunflowers everywhere, you're like, It's so weird. I just keep seeing them everywhere I go. People have got them on their clothes. I just see them in vases everywhere. What do sunflowers mean to me? They mean like new beginnings. They mean happiness. They mean like it's time to make hay while the sun shines. It means golden era, something it means to me. I want to teach you something now that's really, really powerful as a way of connecting with intuition, and it is teaching you how to use your imagination to connect with your intuition. This is really important thing to learn because it's a classic example. When we talk about imagination, a classic example of how our ego blocks our intuition or shuts it down and discards it. Because how many times have you tried to be psychic or do a meditation? You might have done one with Alex and she'd have led a beautiful meditation and been like, What is your higher self telling you? You might have looked in with her and then you've gone, Oh, for goodness sake, I'm just making it all up.

I can't do it. My brain is just making stuff up. My imagination is just doing it. It's not even real. Your imagination is part of your intuition. Your imagination and your dreams, they work together and that's your intuition, right? So you start seeing your imagination as a tool, a part of your intuition. I'm going to help you understand this now through this little meditation or visualization I'm going to guide you through. Actually, Alex, would you mind if I use you as a volunteer? We'll do it out loud together?

For sure, yeah, I'm.

Happy to. I would like you, so don't choose anything too personal because obviously I want you to talk about it out loud. I'd like you to think about something, like a problem that you'd like to solve or something that is not making sense to you right now that's causing an issue.

Okay, I think I have something.

Okay, so could you just tell us what that is so that we can do it out loud together?

Yeah. I think something that's been an overarching theme for me for so long is that I feel this draw and pull to live in Bali. Yet, at times it can feel like it's really being here and the time zones and me trying to connect with people in North America and Europe, for example, it's like my life would be so much easier if I lived in a time zone that was more aligned with the rest of thewith the rest of the people that I work with. And so that's something that's been really I've been thinking about ever since I moved to Bali, really, is I love being here, but I also think that my life would be easier in many ways if I lived somewhere else. Is that a good problem?

I love that it's a perfect problem. Don't ever think this. I want you to do it really, really quickly. Just tell me whatever comes through. It doesn't really matter what you pick at all. I just want you to pick a symbol that we're going to use to explore this theme? What's coming to your mind?

A hummingbird.

Okay, lovely. If you just close your eyes and I want you to visualize that hummingbird, like fully use your imagination, show that hummingbird in front of you in as much detail as possible. I want you to think about how big it is, what colors it is, what background it's in, what does it look like? I'm going to ask you to tell me about this in more detail. So tell me, Alex, how big is this hummingbird?

Like the size of my hand.

Okay. Tell me more about what its physical appearance is like.

He's like a blue, but it's like... I don't know how to describe this blue. It's not royal blue. It's not sky blue. It's a deep but also like pastel blue. And he has some like black little accents on his wings, and he really has flapping wings.

Okay. So he's really got a flapping wings. So his flapping wings, is he like flying around? Tell me how he's flying.

He's not really going far, they're just flapping. He's like staying still, but they're just flapping.

Kind of like treading water? Yeah. Staying still but flapping. Okay. How is he feeling? How does he seem happy? Give me some feelings that he's feeling.

I mean, he doesn't seem sad. He seems content.

Okay, cool. What's going on in the background of this picture?

It's just sky. It's just blue, blue sky.

Just lots and lots of blue sky. Okay, cool. Are there any other creatures around?

No, I mean, there weren't until you just asked me. Then when you asked me, I started to see.

Some.

Greenery, some grass, and some caterpillars, but I didn't see them before.

Okay, and I suppose they're on the ground and he's in the sky.

Yeah.

All right. You can open your eyes now. So, as you will have heard, I told Alex that she had to think of a symbol. Now, I think we could probably all agree that if I asked you all to think of a hummingbird and I asked you all of those questions separately and you couldn't hear and influence each other, what your imagination would have showed you would have been totally different, okay? So our imagination, why does it present things in the way that it does? Because you're not really controlling that as such. You can if you want to, but you've decided to look at a hummingbird, and that's what you get shown, and that's what you see. Where is that coming from? That's your higher self, that your subconscious speaks in pictures, it speaks through your imagination. So now that we've got this image, and you can do this on your own, you can do it with a partner, you can do it through drawing as well. Now that we've got this image, much like we would analyze a dream, which psychiatrists across the world would agree, analyzing dreams is a very helpful way of finding out what's going on in our subconscious mind.

This is different. We're just doing it consciously. So, Alex, and again, remember, this is not about what I think because it's not my subconscious. Alex knows her subconscious. And as I ask her these questions, our bodies talking to us. So if I said to you, do you think it means this? You would know in your body, no, doesn't really feel right, or, Oh, yes, that really lights me up when you say that. That really resonates. Our body is always giving us the yes and the no feeling. Okay, so, Alex, talk to me about why do you think the bird is on this background of... You said blue-blue. You said blue twice there. What's that about?

As you ask me that, the only thing that comes to mind is how drawn I am to the ocean and being in big, open blue spaces like Ocean Blue and Blue Sky. I think I just spent ten days at the beach. I went to three different beaches for 10 days, and now I'm back at work in the jungle, which is also beautiful. But I think I'm seeing this bird in this open space.

Tell me if this resonates. What I'm hearing when you say that is freedom.

Does.

That resonate or freedom adventure?

Freedom does resonate.

Okay. When you were saying Blue Blue, you had such a good, like a happy tone. When I said, What? Where's the bird? Such a basic... Could be a boring question, right? But you were like, Just blue. Blue. It was this lovely energy behind that. I've got this... I've got this happy feeling of freedom in this background that your subconscious is giving you. Now let's talk about what the bird is doing, because we've got this three vast background. Let's also talk about the ocean and the sky represent infinite potential, right? There's no end to them. We've now got this image of the bird flapping its wings, but it isn't going anywhere.

What's that about? You know what I think that resonates with me is that what I'm thinking of is this idea of having one anchored spot. As much as I am someone that loves to travel and loves to explore, I think it's important to me to have a place that I can call my home.

Yeah, because you used the word content when you were describing it. So it's not like a flapping... There's no stuck energy in that. There's an anchored vibe. It makes the vastness of the blue less overwhelming, right?

Yeah.

Okay. Interesting. Okay. I mean, is there any significance around the size of the bird? He says it's around the size of your hand. What's that about?

You know what? I realized when I said that that I should have described it. He was smaller than my hand. He was like this really small bird. I don't know why he's so small. I'm not sure. Maybe it continues on with this idea of freedom and lightness.

Okay. Any significance around his color? You said he's blue, but he's also like a pastel blue with black accents. I feel.

Like I may have seen this bird before. I don't know where... I feel like I'm describing a bird that I've seen in a cartoon movie or something.

Okay. So if that's come from a cartoon, is there a child-like playfulness around how being this bird makes you feel? I'm hearing creative, fun feeling from the cartoon image there.

I'm thinking of this really random movie right now that I feel like it might be connected to. But I've only seen the movie once. It was like... God, it was this movie about this... It came out when I was in high school, and it was this princess who she either was a... I think she was a Disney princess that ended up in real life or the opposite. She was a cartoon that ended up in New York or something. I think it might be called Enchanted. I'm going to have to look it up after this. You know the movie I'm talking about?

No, but I'm just psychoanalyzing what you're saying. I'm like, Oh, I like where this is going. Okay, carry on.

I don't know where it's going from here. It's just this is this movie that's come to me that I really liked it. I went to see it in theater in high school and I thought it was going to be one of my favorite movies of all time. I just thought of it now for the first time.

So you're describing, Viviv, where a Disney Princess is in the real world. We think of Disney Princesses, right? They have everything, don't they? They have the happy ever after. They are, "perfect". They're happy all the time. Everything is great in Disneyland, yeah? What's your subconscious telling you about where you are right now? It's like if we add that layer on top of this vast landscape of freedom and this staying still as being this contented, safe feeling, what element is that adding?

Well, I think I've gotten a few different takeaways from this in terms of I don't know if it necessarily means I need to leave Bolly right now, but I think I am feeling content in this place being right now's home. But I also feel like I do need to spend more time down at the ocean in an open spaces. And also then this idea of freedom is like, I need to be migrating my life to be so... One of my things is like, Well, I'm not in the right time zone. I'm working so late, but I also want freedom. And so maybe I can just... I'm the one that sets my own schedule, so maybe I can just not make myself work in the middle of the night. There's all these things that I'm like, Okay, doesn't necessarily mean that it's not bally right now, but there are all these elements that need to be honored in this home that can be honored in this home.

Yeah, because something that, and tell me if this resonates, something that I was seeing when you were telling me about the film, I'm like, your subconscious is reminding you that you're the magician here. Like, you're the Disney Princess of your own life. You're the main character. Then you were in this ocean of infinite potential. Like, you are working in the middle of the night because you think you have to, but you don't. You have to do anything. It's so true. You can get what you want just like a Disney Princess would.

That's so true.

Yeah. Did you find that... Have you done anything like that before or did you find it helpful?

I love that. I want to hire you to be my coach because I want to work through some other things that.

Have come.

Into my mind right now that I'm like, I can't do this on my podcast. But yeah, wow, that was so powerful. And then I was thinking a little bit about some of the different ways in which I guide meditations and how can I make it more intuitive. For example, one meditation that I led today, I think, was intuitive in that similar. It was guiding people into like, okay, connect to this memory. What does it feel like? Whereas versus the other way in which I might guide a meditation, which would be literally describing a place where a person is. I just think that was such a beautiful invitation that you gave me to come up with my own little world. Yeah, it was just beautiful. I loved it.

I'm so pleased you liked it. Just to break that down for you and everyone listening, know the order that we did this. We started off with no words or the words were describing the picture, but we were not trying to intellectualize anything. We turned that part of Alex's brain off. That's like the analytical, the masculine side of us. We told that part of us to be quiet. And we completely lent into, I'm literally just imagining something. I'm not attaching any meaning to it whatsoever. What's my brain showing me? And we went into as much detail with that as we could. And when you're doing that on your own, you could go into even more detail. And if you if you're a really artsy person, I'm not as like that good at drawing, but if you are someone that's like that, you can do this with just doodling and pictures and then analyze it afterwards. Again, psychiatrists have been doing this for like centuries, I don't know, 100 years, getting people to analyze their own doodles and things like that. We do that a bit first. We open up that's our intuition, and then we're decoding it with our masculine side, with our logical side.

We're like, okay. It's actually no different, right? When we were at school and we were analyzing poems, I'm like, okay, what's the poet doing? Why have they done this? You're analyzing like, What's my higher self trying to show me here? Again, you don't have to do what you did at school, which is I don't know, did the poet actually think that, or are we just like going off on a tangent? Because you're connecting back into your body all the time. When I was giving you suggestions, they're saying, Does it resonate? Does it resonate? If it does, you're like, Oh, yes. If it doesn't, sometimes I say to clients that, and they're like, No, I'm not feeling that one. Okay, fine. Let's go this way then. But yeah, I'm so glad you found it helpful.

It was amazing. I really enjoyed that. I think I've taken away a lot from my own... I think I've come to a realization of this is definitely a beautiful home for me right now and I just need to keep bringing in the things that are important to me. I work for a month at a time per 20. I have my clients in for like 22 days on yoga teacher training and then I get about a week off. What I've been doing is every time I get a week off, I'm going to the beach and just keep bringing that element into my life and keep bringing in the things that are important to me.

Amazing. Just like pulling back from this now and having a bit of a bird's eye perspective, this something that's in our toolkit, our intuition. We're not connected to our intuition all the time. Of course we're not. We're like going about our lives. What are the moments where we really need to say, Right, stop. Listen to your intuition. What do I need to ask myself? They are the moments when we feel that we are being triggered or that we are being presented with a test from the universe. We feel uncomfortable, but I don't like this feeling. Something's not right. I don't feel good. I feel out of alignment. We feel it to heal it. We just let it run through us. We use our somatic techniques, whether that be yoga, walking, running, any movement to move it through us. We regulate our nervous system, and then we come back to our intuition and we say, Okay, universe, what are you trying to tell me? Where are we going now? Because you're sat in that basically just going, Make a U-turn. Make a U-turn. Oh, for God's sake. This was.

So amazing. I learned so much. Definitely, my action steps are one, hire Anneka. That was amazing.

I'd love that. But two, I.

Also just want to listen to it again and then just take in because there were so many brilliant metaphors that helped me perceive concepts in a different way and so many different elements brought into it than I thought would be in this conversation. So yeah, it was just amazing.

Oh, that's made me so happy. I'm so pleased, Alex. And as always, it's just so lovely to connect with you and to say hi. So yeah, thanks for that.

And before I wrap it up, I just want to ask you, is there any thing coming up right now in your programs or your offerings that you want to share with us and where can everyone find you?

Yeah, so I'm actually launching the next round of Sober and SoulFULL on Monday the fourth of September. So if you're listening to this live, then there's still time. You can sign up as late as Monday. If you are listening to this after the next round, launch is in January, so you can still contact me and get in the waitlist for that. That's my six week course, which guides you through learning about how alcohol is a manifestation block and how to let go of FOMO. However, if you just want one to one coaching, you want to do more things like Alex and I did today, and you want me to guide you through your little tests that are coming up in your manifestation process to make it super bespoke for you, then I offer one to one coaching programs and you can book in a free discovery call with me by emailing me at thrive@coachingbyanneka.co.uk or you can follow me on TikTok @coachingbyanneka, or sorry, TikTok is @coachingbyanneka_official and Instagram is @coachingbyanneka. Anneka is spelled A-N-N-E-K-A.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much. So this conversation we recorded live on Zoom as part of our new big talks. So this is for Mindful Life Practice members. We have a monthly theme. This one is sobriety and intuition. And so if you are a member, you're welcome to join us every single Friday where we'll have a different guest. And if you're not, we will later be uploading them as podcast episodes later on. So yeah, thank you so much.

This is amazing. Lovely. I'll catch up with you soon.

Sounds good. Take care. 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.