Olubunmi Aboaba's Inspiring Story with Recovery

Olubunmi Aboaba is a recovery coach who supports clients working with their energy lines to enhance recovery. She helps people achieve their best lives after facing burnout, addiction, or divorce. She helps them find their success through Future Life Progression. You can discover Olumbunmi's work at: https://yourfuturelife.co.uk/

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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.

Hello. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Sober Yoga Girl Podcast. In today's episode, we have Olubunmi Aboaba as a guest. And she is in the UK. She is a sober coach.

She helps people with coaching from burnout and divorce. And she is also 15 years sober. And we got connected through a mutual friend, Ruby, who recommended her to be on my show to share her story with sobriety. I want to welcome you, Boomi. How are you?

I'm very well. Thank you, Alex. I'm glad to be on your show. So, yes, super excited to share where I've come from, what it's like today, so give some people out there some inspiration.

Yeah, amazing. And so you're 15 years sober, almost 16 years, right?

Yeah, 16 years sober and very interesting journey. And it's been a fun one as well Yeah.

Congratulations. It's a huge accomplishment. I know in the early days of sobriety, something like 16 years seems like so far away. And it's just incredible to think that you have been able to achieve that long of sobriety. Amazing.

Thank you. But as I said, it's just going back to just keeping it in the day. That's all I could do right at the beginning is just keep it all in the day. Sometimes it was in the hour. Sometimes it was in half a day. It was just simple steps. That was, I think, my big lesson right at the beginning, because relapse so many times was just keep it very simple. Right, yeah.

I was wondering maybe you could share with us a little bit about your life before sobriety. What was your journey leading up to that point?

Right. Okay, so just really briefly, I'm going to say how long have you got, but just joking aside, it was the way I thought it was very different right from the get-go. As a youngster, I was very much a dreamer. I was the only child until the age of twelve. When my sister came along, I came from a background which was quite a Nigerian-African background. Father was very strict. They worked very hard, my mom and dad. I was a latchkey kid. So a lot of the time I spent on my own. I'd go to school, come home, do my homework. Mom and dad would come back about an hour or two later, so I was very much on my own. I'm very much a daydreamer. In a way, when looking back, I always escaped out of my head whether it was reading books, reading, watching television. I always became the character. That was me. I was very much the dreamer and the meanderer through imagination. My earliest, funny enough, it was food was my first primary addiction, was food. It was there. My mom gave me snacks and stuff when they were working. But before they got home, I'd raid the pantry and this is when my food addiction did start.

But then that morphed as I got older into alcohol, so I remember my first alcoholic drink was at the age of 12. My parents weren't big drinkers at all. It was Christmases, birthdays, things like that. Very rarely drank. But I remember being offered a glass of Martini one Christmas and that was it. It was almost like the lights came on, the sun came out, I could feel confidence. And it was just that feeling. And my life was always feeling in a state of high alerts. I always felt there was always going to be a problem. As soon as I left the house when I was going to school, I was the only black child at school in a white community. So for me, it was It was always on a state of what's going to happen. So that was my life through for a few years and then going into university. That feeling always followed me, that feeling what's going to happen. So I was always on my garden. Today I know it's the sympathetic nervous system on overdrive, basically, and the overwhelm. So I couldn't emotionally regulate. So for me, it was always what's going to happen next?

And then being on my own and my imagination, I was a loaner, so I had the perfect ingredients to really take that drink to the next level. It made me feel different. It made me feel normal. It made me feel confident. It was my best friend. Alcohol was my best friend right through university. That was the thing I was at the end of the day, so long as I had my drink and it was never a big thing. It wasn't even huge at the time. It was just a glass of wine, gin and tonic, that thing. But I had to have it. I had to have it and it was there. It was like a little mental obsession. But then that morphed with life events and not being able to cope with life on life's terms, not being able to see life as it is and deal with it and have that emotional coping strategies. So it was always back to alcohol, always back to alcohol. But then when the huge events happened, like meeting somebody and getting married and all this and my profession, my profession was very stressful. Then it just started to build up and up and up and up until it was my nemesis.

It wasn't my best friend anymore. It wasn't helping me change the way I felt in a good way. And it was always interesting when I think about my alcohol journey, I never actually enjoyed the taste, but I enjoyed the effect. And that was really, I think, quite significant that it had to change the way I felt. When it stopped doing that again, I was drinking more and more and more and it was just like the wheels fell off bit by bit. I was trying to hide it. I was very much a secret drinker. I was very much somebody who drank at home and go out and pretend that I didn't drink. I didn't drink in bars or anything like that. I was a ho drinker. But for a long time, it got me through and they just stopped working. That's when life got very scary and very out of control. There was a lot of consequences. Getting a DUI, a divorce, custody, have a fight for the custody of the children, my professional bodies knew about it. So it was again, all of that was going on. And yeah, that happened. And then it was okay.

And then again, I was trying to scramble back to normality and everything's going to be okay. I'll make sure I fix this. So again, I was doing everything for everybody else, not for myself. The shame and guilt and what I felt I had done, the mistakes I made just spurred me on for a little bit to do the right thing, try and stop drinking, white-knuckling it. I was successful for about two or three years and then it happened again. Really, it was a case of, I'd say seven rehabs later. Wow. Four down seven, stand up eight. It was ferocious, absolutely ferocious. So yeah, 2008 was my anus foribilus. It was the worst year of my life. And yeah, divorce, fight for custody, my professional body is everything. And I think when I came out of rehab the last time, it was a case of sink or swim. I knew I was going to die when they saw me coming in and I was out of it. But when I came to, he said, Oh, my goodness, I've never seen anybody so bad, like so bad. I don't know. Thanks. But probably about six months out of rehab, I'd found out that that person had died of an overdose and that made me realize how powerful this all is, so powerful.

And that's when I made a decision to try and have different approaches. So for me, it was I did AA, but then I really had to find out I had to have my own journey as well. I knew there was something more. Aa had saved my life, but I was seeking other ways of staying well. It's a coincidence, actually. Well, it wasn't a coincidence, I think it's the universe. But I remember speaking to this lady, patient of mine, who was a friend, and just saying, I'm out with both... She was in AA, so we chatted. She said, Look, speak to this woman. I know this woman. She's fantastic. She's called Anna Coates, my friend today. Go and have a chat with her. She's a shaman. Go and have a talk with her. I'm in the medical profession. What is a shaman? I don't know what a shaman is, so I had no clue. But she'd gone visit her, kept her open mind, went to go and see her and I thought, well, I don't want to go on to antidepressants. I don't want to be that person addicted to Prozac. I want to get really well top to bottom.

I just knew that I just needed the whole shebang. So I went to see this lady, kept an open mind and I remember she did a healing session on me and immediately I felt different. Now this is somebody who's not into shamanic practices, anything like that. I always thought it was a bit woo woo and it just felt different. I felt different. It was just a perceptible slight difference. But what I was going through at the time with divorce, court, DUI, everything else. It was though I felt protected after her session that everything was going to be okay. That was the switch. Everything's going to be all right. I knew it and I've never felt that way before. So I went back to see her a few more times and it just got stronger and stronger and stronger. I thought there is something in this. And she practiced Reiki on me, used crystals, all of that. And it was like, whoa, okay, I'm feeling all right. Despite what was going on around me and it was mayhem around me, I was feeling really centered, really centered. So I got greedy. I wanted to find out what this was all about, what Reiki was all about, what the crystals were.

And so I went and started to learn, became a Reiki master, getting into a crystal healer as well. I just went into all of that and future life progression. Just over the years, I started to build and build and build. For me, it really enhanced my program that I was on in recovery. It really enhanced my recovery. I felt very-centered. Curved balls wouldn't hit me and destroy me anymore. It was almost like there's just very grounded, very centered. Not all the time, I'm not saying it's that I'm going through life like that, but I could start to navigate life in a regulated way. My emotions were a lot more centered. I could regulate my emotions more. For me, recovery was all about the healing practices. That's what has kept me going. I was just really excited about that. It was just by sheer coincidence I met this lady through a friend, but I didn't realize that energetic practices would be able to support me and align me to who I truly want to be, how I want to show up in the world. A lot of the time when I was drinking, I was hiding.

I didn't feel good enough. My self-esteem was on the floor. Even though I was doing well on the outside, little bummy on the inside was just this kid that was just scared, scared of life, scared of people.

Wow. Thank you so much for- Through.

That journey, I started to grow inside. The inside was starting to match the outside, whereas it was very incongruent before. So it's about standing in my power as a woman and a sober woman and being proud of myself and not feeling shame from what happened in the past and being proud of being able to move forward. And I just saying that none of this was a mistake at all. This was my learning. This was learning about me and who I want to be and who I really want to show in the world. So today is 15 years down the line. I've carried that all. I do it daily in my practices, and I'm excited to have people that I can help. And that at the end of the day, is what I'm about, is all about service. And I love it. I just love it.

So amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. And what really interested me about your story is that it just reminds me a lot about my own personal journey, which is 30 days into my sobriety, I met a psychic and that was the moment of like, he instilled this hope and this faith in me of like, This is going to be okay. Then he actually sent me to practice Reiki and I did my Reiki levels as well. That was a big part of my early days of sobriety and I just really resonated with that share because it just seems like such a similar path to me of the initial sobriety work was done, but then it was really the spirituality that kept me on the path to healing.

Absolutely. That's what I was missing for so long. The seven rehabs, for me, I just I wasn't getting that it was the whole whole of me that needed to be healed, the spiritual side, which is so important. That hole in the soul was always there. I couldn't put my finger on it, that restless feeling, irritable. I don't know what I should be doing in life, why I'm like I'm feeling. And it was that spiritual work. It was that the energetic practices that helped to fill that up, to say, I don't hide inside, you're going to get well from inside, within. I've always said if recovery was going to be boring, I'd probably still be drinking. But my recovery journey has been amazing because I've learnt so much about myself. I've got to a place of just feeling happy that happiness was never there before. But that underlying happiness and that joy is there always that optimism that, yeah, another morning is going to be great. No matter what ever happens, I can still keep my center. Sometimes you can have a wobble, but I'm so attuned to myself now, my little practices that I do, I can do without even thinking about it.

But it took practice, it took work, and it is it's a case of putting the work in. You have to be all in, in your recovery, whatever it is you're doing to help you keep well and stay well and evolve as a beautiful woman, a human being. You have to keep putting that work in. But that work feels so much like work when you've got the energetic practices behind you. It's the energetic practices that help me keep aligned with my recovery. It enhances my recovery journey, my recovery. Whatever recovery program somebody's on, energetic practices help you stay aligned, keep you in the flow, and keep you moving. I just think combining energetic work with a recovery program, it just makes it all flower, blossom.

I absolutely agree with you. Absolutely. I'm wondering how you went from where you were like youYou made it out of your rehab program, you got into spirituality, and how have you gone from there to beginning to coach? What was the journey along that way?

Well, 2012, I did my Reiki, did my NLP, and something just kept guiding me to just do these practices: spiritual progression, future life progression, crystal work. It was just a step-by-step thing, really. And then I just wanted to work with some of my colleagues who were in trouble, who were going through some of the wars of alcohol, addiction, drugs. I reached out to some of the professionals that I knew in my field and I started to work with them and it seemed to get benefit out of that. I just felt very passionate that a lot of people don't understand about the, they say they're alcoholic and there's a lot of shame and guilt around that and they don't want to talk about it. Many go, Why can't I use willpower? Why am I such a failure? Why can't I stop? All these things just made me really look into the neuroscience of it as well. There was a scientific explanation, because this is what then they understood. It's like, Oh, my God, I get it, the amygdala. Then for me, it was the neuroscience and it started to make perfect sense why willpower wouldn't work long term, why we get anxious when we don't drink and guilty when we do drink and all these things and why we crave.

So for me, it was explaining that in just really straightforward terms to certain people that I knew and they would be like, well, could you just help me? I started to put something together, listening to people's feedback as well. It started to morph into a little coaching practice. But what was very interesting, I took my recovery coaching in 2017. I think I knew Mandy then. I think Mandi might have been on that particular course. I practiced past that 2017, but I also realized a lot of people started to come to me around food and that was something that I'd forgotten. Because back in 2008, when I came into recovery from alcohol and I'd stopped drinking, I was working the program, I started to go towards back to the food again and then starting to realize, Oh, my goodness, it's jumped! And for a short period of time, it was quite ferocious. Then I thought, Hang on a minute. I'm doing exactly the same with food as I was doing with alcohol and that felt like an addiction. And many people say you can't be addicted to food back then. I said that's how it feels.

I actually feel like I'm addicted to specificfoods, my problem foods, my problem foods. They're the ones that are high in fat, sugars and salts, your processed stuff. And yet I was treating it just like I was treating alcohol and I put a very quick stop to that because I knew very, very quickly that is that's where I'm going. This is not feeling good. And then that's why I really discovered that my primary addiction was food. When I was younger, that was what kept me feeling good, changing the way I felt, that alcohol took over. I thought let me again look into this a bit more because people say, Yeah, it's food and it's alcohol and it's food and it's alcohol and it's food. I can't trading addictions, trading one-off or the other. I started to go into learning more about food addiction, binge eating, bulimia, and then took the certification. I'm a food addiction councilor. I'm on the board of the Food Addiction counselor. I'm on the board of the Food Addiction Institute. But everything goes hand in hand, doesn't it? And this is what I want to point out to your business that you may be looking at being in recovery and alcohol, but it's about you.

And if things, issues aren't dealt with, root causes aren't dealt with, you'll be reaching out for something else, whether it's food, whether it's shopping, whether it's gambling. It's all part of the mix, isn't it? It's trying to fill that hole in the soul, the feeling of not feeling self-worth, not feeling good enough. And that's self-harm, isn't it? That's self-harm. So we put a lot of radical self-care into my work, a lot of radical acceptance and self-care.

We were talking about radical self-care, and that was where we left off. I was going to ask you, well, I want to lead into asking, what work do you do with clients? How can people work with you and what services could you provide to someone who's experiencing something like this?

I have my personal brand, which is the Recovery Enhancement, so I'm the Recovery Enhancement Coach. If anybody's working a program, I can enhance all that and help them tune in, align, enhance their recovery with energetic work. That's a bespoke thing. It's not a standard thing. I tune in, see what's needed, get to really assess and then start working with that person energetically to support their program. If it's food and addiction, food addiction, again, I have a beautiful program coming out in a couple of weeks' time, and that's craving freedom, my Facebook group, craving freedom from binge eating and food addiction. They can connect with me there, I can send you a link to that. So if food is an issue as well, then I suggest anyone who is going through a recovery program with alcohol, you may find that they're veering towards food as well. So you can always get in touch with me that way as well. So that's my general service at the moment. I do lovely, what we call future life progression, trying to find your best self. And that is your signature of success, your blueprint, who you really are. And we can do that in...

It's a light trance work, and that's something we can do in a session, for instance. I do a past life progression to see where it all started and see if we can clear it. And then a very gentle future life progression, to look at the different avenues, what life would be like in five years or ten years, if you carried on or five or ten years, if you stopped, what would your life look like? Your future self will give that person the messages that they need to stay sober and carry on their journey. And that's a really, really beautiful session. It normally takes about an hour, but it's really, really nice. It gets people energized and you're embodying the energy of your future self. You're bringing it back and embodying it and working with that energy. So, yeah, I can send you links my doll in and if everybody wants to reach out then yeah, I'm there. Definitely. Wow.

That all sounds amazing. And, Bunmi, I must say you have the most grounding and beautiful energy and I'm sure people listening and watching can feel that and so I think you would be an amazing person to partner with for this part of.

Your journey. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm just saying for anyone who is struggling out there, the first thing is be easy with yourself. Really don't beat yourself up. Take it very slow. It's like meandering. Take it a day, take it a minute, take it an hour, whatever it is, just step by step by step.

I have one more question for you, which is, I guess that might be an answer to the question, but maybe you have more to add, which is if you had any advice or wisdom to give for someone who is just starting out their sober journey, what would that advice be?

Get connected. Get connection. Yeah, connection, because addiction loves isolation, loves being on your own, loves messing up with your own thinking. It's always get connected, whether it's a peer group, whether it's AA, whether it's holistic practice. Start connecting with people who've been through a similar journey yourself. That connection is key, connection and consistency. Whatever practice you're doing, be consistent because it will work. I love that. Connection and consistency.

It's beautiful. Thank you.

Bunmi, thank you so much for your time today being on the show. You're just a beautiful person and your story is so inspiring. And I just appreciate you sharing with us.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Thank you, Alex.

Welcome.

Hi, friend. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I'm here to help you out with the 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.