Transform Yourself
1 YEAR NO SUGAR, 20 YEARS NO CIGARETTES This month marks 20 years no smokes, and 1 year no sugar for me🤩 My foto was taken last weekend and shows how I feel living in freedom🎉 I've had numerous substitutes for beer since I gave it up in 1999 at 22 years old. Cigarettes, though …
6 months ago I met a guy from Tinder who gave me some back-handed compliments about my looks and my age. (See Tinder Part 1 here - https://nataliemspeakman.com/2021/07/29/tinder-date/) As a result, I made a declaration to embrace myself as a 44-year-old woman. I shared an authentic-not-airbrushed selfie. (See above.) I got a lot of wonderful …
Continue reading "TINDER DATE Part 2 – The rest of the story"
I'm taking a few days away from screens. Here's why. I had a moment of clarity last week when I tried to read a book. A book I'm really interested in, that when I saw it on my friend's shelf, I immediately got it down from the shelf and wanted to start it. I sat …
July 15, 1998, is twenty-three years ago today. Almost half my life has gone by since then. Still, I remember it every year. Here’s why. In late 1997 when I was twenty-one, I hatched a cowardly suicide scheme. I was too afraid to take direct action to kill myself, so I came up with an …
A year ago today I was in an AA Big Book study with my sponsor. We were reading page 31 of the book. I read the sentence "Through every form of self-deception and experimentation, they would try to prove themselves exceptions to the rule, therefore nonalcoholic." My sponsor asked me if I had been deceiving …
On December 21, 2020, at 12 midnight, my job of 12 1/2 years gave me shocking news: that if I did not move back to the US from overseas where I'd been working for 8 years, that I would no longer have a job. On top of that, they wanted me to start working in …
I have spent the majority of my life in the meeting rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Since I was first sent to rehab at 17, Twelve Step programs have been a backdrop of my life. In 1999, at the age of 22, I put down alcohol and drugs for good. When I was in the early …
There is a space between an event that occurs and how we interpret the event. This gap is imperceptible for people that are living unconsciously. You know the type: they go stumbling around their lives, bumping up against things unwanted, and react to everything. They take everything personally, internalizing everything in their outer world. It's …
Then My eyelids are heavy and they don’t want to open. Yet the stark light is insistent, telling me that it’s late. I turn away from the window onto my right side. My left temple’s throbbing intensifies, an unwelcome reminder of last night’s overindulgence. My whole body feels like it’s encased in lead. I want …
Working with myself, over and over again, surrendering and opening, reveals a path within to the center of the heart space where my soul resides. I show up to my meditation space, a commitment to myself, another act of self love. When I choose to get up, and sit up, and show up, I am …
