Navigating friendships post-sobriety can be one of the hardest parts of a sober journey. Maybe you're finding you're beginning to evolve away from the friends you used to hang around with when you drank. Is it time for a friendship breakup? In this episode I'm sharing my top three tips for navigating friendships post-sobriety. This is a sneak preview of one of my lessons in my new Sober Curious Yoga School which will be launching on July 4th!
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This week I've launched the waitlist for my Sober Curious Yoga School - to get on the waitlist sign up at www.sobercuriousyoga.com !
For more information about my yoga classes, meditations, and coaching, join in at www.themindfullifepractice.com. Follow me on Instagram @alexmcrobs.
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Sober Yoga Girl podcast with Alex McRobs, international yoga teacher and sober coach. I broke up with booze for good in 2019 and now I'm here to help others do the same. You're not alone and a sober life can be fun and fulfilling. Let me show you how.
Hello, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Sober Yoga Girl, you're catching me at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. I am about to start my power yoga class in about an hour, got my coffee, had my breakfast, woke up this morning and had a super early podcast interview with Tori from Retired Party Girl, which is going to come out next week.
And I just thought I would pop on and do my own little episode. So a ton of exciting stuff has been happening this week, as always. And what you've probably seen all over on social media is that I got the first Mindful Life Practice merchandise, which is really, really freakin exciting. And with that, I'm launching a new online store for the merchandise if hopefully I'm able to get that whole thing running by Friday. The whole new website is going to be launching on Friday, which is a huge, huge, big deal.
It's been two months in the making, a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of energy has been focused on building that project. And I'm so excited about it. And hopefully the online store will be ready to launch on Friday as well. But if not, it might be a few weeks. You know, we have all the merchandise but what needs to happen is I need to be able to integrate and set up international shipping, which is a bit more complicated.
So stay tuned for all of that. But do check out the website, which is launching on Friday and with it something really, really huge. So I decided this week, you know, the first Mindful Life Practice yoga challenge we ever did in March 2020 was free. We had people participating from all over the world. I think we had like 40 people join that 30 day yoga challenge. Since then, we've had 177 people from all around the world do a 30 day yoga challenge with us, which is amazing.
So I decided with the launch of the new website, it would be a great time to launch another free 30 day yoga challenge. So coming to your inbox this week is going to be the wait list linked to sign up for our 30 day yoga challenge, which is starting on June 4th. And when it starts, we're going to have brand new classes. We're going to have a brand new schedule. We're going to have tons of amazing new things going on.
So make sure you check it out. Another thing that is happening this week is I am launching the wait list for my Sober Curious Yoga School and Sober Curious Yoga School is going to be huge. This is the first time I am putting together this really comprehensive program with all these tools, all these strategies, yoga classes done with me, life coaching skills community. I have 13 leaders in the community who have been doing training to facilitate these programs coming up.
So it's going to be huge. And so we're curious. Yoga school is not launching until July 4th, but I am launching a waitlist this week to sign up and register to be the first to get the early bird links. So stay tuned for that. What else has been going on for me this week? I am launching the third module of my Yoga Teacher Training today, which is amazing. It is a module. It's called Core Chakra.
I am empowered and it's all about the ethics of yoga, cultural appropriation of yoga. We're learning about core anatomy, core poses. It's going to be phenomenal. I honestly can't believe like, you know, we are partway through the training, which is unbelievable. It's like a life dream of mine. I am loving it so much. We have such an amazing little group and community doing the program and I just can't wait for these people to soon become teachers for the
Mindful Life Practice is going to be huge. Yeah. So a lot of exciting things going on as well. Oh my God. What else happened this week? I also launched my retreat, so I'm doing my first yoga retreat for the Mindful Life Practice. It is called the Sober Soul Weekend. It is a short little weekend away in Al Ain on June 17th to 19th. So the link and all the information went out to my email subscribers this week. Early bird deadline to sign up to get a hundred dirhams off is this Thursday.
So make sure you check it out. If you're in the UAE, sign up, don't miss it. It is the first event of its kind of sober weekend for people that don't drink alcohol. So super, super pumped about it. All right, let's get into today's episode topics. So today's episode topic is about friendships in sobriety. And more specifically, it is about when do you know if it's time for a friendship break up when you're sober? So I think one of the most common things kind of that happens in sobriety is that navigating your friendships can be really, really hard. Okay. You're showing up for your sober journey.
You're learning, you're growing. Maybe you're doing yoga with Sober Curious Yoga School or the Mindful life Practice, but you're feeling kind of lonely. I think one of the most common and one of the most hard things in sobriety is that your interests, your passions and your friend groups might start to change. I know when I quit drinking, most of the people that I was hanging around with were party people, right? Because I had been a party person for 10 years.
So the people that I was hanging around with really liked to go to brunch, really liked to drink all day, really liked to go to the Ladies Nights in Abu Dhabi. And as soon as I started to get sober, I kind of had stopped having an interest in going to these same old events. And I felt like, you know, I didn't have anyone. I didn't have any friends. I didn't have people that I could confide in. I didn't have people that could really support me in my sobriety.
And I've talked a little bit about this in previous episodes. You know, this is how I ended up in such a close relationship with my partner at the time that I quit was because, you know, I didn't have anyone else. And he really became this, you know, the support that I needed. And so I kind of gathered, you know, thought a lot about what are my top tips for navigating sober friendships. And I'm actually-- the reason why I'm focusing on this is because it was the one of the things I was working on for the Sober Curious Yoga Teacher Training.
for their workbook this week was about navigating sober friendships. And kind of the question is, you know, how do you know if it's time for a sober friendship breakup? Maybe you just don't want to go to the same events, you're triggering around alcohol. Maybe when you get together sober, you're finding you have less in common and it's hard to carry the conversation. You know, what steps can you take around this? So I came up with three things that I think are the most important things to do when you're navigating sober friendships.
And the first thing I think is really important is to be honest. Right. So share with your friends how things make you feel, their actions, what they say, what they do. And I think this is one of the hardest things that I struggled with is that my friends would upset me, my friends would trigger me, and I wouldn't tell them anything. I would keep it to myself. And the thing is, if we don't tell people how we feel, they are never going to know.
And my friends never knew that certain things that they did or said were upsetting me. And I just kind of let them build up over time. I will give you an example. One of the first nights out at the bar, I was 21 days sober and a friend put a glass of wine underneath my nose and I didn't say anything in the moment, but smelling wine when I was 21 days sober made me really uncomfortable. And this would have been a great opportunity for me to say to that person, you know, this kind of upset me and I'm recently sober and this is triggering me to want to drink.
Right. And the thing is, these types of hard conversations are super hard in the moment. But if we don't tell people how we feel, they'll never know. So the first big tip I have around sober friendship is to try as much as you can to be honest with people, be honest about how you feel. Be honest about what's going on, because it's easier, you know, if you're turning down invitations and you're telling people, you know, it's hard for me to be around alcohol that will help them understand your actions more than you just ditching the event.
You know, and of course, it's fully up to you. Some people don't want to be honest. Some people don't want to talk about it. And there is no one size fits all in sobriety. And I say stuff like that all the time. Now, the second thing I would say to you in navigating sober friendships is be open, so be honest and be open. Right. So as you evolve over time in your sobriety, the types of people that you might be interested in building a friendship with are going to shift dramatically.
Right. So I was maybe 20, 30 days sober and I was really realizing, you know, I don't want to be on this endless loop of ladies nights and brunches anymore. I don't want to be hung over. And I'm not really enjoying going out to these events. And I think if you kind of close yourself off into your little world inside your apartment, then you will feel really lonely and you won't have anyone. So I would suggest be open to finding people in different ways.
You know, when I was around 40 days sober, I posted on a sober Facebook group asking if there were any other sober people in Abu Dhabi. And that is how I met one of my first sober friends who I am still really good friends with to this day. She's actually a member of Sober Curious Yoga and the Mindful Life Practice, and she's doing her yoga teacher training right now. Actually, I tell you a little funny story about that.
I posted in One Year No Beer asking if there were any alcohol free people in Abu Dhabi. She commented, and then she follow up, messaged me about five minutes later being like, Oh my God, you're my yoga teacher. And it was so embarrassing at the time. So I was like, holy crap, yoga teachers are supposed to have their shit together. And now she knows that her yoga teacher has a drinking problem. And I was mortified.
And she ended up coming to talk to me about it at the end of my yoga class. And I was so embarrassed. I was like, I don't want anyone to hear this. I don't want anyone to know I'm part of One Year No Beer. It's so funny now because now I just shouted from the rooftops, you know, I'm talking all the time about my sober journey. But the whole point of this is to say, be open to new friendships, because as you evolve, the types of people that you're going to want to be friends with are going to evolve.
And if you don't open yourself up to that, then you won't know what kind of beautiful friendships will blossom. The third tip I would give would be have the courage to say "NO". So the longer I was sober, the more I realized that hanging out with some of my party friends were unfulfilling and I was okay being around alcohol. But I started to wake up to the rest of the friendship, not just the booze. And I was no longer enjoying being around people that gossiped, being around, people that made judgments, shameful conversations.
And I finally had the courage to start saying "NO". So for a few weeks, I was still going along to these events, going to these ladies nights, going to these brunches. And I think it hit a point where I was invited on a weekend away and I was like, I really, really don't want to go at all. And the irony is that, you know, a year before I had been so desperate to get an invite to be part of this group to get invited on a trip with these people.
And then, you know, I'm invited into these trips and I put on a WhatsApp group and I'm like, the last thing I want to do is be sober in this event. And finding the courage to say "NO" was really, really, really hard. But ultimately, it was way better than sitting through an event or a vacation that I did not want to be on. So I think having the courage to say "NO" is huge and that you kind of build up muscle and then it sort of comes with time.
So I was working on some sober friendship journal prompts this week around the whole concept of sober friendship. And if you're interested in doing a little bit of journaling, this is kind of a sneak preview of what I offer in my Sober Curious Yoga School. Here's a couple of prompts that you could do a little bit of journaling or thinking about. The first is, What things do you have in common with your friends? The second is, What differences do you have between you and your friends?
The third is, Are there any friendships in your life right now that are holding you back or weighing you down? And then the fourth question is, How vulnerable are your friendships? So let me know, you know, how did things go with your sober friends? Did you have some friendship breakups? Did your friendships remain despite your sobriety? What was that experience like for you? I would love to hear. I know for everyone it's different. I must say that all of my friendships now are so deep, so meaningful and so fulfilling.
As soon as I started prioritizing finding like minded people and, you know, you might think those people are not out there, but they are and you'll find them. You just need to be open to it and take risks and be brave in who you are, befriending or be brave and how you're meeting new people. So thank you so much for tuning in. Thanks for listening. I am super excited about all of the amazing changes happening at the Mindful Life Practice and within Sober Curious Yoga.
So stay tuned. Follow me on social media at Alex McRobs. Do not miss the grand opening of the new website on Thursday. Sorry, Friday. I lied. I'm so excited that I said it was a happening a week or so a day early. But it's themindfullifepractice.com, grand opening happening on Friday. All right listeners, I really, really appreciate you all tuning in. Have a beautiful day and we'll talk soon. Bye.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Sober Yoga Girl with Alex McRobs. I am so, so grateful for every one of you. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next one and leave a review before you go. See you soon. Bye.