We're bored

Your first step in reaching success is to know what you want and to remind your subconscious everyday what it is. Once upon a time, we thought of sobriety as doing without, as giving up, as deprivation, as substitution. Now our philosophy is rooted in abundance and pleasure. We love seeing parallel approaches, like vegetarians who no longer make a turkey out of tofu but rather serve a feast of ripe tomatoes and garden zucchini and toasted pine nuts and sweet potato with a homemade tahini sauce and grilled halloumi and naan with a dessert of ginger sorbet and pomegranate. They have rethought culinary pleasure from the ground up. Or a friend who wanted to get strong but didn't just give up junk food and sugar--he started kickboxing and learned to cook exquisitely and bikes to work, and he's stronger but also more alive. Sober lushness is not a moral code, and not a closed club. It's a loose set of ideas and experiences that anyone is welcome to use, and we're all free to come and go as we please. We don't believe in sides; We don't imagine someone as in or out. For this reason, we decided to use the we voice to invite as many readers as possible to connect. We're not interested in minimum requirements. That would be far too ordinary, and there are already more than enough people in the world living lives of compromised impact and happiness. No, we want you to do so much more than just `get by'. And we wish for your children to choose out of possibility, not fear or scarcity. We believe that your teams should be lit up, not just putting up with the change that they feel is being thrust upon them. We want you to be the kind of leader who guides people through change to something better, not the kind who reacts blindly in panic. You see, no matter what the future holds, we need people willing to make positive change and make change positive. We will -- forever. The Three Spheres of Change

We typically think of change primarily in terms of what's changing. This was the only thing that helped my mind settle, even for a few seconds. And it was in those seconds that I eventually started the very lengthy process of learning how to regulate my emotions without the need for substances. When I got out of rehab I went back to college to study printmaking, and after graduating I moved to San Francisco to pursue an MFA in socially engaged art. After graduate school I began teaching art and traveling for exhibitions and lectures. While I was living as an artist, I kept up with my breathing and meditation practices, albeit in a very imperfect way. I would have months of rigorous practice followed by months of no practice at all. It took me years to learn to be consistent despite the suggestions from my teachers and nearly every article I read on meditation. In my late twenties, I began to develop a deeper practice of simply breathing and being with myself. And that's when my life and spiritual development accelerated in tremendous ways. During those intense years of personal discovery and study, I found myself drawn to different schools of Buddhism and various branches of Hatha yoga, and I eventually found my way into studying energy medicine, medical intuition, neuroscience, and somatic psychotherapy. The state contains only one national forest, one national park, no wilderness. Scott Russell Sanders points out in his essay Buckeye that the Ohio landscape does not show up often on postcards or in films (notable exceptions are Brubaker and The Shawshank Redemption, both filmed partly in historic prisons), seldom even figures in articles. The state's location east of the Mississippi and its richness of soil, water, and mineral wealth ensured its early settlement and exploitation, prompting many to dismiss environmental efforts as doomed from the start. Ohio's natural history, however, holds the key to its rejuvenation. As William Cronon argues in The Trouble with Wilderness, the problem of deleting long-abused land from an environmental ethic means that we idealize a distant landscape at the expense of neglecting the one in which we live, the one we call home. Ohio contains five physiographic sections. Just under a third of the total area, the unglaciated hill country of the eastern and southeastern counties--called the Allegheny-Kanawha Plateau--is part of a larger division, the Appalachian Highlands, one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world's temperate forests and the most diverse in North America, a fact overlooked by those who dismiss the area as not worth caring about. The Till Plains cover the north, central, and southern reaches of the western half of the state where the soil was formed from glacial deposits over limestone sedimentary rock. Slightly smaller in area than the hill country, the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau angles nearly three hundred miles from Lake Erie's northeast shore to south-central Ohio.

Prior to the ice ages, the plateau was hilly and steep; Do not worry about the `how. My teeth began to chatter as electricity flew through me. His words activated knowledge hidden in my DNA. High school teachers had taught us that the earth generates its own magnetic field, but they never went into how it all worked. How did all the planets know to line up in just the exact right positions? What force, or Intelligence, keeps the Universe in perfect order? Religions from around the world call it by different names, but it's still the same. There is a guiding intelligence we can all tap into. I want to knooooow, he shouted into his microphone, who's it going to be? Forty-thousand people from 47 different countries exploded out of their chairs, raising their hands, shouting, Me, it's going to be me! Some of these stories belong to one of us and some are closer to being universal. This article is not meant to prescribe a way of life, or to show that one way of living is better than another. This article is not against alcohol--we know many people who drink and drinking doesn't do to their lives what it did to ours. This article is simply a collection of the beautiful lovely things that we do (or dream of doing) that link us to the creative and rebellious side of being sober, now that we have given up drinking because--for personal and particular reasons--it was a good thing to do for ourselves. We do not claim to know who else might want to go down that road; The spectrum of human beings who play with sober hedonism is large and diverse, including women and men, old and young, from all backgrounds, famous and anonymous, newly sober or sage warriors lighting our path, and they do it for a spectrum of reasons too. Some of us are just starting to explore, some have been committed to sobriety for decades, some are curious about moderation, some have survived life-and-death crises with substances, but sober hedonism is a meeting place for anyone. No one is excluded. We don't want to intimate that this article is full of answers and prescriptions and therapeutic advice.

We are dreamers and storytellers who have made a hundred mistakes and have more questions than conclusions and who see life as a crazy journey and not a blueprint. No great surprise, given our brains have evolved to view change as mostly threatening (often with good reason). So it stands to reason that we have a heightened sensitivity to the changes that occur in our environment, in technology and even in the moods of the people around us. We talk about it, hypothesise about it, evangelise it and complain about it. We try and predict it, manage it and keep up with it -- and we often panic about it. However, change has multiple dimensions and, consequently, multiple impacts. If we are to adequately prepare ourselves for an `unpredictable future' we should take a more complete view of change. Our goal in this article is to broaden our emotional palette from one of fear and panic to one of calm acceptance and even inspiration. Through our work and research in the worlds of professional training, business strategy leadership development and innovation consulting over the past decade, we have identified three critical areas of change. These three aspects inform how well people and businesses perform in an environment of change and also identify where their focus should be applied in terms of skills, strategy and investment in both time and resources. We call these the Three Spheres of Change. While living in Berlin on a grant from the Danish Arts Council, I created a blog about how I was changing my life through meditation, yoga, and eating whole foods. I started the project as a way to process and understand my own transition, but within six months I had friends asking me to coach them through their own lifestyle struggles; I realized my struggles were not unique and that the tools I was using could be made available to anyone. Before I knew it, I felt the call to move to Los Angeles and start a holistic health practice. I arrived in Los Angeles with one friend and a big dream of supporting people in their work to inhabit their bodies. At the time I didn't know exactly how it would unfold, but for the first time in what seemed like forever, I knew I was where I was supposed to be. I jumped into a yoga teacher training course with one of my dearest teachers, Tony Giuliano, and after completing it I began teaching in studios across the city. Within a year I realized that I was less interested in teaching asana (yoga postures) and more interested in teaching about the breath. What I loved about the breath was that it was more accessible than yoga poses and traditional meditation practices.

It felt really modern and fresh to me, despite the fact that many breathing practices had been around for thousands of years. The plateau, while not as dramatic as the hill country, contains some spectacular woodlands such as the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and attractive farmlands in the Amish country of Holmes, Knox, Wayne, Tuscarawas, and Ashland Counties. Still smaller physiographic sections are the Bluegrass and Huron-Erie Lake Plains. Smallest of Ohio's five sections, the Blue-grass extends northward in a crescent-shaped wedge from the Ohio River and includes the Brush Creek drainage area, characterized by hilly terrain and steep watersheds. The section called the Huron-Erie Lake Plains skirts the northern coast from east to west, where it fans out over several counties. Once the site of the Great Black Swamp, a wetland drained by settlers, the western Huron-Erie Lake Plains now include some of the richest agricultural land in the world. Ample rainfall and geologic history provided the area with a wealth of water--3,300 named streams as well as unnamed tributaries with a combined length of 44,000 miles as well as 50,000 lakes and ponds, abundant ground water, and billions of gallons of water in the wide river and lake that form the southern and northern boundaries. Like most freshwater lakes, Erie is, geologically, a river, which connects Lakes Ontario and Huron. Last of the lakes to be scoured out by the advance and retreat of the Wisconsinian Ice from 100,000 to 10,000 BC, Erie's westerly current runs downhill from Huron to the Saint Lawrence River; When the Niagara Falls, which are migrating upriver at about one foot per year (they would migrate at five feet per year if nearly half the available water were not diverted to operate power plants), reach Erie about ten thousand years from now, the lake will become a meandering, narrow river. Prior to European settlement, the state was part of a vast wilderness stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Great Plains, an immense and varied temperate hardwood forest containing oak, hickory, beech, maple, tulip tree, walnut, elm, sweet gum, chestnut, ash, and many kinds of conifer. Still hunched over my notearticle, a stack of sticky notes in front of me, I furiously wrote my goals down on each small square without looking up. I didn't realize I was the only one in the stadium still seated. If one sticky note put up for that amount of time would make me a millionaire, how much would hundreds of little notes stuck up everywhere make me? Our thoughts--what we focus on, dream about, talk about--open us to ideas that lead us to opportunities. Jim was reigniting something inside me, and I felt hope--a dangerous feeling if you don't have a plan, but invigorating if you've got a map showing you a way to reach your goals. Life is a combination of hard work and intentionality, and I hope through reading my story and the lessons I have learned about marketing, myself, and my business, you will experience the same success I did. If you follow the basic marketing rules outlined throughout this article, combined with the Laws of Attraction, nothing can stop you. As you travel on your own journey, you'll pick up your own lessons along the way. Everything we do comes from the foundation of knowledge and experience.