I’m still coming off teaching a retreat at The Art of Living in Boone, NC last weekend. This was my first retreat since before the pand-o, since I became a published author, since I hit ~my second spring~, since before I had a teenager and a fiancé. In other words, I had no idea how it would feel to teach live again! The last time was only a few years ago, but also another era.
Luckily, it felt great. I had some jangly nerves before we started on Friday night, but quickly fell into a familiar rhythm once we began. I had three incredible people from the TLC team assisted (I love you Sarah, Alexander, and Tammi!), and that made a world of difference. And all the folks who came! You really showed up. Thank you.
If you’re interested, a little highlight video is on Instagram here. I’ll be sharing a sampler Spotify playlist from the retreat later this week.
At the end of each session during the retreat, we had some time for Q&A. People brought forward all kinds of questions, but I’ve been thinking a lot about one particular theme: the way we process judgment from others.
Questions like:
How do I accept this about myself when my family sees [addiction] as such a failure?
I’m angry that people I work with are talking about my drinking/sobriety without having all the facts. What do I do with that?
I’m not positive, but I’d guess based on the conversations I had outside of the sessions and the faces I knew and recognized, 90%+ of the folks who attended are in recovery or trying to get sober, so the questions around judgment were specific to that. But really, what I’m going to share below applies to any kind of judgment we receive from others.
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