#20: Cecily — Alcohol-Free Living, Dharma, Nonfiction Books
An invitation to live with more clarity, intention, and presence.
Welcome to Mia’s Queue, a newsletter spotlighting the secret agents of taste among us. In each edition, I chat with an undercover tastemaker infusing creativity and wonder into their (and our!) everyday life. Learn what lights them up, where they find inspiration, and what they think we should all be enjoying right now. Meet Agent 020: , Co-Founding General Partner of Wisdom Ventures.
The universe conspired in many ways for Cecily and me to connect. We’re part of a large, boisterous friend group called “The Unicorns”; we’ve worked together at two different tech companies; and we are Burning Man campmates from back in the day.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was there for her “Day One” — a pivotal moment at Burning Man when she decided to change her life for good. It’s a transformation that I’ve followed with fascination and honestly a bit of envy because, wow, it seems like she’s really Figured Things Out.
While I’m not quite ready to “go clear” — her term for living without “dimmers” like alcohol — I do have a ton of curiosity about what she calls ClearLife, and I admire the world she’s unlocked for herself with this philosophy. Qualities like intention, presence, service, and mindfulness are paramount. And it seems like the more she devotes herself to these things, the more energized she gets.
Cecily explained to me what ClearLife means and how to live it, gave me a sneak peek at the books she’s been working on (including a re-framing of the Twelve Steps into “The Eight Awarenesses”), and recommended some essential reads for anyone interested in deeper self-exploration.
How would you explain ClearLife to someone who's never heard of it?
ClearLife is a practice. At its core, it’s an invitation to live an undimmed life with more clarity, intention, and presence — it has everything to do with being more attuned to your intuition, being more thoughtful and careful about how you spend your time. That’s the core idea: to remove any habit, substance, or tendency that stands between us being present.
Why do you think this kind of life is worth pursuing?
I believe we all have enormous potential within ourselves. We all have dreams, visions, and hopes for ourselves, and what we might want to be or offer as we grow up. Somewhere along the way, we picked up messages that either made us feel insecure, or that we're not worthy, or that that fantasy or vision is misguided in some way.
The notion of ClearLife is that we get to peel back some of that conditioning and come back to our true core selves.
One of the ways that people tend to keep at a distance from their true selves is by engaging in some type of habit or pattern that quiets their intuitive voice, their inner child, whatever it is that’s pushing them towards that original expression. Through this work, my hope is that people recognize that when they take away those dimmers and when they actually do allow themselves to feel discomfort or feel inspiration or feel an inclination that they've tried to turn the volume down on, they'll be more connected to their true essence and then have a much more aligned and fulfilling life.
What rituals and practices do you personally follow to live this kind of life on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis?
Well, I'm a parent. I also have work, projects, and responsibilities. In my case, I tend to fall into a state of busyness that distances me from my own intuition on a day-to-day or weekly basis. So all the practices and habits that I maintain are about finding space and quiet to tune in.
One of my most potent sources for that is time in nature. Ideally time in nature alone — and ideally time in nature alone without something in my ears, other than maybe lyric-free music.
If I feel really overwhelmed or my calendar has gotten too busy, and I'm just in this sort of robotic, one foot in front of the other way of moving through days instead of being really present, I can find as little as 30 minutes outside [can make a difference]. Ideally, it’s an hour or more to take a walk or go to a nearby tree or a beach or a rock that allows me to have quiet space to tune in and actually hear myself again.
In the middle of winter, when it's less easy to do that, it can also take the form of even just a five-minute sit/basic meditation in the morning. I try to do that before looking at my phone, before making coffee, before even turning the lights on in the house. Just find five minutes to sit in quiet. That sometimes can help me ground for an entire day.
Presumably, a lot of thoughts come up during those times. How do you note and organize those ideas?
I have one big writing project that I’ve been working on for four or five years, which is the story of my journey into this notion of ClearLife. It's a detailed, very heartfelt tale about waking up one day and realizing that I had grown so disconnected from my intuition and my life was no longer an expression of what I needed and wanted it to be— a good mom, a good friend, a good daughter and sister and partner and so on. I had to do a really hard reset.
I’m also doing weekly writing for my Substack. Sometimes I feel like there's something really important that I need to get out because it's a building block to a bigger broader idea I want to explore, but I’ve found that my favorite writing, the most potent actually, is what's alive and current in that life moment. Instead of letting my brain decide what I should be writing about and spending time on, I'm spending more energy trying to tune into my heart and into my body and actually feel what's really alive.
I publish every Friday morning and then need at least a day or two to just kind of not think about writing. Come Sunday and Monday, I'm starting to think about what's moving around me: What are people coming to me and wanting to talk about? What am I experiencing that’s sparking a lot of reflection or changes in either how I live or in my relationships with the people I'm loving and supporting?
Usually, by Tuesday, I have two or three topics that I know would be good candidates, and then there's almost always a sign of what is most alive and potent. It'll be a text from a friend saying I've been really thinking about this particular theme or listening to a podcast that just makes my heart open in a way that I can physically feel. I try to not be too scheduled or too systemic about it, and instead, let the week let me know what I'm writing about.
Since you alluded to your book, tell us a little bit about what it's about and when it might come out.
I have one that is completely written and one that is in process. The one that's written is currently titled “The Canary.” It's a 340-page memoir — which is a word I'm still getting used to because I had somebody tell me you have to be famous to write a memoir — that’s my personal story that I started writing in a therapeutic way and then ended up realizing that I wanted to make my story available to others.
It started with my losing my mother to depression and alcoholism in 2011. Then, five years later, I realized I was falling in her footsteps and wanted to make a change without the labels of addict, recovery, or alcoholic. I paused a social drinking habit and felt the discomforts of finding new footing in a world without alcohol. I also did a deep dive back into my family history and my own life to understand what it was that was making me inclined to “dim” myself in the first place. My life is completely different than it was when I made this break six years ago.
The second book, likely to be published first, is a lot simpler. It outlines an approach I developed as an alternative to the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, what I call “The Eight Awarenesses.” It's an approach to making a choice to live clear, whatever that means for you, in a way that is more about choice over surrender, agency over powerlessness, and freedom over failure.
“The Eight Awarenesses” invites us to make the choice around whether or not we consume or do things that take us away from our more authentic or true selves. We have the opportunity to understand and ideally heal, but if not heal let go of things that had been weighing us down, or difficult relationships, or capital T or little T trauma from our past, and really start to hold the time we have left as our most precious currency and spend it in a way that is aligned with our core values and our core beliefs.
I'm hopeful that “The Eight Awarenesses” will serve as a tool that I myself was really looking for. When I paused drinking, I attended a handful of AA meetings and, while I found them very interesting and I have very high regard and respect for the program that has helped literally millions of people for almost 100 years, I found that it didn't fit for me. I'm finding through my community that it doesn't fit for a lot of people and so “The Eight Awarenesses” is an alternative to that, a path to change by using your internal resources, not depending on an external power of some kind.
My hope is that this first book will be released in late 2024 or early 2025.
Do you consider yourself a tastemaker?
Oh funny. I guess in some ways, there are people in my life who let me know that I have influenced their tastes, for sure.
Well, let’s dig into your tastes! What would you recommend everyone check out?
It's actually a tough question because I'm such an experimenter in these mediums! For books. I'm a 100% committed nonfiction reader. Not the “healthiest” way to live, but we have an enormous library on everything from physical health and well-being to parenting and overcoming obstacles to our own growth.
For books: I generally hold two different groups of books very dear to me: (1) those that impacted me in such a material way (some of them many years ago), I still think of them regularly and often revisit them for reminders and inspiration; and (2) books I am currently reading or referencing as they are particularly relevant to my current efforts and activities.
For the first set:
📚 “The Book of Qualities” by J. Ruth Gendler
The personification of feelings in a way I loved as a teen and still refer to at least monthly.
📚 “Reincarnation and the Law of Karma” by William Walker Atkinson
My first "dharma book" and what first opened my eyes to Eastern philosophy and religion, also as a teen with the notion of a soul journeying through many lives making so much sense to me!
📚 “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse
The book helped me to really understand the life and work of the Buddha, and Buddhism itself.
📚 “Kitchen Table Wisdom” by Rachel Naomi Remen
A compilation of stories of consciousness and perspective transformations from a doctor who worked with cancer patients from a therapeutic lens for decades...I read this while in law school and then gave it to almost everyone I knew, including apparently my grandmother twice! (lol)
More timely and current reads include:
📚 “Drama Free” by Nedra Glover Tawwab
Nedra's "coaching" has been instrumental in helping me to reframe some important relationships this year.
📚 “No Bad Parts” by Dick Schwartz
I started learning about Dick's "parts work" a couple of years ago and then was fortunate to deepen my appreciation for this work on retreat with him in February when I was trying to understand some of the subtle features of an illness I experienced early this year.
📚 Yung Pueblo's poetry books
“Clarity and Connection”: I am always finding applicable gems here. His most recent, “The Way Forward,” goes yet another layer or two deeper on the nature and opportunity of relationships, a topic that is super alive for me right now. I particularly appreciate Diego's invitation to view our own internal work as a vehicle for human connection, well-being, and service. It resonates with all of my ClearLife work; it's an inside job!
🎙 “The Daily,” “Hard Fork” and “On Being” podcasts
I'm a devotee of The New York Times. I left my last tech role in December 2022, but I'm still super fascinated with what's happening in the field of technology. Through Wisdom Ventures, we're meeting with startups every week. I'm still very fascinated with tech trends and how the world is moving towards AI, using tech for well-being, and other overlapping topics with our work.
I also think I might be the last person to discover and fall in love with Krista Tippett’s “On Being.” I discover amazing humans and initiatives through her work, and simply love her voice and interview style.
Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?
“Why am I doing all this?” is probably the biggest one. I'm a little surprised at how much energy and time I pour into my writing these days. I can spend 20 or 30 hours a week, easily! I’m doing research, drafting, listening to different perspectives on things, digging into my own library, and finding where the seeds of certain reflections or experiences I have lay, even going back into old journals. When I really think about what keeps me going, why I care so much about this, why I wake up at five in the morning three days a week to write something, it’s that I really feel driven to offer what I wish I had when I started this journey.
It was a very lonely time for me. When I first took a 30-day break, I struggled to find community and I felt very isolated and weird. And I think, in being really open and honest about my path, and sharing bits and pieces from others and sharing tools that I discovered along the way, my hope is that there's a bit of community built around it and people feel less alone. I want to destigmatize alcohol-free living in a way so that the responses when we tell people that we're not drinking tonight aren't, you know, “Are you pregnant?” or “What's wrong?” or “Come on, why not?,” but rather another reasonable response: “Good for you!” or “What can I get you instead?”
I really feel very passionate about being of service to people who are treading a path that I'm still figuring out on my own.
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Thank you, Mia! I love your questions and some of the insights that emerged from our conversation and follow ups.
Inspiring, Mia! Thank you for sharing. I will have to check out some of her book recommendations. I’m a huge fan of On Being podcast too.