Grab your favorite sparkling water.

It's Recovery Happy Hour, where we talk about Life beyond the bottle

and what happens after we get sober?

I'm your host, Tricia. Thanks for joining me today.

I got back yesterday from the Recovery Elevator Retreat in Nashville Nashville where about 40 of my

closest friends in recovery all met up for a weekend of workshops networking and

a whole lot of sober fun. These are the things that put gas in my tank.

Imagine 48 hours of true connection with people I usually talk to in a private

Facebook community called Cafe Ari. I'll put a link to it on the show

notes if you want to know more about how to join. So it's fitting that today's episode is an interview

with Paul Churchill, host and creator of the podcast Recovery Elevator,

and the man who runs these sober Facebook communities and organizes the retreats.

This is Paul's second interview on Recovery Happy Hour, and I asked him back because his episode on my podcast is the most downloaded episode by about double, so it sounds like you want to hear more.

I also wanted to dig deeper into a story and find out more about how a recovery program can change and evolve over the course of a few years.

I know that when I got sober, by the first month I had assumed that my routine

would just include AA meetings forever and that's not at all what happened.

Our lives change and evolve so our recovery does too.

It rarely moves in a straight line.

There are ebbs and flows, highs and lows,

failures and successes. And it's not the changes that really create success it's your

ability to lean into the changes and be flexible with them that often drives

your success and what is success really? Is it an

...