Ep 153. How Your Energy Shapes Your Life and Protecting Your Peace, with Rod ButterssEp 153. How Your Energy Shapes Your Life and Protecting Your Peace, with Rod Butterss
Behind The Smile with Ash Butterss
Ash and her dad Rod talk about how energy, gratitude and spiritual practice shape their recovery, and share candid stories about family, ambition and healing. They also offer grounded advice for handling christmas and birthdays while protecting sobriety and inner peace.
1:07:43•14 Dec 2025
How Your Energy Shapes Sobriety and Protecting Your Peace at Christmas
Episode Overview
- Raising your energetic frequency through love, gratitude and acceptance can shift your experience more than external circumstances.
- Simple practices like Ho’oponopono, meditation and gratitude lists help soften old patterns and support ongoing recovery.
- Balancing ambition with sobriety means checking motives and remembering that status and wealth do not guarantee happiness.
- Holidays can trigger old wounds and expectations, so it helps to lower demands on yourself and others, use the ACE strategy and protect your boundaries.
- Treat christmas and similar events as just another day in recovery: arrive late, leave early if needed, and focus on one act of kindness each day.
“If you want to be at peace with yourself, you can't buy it over a counter.”
What remarkable journeys have people faced head‑on against addiction? This father–daughter chat between Ash Butterss and her dad, Rod, brings that question right into the living room – with plenty of honesty, humour, and practical wisdom for anyone in or around recovery. The conversation kicks off with energy and consciousness rather than booze and rock bottom.
Rod shares how the teachings of Dr David Hawkins, Joe Dispenza and the ancient Hawaiian chant Ho’oponopono have shifted his daily life: "I'm experiencing miracles on a daily basis." He breaks down Hawkins’ chart of consciousness in everyday language, explaining why living from love, gratitude and acceptance changes what shows up in your life, while shame, fear and guilt just recycle more of the same.
Ash adds her own experience of spiritual practice – yoga, meditation and gratitude – and talks about how healing her "deep belief that I wasn't enough" changed what she wants from ambition, status and success. Their back-and-forth feels like sitting at the kitchen table with two people who’ve done the work and are still doing it. Later, they tackle christmas and birthdays, including childhood grief, family fractures, and why this season can be so triggering for people in recovery.
Rod calls out the pressure and marketing circus, while Ash speaks candidly about being born on christmas day and feeling like "an inconvenience". Together they offer realistic tools for a first sober holiday season: arrive late and leave early, manage expectations, prioritise boundaries, and keep a firm grip on your why.
Threaded through it all is a simple invitation: raise your energy, keep your practices, be decent, and, as Rod puts it, "Please, all of us, just one act of kindness a day." It’s a grounded, gently funny conversation for anyone who wants sobriety plus peace, not just white‑knuckling through December.
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