Hi. I’m Dayna Del Val, and I’m thrilled to be on this journey with you!
One thing I know is that we can go for way too long a time straddling the seemingly opposite sides of extraordinary. Life does an excellent job of keeping us trapped between remarkable and so, so ordinary, often leaning heavily towards the so, so ordinary side.
I get it. For years I lived mostly in the so, so ordinary.
But that all changed in September, 2020. I was on a solo, 2-week artist in residency retreat in rural North Dakota. On day three, I woke up feeling emotionally and physically like I was wearing a full-body wool suit in a sauna: I was so uncomfortable and itchy; my mind was all over the place, and none of it was comfortable!
I decided to just sit in it and not judge it. I woke up the next morning and realized I was on the other side of “it,” whatever “it” was, and I was so grateful.
I was out walking on the dirt roads around the farmhouse, talking loudly and gesturing to the sky, saying I wanted to help other people have this kind of disruption, and clarity, brought to their lives.
The Universe clearly said to me, “Dayna, you are a Personal Systems Disruptor.”
I stopped to look around to make sure it really was the Universe talking, and I said, “I am?”
“Yes. And you’re going to do this work with everyone.”
I took a moment to take this information in and then kept walking.
In the 3/4 of a mile I had left to the farmhouse, I created the foundation of what is now called Discover Your Spark work.
The name has changed, but the mission remains.
Eat. Drink. Spark! experiences are a new and important piece of this mission. Developed in the spring of 2023, they are a glorious way to get started. An element of Spark work is paired with extraordinary cuisine and cocktails (or NA cocktails) for a joyful, insightful and fun event.
And I feel incredibly lucky to have found a way to include the two most important men in my life in this work as well (read on).
I’m not an expert at living consistently on the remarkable side, but I am a guide to get you started, to encourage you to keep going and to bring people together for sparkling experiences.
Meet Dr Mazz Marry, and join us for an Eat. Drink. Spark! Couples experience.
Meet Dr Mazz Marry, my Irish-turned-American, chair of the Biological Sciences department at Minnesota State University Moorhead, husband and co-host of the Eat. Drink. Spark! Couples experience. He called me “Lass” the first time we met in 2001, and we’ve been together ever since. I mean… come on. Lass??? You get it, right?
But as with all people, there’s more to his story than lots of education and a dreamy accent.
Dr Marry and I went public with his alcoholism and our journey together through his addiction into sobriety and back to a joyful marriage on February, 1, 2020: his 3-year soberversary.
We were gifted with the opportunity to (re)Discover Our Spark together when he got sober for the first time in our nearly 17-year relationship. We needed to decide who we were going to be as a couple in this new paradigm.
Before he went to the hospital and rehab, we certainly did things together, but a lot of it was centered around alcohol. We needed to try something different.
We began the slow, sometimes painful but more often joyful, process of (re)discovering each other and ourselves inside this relationship.
Addiction might not be what has caused you two to drift apart or even just be on a kind of numbing autopilot where your relationship is concerned. It might be children, demanding jobs, aging parents, hobbies that don’t engage you both, health challenges and more.
Whatever it is, we know that an Eat. Drink. Spark! Couples experience has the power to reconnect you in meaningful ways, remind you what you were drawn to about your partner in the first place and help you discover new pursuits to take on together.
Follow us to learn more about our story and find inspiration in living in sobriety. Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Meet Quinn Del Val, your mixologist and past Discover Your Spark course participant.
In April 2021, one man was signed up for a virtual Discover Your Spark 6-week course along with a number of women. I could only think of one other man I could lean on to take the course and provide some balance for the group: my son, Quinn.
I pitched the idea to him, and without hesitating he said, “Sure, I’ll do it.”
Quinn says, “I didn’t really have anything specific in mind when I took the course. I had enjoyed making cocktails for a number of years at that point, but I wasn’t particularly serious about them. I basically threw some darts at a board to see what stuck, and mixology stuck.”
Today, Quinn lives in LA, working as an engineer by day and developing extraordinary cocktails and NA cocktails by night. He’s worked at some high-end bars to enhance his skills, he’s traveled around the world to meet with mixologists he admires and he’s proven through a number of events that he has an incredible palette for creating cocktails you’ve never imagined much less tasted.
Follow Quinn to watch his mixology journey and learn new cocktail recipes. Instagram
