By Dr Anne Malatt, Australia
Most of us can remember having a hangover and saying to ourselves that we will never drink alcohol again. Why do we? Why do we drink to begin with?
Alcohol is a poison. It kills nerve cells, and hence pain. It is a sugar hit which picks us up at the end of a hard day and leaves us feeling comfortably numb. It is a treat, a reward for a day’s work. The prospect of enjoying a drink can get us through a day, a week, a life. It can be a substitute for intimacy, a companion, a best friend. No wonder we arc up at the prospect of losing it.
Alcohol also opens us up to energies which are not us. It can allow us to behave in ways we would never behave without it. It can lead us to do things which are dangerous, hurtful to ourselves and others and leave us feeling ashamed. We cannot bear to remember and feel this, and so we drink again.
Medical and scientific research, which has supported the drinking of alcohol in small amounts, is finally coming out and saying what common sense, and our bodies, have been telling us all along – that there is no safe level of alcohol. One hangover should be enough to tell us this, if we listened to the truth of our bodies. Why do we ever have more than one?
Why do we need to drink alcohol?
Why is our life not enough for us?
Why are we tired? Why are we angry? Why are we sad?
When we drink, it is easy to deny that we feel this way. We go to work, we live our day, and at the end of the day we have our reward. We bind ourselves together with it socially; we use it to sweeten our relationships; it comforts us when we are on our own. It is easier to believe that life is good with a drink in our hand.
If we think about taking the drink away, we start to feel differently. This is almost unbearable for many, and we look outside ourselves, blaming others or our lives, to give us an excuse to keep drinking.
Let’s say, just for fun, that we have a glimmer of an understanding that we are drinking because we have to, not because we want to, and we would like to stop but don’t know how. Let’s say we have some health problems, or it is causing problems in our relationships, or we are just sick and tired of needing to drink.
Where do we start? How do we deal with the feelings that bubble to the surface? What helped me was to understand that I was drinking for a reason, and to take full responsibility for how I was feeling and for the choices I had made in my life. Blaming others for my problems is a very bad habit of mine, and this was a fact I had to face, before I could deal with anything else. I also had to look at the way I was living and make deep and lasting changes. This was incredibly difficult, and I fully understand why people choose to drink, even when they know it is hurting them. I was one of those people for a very long time.
We drink because we don’t feel good about ourselves or our lives. If we did, why would we poison ourselves? These feelings can be very subtle and deep, and we may have created a great life to cover them up, but they are there, underneath.
So, how do we deal with them? It helps to be very loving and tender with ourselves as they start to surface. It also helps to get help. There is a saying “A problem cannot be solved from the level at which it was created”, and this is very true of a drinking problem.
I found the work of Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine more helpful than the many other things I had tried in the past. Serge helped me to feel that I was so much more than I had previously believed, that there was a greatness, a grandness of love in me that I had not connected to for a long time. By connecting to that love, that living stillness within me, I was able to make more self-loving choices.
I continued to drink after meeting Serge, and would sometimes come to sessions with a hangover, and sometimes drink after I had seen him. This was because I still could not bear to feel how I had lived, and the choices I had made, which were still living in my body. It was a very painful and difficult time, but I received only loving support from Serge. He never judged me, never told me what to do, only offered me love.
We drink because we think that our life is not enough, that we are not enough. But we are. Try life without alcohol. Get help if you need it. Feel and deal with what lies beneath your need to drink. Feel what is truly within you. Give yourself a chance to feel how great you truly are.
The Truth about Serge Benhayon 
Anne, it’s a very good question, ‘why do we drink?’. And I totally agree it helps us feel different to how we are feeling when we are sober. That is to manage the intensity of life and what it throws at us. But, at the end of the end, no matter how much we drink, the issue/problem remains, unless we face it head on. And to be honest it’s worth every tear, every emotion that appears as I much prefer to be aware of what I am doing than be taken out by something that isn’t me.
That journey has been worth it and it wouldn’t have occurred without having Serge Benhayon in my life. No imposition, no telling, just simply loving and bringing the understanding of what we are all going through. Alcohol or not…
Society has some strange ingrained habits which are actually harming but deemed as OK or normalised – one such thing is drinking alcohol. It is much harder to break a habit that has been normalised and so this normalisation of things is actually a very devious way to create harm for decades. Once we believe something is ‘normal’ we are less likely to question it or try to change it so it is like the damage has already been done. It takes a lot to see this and then to step away from it too, and can for some take several attempts to step away from, but is well worth the realisation.
I agree Henrietta, society accepts these normalised behaviours but frown upon you when we choose to do the opposite. We are then labelled and sometimes called weird. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
When you think of it, there are many things we do that do not support us and in some ways it does not make sense for us to continue like that. And yet for us to continue something that is obviously or perhaps less obviously harming us, there must be a reason why we continue. We are not stupid beings, there must be something we get from doing something that is the motivating factor for us to continue that activity. But how important is it to be aware of this so that one knows one has the choice.
Awesome sharing Anne – and one that looks at the ‘why’ more than the ‘what’ because in the end the ‘why’ is what helps us to understand so that we can make a change in the ‘what’.
This is beautiful to read and feel, ‘By connecting to that love, that living stillness within me, I was able to make more self-loving choices.’
Indeed, why do we repeat a choice that we have already established is not supporting us? It is interesting how we get more attracted to less loving choices as if to test how much we can push and get away with it – till we get seriously burnt.
An important question to ask ourselves, ‘why do we repeat a choice that we have already established is not supporting us?’
‘Give yourself a chance to feel how great you truly are’ and allow yourself to be, and those props we use like alcohol do not allow that, so experimenting with not having them gives us a space to understand more clearly who we are and where we are at … and that honesty allows us to live more truly ourselves.
It seems to me that from what I have read and understood that we are replacing alcohol with drugs. Is it possible that alcohol isn’t enough anymore and in comparison to some drugs expensive? With states and countries legalizing a particular drug I feel we are making a bad situation with our health even worse. For some there seems to be a perverse wish to obliterate our current way of life by getting through it as best they can by numbing themselves to the horror of what we have all contributed to and now do not like.
Alcohol is the drink of choice of the spirit. It permits to keep trying what does not work once and again.
‘…until we actually experience life without alcohol – or any such drug, we don’t know how amazing we naturally feel’ Yes, that’s it. Sometimes we don’t take a step because we think we are not going to be able to do it or because we haven’t experienced yet how it would feel later in our body. But why not having a try? There’s no need of taking that first step with the choice of definitely let it go. Just have a try and honestly observe how the body feels… and having that new experience of ourselves, when ready, make a new self-loving choice.
It is crazy and yet makes sense, we drink to change the way we feel and yet the way we feel is a direct result of not living and feeling who we truly are.
I don’t miss drinking at all now, and I am far more aware of what goes on around me, and it is interesting to see how that affects others around me who then tend to drink less or not at all, not because I say anything, it is as if they have given themselves permission to be themselves, and therefore they don’t feel they have to join in with everyone else.
Anne thank you for your honest article, when I gave up drinking I realised how much of a habit it had become in order not to feel the hurt I felt inside, now I don’t drink alcohol at all because I have dealt with the hurt that I felt, and am now making more loving choices that support me to be who I truly am.
Anne your absolute honesty is what made your blog so inspirational. Yes – Alcohol is a poison and your amazing blog could be the best medicine ever and should be read each time people choose to drink it.
Alcohol allows who chooses it to manage life by altering the body and playing with the physiology. It delivers a state of being to be with ourselves and in the world in a specific quality. It gives a sense of self-sufficiency because we can get there on our own. Yet, it opens up to be played by the unseen. The self-sufficiency is simply rubbish. We are not left alone.
When we feel we are not enough we look outside of ourselves to fill that void, that emptiness, and alcohol is one of those vices that is used, when we choose to become honest with what we are feeling and take responsibility for our choices, true change can come by lovingly caring for ourselves.
Great point Jill – do we fill the void with the drink? or do we fill the void with what we truly deserve which is with love and care?
Very wise advice Anne with which I completely agree having had a very similar experience. Acknowledging that I was drinking because I believed I was not enough and then choosing to make loving choices for myself made all the difference. It is now 12 years since I have had a drink of alcohol and I feel marvellous for it.
When we allow ourselves to feel the grandness of our potential is definitely supports us to make more loving choices – great blog Anne.
I remember at one end of this debate wondering why on earth would I ever want to give up drinking alcohol – it was what I did at parties, everyone else did it and it was so normal. I have not had a drink for well over 10 years and I wonder why on earth anyone would want to drink? To dull the sparkle inside, to stop being myself, and to stop me feeling everything that I can feel inside. I feel naturally me, all the time.
I have recently read some guideline for heart failure prevention and it actually states that the incidence of heart disease in those who drink moderate amounts of alcohol is lower than in nondrinkers, and even though they may not encourage nondrinker to start drinking, they would not advise patients to give up alcohol unless they are obviously having a drinking problem – and they say so because there are some research published out there that support this. We don’t need any research, especially a sponsored one, to tell us what is good/bad for our body, our own very first experience with alcohol can tell us loud and clear how this substance does not agree with our body – yet somehow we train our body and convince our mind to keep drinking. Incredible. Self-love is a very simple medicine that can begin to undo this choice.
Beautiful Anne! Such an honest offering of the reality of why we drink. We are all guilty of lacking appreciation for ourselves, and hence the need to be topped up with deceiving confirmation.
To have a hang over more than once, to over eat more than once and feel the bloating effects and to choose anxiousness more than once are all things that no one could honestly enjoy in their body. So why do we do it? What are we getting out of these choices, which totally disregard the body?
Why do we poison ourselves over and over again? This is a great question Anne. Alcohol gave me such a hard time I gave it up nearly 20 years ago. I would have the hangover from hell after 2 glasses of wine. It was so not worth drinking. As I recall I was in peri-menopause at the time and my body was demanding a stop. The thing is why did I wait for the body to scream at me when I knew from the first sip that alcohol was poison.
I agree with so much of what you say here Anne. i remember the first time I got drunk and how very sick I was afterwards. I could not go to work the day after. All my colleagues felt it was funny and treated me like I had somehow passed some initiation. I continued to drink for many years after that. When I decided to stop drinking, it took me a year before I finally had my last drink. My body was always telling me that alcohol was no good for me but I kept ignoring it.
We are not stupid – we are a highly intelligent race – so why are we drinking poison? The life style of drinking alcohol is a very thick and heavy consciousness that swallows people up into thinking they are having a great time, that they can be more themselves and connect to people more freely when intoxicated. Even the work ‘intoxicated’ really gives the severity of the substance away as TOXIC.
So true Ann what you’ve shared makes perfect sense… one hangover ought to be IT, and in fact for me it was, but that is most definitely not the norm. It begs the question what is really going on that we don’t seemingly have a grasp of our good sense over and above the need to numb ourselves in this way.
Yes Anne, one hangover should be enough, why wait for the research when our bodies were telling us the truth all along, ‘Medical and scientific research, which has supported the drinking of alcohol in small amounts, is finally coming out and saying what common sense, and our bodies, have been telling us all along – that there is no safe level of alcohol’.
“Give yourself a chance to feel how great you truly are.” When we reconnect to the beauty of who we are this is not a feeling that we want to poison or escape from.
I laughed when I read the title of this blog, as the first answer I thought of to, ‘why do we have more than one hangover’ is that we must be stupid or gluttons for self-punishment. But we are intelligent, very intelligent. We have just forgotten (or I should say avoided connecting to) the fact that our intelligence comes from our body. So instead of being stupid, we could say we stubbornly avoid hearing what our body has to say and use all means of poisons, like alcohol to shut it up.
Great exposure Anne on when we have a need we can and do whatever we need to for that need to be achieved… that is why we drink again after a hangover or why we binge eat or stay on the computer for hours on end checking out. I can remember not liking the feeling of alcohol from one sip starting to run through my veins and body, I felt the imposition of it on the body instantly. Yet it gave me a way to be different with people and a so-called freedom in the bedroom. But I never felt like it was a great thing to do or championed having an amazing night out… because in truth I always knew it was hurting me.
Anne I agree it is crazy to experience more than one hangover, I suffered greatly from hangovers and then would get up and do it all over again, it was obvious the level of disconnection and misery I was choosing to live with allowed me to reach for a drink again. Letting go of alcohol was quite simple when I began to self care and listen to my body as the messages I was receiving I could no longer ignore. I now know there is no way I would ever say yes to alcohol again in my life and this is thanks to Serge Benhayon and Universal Medicine and the true love and deep wisdom these teachings bring us all.
When we begin to ask questions e.g.why we do things or why do we feel a certain way that we know is harming our body the self honesty opens doors to opportunities for a healing to occur. I recently have been pondering on why I get so tired after being in the company of others. It feels an old pattern where in the past I have blamed others for the tiredness but am beginning although reluctantly to see that it was My choice to self sabotage myself to be left feeling tired sometimes exhausted and it is also My choice to accept self love to get to the root of this behaviour and heal it.
Yes Anne, discussions about Alcohol can tend to dwell on declaring it ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But the truth is Alcohol does work – in that it deliberately decommissions our feelings and inner senses. We can’t say that it’s not effective, but what is awesome to explore is why and how it is that we want to wipe out our senses this way. After all, it’s not as though only a few people poison themselves – drinking is massively popular all over the world today. Could it be, as you steadily illustrate Anne, that it’s all because we are infinitely more aware than we think, divinely dear, sensitive, grander and geared to know Love? What if, far from being Alchoholics Anonymous we are marvellous and multi-dimensional markers of God’s light? That to me, would go some way to explain why we have such trouble accepting life today as it is, and sleeping at night.
Funnily enough I did only have one really bad hangover in my life… the very first time I drank. It was so bad I was in bed for 2 days, vomiting for 1 of those and vowed I would never do that to myself again. And I didn’t. I recall my parents treating me quite normally afterwards with one of them casually saying to me… ‘I hope you’re going to put that down to experience!” I definitely did, never forgetting it, and never willing to suffer through it again. I would happily have never touched alcohol again, but found it hard to be the only one sober at any party or night out. Eventually this didn’t matter to me either and for nearly 20 years I haven’t had a drop, and haven’t missed it even slightly. The way I feel without alcohol beats any short time high I could get.
This is a very loving approach to one of our biggest challenges in the world.
I found it easy to give up alcohol. What I found difficult was giving up the emotion of sadness that I had been masking for much of my life. I found that the sadness was how I defined and saw myself and couldn’t imagine myself as not being this way. The truth is though as shared by Anne in this blog, that we are all much grander than the emotions we feel. It is by far the greatest gift to allow for the possibility that what is shared here is true, as we may feel emotions, like sadness or anger, but we are not that. We are the grace that lies below the emotions.
Awesome sharing Leigh – I love how you nailed it by saying that it was not that difficult to give up alcohol, but in fact it was challenging to have to deal with the emotions you were faced with when not drinking alcohol. This is the key reason why so many of us make the choices that are not that supportive – to mask underlying emotions or issues we can feel, however deep or buried they have been.
With any harmful habits that I might have, I do find it very helpful to stop and ask myself how I am feeling in that moment and what am I trying to bury or not feel? Opening up this honest conversation with myself and re-connecting with myself usually puts a stop to any desire to bury my feelings and therefore any cravings for things that will do that job.
One of the unusual and successful characteristics and teachings of Serge Benhayon and the work he does is to not trying to solve a problem or change a behaviour without first connecting to the healthy and untouched part within, dip into the essence that has got lost and is missed by us more than anything else. It is the separation from that essence that produces the destructive and loveless behaviours and emotions we then suffer from on top of the original pain. It all comes down to returning to our essence to truly solve or undo the issues we won´t even have otherwise.
Alcohol was for me a necessity but with a history of alcoholism in my family I was always aware of how unhealthy my relationship with it was. I stopped after a few years of wanting to. Then one day I decided I was not going to travel any further down the road of alcohol dependancy and I stopped. This was my first truly self-loving choice. A few years later I met Serge Benhayon and began to understand and become understanding of why anyone chooses to drink alcohol and this is when the healing began.
I have heard alcohol referred to as truth serum because people would drop their inhibitions and blurt out their pent up emotions. Why would we need something so poisonous to our bodies for us to open up to each other? When we abuse ourselves with alcohol we are being dishonest with our own body. There is no honesty or true connection in ‘pub talk’ we just look for people who will enjoin our self abuse.
We drink to take the edge off life, when reality is too severe, and we don’t want to feel it clearly, we would rather muddy the waters, we would rather justify our behavior than take responsibility for it. Basically we use alcohol to numb our hurt and angst and to help us be dishonest. It is the numbing we are addicted to and not the alcohol. Think about it, we must have deep hurts we don’t want to feel if we repeatedly medicate ourselves to the extent that a hangover is less painful than feeling our hurts.
What helped me stop alcohol for good was knowing I was opening up myself to more issues than I already had going on. I was doing it because so many others were. You only have to acknowledge the truth by being honest why you drink, instead of creating further issues that complex otherwise a simple truth.
Drinking for me was symptom, I was unhappy within myself and it provided the perfect distraction, the hangover would occupy me for days, the physical pain stopped me from noticing how depressed I was. It was the best thing I had on hand to escape all the pain I was in. The thing is that when I stopped drinking, I didn’t address the energy and so it was replaced with other things that are equally enabling me escape from feeling, might look better but is it?
This is a great blog Anne, and I know many people who have exacerbated misery and mental health issues with alcohol but it is rarely discussed in a manner that gets to the root of the issue. Why do we drink alcohol knowing it is harmful? For myself in my twenties & thirties I was living a lie. I was living what I thought society was telling me about being a man was all about. I knew it was a lie and not my true nature but everybody else was living their own lies as well and they approved of me living my lie. Whenever I had moments of clarity where I could see my life clearly it put me in conflict with the life I was living, something had to give. I did not feel like I had the courage to change so I turned to alcohol because it was acceptable and it helped me live a lie, when reality was making things too clear for me alcohol would help me blur the lines and I could convince myself it was ok, I could justify anything which I could not sober. I have been clean now for 9 years and in that time I have been more honest and responsible in clearing the lies from my life. In my experience when you go for alcohol you turn away from honesty, and it makes everything worse.
‘Why are we tired? Why are we angry? Why are we sad?’. Such simple questions, but boy will they help get to what’s really going on for why we reach for the tipple to take the edge off.
There is so much support out there, support I have reached out for and received and it’s changed my life. I never had a so called ‘problem’ with alcohol and compared to many drank very little, and never drank when I was down, but the reason I drank alone was above all else to have more confidence. I felt like it gave me a little boost, like it brought out the bigger me. So not true, it was a very false sense of security and working on being more of me has far outweighed the temporary feeling of being invincible with a drink.
What Anne has shared here about the reasons we drink alcohol feels so true, and I can relate to them very much. What I have also noticed, after letting go of alcohol since I found Universal Medicine, is that at first, I replaced alcohol with other drinks like coffee or green tea, which I used to over-stimulate me to not feel those same feelings of not being ‘enough’ and not feeling the Truth of who I am inside. So it’s helpful to have an awareness as to when and what we are using to not feel what is going on for us so we can heal those issues that keep us from knowing who we truly are.
I agree Anne that when I used to drink alcohol and I would wake up the next day I would feel a deep sense of regret at the harm I had caused. I did not have words or full awareness of it at the time but my feeling now looking back is that I was sensing the harm not just to my body physically, but the energetic harm I was doing to myself and others by inviting an energy into my body/being through drinking.
I have come to realise that blaming others is no other than an avoidance of responsibility in that I am a part of what is going on around me. For so long I have avoided my part in creation under the false illusion that I had come from another planet to save the world!
It kind of begs the same question for why we repeat any of the things that do not serve us.. that make us feel ill, or tired, that creates reactions, feelings of emptiness. In truth its not that hard to feel the simplicity of everything that we are offered in this life – just ask a child. Yet we have distanced ourselves from this simplicity, built a wall around it to protect us and it is that distance that then allows this behaviour to repeat again and again.
Can I be so blunt as to say if all the true research breaks things like alcohol down and confirms what is already pretty obvious, it’s a poison then there is no real argument. You choose to drink it or you choose to debate it and you have already made a choice well before the words are out of your mouth. We may think this is also something but the truth is that there is more to us than meets the eye. There is the fact of energy, the whole world is energy and so the weight given to any decision should come back to energy well before any discussion is gone into. What energy would give you anything other then the truth of alcohol? An energy that doesn’t care at all for you but is just looking to have you not be truly you. If we hold that we are love, truly love then anything that is within you saying it’s ok to do something or drink something like this is already simply not you. It’s great to get to know and trust yourself by feelings and bring everything back to this. Walk away and you can do anything but at some point that anything needs to be balanced. I would rather walk clear in the present rather then be in the future trying to make up for the past.
Why we choose to drink alcohol has many reasons, my personal one was to fit in with friends and family. Alcohol itself never had a hold on me, it was easy to give up, what was difficult is how by choosing to do this it has ment a massive shift in how I feel about myself. It has revealed how little I thought of myself, hence the choice to drink to fit in. This is what hurt and there are still remnants of it today that I am steadily clearing from my life. To me it is absolutely insidious how drinking contributed to how I felt about myself. There is such an un explored aspect to alcohol and the connection to how it keeps one totally oblivious to the fact of the beauty and grace that resides within. This part of our selves, the whole world deserves to see and feel.
“Give yourself a chance to feel how great you truly are.” This is an invitation to address our problems/vices in a different way. Instead of standing stuck and dead-ended in front of our behaviours, knowing they are not doing us any good it allows us to walk along the road, it allows us to walk with us and to ponder of what is all there to appreciate about ourselves, it allows us to come from the fullness of ourselves which we then can work on to strengthen, to expand. And the more we do that the less we give room for the ‘checking out’ the ‘not wanting to see’ ourselves.
It seems that in life we are innately full of a natural ability to sense what we are feeling and acknowledge the truth, and when we are young we live very close to this but learn to develop ourselves out of this to comply.
It’s astonishing how we can have a bad hangover and then continue to drink – with such a clear message. It makes it obvious that we are more than human and there is a part of us that seeks a constant form of recognition with something – even though that could be harming our body.
‘Alcohol is a poison. It kills nerve cells, and hence pain.’ This fact alone should be enough to change the way we look at alcohol and the seeming ‘pleasures’ it gives at the time of drinking. Imagine if alcohol didn’t actually have sugar in it! I bet we wouldn’t drink it then, no matter how satisfying the escape from reality was.
Great point Rachael. I remember when tasting alcohol for the first time it literally tasted like poison.. now how is that something we can like and say we enjoy… ?
I agree Anne, one hangover should be enough for us to learn and accept that alcohol is not a healthy option for our body but unfortunately it rarely is and certainly wasn’t in my experience. I cannot begin to count how many hangovers I have had in the past, and although the morning after many a time I said ‘I am never drinking again’ I always did…until one day I felt so rotten with the ramifications of the after effects I didn’t. Today I can honestly say today I feel so much better by getting off the merry go round that alcohol brings to our daily life.
We need a feeling of our greatness within our bodies as without that we are lost and will always look outside to find that greatness or fill the gap. Universal Medicine provides us with this marker of how amazing we are by just being us, that is why so many people are successful in making new choices. It is much easier to make self-loving choices when you feel full inside and know what you are cherishing, then when you cannot feel this, as there is nothing worth doing it for.
Indeed, Anne – why more than one hangover? Why more than one bloated stomach? Why more than one argument? Why more than one war? The more it happens, the more ‘normal’ it becomes in our life.
What an offer…give yourself a chance to feel how great you really are! Something that struck me as I read your blog was how in movies and on TV we observe people drinking as their form of medicine for things that happen to them, we watch it be their medication, their distraction and yet we rarely apply the same level of observation to our own life till something happens to make us sit up and reassess.
Yes Ester even our hero’s in the movies turn to alcohol when times get tough. Having a binge for a while is considered ok for our movies, ok for their private lives, and ok for us as well. You never learn from life’s lessons by numbing yourself, it is better to humbly feel the consequences of your choices and be loving to yourself.
Once we start connecting to the light within, alcohol simply doesn’t make sense, and yet it is still tempting sometimes to seek a form of numbness when met with the immense cruelty and devious games and assault that the world indulges in – so learning to observe and truly understand how and why the world acts in such ways helps allow true compassion, and so instead of judgement and reaction (and seeking numbness and oblivion) it is possible hold steady and stay true, connected to that inner light we all hold within.
It is very exposing of where we are as a society when those who speak up about the harmful effects of alcohol get pilloried by their peers, professionals, even doctors yet each day we somehow manage to ignore the levels of liver and kidney disease, diabetes, not to mention the alcohol-fuelled domestic violence epidemic. What is going on within us that we turn a blind eye to such a massive crisis.
Will power is not enough to stop any form of habit that is medication based…. And connecting to the loving beings we are is also not enough if we have not addressed the emptiness or hurt that lay as the root cause of our behaviours. Once addresses however, the need for medication in any form just falls away, amazingly so.
Why do we poison ourselves day in and day out? Be that alcohol, sugar, caffeine etc the fact that they are legal and legitmised does not take away from how we feel after their consumption. A brief high to alleviate the discomfort we may feel, followed by the repercussions only to turn the wheel once again. Seen clearly it seems insane, yet it is how we all live day to day.
Why do we ever have more than one hangover? Because we are masters at overriding our innate wisdom, just as we so too can be masters of listening to it should we make the choice to remember how divine we truly are. This is a great presentation of the truth behind why we do what we do, thankyou Anne.
“Alcohol can be a substitute for intimacy, a companion, a best friend. No wonder we arc up at the prospect of losing it.” The relationship I chose to have with alcohol was the best way to avoid a loving relationship with myself and look at the things I knew I was responsible for and with alcohol you keep everyone at a safe distance. Living without alcohol is freeing oneself from a dependency on something we all know we should not put in our body and it makes my life truly loving and joyful.
This formula for becoming more aware of how GRAND we really are, goes with any choice we make that moves against our divine and naturally loving ways. Why are we still eating foods that make us sick? Why are we choosing to indulge in emotions?
“What helped me was to understand that I was drinking for a reason, and to take full responsibility for how I was feeling and for the choices I had made in my life.” Oh yes very true, all our unloving behaviours have originated from the feeling of not being content with ourself in life and that it is our responsibility that we feel this way. I found and at times find it very uncomfortable to feel how everything that I feel and do not like (or like) is indeed because of, yes, my own choices and not because of anyone else. The oldest hurt is probably that we choose to please others over feeling the greatness and amazingness in ourselves. Knowing this there is also a way forward with taking this responsibility. Thank you for sharing Anne very inspiring.
Awesome and thank you Anne – a 101 sort of guidance if you feel like drinking is no longer your way.
“Alcohol can be a substitute for intimacy, a companion, a best friend. No wonder we arc up at the prospect of losing it.” – And so I understand why I was not just able, but happy to quit alcohol out of my life: I did start to go for intimacy in my relationships, I did open up to people, become more committed and embedded myself into a community and with that – into humanity. I feel connected to me and all. I work on it when I lose it. I can count on me, I will come back to connection when I find myself out of it. I take responsibility about my longing for deep connections. And so – Alcohol is not needed any more to numb my lack of intimacy or lack of taking responsibility. Because I go for it instead of numbing my giving-up.
Anne, what a great sign-off ‘Give yourself a chance to feel how great you truly are’, and that is what many of us avoid, and we can use alcohol and other substances to temper life and our reactions to it, but it really doesn’t work and we know it, but it’s only when we get the support and are willing to understand how we truly feel that we can learn to drop those props we have, and come back to feeling how great we can be.
Anne you wrote: “A problem cannot be solved from the level at which it was created” that is really true and therefore most of us need someone who gave us a true feedback and it is on us if we listen or choose to not listen – everything is always a choice.
“What helped me was to understand that I was drinking for a reason, and to take full responsibility for how I was feeling and for the choices I had made in my life.” That is really a profound realization Anne – this one can really change a whole life as you so wonderfully demonstrated and shared.
“Give yourself a chance to feel how great you truly are.” So very honouring of who we are.