My parents rarely drank alcohol – I cannot recall seeing either of them drunk. I do recall my father being very ‘tired’ on some days, but this was very rare. My family were dairy farmers; my father worked hard, seven days a week. There were no days off to recover from a night out. We lived with my mother’s parents and most Sundays my grandfather would head off to play lawn bowls at the local bowling club. He would arrive home in the early evening quite drunk and very talkative and also very authoritative.
Around the age of 16, at a family function on the front verandah, I was asked if I wanted to have a taste of beer, which I did and I hated it. I certainly had no desire to start drinking, yet within a year or two of this I was binge drinking two or three times a week.
I have often wondered why I fell into the trap of alcohol when my parents hardly drank at all. Was I just rebelling? Was I being influenced by my grandfather’s behaviour or was I trying to be recognised in a weird and destructive way? I was heavily involved in sport and the drinking culture that goes with it –– was it this that led me to binge drinking?
I had a low tolerance to alcohol so maybe I could blame that. I can look back now, 40 years later, and see that it does not matter which one it was – or combination of them or indeed all of them together – as there was always a point where I had a choice. It is very clear to me now that I chose to continue drinking knowing what would occur and the consequences that came with it. There was something within me that gave me the opportunity to choose to go home or continue drinking. As I write this I can feel the lack of responsibility in those actions.
So, why did I make the choice to continue drinking? Was I waiting for that magical moment when someone says something that allows me to feel good about myself? Was it because I needed to be one of the boys or was it me, avoiding the tensions of my everyday life? Could it be that from an early stage of my childhood, society dictated how I was to be as a man. This never felt right but I embraced it and attempted to live my life in that way.
You would think that making the wrong choice a few times might send a clear message to me that I needed to stop doing this. These messages I did receive but in my arrogance, I ignored them. I could handle the situation. I ignored them for almost 20 years. I could convince myself that it was okay for me to have a couple of beers and then come home… I wish. Many times it was “just one for the road,” which became one too many.
I met my first wife when we were both drunk. My intimate relationship with my second wife began with us both being drunk. Had I learnt anything? Not at all. My behaviours the second time round were exactly the same as they had been since I began drinking.
I was at a sporting function at a local licensed club when I was called to the front desk. My girlfriend was ringing to say that she was in hospital, seriously ill and had been suffering a lot of pain. She explained what was going on. I had been drinking for quite a while so heard only some of what was said, but eventually I heard what I wanted to hear; “I do not want you to come to the hospital, stay at the football presentation.” It may not have been said as clearly as that, but it was what my interpretation allowed me to hear. I was having a great time drinking and could not see any sense in going to the hospital and standing around feeling useless. It was all about me!
Sport was used as an advertising vehicle for both alcohol and tobacco 40 years ago; consumption of alcohol was made out to be a ‘manly’ thing to do and there was a strong culture of drinking alcohol in the sporting clubs that I was associated with. In saying that, I cannot blame these clubs I was associated with for the choices that I was making in regard to alcohol. That was my responsibility.
Because of my drinking, I was feeling very uneasy about my life. It was affecting my work, it was affecting any relationships I had with people. I reached a point where I knew I needed to leave town. I was not honest with myself at first, saying that I was tired of my work and that I wanted to be self-employed. In the mid-nineties, we went on a family holiday to the North Coast. By the end of those two weeks, I had bought a small business. It was an interesting choice as it involved me having to build relationships and sell products to these people. I did not see communicating and connecting with people as one of my strengths at that point of time. Did I know that I was hiding something about myself?
Upon returning home, I went back to work, gave two weeks’ notice and moved to the Northern Rivers. This was my solution to my drinking problem. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself and I just wanted to run away, so I did. It certainly was a step in the right direction. The underlying issues that caused me to turn to alcohol were still there, but I managed them in a different way – mostly through my work, the volume of it and the way I carried it out.
We lived out of town, away from my work so I had no need to mix with people and I began drinking low alcohol beer. I only ever drank beer; very rarely did I drink spirits. By isolating myself and through my commitment to ‘solve’ my drinking problem, I did – almost. There were two occasions in the late 90s where I allowed myself once again to step away from the responsibility mentioned above.
Six and a half years ago, I met someone who introduced me to Serge Benhayon and the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom. By this stage I was rarely drinking at all – only light beer and always choosing to be responsible, mostly just to fit in at social events. The decision to let go of alcohol completely was very easy. It was like I needed someone to give me permission to just let it go. It is funny how sometimes we hang onto the past behaviours, whether they resulted in a good or a bad experience.
This 40-year journey has cost me a lot … I am not just talking about money here. The 20 years of needing to escape by using alcohol has dominated the way I have lived for most of the next 20 years. It has affected all of my relationships with people, particularly in the heavy drinking days. It is a horrible feeling talking to someone who was with you on a binge, not knowing anything about what I had done or said: the anxiety that I went through in the days following was terrible. My relationship with my wife and family was very unhealthy, and my relationship with myself was unbelievably toxic.
Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body. I put a lot of pressure on myself. This was exhausting. I needed to escape the pressure and anxiety. I needed to escape life. Ahh, enter the drinking. This was my escape and it became a part of my life. I did not realise that the drinking created the same problems… I was going around in circles. Even when I had the drinking under control, so to speak, I used other ways of escaping, like work.
I still feel, occasionally, the guilt that accumulated from those years where I stepped away from my responsibilities. Through Universal Medicine and its practitioners, I have been able to peel back the layers and expose the expectations, beliefs and ideals that were put on me – initially as a young child and then as a man – from society, my family and eventually myself: expectations, beliefs and ideals that were not a part of me when I was born.
Thank you to Serge Benhayon, Universal Medicine, its practitioners and my partner for those six and a half years.
And a huge thank you to me for allowing me to be honest with myself… finally.
By Anonymous
Further Reading:
The Body and My Relationship with it
Giving up Alcohol
Why I Hate Alcohol
“Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body. ” Yes, the effect that has on the body is huge. Yet some would try to drown out and numb those feelings even more, as they aren’t pleasant to feel.
Acknowledging the self styled patterns that disconnect us starts at a young age when we are directed away from the natural cycle we are in and the awareness we have. We are set up to do the opposite of what would allow us to live in a way that would be transparent and tender with the feelings that our fragility is being crushed and thus when we get in our teens we fall into the deeper trap of abusing our bodies even more to not feel what we have let go of.
This is what we tend to overlook
“…as there was always a point where I had a choice”
We make choices every second of the day but what choices are we making and are we aware of the choices or do we just go with what we hear in our mind?
We have a tendency to listen to our minds over what our bodies are telling us. Is it possible that we feel the urge to join the pack energy or consciousness we want to fit in with which is our peer group to be recognised and accepted as being one of the crowd. It’s very unusual for someone to stand out from the crowd and say No, that’s not how I want to live. And if one does stand out then is it possible that the pack energy joins forces with other likeminded pack energies to try and take them down because we do not want to be exposed for not living the truth?
It is interesting that sport is associated with a drinking culture when everyone is aware that alcohol affects how the body can perform. One form of distraction attracting another?
I have seen this in hospitals too – a form of escape to get away from the overwork and sometimes horrors that are witnessed? It also surprised me to see how many doctors and nurses smoked – a way back – when they daily saw the results of abuse to the bodies of their patients.
sueq2012 what you are sharing about doctors and nurses smoking just doesn’t make any sense. These are very well educated people we know this because you need many years studying to be a doctor in order to get a licence to practice. Plus while training they see the results as you say of how the tar from the cigarettes destroys the delicate inner lining of the lungs which reduces the capacity to breath and people who smoke start coughing as a way to bring up the tar from the lungs as the tar acts as an irritant within the delicacy of the lungs. We also know that doctors and nurses drink alcohol – it is by far the drug of choice when it come to wanting to numb ourselves so that we do not feel the full brunt of a life that is so unsatisfactory that the alcohol is used to take the edge off life. We have all contributed to a life that we hate but continue to buy into it because we are led to believe this life is all there is. We are blessed beyond our wildest imagination that the world has the teachings of the Ageless wisdom brought to humanity in this life through Serge Benhayon who is demonstrating daily to the world that there is indeed a way out of this mess we have created for ourselves.
If you ask people if they enjoyed their first drink, cigarette or smoking grass they will most likely tell you the taste was awful but then, later on, have acquired a taste for it and defend the reasons why we should all partake in such activities. It does make you wonder because in the past I have seen adults give children alcohol when they are very young and the child recoils but then minutes later comes back for more – is it the sugar that is so addictive that we override our first taste. Should we be looking closer at sugar instead of adding it to everything and coming up with inventive names to disguise that sugar has been added?
Not only do we develop a taste for it, but we can develop a snobby taste for it – the wine connoisseurs, the weed experts and gin critics. We can be so full of ourselves, in our arrogance that we know everything in our heads while the body screams different.
We love anything that identifies us, especially the things that we feel elevate us to a higher status than others. More knowledgeable, more wealthy, more informed, more athletic but all of these topics can be broken down into minute moments e.g. ordering an expensive bottle of wine, rolling a spliff with a better quality of cannabis, having the answer to a question, an expensive dress, a brand name handbag, an endless array of moments in which we feel momentarily identified, momentarily elevated, momentarily better than others but those moments are very short lived. True beauty comes from connecting to the constantness of our soul, which needs or wants no recognition because it knows who it is and it recognises that it’s the same one soul of us all.
Yes, if we take that first taste and feel what it does to our body we wouldn’t consume any more. However it is often peer pressure that takes us down that road. It takes a strong person – as an individual – to go against the crowd.
Julie, when I first tasted alcohol it did taste very bitter so the people I was with added lemonade which made the drink taste sweeter and drinkable. I feel certain if we took the sugar out of alcohol very few of us would want to drink it.
Julie maybe we should as a society start looking at why we add sugar to everything? We cannot just point a finger at the manufacturers of the product and blame them. We know sugar races our bodies so that there is no chance in staying in connection to our bodies. I know this to be true from my own experience with sugar. I now know that I used it to slow down my awareness because when I was racy from the sugar I was not with myself at all. We can checkout on life and the easiest way to do this is to overload our bodies with sugar, add to the mix caffeine and there is no way the body can cope. Then we wonder why people act out of character, well may be they were not themselves in the first place because of all the additives they have put into their bodies, if we are not in control of our bodies then who is?
A meeting with Serge Benhayon is a meeting blessed with love, if we are open to the wisdom he shares we are given the opportunity to enrich our lives beyond measure.
Thank you for talking about honesty and the transformative impact it has. Away from shame and criticism I understand that if I can be really honest with myself then there is a real opportunity to heal and move on.
“You would think that making the wrong choice a few times might send a clear message to me that I needed to stop doing this” Crazy how stubborn we can be, and crazy how long it can take us to choose to change.
Interesting point made that lessons not learnt the first time round remain for another round. It is this which gives us another opportunity to learn in life and that the same lesson will repeatedly present itself until we have chosen to recognise what is on offer to us and chosen to make a different choice. This is known though my own experiences and presents a new enthusiasm for true learning.
I love how you highlight that it was your choice to drink alcohol and that you can’t blame your parents or grandparents for that as it is your choice thus your responsibility to do that. It also shines a different light on responsibility as we often only relate it to work and family etc., you showed how responsibility is in every single choice we are making.
It’s a great point you make Anonymous at the start – if we have true purpose and dedication to service there’s just no room for addiction, issues and complexity to set in.
Having given up alcohol some ten years before i met Serge Benhayon, I thought that drinking no longer concerned me but I have learnt that their is more to do with understanding the energy that makes us drink in the first place and that we can heal the underlying issue and thus truly heal from this indulging way of being.
So true Greg. It’s confronting to see but when you look closely at your own life you can see that habits and past times may have changed but so often the energy and quality has remained the same.
It used to be promulgated that a drink or two did no harm but just this week in the UK it has been stated that even one or two drinks affect us – as if we didn’t know! It seems to me that depending on who funds the research the results will vary – no surprise there tho!
Sponsored science and its research always have another card up their sleeves – but one day this pack of cards will have exhausted its resources and common sense and our knowing will prevail.
Isn’t it interesting that those scientists or doctors that years ago told everyone it was okay to drink wine two or three times a week to my knowledge have never been called to account for the possible damage that has been done to peoples health. We live in a culture that encourages us to revere the scientist or doctor and believe what they say is true but in light of the confusing information we often get presented with maybe it’s time to begin to question the advice we are being offered
Alcohol causes so many problems, as I witnessed in my family too. How inspiring that you managed to turn things around. The past is the past and as someone said to me ‘guilt is a useless feeling’ – It serves no one. Appreciating all you can offer from your past experience is an inspiration to those who now know their lives can turn around…..
“Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body. ”-
Our body is an amazing marker of truth, but do we listen to it or are we swayed by our peers, society and pictures or ideals and beliefs that we have taken on and ignore the body signals ?
A non-alcoholic party I assume?! ?
Alcohol is obviously the cause of much domestic violence, crime, violence and accidents and illness and disease – these are thing that are easy to measure and quantify. However there is a hidden cost to alcohol which you mention here in your blog – the gradual eroding harm and separation that it does to relationships which is not so easy to measure or quantify and some may not even notice it because it just takes the sparkle and joy off life including our relationships and people may even assume that it is normal or nothing is wrong. However I know that all my relationships have improved out of sight since I said so long to alcohol which is a good enough case study for me.
Our bodies rejoice when we actually listen to them.
When we finally stop the abuse there is more space for love.
Alcohol gives us the illusion of escaping, but in fact takes our life away, robbing it and making it something without any purpose. Thus, any time involved in alcohol is somehow lost. The great news are that we are the true owners of our life and we can change our choices whenever we want and fully claim it again, as you did, Anonymous. Never is too late
Amparo what you say is very true
‘Alcohol gives us the illusion of escaping, but in fact takes our life away, robbing it and making it something without any purpose.’
I saw this with a family member their life became dependent on alcohol, they lived for the numbing effect it had on their life, so that in the end there was only alcohol it became their best friend and it killed them at the same time.
The reasons we have such high alcohol consumptions in society is that we quite simply do not want to deal with under lying issues.
This is very true LE and if it’s not alcohol that we choose as our go to when we don’t want to deal with our under lying issues, then it might be excess food, box set binging, computer gaming, social media, gambling, arguing and anything we can do that will distract us long enough to not feel what’s going on. If we stop for just one second then we have to feel what is going on, so perhaps this explains the incessantness of our addictions.
Rachel we could say we live in a repetitive world; it is the repetition of life that entraps us. It dulls our awareness and our senses.
The underlying issue being that we all jumped ship. There we all were, connected to truth, love and God (which are all basically the same thing) and then we chose to take one small step away and ‘et voila’ you have the God forsaken mess that we’re all in right now.
I now know why I drank …. because I did not have any true love for me. This highlights the importance to me of dealing with issues or things we feel instead of ignoring or burying them as when we do this, from experience and as you share here, it goes down a slippery slope.
This is the honesty that opens doors for change. Knowing that our ill choices come from a lack of self love, worth, respect and/or care, being honest about this, means we cannot pretend we do not know what we are doing.
Appreciating who we are and where we have come from is so needed – saying thank you for the choices we make.
Letting go of expectations, ideals and beliefs allows us to build a truer relationship with ourselves where the old props of alcohol and other substances are no longer needed to quell the feelings of not being good enough etc.
Why would we put something that is flammable, in our body? Remember the first time you drank something neat that burned all the way down? There was recently, once again in the news of 17 people who died from drinking alcohol that someone mixed with wood alcohol. Both are classed as poisons and can make you blind drunk, but one can do it permanently.
Yes… putting it into this context (drinking a flammable substance) and taking a step back on the situation, makes our drinking habits rather a bizarre one.
My longest relationship that was fraught with problems, but I persevered, was with alcohol. It was a managed, unloving relationship I supported. What harm did this relationship do to all of my other connections to people around me?
Alcohol does nothing for our society, it just fuels the deep unrest and lack of love we have for ourselves.
My journey was similar in the fact that I vowed never to take drugs and then low and behold spend most of my 20s doing just that. Thanks to studying with Universal Medicine I have been able to identify and heal the deep self loathing that was driving the self harm and today stand free of all desire to poison my body and dull myself. The result is an immense commitment to life, people and myself that I previously had no idea was within me.
I inspire by my movements living life by what I feel is truth. I cannot tell another what to or not do – that is not my responsibility.
When we begin to recognise that which is not who we are and let it go, it is life changing; we live the truth of who we truly are.
And it is our ‘doing’ that seems to lead us into comparison and competitiveness with each other. We see what another is doing and so often we react to that. But there is something very passive about a person who is in their beingness, it’s almost as if we are encouraged to be absorbed back into our beingness when we’re with them. Being doesn’t trigger nearly so many reactions in others that doing does and feels like it encourages inclusion rather the individuality that doing seems to promote.
Peer group pressure is what distracted me after all we all wanted to keep up with the Jones and would virtually do anything to fit in, and this feels like a wanting to be recognised and liked. Life is definitely a trap to keep us from re-connecting to our essences and dull our awareness’s so we end up looking for a fix that is outside of us.
Alcohol has played a destructive part for years within my wider family and continues to do so. Sometimes I wonder what the quality of my relationships would have been like without it.
The body would be saying a big thank you to saying no to alcohol. What a celebration – and no alcohol needed.
Drinking alcohol always comes at a high cost in more than one way, ‘The 20 years of needing to escape by using alcohol has dominated the way I have lived for most of the next 20 years. It has affected all of my relationships with people’.
Yes it can be an insidious fog or cloud that we don’t even notice until it is gone.
I can remember when I was growing up and going through my teens there was tremendous pressure from everywhere in society to drink alcohol. It really did not come from my parents (even though they drank at the time) it was more from my peers, but also media, advertising, sport was even linked to it so it was everywhere and the message was loud and clear – you are abnormal if you don’t drink so I joined in, even though my body told me loud and clear many times that is in fact not natural to drink. Eventually I stopped listening to all the pressure from outside and started listening to my body and my health and wellbeing has not looked back since.
YAY to listening to your body, health and wellbeing and not pressure from the outside! ?? Very Cool ✨
The appreciation in this blog is very rel and so it needs to be to appreciated.
What struck me one day when having lunch with a friend is how much we upset our metabolism when we drink alcohol. A glass of wine with a meal needs to followed by a coffee to ‘pick us up’ and all the while the liver is attempting to process two lots of poison at the same time. And then we wonder where the afternoon headache comes from.
“Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body. ” if only we got taught as part of everyday education that if things don’t feel right in our body – they generally aren’t .
This is a show stopper, Anoymous, ‘….if things don’t feel right in our body – they generally aren’t.’ And yes, why don’t we get taught this as part of everyday education?? We get taught irresponsibility from a very young age and the older we get the more willing we become to enjoin this way of life that is lacking any sense of responsibility. It is my lived experience that picking the reins of responsibility back up is the beginning of bringing life back into a rhythm and harmony so sought after but that all the world’s waywardness has been unable to deliver.
‘Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body’ Interesting to see how these two things can be related and how by lessening this sabotaging behaviour we close a gap in the trust that we have for ourselves and create a more harmonious feeling in the body.
Alcohol, a scourge on every level of our society.
Drinking was a passage of life. You first tried it because it was forbidden and convinced yourself it must be something that gets better with age, for at a young age the body explains clearly what it thinks and feels about alcohol, smoking and drugs. But we are persistent are we not to push our bodies to accept and even enjoy that which is unhealthy to our bodies. When we allow drinking in our life as a passage of life, does life pass by without us?
Yes I remember drinking just being accepted as a ‘right of passage’ through my teens and it was somehow linked to being grown up and an adult however looking back on it I made far more bad decisions and did far more harm to myself (directly or indirectly from the influence of alcohol) as an adult than I ever did as a child so is this really growing up or growing down?!
Andrew and Steve you raise great points that drinking alcohol is seen as a right of passage. I can remember my ex partner say that he couldn’t wait for his son to grow up so that they could go down to the pub together. When his son grew up he was offered alcohol but like all of us at first didn’t like it, but we persist so that we mix the beer with lemonade the sugar takes away the bitterness of the taste of beer and so another body is hooked onto the alcoholic bandwagon. If we don’t think it is a drug then we are fooling ourselves.
Alcohol comes at a high cost not just financially but also through the loss of self esteem and the damage to relationships whilst society often has to pick up the tab of our collective irresponsibility and yet drinking alcohol is still seen as socially acceptable by so many.
Helen how crazy are we when there have been uncountable studies relating to alcohol and its harmful affects on families and society and yet despite all of the research we still drink it? No one has stopped to ask why is alcohol such a crutch to society so that even though we know how damaging it is we still insist on drinking it? What intelligent is running us?
Anonymous, I see a lot of similarities in my background. At the age of 14 when my parents separated I turned to alcohol as a way to numb the pain was feeling. And yes this was my choice too, to use it as a way of coping through life.
Competitive sport and drinking alcohol, allies in taking us away from who we truly are.
We are already who we are therefore the only way that the forces of evil can prevent us from knowing who we are is to distract us away from ourselves.
Growing up I saw the negative effects of alcohol and how it hurt and affected relationships. This is why I chose to never drink as an adult. It is a known poison, however despite this it continues to be socially accepted.
‘as there was always a point where I had a choice.’ This is very powerful. This week I’ve been feeling my original choices in how I dealt with the hurts and the suffering I saw all around me growing up. It’s been very sobering and wonderful to realise, I always had and have a choice to remain present and connected with love.
What’s wonderful is feeling like it’s never too late and there are no barriers to this – something I’m only just realising now as a I felt sad when I was with a group of people who I’ve been with each week, for the last year and a half and realised I’d not fully let them in. No need for regrets, making up for ‘lost time’, just that return to love in an instant.
I love the picture, for appreciating our choices does support us to make changes in life.
We have all seen a homeless person that manages to get money for alcohol. Could it be, their way of dealing with a mountain of hurt?
It’s true, the more we value and love ourselves, then taking care of ourselves is an easy step to make.
The whole of my twenties was a blur because of how much I was drinking, looking back I see it for what it was – such a waste! So glad I have sorted my life out to now not to need to drink to fit in, check out, avoid life or any of the other hundreds of reasons.
Our bodies are the very things through which God flows, therefore how we care for our bodies is absolutely crucial to our relationship with God. It’s not that God is being judgemental and choosing not to come through those that drink alcohol, it’s simply that the consciousness of God can’t be conducted through apparatus that is not in tip top condition. And when I say ‘tip top’ condition I am not referring to an athletic body or even a body that is free of disease but to a body that is energetically aligned to the consciousness of God through it’s living choices.
“It is very clear to me now that I chose to continue drinking knowing what would occur and the consequences that came with it.” What I have come to realize is that these choices arise from a deep sense of self rejection and when we encouraged to address this on a fundamental level and begin to love our selves, altering the trajectory of these choices becomes innately simple.
It’s true, the more we value and love ourselves, then taking care of ourselves is an easy step to make.
We escape life using many different methods, alcohol, food, any sort of sport to extreme sports, books, television the list is endless because when we go against what our bodies are telling us the nervous tension this generates needs to be off set somehow and we are very devious in the many way we do this.
We have constructed a whole life around ‘offsetting nervous tension’. Offsetting nervous tension is the life that most of us are currently living and we manage to kid ourselves that we’re happy; just.
This feels raw and beautifully honest. Thank you for sharing and choosing to come through your relationships with alcohol.
Raw and honest is the best way for us to be with one another, as opposed to guarded and dishonest, which is unfortunately how most of us are with each other, even the people that we say we’re the closest with.
The pull to not live connected to who we are is very strong and whether it is alcohol, drugs, food or one of the many other forms of distraction the outcome is the same. Thank you for you honesty Anon and the willingness to explore in this blog how you have deepened your relationship with ‘you’.
Why is that? That the pull to not live connected seems stronger than the pull to be connected? Like how crazy is this. It seems there is something whether it be the spirit or another energy that really does not want us to be all that we truly are ✨ Im so looking forward to the day for humanity when the pull to be all that we are is far far stronger than the pull not to be.
I too have deeply appreciated how Serge Benhayon empowers us to take a look at our long established societal norms and make choices that are not based on well worn beliefs and ideals, but on what is correct and true for our bodies, relationships and responsibilities in life.
It’s interesting that cigarette packets come with a health warning on the front… ‘smoking kills’. I wonder if every bottle of alcohol came with the warning you suggest Gill. It might be a 1st step to responsibility?
“… as there was always a point where I had a choice.” This is a huge realisation to own and one that when we do, completely changes our relationships with so many habitual behaviours that hurt us and other people.
I agree Rowena it is a huge moment because often we tell ourselves that everything is beyond us and out of reach and that things just happen. When we get to the point where we can examine our choices inevitably we will always see that in the very beginning there was a choice made that led to a situation or a health condition and that we actually did have a hand in that decision.
Whether we escape life by either consuming alcohol or getting caught up in work, it is one of the same… there is no difference between the two even if we give credence to one over the other.
There’s no better way to waste time than to regret the time we’ve wasted.
For the majority of reading this blog I felt like I was looking in the mirror, having had very similar experiences with alcohol abuse. Alcohol for me was the perfect ‘solution’ to dissolving all the pressure I put on myself to be enough in the world and be accepted and not rejected anymore for the naturally sensitive, caring, and gentle man that I was (and am today). But the irony is that there is actually no solution here at all, as the alcohol abuse just exacerbated all my issues and made me feel even more of a failure, with a lot of guilt and shame involved with how I had let myself become such a mess and been living more deviated from my true self. Finally letting go of alcohol was actually a very easy thing to do once I came to Universal Medicine workshops and began to be understood and honoured for who I am without any need to prove myself. The great thing to appreciate when we can let go of the grips of this irresponsible way of living as Anon. did here is that we never again have to go back to that destructive way of being again, not in this life or every one thereafter.
Dear Anonymous what I appreciate most is your honesty as with this honesty you are an inspiration. You showed that it is possible to choose a different way to live and to expose the trap most of us are living in.
“Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body.” And then we scrabble for the substances that dull the tension in a vain attempt to avoid taking responsibility for our lives, but in the end as you have proven there is only one true way to deal with life, by sobering up.
There is a lot of social pressure these days on both men and women to drink however I completely agree that we always have a choice to go along with what the world demands of us or go with what feels true for us.
There was pressure to drink when we were young, and there still is a lot of pressure. It is important that we have a strong sense of self and worth and honouring our bodies to support us to make loving choices.
‘Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body.’ This is true for everything, not just drinking alcohol. Eating the wrong thing, going to bed later than needed, not speaking up, etc all adds tension and anxiety. This one statement alone explains much of our current ill-at-easement with ourselves.
To drink the metaphorical food of a life simply and clear of all intoxicants brings us back our natural and vital selves.
Similar to you anonymous, I was not influenced to drink by my family. As practicing Methodists there was never any alcohol in our family home and in the Welsh community I lived in the 1960s pubs closed on Sundays. I was introduced to alcohol as a teenager, hated the first taste but persevered to fit in with the group. In my teens I did not have the sense of self, steady enough to say No in a community where drinking alcohol with the sole purpose of getting drunk, especially at weekends, was the norm and considered a badge of honour along with smoking marijuana and taking hallucinogenic drugs. Having lived this myself, when I look at young people today, it is with understanding, for I know how easy it is to get sucked in and follow the crowd. Without an inner connection that impulses them to reject anything that violates their natural and inner essence, there is little chance of resisting the push to take these intoxicants.
I didn’t need any pushing to get into recreational drugs, I was more than happy to jump in myself. I was convinced that I was having a really good time and would have happily taken a lie detector test to back myself on this one. The only possible way for me to be so adamant that I was having a great time was for me to be totally and utterly disconnected from my body because my body was sure as heck not having a good time!
Anonymous, reading this really helps me makes sense as to why so many of us end up drinking alcohol; ‘Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body. I put a lot of pressure on myself. This was exhausting. I needed to escape the pressure and anxiety. I needed to escape life. Ahh, enter the drinking.’
Honesty over how we have been living is very crucial, thank you for yours, it’s deeply appreciated.
Living with the intense need for alcohol is so common for so many. It permeates through every event in life. I love your honesty, Anonymous about your experiences with alcohol. This is a topic that needs to be aired and open.
And isn’t it crazy that we see poisoning our body as a reward e.g having a glass of wine at the end of the day.
If someone wants to drink they should go for it, what I don’t respect is when responsibilities like work then suffer because of the consequences.
It’s not possible to ever drink alcohol without something suffering, be that the cells of our liver or our relationships, something always suffers as a result of alcohol. It’s a poisonous substance in both our bodies and in our society.
All I know is that when my father stopped drinking when I was 14 he was a different person. Suddenly, he knew I existed and we started to have a more honest relationship; not perfect but a relationship all the same. Alcohol will always get in the way of relationships even if both parties are consuming.
Alcohol has a brutish personality. Even champagne.
Thank you for sharing your experience as it helps us all to understand how a drinking problem starts and why it then governs so much of our lives. This coping mechanism can then run our lives and dull our awareness until someone comes and gives us an understanding of why we drank in the first place and what role it has in our lives. By understanding why we can start to get to know ourselves better and as patterns repeat we can take the opportunity to unravel embedded patterns and choose afresh.
Yes, no amount of alcohol or whatever is the drug of choice, so to speak, can ever support us to come to loving ourselves warts and all.
I’d never fully appreciated the nervous energy and anxiety that drinking can cause and no wonder. I can relate to this but in connection more with disconnecting from myself and feeling on edge and turning to food to ease the dis-ease. Using what creates the anxiety to quell the anxiety really doesn’t work!!! There maybe a tiny temporary relief which is what is sought, but the consequences of this are huge and costly in all areas of life. It’s wonderful to have the wisdom as presented through Universal Medicine.
Karin your comment resonates with me. Trying to cope with life’s intensities wasn’t done with alcohol, for me, but with food instead, especially sugar, cake and chocolate. Whilst trying to dull my senses, I didn’t appreciate that all that sweet stuff increased my nervous energy and anxiety and exacerbated my insecurities.
My first feeling with both alcohol and drugs was it is not for me but eventually peer group pressure got to me so I became extremely addicted to both to the detriment of my health so at age 40 I stopped abusing my body to discover from the Universal Medicine presentation that I had then used replacements and these as well as other abusive behaviours have all been healed Thanks Heaps to Serge Benhayon.
The first taste of alcohol is unpleasant yet the desire to fit in, to be accepted is so strong that we can over-ride what our body is telling us is such a powerful reflection that we are not in harmony with our self.
There are so many things that are utterly distasteful to our energetic palette but we imbibe them anyway. Competitiveness, ganging up on others, putting people down, taking on beliefs, being fearful, being arrogant, being selfish, the list is literally endless. Basically anything that is not borne from truth and love is energetically distasteful but we hold our noses and force ourselves to swallow just because everyone else is doing the same.
It is not only the act of drinking alcohol that is the problem, it’s the culture of alcohol that is all pervasive: restaurants, bars, clubs, music, all media, advertising, sport, retail outlets, every social event. Try buying a greeting card that doesn’t reference or promote alcohol. I’ve seen similar on bath liquids and salts, including those designed for children and young people.
The day before I read your blog, a memory came back to me. As a student and in the company of two student friends from a culture where hard and senseless drinking of alcohol was the norm, I joined them for an afternoon’s drinking. I became hopelessly drunk to the extent I could not walk and ended up just barely getting home and then vomiting. I don’t know who I was then to have degraded myself to that extent. And fortunately for me, I had the common sense to walk away from drinking to extremes but continued to drink alcohol intermittently until my early fifties when I met Serge Benhayon. I have not touched a drop since, never miss it and each day I feel a quality in my body and know I would not be feeling this amazing, had I continued to abuse my body with alcohol.
Alcohol has such a huge presence in our lives and is used for many different reasons. We tell ourselves we are more comfortable around people when we have a drink, we may think ourselves funny and likeable when we drink but the bottom line is we have to get to the point where we accept ourselves warts and all – no amount of alcohol will do that for us.
We can come up with every excuse or justification to do what we please and yes this is a very selfish way of living. Alcohol does exactly this where no-other or anything is considered other than self.
‘Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body. I put a lot of pressure on myself. This was exhausting. I needed to escape the pressure and anxiety. I needed to escape life.’ An equation that so many of us create for ourselves…with often dire results. Peeling it back to our relationship with ourselves and why we would go against what we feel is right is crucial. Building a deepening relationship of respect for ourselves can start with little things like brushing our hair gently and lovingly. Gradually as we pay more regard to ourselves things begin to change and we build more trust in ourselves, more steadiness and dependability and when we make’ mistakes’ we allow ourselves the understanding that this is a learning and an opportunity to raise our standards and up our game so to speak.
If we loved ourselves to the max then there is no way we would hit the self destruct button or sabotage ourselves. I did this soooo many times in my life I have lost count but thankfully that behaviour is no longer with me because … I have decided to love me. This, I feel is something we really need to bring to our younger generations (and older!) for them to deeply value, care and respect themselves and to honour what they feel in the first instance. It is not about being perfect but instead giving ourselves the space to just be. Understanding the truth about energy as well is really important and can support us to love ourselves more.
Once the choice is made to love ourselves, we no longer want to abuse our bodies with alcohol or any other substance. And having experienced alcohol abuse ourselves and made the choice to stop, we have much to offer those still in the cycle of self abuse: understanding, love but never judgement.
What have we done with our choices to make the word; drink or drinking synonymous with alcohol?
Reading this article makes me realise how much we can override the messages from our bodies, the effects of drinking alcohol on our bodies the day or two after drinking are huge – with hangovers, feeling achy, tired and ill and yet we often carry on drinking after this experience, I know I certainly did. This makes me realise that there are so many behaviours that we carry on with despite their effects on our bodies.
Anonymous, thank you for sharing so openly and honestly about your experience with alcohol. I spent many years drinking alcohol and becoming very ill at one point and still carried on drinking – the need to fit in was huge. I no longer feel this way and now put my health and well being above fitting in and being liked and accepted and as a result I feel well and so not miss alcohol at all.
Thank you for exposing the true cost of alcohol not only in society but in the toxic relationship we have with ourselves when we are ingesting a poison that our bodies clearly show us is damaging but we so often choose to ignore these clear messages and continue on our irresponsibility path.
Living under the influence as you describe it feels like being in a permanent conundrum and ubiquitous fog of uncertain outcomes and huge levels of anxiety – a very honest counter to all the hype in the ads and the findings, or should that be stumblings, of sponsored science. We defend the lies that suit our comfort.
As a society we need to get honest about how destructive alcohol is to our relationships and therefore to the very foundation of our communities.
Giving up alcohol was the best thing I ever did and thanks to Serge Benhayon I now have also found the reason why I was drinking in the first place, so I also have now healed that issue surrounding my drinking alcoholic drinks.
“You would think that making the wrong choice a few times might send a clear message to me that I needed to stop doing this. These messages I did receive but in my arrogance, I ignored them” – this is so familiar. And once we think we’ve got away with it, we think we are invincible – until the reality hits us right back. It’s like we do know one way or another exactly what we are doing, and it feels like we can no longer stop on our own accord but need to be stopped somehow.
There are so many beliefs around alcohol that aid and abet it’s glamorous image. It’s seen as something that supports us to relax and loosen up. It’s seen as something that promotes confidence. It’s seen as something that helps us to be physically intimate. It’s also seen as something that helps us to open up. On top of all of these things the advertising companies use glamorous images of people drinking so that we believe we are, in some way also glamorous if we drink. The whole lot is a rotten lie but it suits us none the less to buy into it because we get to avoid looking at our stuff for a little longer.
We choose to ignore the many indications that alcohol is a poison that affects not just those who ingest it but all associated with them and society pays a heavy price for our collective irresponsibility.
Stripped back bare honesty, love it.
In Ireland we have a saying
” come on lets drown our sorrows”
This is the process of going to a pub and talk about your troubles and numb oneself with alcohol.
But of course no understanding is brought to the issues, they are only buried and keep being added to and more drink (alcohol) required to “drown the sorrows” .
Most of my first experiences with alcohol involved vomiting, doing dangerous things or becoming very emotionally upset- all big signs of the harm that alcohol was.
But even at an early age there was a great appeal in it. It numbed the pain and tension and ultimately it was the strongest way I could send out the message that ‘I fit in here.’
It all started to change when I met someone for whom alcohol had no hold and who had also felt the poison of alcohol in her body. I was hungover at the time and suddenly I was questioning why on earth I would do that to my body and why I was drinking.
Looking around it is so obvious that so many of us use a myriad of things to numb what we don’t want to feel, or to address in our lives, and one of the biggies is alcohol. It really doesn’t make sense that a substance, classed as a poison, can be sold in legalized outlets, even in supermarkets next to food items. What sort of standard is this setting for our young children who may grow up thinking that alcohol is actually as good for you as food?
Thankyou for sharing your story Anon. “I have often wondered why I fell into the trap of alcohol….” Both my parents drank but I never saw them drunk. yet I and my siblings have had different reactions in our own lives – some drank heavily, others socially. I never coped well with alcohol so two glasses affected me so much. I used it as a prop on social occasions to help me do something with my hands! I haven’t drunk any alcohol for eleven years now – and don’t miss it at all.
” The underlying issues that caused me to turn to alcohol were still there, but I managed them in a different way ” When we are open to admitting we have a problem we can find different ways to cope with it – some will be healing – ( as is the support obtained from Universal Medicine therapies) – others can be just about moving the furniture around, so no real healing takes place.
“….. I have been able to peel back the layers and expose the expectations, beliefs and ideals that were put on me …… expectations, beliefs and ideals that were not a part of me when I was born.” Realising we are not the ideals and beliefs we live by but have chosen them, consciously or not, is the key to liberation as we then have the choice to discard them or not.
Beliefs, ideals and pictures about how things should be are like a lead overcoat to our beingingness.
Yes and it is only by not running away and avoiding the discomfort when the tension comes up that we can consider another way to address the tension.
Thank you anonymous. Many will relate to what you share. We often talk of the destructive influence alcohol abuse has on users, families, colleagues and you confirm powerfully how this played out in your life. Rarely do we seek to find the underlying reasons why we continue to drink alcohol even when we are experiencing its harmful effects. But you did, stayed with it and looked for answers until the time came when you ‘gave yourself permission’ to stop for good with the support of Universal Medicine practitioners. Now time to appreciate yourself, the journey you’ve been on and your new and more loving relationship you have with yourself.
Thank you for such a candid account of your relationship with alcohol, one that ultimately reflects the quality of relationship you had with your self. What Serge Benhayon offers us all is the space to stop and truly feel why we assume such harmful behaviours that more often than not hurt many more people than just our selves. And once we have looked within, enabling us to relinquish the beliefs that have kept us trapped in these habits and return to the simple knowing that who we are when we are born is more than enough, there is no need to lace this amazing purity with false ideals.
I have used alcohol in the past to numb myself or seek acceptance and recognition from others. It is a harsh lesson to go through and it feels so good once we are out of it, it just feels like a bad dream. However, we still carry with us the damage caused by alcohol on the body and it may bear heavy consequences. And you are right, when I first tried beer, it tasted disgusting, it’s very bitter, so why on Earth do we feel the need to think that our body will like it no matter what?
I can also remember the first time I tried alcohol I did not like it and my body did not like it either. So I had to over-ride this to keep drinking which definitely tells you something about what it is really like.
I arrogantly thought smoking pot was superior to drinking alcohol. I saw alcohol as a very crass substance, which it is but putting pot on some imaginary pedestal was ridiculous.
When we are willing to go there, to get to the root cause we naturally change our behaviours. The beauty is that the healing is not dictated by the mind but led through the communication and response to the body. Thank you for sharing.
A refreshingly honest blog about alcohol, Thank you Anon.
Alcohol is an everyday consumable, it is normal to go to the pub for a pint, to go out for cocktails & nights out. We drink and never think twice about why, why we started in the first place. There’s a lot to be honest about when looking at our relationship with it.
We are usually aware of the harmful behaviours we indulge in and our body consistently gives us the message but until we take responsibility for the choice to care for ourselves with love and respect nothing changes.
So true Mary. We can kid ourselves into believing that what we are doing is ‘normal’ for our society that we live in. But how much damage alcohol can wreak on families – not just the drinker – is unquantifiable. Getting to the root cause of why we choose to drink and from there taking responsibility for ourselves then allows us to make different more loving choices – otherwise it is just a discipline, which can fall apart at any time.
I can fully relate to your journey with alcohol, for I had my own 40 years of drinking that after the first 20 years it became a managed maintenance drinking. It was that nightcap to wind down during the work week and weekends were spent falling asleep in the chair. I had a medical problem that could have been caused by alcohol consumption, and I was asked to quit drinking for six months to see if it was the cause, it was not cause, but I never drank again. That was 15 years ago. It was just a pattern I had chosen to numb myself. Finding Serge Benhayon allowed me to see and feel the choices I had made, to not accept my responsibility. Its not too late to rid one’s self of past hurts that build walls around all of us.
Amazing sharing of how easy we get caught in trying to fit in, and joining in, doing stuff we really don’t want to. And how sometimes it feels like we need permission to stop doing those things. I look forward to the days when many more of us choose to do what truly feels supportive, what feels true, rather than what we think is expected of us; without needing permission from anybody.