One Year Without Alcohol & Automatic Quitting

Is there a better way to quit things than willpower?

Happy Holidays to you and your loved ones.

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I just crossed one year since I’ve had any alcohol. 

There’s a great Yogananda story I love that reminds me of my own relationship with alcohol which goes like this…

There was a new follower of Yogananda who was eager to learn from the teacher, but unsure what following him really meant for his life. 

So the aspirant asked the guru what activities he could continue to do while studying with Yogananda?

Yogananda asks the man, “Do you smoke cigarettes?”

The man answers, “yes.”

Yogananda replies, “You can do that.”

Yoganadanda then asks him, “Do you drink alcohol?”

The man replies, “yes.”

Yogananda says, “You can do that.”

Then, Yogananda asks the man, “Do you have relations with the opposite sex?”

The man responds, “yes.”

 Yogananda says again, “You can do that…”

"But, you may find that you do not want to do these things so much anymore.”

There are many ways to quit or establish a healthier relationship with things we believe are not supportive for our life.

One thing I hear less people talk about that Yogananda alludes to is how this tends to happen automatically as you work on your consciousness. 

Purifying Ourselves Creates Healthy Preferences 

To purify something means to bring it back to its original state. 

When we “purify” our consciousness, it means untangling all the unsupportive mental and emotional material that obstructs the original essence that has always been there.

As this happens, our preferences, perceptions, and way of being shifts automatically. 

The teacher who really illuminated this concept which helped me make sense of the shifts in my own experience was David Hawkins with his Map of Consciousness. 

His map illuminates how the evolution of consciousness manifests as an all-encompassing paradigm shift.

In his model, he highlights how this can express itself in our predominant emotional state, view of Life, God, and Self. With greater awareness, many of these components start to change simultaneously or in close harmony with each other. 

David’s view, which I agree with, is that this paradigm shift expresses energetically. We both see energy as the basis for reality (as a facet of consciousness). We can look to physics and its laws of resonance as to why certain preferences like drinking alcohol start to fall away naturally as the consciousness and corresponding energy shift.

In this example, your personal vibration and alcohol’s just no longer resonate like they once did. The lack of resonance expresses as no longer wanting it. The same dynamic cascades across all of our relationships with life including other people.

My Own Story Of Alcohol Becoming Not Interesting

 In my 20’s I was living in NYC drinking like a fish.

This was just part of the culture. Every gathering after 6pm that wasn’t a boutique fitness class usually involved “drinks.”

Though I had been meditating since age 24, my spiritual interest and direct experiences came online when I turned 30.

The more my inner fire for exploring consciousness grew, the more I felt like I was living a double life.

I began to feel a growing incongruence of boozing on the weekends with my buddies and then basically trying to be a yogi the rest of the time. I wanted to remain seated in a state of calm alertness and it was very obvious alcohol took me out of that.

Despite this, I still found it hard to say stop drinking as a single guy in the face of social conventions and at times when I needed to take the edge off while running a startup.

2.5 - 3 years ago a funny thing started to happen. 

I noticed that my body really started to have an extremely adverse reaction to alcohol in a way it never did before. I would feel ill after a single drink and the days following would be incredibly emotionally difficult . 

As time went on, I became less interested in drinking because the repercussions were so severe.

Every now and then, I’d test the waters again because I loved how certain drinks tasted. 

Despite vastly cutting down on my consumption to about a drink a month, instead of my capacity for alcohol improving, the aftermath would get worse.

About a year ago, a beer with one of my college friends in NYC resulted in one of the most physically challenging nights of my life.

That was it for me. It just was no longer compelling for me to drink even on occasion.

Quitting Stuff

Before all this, I considered quitting things as a mental decision; if something logically no longer aligns to your life, make a decision and then use your willpower to say no until you’ve settled into a new habit.

I think this is certainly one way to go and probably the primary option available at a certain depth of experience.

But what’s so interesting to me is that many of the things I tried to unsuccessfully quit in the past just seemed to fall away more organically with the consciousness work.

In the realm of substances, other examples include coffee and a meat-heavy diet. I don’t have anything against these things. I just don’t enjoy them anymore.

Moving away from them wasn’t some big decision and fight to not do something. It just fell away naturally due to a shift in preference.

I acknowledge this may not be everyone’s experience and don’t think the enjoyment of alcohol is any commentary on your consciousness work. This is just my experience and seems pretty consistent with a lot of people I’ve talked too who’ve been on this path awhile.

If you are on the consciousness path, I think this has interesting implications.

For a long time I felt guilty about habits I knew weren’t good for me, but a part of me enjoyed. 

So I would get into these willpower games which proved to be draining and provided tenuous results.

I now think about changing habits differently.

Enjoy and pursue the things that you authentically want. Remove all the shoulds. And if you keep working on your consciousness, your preferences and the world around you will automatically self-organize over time. 

I believe this is the physics of behavior change that underpins our reality and that shifts in consciousness are a much more primary mechanism for change than willpower. Changing the conception of who You are, is a more fundamental input to how you engage the world than anything else.

I think this is why so many people like myself see helping humanity with consciousness as the most compelling thing to spend our time on. 

You change the consciousness and everything shifts with it.

It increasingly becomes more automatic to have a healthy and harmonious relationship with yourself and the world around you

…and go easier on the booze.

Happy holidays and new year! 

-Scott

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