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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.