Drunk on Meditation
Have you ever come home after a stressful day of work and headed straight to the fridge to grab your alcoholic drink of choice? With each sip, the problems of your day dissipate, floating away like a lost butterfly. After two drinks, the problems that stressed you out just one hour ago disappear. They still exist, of course; you just don’t worry about them anymore. Naturally, alcohol becomes a tool for helping you deal with stress and anxiety.
Have you ever come home after a stressful day at work and headed straight to your meditation cushion? With each breath, the problems of your day crash against the walls of your mind like a frothy ocean swell. Your instinct tells you to stiffen and look away, but you know how this process works; you have been here before. You take another breath and soften. With each breath, the stormy waves begin to calm, until they, too, soften, and you are looking at a quiet ocean and clear blue skies. The problems that stressed you out just one hour ago still exist, of course; you just don’t worry about them like you did before. Naturally, meditation becomes a tool for helping you deal with stress and anxiety.
Both meditation and alcohol are tools that help us deal with stress and anxiety. Alcohol does this by postponing the present moment. Meditation does this by touching the present moment. When we drink, we avoid ourselves. When we meditate, we face ourselves.
By looking directly at our problems, we may just find that the problems of our lives are not the mountains we have been carrying. Oftentimes, the stress is not coming from our problems. The stress is coming from how we are relating to our problems.
Drinking alcohol, on the other hand, helps us avoid looking at our problems altogether. We have fun, but we learn nothing. And we can postpone the present moment for only so long before it comes crashing in our face. Hangovers are a great reminder of this.
The point of this newsletter is not to share my personal opinion about alcohol. Instead, it is about the mechanism that makes alcohol so attractive: avoiding the problems of today by borrowing happiness from tomorrow. Alcohol serves as a useful contrast to the mechanism that makes meditation useful: "a serene encounter with reality," wrote Thich Nhat Hanh.
Get your week off to a mindful start by practicing with us tonight at 8:30 pm ET. Zoom Link: https://stevens.zoom.us/j/99566082328
*For more information on how alcohol effects your body and mind. What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health - Huberman Lab
**An interview I come back to often. My favorite takeaway: If you want to give up drinking, you need something better than being drunk. Jordan Peterson on Alcohol - YouTube