As it stands, I still think about buying beer every single day (you know how it can be). I am constantly confronting that urge and working to let it go (or make it let go of me). My sobriety is challenged daily by a little voice in the back of my head suggesting the “next time we’ll get drunk”.
Through daily meditation and study, I’ve come to discover that alcohol use disorder (or whatever we choose to call it) is the inevitable outcome of an unhealthy and compulsive desire – an obsession with alcohol. This compulsion to drink all the time is an entrenched habit on autopilot. You continue to seek the reward long after it has vanished. The high is a mirage. You drink just to feel normal.
I keep telling myself that my goal, what I’d like to get out of daily meditation, is a much reduced and more controlled relationship with alcohol. Total abstinence is a last resort at this point. However, I never planned to stop smoking weed, yet here I am free of that monkey for the last 45 days. Who knows, there may come a time when alcohol leaves me in the same manner. If it does, so be it.
It appears, happily, that my lack of munchies (since kicking my marijuana smoking habit) and my drastic reduction in drinking have given me quite the head start! This makes me wish I had bought the scale sooner so I could have tracked definitive numbers. But, my joy at seeing the readout on the scale this morning was priceless. I’ll take the upside surprise any day of the week!
I’ve found the R.A.I.N. technique to be quite helpful in identifying and releasing negative looping thoughts. Releasing our negativity into the vast ocean is liberating. With fewer negative thoughts to suppress, I feel less and less a need to self medicate with alcohol and marijuana. The less I self medicate, the better I feel, the less I self medicate. Win, win, win.