. I needed to reframe my relationship with alcohol. But I wasn’t yet sure what that meant. Was that full abstinence? Did I need to start attending AA meetings? Did I need to seek out professional help? Or would I be able to simply drink more responsibly with mindfulness and intention?
You could say that between the exhaustion, weight gain, and increasing frequency of negative thinking, I had become sober curious. Should I go to AA like my brother, sister-in-law, and a good buddy of mine? Did I need that kind of help? I was certainly open to the idea. Especially since I had noticed a new drinking motivation arising: drinking to relieve hangovers.
Enter meditation & RAIN. I started daily meditation practice exactly 157 days ago (as of the publication of this blog). And it’s been quite a journey. At day 35, I completely stopped smoking pot after being a near daily smoker for over two decades. By day 90 I had gone from drinking 5 nights a week to twice a month, and drinking half as much in a sitting (from 7-10 beers to 2-4). By day 140, I had lost 26 pounds.
What I soon found was that having to actually write things down brought with it a whole new level of accountability. If I had previously written that I wanted achieve a “Twice Lucky”, and I had thoughts of buying some beer along the way, I suddenly had second thoughts. I didn’t want to face my journal having written one thing and gone and done another. It exposed my habit of lying to myself about my use disorder in technicolor!
Funny enough, it turns out that many of the world’s most famous and wealthiest entrepreneurs never attended college or dropped out. This list includes such luminaries as: Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, and Bill Gates. These billionaires were all too busy starting and scaling successful businesses to, as Mark Twain famously quipped, “let schooling interfere with *their* education.”