Never doubt common sense!
Make your drinking buddy your meditation buddy & your drinking time will be more about celebrating life than avoiding it.
‘Stress drinking’ is a coping mechanism in that alcohol can be a short-term sedative when you’re really wound up over something in your life. Excessive drinking or self-medicating as a lifestyle can become an unconscious habit that sneaks up on you by repetitive avoidance of one single issue.
You can reach the point of continuously avoiding any troublesome situation because it’s just so damn easy to instantly feel good as if the problem’s gone away. If the over-drinking habit is not addressed your body will reflect the health consequences over the years, not including hangovers.
How meditation helps is by relieving the relaxation load that several glasses of wine or doobies or tablets serve, thereby decreasing the amount of those substances needed to cross the relaxation threshold.
It’s not to say that you need to quit cold turkey or join AA, because meditation is a gentle process where you may not notice the subtle changes in your drinking habits. Plus, you will be able to enjoy the drinking experience more and in a more leisurely fashion than chugging brewskis just to get to the buzz.
Also, meditation creates its own high that comes with practice and helps the body to offset the health complications that arise from substance abuse.
