How To Handle the Urge to Drink

All of our actions are guided or manipulated by our emotional state and the feeling inside. For most addicts we have this varied layer of tension that causes us deep pain. The reaching out for external things tonight is just a coping mechanism that we’ve developed because who wants to be in pain all the time?

We get so used to this pattern of pain and then impulse to numb the pain and make it go away as best we can, that it becomes an autopilot response. For most of us we don’t even pause because the pain is so unbearable.

Now, if you listened to the prior podcast, I have taught you that your thoughts create your emotions and thus the vibration or the resistance inside of you and then depending on how often you listen to that urge or impulse, you have developed an emotional, energetic, and mental pattern. We know patterns and autopilot are very easy. Just think of cruise control on your car.

So after bringing awareness and taking the cruise control off of your reactivity to pain impulses, you can learn to release resistance, and walk towards the urge and sit with it.

This is definitely a skill to be practiced, and it is very helpful to set aside time every day if you can for 10 minutes of practice saying, feeling and staying with an unpleasant emotion urge.

For example, if you really have that urge to drink a glass of wine, or slam a beer, set a timer for 10 minutes, and see how much you can breathe and relax your body and imagine walking towards that resistance, that urge. Find a space in your body where you feel the clenching and you feel the tightness and you feel the pain, rather than running away from it.

When we are far away from things we make mountains out of mole hills, and it’s the same thing with these urges. We think that it’s like a monster or a demon inside of us and when we go to AAA meetings or NA meetings they say the same thing. They tell us that we are diseased, and the disease just needs to be managed.

I offer to you that you are completely curable and a normal human being who has just gotten themselves into a destructive pattern.

Having compassion that you have developed this pattern is so important in understanding it very objectively and realizing that there is nothing wrong with you and you are perfectly amazing and so is everyone else, is a great belief to adopt. The more space we can create from ourselves, our true self or conscious self, and our patterns because you’re not a drunk, you are not an alcoholic, you are not a drug addict. You can be thriving after addiction, and actually using your addiction as the greatest gift that has ever been given.

So, there are different methods of walking towards the urge. I had discussed journeying on this podcast before and that is an excellent way to go towards your emotions. Another way is taking a yoga posture specifically a heart opening yoga posture. There is power in the poses and energetically you can correct and release some of this pain. So it’s not so unbearable.

You have heard me talk recently about how the heart is 10 times stronger with electromagnetic energy than the brain, so we can use the body as a bus to open up to allow the energy to pass and it doesn’t take that long with a focused effort.

We practice the act of surrender. And this is something that needs to be practiced for sure. In yoga, even someone who has been doing yoga for 20 years, it is still a practice. Life is the same way it is a series of lessons and we practice and we get a little bit better every time.

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