Hey, it’s Molly from alcohol minimalist. What do you do in this October? I would love to have you join me in my more sober October challenge. What do I mean by more sober October, it simply means that we’re going to add in more alcohol free days than you currently been doing, whether that’s one or two or 31. It’s up to you, you get to set your own goal and that’s why it’s more sober October. You can check it out and learn more at get got sunnyside.co/molly It’s totally free. I’ve got prizes, I’m going to be going live every week to announce the prize winners. And it’s just going to be an awesome event. So I would love to have you join me. You can learn more at get.sunnyside.co/molly and you can get registered today. Welcome to the alcohol minimalist podcast. I’m your host Molly watts. If you want to change your drinking habits and create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, you’re in the right place. This podcast explores the strategies I use to overcome a lifetime of family alcohol abuse, more than 30 years of anxiety and worry about my own drinking and what felt like an unbreakable daily drinking habit. Becoming an alcohol minimalist means removing excess alcohol from your life. So it doesn’t remove you from life. It means being able to take alcohol or leave it without feeling deprived. It means to live peacefully, being able to enjoy a glass of wine without feeling guilty and without needing to finish the bottle. With Science on our side will shatter your past patterns and eliminate your excuses. Changing your relationship with alcohol is possible. I’m here to help you do it. Let’s start now. Well hello and welcome or welcome back to the alcohol minimalist podcast with me your host Molly Watts coming to you from a very warm Oregon still, I left the state went to the great state of Wisconsin had a great time visiting with my family, my all my nieces, my nephew, my grand nieces, my grand nephew, and even my own kids big family reunion that we did, really in honor of my late father. So it was super awesome to see everyone including my niece from Australia. And while I was there, I knew it was gonna be hot in Oregon got back and it was like over 100 degrees. And our air conditioner is out in the house. So super fun. We’ve been got fans everywhere set up in the house we’re living we’re living it we’re doing it supposed to be in the 80s this weekend. So that will be nice a relief from 100 degrees. And hopefully my air conditioner will be fixed repaired here in the not too distant future. I am going to be into our summer content series here again this week. But before we get there, I’ve got a couple of things. First of all, I have a prize winner. I think I forgot to do a prize winner for a couple of weeks. But we’ve got one this week. And it is Melanie and Melanie, you left a review of breaking the bottle legacy over on Amazon. And she says love all the neuroscience research Molly has done she has done an amazing job breaking down the research behind discovering why we do what we do. In this case, a habit of having a drink or two plus, you are capable of breaking away from the thoughts you’ve had instilled since a child, Molly gives step by step guidance on how you can retrain your brain and build a new story for your life. It is not necessary to completely abstain from alcohol. And this book will show you how to design your own story with alcohol. Thank you, Melanie I love that’s what you got out of reading breaking the bottle legacy. I hope that that is working for you. And if you would like to be a prize winner, just like Melanie, all you got to do is leave a review of this podcast wherever you listen to podcast or a review of the book anywhere you’ve read it and or even a comment on a YouTube video. And that is where i i find the people who’ve done all that I entered them into the random prize generator and it spits out a name and today it was Melanie. So Melanie, if you would like to email me, Molly at Molly watts.com. I will send you out your alcohol minimalist swag. Also, another little bit of housekeeping. I was supposed to be doing a live webinar on Friday, August 18. How to Stop Worrying and start changing your drinking because of some internet connectivity issues up there in the North Woods of Wisconsin. I wasn’t able to connect neat things that I had anticipated doing ahead of time. So I pushed back the webinar to Friday, August 25. So if you are listening to this podcast episode on the day or there abouts that it releases on Wednesday, August 23. You still can get signed up go to webinars dot Molly watts.com. And come join me this Friday coming on Friday August 25. For a live masterclass on How to Stop Worrying and start changing your drinking. You have to be signed up ahead of time to be able to watch the replay even if you can’t be there live. You’re also going to get for for signing up a free PDF calendar I have my peaceful process planning calendar, which I’m going to talk about during that during that live masterclass and show you what I mean and how to use it. But you got to sign up so webinar dot Molly watts.com to get yourself on the list or email me Molly at Molly watts.com If you have any questions, and I hope to see many of you there without further ado, here is this week’s summer content series episode this is Rory can Sela Rory came on the show this year. He is a meditation teacher in Australia. He has a program called the wise monkey way, where he helps people use meditation to change their relationship with alcohol. Now, Rory and the person that he’s interviewing on this particular episode that I’m sharing Claire Robbie are both meditation teachers and they both help people change their relationship with alcohol but really to eliminate alcohol from their lives. I think there’s still so much to be learned from meditation and from using it as a tool to change our drinking habits regardless of whether or not you choose to be completely alcohol free, or include alcohol in your life in a minimal way. Many of the people that I talked to struggle with anxiety and meditation is such an effective tool. So I know there’s a lot to be learned from both Rory and Claire, and this podcast is his from his older podcast called not quite alcoholic, and I think you’re really gonna enjoy it. There’s so much to like I said we can hear in the stories from people who have used mind tools to help them change their relationship with alcohol. And I loved listening to Rory I loved having him on the show. Enjoy. Rory can Sela and Claire Robbie. And I will see you next week. Have a great week. Wherever you are. Stay cool. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by my friend Claire Robbie. Claire is a meditation and yoga teacher based in New Zealand who is the founder of the School of Modern meditation where she teaches awareness insight meditation. Claire also runs the reset program, a 90 day program that helps people reset their relationship with alcohol and is the founder of no beer, who cares events. And Claire had a key part to play in my journey of quitting alcohol after we met on a meditation retreat in Mexico in 2017. Claire, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you it was a it’s an accidental part of your journey. It was an inspirational part, which we may cover in a bit. But to start with, yeah. Could you tell us a bit about your your history of alcohol or maybe your earliest relationship with alcohol? Sure. So growing up in New Zealand, I had a very social upbringing. My parents were very social people. We did lots of outdoor stuff, lots of barbecues, we spent heaps of time on lakes and beaches, and with my cousins and my aunties and uncles, and everyone drank, everyone drank quite a bit. I didn’t realize it was quite a bit until I reflected upon that as a sober adult. But essentially, my parents drank quite normally compared to all the people around them. And so I grew up with social drinking and binge drinking being very normalized. And I feel like I drank like a pretty regular teenager. So around about 1617 I started going to parties and binge drinking at those parties and experimenting with other sort of recreational drugs as well. And then when I went to university, pretty standard, lots of drinking there, not much studying. It was at university also that I started to feel a bit lost in my life. I didn’t know what to study at university I had done really well at school, as debating captain and I really loved school and I really loved learning but when it came to starting university, which is kind of its spected of me to go to uni. I ended up studying ancient Polit ancient history and Russian politics, which I found useful was really interesting. But exactly, completely unusable unless I wanted to be an archaeologist was something along those lines, which I didn’t. And so I think I started to drift a bit there. And then when I did finish university, I ended up just going straight to Japan, and worked as an English teacher, and the culture there for English teachers in Japan, this is 20 years ago, was you worked hard, and you earn lots of money, but then you partied hard. And it was also the first time in my life. So I was 21 that I lived away from my parents, and so not that they were overly controlling. But you know, they were around in the periphery throughout my adolescence. And so things started to get even messier with my drinking, and also my drug taking. And I thought it was really cool. Like, I thought I was really cool, too. I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy. And I’ve always had a lot of male friends. And so I always wanted to keep up with the dude’s name from Japan, I moved to Shanghai. And, and in Tokyo, actually, I started working for radio station. And the media world is also heavily saturated with alcohol. So that, you know, fuel on the fire of my drinking habits. And then the same thing happened in Shanghai where I was earning really good money and a place where alcohol was incredibly cheap. And you could live this lavish lifestyle are still very, very young, early 20s. Live this incredibly lavish lifestyle, all my friends were older than me. And they were all very glamorous Europeans. And so again, I kind of kept up with them. With lots of champagne, and I thought, again, I thought it was so cool. And throughout this time, I got myself in serious trouble. I made lots of decisions that were really irresponsible, dangerous for a young woman overseas, and made some choices that really could have put my life in danger. And in a way I thought I was a feminist. I was like this powerful feminist who would do anything. Have these crazy nights out end up in places that Oh, my mum would my mum would just die if she heard some of the things that I got up to. So I got to about 25 And I came back to New Zealand for a wedding. And waiting. I as what happens at Kiwi weddings within my group of friends, you get shit faced. And at the wedding and my very high shows and my teeny tiny dress. I tripped over and I landed on my own champagne float, broken champagne flute and I severed my patellar tendon completely. And I was rushed to hospital had to go through emergency surgery. I couldn’t move back to Shanghai because it was such a serious injury. And that didn’t dampen down my drinking. But that got me into yoga. Yeah, so this injury was the gateway into yoga for me. So I started doing Bikram yoga to heal this really serious leg injury and then in New Zealand, so I moved on my staff back to New Zealand and went back to Shanghai with this moon boat, pick up all my stuff. Come back to New Zealand. I even had a massive night out in this moon boot and Shanghai. And I got a job as a reporter at a local TV station here. Again, that was an industry that absolutely encouraged us to drink together. So we worked really hard together. We were a team, and then we would party hard together. That’s how you bonded with your bosses, your workmates, the camera people. And compared to many of the people around me, I didn’t drink as much so it never crossed my mind that my drinking was problematic. Even after that injury, even after all the terrible mistakes and sleeping with people that I never would have slept with sober. Never thought it was problematic until I moved to the United States. So a few years after all this after working in New Zealand for a couple of years. Me and my then husband divorced, moved to Los Angeles and I couldn’t get a job because I didn’t have the right visa for a couple of years. And my husband worked in the media and we had a very intense lifestyle. We we traveled for his job we partied hard And since I couldn’t work again, that kind of drifting came in, and I had gone from, I absolutely loved being a journalist love being a reporter. So going from a job that I actually saw a real future for myself in having to give that up to move to the states was actually incredibly hard, incredibly hard for me. And it took a long time for me to get over that, but not having a sense of purpose, and having drugs and alcohol readily available. And also not really understanding my own mental health, I had no idea that drinking and drugs had an effect on your mental health. And I started to experience some pretty deep waves of depression. And I was anxious a lot of the time. But I didn’t know it. I just thought I was dramatic and moody thought that was my personality. And I also didn’t notice the cyclical nature of my moods, I didn’t know how intertwined they were with my hormones and my hormonal shifts, because I went from being drunk to hangover, so regularly. So over in the States, things started to get really, really dark. And it’s what I call my rock bottom. What happened to me over the air, I actually went through a period where I started contemplating suicide, which was very like the flashes, the suicidal ideations would come into my mind. And I’d be so shocked by them. But I didn’t want to tell my parents, I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about it. I didn’t know the correlation between alcohol and drugs and mental health. Because this is 15 years ago, when it wasn’t as widely talked about, as it is now. And I just started feeling really, really confused. Because externally, my life was really good. You know, we traveled and we lived in Los Angeles. And we did all these amazing things. At that stage, I had actually got my green card, and I had started working for a private rooftop Club, which is very dangerous territory for someone like me. And so I did have a job. But I was working with celebrities and Hollywood people. And it wasn’t particularly satisfying, although it was exciting. So these flashes used to come in and just got to be have had had started having panic attacks every single night almost. And part of me just knew I had to change something. And I didn’t know what so literally, in the space of a week, I left my husband quit my job, packed all my clothes into my car and drove off into Los Angeles, not knowing where I was going to go. Fortunately, a girlfriend let me stay with her for a while. And I often attributed a lot of my drinking habits to my ex husband. Because he was a heavy drinker, and really like partying and as an I used to blame him for a lot of the decisions or the situations that I found myself in. But after I left, I was still doing that stuff for about a month afterwards. And so they came a point after one particular night out where I lost both my phones, spent the last cent of my money ended up somewhere that I didn’t even know how I got there. And that’s what I kind of call my rock bottom moment where I was like, oh, gotta stop this. This is awful. This is not who you are. And and, you know, that was actually a regular night out, used to lose stuff all the time. But it came to a point for me where I just had enough. And the people I was hanging out with didn’t think it was that bad either, you know, just another night out. But for me, I was like, No, I’m making all these changes, you’ve left your husband, you’ve quit your job, you have to stop drinking. And from that, so that’s about 12 years ago now. From that point, I never did drugs again, which I’m incredibly proud of. And I stopped drinking for two years. And at the same time a miracle occurred and that a friend of mine was doing a yoga teacher training. And even though I’ve only done a little bit of Bikram yoga, and I did not call myself a yogi, but I was not a yogi by any stretch of the imagination. I decided to do that teacher training predominant because it was on the weekends. And weekends were my hairy time. And I thought if I can go to this on the weekends and have something to do, maybe I would be able to keep myself out of trouble. And it worked. It worked If I went to that first teacher training, amazing teacher by the name of Jay Cole, who has a studio in Los Angeles, and I started learning about the practice of yoga, the lifestyle of yoga, the philosophy, the science, the discipline, part of yoga was also a meditation. And at this time in my life, I was fortunate enough to now be completely untethered to anything. And I was able to fully immerse myself in the yoga community, and then eventually, the meditation app or meditation community, in Malibu at the lake shrine center. And for the first time in my life, I started understanding that there was this inner landscape of sensation. And it was governed by deep conditioning, and also how a lot of the choices I were making were unconscious rather than conscious, and how I’ve been asleep most of my life rather than awake and present. And for some reason, and the reason I can’t, I can’t even really describe the poll that kept me on this path. Because historically, I’d been very flaky. And I try something and I give up. But I was able to practice these things that I was starting to be taught by some of the best teachers in the world, consistently. And regularly. So for two years, I stopped drinking, started applying these practices. At the two year mark, though, I had a beer. And it was disgusting. And I remember having this beer and feeling myself almost leave my body. So this is after two years of being present, present through some absolute turmoil, mental emotional, and physical turmoil going through my divorce, figuring out how to live by myself. Living in Los Angeles, basically broke most of the time. And processing all this deep, deep conditioning and stress that had that was in my body. That beer wasn’t a good time, but for some reason, for the next couple of years, I drank a bit. I never drank the same. I was never able to drink like I used to drink. But I had a rubber arm. So if everyone around me was drinking, I’d have a couple of drinks, even though the mental chatter of like, don’t do this, while you’re doing this, it’s going to backup your practices. Because meditating in the morning after I’d had two wines was a ship time. I was navigating my practices around drinking. So if I knew I was going out, and I had to get everything in, before I went out. So what was what was the trigger for that? For the beer after two years? A sunny day, I think something as simple as a sunny day. It was no emotional turmoil. It was just it was really at the two year mark. And as that you’ve done two years, well done, you pat yourself on the back and have a beer. Yeah, you’ve got it. You can have a beer now. All that peripheral noise of the ego, trying to pull me back into my old ways. And it sort of kind of worked. But I really didn’t drink the same until it got a little bit worse and hairy when I had my son. I’ve got an eight year old now. And I didn’t love the first few months of motherhood, I have to say I found it very grueling. And I lived with my parents. So I so cut a long story short, I met a man in America, we very quickly decided to have a baby the relationship didn’t work out. I came back to New Zealand as a single mum lived with my parents didn’t feel that cool about that. And I’d get to five o’clock in the afternoon, my mum and pour herself a wine, have a couple of sips and tip it out because she no longer drinks much as much at all. But oh, fuck it switch clear, would have that first wine, and then another, and then sometimes another and it would sort of mute the the discomfort that it accumulated being at home with a baby all day. So that didn’t last too long. Thank goodness. And five years ago, I on a New Year’s Eve. I decided after that New Year’s Eve I had I had one drink that New Year’s Eve and I was surrounded by people who are just off their faces. And I was looking at the room just thinking what are you doing? Why are you drinking this disgusting Espresso Martini that you’re not even enjoying? And the reason in my head that popped into my head was because everyone else is at And I was like, well, that is a shitty, terrible reason, put it down. And I woke up on the first of January. And I was like, No, I’m done. And I didn’t put any parameters around it. But I did put a post on Facebook. And I said, I’m gonna give up drinking for another year. I just, I just put a year there. Does anyone want to do it with me? And by the end of the day, I’d had 80 People message me and saying, Yeah, I want to do that too. Amazing. And so I thought, oh, there’s something in this be lovely to do it with a group of people, because last time it had been quite lonely. And so we met in a bar in January, and nobody is who cares was formed. So we’d meet once a month in a bar, have our soda water or ginger beer. And this time, five years ago, at bars in New Zealand, your choices were real slim with non alcoholic beverages. So it was a Diet Coke or a ginger beer. Now, oh my gosh, it’s amazing. There’s all sorts of mocktails and kombucha on tap and all sorts of amazing things that we would hang out, I’d always do a little guided meditation, the beginning and the middle of the bar. Because this really was a mindfulness experience for me. And yeah, these events grew and grew and grew. And by the middle of the year, we had like 200 people coming to our socializing sober events. And so yeah, it was it was really, really cool. And I did that for a couple of years, until I got a bit of burnout, running those events. And then I started working with people one on one, helping them reset their relationship with alcohol about three years into my sobriety, teaching people the things that were working for me, because that second time giving up drinking, so the stretch, which has been five years, although I never like to get smug, never like to get smug about it, because who knows what’s around the corner or what might trigger something. And I feel like not being too smug. Keeps you present and the experience. Yeah, a couple of years ago, I started working with people teaching them the things that were working for me and helping me process the things that would come up that would trigger a desire for a drink. And it’s been incredibly satisfying and fun. And I’ve just met some amazing people through working on this with people. Yeah, amazing. A just a quick break to talk with you for a minute about Sunnyside. You’ll hear me talk about it on the show often. And it really is my number one recommendation for a mindful drinking app. People use this tool in my groups in my classes, and they tell me all the time, how much they really appreciate the fact that Sunnyside is a very positive reinforcement. And what I mean by that is that when you track your drinks, and let’s just say you planned for one drink and you ended up having to, if you’re honest and you track that second drink, you’re not going to get a message that shames you in any way or reprimands you, you’re actually going to get positive reinforcement for tracking a drink that you didn’t plan on and some ideas of some suggestions for going and grabbing a snack or getting some water. Sunnyside is like having a coach in your pocket. And I love that you can try it for a 15 day free trial go to www.sunnyside.co/molly that gets started today. So what are the kind of pillars of that process of the things that work for you? Well, this time around, it genuinely has been easy. That’s not to say I haven’t had not being smug. No, it’s been it’s been relatively straightforward with no smugness, because in the back of my mind, I do have moments where I’m like, oh, wouldn’t it be nice just to have a beer in the sun? Or Oh, I wonder what that wine tastes like. And I’ll imagine, you know, having that drink. And I remember because I met you in Mexico. I think I was urine was an eye. Yeah, cuz that was Yeah. Yeah. So I was a year into this process. And that was my first New Year’s sober, which, for this period, Fortunately, we were with a group of meditators. And it’s an alcohol free retreat. Anyway, although there was a bar, so I could have had a drink. People did if I remember correctly. Yeah, we were those sneaky little drinks. And I was really excited to pass that milestone. But I do remember leading up to that retreat, I’d had this moment where I’d had a really stressful day. And I was sitting in meditation. And I imagined like after the retreat in Mexico, going to Cabo and just drinking heaps of margaritas and doing heaps of cocaine and how crazy and, and I used to call it like the oblivion, you know, just wanting that Oblivion, because that was why I drank to escape for that oblivion. And playing out in my head, what that would be like, and I’ve actually found that’s been one of the most powerful tools you can use in your sobriety, is to go into the minutiae of, like, if you really feel like having a drink, or you’ve got something coming up and event that usually you would drink hat, you visualize the whole process, having the drink, what you would drink, how many you’d have what you’d start to behave like the decisions you’d make, what you’d eat, how you feel in the Uber coming home, what your sleep would be, like, waking up how you feel. And then you go backwards, and you do the whole thing, making a different choice, making the choice not to have a drink. And even though it may feel harder, and there’s the awkwardness, and then there’s the feeling like you’re the odd one out, that drive home is going to feel very different, that sleep is going to be markedly different waking up in the morning, you are going to have that little glimmer of, yes, I did it a little without smugness, little glimmer of, Oh, I did it. And then the day that’s ahead of you is an entirely different day than if you’d made that slightly different choice at the beginning. And what’s interesting, from my learnings of running my six steps course group course at the moment is that, you know, everyone feels this awkward period is when you arrive somewhere and everyone’s ordering their first drinks, and they’re getting excited about what cocktail they’re going to have and all that it’s actually quite a short period of time, maybe even 10 minutes. Once you get get over there, and you order your first drink, whatever it is, you know, your soda, soda and lime or whatever it might be, then that’s done, then you’re just being consistent with that decision you’ve already made. And we will like to be consistent. And it’s such it’s not like you have to hold on for six hours straight, you know, on that roller coaster. If you get over that 10 minutes or half an hour, however long is because there’s there’s an inbuilt anxious period social anxiety built in events anyway. Because you don’t know where you are. You don’t know who’s who. That which I used to think is, it’s the alcohol that cures that. It’s not it’s the time that cures that if you’re there for half an hour, then you start feeling at home. Isn’t that amazing? Yeah. When you realize that I remember the first. So when I first gave up drinking, and I would go to dinners, and I would feel so anxious that I’d hold on to the table so that I wouldn’t have a drink. I’d grip the table. And what I started to realize was it wasn’t just me feeling anxious. It was the whole energetic quality of the group. Anxious anticipation, whatever it is, whatever however you want to describe it. And then once they had had a drink, the whole energy kind of depressed down. And you started to relax as well. It was profound once I realized, okay, yep, I just have to get past everyone having their first drink. And then everything will be fine. Yeah. Which is so interesting. And once you’ve had a taste of that, it’s like, ah, mazing, which is a classic, classic limiting belief that you know, we need alcohol to relax. We don’t. So let’s talk a little bit about how, like, I love that part of your story where you announced it on Facebook, and then it became a group, a group event. So how, how sharing your story, you know, because this was a kind of a beginning part, you were saying I’m announcing announcing this year of alcohol, how sharing your story and making it more of a public shared thing, how that helped with your journey. I think for me, accountability is really really huge. It works for some people. It doesn’t work for others, but for me if I to say something publicly, because of my pride, whatever it is, I am going to follow that through. And then also, I started to feel responsible for a lot of the other people who were in the group. So I really wanted to, it’s not like I was carrying them all. But I didn’t want to let anyone down. I wanted people to see that it was possible. I wanted people to see the truth that it wasn’t easy all the time. Even though this time for me, it was relatively straightforward. And I think it probably was a lot more straightforward. Because I publicly announced it, I had this group of people who were keen, and there was no way I was going to have a drink. The desire was there every now and then. But I no longer fit the desire, I would stay present with the desire. And so meditation has been. It’s it’s one of the pillars definitely within the program that I run, but for anyone wanting to shift, a habit that they have done unconsciously, for a long period of time, self awareness is at the foundation of that. So I was aware that if I had the sensation of wanting to have a drink, and then the thoughts if I stayed with it, and I stay present to it. And I didn’t have the drink, which essentially represses and locks the feeling within you if I let it have its full expression. And I made a different choice, which was just to stay. Then over time, it dissipated. And so I wait for maybe the first year craving a drink 20 times the next year 10. The next year? I don’t know eight. And then I honestly couldn’t tell you the last time i Last time I really felt like a drink. Because as soon as I haven’t seen alcohol now, my body just goes, no, no, thank you. And I don’t know if that will last forever. But that’s what my situation is now. And just like they’re saying, I do take this one day at a time. Yeah. So yeah, meditation is obviously a huge part of what what we do and and how we help people move away from alcohol as being that crutch, it’s a different way to relax a different way to you know, remove those stresses rather than numbing them. Let the alcohol does, it’s a way of actually removing them, and it can be uncomfortable as they come up. But it’s also because I teach a transcending type of meditation, as you know, it is a way of reaching a void in a different way. And it’s that way of going right, I can switch off for a little bit turned my lap laptop in my mind off. So we have meditation, and I presume yoga as part of your daily routine, what are the things form part of your daily routine that support your sobriety? Meditation is absolutely and utterly the predominant Foundation, my yoga practice over the years is softened quite substantially. And even though I do practice maybe four or five times a week, it’s not as intense or as physical, as it used to be. I think working with people who are giving up drinking is actually a really powerful tool for me, being able to recognize the patterns and the traits and actually feel what other people are experiencing and how hard it is for them to let go of this habit. Makes me never ever want to go back there. Yeah, I don’t really, I just I really think my meditation practice which is my meditation practice is ever so slightly to a trend ascending technique where you actually go into the sensation and which I kind of describe meditation as the absolute opposite of drinking for me. So, instead of avoiding the discomfort, which when you think about why people drink and you know the intention behind why people are drinking, it is always to shift, a sensation, whether it be to feel more relaxed, to feel calmer, to feel connected, to feel less awkward, to feel excited. Essentially what you’re doing is trying to change the present moment and The nature of alcohol is that it mutes sensation, essentially, and actually represses it and locks it into your system. Whereas when I meditate, it’s the complete opposite. It is absolutely lasering in on the discomfort and making friends with it. And that means when you go into situations you know, social situation, we naturally you start to feel discomfort instead of wanting to do anything to take you away from this company go, oh, I recognize you. upset with you before I can do this now. So meditation, working with people and really recognizing the sameness. So seeing myself and every single one of these people is really helpful as well. And then just exercise trying to eat as well as I can, basically trying to make the best choices I can in my life, I do adhere to the yamas and niyamas. So these are these yogic principles sort of codes of conduct. So the first couple, Satya, which is truthfulness towards be truthful, Ahimsa to not harm. So I try to live in a way that doesn’t harm me. And alcohol obviously does, so can’t drink. And the other is is other santosha contented to practice appreciation and being content with what is happening is another you know, there’s there’s 10, yamas and niyamas. But I just have these codes of conduct my meditation practice and being of service essentially, that means I am responsible not just to me and my son, but also the people that I’m helping because there is no way I want to be a hypocrite with this. You know, I want to embody what I’m guiding people through. Yeah, 100% And it’s like, we can’t sit here as meditation teachers who run courses, helping people quit alcohol and just be like, Oh, should I have a drink? No, no, no way. That’s the best thing you can do. Just set yourself up as a quit alcohol meditation teacher. Thank you for listening to the alcohol minimalist podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping you change your drinking habits and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Use something you learned in today’s episode and apply it to your life this week. Transformation is possible. You have the power to change your relationship with alcohol. Now, for more information, please visit me at www dot Molly watts.com