After the “excess” of Christmas comes the reckoning. And it’s not just in our bank balance that we feel it. The New Year is also a time for confronting our addictions in other ways. Hence people include “losing weight”, “getting fit” and “less chocolate” on their to-do lists. Food has tended to figure high for ages, but alcohol consumption has been a more recent addition, no doubt fuelled by the high levels of town-centre and youth drunkenness recently and the rising warnings of the dangers to one’s health not just of drinking binges but also long-term, steady consumption.

It is quite sobering, pardon the pun, to read for example of the symptoms, or rather lack of them, for the onset of liver disease. What I was struck by was that people are likely to be laregly unaware of any potential life-threatening risk until quite late on. Hence not surprisingly people are mow warning us to not just cut down but cut it out for parts of each week.

“What!” you might think, “Can’t I have at least some pleasure?” I can almost hear the puritan preacher in the pulpit warning of hellfire and damnation, or those Hogarth engravings of the Idle Apprentice, or of Gin Lane, both in 18th Century London.

However, part of my family is Catholic and Irish, so there’s a mixed heritage. As a lover of a glass of good wine, I’m aware of the challenges of steady drinking myself, albeit at a small level, and have found it helps to abstain except at weekends when I choose a good bottle of wine to enjoy. But I noticed the effort initially required and when engaged in that effort became aware of the subtle power of the bottle. For example, drinking was habitual, like it formed a distinctive and pleasureable part of the evening, and not to have a drink left, initially a sense of something missing. However, it could be subtler than that, because alcohol deadens the senses and gives a short-term lift. So, rather than rely on my own inbuilt or developed ways to manage my state, I was using something artificial. And alcohol stays in the system a long time, and thus there’s a long time that it is limiting one’s awareness.

Now for a lot of people, that has a value, one they may not be aware of, that cuts them off to some degree from how they feel, for example if you want to avoid something difficult. But you can see how tempting it is to become over-dependent of this prop to avoid facing our challenges.

Looked at another way, using alcohol even at low levels, such as I am writing about, is limiting our ability to tune inside and be aware of the subtle, powerful and very positive forces within us, for example that still, small voice within that speaks to us of our higher purpose, that seeks to remind us of Who we really Are, that senses when something is true or not true for us, that is tugging at our sleave saying, “You are so much more than all this.” It is like an amnesiac, blotting out our awareness for parts of the day to some extent. It’s like we’re escaping that which potentailly offers us bliss. Ironic.

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