Q: Is alcohol something we should avoid for overall health and well-being, or does it have some benefits for the body, as some studies have suggested?

A: Alcohol is not harmful to the body in small quantities, but very harmful to the tissues and cells in large amounts. Your question is whether the body is designed to consume alcohol. No, it is not. It is also not designed to consume corn dogs and many other things that don’t have the social stigma that alcohol does, and so you don’t have as much angst around them. The body is designed for proper nutrition to sustain it—fruits, vegetables, grains, and protein—basically, what grows on the earth in great abundance and would continue to grow without any human intervention. You have taken those ingredients and distorted them into all manner of things that can barely be called food. In general, the more processed your food and the more chemical additives it contains, the less in alignment it will be with that which the body needs to sustain itself with utmost health. And if you eat or drink too much of those things, it will quickly work against you in maintaining health. This includes alcohol.

Having a corn dog or a beer every now and then is not going to have a long-term negative effect on the body, although there may be a short-term effect that makes you feel bad. How much is too much depends on the person—everybody is in a different state of toxicity. The more toxic you are, the greater the impact of ingesting low-quality substances.

With alcohol, the feeling of euphoria you get can be beneficial in shifting your mood to joyful and can help you relax when you are feeling much stress, which is also toxic to the body. If you need to shift and are having trouble doing so, a glass of wine, a beer, or a cocktail can be beneficial in terms of the overall impact on your body. That is, you may be adding toxicity via the alcohol, but you are lessening the toxic effects of the stress you feel, and the net result may be positive. But there are also many options to help you make that shift that will also have a detoxing effect on the body, such as exercise, yoga, or meditation. You can choose any one of them, and you have the free will to do so. If you pay attention to your body, it will tell you clearly what is a healthy choice for you and what is not.

Drinking to get drunk is not healthy in any regard. Usually, if you have more than one drink you are  trying to escape some pain that can be dealt with in healthier ways. And once you progress from having a drink with the goal of experiencing a shift to having more drinks with the goal of keeping the artificial euphoria going, then you are steering into the territory of needing the processed substance rather than making a conscious choice to have it. In other words, you start to give up your power to the substance. You go on autopilot rather than being a conscious creator of your life.

Consciousness is Key

Thus, the consciousness you bring to the decision of whether or not to drink is as important as what you ingest, if not more so. Investigate what is driving your decision. How much fear is involved? Is it an act of love of self-love? Be honest with yourself. If you fear that you cannot relax, be social, express your emotions, be open to your loved ones, or be creative without having alcohol in your system, then you are misleading yourself. If frequently after drinking alcohol you find yourself wishing that you hadn’t, that’s a good sign you are invested in one or more lies about why you drink.

It is our absolute promise to you that you will never regret a decision that is in alignment with what is best for your health and well-being. For those who do not like to exercise and perhaps find it difficult or even painful in the moment, the good that you feel afterwards will validate that you made a healthy choice. Sometimes you must tune the body to those things that may be difficult in the moment but are for your highest well-being (including foregoing substances that are not in your best interest). If the muscles are not used to the strain of physical exercise, they will hurt the first few times you do it. But they quickly adapt, and before long they begin to crave the good feeling that results from exercise. The body organism begins to crave it because the memory of the good feeling is in every cell of the body.

By the same token, the cells will crave the euphoria that comes with drinking if you consistently choose it as an artificial means to feel good. But the flip side is that drinking is a sort of time bomb. The euphoria has a limited duration. Then the toxic effects of the chemicals in the alcohol take over, and they last longer than the euphoria. They may well last for a day or more. When you must deal with that, both mentally and physically, it takes energy away from other more productive and beneficial pursuits, and toxicity is compounded.

Summary

If you are looking for us to say whether alcohol is “good” or “bad”, we can’t do that for all situations. First, we don’t judge anything in creation as good or bad. Second, the effect that alcohol has on the body is different for everybody, as are the circumstances and consciousness surrounding the choice to drink. But we will say the following in summary:

• Pay attention to your consciousness prior to and during drinking. Be honest with yourself about why you are doing it—especially if you have more than one drink.
• If there is any fear present in your decision to drink (e.g. fear of not being able to have a good time, not being attractive, not being outgoing enough, not being able to handle what or who is present in your world, etc.), then you are drinking for the wrong reasons and there is a better option for you.
• If you have a drink because you want to shift, there are many other options that can help you do that: exercise, yoga, meditation, laughter, rest, music, creative expression. And none of these things will have a toxic effect on your body or the potential for a hangover—many will detox your body.
• The adage of “everything in moderation” is a good standard to live by if all of the above seems too complicated.
• If it’s difficult for you to make the choice not to drink, remove yourself from the situation, get quiet, and ask to feel Divine Love. As always, love conquers all fear.

As always, seek to make the choices that you intuitively know are in alignment with your highest good.

 

 

Image Credit: ejaugsburg