Contents:
- Introduction
- Is there a healthy alcoholic drink?
- What Vitamins should I take if I consume(d) alcohol?
- Hangover Recovery Drink
- Why do I crave alcohol?
- How do you know if you are an alcoholic?
- The purpose of alcohol in our evolution – Rudolf Steiner’s view
- Astrology and Alcoholism
- Alcohol and the Oral Character Structure
Introduction
Alcohol in small quantities is a stimulant. In large quantities is a sedative. The World Health Organization states 2.5 million deaths per year caused by alcohol. That is almost 4% of all deaths worldwide.
Drinking a lot weakens the immune system and damages the liver. It can lead to fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis, fibrosis, and cirrhosis. It also affects the cardiovascular system causing cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, stroke and high blood pressure.
Is there a healthy alcoholic drink?
While I don’t recommend drinking alcohol, if you plan on having a few drinks, the least unhealthy drink is organic wine with no added sulfites. David Wolfe mentions that you can add Chaga tincture, x factor, resveratrol, phycocyanin and goji berries to your wine to upgrade it!
For beer, is preferable to drink the darker ones since they have more minerals and have a less dramatic effect on blood sugar levels.
What Vitamins should I take if I consume(d) alcohol?
If you drink too much alcohol or are a recovering alcoholic; experts suggest taking folic 
acid and thiamine; always consulting with your physician before taking a new supplement. Alcohol depletes these two compounds in our body. Folic acid is a form of B vitamin which is found in citrus juices and dark leafy greens. It plays a role in repairing DNA and making it as well as producing red blood cells. Not enough folic acid in our body can cause fatigue and a form of anemia that deprives our tissues of oxygen. Red blood cells are responsible for carrying oxygen.
Thiamine is also known as vitamin B1. It’s present in whole grain cereals like brown rice, nuts, dried beans and peas. When consuming grains it’s important to soak them in water to release fidic acid which binds with minerals like Zinc and inhibits their absorption.
Brain regions affected by thiamine deficiency include the cerebellum, mamillary bodies, thalamus, hypothalamus, and brain stem. Thiamine deficiency can lead to three phases in alcoholics: 1. Wernicke’s Encephalopathy (WE) in which people become confused, have muscle weakness and abnormal eye movements. 2. Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (WKS); its associated with a severe amnesia and cognitive impairments. This two conditions respond and can be reversed by thiamine treatment. 3. Dementia is the final phase and it has shown to be untreatable.
David V. Gauvin, a psychopharmacologist, and drug science specialist don’t agree with mega-dosing thiamine because he has found that thiamine injections made people even more sensitive to the effects of alcohol; he thinks that the root cause of this sensitivity is related to the magnesium deficiency that high amounts of thiamine create in the body.
David did see good results with thiamine food supplementation: “When we gave our animals regular food that contained thiamine, they did not develop sensitization to alcohol. The body can naturally absorb and process low-grade doses of thiamine in the gut and the liver. It’s the whopping injections that are problematic. Eating enriched or regular food gives you the thiamine in relatively normal concentrations.”
Hangover Recovery Drink
- Blend a whole melon and drink it.
- David Wolfe’s remedy for hangovers: juice 1 head of romaine lettuce, 1 stalk of broccoli and 1 handful of spinach.
This will help you replenish the B vitamins destroyed by alcohol and you will hopefully feel better.
Why do I crave alcohol?
When we eat too much meat, we might start craving sugar and alcohol. Meat has a contracting effect on us while sugar and alcohol are very expansive, so this is how our body balance itself. For alcohol cravings, we need to focus on eating less meat and cooked foods and drinking more water and eating salads. Remember, sugar increases the alcoholic’s depression and irritability and intensifies the desire to drink to relieve these symptoms.
Other reasons why a person may crave alcohol are to feel more relaxed, outgoing and fun; to feel relieved from emotions or because one is addicted to alcohol. You can read more about healing from alcoholism here.
How do you know if you are an alcoholic?
If you can’t control how much you drink could be a sign of alcoholism. There is the CAGE questionnaire which is an acronym of its four questions. Two “yes” responses indicate that the possibility of alcoholism should be investigated further.
The questionnaire asks the following questions:
Have you ever felt you needed to Cut down on your drinking?
Have people Annoyed you by criticizing your drinking?
Have you ever felt Guilty about drinking?
Have you ever felt you needed a drink first thing in the morning (Eye-opener) to steady your nerves or to get rid of a hangover?
The purpose of alcohol in our evolution – Rudolf Steiner’s view
If our planet has alcohol, it’s because maybe alcohol had a purpose at some point in our evolution. Rudolf Steiner mentions that alcohol helps a person individuate.
According to the bible, Noah was the first wine drinker…later on in the post-Atlantean period a cult arose, a cult that worshiped Dionysus –the God of wine and pleasures. Rudolf saw the emergence of alcohol as a way in which people might be cut off from the connection with the Divine and therefore allow the personal “I am” to emerge; he thought that alcohol could be the connection of a human being with the spirit world that he previously existed in and that in the future of humanity, alcohol will draw men very deeply into materialism and become more egoistic thus claiming the ego (self-direction – full responsibility) for themselves instead of placing it at the order of the whole (which is the opposite than the human group soul which is more about depriving men of the capacity to feel themselves at one with the whole in the spirit world). The Dionysius worship was about living together, intoxicated, a merging into the whole without observing the whole. Until mind kind can find union with their divine spiritual powers, there will be a reaction against alcohol and it is already taking place.
In the same period men being drawn most deeply to egotism through alcohol appeared to have a force stronger than others which could give to them the impulse for finding union with the spiritual whole and for that, men needs to descend to the lowest level in order to become independent and have a strong force to give him the impulse to find the path back. The Christ pointed out that the ego must be independent and said his mission was to point toward a far distant future when men will be brought to union with the Godhead, which is the gift of the independent ego.
Rudolf thought that alcohol is an unnecessary evil in our time; it loses the ability to get along with others and understand them. Alcohol use changes the developed higher forces into forces of personal ego and locks it into itself. By consuming alcohol one prepares the fertile soil for a host of beings, just as a dirty room gets filled with flies.
Meditation pulls the spirit up and loosens its connection with the physical body; alcohol pulls it down and consolidates it in the same.
Astrology and Alcoholism
The planets that are related with alcohol are Jupiter and Neptune. A person with a lot of Jupiter’s influence has an optimistic personality, denies problems or diseases and can’t easily follow a diet or have abstention from alcohol. Jupiter is the planet of excess and the organ related with Jupiter is the liver which is the organ that suffers from alcohol consumption.
Jupiter and Neptune are both associated with spirituality, becoming an alcoholic has to do with not knowing where to draw a limit which is Jupiter’s weak point. The hallucinations which can take place in more serious levels of intoxication or abstinence syndrome can be related with Jupiter which is the planet of the third eye/vision that can get distorted and oriented toward lower astral spaces; in some cases, the monsters that haunt alcoholics are perceptions coming from these spaces.
Neptune is related to universal love, compassion, inspiration and connection with God and spiritual worlds; in the remote past, a period prior to the Atlantean Age, referred as Lemuria, the Earth was different, the atmosphere was thick and humans were softer, like babies or blobs. They perceived by sensing and feeling and had little needs which were satisfied immediately. They didn’t lack, need or want much. There wasn’t a clear sense of individuality and they had a very exalted spiritual life; the fact that they were open to the environment meant that the light could reach them deeply. They didn’t know what was God; they just drifted in a blissful state until the painful separation of sexes awakened them. The spirituality of Lemurian was very “Neptunian”. They lived in a state of complete merging. If alcohol has such a pull on human beings is because it mimics high states of consciousness, like the state the Lemurians had. Humans try to reproduce this Lemurian state by drinking alcohol. This means that there is more to a successful detoxification process than just stop drinking: we need a transition of value from this Lemurian/merged state to a personal world.
Alcohol and the Oral Character Structure
Alcohol can also be related to the need for oral pleasure. Smoking and drinking accomplish that. Psychologically speaking we can use Characterology which explains how each character analysis creates defenses in response to parental wounding. The five primary wounds being humiliation, terror, deprivation, betrayal and rejection. The wound related to deprivation (Oral Characterology) can be related to alcohol since it happens on the oral stage of the infant:
While the child is breastfeeding, he does not only receive milk; he receives contact, warmth, and touch. The mother’s presence gives him the experience of being loved, protected and cared for. This welcoming love received from the mother establishes foundations for the mind and body of the adult to be. Qualities such as self-esteem and confidence come from the motherly love one received as a baby.
The baby’s soul lands from the higher worlds in the mother’s womb and requires a lot of effort to adapt. The baby experiences the first contact with the Earth through the mother and from the time the baby is in the womb to two years after birth there is no clear difference between the mother’s emotional environment and the Earth. He also can’t differentiate his own emotions from his mother’s. The baby doesn’t have any protection against the mother’s emotions; he can receive love more fully than adults but at the same time can be hit very hard by his mother’s negative emotions. His brain is very plastic and impressionable; therefore it is more open to learn and more vulnerable to problems during development. The way parents nurture the child programs his primal brain with a pattern of responses that will determine his future behavior.
The planetary archetype related with the mother is the Moon; it is open, receptive, and creative, often associated with water, body fluids, soft tissues, breasts, brain, uterus and reproductive function.
The child who developed the Oral Characterology had an initial wounding created by a lack of nurturing. His mother may have rushed him while breastfeeding or he was abandoned due to mom’s death, sickness, depression, addictions, or busyness. The child may have been left alone crying for long periods of time with no one responding.
The oral stage is the time when the baby receives pleasure through sucking. When there is not enough of that, the child may have oral cravings and want oral stimulation as an adult. In theory, oral fixations manifest as smoking, alcoholism, nail biting, sexual practices, chewing and eating disorders.
The way the oral characterology can compensate his emptiness and neediness is by care-taking others; this is often observed in children of alcoholics. The child care takes the parent until it becomes too much and then collapses. Only then does he feel like he is allowed to have needs. He allows himself to take in and meet his needs to some degree, sometimes guiltily and very soon returns to the pattern of helping others and denying his own needs.
Sunlight and opening to experiencing direct pleasure and self-nurturance instead of using addictions or numbing substances is a great first step. Warm baths, nourishing food, plenty of water and simple grounding exercises are very useful: standing on one’s own ground.
We can also heal our family lineage and our energetic and haric level (level of intention), with a trained healer and find our true essence and the gift of the addiction is valuable.
Stay well, stay at peace.
Bibliography:
Planetary forces, alchemy and healing, Samuel Sagan
The sun-food diet success system: David Wolfe
Institute for Integrative Nutrition: Joshua Rosenthal
Wikipedia
Rudolph Steiner Archive
Stephen M Johnson, Ph.D.: Character Styles and Characterological transformation
Barbara Brennan