The Not Drinking Alcohol Today Podcast
Meg and Bella discuss the ups and downs of navigating an alcohol free life in Australia's alcohol centric culture. This highly rated podcast, featuring in Australia's top 100 self improvement podcasts, is a must for those that are trying to drink less alcohol but need some motivation, are curious about sober life or who are sober but are looking for some extra reinforcement. The Not Drinking Alcohol Today pod provides an invaluable resource to keep you motivated and on track today and beyond. Meg and Bella's guests include neuroscientists, quit-lit authors, journalists, health experts, alcohol coaches and everyday people who have struggled with alcohol but have triumphed over it. Our aim is to support and inspire you to reach your goals to drink less or none at all! Meg and Bella are This Naked Mind Certified Coaches (plus nutritionists and counsellors respectively) who live in Sydney.
The Not Drinking Alcohol Today Podcast
Rory Kinsella: Why Meditation Might Be the Missing Piece in Your Sobriety Puzzle
Rory Kinsella, musician, Vedic meditation teacher and sober coach, reveals how finding inner stillness helped him transform his relationship with alcohol and eventually quit completely. He now teaches others to do the same. We discuss:
• Growing up in alcohol-centric UK culture where drinking was normalised from teenage years and how that lifestyle continued for a while in Sydney
• Rory's progression to an alcohol-free life and how discovering Vedic meditation changed his relationship with stress
• Using meditation during "witching hour" to interrupt the stress-drinking cycle, and
• Developing a coaching approach that celebrates progress over perfection
RORY KINSELLA
https://www.rorykinsellameditation.com/
https://www.wisemonkeyway.com/
Rory offers pre-recorded online programs, live online group programs, one-on-one meditation teaching and sober coaching.
MEG
Web: https://www.meganwebb.com.au/
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/meganwebbcoaching/
Unwined Bookclub: https://www.alcoholfreedom.com.au/unwinedbookclub
ConnectAF group coaching: https://www.elizaparkinson.com/groupcoaching
BELLA
Web: https://isabellaferguson.com.au
Insta: @alcoholcounsellorisabella
Bi-Yearly 6-Week Small Group Challenges: Learn more: https://www.isabellaferguson.com.au/feb-2025-challenge
Free Do I Have A Drinking Problem 3 x Video Series: https://resources.isabellaferguson.com.au/offers/JTFFgjJL/checkout
Free HOW DO I STOP DRINKING SO MUCH Masterclass: https://resources.isabellaferguson.com.au/offers/7fvkb3FF/checkout
Online Alcohol Self-Paced Course: https://resources.isabellaferguson.com.au/offers/fDzcyvWL/checkout...
On the Not Drinking Alcohol Today podcast, we're welcoming Rory Kinsella. Rory is a Vedic meditation teacher and sober coach based in Sydney, although, as I would imagine, he would have clients all around the world. Rory has been alcohol-free since 2017 and is now a passionate advocate of helping others to well meditate and quit alcohol. A huge welcome to you, rory.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Isabella. Great to be on the show. Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. Look, I'm so glad that you're here because I know sitting in stillness, I know meditation is really important to being present, de-stressing so many good things this mindfulness practice that we're all told to engage in, but it's often elusive for many, many people, and I'm also finding it's hard to stumble across a good teacher, so I'm really thrilled you're here. Roy, before we get started or really focusing in on the meditation piece, I'd love to hear a bit about your life before meditation made an entrance into it. What did it look like? What was going on for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, as you mentioned, I live in Sydney, but I'm originally from the UK, so I grew up in, you know, quite an alcohol centric culture, as Australia is too, but I think maybe England is even more so. So my teenage years were about sneaking out of the house, going to house parties, drinking, getting into pubs. We were allowed in pubs at like 15. This was back in the day. I'm going to show my age here. This was back in the day when we had paper driving licenses in the UK.
Speaker 1:Same same, I'm 1975. What are you, rory?
Speaker 2:77.
Speaker 1:There you go. I can actually remember having Aaron out there on his printer print out a fake and stamped it with original and I just use that. There you go.
Speaker 2:That brought back memories, remember their date of birth, and then the really sneaky bouncers would say what's your star sign? And that would, that would trip you up and they didn't know what month was what star sign. But if you, if you kind of stumbled over it, they were like right, you're not coming in.
Speaker 1:I can remember those moments. That is so funny so.
Speaker 2:So. So drinking from an early age. And then that you know university experience in in the uk, which so in the UK most people go away to university. So you're living in halls of residence, you're living in chair houses, perfectly normal to drink heavily. And then that led seamlessly into my 20s where I, as we were talking before you press record, I've got lots of guitars behind me which you won't be able to hear.
Speaker 1:It just looks so good, so organized.
Speaker 2:But I was. Yeah, my dream was to be a rock star when I was a teenager, like your 15-year-old son.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was fortunate enough to get a little taste of that when when I was joined a signed band when I was 22 and spent the next few years recording an album touring around the UK, having this weird episode where we were semi-famous in northern Italy for a couple of years goodness, what was it?
Speaker 1:what was the band called?
Speaker 2:we were called gin ray, which you will not find any reference to, is that weird period in the early 2000s where the internet was didn't really exist and then. So there's nothing online of us. So it's kind of like I made it up but I didn't what kind of music I'm interested now? So we we described our music as folk soul oh so we were kind of a bit funky, but we had acoustic guitars, we had a flute player, we had two violins flute player we had saxophone trumpet.
Speaker 2:There were 10 of us at one point that sounds really fun.
Speaker 1:What a what a great way to have spent a part of your life.
Speaker 2:How, yeah, yeah so that was, that was great. Um, and at the same I basically remember my whole 20s as being music centric. So I was in the band, I also did club promotion, I was a DJ and I had a record label with my school friends and then, when the band fell apart, I became a music journalist. So I was basically like all music. I was thinking recently, if I had to put a word for each decade of my life 20s would be music.
Speaker 1:Yeah, every element of it, every aspect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and a lot, you know, a big part of that for me was was drinking heavily and, you know, recreational drugs and glamorizing that whole kind of lifestyle. Yeah, which which worked for me because I'm I'm slightly introverted. So when I discovered alcohol, I was like, oh, this is great. You know all those that that overthinking mind that I used to have that would say, oh, what does that person think of you? Does that girl like you? You know, did you say the wrong thing? That got quietened, right. So the alcohol quietened that and I found that I was more, more extroverted and I could jump around on stage and I could, I could do all those things that I would be that I thought that I wouldn't be able to do if I wasn't drinking. So it kind of it worked for me.
Speaker 2:Alcohol worked for me as a, as as a young teenager into twenties, as as a young, you know, teenager into 20s existing in a social um landscape and, you know, as a as a journalist, as a music journalist. I would interview all these people who were mega successful, you know, basically, alcoholics. Yeah, everything was saying that this was okay and we could. We could come into the office. This is when I worked in london and it was kind of funny if you, you know, if you came in at 1 pm because you were so hung over, we had this thing called the hangover hat of shame that you had to wear, which was like it was funny.
Speaker 1:But also glamorized a little.
Speaker 2:It was like you know intrigue, what did?
Speaker 1:you get up to last night, it was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 2:And it was you know my boss was like a year older than me and he'd also been in a band and you know it was that, it was that vibe. So the point of this is that it was normal. What I was doing was very normal, yeah, and it kind of worked. For me. It was like, yep, socializing works, oh, and I at that point I wasn't seeing the negative, or I was minimizing the negative consequences that I was seeing, or not even attributing them to alcohol. So then that continued into my 30s. So I moved to Australia when I was 31. And I have an ex-girlfriend who was like you Brits, you have your 20s in London and then you come to Sydney and you have your 20s again.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, yeah, particularly if you're down near the eastern suburbs, bondi Beach, yeah, which is where all the Brits live.
Speaker 2:So I came to Sydney and had my 20s again, because you know, you have a new set of friends and it's like, oh, we need to get to know each other and do all these things that I'd probably done with my school friends when we were teenagers. You know that kind of bonding thing. So then that was like a new lease of life of that drinking. So that continued and again, so I wasn't a music journalist here, but I was a lifestyle journalist. So I would do things that you know involved writing about lots of different things, but including like I got a trip to vegas to to review clubs oh wow, gosh, and I once went to this week-long uh, it was called the the cocktail world cup.
Speaker 2:It was a vodka festival in new zealand the cocktail world cup, and it was basically all these, all these alcoholic barmen from around the world convening in in rota in queenstown is where it was how would you go ordering a mocktail there?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, I mean yeah no I dread to think they, in the welcome pack, everyone had a bottle of vodka for their room, because you would need that, apart from the fact that there was, like, cocktails for breakfast, cocktails for lunch there was always cocktails, but still we had, you know, a safety bottle of vodka in the room oh, safety bottle.
Speaker 1:I can't believe it.
Speaker 2:Oh, it makes me feel a bit nauseous and nervous oh yeah, and then and then, um, this was towards what I'm going to get onto, which was my early midlife crisis, when I when I changed my relationship with alcohol. But there was one when I got back from that vegas trip, um, because I didn't want to take another day off work, so I came straight to the office from the airport because you know a lot of us flights arrive at six in the morning went straight to the office, straight into this editorial meeting, slurred my way through it, wow, and I had, like you know, blood around my nose from all the excess partying and my boss was like, right, go home. And then he banned anyone from ever coming straight to work from the airport oh, you were the, you were the the of change.
Speaker 2:The tipping point, yeah.
Speaker 2:The tipping point, oh dear. So then when it started to change for me was when I had what I call my early midlife crisis, which is when I hit 35, which is when I realized that something wasn't quite working. So I had this 35th birthday party, which was this really seedy illegal rave thing that me and some friends organized, and there were these super seedy discussions about who would make money from the in-house drug dealer and blah, blah, blah, yeah, anyway. So I DJed. I didn't enjoy any of the records I played, I didn't enjoy the whole night at all. And then I was like why am I doing this? Like I was feeling paranoid. I couldn't you know. It wasn't working. Whatever I was doing wasn't working anymore. So I woke up the next day and I'd had it in my mind that I like I originally cause I smoked, I was a social smoker as well and I was like I'm going to quit smoking at 30. And then that didn't happen. So I was like right, 35.
Speaker 1:Yes, round it up.
Speaker 2:So on that day, the day after my 35th birthday, I was like, right, I'm jacking in the smokes and I'm quitting DJing and that was my two lifestyle changes that I committed to that day. And then also I was like, okay, well, that that gets rid of that partying lifestyle. But then that left a bit of a hole in my life because what I hadn't realized because my whole 20s was about music I'd created my identity around around that. Yeah, for sure, including things like you know what's my purpose?
Speaker 2:my purpose is helping people forget their worries on the dance floor yeah right, yeah, not that I might have thought of it like that, but you know that's what. I did. You know, I put parties on.
Speaker 2:I I help people have fun yeah so if I, when I stopped doing that, I was like, well, hang on, what, what, what am I doing? So this led to a bit of a uh, an exploratory phase, where I was still drinking at this point, but but less of that intense partying, um, but I got fit, so I couldn't run for more than five minutes and then, within a year, I I ran a marathon and I was like, whoa, this is great. You know, uh, the feeling of satisfaction of achieving something healthy, but then also, you, the endorphins, the natural internal pharmacy that we can access through things like exercise. I was like, oh, it's called the runner's high.
Speaker 1:You feel high and this is a very kind of cliched story of man starts running in middle age middle age and I guess with that pull towards health and feeling healthier, there was a misalignment with more uh frequently with what alcohol might be doing to your body, because they, you know, the balance can be greatly offset there it can, but that didn't stop me for the next four years trying to balance them yeah, which would include things like getting hammered and then doing a 30 kilometer run the next day, which is awful for your liver.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right um and that, but that's kind of bondi wellness. Uh, it's like a cliche thing of you know out partying saturday night but then being a yogi the next day oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1:What do you think was happening to you at that 35th birthday? You know it was a. It sounded like a real moment and you, you could remember that feeling quite well, just this is just 35, you're supposed to be enjoying it, but you just weren't. What was? Was it kind of just a penny drop or a deep reflection.
Speaker 2:I had made it in my mind, this point of reflection which was, you know, tied to this you should give up smoking by this point thing that I had in my mind, but also around that point, so I didn't. I started meditating a year after that, which we'll get on to in a sec, but around that time I had my, my boss. My boss, who banned me from coming straight from the off, straight from the airport, also encouraged me to start journaling. So one of my first self-reflection tools was to start journaling, which I did around this time, yeah, right around this time in fact, and that you know, as anyone who's done the journaling knows, it's a chance to you know, as we said, reflect. So think about the bigger picture, think about how things are affecting you. So I think for me it just happened to be a kind of accumulation of various factors that milestone age, which happened to be 35 yeah plus just being more aware that that I wasn't enjoying it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I wasn't doing it for like moral reasons, like I didn't cut down for that I was, just I didn't like it anymore yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And where's this heading to where? Where am I growing? Is there longevity in this lifestyle?
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I was seeing myself like what if I project that 15 years, which is, you know, close to what I am now? Like, do I want to be the nearly 50 year old DJ? Still, you know playing tunes and you know like sharking after the younger women?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I wonder, rory, you would have come across those people in that interview mode. You know the rockers that were still drinking, looking a bit crusty. Well, 100%.
Speaker 2:As a journalist, I was at least interviewing the, you know, the successful ones, whereas there's tier two, tier three.
Speaker 1:You know, I would have been way down the tiers, but at least you had seen what it could look like.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean actually on my another key point. Well, like a milestone birthday, on my 30th birthday, I interviewed Fatboy Slim in London.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, yeah.
Speaker 2:I can't remember what his timeline was, but he, he's a. He's a heavy drinker.
Speaker 2:He no longer drinks that's right yeah just as a, just as a by the by, but, yeah, that kind of whatever accumulation of events happened, then that, that, that is what I've I class as this turning point moment, and then the exercise really being the most um, well, it was the thing that appealed to me most at that point um, which then led to more what else? What else is out there? So in that year or over the next two years, I did things like I did, did an NLP course, neurolinguistic programming yes wow and at work we'd always do.
Speaker 2:You know, myers-briggs is the lightest version, but we did the enneagram, which I really liked, and that kind of started um more, more self-reflection processes. So there's the journaling, the nlp, this, and then I was fortunate enough to have this mentor at work, you, you know, like a leadership mentor, and he was like you should learn to meditate and I was like, oh yeah, I kind of been skirting around it. But one issue that I've had is that in my first music journalism job this was back in Birmingham in England this was back in Birmingham in England we had this really eccentric boss who was a real lefty and very kind of hippie, but he also ripped everyone off.
Speaker 2:Oh right, right, Like he pretended food was kosher when it wasn't. And you know, pretended things were organic when they weren't I? I better not. I won't name him, no, I'm sure he won't be listening, but you know, don't want to defame him, anyway.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's just so wrong, anyway, anyway so he was the first person who introduced me to meditation, right, and he did a really bad job, and he didn't give any proper instruction and just said, hey, now we're meditating, which he used to do before our before, before before this meeting, where he would then proceed to have a massive go at everyone for doing a bad job, right? Yeah, so I had this experience of like he would just say, like, clear your mind. And I would not be able to clear my mind, guess what? And so I had a bad experience of it because I felt like a failure. Plus, it was mixed with this very difficult character who presented it to me. So that kind of put me off that, for that was when I was 26. So, yeah, for 10 years, until I came around to this mentor saying, hey, you should, you should learn to. So then I started this meditation journey. So this is in 2014.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I started exploring it. So mindfulness was the first thing I tried, which, as you mentioned before, it's the most commonly practiced version and I did that for about six months. So this was I learned from a lady in Edgecliff and I did. It was like once a week for six weeks and we did breath meditation, we did body scan you know, as you would find in the headspace app, for example and we did one called loving kindness oh, how brilliant I enjoyed that, but I didn't.
Speaker 2:I was like there must be more, yeah, so, um, I kept searching and came across the style that I now practice every day and teach, which is called Vedic Vedic meditation. So Vedic is slightly different in that it uses, rather than using, breath, we use a mantra. So a mantra is a word, a word or sound that you think silently in your mind so you're not chanting it. Importantly, the word. This is why I say sound. The word doesn't have any meaning, but it's got this soothing sound quality that helps you move to a place of stillness within. And another key differentiator from mindfulness is that we sit comfortably, so you're not sitting upright. You you've got back support, and I've always been a bad yogi. I was like this is great, this is comfortable.
Speaker 2:The day that I learned Vedic meditation, I just felt this real tangible shift, like I had when I got that runner's high. Like it wasn't. It wasn't that I was doing it because I felt I should. It was like I got a real tangible physical sensation, and the way I describe it is it's like my head was a clenched fist and then I could feel that, that unclenching as I did this practice and then afterwards I just felt, felt more relaxed, and it's a four-day course and on day four of the day three of the course, as I wrote in my journal because I'm a good journal writer I literally skipped down the street. This is in Paddington and I'm not a skipping kind of guy, so like it obviously changed something for me, you know, and it's not just, not just, oh, I'm eating my greens because this, I know, this is right like it changed my mood.
Speaker 2:It changed my mood. It changed something physically for me, so that that then made me be like, okay, this is, this is the style for me, I love this. So I that was now 11 years ago I was very dedicated and I did my two meditations a day. But and again this is from the journal two weeks later I wrote wouldn't it be good to teach this? Like literally only two weeks, two weeks after. So then that started.
Speaker 2:Uh, it took took two years of practice before I, before I was able to, to learn to teach it. But then I spent a year learning to teach it and then I did it as my side hustle for my alongside my media job for six years before before doing it full time. But but to begin with, doing doing the meditation as me just cause it helped me cope with, cope with life Right, and that's one of the the real there are. There are countless ways to, to to talk about why we meditate, but one of the most practical is that I like to talk about is that it helps you cope with life, and the way that relates to alcohol is guess what Alcohol helps you cope with life.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and it's, and it's, it's, it's Absolutely. Yeah, right, and it's, and it's a, it's, a, it's, it's the most. Alcohol is the most easily accessible version of that. I am feeling stressed, I'm feeling anxious about this dinner party, right, so you grab, grab for a drink because it's there, everyone else is doing it. There is eight billion dollars is spent by the alcohol industry every year saying, hey, this is a fun, do this helps you relax. Here you are by the pool on a cruise yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:So for me personally, what I noticed is that when starting to meditate and this is still in that first week when I skipped down the street I had this um work drinks thing, where normally I would have gone and got hammered and gone home at three in the morning, found myself at the casino at three in the morning and then gone home and then been felt disgusting the next day. Instead I was more able to stick to my my thing, which was like I'm not going to drink tonight because I know it's going to be bad news. So my people pleaser tendency, which would have gone along with with anyone else wanting to drink, was, was gone. So the way I relate this to meditation is that coping with life is about removing or diminishing things like fear and anger. So I like to talk about fear and anger as being the two emotions of the stress response. We often hear about fight or flight.
Speaker 1:The emotions behind that are anger to fight or fear to fight, but fear to flee as well, and I might throw resentment in there as well if that's a species, maybe of fear potentially, but it's a big one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a lot of these things and you know you can we're just drawing a map here so you can redraw the map how you want but a lot of those things I put under anger. So frustration, and this was a really interesting thing for me um, because I didn't see myself as a stressed person before, right, I was this chilled out, muso, right, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't express my anger, for example, all my fear, but it didn't mean I didn't have it. So what I realized afterwards is that I had all this anger, but it was in my head, like I would be, I would be dissing you in my head or the situation, and it wouldn't come out. The way it would come out is in a very British way. I would just be really sarcastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, I can relate. I mean, I have always said throughout university, when I was a lawyer, my catchphrase I just go with the flow, I'm a go with the flow person, you make the decision, I just go with the flow, I'm a go with the flow person, you make the decision. No, well, I was internalising those criticisms as well and not expressing it because there was fear to express it, but that was a penny drop moment for me as well. Just realising that well, go with the flow doesn't mean that you're internally going with the flow, exactly.
Speaker 1:It has to come out somewhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what I love about all of these approaches to increasing being self-reflective and wellness in general is there's lots of different paths to the same place. I coach people as well, and we might talk through things like the inner critic. And you know, wellness in general is there's lots of different paths to the same place. Like I, I coach people as well, and we might talk through things like the inner critic, as I call it, and you can reframe these things and and and do talking work to to get through it. But what I, what I loved about meditation and why I embed it in everything I do, is that you kind of get that for free, right? You don't have to talk about it. I just naturally found that that so people pleasing again is a fear-based response. I'm in some way afraid of what someone else is going to say if I say I'm not drinking or I'm going to order you know this was ordering.
Speaker 2:There weren't alcohol-free beers in most, or there wasn't maybe more than one in most bars in 10 years ago. So there's this fear of being being different so that when that is gone, you're much more able to to stick to your goals. So what I found then was that for the next two years, um three years, I, I, I drank less and less, but I still drank. So I got rid of what I call the crappy, crappy midweek drinking. Yeah, so stress-based drinking, people pleaser, drinking the stuff that I definitely didn't want to do. But then it took a while for me because it'd been so embedded through my 20s that I was.
Speaker 2:I was a party monster. That was my thing, as were all my friends from having reliving my 20s in my 30s. They were all big party monsters here. Yeah, so then took another couple of years of me. My solution in this moderation phase was I just didn't go out as much. Yeah, so rather than like twice a week, it was once, and get down to like once a month. But then I would still be in this cycle of having a huge night out and then it would take till Thursday to recover and I'd be like what am I doing? Like that took me five days to recover from that to this point where I was then age. I just turned 40, another milestone age when I went on a meditation retreat with one of my teachers and then had the clarity just to go well, why don't I just stop?
Speaker 1:Yeah, god, but I like that. You, I really like the way you phrased getting rid of the crappy drinking the obligatory drinking and the people-pleasing drinking. That's really clever. And then you didn't have that forever deprived feeling, because it could still. You know, you still had patches of it until you were ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm big on that with people who are starting out. So people who are doing I know you're doing a program at the moment, so I do things like Try January, for example, or Try July, so alcohol-free months. But then I've also played with moderating months because people don't want to think of stopping forever.
Speaker 1:Oh no, I'd have no clients if that was a rule. No, it's so frightening You've got to kind of land there yourself, like you did, you do.
Speaker 2:And that take like my journey was was was moderating for for years and and that's that's fine and what? The way I coach my clients through it. Because, for example, like I had one lady who she, she didn't drink for I think it was like 27 days, and then she had a drink and she was like, oh my god, I'm such a failure. I was like no, you're not, you used to drink every day and now you've. Just, she was like it's one step forward, two steps back. And I was like no, it's 27 steps forward, one step back. If you want to think like that, which is 26 steps forward.
Speaker 2:So thinking that the that in that period of when you know you probably shouldn't be drinking, but you still are and you're not very sure, and maybe birthdays are an exception and other things are an exception, that's okay, enjoy the process. Because during that I had another lady the other day who we worked out she was drinking 90% less. Yeah, and that's like bringing her well within, like medical guidelines, etc. It's no longer a problem, but it's still. It's still a bit of a problem, but mainly just because of the, the mental effort it takes to to moderate and that's what I say to people. Is it worth it? I had another client who who was in Singapore and he had this quarterly boys dinner. They were all like well-paid execs in Singapore and it was this big thing, but he spent two weeks thinking about whether to drink at this fancy lunch.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, I've had clients that it weighs on their mind, the anxiety inducing weeks in advance and we had a call the day before and he was advance, you know how, and I was yeah, and we had a call the day before and he was like that's it, I'm not going to drink and I'm not, I'm going to stop now because that was not worth it the two weeks.
Speaker 1:The mental torment yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's why you know that's I as a coach, I kind of guide people along, being like it's okay, moderate.
Speaker 1:you've got to learn these lessons for yourself until they're ready. Inevitably you want to get to a point where you don't desire it and it doesn't happen. Yeah, but you don't want to have a success, fail, mark. People just really take that to heart and that can stop you from progress for a long period of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's something that I find myself talking about daily. It's like progress over perfection. Yes, in one of my WhatsApp groups this week, I shared one of those little graphics of what people think success looks like and it's an arrow going up like a graph straight arrow and then it's like what success actually looks like and it's this squiggly line that goes around.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right. I really really love this conversation, rory, because as I spend more time in this space, it's very clear to me that the physiological response is probably more important than the cognitive response. It tends to come first. We scan a room, our body scans a room Is it safe? Are we not safe? And that can dictate our stress response and then perhaps our susceptibility to drinking. But if you've got that nervous system resilience built up through meditation, then you're becoming more resilient to managing life stresses, which is kind of where we started.
Speaker 1:Life stresses. Which is kind of where we started, because when I was starting out on this whole journey in quotes, that wasn't my language, I didn't get it, I didn't understand it. A lawyer, I just existed in my mind. So I really had to deal with the cognitive aspects first, because I just had no language around how to deal with the nervous system and the body, and I still have a lot of room to go. There's a lot of room because I still am not very good at it, but it is clear to me it's a very important piece.
Speaker 1:And I know for men, but women we're just this rushing women's syndrome. We're just. We wake up with this pressure on our chest and the cortisol's kicked in and we're like that until six o'clock with the witching hour. Rory, with your work, how are you sort of readily answering that phase, like what would you say to women and men? We've got male listeners, of course, who, a bit like me, they're rushing their cortisol's high. They know that's their weak spot, their risk window. What might be some tips to work with there?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, this really fits exactly into what I do, and you know meditation is one part of the process, but you know you need to go through everything else as well. But the basic point is it makes everything so much easier because you're not fighting against your body saying, hey, we've had this response before, which is feel stress, grab a drink, don't feel stress, Right. So what we're doing instead is we're saying we're going to preempt that by meditating, and then that takes away the trigger. Right, it's called a stress trigger. So what I advise people to do is I get them to meditate in witching hour or before witching hour Because, as you said, you know, so I work with what I call high functioning drinkers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know it's part of our job as coaches to to push away the people that we that, uh, you know that we can't help, but so therefore, you know these are people who are not drinking in the day. They're, they're, they're functioning in their, in their work. But there comes a point where that build-up of stress has reached a point where they're like, or it becomes socially acceptable to to drink because work's finished and they make this um decision to have a drink. So so my approach with meditation is to say, well, look, let's just run an experiment of meditating at that point. So, whether that's five o'clock or if for parents that might be three thirty, before school pickup, whatever that stress point is for you meditating at that point, I obviously recommend the mantra based meditation, but really any, any meditation that you're comfortable with. Do it then and then run it as an experiment. See if you're less likely to want to drink, because my, my bet is that you will be, because you, you've taken out that trigger, yeah. But then, going back to your physiological point, I love this.
Speaker 2:Um, I had a client well, you know lots of different clients who have different triggers, but one of them was, like, I drink a glass of wine when I'm cooking because I'm hungry, right. Or I had another client who drank because she was thirsty Right, these are physical needs. So, you know, drink, drink two glasses of water, and then check in Are you still craving a drink as much? Right, and this you know. I know you've got your lawyer in your head doing all these things, but we're just taking away those arguments that the lawyer can make because they're no longer necessary. It's like the judge has kind of dismissed. You know, I'm going to get in trouble with my legal Metaphors, legal metaphors, yeah yeah, but I really get it.
Speaker 1:This really appeals to me right now, particularly with this whole discussion around what can we do to decrease the cortisol in our day? That's a large part of our discussion. Whether it's so many women and men out there don't have breakfast, they wake up and have two shots of coffee, and that gets them through to one o'clock. You kind of have set yourself up to just be highly strung by the time well, yeah, and walks by yeah, so so.
Speaker 2:So two approaches, so plenty of studies that show that meditation has a direct impact on cortisol and adrenaline, you know the two biggie stress hormones. So one meditating in witching hour, but two so I get people to meditate twice a day. And this is where it gets a bit shocking and people are like what I'm not doing once and you want me to do twice?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah but the idea by that is so we do once first thing and once last, you know, but we, for people with with jobs, it'd be bookending the work day and then guess what you do that first thing and maybe then and this was my experience like I'd stopped drinking coffee since I became a meditator.
Speaker 1:I'm on my way. It's a hard process, but I'm on my way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like you're plugging into a different energy source, right, and one of the ways that we talk about this is you're you're plugging into a, an inner source. So, rather than these external sources including alcohol, including caffeine, including, you know, the dopamine hit of social media, sugar, yeah, all of these, these things that we know are kind of short-lived buzzes, instead, you know, rather than, rather than the coffee, it's more like the banana slow, slow release yeah, yeah and it means that you're not, then, you know, highly strung because you've you've changed your physiology and this is you know.
Speaker 2:What I coach people through is don't pay attention to whether your mind was busy or not during meditation. Pay attention to how you felt in your body and how we judge success is not through whether you could have these like exotic on a magic carpet meditation experiences. But did you get angry at someone at work? Did you get angry with your kids?
Speaker 2:right, real world things yeah, the people around you don't care whether you what the quality of your meditation was like. They care about how you're showing up in your life and by doing this thing, regardless of what our internal experience of it is, which you know, as you were saying before, you know I'm not good at it. People are often. My mind is too busy to meditate. It's like, that's fine. Let your mind be busy. How do you feel afterwards? And you know, enough of us wear things. I've got my apple watch here.
Speaker 2:It'll tell me my heart rate is lower. You know, if we, if we, were plugged into machines, we would see that our blood pressure is lower. There are huge studies, wide-ranging studies, that say you know, people self-report as being less stressed. They self-report as sleeping better. People self-report as being less stressed, they self-report as sleeping better. They self-report as being happier. All of those things play into not only you having less of a cause to drink, but also, you know, you doing better at work, like.
Speaker 2:One of the things I noticed at work is I stopped caring as much and I got better at my job. Yeah, you think that those would be opposite, but hey, guess what, they're not. I got promoted twice in two years after learning to meditate, because so I used to work in web development after I was a journalist and people would get. People would do a bad job because in this job, which is called product manager, because their ego would get involved and it's like a stakeholder management role, whereas they'd be standing on everyone's toes telling the designers what to do, telling the engineers what to do, telling the editorial people what to do, whereas as a chilled out meditator, I was more able to go.
Speaker 2:Ok, I'm in the middle of this storm here. I'm hearing what everyone's saying. I'm not taking things personally, I'm not investing my ego in it, which therefore better at my job, which also means that I'm not kind of uh awake at night worrying about what could happen because, guess what, the thing that goes wrong on a website launch is not the thing that you thought was going to go wrong. Yeah, yeah um.
Speaker 2:So then when, when the random thing does go wrong, everyone's like, oh, you're so chilled about this, and I'm like, yeah, I didn't worry about it before yeah, yeah and.
Speaker 1:But this time around, when people are saying oh, I'm chilled you actually don't have that in a dialogue. It's, it's real yeah, so it's.
Speaker 2:It's like I became. I became the person that everyone always thought I was. Yeah yeah, I get that and then and then, just going back to my, my the, to wrap this up, like the meaning I had in my 20s, like I said, you know, uh, I found meaning in helping people forget their worries on the dance floor. Through this midlife crisis of losing that, that identity. I then becoming a meditation teacher, I was like, well, now I help people forget their worries through meditation oh, I love it.
Speaker 1:It is, it is, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:You've kept to kept the theme yes age, the modality, yeah thread that goes through that and it means that I'm not complete a completely different yeah, it just a different medium. And guess what? I still play music. I'm still in a band, I'm on. You know, I was going to ask you that I still want to be a rock star.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you that because I've often. There was that Black Books comedian that spoke about giving up alcohol and he was talking about the very difference between going on stage alcohol-free versus you know decades of getting his courage out of drinks. What's it like for you? So you've done it, obviously.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, it's just, you play much better. So I've got a current example. So I play in reggae bands and guess what Reggae musicians like to smoke weed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, had a noticed. Yeah, so an artist, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I don't, but the rest of the most of the rest of the band do. And we've me, and the guitarist doesn't as well, and we've had this new recent rule where we're like no bongs before rehearsal Because the people, the guys who are smoking, they love it and they think they're playing better. But we're just like you're making so many mistakes and we'll get to the end of a song and they'll be like, oh, why don't we play that song? And I'm like we just did it.
Speaker 1:Like five seconds ago. Oh God, I love it. I could talk for hours, Rory, about the ins and outs of the benefits of and I wasn't even pronouncing it right the introduction. I said verdict, but it's vedic is it?
Speaker 2:that's okay. You'd be surprised. I would say over 50 people get it.
Speaker 1:Get it there, you go um I look, I really have loved your story. I've loved that you um have been that person in your life that has been open-minded to new things, the journaling. Well, when someone said meditation, oh yeah, I'll give it a go, and that's just been that, by experiment, the way that seems to evolved for you from what was it Cocktail.
Speaker 1:World Cup onwards, and I also just really like your philosophy as well. That it's not. You don't have to suddenly be alcohol free overnight, and I think that's probably the same with meditation it's a practice that builds. Uh, I just would like to ask you where can people find you? What are the services you specifically offer in this space, because I know there'll be a few questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I offer, I teach Vedic meditation to anyone who wants to learn for any reason, but I specifically offer it to people who want to moderate or quit drinking. So the website that I do that through or the brand I do that through is called Wise Monkey Way, so that that I do pre-recorded online programs, I do live online group programs and I also do one on one meditation teaching and then sober coaching off the back of that. So you know weekly meetings, zoom calls.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:The Wise Monkey Way. Just Google it and there's nothing else called that. So you're fine there. And then also I run uh retreat, so I've got a colleague who she's called sober yoga girl. So I'm I'm not alex alex yeah, alex mcrobert's in bali. Yes, she's fabulous yeah, so we ran a retreat together in bali in september and we've got another one coming up in May.
Speaker 1:Oh fantastic. Oh, that's nice to join the pieces of the puzzle there together. She's been on the podcast twice.
Speaker 2:Oh she's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she's really lovely. Well, I've got to say it's a lot. It's a lot in your world, but it sounds like you love it, that you enjoy it.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's hard, as you would know. Running your own business is hard and you have to learn all these things about marketing.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's the only part I don't like.
Speaker 2:Doing something that is rewarding, and there's nothing more rewarding than seeing the look on someone's face when they're like oh, I can meditate.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or I have hit a certain drinking milestone, Like when people hit a year alcohol-free, two years, three years. You're like this is great what I know. But being able to witness it and be a part of it, cheering on the sidelines, is very rewarding.
Speaker 1:I agree there's that moment, because it is quite an emotional personal experience to feel so caught up in alcohol and to see, yeah, to see the, oh, I can do life without it. Yeah, Rory, it has been so wonderful to meet you and hear all about your adventures, your journey and to gain an understanding of what you do. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, isabella, it's been a pleasure.
