How Mindfulness Meditation Helped Me to Stop Drinking

By Charlie Vazquez

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I quit drinking at age 52 to see what it would feel like, the final phase of a gradual purification that began with giving up cigarettes when I was 44. Hard liquor came next. The marijuana that I smoked daily during the COVID-19 lockdown followed, a habit I formed as a teenager. Rather than allowing the stresses of the pandemic to accelerate these addictions, I used the lockdown as a catalyst for cleaning up. A painful rebirth it was, though there’s no going back.

This shift toward sobriety coincided with the deepening of my mindfulness practice, which I first attempted during my party years as a twenty-something, long before I’d commit to anything so transformative. In my forties, I began a transcendental meditation (TM) practice to cope with the depression that had isolated me. This evolved into the Buddhist mindfulness practice that I wasn’t ready for twenty years prior, a pivot that’s provided me with the philosophical foundation to free myself of the toxic habits that were part of my life for decades.

How did he do it? you might be wondering.

When solving a problem, you revisit its origins, the cause for the effect. How has it come to this? I asked myself in a San Juan bar last summer. And why am I quitting after all these years? The answer to the “why” question came easier since I was embarrassed by the dishonesty that I committed during the lowest points of my drinking life, the erosion of values that should’ve awakened me to the truth sooner. Plus, the expense and health impact. Coming up with an answer for “how” I’d gotten there required more intensive retrospection.

The sleuthing led me back to the working-class musical culture I grew up in as a teenager, the orchestra and jazz bands I played trumpet for in high school in the 1980s. It took me back to the rites of passage for those of us who grew up amidst the excesses of the 1970s and the despair of the 1980s when much of the Bronx, where I grew up, was ravaged by fires, violent crime, and corruption. When I started sipping beer prior to jazz band performances, a ceremony that my best friend and I transplanted to our local park on weekend nights.

My father’s influence was worth examining since he’d given me my first taste of beer when I was eight. Years passed before my second sip of a drink that would distort my grip on reality in times to come. Being raised by a heroin addict had taught me to set firm limits on which substances I would and wouldn’t try, but it didn’t protect me from getting hooked on a beverage that symbolized masculinity. Macho men drank beer and smoked cigarettes, pot even. That’s the image that I wanted to project despite my fascination with Buddhism following a field trip to a Chinatown temple when I was seven.

Realizing that I was queer during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis intensified the terror I felt as every gay man I knew in the 1980s died, a dark reckoning that coincided with the violence that drove my mother to kick my father out when I was 10 in 1981. A grim start to a rocky decade to come. There were so many problems to escape from back then that I didn’t know where to start, such as the sexual secret that I dragged around like a curse. With little choice, I went to live with my mother’s family in Oregon when I was 17 in 1988.

In Portland’s underground music scene, I found my tribe. This brought me relief as a closeted musician even though the Gen X punks that I befriended there partied harder than anyone I knew back home. My weekend drinking spilled into the rest of the week as I experimented with “club drugs” like acid, mushrooms, and ecstasy in my twenties. Once I came out, I immersed myself in the gay subculture where alcoholism reigned as a coping mechanism for dealing with the cruelties of a homophobic society—a world I phased out of by my early forties.

Mindfulness meditation filled the space that nightlife had occupied once I took it seriously in my fourth decade. Transcendental meditation introduced me to inner stillness through the repetition of a mantra, which appealed to my musical imagination. By embarking on an inward search, I settled into the calm awaiting beneath the choppy surface of anxiety and depression, a wellbeing so profound that I practiced TM daily. I unveiled the person I was meant to be once I drank less and introspected more, a gradual transition to befriending myself.

I began my mindfulness practice while studying for Tibet House’s 100-Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training with David Nichtern during lockdown. By then, I’d experimented with sound, metta (lovingkindness), and breath-based techniques in addition to TM. When taught in the Buddhist context, a mindfulness discipline trains you to observe the thoughts, emotions, and perceptions that arise and vanish. These “movements” of the mind can vary from joyful to disturbing, all of which you let go of while returning to the breath.

Herein lies the key to self-transformation. ?

Disclaimer: I don’t attend AA meetings or participate in recovery programs since my nightly beer guzzling wasn’t as serious as compared to other people’s habits. While I drank heavily in the past, I weened myself away from those tendencies which could explain why it was easier for me to stop. Despite this, I believe that a mindfulness practice can help serious drinkers and addicts based on my observations as a meditation teacher for recovery programs in the Bronx.

Teaching meditation has enriched my life as a Buddhist, an extension of the creative writing that I’ve taught for the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York Public Library, PEN America, and other organizations. Acacia Network hired me to teach meditation to recovering opioid users in 2022, which we combined with abstract artmaking for allowing the clients to express the traumas, emotions, and challenges associated with substance dependency. The strategy would also work on me since I was drinking at the time.

The method that I’m sharing isn’t a substitute for any medical and/or therapeutic supports that you might be receiving as part of your recovery. Quitting alcohol cold turkey can result in devastating health consequences for certain drinkers—even death. While a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t exist, learning how your mind functions—and working with that insight—can help you to reduce your suffering by understanding how desire comes into being.

My daily practice is rooted in the Tantric teachings of the Tibetan Nyingma and Kagyu schools, which provide a philosophical framework for transforming defilement—addiction in this case—into realization through skillful means. We turn garbage into gold. While this was easier said than done for many of my students, it’s presented an ancient system for managing the energy of craving through awareness and discipline. This is how you change.

Here's the two-step method that’s helped us.

Step One: A disciplined mindfulness practice will create distance between “you” and your thoughts. You notice them as they appear in the present moment, such as the triggers that drive your desire for alcohol. Observing this cause-and-effect reaction has taught me to reel myself in whenever this happens, as when entering a roomful of strangers where alcohol is available. When I sought the distraction of a drink to cope with the awkwardness of social situations that I didn’t want to deal with—a trigger that aroused my desire.

The first step is to observe your triggers and desires as they happen.

Step Two: Once observed, you can redirect that energy into an alternate activity such as running, power walking, or deep breathing before acting on it, any physical outlet that will exhaust the momentum and emotions associated with the deep-seated craving for pleasure. We divert this movement toward a meritorious activity rather than perpetuating the suffering that yielding causes us. Which only we can control. We transform the energy of desire from garbage into gold through awareness and discipline.

A ritual that’s worked me for is taking Nine Purifying Breaths, a series of full inhalations with the right nostril pressed down for the first three complete exhalations, the left nostril covered for the middle set of outbreaths, and neither of them pressed for the final three. I relax my body with the infusion of oxygen, exhale stale air, and intensify my awareness of the present moment, a practice I learned from Dzogchen teacher and scholar, Keith Dowman.

The second step is to redirect the desire’s energy, thus transforming it.

Meditation has helped me to stop drinking by making me aware of the causes that beget my desire for alcohol. My urges for getting drunk have diminished through the practice of noticing and redirecting energy into skillful action to transform it. By tapping into your awareness of the present moment, you can do the same with your habits. Filling the space of addiction with a healthier alternative such as mindfulness meditation can get you started—then far.