The Paradigm Shift off the Oyster Cult

I did something mildly terrible today. I fell off the wagon. Well, not the binge-drinking, shouting rude words, belting out pop songs and doing a Myley Cyrus kind of falling off the wagon. But I had a glass of wine with my oysters. It was very nice for about 2 minutes... and then it hit me that the promise of white wine is a big fat lie.

Let’s start at the beginning though. It is the 28th of December, and I haven’t had a drink since 30th of August. I stopped to see what happens, and it turns out that I love not drinking. No hangovers, no energy lows, no entire weekend afternoons missed because I needed to sleep off lunch. My Reiki channeling grew much stronger, my meditation practice became deeper and I practice more yoga and more selfcare daily.

But, there are also things I miss, as I wrote about before. That whole good-times thing that revolves around alcohol. It’s always a challenge not do drink on any night out, but whenever I almost thought I might have just the one glass, this happens: People around me start to repeat the same story again in a much louder voice and ask my opinion of the same thing about 20 times. Then they all shout over each other at the same time. Finally someone will decide to try shooting pennies into his pint glass from his buttocks, and I bow out and go home instead.

I have many visual memories with oysters: luxury, champagne, chilled white wine glasses, ocean, France in general, polished cutlery, sunshine, sliced lemons, happy suntanned people dressed in casual linens or Après Ski uniformette.

Les Halles in Limoges is totally amazing, go and visit if you can: An abundance of incredible eateries in a huge old renovated market; you’ll find anything from abalone to Vietnamese street food, from crevettes via frites to patissery, and every stand is surrounded by shiny happy people discussing life over a glass of bubbly or wine and excellent food.

So, I decided that oysters need a chilled glass of white wine. I accepted a half glass of Uby (there are small mercies in my bad decisions, 'half' being the important word here). It tasted very nice, and I almost immediately got that nice warm “the world is your oyster” feeling (no pun intended). The promise of that first swig of alcohol tells you that the world is about to present you with something incredible if you just let it.

And then… I also felt as if I slowly was being poisoned from the inside. I am now so in tune with my body that I felt how I became almost immediately numb in the most peculiar way. And, to be truthful, I went from straight to sloshed in 3 seconds flat. After the oysters, we walked around town, and I spent an absolute fortune on sugary things: chocolate pastries, nougat, chocolate kisses, candy canes and on the way home from Limoges I fell asleep in the car - in broad daylight. And now I feel simply bleurrgh.

But you know what? I am really glad this happened. It is yet another paradigm shift in this massive transformation I find myself in, and the shift into healing from my past means listening to the small things.

A shift does not have to be this huge powerful memorable experience, but it is simply a new understanding of the fundamental way things work. It’s my personal equivalent of now realising that the sun does not orbit the earth, but the earth orbits the sun and that the sun is part of a much larger galaxy, part of a larger universe (as Harold Kent Straughn explains in his book LifeSpirals).

I drank that glass of wine because in my mind I have an image of how good times work. In this image oysters plus chilled wine equal good times. Revisiting these previous images to create a wonderful day, and for some reason expect a new outcome is foolish indeed. I am more than grateful that I realised this so quickly. Reminder to self and all of you who are on their path too: all that happens if you drink is that you get poisoned, start behaving like a prize idiot and then just have a fuzzy blur of a memory.

Really, I am happy. Because another realisation I just had is that I need alcohol to stomach oysters. They aren’t all that I remember. So as I type this in front of the fire, all hygge and comfortable, I nibble on crackers with avocados and I know that my image for good times is slowly changing for good. I’ll let you know when I know what exactly it is.