My editor asked for an additional short section for my Seership book relating to Lower Cauldron Physical chapter. I thought you’d like to read my draft about Alcohol & Drugs:
Alcohol
The idea that a glass of wine a night is good for you has well and truly been put to rest. Stanford Medicine researchers, along with many colleagues across the field, now agree that the long-held belief in moderate drinking’s health benefits is outdated.
The World Health Organisation has classified alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen, sitting alongside asbestos and tobacco, and states clearly that any beverage containing alcohol, regardless of quality or quantity, poses a cancer risk.
A 2025 US Surgeon General’s Advisory confirmed that alcohol is responsible for around 100,000 cancer cases annually in the United States alone, and organisations like the WHO are now saying plainly that no amount of alcohol is safe.
I’m not here to tell you what to do with that information.
You’re an adult, and we live in a privileged world that allows you to make your own choices about what you put in your body. But as a seer, as someone working to develop and refine their perceptive capacity, here are some perspectives you might find helpful.
Alcohol is a depressant.
It slows the nervous system, dulls the edges of sensory perception, and creates what I’d call a perceptual fog. In the short term, it might feel like it loosens things up, drops inhibitions, and makes you more open, and in a purely social sense, maybe it does.
But that loosening is the opposite of what we’re cultivating in seership practice. We’re building discernment, precision, and the ability to receive and interpret subtle information cleanly. It’s well-documented and easily demonstrated that alcohol muddies that water.
If you choose to drink, keep it entirely separate from your practice. An occasional glass of wine at a dinner party is different from a glass of wine or two a night, or worse, drinking before a seership session.
Most people think about alcohol in terms of the night itself, but what they don’t account for is the days that follow. Your headache might have cleared, but the perceptual system takes considerably longer to return to baseline than most people realise.
Research into alcohol’s effect on sleep architecture
The research shows that it significantly disrupts REM sleep, the stage most associated with dream processing, emotional integration, and, for our purposes, the kind of subtle inner listening that seership depends on.
Even light drinking can suppress REM sleep for two to three nights after consumption. Add to that the inflammatory response alcohol triggers in the body, and your physical system is left working hard just to recover, with very little left over for refined perception.
Recreational drugs like cannabis, MDMA, and psychedelics used in social settings follow a similar logic to alcohol for our purposes.
They alter consciousness, yes, but altered isn’t the same as expanded, and it’s worth asking what kind of alteration is happening and what the benefits are.
Recreational substances can be enjoyable and, depending on your values, may have a place in a well-lived life, but, in my experience, don’t pair well with visioning.
Pharmaceutical medications are a different matter entirely. If you’re managing a health condition, physical or mental, your medication is part of caring for your physical vessel.
There is no spiritual merit in suffering when there’s help available. There are certain medications that will affect your visioning capacity, yet I know many people who navigate them well.
They accept how things are and effectively manage other areas of their cauldrons to reach their potential.
Plant medicines, ayahuasca, psilocybin, San Pedro, and their kin, occupy a more complex space. Used in proper ceremonial context, with skilled facilitation, and with genuine intentionality, they have a long history as consciousness-expanding tools in many traditions.
There is a growing phenomenon, particularly visible in online spiritual communities, in which a powerful ceremonial experience is conflated with spiritual skills.
Someone drinks ayahuasca in a retreat setting, has an extraordinary journey, meets spirit presences, and comes away believing they’ve awakened their gifts. Sometimes that’s true, but often, it’s more complicated.
What visionary experiences offer is, alongside healing, an invitation to begin or continue the work of living a human life, not a substitute for it.
Using plant medicine experiences, however profound, to avoid the slower, less dramatic work of developing discernment, grounding, ethics, and craft is a form of bypassing.
None of this is a dismissal of plant medicine traditions or the people who work within them honourably. It’s simply an invitation to be honest with yourself.
Did the experience open something that you’re now committed to developing through a daily practice, or did it offer a temporary sense of expansion that you’re now trying to recreate through further ceremony?
This conversation would be incomplete without acknowledging that for some people, alcohol and substances aren’t a matter of casual choice. They’re something more entrenched, and that deserves to be addressed with honesty and without judgment.
I have been sober for a long time; for my sight, it’s one of the best things I’ve done for myself. I’d become a habitual drinker, and it crept up on me slowly. I didn’t see myself as an addict or an alcoholic because alcoholics don’t have jobs, drink spirits straight from the bottle, and can’t function in society. How in denial I was. Yet, I was drinking at least a glass of wine every day (except on a Monday, and that somehow made it alright), spending quite a bit of money needed elsewhere, and not showing up in my life as I should.
When substance use becomes habitual, when alcohol or drugs are used to manage pain, numb emotion, or simply get through the day, the physical body shoulders a burden it wasn’t designed to carry.
There’s nothing shameful in this. Many people come to spiritual practice because something in their life has been out of balance. There are many other, healthier ways to relax after a hard day.
The trick is to look for and practice other options, and to decide to transition away from habits that inhibit your body’s ability to function optimally.