Has anyone had shamanic experiences with alchohol?

I personally don’t see how you could. I feel alcohol is in the opposite of what a shamanic experience would contain. I see alcohol more as a poison when it comes to spiritual growth. I have so many alcoholic friends that would benefit greatly from a ritualistic psychedelic experience. But they are so scared because alcohol has numbed their consciousness and their own relationship with themselves. This is just my opinion by the way. I still love my alcoholic friends, I just wish they would open up their minds, which depending on the sauce is preventing.

In all honestly I couldn't have said it better than Metta did, call it personal bias but having a dad both addicted and physically dependent on this garbage made me realize very early in life that this is arguably the furthest compound from a shamanic or healing agent and I'm pissed off to say the least (pardon language) that it's (and nicotine) still legal and socially accepted despite all the violence and damage it's caused relative to other drugs.

The hell with this poison.

Everything can be used to reach God if you just know how to use it.. and can maintain your focus and concentration enough. I have an alcoholic running around in the park of the neighbourhood every day.. He is with God all day long.. every day haha

They say there is a time and place for everything.

I guess in the case of alcohol that would be the death bed. When you're dying and in palliative care, on a morphine drip, that may be the time for alcohol if there is one in a person's lifetime.

Any earlier than that and you're doing yourself a disservice, unless you need to e.g. have a limb amputated and no other anaesthetic is available.

Yeah it's pretty useless.. I wish there was a way to enjoy a beer or a glass of wine without the effect of alcohol.. same with coffe..

I guess it depends on how one perceives shamanism. Plenty of dunkards speak in toungues. And there are plenty of people that have a decent relationship with alcohol. The abuse of any drug is largely down to exterior influences. Just because some us use drugs chronically does not mean that they are not useful in certain contexts.

I have friends who get drunk and when they pass a certain phase in drunkeness, i cannot understand what they are trying to explain. But they do. So there is loss in communication due to us being on different mental wavelengths. The only way for me to be able to relate to a drunk person is to get drunk myself (although getting stoned around drunk people can be quite beneficial as empathy and humour can come into play). The same could be said if you came across someone heavily tripping. If you have no experience of tripping yourself there would be a cognitive dischord in the interaction. Or if you have tripped before there still may be confusion as what the hell the tripper is going on about.

I have also had a lot of relatives and friends who are/were alcoholics. Is it a crutch or a search for some kind of meaning life? Or both? Can it really be differentiated from any other drug that a person takes regularly to alter their consciousness? Apart from it being legal and regulated?



Some people find alcohol and opiates synergistic but i don't react well to mixing the two.

vodkas role in a mongolian shaman ceremony

A Shamanic Perspective on Wine and Other Spirits

Thank y’all for your replies so far.

Lately I’ve been drinking quite a bit of alcohol. About 5 years ago I stopped taking suboxone, just after the time that my spiritual awakening began. Around the time I stopped suboxone, I started to experience subtle energies in my body, and I experienced a lot of energetic love along with it. There were challenges though, and for a time I wasn’t really aware of the reason for them, I was basically unaware of the amount of shame and guilt, etc in me so to the trauma. Now I believe it was the belief that I’m not worthy of such love, caused by shame and guilt and such things. So in essence my own trauma and shame was challenging me I think.

About 2 or 3 years ago the energy flow became extremely intense in my body. I began to take kratom daily, and sometimes suboxone, which ironically showed me that it was trauma that was challenging me. I suppose re-introducing the drug which kept me balanced for so long had a parallax kind of effect between my conscious and unconscious minds.

So that’s something of a background for my recent adventures with alcohol.

I hadn’t really drank alcohol in a long time before I began to drink again around 3 years ago. I’ve found that at low doses it sort of smooths out the energy in my body as well as having a pretty cool spiritual effect - depending on the dose and the kind of alcohol and the set and setting.

It’s been a mixed bag though and it’s gotten out of hand sometimes, and been awesome at others.

I had the idea that perhaps I could do spiritual work with it, and that kinda worked sometimes. Yet lately I’ve noticed that when the desire to drink arises, it seems to be something of a double desire. Part of me desires it to become more aware of myself, while the desire also existed to drink in order to numb out my trauma.

I’ve had some kinds of shamanic type experiences with it, yet the potential price of that is the potential to self destruct. Sometimes it has seemed to supercharge the trauma in me, which I experienced spiritually. But it was that reason that I saw potential in it to heal with, since it brought the trauma to the surface.

So it’s definitely been a double edge sword. Although I feel maybe something like wine created by oneself from wild berries say could perhaps be awesome, while mass-produced alcohol seems to be something of a can can of worms for me, at least.
sometimes lately.

Perhaps it was the universe causing me to re-visit an old pattern to become more karmically aware.

I can relate to what BFP is saying.

I'm hyper-vigilant, a result of some stuff in early life. I've never used opiates, but nothing else of the things I have tried (basically everything bar opiates) comes close to 'soothing' the tension I feel when things starts to get a bit much. This despite the 'stuff' being largely alcohol-fuelled in the first place... Fairly unusually, I think, I have never caused harm/suffering to another person while under the influence. I seem to metabolize it well, maybe due to genetics (ha!) and transmute it into 'good energy' before crawling off into a corner to sleep it away, eventually waking up fully refreshed. I literally do not know the true meaning of the word 'hangover'...

There are other threads, and even shamans too, which find ethanol a strangely useful 'antidote' to some of the energies unleashed by the serotonergic medicines.

For me, the plants/substances which seem to lead away from this, are those which are kappa-opioid agonists (salvia, iboga, ketamine) and after large doses of each, is the only time I feel the thirst go completely away. But so far, I have always relapsed. Because I thought it would be different ;-)

Beginning with the death of a parent, and continuing into lockdown, this year has not so far been great, and I find myself drawn back to a slightly-earlier self who had more discipline, practise and connection.

Need to get back there, I think. Whatever it's putative benefits, it's a deceitful drag on the soul, IMO. The day can be half-gone before you get to grab it, but by then you're only a few hours away from 'downtime' again...

I wonder if, like nicotine, it's case of something that's 'ok' once in a blue moon, but pernicious if used regularly? Obviously the stock-market-state prefers the latter pattern to the former...

As always, I guess it just boils down to whether you have mastery over it, or it has mastery over you.