How Bali Made Me Quit Drinking

It was barely 6 PM, and yet the place was already packed, the music was pumping and wherever I looked people smiled back to me: Old friends, new friends, probably-friends, and definitely-strangers-I-thought-I-knew-but-didn’t. We were shouting that year’s party anthem:

And that’s when I got elbowed in the arm.

Pass it down! - my friend at the bar shouted and like a beer-carrying asteroid cutting through the dense atmosphere of drunk people he handed me a dozen beers in quick succession.

Once everyone had one, I barely had time for a quick spill-saving sip before the crowd went wild for the next Na-na-na-na-na part. 

Right about where I was two hot blonde girls were drilling their way through the crowd. I looked at one of them and shouted:

She nodded with a smirk and I handed over my beer. We kept shouting short sentences at each other over the music and exchanged contacts, before she got dragged away by her friend. As I turned back to my friends, chaos squared.

The girls from our friend group were now flailing their arms from the top of a table like they were directing airport traffic.

We locked arms like the drunkest safety net in Europe and caught them mid-flight. Then everyone wanted in. Friends, strangers, probably someone’s uncle. It turned into a full-body trust fall free-for-all. People were jumping. Laughter was exploding. Beer was flying in slow motion like we were in some Heineken commercial.

Because booze does this magical thing—it temporarily deletes the Adult Supervision app running in your brain and replaces it with the sandbox mode from your childhood.

Suddenly, you’re brave. You’re loud. You’re generous with your beer. You’re…jumping into strangers arms from a wobbly table in the middle of a club. 

Alcohol is this magical potion that turns Friday afternoons into stories that your friends will butcher in group chats for the next five years.

Until something happened to me one Tuesday evening in a Budapest basement that made me start to question everything I knew about having a good time.

Strike 1. My breath gets taken away.

About a month after that beer-sprinkled, crowd-surfing core memory night, my brother turned to me one random afternoon and said the sentence no one expects to hear:

Ah yes, meditation. My old nemesis.

I’ve tried it before. You know, the whole “close your eyes and just be” thing. But instead of serenity, my brain turns into a high-speed blender of to-do lists, weird flashbacks, fake arguments with strangers, and song lyrics I hate. So I hesitated.

But I also had nothing better to do.

So I shrugged. “Sure.”

Two hours later a yoga mat, a pillow, and a blanket looked back at me in a basement in the outskirts of Budapest like a starter kit for a midlife crisis. In the corner, a band was tuning instruments that didn’t even look real. 

Then came the instructions:

I started scanning for exits, but they were already handing out the blindfolds, so I couldn’t escape.

For the first few minutes, I’m just a blindfolded guy breathing fast and heavy like I’m trying to push a baby out while standing. I feel dumb. I look dumber. But I keep going.

Then something weird starts happening.

My body begins to move to the music—not like “oh I think I’ll do a little shimmy,” but more like “my limbs are possessed by an invisible rave spirit.” My arms are flying. My legs are moving. I’m still blindfolded and the music is loud, so I have no idea what anyone else is doing. But I don’t care. I’m in my own little oxygen-fueled universe.

Then—bam.

I hit this… state.

A trance. A zone. A euphoric, I-love-everyone cloud made entirely of serotonin and mystery.

I forget to breathe (ironic, I know).

I forget I’m standing.

I forget that I once doubted any of this.

Then the music creeps back in. I hear other people hyperventilating like stressed-out vacuum cleaners, and the magic fades a little. I remember I’m supposed to be breathing, so I get back to it—like an addict chasing that sweet, sweet moment again.

And I do find it. A few more times, in waves.

Each time it fills me with so much love I want to hug the musicians and call every person I’ve ever loved. I do actually call my parents afterward and tell them I love them. They’re confused but supportive.

For two whole days, I walk around like I’m ten centimeters above the ground. Like I’ve discovered a cheat code to joy.

No booze. No pills. No mushrooms. No mystery elixirs from a forest shaman.

Just… oxygen. And an ungodly amount of mouth breathing.

Then a thought creeps in:

And then it happens.

I say the sentence I’ve hated my whole life. The sentence every smug yoga poster has ever whispered into my face:

And—for the first time ever—it makes sense.

But then another thought crashes the party:

Strike 2. The Accidental Alcohol-Free Party

When my brother and I first landed in Bali, a friend recommended this party. “Starts at 3 PM, ends at 11,” she said. So, naturally, my brain translated that to:

Ah, a gentle pregame before the actual party.

We showed up fashionably confused at around 5:30 PM.

The sun was still up. Toddlers were crawling in the grass. People were doing yoga.

They weren’t selling alcohol. They were only selling raw cacao.

Cacao? Like… hot chocolate?

I turned to my brother with the same look you’d give someone who just told you the rollercoaster was pedal-powered.

“Maybe we can still make it to a real club later,” I shrugged.

That’s when the guy behind us laughed out loud, and said in Hungarian:

Spoiler alert: He was right.

Not only did we hit it off with him and his friend (David, aka the lovable antagonist of my last two newsletter adventures), but we stayed all night. And it was amazing.

The whole thing kicked off with this guided breathwork thing—yeah, again with the breathing. Then came the cacao ceremony, where they passed around this dark, savory drink and asked us to “feel gratitude” while sipping.

And I don’t know if it was the music, the people, the cacao, or the magic powers of a professionally tanned man whispering into the mic ‘open your heart’—but something shifted.

The music hit. Melodic techno. Deep electronic beats.

And the dance floor transformed.

No one was sloppy. No one was shouting over music.

No one was clutching a drink like it was a safety blanket.

People were smiling. Making real eye contact. Actually present.

We left the party energized, like we’d discovered a new way for having fun. 

And the next morning?

Strike 3. Ecstatic Dance

By this point, I was convinced:

But what if you’re the only sober one? In a normal club? That’s different, right?

My brother and I have tried all kinds of things in Bali: meditations, yoga, singing circles, breathwork, even cacao-fueled techno temples. But there was one thing left on the unofficial “Bali Bingo” card that kept coming up in conversations with suspiciously blissed-out people:

Just… movement. From 7 to 9 PM. In a yoga place.

We’d seen one from afar once. It looked like a group of toddlers had been left unsupervised. People flailing, spinning, crawling, running around—you name it.

We were skeptical. Judgment-free dance floor? Nice in theory. But I grew up in regular parties, where every movement is judged like an Olympic sport and scored for swag, sex appeal, and rhythmic congruence.

Still, we decided to go.

We arrived at the yoga shala—a round bamboo structure with a polished wooden floor and that faint smell of lemongrass and unresolved trauma. The DJ was setting the mood with background music while people awkwardly hovered around the edges like 7th graders at a school dance.

Except for two people.

Two early adopters who were already twisting and turning in the middle of the floor like interpretive dance had just discovered MDMA. No choreography. No logic. Just… vibes.

I tried to be open-minded. I really did.

But my inner judgmental voice—the one I thought I left behind at the cacao ceremony—whispered:

Then the music shifted. The beats deepened. The bassline arrived.

The party had officially started.

Everyone glanced around awkwardly while slowly inching onto the floor. I did my best low-risk sway—just enough to qualify as movement, but not enough to be held accountable. The internal monologue continued:

That’s when it clicked.

I closed my eyes and asked the most important question I’d asked all week:

Not drunk Marci, not cool Marci, not let’s-see-if-that-girl-is-watching Marci.

Just plain, unapologetic, sugar-high, childhood Marci.

And childhood Marci didn’t care about rhythm.

Or looking cool.

Or social approval.

He just moved because movement was joy.

So I gave in.

At first, just small stuff. Eyes closed, elbows loose, hips unlocked. I danced like no one was watching because, let’s be honest, probably no one was.

The music rose. My self-consciousness melted. My body started inventing shapes I didn’t know it could make. By the halfway point, I was jumping up and down, growling, shouting, flinging joy out of my limbs like I was trying to cast a spell.

And it felt incredible.

The final track slowed things down. Everyone lay down on the floor, eyes closed, soaking in the last notes.

I walked out sweaty, glowing, weirdly emotional… and completely sober.

I’ve never liked dancing. Not really.

Dancing had always been a tool:

To pick up girls.

To blend in.

To not be the guy standing alone by the wall.

But joy?

And I hadn’t needed a single drop of alcohol to find it.

End Game: Putting it to the test

The first real test came at a rooftop party. Neon lights, sweaty strangers, that familiar whisper in my head: ‘This won’t work without a drink.’ So I grabbed the sexiest thing at the bar—a sparkling water with a sad slice of lime—and hit the dance floor.

At first, I felt lame. Everyone else had cocktails; I had bubbles and a poker face. But then I closed my eyes, let the bass crawl under my skin… and something cracked. My foot started tapping. My shoulders followed. Suddenly, my hips got the memo.

My eyes opened and my pokerface melted into a smile.

So did I break up with alcohol completely?

No. There are moments when a glass of wine is just too fitting for the occasion. But I don’t drink, to relax or get in a good mood anymore. I haven’t had a drunk night over a year and a half now.

Am I a sober party god now?

No. I still have to work myself up to open up, by talking to friends and strangers and by hitting the dance floor. 

Does it always work? 

No, but alcohol didn’t cheer me up 100% of the time either. On the other hand not waiting on alcohol and taking ownership of my mood and how my night unfolds made me more likely to suck it up and put myself out there. 

I don’t have to sacrifice my whole weekend and my liver for a fun night out anymore. It’s basically a dance workout. 

Six months after my drunk night out catching friends jumping from tables I was at a wedding. This time sober. It was ten past four in the morning and the staff of the venue begged us to leave already, so we asked for one last song from the DJ, arms locked we threw and caught the groom in the air while shouting that years party anthem:

Freed from desire, mind and senses purified,

Freed from desire, Na-na-na-na-na. 

And it became a cherished memory.

See you soon,

Marci

ps. The newsletter has a new home now at letmeoverthink.it (and lmot.it for the lazy ones)

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