How to keep cool without alcohol: Ü Relax

I'm an artist, and I do art for art's sake in L.A. Kava Bar & Botanical Lounge (the Valley)

I want to feel less inhibited without all my hangups, at least on the weekends, and I need help.

Alcohol is liquid ignorance.

The world’s most effective calming tonic experience provides a new kind of cool with delicious, ready-to-mix drinks that kick stress to the curb.

Try Ü Relax with plant-based ingredients, scientist-backed formula for quick, convenient, and delicious drinks.

Hours of calm in one small packet

Anti-vax comedy tee-shirt

These brews provide up to four hours of continuous calm in one small packet. They are powerful anti-stress blends.

Forget about worries and let go of whatever is bothering. Tasters are just one sip away from a calmer, less-stressed state of mind.

What's in it?

Sit back and unwind with Ü Relax. Take a moment, anytime, anywhere. Ü Relax delivers a great-tasting medley of the potent and powerful properties of these three plants [nootropics] for a happier, worry-free experience:

• Kava
• Ashwagandha
• Lemon Balm
• with L-Theanine.

Ingredients to feel good about

The Alcohol Freedom Formula

All Ü Relax tonics are made with ingredients found in nature and backed by science. Each stress-reducing property comes together for a super-functional formula that tastes amazing and mellows one out quickly.

We all get stressed... The knots in the stomach, the tight pain in the chest, the thoughts racing through the mind—that’s stress.

It happens to all of us, but instead of letting it bring us down, we’re kindly kicking stress and anxiousness out the door. We believe we deserve to feel good and smile, no matter what life throws at us. More

Why can Paddy McGee drink and drink like his dad?

But why not drink alcohol? What's the big deal? Everyone's doing it! (Everyone isn't)

Those sound like Yoda's words stating the Buddha's sentiments. Maybe they both said it?

.

The Buddha spoke of human virtue in terms of Five Precepts. It is the kind of karma that leads to (re)birth on the human plane. There are many more human worlds not of this familiar one. Just to be human, in the past and in the future, it is because one kept this minimum of conduct, behavior, action. The Five Precepts are restraints, refraining from:

1. killing
2. stealing
3. sexual misconduct
4. false speech (bearing false witness)
5. intoxicants (that occasion heedlessness).

Whoever goes to a shrink ought
to have his head examined.

What are the worst of these? The answer would seem to be the first, killing. Actually, that is not the worst. The Buddha spoke of No. 4 as being worse than that -- insofar as it was observed that someone who lies, deceives, misleads might do any of the others since such a person has no shame about lying about it (as to evade consequences).

We maintain, while those two things may be true, there is one worse, and that is No. 5, using dope (getting wasted, sauced, trashed, inebriated, intoxicated). Why? Of all the things we would not do, what wouldn't we do when stoned -- when out of our mind, out of our reason, out of sorts, out of our heads? They all become possible.

So the (otherwise) good person suddenly, when drunk, lies, cheats (sleeps with another person's partner), steals, and even kills in a fit of anger or, more likely, in a reckless disregard for consequences, such as driving under the influence, or operating a gun or heavy machinery or a horse and carriage or a laser or blacking out and becoming possessed and doing who knows what?

In fact, in the Sigalovada Sutra, the Buddha spells out the misery that accompanies one who gets drunk. Of course, this would apply to any intoxicant (meth, weed, pharmaceuticals, fairy dust, venom, soma, yerba deliria or delirium-inducing-herb like Jimson weed, whatever). But it's usually alcohol, whether beer or spirits. What heedlessness, shamelessness, recklessness, negligence, carelessness might it occasion?

Whatever one would scrupulously not do (sober) becomes a wide-open possibility when s-faced, stoned, wasted, out of one's gourd. One is straight but drunk or stoned suddenly one is open to anything. One is a preserver of life and would risk one's own life to save another, but drunk or stoned does such stupid things that someone gets killed. Do the courts hold one responsible for killing-while-drunk? Yes. Judges look down on it and sentence one to many years in prison.

We may not feel responsible because what we did, we did when we were not in our right mind. But think about it -- as you're telling the other prisoners that you don't belong in prison with them -- what were we when we got drunk or stoned? We did that sober.

And in doing that, we take all the responsibility of what we end up doing inebriated. Fair/not fair? What does it really matter what the court says, what the judge says, what the jury says, what the society says, or what we say? What matter is what karma says. We will hold ourselves to account for all we do under the influence of

• greed (passion, liking)
• hatred (aversion, disliking)
• delusion (foolishness, ignorance, stupidity, wrong views)

We're sticking to toxic soft drinks full of sugar,
aspartame, carbonation, saltpeter, and caffeine.

That being the case, why would we make it worse? Why would we drink, fall into the habit of drinking (by repeatedly choosing to or allowing someone else to choose that we drink), think nothing of drinking (until something very bad happens)?

Maybe we'll say it's because we needed to relax. Well, if that were true, if that were the case, why not use Ü Relax or some similar mood-enhancing but not intoxicating-to-the-point-of-heedlessness substance?

Above all, the Buddha said, let us be lamps/islands (dipa) unto ourselves and work out our salvations/liberations with diligence (mindfulness). There is no time to waste. We might say, above all, to pull a cultural reference from the 1980s (rap song), "Check yourself before you wreck yourself." Or maybe it would be better to say, "Know thyself" and, as Howard Stern's father always used to say to him, "Don't be stupid, you dummy" (which means, "Don't be a wiseass, Dumbass.")

• CalmingCo.com; Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Dhr. Seven, Moon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly Public Service Campaign and COMMENTARY