Author: Teresa Bergen

Should a sober person go to a place so in love with craft brewing that one of its nicknames is Beer City USA? Yes. Because beer is not the only thing Asheville is enthusiastic about. “People come to Asheville and find their passions,” Torin Kexel, who’s lived in Asheville for seven years, told me. “And they live them out, whether outdoor recreation like mountain biking, culinary entrepreneurialism, or music and art.” Kexel’s passion is introducing people to the city with his e-bike company, The Flying Bike. His whole family has also gotten involved in the old-time music community, with Kexel…

I once lived in a one-towel punk rock household where nobody ever took out our empty beer cans. We’d sit around the living room floor—we didn’t have much in the way of furniture—contemplating bags and bags of empties and fantasize about rigging a pulley system that would lower the cans three floors down to the street. But nobody was willing to get off their butt and carry them. I have no memories of housekeeping there, though we must have occasionally scrubbed the pot as we cooked our ramen noodles. One of my punk friends lived alone in a studio. Every…

Choose Life Sober Adventures is one of a handful of small companies specializing in group travel for non-drinkers. I’ve traveled twice with Choose Life, once on an action-packed trip to Costa Rica and once on a hike-filled journey to Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley of Peru. We did all sorts of the usual fun adventure travel things like kayaking, ziplining, and eating at good restaurants. The Choose Life facilitator leads daily yoga classes and a nightly recovery meeting, which makes for faster bonding between participants than you’d see in your average group tour. I love the company and was…

I first heard about the Ette Hotel six months after it opened in June of 2022. An upscale, wellness-focused hotel, and proudly alcohol-free? I immediately knew I had to get there. I wasn’t exactly sure where Kissimmee, Florida, was or how to pronounce it (emphasis on the second syllable, it turns out), but I was scheming to go. How many times had I been to an alc-free property beside a church camp, a hippie oasis, or a retreat center screaming cult? Probably never. I finally got there in May of 2024. Kissimmee sprawls into Orlando, and I was surprised to…

Imagine you’re a 15-year-old girl, and you enter a room where a bunch of friends await you, gathered around a mirror laid flat on a table, a twinkle in their eyes. “Have a line!” they say. You do. “Have another!” They keep making you lines, and you keep snorting them. A little piece of your mind wonders why they aren’t partaking. But you ignore it because, well, more for you! You snort seven before your friends all lose it, rolling on the floor and laughing at you because you just did seven lines of Sweet’N Low. And they knew you’d…

When I entered Juniper, the rooftop bar at AC Hotel, to check out the mocktails, I was overwhelmed by florals. Gobs and gobs of fake flowers festooned every wall of the dimly lit space. Fortunately, floral is just the kind of overload I like. During a long weekend in Greenville, South Carolina, I noticed that the romance of the South was going on, from flowers to beautiful parks to the pink, yellow, and coral flounces of women’s clothing. This clean and friendly town has a way of winning over the hearts of visitors and converting them into residents. Greenville has…

Continuing with our study of yoga philosophy, this month’s column delves into the yama, or ethical restraint, of brahmacarya. You wake up naked with some guy, wearing nothing but a concha belt. Apparently, you had sex with him, but you have no idea whether it was consensual because you were blacked out the night before. As usual. Or you look at your one-night stand and think, never in a million years would I choose this person…but you did. Or the alcohol did. Now, you’re faced with the consequences. These scenarios are the opposite of this month’s yoga topic. The fourth…

My Uber driver oriented me to Tulsa as we drove from the airport to my downtown hotel. “People in Oklahoma get along even if they believe very different things because everybody respects American ideals and that piece of paper written by our founding fathers,” he said of the US constitution, “And especially the Bill of Rights.” I contemplated his eccentric facial hair and the blocky wooden cross hanging from his rear-view mirror, wondering what this city had in store for me. It turned out to be a nonstop parade of friendly people with, as my driver foretold, all different points…

Continuing with our study of yoga philosophy, this month’s column delves into the yama, or ethical restraint, of asteya. What’s the difference between a drug addict and an alcoholic? The alcoholic will steal your wallet and run. The addict will steal your wallet and help you look for it. I’ve often pondered this old joke, which portrays the blundering drunk and the wily addict as thieves. But either way, they’re both thieves. And that’s what this month’s yoga philosophy column is about: the yogic principle of asteya, or non-stealing. Are you a thief? Back when I got sober a loooong…

Chile is one of those countries you would need months to explore fully. Since it’s 2,653 miles long, this skinny country stretches through all sorts of geographic terrain, from one of the world’s driest places to jaw-dropping icy mountains. So, if you’re only going for 10 days, you’ll have to choose just a few places to explore. Here’s a peek into Chilean life via three places I visited in March this year. Atacama Desert I wasn’t sure what to expect from the enormous Atacama Desert in northern Chile near the Bolivian border. And it didn’t look like much when I…

Continuing with our study of yoga philosophy, this month’s column delves into the yama, or ethical restraint, of satya. The second of the moral restraints, or yamas, is satya, which means truth. We’re supposed to tell the truth. So, does this mean we should go around venting freely, giving voice to every thought, with no filter between lips and mind? No. Notice that satya falls under the list of restraints. This means that we speak the truth, but carefully. If you’re familiar with the twelve steps, this may sound very familiar. In the eighth step (building on work done in…

Yoga is more than poses. The word yoga means “to yoke.” In this case, we’re trying to yoke our own little souls to a cosmic consciousness. Yoga includes a whole body of philosophy, spiritual theory and ideas of how to live clear-headed, peaceful lives. This column goes beyond the physical practice of yoga for a peek into yoga philosophy and how it pertains to sobriety. We’ll start with understanding a series of ethical restraints called the yamas. These yamas improve our characters and personalities, making it easier for people to live with us. The first of the five yamas (look…

Bar owner Abby Ehmann opened a sober bar after her top two customers stopped drinking. “Customer one had a stroke. His doctor said, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,’” Ehmann told me when I first visited Hekate Café and Elixir Lounge in 2023. Her second customer reevaluated his relationship with alcohol during the pandemic, and realized it was a dead end. Ehmann asked herself how she could recreate the community she had at Lucky, her regular bar, but without the alcohol. Eventually the idea turned into Hekate, which opened in early 2022. At first, they served only coffee and herbal elixirs,…

I’m about thirty feet in the air, balancing on a small swinging log when I stop to stare down at the alligator below. The huge, wide reptile basks in Florida’s mild winter sunshine. Around me, roseate spoonbills nest in the treetops. It’s a viewpoint you can only get from the ropes and zip line course called Crocodile Crossing at the Saint Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park. People have been coming here for thrilling encounters with massive reptiles since 1893, making it one of the state’s oldest attractions. But soaring over gator pits on a zip-line gives a perspective that would…

“Would you like a rum punch?” the receptionist asked first thing as I checked into South Beach Hotel. I was in Barbados, the birthplace of rum and known for Mount Gay Distillery, which dates back to 1703. Instead of getting sensitive and protective, like I sometimes still do, and brusquely saying no, I asked if they had anything nonalcoholic. Which of course they do—I hardly invented nondrinking. I sat in the sunny lobby with a glass of sweet fruit punch, the first of many nonalcoholic alternatives I would drink during five days in the land of rum. Sure, there’s a…

In downtown Loreto, the church bell rings every 15 minutes, day and night. It’s a gentle background sound during the night that I can sleep through if I’m already asleep. But at six AM, the bells go wild, bursting into a whole song. Must mean it’s time to haul my carcass out of bed and hurry the few blocks to the waterfront to catch the sunrise. It would be a shame to miss the sun coming up over the malecon, the 1.7-mile walkway along the beach. This fishing town in Baja del Sur, population 10,000, is lively in the morning.…

The hike took seven hours, and we gained 1800 feet of elevation in the first three. Huffing and puffing, we climbed through cloud forest, passing orchids, ferns and a glorious waterfall. Sometimes we walked on dirt trail, sometimes we climbed old, uneven Inca stone steps. The last 52 were so steep we had to crawl. At last, we reached the Sun Gate and saw it in the distance: Machu Picchu! Our little group of sober hikers had survived the arduous climb and could reap the reward of visiting this 15th century archeological site. It was the pinnacle of a wonderful…

Dawn comes very early at Lake Shikaribetsu on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. By 4:30 AM, I sit up from my thin futon and see the pink and orange sky lightening over dark water. It’s the beginning of another day at the Hotel Fusai, a traditional hot springs hotel that sits right on the lake. Here, I got a little education in Japanese culture: Shoes off before you enter your hotel room. It’s acceptable to wear your bathing kimono to breakfast and dinner, but wrap the right side around yourself first, as the left first is for burial. Don’t expect coffee…