Everything you need to live your best no-alcohol / low-alcohol lifestyle.
Ever wondered what inspires Alcohol Behaviour Change (ABC) coaches to do what they do?
In the Beyond the Bio Interview Series, we go beyond the professional profile to meet the people helping Australians and New Zealanders positively change their relationship with alcohol. We explore their backgrounds, approaches and techniques — and, importantly, what motivates them to do this life-changing work.
Why you’ll love this interview
Looking for insight into the work of a Meditation Teacher and Sober Coach who helps people reduce their drinking? In this Beyond the Bio interview, Rory Kinsella shares how a drinking culture in Bristol and years in music journalism shaped his relationship with alcohol, how learning to meditate changed it, and how that led him to coach others.
As a Meditation Teacher and Sober Coach, Rory combines Vedic Meditation with one-on-one coaching, using NLP, CBT-inspired frameworks and breathwork. He works with high-functioning professional people who want to reduce their drinking by lowering both their need and desire to drink, with particular experience among 40 to 65-year-olds.
Hit us with the personal stuff first, we’re intrigued to learn more about your own background and experience with alcohol?
I grew up in Bristol in the UK in the 90s which was very much a drinking culture. It was perfectly normal for us to go to the pub at 15 or 16 with fake IDs and our parents’ permission. They would even pick us up afterwards – I remember regularly claiming that the stench of cigarettes on my clothes was from the general pub atmosphere – pre-smoking ban – rather than me having puffed on twenty fags myself.
I’m naturally more introverted than extraverted and I loved how alcohol allowed me to come out of my shell. I had a great time in my teenage years, which heavily centred around drinking, and am still in touch with many of my friends from then.
My main passion outside of drinking in these years was music and the week I graduated university, I was given the dream opportunity to join a band signed to my favourite record label at the time, Acid Jazz, who had discovered Jamiroquai.
Although this ultimately didn’t go any further than countless unglamorous gigs in provincial English towns – and a brief inexplicable minor stardom in Northern Italy for a couple of years – it set the tone for my 20s.
I became a music journalist while continuing to make music on the side, DJing and running club nights. As you can imagine, these pursuits made heavy drinking feel entirely normal and was regularly celebrated.
I worked as a journalist in both London and Sydney for about ten years until the cracks started to appear in my drinking.
Rather than the relaxant and social lubricant it had always been – by my mid-30s, the negatives were beginning to outweigh the positives. Weekend binges and rampant partying in the Sydney ex-pat community would mean hangovers that often lasted until Wednesday.
My girlfriend at the time used to say: You Brits, you have your 20s in London and then come to Australia and have them again in your 30s!
At 35, I quit smoking and DJing and started exploring the world outside of partying. This began with running, eventually marathons, and a year later I learned to meditate.
Meditating was a huge turning point for me as it gave me a completely new way to relax as well as change my conscious state.
One of the reasons I liked drinking was to get out of my relentless thinking mind and with meditation, I had a natural, sustainable way to do it.
Get out of your mind without the hangover – this was a strap line I used when I eventually started teaching meditation.
As a meditator, the urge to drink gradually receded and the intuition to stop drinking became clearer.
My body was also giving me increasingly explicit clues that it was over alcohol. Apart from the debilitating hangovers, I also finally realised that my “weekend hay fever” was actually a newly-developed allergy to wine and beer.
When I became a meditation teacher and started looking for people to inspire to learn to meditate, it made sense to use my own experience of how it helped me reduce my drinking.
Now let’s cover off on the credentials – what makes you qualified to work in this specialised field of coaching?
They say you need 10,000 hours to become an expert in anything – and I easily have 10,000 hours of drinking experience. And I now have nearly nine years of experience being sober and almost as long helping others reduce their drinking, having worked with hundreds of people individually and in groups and thousands through my digital courses.
I’m a certified NLP Practitioner (2014 and 2020), a certified Expert Coach (2024), Initiator of Vedic Meditation (2016) and Breathwork Healer (2026).
If I was to work with you, what should I expect?
I work with people one on one as I find it’s the most effective approach. Everyone has their own unique habits, motivations and eccentricities so I’ve found that a bespoke approach usually works better.
My program consists of comprehensive training in Vedic Meditation to get clients up and running as self-sufficient daily meditators. Most find so much benefit from the meditation that they continue years after they’ve tackled the drinking issue.
Then we do a series of 50-minute one-on-one coaching sessions on Zoom, once a week for the first two months then once a month for the next four. Everyone I work with has been drinking for decades and I’ve found that prolonged contact is the best way to get lasting results.
As well as meditation, I also use various coaching frameworks from NLP or inspired by CBT as well as breathwork.
I heavily emphasise progress over perfection and don’t preach abstinence. It’s my job to give clients the skills and understanding so they can reducing their drinking by lowering both their need and desire to drink.
What sort of people do you normally work with?
I work with what I call high-functioning professional people, people who are regular or nightly drinker, perhaps drinking a bottle or more of wine a night. I don’t work with daytime drinkers or those with physical dependency unless they are also seeking medical help.
I have particular experience working with 40-65-year-olds and work with both men and women although I tend to get more female clients.
Why would I choose you to work with?
My meditation-based approach is unlike most other coaches in this area and works particularly well with those for whom stress is a key drinking trigger.
How can people wanting to work with you get in touch?
Book a free session with me here: https://thekinsellamethod.com/book-email
NoLo Life thanks Rory for giving us deeper insight into his life and coaching practice.
You can review profiles of other ABC Coaches and Therapists in our Individual Support Directory.
