Books

Dead Drunk

Dead Drunk is the moving and powerful story of a teenager who lost himself to alcohol addiction after the breakdown of his parents’ marriage.

Paul Garrigan has written an honest (and often darkly humorous) account of his alcoholism.

His adventures took him from the quiet suburbs of Dublin to begging on the streets of London, getting paid to drink in Oxford, and swigging illegal booze in Saudi Arabia, before finally ending up in a remote Thai village where he fully succumbed to his addiction, and was determined to drink himself to death.

While surfing the Internet one night he came across a highly unorthodox detox programme being offered by Buddhist monks, and in a last-ditch attempt at sobriety, he set out on what he was sure would be his strangest and most difficult journey yet.

Dead Drunk is a story of redemption and of how one man found sobriety. It is a story of hope.

Hope Mindfulness Manual

Free ebook (Just click on the image above). Here is the workbook I created for the Hope Rehab Thailand mindfulness program. It includes chapters on all of the topics we cover in this two-month intensive course. Although written for clients dealing with addiction problems, the information can be relevant to anyone interested in mindfulness.

Muay Thai Fighter

Paul Garrigan is not a typical fighter. As a child he dreamt of imitating his hero Bruce Lee, he even practiced Kung Fu for a number of years, but he never got past his fear of being hit in the face. By the time he reached his twenties the only fighting he was doing involved a battle with alcoholism. Garrigan turned from a ten stone weakling in his teens to an overweight alcoholic in his thirties, but the desire to practice a martial art never left him. He ended up living in Thailand where the fiercest of all martial arts is practiced – Muay Thai. Eventually he managed to find his way out of addiction and even though he was now in his forties he decided to pursue his martial art dreams.

In this book we get to see what happens when a middle-aged ex-drunk decides to learn the toughest fighting art in the world. Garrigan wasn’t expecting it to be easy, but could never have anticipated how demanding the training was going to be. It brought him to levels of physical and mental pain that he never guessed existed. A famous saying in martial arts is that the only person you are really fighting is the person you were yesterday. This is the inspiring tale of how we can all still achieve our dreams no matter how much we have messed up in life.