Quitting Smoking
The breath that we welcome into our bodies gets absorbed into our blood, into our organs. This week is all about quitting smoking or vaping, giving you support through Yoga Nidra to help you move into a space where you can comfortably exist without nicotine. You don’t have to commit to anything, just start with Part One and Part Two and see how you feel.
Excerpts
— The breath that we welcome into our bodies gets absorbed into our blood, into our organs. How we breathe, often says something about the unconscious, about stored mental tension.
The quality of our breathing has a ripple effect on our skin, our blood, our organs, or energy levels, our senses. In traditional medicine, the body system is one entity, the energy, the physical form, and the mind all interacting with each other. Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Traditional Tibetan medicine all believe that food can impact the mind, that climate can impact the mood, that a healthy system is gained through seeing the system as a whole and tending to all parts, parts being the mind, the body, and the chi or prana.
In regards to lung health, whether you have lung cancer, asthma, or TB, it is not helpful to mine your unconscious mind for reasons as to why you have this disease. In this episode, I am happy to say that a hayfever is hayfever, that asthma is asthma. Yes, there is an interplay between the mind and the body, but not everything goes in the direction of originating in the mind. I have a dust allergy that can make me bedridden for two days and if someone said that was psychosomatic, I would feel pretty irritated. I say this because I am not positing that all lung-related issues are psychological, instead I am saying that there is interplay, actions and reactions, cycles of behaviour, and a blur of symptoms. If you are a smoker or vaper, I will just be saying smoker for both going forward, we have to accept that there is a dance between the mind’s attachment to the ritual and the physically addictive qualities of the nicotine, we have to accept that the mind becomes weighed down by the addiction and forms certain negative beliefs about ourselves, and that the harm done to ourselves through smoking encourages us to feel negatively about ourselves.
— All of these little betrayals of self, add up. I’m not saying we can never bite our tongue or do someone a favour. What I am saying is that by shifting a bad habit, but laying down a boundary in one area of our lives, there are positive ripple effects. Smoking is the same, I’m already so low, I’ll quit after my mother visits, I’ll quite when so-and-so quits. I’ll quit when I get a less stressful job.
— You matter. Your body, your health, your life, matters. There are people who really want you to be the best, healthiest version of you that you can be. No one in your life wants you to smoke. If they do, they are selfish. Your body wants to be healthy and strong and it is never too late to quit. Your ability to survive the constant influx of poison into your system is not a sign of strength. There is no pride in smoking.
You matter, you are lovable and very loved. I am a complete stranger and I want you to quit because whoever you are, you deserve a healthy happy body.
Give your future self the gift of a strong body and the ability to breathe freely. Know that feelings of self-annihilation or impoverishment of the soul are the illusion of addiction. You are so much greater, so much more than the voice of the poison that wants to be consumed. Stand up to it. And every time it knocks you, stand up again. Do not be bullied by this voice.
Don’t you know that you matter? Don’t you know that you are loved? If you have forgotten, let me remind you, for whatever time we have here, it shouldn’t be spent forgetting, you matter, and you are loved.
— I believe it is of immense value when standing up to the bully that is nicotine, the great corruptor that is addiction. Imagine yourself speaking these words to the symbolic image of nicotine and addition. Maya Angelou writes:
”There's a place in you that you must keep inviolate. You must keep it pristine. Clean. So that nobody has a right to curse you or treat you badly. Nobody. No mother, father, no wife, no husband, no-nobody. You have to have a place where you say: 'Stop it. Back up. Don't you know I'm a child of God?”