Stop Smoking! Start Breathing! I Was Addicted To Smoking
A Personal Story Shared
My personal struggle with tobacco addiction:
I am 62 years old. I smoked two packs of Gauloises per day for 10 years. I remember exactly the first taste of a cigarette. The fear of doing something bad and prohibited, the necessity to hide, the suffocating feeling and the compulsion to cough. Smoking only left a bad taste in my mouth that made me want to throw up.
Why did I continue? The insecurity of being an adolescent wanting to identify with adults? Modeling a cool image? Wanting to rebel against society’s rules? Certainly I did not trust and validate my first hand experience of disgust with smoking!
Today, I wish I did. When I look around me and see the damage created by this suicidal habit; friends dying from esophageal cancer, others struggling with lung, bladder cancer or emphysema ….I wonder: will I be spared? Will these 18 years of regular exercise and pure food clean my lungs and repair my body to spare me the gloomy consequences of smoking?
At the age of 28, I quit with my will power and my sister’s help. She was in control of the cigarettes keeping the cigarettes hidden perhaps in her pocket and allowing me to have what we had agreed on. I was weaning myself down. First, one cigarette per hour. then every 2 hours. Then, 3 a day then one, then nothing. As I was becoming a non smoker I also made some radical changes to my life. I quit being an employee and working in an office and started my own business. I matched my work closer to my ideals. I stopped a non-satisfying relationship. I did not touch cigarettes for the next 10 years. Then, while I was in India, being a fervent meditator and working in an ashram, I played with the fire again.
In one of his discourses, my teacher mentioned smoking addiction and described two ways to quit. Through will power and through meditation. Quitting with your will power, was the wrong way because awareness was not being used. Alas! I started smoking again. First, biddies, then of course pretty soon tobacco. This time, I smoked the lighter blond cigarettes from England or the US. For the 10 following years I tried quitting many times but I would start over again fooling myself that I could just have one cigarette or not being able to deal with the empty feeling left when the addiction was not fed. I would stay quit for a week or two then start again. It was a constant struggle with myself. I felt like a victim. I was depressed by the futility of my life revolving around whether to smoke or not to smoke.
However, after each smoking episode I would decrease the tobacco strength. I would smoke consciously. Being very present to the act of smoking. Breathing in the smoke and feeling what it was doing to my lungs. Soon I was afraid to take too much of a deep breath. I would inhale the smoke shallower, only smoking half a cigarette. I was not buying cigarettes to avoid temptation. When I could not separate myself from the desire I was begging for cigarettes, smoking old buts from the ash tray. Choosing to continue with this dependency was choosing to be a slave, belittled, depressed. One day I dreamt that I was eating the content of an ash tray. I still remember the taste of cold ashes in my mouth. Every morning I was coughing yellow sputum. Deep inside, I was ashamed of my dependency.
Finally I decided to get done with the issue. I rallied a close friend of mine to the idea of quitting on New Year’s Eve. We made a good fire and threw our pack of cigarettes in it. The next days, I remained focused on my breath and watch the desire to smoke without acting on it. The first day was a moment to moment work. The second day was not as intense and it was getting easier and easier as the days were going by. By now I had learnt that I could not be a casual smoker and have a cigarette after a meal every once and a while. I know I was not to take another cigarette again for the rest of my life.
This long love and hate story with tobacco has taught me the evils of substance abuse and dependency. Like a phoenix rising from his ashes you too can break through the humiliating feeling of being a slave to a compulsive desire and soar free and light. Today I can barely remember the smoker in me. I know I once was a smoker but nothing of the smoker has remained. I certainly got trapped into coffee and alcohol for a short period of time, but I was able to apply what I learned from my tobacco dependency and quit in the same way, choosing to own all my brain power to fulfill my higher ideals, rather than vegetate.
All addictions stem from the same illusory belief that desire can be fulfilled and this is the very nature of desire to be unfulfilled. Moving from illusion to truth could be the higher spiritual lesson one may learn from getting rid of this grim life style habit.