In this information era, almost every smoker and nonsmoker knows the ills of smoking. More than the nonsmokers, smokers know how difficult it is to quit smoking. While quitting is the only best option for them to escape from the hundreds of ills of smoking from lung diseases to cancer and from bad breath to wasting hard earned money unconsciously, due to their inability to quit smoking completely some would like at least to cut down on smoking as much as they can. This would enable them to slow down the damage to their health and save a little more money (a lot if they are heavy smokers). I strongly believe the difficulty to quit smoking lies in the fact that when there is conflict between will power and imagination, often the imagination wins. The other reason I believe is that you cannot be the same person with the same self image or self identity with different habits. Your habits go well with your self image and smoking is one such habit.
Here is a wonderful method which will enable you to cut down smoking to more than half of your daily dose. I call it half Dyan method. It involves meditation, thought watch, belief strengthening, and imagination. This method is powerful because while following this method you will find transformation in your life, cutting down smoking and even quitting smoking is just of byproduct of this transformation. And more importantly, there will not be any conflict between your will power and imagination because I will not ask you to take help of your will power. This method as said earlier involves three steps.
1. Meditation:
You can start any type of meditation you are comfortable with, but my favorite method is fixing your attention between the eyebrows knows as Christ consciousness center. You have to do this meditation at least for 15 minutes twice everyday once in early morning and once before going to bed. If you are someone who never tried meditation, it will be very difficult to you to maintain your attention ever for a few seconds. It is the unpleasant feeling and restlessness in our mind and body which makes it hard to meditate. You have to get into the right state of mind before you start meditation. There are many websites online teaching how to prepare for meditation. I personal favorite preparation is affirmation method. Before starting meditation, close you eyes, take three deep breaths and say to yourself. "I am going to meditate for 15 minutes. Meditation will be very easy and smooth task for me. I feel completely at rest." This self affirmation makes meditation easy by removing the unpleasant feelings and restlessness. When you are keeping your attention on the Christ centre, thoughts continue to bombard from all directions. Do not fight with the thoughts, just try to bring back your attention again and again to the Christ centre and complete your meditation. Within a few days the thoughts and bodily uneasiness lessen, and you start enjoying meditation.
There are hundreds of benefits of daily meditation, one of them in decrease in the urge to smoke which naturally cut down the number of cigarettes every day. More as someone who meditates daily, there will be a shift in your self image which is quite different from the self image of a smoker and slowly the habit of smoking starts to leave. You will also starts enjoying many positive effects of meditation.
2. Thought Watch:
The second step to cut down smoking is thought watch. Once you start meditating, you will acquire the ability to watch your thoughts naturally. While you are trying to fix your attention on the Christ centre between your eyebrows, thoughts will be floating in to disturb you. This makes you become aware of your thoughts. You will be surprised to know that majority of thoughts are of no use to your personal life. Among these thoughts some have the ability to make you to start a dialogue with them. Once this happens, your stop being aware of your thoughts and you will forget your goal of meditating and start thinking actively for many seconds to few minutes before you realize that you forgot to meditate. Once you realize your consciousness is drifting away with your thoughts you try to come back to fix your attention on the Christ centre and within seconds you watch thoughts floating into your awareness.
As your experience grows in meditation your ability to fix your attention increases. In addition to this, your ability to be aware of your thoughts increases. You will become aware of the thought impulses which trigger the action of reaching for a cigarette. You will become aware of flashes of visual images of cigarette which leads you to automatically reaching for a cigarette. As you become more and more aware of your thoughts and start living consciously, the habit of smoking without any awareness decreases. This practice of thought watch further enables you to cut down your smoking. Nonetheless, if your addiction to cigarettes is very strong, you will still continue to smoke your active cigarettes.
Both meditation and thought watching exercises decrease the urge to smoke and decrease the number of cigarettes you smoke unconsciously without actually being fully aware of the act of smoking. This leads you to cut down more than half of your regular dosage of cigarettes. The benefits of meditation and thought watch are many and very powerful in changing in your life in a positive way, but for this post we will just concentrate on how they can help you in cutting down on smoking.
3. Belief Strengthening:
Belief strengthening is the only active step you are taking to cut down your smoking, but the previous two steps of meditation and thought watch gives to the strength and ability to be calm without any agitation and anxiousness you might otherwise experience by the thought of cutting down or quitting smoking.
Smoking is dangerous to health, smoking systematically and slowly decreases our stamina and decreases our quality of life and eventually kills us. Smoking is also wastage of money. Smoking is largely considered by the modern society as a bad habit of weak minded people who cannot control their urge. These are a few of many beliefs we have against smoking, but for this beliefs to motivate us to cut smoking and eventually quit smoking, we have to strengthen them and make them our core beliefs, the active belief which pops up in our mind whenever the thought of cigarette comes to our mind. To strengthen your belief you need to read a lot about the ills of smoking. One of the books which helped me cut down smoking and eventually quit is Allen Carr's, Easyway to Stop Smoking.
To strengthen my beliefs about smoking, apart from the knowledge I added vision and emotion to knowledge. I worked to develop negative bodily feelings linked to my beliefs to enable to cut down smoking before quitting altogether. Your beliefs about the negative effects of smoking should become strong with visual images and negative bodily sensations.
You have to bear in mind that you should not use your will power to cut down the cigarettes. If you practice these three steps regularly keeping your belief active, you naturally cut down your smoking without actively trying with your will power.
I have explained the half Dyan method in this post; the complete Dyan method apart from the three steps explained here, involves defining your ideal self, strengthening of core beliefs of your ideals self, strengthening the positive and empowering thoughts of your ideal self. Other steps in Dyan method involves identifying with your ideal self and complete transformation to a successful human being. I will be explaining about Dyan method in future posts in this blog. Don’t forget to subscribe.
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