There is some wisdom in smoking cigarettes. This wisdom knows that breathing slow deep inhales and long exhales, spending time outdoors, getting grounded, taking a pause between hectic life events to reflect on and visualize our next step are all good and necessary aspects of taking care of our body and mind. By calming and steadying ourselves we get ready for whatever comes next.
Smokers are holding out on the dying art of taking a break in a fast paced culture that promotes eating lunch at the computer screen and putting in overtime beyond human limits. When you smoke it may be functioning as a meditative aid while at other times it is the glue to forming new social bonds. Smokers of all stripes band together in the worst and the best of times.
If you smoke you know that something about smoking is working for you. The trouble is that no matter how great the immediate benefits of smoking are in your day-to-day life these benefits are grossly outweighed by the health hazards and costs of this habit, both to others, the environment and ourselves.
Clearly it’s time to investigate change.
Why Yoga For Smokers
Yoga provides a supportive and structured approach to habit change. As a process and not an end point Yoga can assist smokers through all stages of habit change.
Contemplation and Preparation: In the beginning Yoga will help you to address your motivation, by becoming more intimate with your breath and feeling sensations in the body you discover the extent to which your habit has infiltrated all aspects of your life and assess the impacts of the habit. You recover your desire to take care of yourself.
Early Action: Once you have decided to take action Yoga lays out a path for you to follow in the initial stages of making a change. Intensive daily practice is advisable at this time, which will support you through withdrawal and help you to stay focused.
Middle Action: You have a place to turn to instead of your habit. You begin to rely on the classes you attend and look forward to familiar faces and practice routines. The time and place you set aside for practicing becomes ritualized and provides new meaning in your life.
Late Action: Here you start to uncover what was missing in your life along with the deeper emotional issues that lead to your dependency on the substance. Your Yoga takes shape. Who will you become? Your practice expands as desires emerge to try new and more complex poses and you get excited about the stages in the transformation process. You finally have the stamina to accept where you are and to work with what you have got. Tapas is a Sanskrit term for the heat that is generated through Yoga that burns through habitual holding patterns in the mind body and emotional systems and serves as the training ground for integrating difficult mental and emotional states. You leave your obsessions about outcomes behind and fall in love with process.
Maintenance: The best aspect of the yoga approach to smoking cessation and relapse prevention is the ongoing benefits of a regular yoga practice to support and maintain the new lifestyle you have adopted. Make your Yoga work for you. At this point you are self-directed in your Yoga practice and find way to integrate what you have learned into your everyday life. You supplement your home practice with classes, readings, retreats, DVD’s and online material for additional learning. Yoga is a practice of longevity that is vast enough in it’s scope to change with you as you age to support you with whatever you are experiencing.
Awareness
Contrary to popular belief Yoga is not only about feeling good. When we practice Yoga we gain awareness about ourselves particularly about what we have been covering up and avoiding. This can often be painful to realize. What we were covering up when we ran to our substances of choice and comfort be they cigarettes, chocolate or drugs and alcohol, is what comes to light once we start regular practice. The good news is that Yoga offers us a highly organized path to follow so we can learn to support the new awareness and use it to make choices that better reflect our needs.
What we do with the information we uncover in our yoga practice?
On the path of acceptance and healing of habitual tendencies, it is essential that you learn how to relate to what you experiences with the non-judgmental spaciousness of your own mind. Toward whatever comes to our attention when we practice yoga, we learn to direct this non-judgmental gaze. Developing a close relationship with a grounded teacher who can follow and guide you in your practice, will help you to develop a kind and gentle witness within yourself. We sow new seeds that counter our addictive tendencies when turn away from harsh self-criticizing thoughts and cultivate patience and kindness instead.
Purification and Balance
As a highly effective form of stress reduction, Yoga practices can replace the benefits of smoking with non-toxic rituals that are readily accessible and without cost. Observe your mental, emotional and physical state before and after just 5minutes of yoga practice. How you feel after a session will tell you how effective the practice has been. Yoga is a total system of purification that regulates the circulatory, endocrine, digestive, reproductive and nervous systems.
Identity
Yoga helps us to unpack our tightly wound stories of who we are. Many of us believe we are our habit. “I am a smoker.” What would it be like to free ourselves of these stories of who we are? What if we gave up our stories about what we can and can’t do? Yoga addresses habitual patterns of holding and restriction in our musculature, breath and personality. Each asana (pose) provides an opportunity to become something new. The asanas of Pigeon, Eagle, Downward Dog and Cow’s Head each teach us about aspects of being human and emphasize various states of being that we can learn to integrate within our personalities to greater wholeness.
Sacred
Honouring the body we have, now. We have nowhere else to start but with the body, mind and abilities we have now. Each day we come to Yoga with where we are now. That means if you were doing full-wheel yesterday and today you have stiff shoulders you honour your bodies resistance and practice accordingly. Similarly if you were having full deep breaths and feeling great last night and this morning you are wheezing, coughing and have shortness of breath you will find a yoga practice that meets where you are today. Make your yoga work for you. If your yoga practice is not benefiting you, why are you doing yoga? Sometimes we find that competition and self-hatred are the fuel beneath our practice and when this is the case we usually end up in injury and with mental hardship.
Yoga promotes spending time appreciating being ness rather than doing ness. By directing our attention to the things we are actually feeling and sensing in our bodies right now we meet the present moment that is the only place where the power of choice is available to us. When we bring our attention to sensation, breath, our physical and sensate being we relinquish the hold of our ever busy doing mind and it’s perpetual grasping to some thing or some experience out there.
Whatever we put into ourselves and whatever we do effects our environment both inner and outer. As a smoker, you may ask yourself how are you tending to the garden of your body and mind? Yoga teaches us that we are in the process of becoming in each moment.
What will you choose today?
Article published in Six Degrees Community Acupuncture Clinic news letter Spring 2009
“There came a time when staying within the tight bud became more painful than the strain it took to bloom.” — Anaïs Nin
