Like a Leaf in the Wind
Thursday, June 21, 2007
I want to report on a side effect of my practice to date which I’ve been saving up until now. I’ve been a tobacco smoker for 25
years, and over the last few years I’ve tried several different ways on several different occasions, to break that habit.
I’ve used hypnosis tapes, homeopathic stop smoking kits, prescription stop smoking drugs, and several different NLP based approaches. Some of these methods were successful to a very limited extent, meaning I smoked less for some period of time, but did not succeed in breaking the habit. At best, I cut back to 4 or 5 cigarettes a day for a week or so.
Ten days ago, I ran out of tobacco and did not go and buy more, simply because the act of doing so was not inspired. My emotional guidance system did not give me the feeling of rightness, joy, and motivation that I have come to require in order to follow through on any action. I smoked two cigarettes over the following 3 days, each given to me by another smoker. It has now been one full week since I have smoked any tobacco at all.
Along the way, I have felt a number of mild impulses to smoke, each of which evaporated as soon as I realized what it was. None of the impulses has been strong enough to have any perceptible emotion attached, nor has any lasted more than a 2 or 3 seconds, before it was swept from my mind by the forward flowing joy that now characterizes my experience. My tobacco habit has now been blown away like a leaf in the wind, as a mere side-effect of understanding the law of attraction and learning to follow my emotional guidance system.
Meanwhile, I decided on a business model for the site, as I'm sure you noticed when you encountered the new agreement page on your way in. I've designed 4 more NLP tools, recorded them, and begun to edit them for release. I'll plan to post all four over the next 48 hours or less.
Breathing Much Easier,
Taylor
Update - Wednesday, June 27, 2007
I'm posting an update to the whole site today, so I thought I'd add an update here. It's now been 2 weeks and a day since I ran out of tobacco and stopped smoking all day every day. Tomorrow mid-day will be 2 full weeks since smoking any tobacco at all. Still no withdrawals or cravings, although my body did go though about a week of detox symptoms, including a mild fever that lasted several days. That's passed now and it's been over a week since I felt even brief impulses to smoke.
I even had a couple of experiences that were exactly the kind of stressful that used to increase my smoking, one of which happened with cigarettes (the brand I smoked until recently) in the house that a friend had forgotten. At one point when I was emotionally reeling from stress, I noticed the pack of cigarettes and wondered if I would choose to smoke to cope with the stress. My answer was a clear and relaxed, "no", and I went on to the next thing and didn't think about it again.