HAPPY NEW YEAR I RESOLVE TO…
Every year we resolve to lose weight, stop smoking, exercise more, or something. We start out well and lose our momentum by March. I can help you accomplish what you haven’t been able to in previous years! I will share with you how I became an ex-smoker 11 years ago. Along the way I’ll illustrate how hypnosis and understanding how the conscious mind, unconscious mind and emotions interact to produce failure or success. You can use my experience and apply the same principles to what ever you are hoping to change or accomplish. Here goes.
My story
I began smoking in the 7th grade. I intentionally learned to inhale smoke in the 8th grade. I became a full fledged smoker at the ripe old age of 14. I did it because my father smoked. and most adults and a lot of my peers thought it was cool to smoke. By the time I was 18 I was a pack a day smoker. I remained a pack a day smoker more or less until the day I stopped smoking. Notice I didn’t say “the day I quit smoking”. How you think about what you are removing from your life is important. The words you use are important. By the time I was 30 I used smoking to help me do a host of things. I said to people I know:
- I need a smoke to wake up.
- I need a smoke to relax and go to sleep.
- I need a smoke to stave off hunger.
- I need a smoke to complete a meal
- I need a smoke to help me think.
- I need a smoke to clear my mind
- I need a smoke to calm my nerves
- I need a smoke to get up my nerve.
Do you notice a pattern here? My smoking was hooked to doing and not doing equally well over time. I used smoking to insulate myself from other people’s emotions. It worked like a fog getting between me and their feelings and dulling my perception of the emotional energy coming at me. I was a working psychotherapist by the time I was 25 and I relied on smoking to help me do my work. I believed at that time I needed to insulate myself form other people’s feelings or they would impact me adversely in some way.
The Big Insight
At 35 I had enough information to know that smoking was not conducive to a long life. Conversely I was touting to others I wanted to live to be 92, have good sex at that age and die by heart attack or stroke and ski right out of my body on a sunny day on the mountain. However, in the back of my mind I was saying: “I like smoking. I like the ritual, the sociability with other smokers etc. And I’m getting away with it so far. My health is not impaired by smoking. I can still run, jump, ski, without getting too winded. I don’t want to quit until I have to!” Subsequently I stopped smoking three times, from six months to a year each time, until the end of my 49th year.
The Problem
I have been adept at self trance since I was 16. I have used hypnosis to help many people stop smoking since I was in my 20’s. With all of these skills I still failed three times. I set myself up to fail because I was emotionally invested in smoking as long as I wasn’t paying the piper. So that little thought kept me coming back to it until I was 49. In that year I began to feel my body changing. I was going into the conserving part of my life. I began to feel the accumulative effects of smoking on a daily basis. On the last hour of my 49th year I sat at the stove chain smoking until . I threw away the partial pack I had as the clock struck 12. I was now 50 years old. It was time to be done.
The Magic of the Unconscious
It took me three weeks to become an ex-smoker after I threw that pack away... The physical withdrawal was intense but manageable for five to seven days. I ate more than usual and gained a few pounds. It was the psychological/emotional withdrawal that was really difficult. And on the 14th day I fell off the wagon and smoked a cigarette. When I quit in the past, I developed a system for cheating. It was:
Buy a pack myself
Remove one from the pack
Throw away the pack so as not to be retrievable.
Go somewhere else and smoke the cigarette alone.
Buy a whole pack to smoke one cigarette.
The first day I cheated and took the first drag was orgasmic. The remainder of the cigarette was good and I smoked the whole thing. Then in my mind I picked up where I left off -being done with smoking. Notice I didn’t start over. This was another important concept I developed along the way.
For me, being a smoker meant that I always felt an ache in my chest, in my bronchials and in my heart center. Sometimes this ache was the unpleasant longing for a smoke. It was also a wonderful ache of the first drag at other times. But the ache was never absent! I was twelve years old when my chest was free of that ache. I was worried that my chest would always have that ache... The absence of the ache was a hole in my chest which only smoking filled... Nature hates a vacuum and this hole in my chest was no exception. So when I cheated that first time it was because I didn’t trust or believe that I could reclaim my twelve year old presence of feeling whole in my chest... This worried me that I wouldn’t be able to reclaim it, no matter what. I began to worry and longed for it frequently throughout the day. I dreamed about it in my sleep as well. The longing was intense. Another week went by and now I was 3 weeks out from my stop date. I was going to the store and again I was overcome by the urge to smoke. I bought the pack. I threw away all except one. I drove to the store up the road. I sat alone in the car and lit up.
What Happened
That first drag tasted horrible. It felt like I sucked grit into my throat. The ache that occurred in my chest felt bad. Wait a minute. Before I lit up I was feeling no ache in my chest and it was just normal, not a hole, longing for something. I realized that somewhere over the last week my body had remembered how to feel again like it did before I ever became a smoker!! All of a sudden I felt twelve years old again physically. It was a wonderful feeling. I thanked my Unconscious Mind for the gift it had just given me. I’m eleven years older now. I know I will never chose to smoke a cigarette again in this life. I go a year or more now before I even notice cigarettes or smoking products in convenience stores
How We Work
My failure and success hinged on my emotional state. The intense desire to hold on to the accoutrements of smoking until my body started paying the price was the key in the years before I stopped. The intense longing to remember/feel, the absence of the ache-presence of normal comfort, was the key to being done. Desire is a very important part of achieving your goal. Emotion/desire can be both conscious and unconscious. Becoming sensitive to all our emotions about the issue is very important. If there is a conflict between what we say we want and what we feel about it our emotion will dominate the outcome. The following points are necessary in successfully changing and accomplishing your goals:
· A consciously chosen goal.
· A sufficiently intense emotional desire and longing to accomplish the goal .
· An awareness of conflicting thoughts and/or beliefs regarding the goal.
· An awareness of the emotions that work against the realization of the goal.
· Choosing over and over to long for the goal, speaking the words and thoughts that support that happening.
· Opening yourself to or wondering if you can really have it. Ideally this is a child wondering.
It is allowing yourself to wonder and long that allows your unconscious mind to come into play. It creates the magical transformation or change you are looking for. New learning, change and growth are accomplished by the unconscious mind when the conscious desire is clear. and interfering unconscious beliefs and emotions are brought to awareness.
We Consciously Decide What We Would Like to Become
Our Unconscious UItimately Makes What We Think Is Impossible Become Who We Are
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A Personal Letter to Our Readers,
by
Have a Year Filled with Covenants that will Create Health, Happiness and Prosperity! We are envisioning each of you creating a powerful covenant with your Souls for 2012. One of our covenants is that we continue to spread the Aquarian way of life using the Neptune in Pisces and Uranus in Aries message to everyone interested and ready to hear. Between writing for spiritcrossing.org, creating our new blog, creativechoices2blogspot.com and redesigning our web site creativechoices.com we are taking actions that will hopefully inspired and catalyze our community. The web site is filled with new products, information on our new electronic book, Conversations with Linda, written by Kim Patron and opportunities for new people to receive a free astrological chart and so much more.
Our request is that you visit our web site, read and respond to our blog, and spread the word to your friends and family. Together the voice of the Universe, our Souls and God will create an exciting journey for all of us and manifest the sacred new beginnings that the Age of Aquarius promises.
With love and blessings,
Linda and Michael Brady
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