If you are a chain smoker, you might find the concept of quitting smoking with meditation, something silly at the first go, because you already know it well that quitting this bad habit is not easy, and meditating is not that tough either. So, how practicing something as easy as meditation can help you get rid of smoking? This is the beauty of it. Meditation is a simple practice that can be most effective to kill the cause of smoking and thus making you quit it permanently.
It is not only quitting smoking, meditation can give you a bunch of other benefits as well, but as here we are focusing only on quitting smoking with meditation, so we will primarily discuss on how to use meditation for getting rid of smoking. Before we get into that it is important that you understand how meditation works to cure this bad habit.
First let us take a closer look at the habit of smoking and why do you actually smoke? Understanding the reason behind smoking is the key to get rid of it and this is the point on which meditation works.
How smoking works?
As you take the first puff from a lighted cigarette, the nicotine starts flooding the brain. It has the ability to imitate the feelings created by the secretion of acetylcholine and hence within moments you start feeling comfortable, relaxed and happy. As a result, you might even feel re-energized and more attentive at work. It can even improve your memory for the time being and kill away any anxiety.
However, as you go on like this, slowly the amount of nicotine that initiated all these changes in your brain, start to fall short and in order to keep the feeling going on, you have to increase the amount of smoking. This is the reason why a single cigarette a day during college life, turns to packets of cigarettes by the time you reach your professional career and slowly cigarette becomes the only way to feel normal and relaxed.
Stress and anxiety makes part of our daily life, and smokers believe that smoking is actually helping them to relieve stress. However, in reality, it does not work that way. It only imitates a sense of relaxation for few moments at the cost of your health. Smoking has the ability to change the brain cells radically, and hence even within short time of starting that first cigarette, people become addictive to it. Addiction to smoke is nothing less than addiction to drugs, as it has the same ability to change your brain cells.
How meditation works?
Meditation works in two ways. First of all it helps you to relieve stress and anxiety, which works as the primary reason behind propelling you to smoke more and more. Smokers, find smoking relaxing but the feeling stays only for a brief moment. Meditation on the other hand, can relax your senses and can keep you free from stress and anxiety for the whole day. Once you start practicing yoga, you will be able to control your anxiety in daily life and as you are not any more that anxious about anything, naturally, your need to search for a smoke will reduce over time. The best thing about it is that, once you are not anxious about your actions or what is happening around you, it will be much easier for you to deal with tough situations, which will naturally add to the quality of your life.
Apart from helping you to fight stress in the right way, practicing meditation also helps you to become more aware about yourself, your body, your emotions and your actions. Once you become more aware about yourself, it becomes much more logical for you to quit smoking, because you start to realize the harmful effects of nicotine on your body and on your life. Meditation enables you to have better control over your urges and helps you to realize the reason behind the urge, which can be most effective to control them.
So, if you have been trying to quit smoking, but it seems to be really difficult to keep up with the increasing stress and anxiety of life without lighting a cigarette, start practicing meditation in the right way and you’re sure to see the changes.
Meditation for quitting smoking
Meditation can be of different types. When you are opting to practice meditation for quitting smoking, it is best to select the meditations that help in boosting your will power and makes you aware about yourself and everything around you. Here we will provide you with some meditation instructions that can be helpful for quitting smoking, however, always keep in mind, that it is important that you practice the meditation regularly and religiously to get the best effects.
One more important thing to note here is that, it is best if you learn meditation from a master after informing him/her about your physical condition and your goals. The requirement of every person varies and learning meditation from a proper master is the only way to get a customized process that can give you best results, quickly. The meditation processes mentioned here are quite general, but even then they can help you to a great extent if you follow them seriously. However, if you have the scope, make it a point to learn meditation from the best source.
Meditation process 1 for quitting smoking
Select a comfortable and quiet place for your meditation. Make sure that there is no one or nothing to disturb you while you are meditating. Once your body and mind is habituated with the meditation process, you need not to be so cautious about the environment, but these precautious will certainly help you to concentrate better at the beginning. The total time of this meditation should be at least 15 minutes and practice it once in the morning and once in the evening. Make sure that there is at least a gap of 1.30 hours between your meal and the time of meditation.
- Sit comfortably on the floor with your legs folded and spine comfortably erect
- Make sure that your head is slightly upright
- Once you sit with a slightly upright face, naturally the focus will shift between your eyebrows
- Now hold the focus and follow the breath
- It is most expected that at the beginning your breath will be more rapid, as you will continue meditating it will settle down and become milder
- As you inhale try to feel the air rushing into your nostrils and then going into your body
- While exhaling try to track the movement of the air on its way out from the body, in the same way
- Make sure that you complete the total practice in a very calm and comfortable fashion, without any hurry
It is not easy to control the chatter of your mind at first, but as you will continue with the practice, with time you will see that things have started to become much easier and effective. This is a very simple and basic meditation practice that might not be the best meditation for quitting smoking, but is sure to give you benefits at least to some extent. In case, you do not have the scope to learn the best meditations for quitting smoking from a master, you can follow this basic meditation process without any harm.
Meditation process 2 for quitting smoking
This meditation process is more advanced than the basic process mentioned above and can be effective to make you aware about yourself and to have better control over your will and urges, which is sure to help you in quitting smoking. You need to practice this meditation for 20 minutes at one sitting and repeat it twice daily, once in the morning and once in the evening. Also make sure to maintain the right gap between food and meditation.
- Choose a calm and quite place and sit on the floor with your legs unfolded (stretched out)
- Sit comfortably with your back placed against a support but make sure the your head is not rested at the back
- Once you sit at this position, take a deep breath, exhale fully and relax into it
- Follow the same for two more times and you can actually feel the relaxation spreading through your body
- Now try to feel your feet first and then slowly move your attention from the feet towards the head and finally to the arms
- Make this process slow and comfortable enough and focus with full concentration on each of the segments of your body while moving your attention
- Once you have completed this process, take a deep breath and relax into it
- Now sit quietly, without any movement, in the place just watching your normal breath for the rest of the time
It might be difficult at first to keep a check on the time while doing the meditation, but as you will continue practicing, you will be able to maintain the time exactly, even without the clock.
While practicing the meditations above can be helpful to quit smoking, you can actually get much more from it with advanced meditation techniques and for that it is essential to learn meditation from a guru.
