Quit Smoking : Is There a Buddhist Way?

So… it has been another week or so since I have smoked a cigarette. I have been doing fairly well actually. I was wondering what made this time different than the last couple times I have quit? Could it be the meditation?

This article talks about my quitting smoking, and if meditation can help in the battle to quit smoking. Is there a Buddhist way to quite smoking? – DV

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I have been smoking on and off since I was about twelve years old. I can’t say the peer pressure was from friends. Honestly, what I can say is that my smoking habit formed out of watching my family. Very few of my friends if any up until university smoked, and I can’t really think of any friend that did smoke then at the moment. Amazing odds when you consider the the statistics, even back then, about the numbers of pre-teen to young adults who smoked at that time.

The first time I actually smoked was when my older cousin stole two to of her father’s cigarettes. The cigarettes, if I remember correctly, were the “Salem” variety, or some other nasty menthol monstrosity. I was six or seven years old when she took me into the basement bathroom to show me “something”. At that time my cousin, who was five years older than me, seemed to be doing all sorts of things that even at my age I thought was quite curious. Stealing from her family and in one particular episode lollypops from the store (with me in tow), was quite common.

As we sat in the bathroom and tried to smoke down those nasty things (I do remember them being nasty), I remember us coughing and my cousin really trying to smoke. Although I don’t remember anyone telling me that cigarettes were horrible things, I do remember that after that little smoking experiment with my cousin I had decided to never smoke those horrible things again. Well, that didn’t quite work out.

In my family, the question was not really who didn’t smoke, it was more who did smoke. There are only a few people I had looked up to as a child that didn’t smoke. Who smoked? My father, my mother, my grandfather, my older cousins (the cool ones), and even my mother’s favorite niece, who of course, I had spent at least a short period of my life trying to emulate.

I can’t blame it all on my family. I mean, no one in my family but my cousin in those very early days really held a cigarette up to my mouth.

I was about twelve when I would occasionally buy myself a pack of smokes. Marlboro Lights were the cigarettes that my older cousins smoked at the time. I already had the job as the one in my family to go to the store to pick up the smokes for my mother, so there was no real issue with me eventually buying cigarettes for myself. Back then, where I lived, few stores cared if a teenager came in and bought cigarettes, and they certainly weren’t checking for identification back in the 1980’s, or in the 90′’s for that matter.

So the rest is her-story. On and off I smoked, really very little, till I got to about college. When I hit college I smoked about a quarter pack a day. Then about when I began to work after college, I smoked about half a pack a day. And here I am about twenty years from then and when I quit this last time I was smoking about a pack a day.

Addicted to Nicotine, why yes, I am.

You can kind of tell where you are in the addiction spectrum with cigarettes. For me, back in my college days I could really just take them or leave them. As my addiction grew, I began planning my day around making sure I had enough cigarettes to get through till the next morning. Those two distinctions are quite clear, at least they are for me. Another distinction is that just writing this article is kicking up the need for a cigarette, but I’m paying it no mind… you see, this feeling will pass shortly.

And there you have it, the Buddhist way to quit smoking

Let’s go into it in a little more detail than that just stating that “the feeling will pass”. It is much too much a difficult process to quit smoking and just say “the feeling will pass” and call it a day. That is like saying it is simple to meditate without saying how difficult it can be to meditate sometimes.

First thing I recommend is to read and follow the typical ways to quit smoking.

I suspect that if you have searched and found this blog, you probably have found some good references already that have recommendations on what to do when you are ready to quitting smoking. There are plenty of good sites on the Internet that talk about things you can do to help you. Click here for one of them. I perform many of their recommendations, like I actually put a timeline (just like this) in my kitchen and my office to remind me of what I will be feeling if I do stay quit. I have left these timelines up in my everyday view when I have “quit quitting” to remind me I need to try to quit again.

How I have incorporated Buddhism into the act of quitting smoking

Meditation practice and Buddhist ideals are wonderful tools for quitting smoking but it is certainly not easy addition to the common cessation tool list. I definitely believe that meditation does help increase the odds of staying quit.

Here are some specific Buddhist ideas and techniques that I have used to augment my quitting process:

• Be compassionate with yourself

“They” say that it takes seven times for the average smoker to really kick the habit for good. So, if you quit and you fail, live to fail again. If you treat failing as no big deal, you can quit the day after you fail. This last time I quit, I failed twice already. No big deal. I forgave myself for failing which is an act of compassion and kindness to myself and is very Buddhist. It certainly makes the process of quitting that much easier and places less stress on myself.

Remember to tell your friends that you think it is ok for you to fail, especially in knowing that you will quit again. Teach them how to give you compassion if you fail to quit smoking. This doesn’t mean that their support and small reminders for you to quit are not wonderful, just that it is probably not a good idea for them to give you a real hard time if you fail. It is a hard enough process to quit smoking, adding additional negativity from yourself and others while you are in the process of quitting may lessen the likelihood that you will try to quit again.

• Quit again and again

This one is not particularly Buddhist, but it fits in so much with the last point that I want to add it here.

If you quit and fail, quit again as quickly as possible. Withdrawals are an awful thing. I have gotten everything from cold sweats to waking up with hard starts in the evenings while I am sleeping. When you quit smoking you start getting comfortable with these withdrawal symptoms. You tend to forget these feelings when you have quit for quite a while (which is probably why so many people relapse). So it really is best to accept that you have failed, and then get right back up, commit yourself to the purpose of quitting, and then quit again as quickly as possible. I find this reduces the chances of going through the whole spectrum of withdrawal again.

Quit every morning…

• Meditate

Of course I will recommend Meditation. This sounds like the Buddhist answer to everything. In this case, it is the perfect tool for a number of reasons. Let me explain to you how and why I am using meditation to help me in my process of quitting smoking:

Over all these three things, with the addition of the usual cadre of “things that help us quit”, have helped me quite a bit. The last part, meditating, is the hardest of all. Meditation is the action in which I have the opportunity to accept the parts of myself that I’m trying to hide from by picking up a cigarette, and actually finding these hidden things is a long term approach to keeping from picking up that next one.

Namaste -DV

Articles that may interest you:

More articles on how to reduce suffering… and those recommended ways of performing zazen

A good site for traditional non-Buddhist ways to quit smoking

A timeline of what happens to you over time when you quick smoking