I Had A Nightmare

I need to sink to my lowest point in order to rise to a new level of being.

You sit there and you’re just being. You are just awareness. There is no thought. Your eyes are wide open. There is no thought to flee from nor none to run to. You are at the center now. The center of your Being. All is still. The conscious mind is sleeping but your soul never sleeps.

Here you discover subtle emotions in your being and make subtle or even not so subtle changes in your personal reality. Here you can grab the tail of the animal so to speak. The beast of any addiction which formerly brought relief from the stress of mundane daily thoughts that enter in to upset your center continually. It is called life, and there's no escaping it, nor escaping death, but there is a balance between life and death, you can gain that.

The range of these thoughts are infinitesimal. They all just go by on parade. They are related to subtle feelings you’ve accepted in order to be a human who is being. It is part of earth life system.

Your mind wanders back in time, perhaps to the 50s. You think about your addiction to cigarettes. You see a romantic image of a good looking man smoking a pipe contentedly indulging in a relaxing moment of a stressful life perhaps. Or you see your peers and want to be accepted by them.

Thereafter, perhaps, if you are a woman you romanticize the image and look for that man who smokes a pipe. Maybe it was even you in another life who was a man who smoked a pipe. You don’t know, but now you are a woman who smokes cigarettes in this life and it is just a dirty habit and you cannot get your breath. The air is no longer sweet; it is cloudy and you spend your time cleaning up after your smoking times or taking lung cleaning herbs because the sinus cavities are filled with mucus from smoking. Or worse, you might even have cancer, but you don’t want to find out. And you spend a lot of time justifying that you won't die from a bad habit.

Back to reaching the lowest point at which decisions are made.
It is fearsome to go to the lowest point for we are afraid if we go there we might discover how weak we really are when it comes to kicking a bad habit. Nobody wants to feel weak and fearful.

Yet on the other hand, I mentioned a new level of being is awaiting you if you are willing to go to the creative point, which means you have to bottom out to ascend a new level.

Here at the bottom you stand face to face with fear. You are afraid of yourself. Of changes. Of losing something. The fear of failure. To face off is a battle you must win for the sake of love of your life, despite having to drop comfortable habits in order to continue with physical life in a new way, a new level of being.

Let’s consider the past again. Why did you start smoking way back when? When I was 4 yrs. old women were just beginning to smoke as it was fashionable somehow. The advertisements became not a man with a pipe but a woman with a very long cigarette holder gently puffing away in her stylish clothing. Ah, yes the epitome of woman’s emancipation. A woebegone symbol of her emerging power in the world. The man had to stand aside for a minute while the woman caught up with his self assurance and self confidence, while the gloved and hatted woman, so stylish and self satisfied in the ad, portrayed the image we women should all strive to be like.

This is how associations lead to bad habits, for it would not be long until women would be catching up to men and having just as many heart attacks as the men were having; not from smoking, but from smoking, used to relieve a stressful moment, in a world which continues to be stressful even after the addiction is laid aside, yet with one added feature: a sense of real power unfolding in your inner being makes the stressful moments less effective to throw you into a tizzy; all this to conquer a craving which is basically physically based.

There’s one difference in the stress level after quitting. The difference is a growing sense of awareness that you are in control, not the habit. The reflex habit keeps you in bondage and momentarily distracts you into a pleasure moment but also keeps you from reaching that next level of being which is far beyond the pleasure of a cigarette. I tell you that there is a pleasure beyond that of smoking, so subtle is it, but so much sweeter than a cigarette could ever be. It is called self respect. Or, to say, it’s like feeling the power of your own self creating, or overcoming the inclinations of the lower thought forms; like, well, a thought that life sucks, and therefore I will suck on this stick. Life does not suck…YOU SUCK! haha! a little joke. Anything to awaken you to your new power is ok to say to yourself.

For one thing, it’s no longer cool to smoke. Everywhere a smoker goes they are being pressured to smoke outside or to quit. It may have been a social habit in the past that was accepted and even respected, but nowadays, a smoker is seated in a reserved section in a restaurant if indeed that is available. Many offices do not allow smoking while working in the building. Smoking is clearly on it’s way out in our society. Women are now emancipated and equal with the man in nearly every way. Women in fact may find it’s easier to quit for them, than it is for a man; she is more health conscious as she is the child bearer here so she has to be health conscious. She may be the leader in this respect of a family of smokers.

I had a horrible dream. It was fear filled. That is the reason for this article, for I have smoked on and off in my life since the age of 13, when I was curious about my parents smoking and decided to cultivate a monkey see, monkey do habit.

The habit starts out slowly and builds up to wanting more and more of the nicotine in the blood levels. I never quite got up to more than 18 cigs a day, and most generally 10 was my daily habit after reaching adulthood from starting with one a day. Yet it would become too much for my body, even this small amount. Smoking can increases with the stress level of life as time goes on.
Alcohol and coffee stimulants seem to go with cigarettes, increasing the levels of both nicotine and the other substances and all this in the blood causes a sense of heightened momentary emotional pleasure in the partaking of acceptable drugs in our society. Alcohol is another acceptable legal drug which is abused excessively in many cases.

We are after a new level of being remember. To quit smoking may mean to quit drinking also is my point or just to be aware that the thought "I'll just have one cigarette with this glass of wine and that's all," does not work as well as you'd hoped it would. Nicotine and alcohol have this curious thing about them which leaves you craving for one more hit, one more drink. Yet let us take one habit at a time, so we won’t be overwhelmed with what we must do, in order to master our habits.

Back to the horrible dream. One of my adult children had climbed into bed with me and lay at the foot of the bed curled up in a ball, like a fetal position and was complaining “mom! I can’t breath! Right at that moment I tried to take a breath of air myself physically and could not get any air into my lungs, like I was drowning..a horrible feeling when you can’t breath, it feels like you are dying. I struggled to get air. At last I awoke and pulled some air into my lungs. I almost started to write the dream down, but thought, no, I will remember this without writing it down for now it was a matter of survival, for both of us.

I spoke with my child and asked her, in the morn, that she may consider a smoker’s support group, for she has not been able to quit smoking in 22 years. I have been able to quit and have done so 3 different times in my span of 50 smoking years. I have been successful in staying off them for periods of up to 5 years, the latest time only one month. Yet I remember, there was a span of time where I never craved a cigarette nor was tempted to start up again. It became a foreign idea and I grew healthy for a time, but failed to notice how free I was and once more I became guilty by association, upon meeting and falling in love with a chain smoker.

Now I see smoking as an exit point of life. A place where I can die and leave this world. It’s no longer such a stress reliever, now it is a way to die. I had to ask myself “do I want to use this as my exit from life? As a way to get out of life? But what am I fleecing from?

No, I want to stay a long time, I decided, life was ok, there may be something that will happen that I would miss out on if I took my leave through a nasty habit.

Besides, it looks like my children love me. I don’t want to leave them too soon for the other world. Perhaps my child needs me to stay. Perhaps this article will reach her, and she will know that I am speaking from my heart to her. Her soul is so beautiful like her body is, but she does not know how to control her stress levels yet other than through these drugs mentioned. I can hope that my words will help.

I feel good today. I feel a spirit inspiring me to chat. A spirit of life, of reason, of purpose. A spirit that loves me unconditionally whether I smoke or not. I want to live for my children. Just as I learned long ago, without them I’d want to leave. It is because of love, then I stay. We will all get there by holding each other’s hands. Please be strong my children and let us all arise to a new level of being together by not being afraid to go to the bottom of our souls and feel our power to change things, but mostly to change our own habits and reach that new level of strength and purpose that is waiting for us. I know it’s there. I can feel it. My prayer is Please God, let me take a deep breath and give thanks for each new day I have left.