There are many way to quit smoking. It is always recommended to choose those ways from which you understand ‘why you smoke and why you wanna quit smoking’. Pains don’t go from pain killers, they will just not be there for few minutes. Once your pain killers has lost its effect, you will again feel the pain. This is because you are not working on ’cause of the pain, but just on ‘the pain’.
Here is an amazing article on how to quit smoking where Osho helps one of his disciples to quit smoking. The way he has explained is really appreciable. Please go ahead read and enjoy!
Osho on how to quit smoking
Religious people are very skillful in doing that. Now, what are you really doing when you are smoking? Just taking some smoke inside your lungs and letting it out. It is a kind of yoga…filthy, dirty, but still a yoga! You are doing yoga, in a stupid way. It is not sin. It may be foolish but it is not a sin, certainly.
There is only one sin and that is unawareness, and only one virtue and that is awareness. Do whatsoever you are doing, but remain a witness to it, and immediately the quality of your doing is transformed.
I will not tell you not to smoke; that you have tried. You must have been told by many so-called saints not to smoke: “Because if you smoke you will fall into hell.” God is not as stupid as your saints are. Throwing somebody into hell just because he was smoking cigarettes will be absolutely unnecessary.
No act is virtuous, no act is a sin. What consciousness is behind the act – everything depends on that.
You say: “I cannot drop the habit of chain-smoking.” I am less interested in your chain-smoking; I am more interested in your habit. Any habit that becomes a force, a dominating force over you, is a sin. One should live more in freedom. One should be able to do things not according to habits but according to the situations.
So remember: I am against all kinds of habits. Good or bad is not the point. There is no good habit as such, there is no bad habit as such. Habits are all bad because habit means something unconscious has become a dominating factor in your life, has become decisive. You are no longer the deciding factor. The response is not coming out of awareness but out of a pattern, structure that you have learned in the past.
Smoking or no smoking, that is not important. Maybe if you continue to smoke you will die a little earlier. So what? The world is so overpopulated, you will do some good by dying a little earlier.
Have you not observed? Whenever you feel emotionally disturbed you immediately start smoking. It gives you a kind of relief; you become occupied. Your mind is distracted from the emotional problem. Whenever people feel tense they start smoking. The problem is tension, the problem is emotional disturbance – the problem is somewhere else; smoking is just an occupation. So you become engaged in taking the smoke in and out and you forget for the time being…because mind cannot think of two things together, remember it. One of the fundamentals of mind is: it can think only of one thing at one time; it is one-dimensional. So if you are smoking and thinking of smoking, then from all other anxieties you are distracted.
You may have decided again and again, and again and again you have failed – not because smoking is such a great phenomenon that you cannot get out of it, but because you are trying from the wrong end. Rather than becoming aware of the whole situation – why you smoke in the first place – rather than becoming aware of the process of smoking, you are simply trying to drop it. It is like pruning the leaves of a tree without cutting the roots. And my whole concern here is to cut the roots, not to trip the tree.
Relax and don’t try to drop smoking with effort. No, that is not going to help. If you want to quit smoking, then start smoking very slowly, just like Vipassana. Don’t do it like a pranayama – quick and fast and deep – but very slowly. Buddha says: Breathe naturally. So you smoke naturally: very slow, no hurry. If it is a sin you are in a hurry. If it is a sin you want to finish it as soon as possible. If it is a sin you don’t want to look at it.
This was just an excerpt from www.osho.com. There you will find a very detailed and lengthy article on Quit Smoking. That also has few stories in it which I felt were not necessary. Read, share and Quit Smoking, if you really want to.
