If Smoking Isn't the Only Problem

I am not recommending this book as a cure all, it is primarily about giving up smoking and as such it is focused in a certain way, but it is also about loving the truth and learning about yourself and these to things can help you with any problem. So here are a few general thoughts.

Smoking, and other drugs, are in many ways the easiest of bad habits to give up. They are highly unnatural, provably bad for your health and have other unpleasant side effects, such as ashtrays and the bad taste in you mouth most of the time. Unlike other bad habits smoking it is not really related to any healthy aspects of life. We know 100% absolutely that human beings can live without smoking cigarettes or snorting cocaine, or even without ever having tried to. This gives us an easy stance to take in our minds, everything is black and white. Smoking is bad for me and I don't do it and that is all there is to it.

Alcohol is also fairly divorced from the biological necessities of life and as such it is easier to separate in our minds from those things we do need to do in order to stay alive. But if you wish to try these ideas to help you with an alcohol problem -- do not think of yourself as a non-drinker, Human Beings are not Koala Bears. We need to drink liquids, pure water or water based liquids everyday in order to live. Thinking of yourself as a non-drinker will ultimately cause confusion in some of the simpler aspects of your mind. Instead think of yourself as Tea-total, as Alcohol free (I am an alcohol free zone now) or simple think of yourself as someone who doesn't like alcohol. If alcohol is your problem, then the demons associated with your habit will come calling the minute you express the thought 'I don't like alcohol'. they will be waving banners saying "don't be ridiculous I looovvee alcohol". But the truth is that you do not love it, you do not even like it, better still if you realise that you don't like even the idea of alcohol.

Remember alcohol is a poison, it is such a good poison that scientists use it specifically as an all purpose killing agent. You can keep dead animals in alcohol for ever and they won't rot because alcohol is so good at killing living things that not even the toughest microbes can't live in it. There is no way around the fact that alcohol is a very potent biological poison. People do kill themselves with it even in its diluted social form. So remember, you are not a suicidal person, think that quite clearly.

This will work best as part of a change of life habits that allows you to tackle, through awareness and loving the truth, the inner causes of self hate and self rejection that lie at the heart of so many addictions.

The desire for most drugs, which like alcohol seriously alter the mind, can ultimately be tracked down to an attempt to escape from the present, at least initially. So it is a useful idea to try and discern within your own mind just what it is you find dissatisfying with your life, what are you running away from when you drink, or snort. This may sound silly but if you were fully contented with your life you would not be interested in drugs at all. Remember it is the ego, (what I have called the false ego) that is seeking to escape, not any other aspect of self, so while the ego is in control your thoughts will tend to deny that there is any truth in this suggestion that drugs are an escape from life, or else they will maintain that escaping is obviously the only solution. You do not have to accept these thoughts however, you can recognise them for what they are and continue in your search for truth. Finding the truth is your only hope of changing things successfully.

The more you get in touch with your natural physical and spiritual selves the healthier your desires will become. You should get into the habit of keeping a look out for, and being ready to defend, healthy thoughts like "I could enjoy a bit of exercise now". Go for it straight away, don't let the old bad habits squash these seeds, get up and go for a walk, while mentally saying thank you for this thought.

Consciously acknowledging helpful constructive thoughts like this is also a useful tool in changing your mind set. In this way you are encouraging your mind to generate useful thoughts even while you are discouraging damaging or erroneous thoughts by rejecting them. You are a living organism and your mind is part of you, therefore it too is living. So don't treat it like a machine. Respond to it as you would any living thing, being grateful for the good and firm in rejecting the bad. Take an active role in your own mental and spiritual development from now on. Work inside yourself for your own better peace and health.

Exercise is one aspect of healthy living. Eventually, as your faith in yourself as a naturally healthy being increases, and you will get better at living from your own inner sense of good health. You will find, for instance, a tendency for what you eat to balance and reflect your actual nutritional needs.