Smoking Yoga

And how I inadvertently replaced a bad habit.

I smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day for 14 years. During the last 7 of those years I struggled with quitting. I tried techniques like hypnosis, stopping cold turkey, punishing myself with elastic band snaps to my wrist, moderation to only smokey weekends, and other things. And these techniques relied on negatively-framed mindsets: the language made me focus on things like “giving up,” “getting rid of,” and “having less,” and my least favorite, “punishing.”

and none of them worked.

This is because I needed something smoking gave me.

Sometime during that quit-fail-repeat cycle, I went with a friend to a yoga class. Then I started going weekly. I wore whatever was handy, and I did very un-yoga-like things like chain smoke the way to class, use my dog-drying towel as a mat, and gulp down pitchers of coffee with huge bacon-laden breakfast afterwards. My teacher was gloriously unconventional and I was just showing up. A smoking yogi. And I was cool with that.

And yoga felt good. My teacher was good. And gloriously unconventional. I kept going.

The deeper breathing I did in yoga gave me the same kind of relaxed feelings that smoking did. Inhaling smoke is diaphragmatic breathing, you know, with drugs. Who wouldn’t get hooked?

I didn’t notice the correlation at first, but yoga and smoking both made me pay attention to my breath, and let me “take a breather,” so to speak.

I’m definitely the kind of person who needs lots of breathers.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve trained myself to speed through things and to be hyper-efficient, all in service of getting a break, or maybe a vacation. A moment of calm in the storm. Smoking was a crutch that supported me in doing MORE things faster, so I could not only earn but also signal my break. And the more I did, the more I needed to take a breather. If I worked extra fast and was crazy productive, I figured everyone would leave me alone. No complaints. And I could just breathe, breathing yucky crap, but whatever.

Fast forward a year or two, and I was able to let go of smoking. It was pretty easy.

I slapped the patch on to slowly drip in nicotine into me for a couple of weeks, and kept breathing.

And I still do yoga to this day.

I also take more breaks, and give myself more breathers. At least I try: because I still work awfully hard to “earn” a rest where people will stop asking me for stuff, but that’s another problem for another day.

I didn’t really equate the replacement of yoga for cigarettes until later, but I know without adding the deep breathing yoga (and later, adding the patch), I wouldn’t have been able to stop smoking the way I did. In my case, I needed calm moments and belly breathing, before cigarettes could leave. In order for me to become a ‘non-smoker,’ I actually had to become a ‘yoga practitioner.’

Additive, not subtractive. This is a creative’s way of letting stuff go.

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COACHING CORNER (IF YOU WANT SOME)

So, what’s a bad habit you’d like to lose?

What surprising thing does that habit also give you?
What are two other ways to get that fulfilled?
Are you willing to “add” in those other things while you continue to do the crap habit?

Good luck. I’m guessing if you write the answers to the questions above you’ll get faster results than I did. I backed into the solution, but if I had done mindfully, I’m guessing I could have felt proud of the process and hopeful the whole time. Not a bad way to let something go.