Stop Smoking
October 22 2004
http://cainer.com/ericfrancis/oct22.html
Dear Eric:
I wish to quit smoking. It is a 30-year habit and one which I have been
unsuccessful in the past in putting behind me. My birth date is March 24, 1959
and I was born at 9:15 am in
Sincere thanks!
Sarah
Dear Sarah,
It's never too late to quit smoking, and now is a great time, so
congratulations on stating your desire out loud where several hundred thousand
people can send you loving and supportive vibes. People click on this web page
every minute who want to quit smoking, a choice I whole-heartedly support,
because there is no singe more important thing you can do for your health or
quality of life on this planet, none that I can think of anyway. So you have
good company.
Addictions are complicated. But many
people have managed to quit. You might want to find out how they did it. I
suggest you ask some of your friends or colleagues what they learned from
quitting smoking. I am sure that you will hear some interesting stories. I
thought I would run this past Jonathan, who is a careful observer of himself
and of life, and see if he had something to add to the discussion. "No
matter how righteous you feel from giving up one vice," he said,
"there's always another bad habit left to break."
I will interpret this, a bit, if I may.
Improving our lives is a process. Life is a process. Astrology has a lot to say
about processes, because it deals with cycles.
It seems that your relationship with
cigarettes goes a bit about one full Saturn cycle, which is about 29 years. (If
you're into astrology and somebody blurts out, mumbles or sings anything in
approximate range of 30 years, your mind should respond: 'Saturn'.) So you are
having this discussion just after the Saturn return of having started smoking.
That's interesting. The Saturn return is a point of maturity and restructuring.
I wonder, in that case, what was going on at the beginning of the cycle. That would
be around the age of 15, or perhaps even 12 (around when Saturn crossed your
Gemini ascendant for the first time).
Checking additional transits for when you
started smoking, it seems you were under quite a bit of pressure. (Pluto was
opposing your Sun, for example.) I think there might be a real benefit in going
back to the beginning and taking a look at what your life was about; what
expectations you had, what needs you had identified; and what you were dealing
with at the time. There was certainly a lot of pressure to be self-sufficient;
you may have been dealing with a sense of alienation.
Whatever the case, I would view the
themes of your life when you started smoking as being perfectly relevant to
your desire to stop smoking now. Addictions almost always function as a cover
story for something else, and we need to get to what that something else is.
This is one reason why they are so difficult to get out of. If we treat the
addiction without looking at, and working with, the rest of the story, then 'quitting'
is like trying to smooth out the surface of water with a canoe paddle.
If we were working together on a
client-basis, I would also (based on certain chart factors) want to hear the
most detailed possible account of your mother's pregnancy with you, and of the
first six months of your life. I know you don't remember, but I would ask you
to collect facts from relatives, make a list of everything you know, no matter
how seemingly trivial, and have a good idea of who was around you and how they
treated you.
There appears to have been quite a lot of
emotional stress. Without getting into too many details, I can tell this
because of the position of your Venus and your Moon. I think you are carrying
around old grief that comes through your mum and other women in your family.
This is likely to be a situation of 'not seeing the forest for the trees'. It
is something that's so 'natural' that you barely notice it.
Smoking is a deeply emotional habit.
There are all kinds of feelings and hidden feelings associated with it.
Generally, people are quite angry at themselves for smoking, and I have never
seen the idea proposed that the real addiction is to this self-directed anger.
In homeopathy, the remedy tabacum (made from tobacco) is used to treat
constriction of the heart. No wonder that cigarette smoke attacks the heart.
Smoking is often a cover for childhood
grief. The habit can quite literally be rooted in this grief, and your chart
speaks of this strongly. Of course, it's much more acceptable to walk around
and say, 'I'm quitting smoking, everyone' than it is to say, 'My mother
suffered some terrible loss as a young woman, which leads me to be in all kinds
of fear that I don't understand, so I deal with it in these ways that don't
work, one of which is smoking'.
In the physical and psychic sense, I view
smoking as a holistic issue. It affects every organ and system in the body. It
threatens the existence of the body in its current form (alive). And it has
many connections on the emotion-spirit level.
When dealing with such a situation, I
suggest you think of it in terms of a whole system solution. You could look at
quitting smoking as something you would do independently of everything else, or
you could look at it as something that is part of an overall improvement in how
you take care of yourself and a change in perception of how you think of
yourself.
It's one thing to say 'I'm going to stop
hurting myself'. It's another thing entirely to begin to help yourself in every
possible way, and to orient on that as a purpose. Which is of course the real
issue anyway.
Quitting smoking is ceasing to do
something. If, at the same time, you put your energy into making three positive
changes (or concrete improvements) in your life, along with this one
subtractive change (quitting), you might find that you have better success.
This will keep the focus positive. For example (you may already be onto these
things, so they are just examples), you could learn about better nutrition and
make improvements to the quality of the food you eat -- including its aesthetic
quality. You could decide to have a more sensual experience of life, for
example, more touch. You could pay attention to your social needs with greater
emphasis, and start building the right companionship, or being around the
people you love more.
There is of course the issue of how many
of our friends smoke. Since coming to the UK Europe, I hardly know anyone who
does not smoke cigarettes, and I find this truly distressing. This might be a
good opportunity to seek out some non-smoking friends, as 'people, places and
things' can trigger a return to old habits.
I also recommend that people going
through significant life changes pay a visit to the homeopath. Homeopathy is a
whole-system, non-toxic approach to healing. Homeopathy is deeply concerned
with getting to the energetic roots of situations, and reaching these roots can
bring on a lot of awareness, personal growth, and attention to health
generally. There is someone named Ardianna Holman who works in
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