Stop Smoking?
Originally posted http://cainer.com/ericfrancis/oct22.html
August 12, 2005
http://cainer.com/ericfrancis/aug12.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
http://www.homeopath-online.com/
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