Eliminating Smoking, Coffee Addictions

[Guest guest]

Sat Nam everyone:

 

I wanted to add to the discussion. Hope it helps.

 

Beating the smoking addiction was really tough for me because I did

it during a very stressful time. It's been about 2 1/2 years now. I

had to handle it like a cold war and had to start from square one a

couple of times. (This was many months before I started Kundalini

Yoga practice.) I used the patch with St. Johns Wort. While the

patch kept me addicted to nicotine, it broke me of the habit of

ingesting it by smoking. The St. Johns Wort helped me cope with

nicotine withdrawal from the patch.

 

To really beat it though I had to examine the root causes of my

smoking in the first place. Root causes will drive you to resume

your addictions long after the withdrawal period ends and your body

is free of toxins. Ridding your body of the toxins that keep you

addicted to smoking can take months. (As a former light smoker, my

experience is that you're still physically addicted after a week of

no nicotine.)

 

I'm sure daily Kundalini Yoga practice is largely responsible for my

understanding and dealing with these root causes differently. I have

had a couple of stress induced incidents where I lapsed in my

practice and let negative emotions get to the point where I started

smoking for a day or two to suppress them, but managed to drop the

smoking after the crises passed. I can now keep tobacco around and

not touch it or even think about it. Being conscious of what drives

your addictions is a big help. Most important is being motivated for

health reasons to drop your addictions.

 

Regarding coffee/caffeine addiction, Andrew Weil recommends going

three days cold turkey when you can avoid responsibilities and

suffer through the headaches (which can sometimes feel like a

gorilla is jumping on your head). I have found that after enduring

the three days, the addiction is gone. For me, menstruation has been

always been a good time for this. Even a black tea habit has caused

me severe caffeine withdrawal symptoms. (One summer I drank cold

pitchers of it straight.)

 

As a source of caffeine, black tea is certainlly the lesser evil.

Coffee, in addition to being a plantation crop containing noxious

chemicals, promotes the body's production of cortisol, the "death"

hormone that promotes pot bellies and other symptoms of aging.

 

P.S. Thanks Guru Karta Kaur for posting the Yogi Tea recipe. I

usually drink a commercial chai, but switched after reading about

the benefits of each ingredient in the recipe. The recipe is

delicious!

 

Sat Nam, Linda.