A real incident:

Once a young man came to me and asked me to help him stop smoking.

I asked him how he picked up the habit in the first place.

He said, once he had gone out with a group of friends who were all smokers. He happened to meet his father on the road that day. Seeing him in the group, his father assumed that he too had been smoking. When he returned home, his father yelled at him, and refused to believe him when he said he was not smoking. The boy said that the next day he smoked a whole pack of cigarettes just to spite his father! In that way he gradually got addicted.

When he asked me how to drop it, I told him, ‘Don’t drop it. Go ahead and smoke. But don’t do it to prove anything to anybody. Don’t do it to spite your father. And don’t imagine that you have become mature and independent by smoking.

Every time you pick up a cigarette, do it silently. Be conscious of why you are smoking. Consciously feel the smoke entering your system. Be aware of how you hold the cigarette, how you put it in your mouth. You will realize on your own.’

After just a few days the boy returned to me. He said, ‘Swamiji, I am not able to smoke anymore! Doing it consciously, I started wondering how I could send so much smoke into my system! Also I realized that smoking is not that important to me after all.’ Then he added something which made me very happy. He said, ‘Swamiji, I realize now that I have been abusing my body all these days by pushing smoke into my system.’ Continue reading “When we become conscious of what we are doing, many things drop on their own!”