Gareth Young's Bohemian Lifestyle

Meditation And Smoking

A Personal Insight into the Nature of Addiction and Quitting

A human life is a miraculous journey of incredible, though mostly unnoticed surprise and change.  A small child called Gareth grew up in South Wales thirty years ago with no intention of becoming a middle-aged man, but here I am.  I grew two feet, went through the considerable hormonal changes of adolescence, and started to smoke; then I graduated from high school and university, immigrated to the US, married, had two children, and quit.  During thirty years of life changing experiences my priorities and perspectives have completely changed.  How did this happen?

The universe took me by the hand and led me in a brilliant and unexpected dance, while billions of my cells have died and been replaced, and the atoms comprising my body have been completely renewed.  I am physically made of different material than the ten-year-old child in Wales, and am separated from him by a chasm of time and experience.

In fact I live and act only in the present moment, and as each present moment passes away to be replaced by a new one, so do I.  While my memories of the past and my expectations and hopes for the future give me the experience of the passage of time, I only exist here and now.  All that came before has disappeared beyond my reach, and the future is still beyond my grasp, while the accessible possibilities of the present are infinite.

This fact, if understood, offers us profound hope that whatever suffering we have had in the past can be transcended today.  Not tomorrow, or in some future plan, but right here and now, in the eternal present.  This is a reality that has transformed my life moment by moment through meditation in ways that barely seem possible, but are actually readily available to all. 

It began about six years ago when by lucky chance I became interested in comparative religion.  Following my intellectual bent, I filled bookshelves and evenings with study.  My reading drew me powerfully to meditation, which I found was common to all the major world religions – even Christianity.  However, my conservative Western childhood and education conditioned me to see this as an occult and dangerous dark art, with the macabre and mysterious undertones of Satanic ritual in horror movies.  My curiosity I overcame my inhibitions and I did the unthinkable – acted spontaneously in the present moment and actually did it!  The books I had read talked of sitting upright in the Lotus position and holding the hands in a particular way, details that seemed not only unnecessary but downright strange.  No, if I were to meditate, then I would do so comfortably.

  I was also very self-conscious, and did not want anyone – even my wife – to know about this!  So one Sunday afternoon while she was out with the kids, I lay down on the couch, closed my eyes, and meditated.  I had selected from the menu of my library what seemed the most “sensible” form, meditation on the body.  So I lay on my back, relaxed, eyes closed and hands loosely clasped on my belly, and began to examine my body. 

The nature and function of the hair on my head has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, as has the complex biomechanical process of its growth from follicles in the skin.  It grows around my ear, in whose canal the wonder of hearing has its source.  A finely tuned physical instrument of enormous complexity picks up ripples of pressure differences from the air, and converts them into waves of electrical impulses in the nerves.  These pulses flow to the brain, which processes and reassembles them, and not only creates stereo sound to provide spatial information, but maps them to its internal library of noises, words, tunes, even individual human voices and dog barks, to allow me to recognize, understand and function.  In this way I ran from the top of my head, over my face, and through the remaining senses, then down my torso, with its organs and the digestive system, all the way down to my big toes. 

I examined with awe the magnificence and physical complexity and of my life, without the experience or insight to even recognize the greatest mystery of all, that of my consciousness (true insight into this was not to come until years later).  When I opened my eyes and sat up after ten minutes I was bright and alert and felt surprisingly fresh.  The room was bright and clean and vibrant with color and life.  As was my habit at that time, I rose and went out onto the deck to reflect on what had transpired over a cigarette.

I was conscious of my actions in a way I never had been before.  My fingers were fat and clumsy as they reached awkwardly into the packet and pulled out a white cylinder filled with intoxicant and tar.  Why was I about burn this and suck its exhaust into my lungs, into my blood?  I had just examined the wonder of my life-giving lungs, whose delicate absorptive tissue permits the gaseous exchange that gives me life, but now I was going cover them in a coat of tar, abusing them for a cheap thrill.  How could I inhale a known carcinogen, and subject my body to this?  Worse, how could I perform this voluntary destructive act on the body of my children’s father, consciously and unnecessarily increasing their likelihood of watching a loved one prematurely die a slow and painful death? 

I was shocked at these thoughts.  I was seeing the world and myself in a completely new way.  I lit the cigarette and smoked it, but was conscious with every inhalation that I was pouring a poisonous vapor into my lungs, where it would precipitate and stick like creosote to my lungs.  I was conscious, too, of my mental and physical dependence not just on the thrill of nicotine, but on the mundane habitual sequence of removing the cigarette from the packet, tapping it down to ram the tobacco tight, lighting it, and moving it to and from my mouth.  I looked at the smoke curling up my fingers, and with bizarre surrealism at my objectified fingers manipulating and adjusting it, flicking off the ash, finally stubbing it out with a sharp, clear noise and a final billow of smoke. 

This powerful and rich experience faded, and my prior state of consciousness returned gradually but quickly.  Though I began to meditate regularly (for some time still secretly), I never again had this particular terrifying insight.  Even so, I could never look at smoking the same way again, and within a matter of weeks I found I was just not enjoying smoking anymore, and quit.  While it was not trivially easy to do so, there was an air of inevitability about it, as if the situation was inverted, and smoking left me, rather than the other way around.

The real power of meditation is not in the experience of meditation itself, though it can be profoundly relaxing, even blissful, and has been recommended by some teachers as a way to attain supernatural powers such as levitation.  Nor is it in material rewards of improved health and confidence, though from my experience these are real.  The real value of meditation is that it opens us up to see and experience our ordinary lives in a richer and deeper way through being intensely aware of what we are doing right now, and experiencing this present moment in its full wonder, as it did for me when smoking that incredible cigarette. 

As meditation has become a deeply integrated and open part of my life, it has opened whole new perspectives to me, and allowed me a wealth of wonderful and deep moments of lucidity.  Along the way other habits and addictions, including alcohol, coke, coffee, and some of my career ambitions have withered and died of their own accord.  But these are not the point.  Rather it is the path of ever deepening insight and understanding that comes with regular meditation, a path and understanding that is the source of the simple life and true joy of the Dalai Lama.

With the small measure of insight I had been fortune enough to receive through my practice, my understanding of smoking has deepened.  I was lucky at that early stage to see that I neither wanted nor needed to smoke, for this led to me quitting, and was an early success that encouraged my ongoing meditation practice.  I quickly came to recognize my good fortune, and feel enormous gratitude, but more importantly have profound and growing compassion for all participants in the social complexity of smoking.  I feel it for the many millions who smoke and wish they didn’t, who despite feelings of self-revulsion cannot quit.  I share the present happiness of contended smokers, but feel deep compassion for the future suffering their habit will cause them and to those who love them. 

But I also deeply empathize with the anti-smoking lobby whose animosity, rising to anger and even hatred, causes such suffering not just for smokers they target, but for the activists.  The militant vitriolic minority stirs up the silent majority to a fever of tyranny that castigates and vilifies smokers with a violent intolerance that reminds me of the treatment of Jews by Hitler and Stalin, and shows a complete lack of understanding and compassion for smokers.  Whether they wish to quit or not, smokers are, as I was a few years ago, physically and mentally hooked on nicotine, in a state of dependency that must be experienced to be understood.  Second hand smoke is unpleasant, but the level of intolerance shown by the anti-smoking lobby is a very powerful and dangerous puritanical force.  How can this be reconciled with the social sensitivities that require us to recognize obesity as a disease, and to outlaw the adjective “fat”?  As Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” 

This behavior also shows a deeply saddening lack of by those leading the charge.  It does not require a psychology degree to realize that the most powerful advocates often hide the greatest weaknesses.  The unwillingness of the activist to acknowledge and address his own frailties, or look at the distress she causes herself by fueling her internal fires of animosity, anger and hatred is sickening, and its consequences physically hurt me.

This is a personal narrative of how I began to meditate, and of where it has taken me, and I can guarantee that your experience will be very different.  You may not be as lucky as I was in having a powerful and encouraging early experience – I tried other techniques and exercises at which I failed miserably, and which demoralized me considerably.  Meditation has its ups and downs, its good days and its bad days, and you may get discouraged, but I guarantee that if you are willing to try, and to keep returning, it will change your life, and bring you ever closer to truly living in the incredible wonder and joy of your real life in the present moment.

My wife told me the recently that at the age of forty you have the face you deserve.  I looked in the mirror, and smiled when I saw a happy face, creased around the corners of my eyes, and up the side of my nose, from laughter and joy.  My life-style of five years ago would not have led to this forty-year-old face, but rather to a down turned mouth and the furrowed brow of anxiety and tension.  In the last five years I have rediscovered the piano, and not only modestly please the ear, but also have a vastly deeper insight into and understanding of the music that I have always loved.  I have written books and essays, and am active in my local Zen community and in the Cub Scouts.  I am beginning to see every moment as vibrant and alive, fresh and new.  At the age of forty I am beginning to flower, and to manifest the beauty and wonder of life that I now see.