The Teachings of Tobacco
All we ever hear are the negative effects of smoking. It’ll kill you. It’ll give you cancer. It’ll give you emphysema. I suppose there all valid points. But from my experience with life every negative has to have an equal and opposite positive.
So what’s the positives of smoking?
And before we go on lets make one thing perfectly clear. I don’t think smoking is good for you.
As a reformed addict of the dirty dark Winfield Reds I know all to well what the darts can do to your health.
But what does tobacco teach?
Tobacco is the plant of peace. In indigenous cultures around the world tobacco was known as plant of peace. Hence the invention of the peace pipe. Used in ceremony to bring everyone to the same level.
So there’s the first lesson of tobacco. Peace.
We use it to harness our anxieties and help to find a limited amount of peace in our lives. This is done through the down regulation of the nervous system or helping us chill out. And another way of doing this is through our breath.
This is the second lesson of tobacco. It teaches you how to breathe.
Every smoker knows how to calm themselves with a long deep breath. We inhale, draw back, hold the breath and then gently exhale slowly. This is exactly the same as doing a calm breath to calm the nervous system. If we’re stressed and need more energy we duck outside and smash one down way quicker fashion. To gain more energy.
This is the third teaching of tobacco. You control your energy.
Short sharp breaths will increase your energy.
A big lesson for smokers to understand is that it’s not the tobacco doing the job it’s the breath.
So to sum it up the 3 teaching of tobacco are:
- Peace
- Breathe
- Energy
We use smoking as tool for to regulate our physical and mental health and if it gets out of control you become addicted and it will cause issues. However once we become aware of the teachings of tobacco, as it is a plant medicine, we can make friends with it and put it down.
You have control over all of them and with a little work you can become a master of all 3 areas.
If you’d like to learn how we help people stop smoking, follow this link.
