I’m trying to check out a lot of alternative and complementary therapies for self-help, self-awareness and self-care. For smoking cessation, we need to have tools to use in times of stress or anger or anxiety, and any way we can access methods for self-soothing without lighting up is a step towards living smoke free. For me, hypnotherapy was key to quitting my last and final time. I had relapsed smoking after 11 years! When I returned to grad school, I went right back to smokes because that was how I got through school the first time. It was my familiar coping mechanism, deeply familiar, on a primary, deep-seated level. I needed to replace that with something else, something that my unconscious mind understood, because the coping mechanism really resided in my unconscious.
So I have been checking out different workshops that have addressed self-care. Yesterday I attended a wonderful art workshop, “Color Me Queer, Color Me Fabulous” by Philip McCabe at the UMDNJ School of Public Health. Making 30-second drawings of emotions and feelings and then doing a guided visualization followed by some drawing of things that came up during the visualization helped us create some self-awareness but were also relaxing. And time-specific. In other words, we could explore some deep stuff, but knew that it would be for a specific and limited amount of time. Which frees us too.
I’ve also attendedn two rounds of the daily “Healing Sound” workshop, by Tony Morelli (link to come), which utilizes vibrations and chanting and meditation to specifically help heal as well as relax. This should be required at every conference in the world. Having a space that was dedicated to relaxation and breath work and quietness was so essntial.
These are all tools I want to be using in smoking cessation. I’m even looking into getting certified in hypnosis for this purpose, because it played such a key role for me and I think I would really like helping to guide others through that process.
Now I’m headed off to see the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do their Bar Ministry. More on this later…
In reading this, I think about the issue of class acceptance with these relaxation methods. Among people from my working class upbringing would call them “silly’ and I think at the same time that there is some fear of loss of control.
Is this related to “risk” or to smoking. I think that even though there is way in which many ways of the working-class or poor folks lifestyles that are risky – every health risk tha I know about is worse with poor folks – there is a kind of comfort in these “risky” behaviors – bad food, smoking, drinking, drugs…
One of my sisters has Hep C, but she lives with an abusive boyfriend and drinks. So there’s kind of a weird intersection between fear and risky comforts.
Comment by Kathy Desilets — March 18, 2007 @ 1:52 pm