Ok.

I've written a few things about smoking, singing the often unsung praises of inhaling the fumes of incinerating tobacco and (depending on your brand) a few pages of unnamed "carcinogens," but the message has not seemed to stick.  Most of my writing on it has been esoteric and anecdotal.  So let me set the record straight.  This can be explained very clearly.


Let's start by naming the current popular wisdom about smoking.  Nobody is for it.  People against it are absolute and demonize it.  "Disgusting habit."  Even smokers - of twenty or thirty years - will become sheepish when you ask.  "Yeah, I know I should quit.  I know its bad for me."  States actively outlaw smoking in public places.  So let's just recognize, to start, that our US opinion about smoking is about 100% against it.

That in itself should tip us off that the whole story is not being told.


But now let me introduce the conundrum.  Native Americans have used tobacco for generations as an aid in Meditation.  In ceremonies, they pass a "peace pipe."   In these contexts, both social and private, demonstrated by a culture that remains our model of living in harmony with nature, there is a place for tobacco.

I ask you, not rhetorically - how do you reconcile the fact that our culture, living out of balance with nature, abuses tobacco while uniformly condemning it, while at the same time a society that demonstrated an expansive worldview that trod softly on the earth found healthy uses for tobacco?

Is it really enough to say uncategorically that "smoking is bad"?


So let's start to look at this.  Is there anything else in the world that we unreservedly call "bad"?  Is there any element, any chemical, any substance produced in nature or the laboratory that does not offer positive as well as negative potential uses?  Uranium and Plutonium, the substance of nuclear weaponry, also offers an alternative source of power that many cities around the world currently use as a peaceful alternative to burning fossil fuels.  Fossil fuels, which today threaten our world with Global Warming, brought us through an industrial age to the present, when many diseases can be controlled, and made things like solar power a possibility.

"There is a time, to every purpose, under heaven." (The Byrds / Ecclesiastes 3)

So why should it be any different with smoking?


To understand how smoking can be both good and bad, however, we need to look at what smoking actually does in our bodies.  We need to go beyond the establishment-sponsored medical textbooks and studies and see the big picture.


When we smoke, smoke goes into our lungs.  Our body sends cells to our lungs to respond to the smoke: to repair the potential damage.

As a result, blood and energy flow into our torso, surrounding our lungs and hearts.  The blood that goes there comes from our extremities: our arms, legs, and head.  The energy that comes back to our core comes from our extremities as well as from the places we have scattered it to.  For example, I just had a conversation with my ex-boss who is also a therapist.  Emotions started stirring for me as we spoke of my Mother, who has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  There was also a lot of energy swirling as he shared about his currently-shattering marriage, and the effect on his kids.  At the end of our talk he unexpectedly took me to meet his son, who was playing computer games in the back office.  My ex-boss sort of dumped me there with his kid, so we talked  about our experiences of having our parents divorce, and how important it is to find someone to talk to about our feelings, and continue to express our needs.

So that's all good, but as I left the office my energy was all over the place, and my body told me I needed a cigarette.  So I bummed one off the hairdresser on the ground floor.    As I smoked, walking in the rain, I felt collected again, able feel focused and go do things out in the world without losing my energy like a kid that got too far away from me in a crowd.


This, then, is the meditative function of smoking.  Sometimes the things that affect our energy are out of our control.  Tobacco is a tool we can use to collect ourselves.  It can help us sit with difficult emotions sometimes.  I have used it to prepare myself for prayer.   So the next time you see someone smoking, do not judge that person.  He or she may have some very hard thing they are dealing with.   Smoking can be an act of bravery of becoming present to the internal realities, rather than letting our instincts lead us to avoid things that promise to be unpleasant.


However, smoking is not always an act of bravery.  In fact in our culture, it hardly ever is.  It more often signals conformity and enslavement to forces that we have taken to be more powerful and out of our control.  This also can be understood by looking at how smoke effects our bodies over time.


The reason our blood and energy rushes to the lungs when we take a drag is because smoke does not belong there.  Our lungs are made to cleanly absorb oxygen.  When they take in smoke, our body responds to the damage.  

Our lungs can repair a certain amount of damage.  But, repeated, habitual injury will cause more serious damage.  When we smoke habitually, our lungs develop long-term damage and start to become numb to the effects of the smoke.

Smoking in a healty way is meant to help us gather our energy to face situations that stretch our limits, that may cause us pain.  Smoking in a healthy way brings us back to ourselves, and can help us feel and be present to that pain.

But smoking habitually is something we do in order to bury the pain.  If we have no other effective methods for helping us deal with pain besides smoking, then we may turn to it in excess.  Until we stop feeling the pain at all. 

So you may ask yourself: do I smoke to help me face my pain, or to bury it?


The crucial difference between these two situations is our level of awareness and presence.  If we smoke consciously, then we use cigarettes to help us work through something we have chosen to take on as a challenge.  If we are not present when we smoke, however, then we are asking the cigarette to solve our problems for us. 

But this should not be so surprising.  Anything we do - even the most healthy seeming activity - will be bad for us, if done without consciousness.

Eating, when done unconsciously, leads to feelings of emptiness, overeating, and obesity.  Jogging, when used as an opportunity to daydream rather than to heighten listening to our bodies, leads to shin splints and knee problems.  Lovemaking, when done without consciousness, will add to feelings of distance from our partners, and the loss of love.   Even going to church, when done without full presence, will lead to self-assured smugness and the sin of pride, the exact opposite of what it is meant to create.

So it is time we looked at smoking accurately.  Smoking itself is really not the problem.  The problem is the lack of consciousness that it allows us to perpetuate, and the pain that is buried beneath the layers of tar inside.  Judging smokers from a distance is never going to solve that.  If you truly want to help, then open your hearts to a human being who does not know what else to do with their pain, and have compassion.


When it comes to burying our pain, however, smoking is far from the only strategy we have.  Just as prevalent - and as damaging - is burying ourselves in work and sacrificing our lives to pleasing others.  At least those are two that I know very well.  And both are scientifically tied to cancer and chronic health problems with as much evidence as smoking is (Gabor Mate, "When the Body says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease connection.)

I discovered the healthy use of smoking during my five-year battle to beat the odds and live a normal life with a life-threatening disease, when no acceptable medical options were available.  I found that a cigarette can help me say "No," and focus on my needs, above all of the many commitments and obligations I would habitually make that I felt indebted me to others.

Smoking is far from the whole story when it comes to Cancer and health (see Mate).  Smoking may be down, as a result of anti-tobacco campaigns, and this may be linked to some health benefits (I don't know, I haven't seen any).  But cancer and stress-related diseases are SHARPLY on the rise.  Perhaps it is time we ask of our growing smoke-free society - do we have the tools, strategies, outlets, friends, and conversations in place to help us deal with our pain, anxiety, and anger?   Or will this go on to be buried inside anyway, creating the toxic sludge that has always been the most dangerous part of tobacco tar?


My mother, who continues to teach aerobics into her late 50s, and follow a perfectly-balanced nutritional menu at home, and who has never smoked, now has pancreatic cancer.

Meanwhile, my grandmother, who has chain-smoked for so many decades in the same house that I cannot take a single deep breath when I spend the night there, is evenly ticking off the minutes into her 90s.


My problem with the anti-smoking obsession is that it is wasting so much energy on something that matters not at all.  There is a problem there, but it is not the cigarettes.  It is the pain underneath the cigarettes.  And the pain buried in so many other places.

It is time we started healing the real problem.