today is a special day for me, I was smoking for more than 15 years, I started when I was 17, and never stoped since. It accompanied me throughout half of my life. Last fall I had a very hard time in my life, it was a time in which I challenged myself far too much and didn’t give my body, mind and soul a rest from performing and being responsible in many areas. Luckily my friends told me to take a break from all the madness and after some initial tranquility the idea popped up in my mind to walk the caminho de santiago from Porto in Portugal to Santiago de Compostela. This has been a very rich and empowering tour for me, I went to walk it through the winter holidays over the christmas days and ended in Santiago right on new years eve.
I walked with 2 intentions, one was to recharge and become more happy again and the second one was to quit smoking for good. I realized how much I was adicted and how much I needed something in order to be able to cope with stress and challenging situations. I came to realize that smoking is just not helping me to elevate my capacities and abilities, but very much the contrary is the case, it kills me on the long end. I started to feel the boundaries of my lung when I was teaching sports to some younger kids, which was a sign for me that I went to far with it.
So I was very scared to take that decision, as I had times of 4 – 6 weeks on political education journeys for teenagers that I organized in which I hadn’t smoked, but the first hour I came home I took out my tobaco bag and rolled a cigarette.
I never realy tried to quit smoking, as I also enjoyed it very much – so to quit for good was a scary step for me, as I saw how much I was still craving for it, even after 6 weeks of abstinence. The morning I left to the train to Porto I smoked my last cigarette, and as it often is, it didn’t feel as epic as my mind wanted it to be. I just started my journey and from then on it was clear, my intention was to become a healthy ahtletic being again, in which smoking is not included anymore. I was so happy to be able to walk without the drive to smoke – I had no problems in the 2 weeks of walking to not be smoking. I had fresh air and a good challenge around me which kept my mind busy in a positive way.
The most challenging part came when I was coming home. This was also the moment I was as frightened about as quiting in the first place, it took me about a month to go through all the moments of trigger that would try to get me back on my path of addiction. With this I want to express my gratitude to my partner and my close friends, who supported me so deeply. I had to face a lot of my suppressed emotions and needed to deal with a lot of anger, restlessness and nervousness, but I knew that these were aspects that needed time to balance themselves.
After this challenging month of inner turmoil and emotional work I felt like a plant that got repotted into a new box and had its time to heal. After a while the new green sprouts would start to appear on the trunk – a sign the plant was doing well and had now the energy to flourish again. This was how I felt and from then on I got ever more strong, especially with my inner capacities.
There are still a lot of aspects to this healing journey, that are circling around these main pillars that I started to work on:
I took all gluten related products out of my diet
I switched again to an intermittent fasting eating rhythm
I am keeping my carbon intake very low, to enhance the effect of ketosis
I started to include about 3-6h of bodywork into my week schedule
I am thinking in long term scales and try to schedule sourcing times like this journey
It would take a bit too much time now to go deeper into all these aspects, but lets see where I have most joy to write about in the coming weeks
Thanks again for tuning in and for sharing this important moment with me.
dusty road stories 