Monday, June 15, 2009

Stopping Smoking for Good

Stopping smoking is a life decision that can have a profound effect on your health and experience in living. Stopping smoking can be done for no one else but for yourself. Those members of your family and friends who have been urging you to stop smoking love you and have your best interest at heart, but their urging alone is not enough if you are to succeed. If you are not motivated on your own and are only bending to their demands, then you will only end up resenting those people who love you and sabotaging your efforts at stopping smoking.

To succeed at stopping smoking, you must realize that you are the one in control of your decisions and life. More often than not, stopping smoking is a process rather than an event. As with all processes, the movement forward is built upon a foundation of successes and setbacks. The setbacks can be as valuable as the successes and are opportunities for learning more about yourself and your desires. Learning from your setbacks allows you to move closer to the success you desire.

It takes determination to stop smoking. An addiction is not easy to overcome. It is both a physical and emotional sacrifice you are making. The result of a sacrifice is to make something sacred. When you stop smoking, you perform a sacrifice that symbolizes to yourself and those around that your health and quality of life are sacred to you.

In some Native American tribes, it was called upon for young men and women to make a sacrifice to achieve recognition of adulthood. Often, that sacrifice involved a ritual of scaring the body. The emotional pain you may have endured on your journey to being a non-smoker can be as scaring to your psyche as any left upon the body and deserves to be honored and respected.

A scar represents pain and injury; it also represents a capacity to heal and grow beyond what has been. Scar material is always stronger than what existed before.

You probably began smoking as a teenager or young adult. By quitting smoking at this time, you have chosen a sacrifice that symbolically moves you beyond the immaturity of your youth. It may be viewed as a rite of passage into adulthood. That is to be honored.

For a sacrifice to have meaning it must be a personal choice made in the aloneness of your being. If stopping smoking is someone else’s decision, then you have not freely chosen it for yourself. As a result, you will have no resolve and the quitting experience will have no personal meaning for you leading you to a possible failure. True sacrifice is not an imprisonment, but rather, it is the ultimate expression of your free will to be honored and revered. And remember, not smoking is a habit too.

Log on for more information on stopping smoking for good and for listening to a free sample of his award-winning album “Dr. Walton’s Stopping Smoking.” For more information on Dr. Walton's private stop smoking sessions, log onto Stopping Smoking for Good. For more information on Dr. Walton, log onto LAtherapist.com.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Recovering from a Break Up

Men pride themselves on feeling powerful, competent and effective in their world. They receive a sense of fulfillment in feeling successful and doing well. Men take great pride in being independent and self-sufficient.

Then, they fall in love. They allow themselves to be vulnerable to another, they get close and sometimes they end up getting hurt and their hearts get broken.

Surprisingly, men generally are the first to fall in love and the last to fall out of it. Men have more difficulty handling their emotions than women. Simply because men have been trained to be more independent so they have developed fewer skills at handling their emotions. They become emotionally overwhelmed more easily and demonstrate it by shutting off emotionally and withdrawing, going into denial or becoming workaholics. All of this is a bid to cut themselves off from those overwhelming feelings of hurt and pain.

In the process, those feelings lie dormant and are actually never healed. When we don’t heal those feelings, we don’t allow ourselves to fall in love again and we miss out on one of the most rewarding, healing and satisfying experiences in our lives that of falling in love again.

The secret that women use for handling their feelings, that men generally don’t, is that women are able to think and feel at the same time. Men, on the other hand, are either in thinking mode or feeling mode. When men are in pain from a break up, they go right into feeling mode and become overwhelmed by those feelings resulting in shut down, paralysis, withdraw or angry bitterness. Men cannot make good decisions for themselves or anyone else under those conditions.

That we fall in love we will inevitably experience having our hearts broken. However, the pain we experience from the loss of a love can have meaning for us and actually enrich our experience in life. Out of the pain of loss, we can observe the true depth of our ability to love another. Without loss, we may never really know the depth of our ability to love.

Suffering is communication from the depths of our soul. Without it, our soul is dead; for suffering deepens and expands our experience in life and we are changed as we give meaning to the experience.

If you have recently gone through a break up, acknowledge that you are going through a crisis and become more compassionate and gentle with yourself. Remove any blame you may be putting on yourself for anything you may or may not have done or for trusting another or having been vulnerable. It’s important to know that we are able to trust and experience vulnerability. Those are important parts of being in a relationship.

Talk about your hurt with people who are willing to listen. You might even want to seek out a licensed therapist to help you through this time.

It’s important to let yourself know that you can and will make it through this time.

Stick to your daily routines. Continue to eat, sleep and exercise at the same times you always have. Meditation can be an excellent way to relax the mind and heal the heart.  If you don’t exercise, now could be a good time to start. Always consult with your doctor first before starting any exercise routine. Exercise causes our bodies to release endorphins that serve to help us feel better.

Don’t seek revenge. It’s OK to fantasize about it, but it’s not OK to act it out. Angry behavior only leads to amping up the drive to act out more angry behavior. Don’t do it.

Don’t follow, spy on, or call the other person. This can keep you attached in a very unhealthy way and makes it much more difficult to let go of your hurt and angry feelings. Resist the urge to try to make them understand your hurt feelings or try to get them to see your point of view. This will only lead to more frustration and feelings of betrayal. Of course, don’t harm yourself. Doing so never gets them to come back.

Throw yourself into an activity or project that you love doing. As men, we’re doers. While we’re doing the activity we love we’re also processing our painful feelings and this can contribute greatly to our healing of those feelings.

Keep in mind that relationships are about growth, they’re not about happiness.

We, ourselves, are responsible for our own happiness. It’s our thoughts and how we choose to interpret them that affect how we feel about ourselves and the world around us. What we think affects how we feel.

When our heart’s broken by someone, we may feel that we’ll never love again. We may feel we were foolish in having trusted that individual. We may have felt that they were the “right” one for us and there will never be another. None of those thoughts is true. There’s not just one person out there for us; there are many right people out there for us. If someone is ultimately not with us, then they were definitely not the right person.

The only thing true about that relationship experience is that you probably learned something about yourself. Search yourself to find out how you’re different now from having known the other person. Have you changed what you want out of a relationship?

It’s our thoughts that determine our happiness, not the person we are with. When we experience a break up, we have a tendency to let go of the bad times and hold onto the good memories. This doesn’t serve us, especially when our heart’s broken and we’re in pain over the loss of the relationship. It may be a good idea to remember the bad times. Keep in mind the difficulties of this relationship and how your needs weren’t met.

For more information on healing from a break up, and to listen to free samples of Dr. Walton’s latest album, log onto “After Breaking Up: Healing the Heart and Finding Happiness.” For more information on Dr. Walton, log onto LAtherapist.com. Watch the Video on "Healing from A Break Up."