Today started off a little slow, I am not a morning person, so morning didn’t come until about 11:00 AM today. I hate getting out of bed, but am happy to be up once I make the initial effort.
I didn’t smoke any weed today but I had two major cravings, both occurred under the same circumstances. Pretty much every time I come home, the first thing I do is pee, and the second thing I do is smoke weed. This can be a trip where I am away for a couple hours, or a couple days, the routine is always the same. Go home, and get high. Since I went out and was social today, I came home twice, and both times I really wanted to smoke badly. The first craving went away after about 5 minutes, and I am working through the second one right now. I had a great evening, I went out and had dinner with great friends, then as I was walking to my place, thought about how great the evening had been, and how much better it would be if I had something to smoke to ‘finish off the night’. These are thought processes that need to change and be replaced by something more productive.
This is the second marijuana smoking trend I have identified in myself, the first being smoking with friends I meet at the pub. So, I have to keep myself busy when I first get home and no hanging out at the pub for the rest of the week. I have a feeling my house will be very clean by Friday.
This is my second post in this weeks series of relaxation techniques to help bleed off some of the stress associated with quitting weed. We will be looking at a chi-kung technique from the falun-dafa school in China. I have practiced this technique and found that the more I practiced and ‘knew’ the exercise, the more relaxing and rejuvenating it became.
This video clip is about 8 minutes long and guides you through the moving meditation called “Buddha Showing 1000 Hands”.
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I will be performing this exercise daily. I recommend doing three complete sets of the exercise once per day. You will get the most benefit out of this technique by going slowly, and really learning the steps and body movement. Even though you aren’t moving much, there is good chance you will sweat a lot….You are sweating out your stress and toxins, so enjoy it!For more information on these and other Falun Dafu exercises, visit the Falun Dafa website
This is my first post on this weeks topic of relaxation. Stress management is an important part of the marijuana addiction recovery process.
Many people, myself included, do not breathe properly, and hold tension in their body while breathing. Nerves and anxiety are often the cause of this. We want to be breathing full, deep breaths from our lower abdomen. An icon of the buddha with a fat belly, is a symbol of his breathing techniques among other things.
If you feel nervous, anxious, or catch yourself breathing high in the chest, you can follow this simple 4 step technique to “vacuum your lungs” and reset your diaphragm back to a deep breathing pattern.
Resetting your Diaphragm
1. Exhale completely, blow out every single bit of air from your lungs as best you can.
2. Bend over. I like to fold my arms in front of my stomach when I bend to get that extra little bit of air out. Bending over expels the last bits of air from your lungs. When you’re totally out of air make sure you hold you breath, so you don’t accidentally let any air in.
3. Stand up while holding your breath. This increases lung volume, so air will want to flow into your lungs, but don’t breathe. Wait about 10 seconds until your body really needs a breath.
4. Then, when you can’t take much more, Breathe! Your body will have moved over from your normal, everyday breathing to unregulated, autonomic “response breathing.” You should feel your breathing has switched to deep and rhythmic breathing.
That’s all there is to it. Once you let your body take that unregulated breath in step 4, your nervous system reboots your lungs, and your previous tense and anxious breath becomes a thing of the past.
I recommend performing this technique, then breathing deeply for a couple of minutes to ingrain the positive feeling of breathing deeply and fully. Hope this helps.
Today I bring you a guest post from Tani. Tani was one of the first visitors on Marijuana-Addict and I am have been glad to exchange stories and information with her. I asked Tani to describe what it was like being in a relationship with a fellow smoker, and how it affected the recovery process. Here is her post Marijuana Addiction in Relationships:
I am one smoker in a relationship with another smoker.
We have quit many times during our near 10 year long relationship, twice for 6 months at a time.Usually though we quit and go back to smoking after a couple of days.The reasons for that are varied but some of them are to do with the relationship dynamic.
When in a relationship weed alters things, you are carefree and having fun when stoned, but remember all your worries and issues when withdrawing.Often one of us will feel confident to quit, but the other feels weak.The times of having coinciding strength are far and few between.
Coping with each other’s reactions to withdrawal can be difficult as well.If one is moody and withdrawn the other will often have little patience themselves to deal with it, and things can escalate where they normally would not.
If you can be strong enough to ride out the withdrawal phase (which really only seems to last a few days in terms of extreme mood changes) then the road is easier.Often I lack this patience and crave a happy conversation and will engineer for us to smoke so we can have a nice time.I do this as I hope it will give me enough strength to last out the negative time to come.It does not seem to work though.
It truly seems most effective for us, when quitting, to actually spend that time apart so we do not do too much damage to the relationship.The trick is then not to think you can go back to occasional smoking.Both times we thought we had beaten it, we went back thinking we could smoke on certain weekends, but it always escalates.
Thanks to Tani for that great post! Are you interested in writing an post about your experience? Contact me at admin@marijuana-addict.com.
This is my first post on this weeks topic of relaxation. Stress management is an important part of the marijuana addiction recovery process.
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