The Nicotine Dragon!

Thursday 9:10 p.m.
                           I've only meditated for about three and a half hours today and that's bugger all for a Thursday. Of course, due to the home brew binge last night, I started late. No excuse really. I'm just on my first pint now.
                            Keef Richards says the first seventy two hours of cold turkey is the worst, the first three days. Same with the wrestlings with the Nicotine Dragon.
                           When I'm imagining the Medicine Buddha above my head, one of the things I thank him for (deity yoga uses the result as the path, so it's already been done) is curing my addiction to tobacco. Then I thank him for curing my addiction to alcohol. Quite often I go around thinking I'm not addicted to tobacco. How can I be when I stop smoking joints two weeks into every month? You can tell yourself what you like, but the first three days without tobacco can be a wee bit tricky. Your concentration is poor and I tend to drink away the evenings. You get crabbit alright.
                            Fifteen years ago, when I was working in another job share, the same thing happened. It was worse then. The tobacco was more of a problem. This current situation has been going on now for nearly two years and started to become established when there was a bob hope drought (well, for ill connected joes like me!) nearly two years ago. Before that, I only ate soapbar. I hadn't smoked joints for five years, so I was nicotine free for all that time, except when I was in the company of someone rolling a joint, which was rare.
                              From tomorrow the Nicotine Dragon will have been subdued once more. I could stop smoking joints and I know that smoking soapbar is really stupid, considering what crap is in it, but somehow I don't care enough. It's a kind of complacency. Also, when I score I tend to see the consiglieri and we smoke joints and that kind of re-establishes the habit.
                              Hmmm? All this is very bad for my meditations. It's harder to sit for long when you're concentration is off and you're a bit antsy anyway from the nicotine withdrawals. But it's as if the meditations occur in a different country as well. Whatever it is - channels opening, sheaths being penetrated - gets stronger anyway. It's as if there's a momentum in there which isn't going to be stopped.
                              Before the lama warned me about unleashing energies I wouldn't be able to control, I knew that something was going on with these meditation that's got a life of its own. I'm not going to stop it. If I sit, it's going to happen. The present is getting unwrapped. It would get unwrapped a lot faster if I wasn't drinking or smoking, but somehow I tell myself it doesn't seem to matter that much. It's easy to be complacent when you're surrounded by folk who don't meditate at all.
                               Every month I tell myself when I've over the three day hump that I'll not smoke the next time I score, but ....
                                I have to say this nicotine withdrawal stuff is nothing in comparison with trying to stop smoking when you've got a cigarette habit. When you've got a twenty a day cigarette habit  and have had it for some time, stopping is horrible and much harder. It drives you mad.
                                Interesting that the drugs which are the worst are legal.