Form is emptiness
The Tantric Way to Quit Smoking
Aggressive quit smoking methods are so 1980
Tantra is one of the most misunderstood spiritual concepts.
People can think it relates to some Hindu tradition, and it can, but that’s not the essence. Some people believe it has something to do with sex, and, again, it can, but that’s also not its essence.
Tantra means to ‘transform’ or to ‘warp’.
Ultimately it denotes the method of transforming literally anything into a spiritual practice.
Some people confuse it with sex because tantra is a way of transforming sex. But, tantra is not limited to this. If you are practicing deity yoga — a form of tantra, you can transform anything through imagination.
In sexual tantra, generally speaking, you visualise yourself and your partner as enlightened beings.
Then you imagine the bliss circulating through the channels and offer it to the enlightened being in front of you or the deities of your own body.
This could be beneficial in our Western culture, where the hangover of religious upbringing, for many of us, has conditioned us to see sex as an object worthy of shame.
This is especially the case when it comes to masturbation.
If you are a tantric practitioner, you can transform even masturbation. You can build up to your orgasm in any way you want, but when you tip over the threshold and the waves of bliss start filling you, rather than just enjoying them, you can make an offering of them to whatever deity you are practicing.
You can imagine your whole body as a pure energy field filled with enlightened beings and offer bliss to them. But, like any spiritual discipline, it requires a redirection of habit.
Still, once the pattern becomes strong, masturbation is no longer a waste of time and shame no longer has a place.
I quit smoking over a decade ago but still know many people who have a problem.
Smoking cigarettes has become a bit like sex in our culture.
We are conditioned to believe that it is a filthy habit and something we should be ashamed of. Sure, it’s not healthy, we know that. It’s also not financially savvy anymore. But I wouldn’t say it is a filthy habit.
The Tibetans, like in many spiritual cultures, like to offer smoke.
They call this SANG — a ritual tantric offering of smoke to various beings.
Fundamental to this practice is the Buddhist understanding that the mind creates all things as in a dream.
If a practitioner understands this, then it is possible in theory to alter reality by adjusting the internal mind. It's not necessary to have some debate as to whether this is true or not. It’s just a prerequisite method to the practice.
Sang or mountain offering was carried out by yogis in the mountains with no possessions. As a ritual, they would burn juniper and mentally transform the smoke into many pure offerings.
We transform the smoke into offerings to enlightened beings and regular beings. We offer it to all those to whom we have karmic debts and local deities such as elemental gods, spirits and the like.
In Australia, we also offer to the traditional owners of the land, the aboriginal elders, gods and spirits that reside in this place.
Some Tibetan Masters were held in prison by the Chinese without access to many of their ritual items, including any incense or sang material.
So they used cigarettes as incense for their rituals.
Someone still at the material level of understanding Tibetan and tantric culture might think that there is something fundamentally wrong with this since they might believe cigarettes are impure in some way.
But the view of tantra is that everything is fundamentally pure, and therefore it can all be transformed mentally.
This brings me to the idea of quitting smoking.
First, we have to stop seeing smoking as something impure.
Next, we imagine our smoking habit as a goddess that resides in the body. Perhaps she is quite dark in nature with a wrathful smile and crazy eyes.
According to Buddhist theory, habit occurs through karmic bondage. In other words, we are trapped in situations or relationships because we owe that situation or person from the past. But this is not something that exists outside of ourselves.
Karma is a self-prescribed prison that is administered entirely by our own minds.
So when we light up a cigarette, we light it up as a beautiful smoke offering transformed into a never-ending stream of all that we could ever desire.
Then, as we mindfully breathe in the smoke, we visualise these beautiful things dissolving into the heart of our wrathful smoking goddess as a pure and endless offering to her so she may be totally free and happy.
Imagine that, as a result, our debt to her is gradually cleared.
To do this visualisation every time will take some work, but the more you do it, the more it will become second nature.
Then, over time you will find that you become released from your karmic debt to the smoking goddess.
You will feel more and more love for her rather than hatred and resentment, which is a sign that the karmic bonds are becoming loose.
Tantra is the most incredible thing. It begins with the understanding that the mind colours everything. Once we understand that, we know that it is possible to literally turn everything into spiritual practice.
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