Time to say the big NO then! Admit that you want those worldly things. Breathe out. Stop suppressing what you want. That is non-spiritual.

Throw out the garbage that you accumulated in your journey towards higher spiritualism.

Breathe out and free yourself!

Self-Observation on my desire to achieve something big

• I can only think of my life that it must be a success story. By success, I mean something big. Anything else is almost meaningless and is many times just a waste of energy. 

• It is putting a burden on everything that I do in my life.

• Nothing is good enough.

• It feels good to think about the time when I will be truly successful. 

• This is an order I have given myself. I feel I need to sacrifice myself for this.

• This goal is not a cause but an effect. I understand from books, psychologists, and others that this is a sign that I have low self-esteem. I don’t see it this way. 

• I allow no real playfulness for myself. Now I realize that I sort of look down on people who are not hard-working super-achievers. 

• Everything is hard to achieve. Close to impossible.

• I do not allow myself to fail. 

Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper

• I think I have set this goal for myself. I don’t remember when. But it is coming from me. At least this is how I perceive it.

• My mindset is such that everything is very serious. 

• I identified my life with this goal.

• I just now realize that I have set myself a goal that is impossible to reach.

• I also realize that there is something paradox in my thinking: I set a goal that is near-impossible to reach and only then I will be fine. But: I sort of ‘know’ that the only way to reach it is if I change completely. Then sadly it means that I must have a problem with my own self. 

• Can I only reach what I want if I change myself? Is this a good logic and life goal? 

Self-Observation on why I am holding my breath back

• I feel fear when I look at why I am holding my breath back
• I don’t know what I am afraid of.
• I see that my whole body is in a state of stress.
• I also feel some kind of shame I think.
• It is the exhalation that I don’t do. No problem with breathing in.
• I feel stuck. Do I feel stuck with my whole life?

Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper

• I am afraid of what would happen if I fully relaxed my breathing. What would happen if I let myself be fully relaxed?
• My view is that if I would fully exhale, something bad would happen. Something that would hurt me. I don’t dare to.
• I got used to this state. I can hardly imagine now how it would feel to have relaxed breathing.
• I do not dare to let my true Self come to the surface.
• It may have something to do with having a goal in life. I mean I think I would be more relaxed if I fully knew what I wanted.

Self-Observation on my feeling of missing something from my life

• I am missing something but I cannot say what.
• I feel sad.
• I blame other people and the world around me for not giving me what I want. It is their fault.
• It is not worth doing things. 
• This thought makes me nervous and panicky.
• I don’t know what to do about it, how to get out of it.  
• I cannot breathe normally. I keep my breath back.
• I feel as if this is my main belief about my life. How I am.

Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper

• I am sad because I have this image that ‘I did not get the things I wanted. The things that I deserved.’
• I know that I have been feeling like this since I can remember.
• Then I start to think that I am selfish and spoiled to think such things. But it does not help.
• Then I start to think that it is not that bad. It is better but I still have the pain in the back of my mind. I know it is just a matter of time that it comes back.
• Then I sort of realize that I am trying to convince myself that my feeling of missing something is not real. This is how I protect myself. 
• Then I realize that I am right. I did not get the things I wanted and thought that I deserved. It doesn’t hurt that much now that I could be honest with myself. It is a bit better now, there has been a small shift.
• I see that my honesty helped me to let go of my protection a little bit. I call it honesty, it may be something else. 

Self-Observation on my constant hunger

• One of the main themes in my life is that I feel I don’t get what I want. There is this constant sense of lack.
• What I feel is fear, weakness, and confusion. So eating comes to my mind. At least this I can control.
• I feel embarrassed. 
• This is an addiction because I feel I am dependent on food. Why am I dependent?
• What is most stressful is the confusion. It feels as if I am just waiting for something to happen, not sure what to do.
• I want more, more, more. I just cannot satisfy myself. To me, it just means that eating will not help. It is not food that I want…
• This is a somatic sensation in my body and it has to do with my throat. But this is far from just somatic.  

Chain of thoughts coming when I am able to go deeper

• I realize what I feel is not actual, physical hunger, but the desire to eat. I mean when I can look a bit deeper, I realize that most of the time I am not even hungry when I want to eat. 
• My mind connected eating with my feeling that I am missing something.
• I also realize that I have learned this behavior. Now I realize that it is a collective behavior. We learned this coping mechanism from each other.
• I cannot say what it is that I do not get. I feel trapped this way.
• I feel shame and embarrassment. Not only because I got overweight but also because I feel needy.
• My neediness: It is normal in the sense that I really did not get things that I should have. What is not normal is that it is still stuck in me. Probably time to let go.
• There is something deeper here than just my neediness. Fear. Fear of losing my safety. I lost connection. At least this is how I understand it now.
• When I become conscious about my need for connection, my hunger is not that important because I feel that I am not that dependent on ‘that indescribable need’. As the only thing that can ‘save’ me.

This is a quick help that you can any time come back to while in the process of giving up smoking. With the below, you can HOLD YOURSELF in the process by observing&releasing your thoughts and emotions as you are going through them. This can make all the difference in success.

When you give up smoking, the thoughts and feelings that your smoking is meant to suppress will surface or strengthen. There are two lists below. The first one is the thoughts and feelings that you want to have. The second list is the feelings and thoughts that come up when you quit smoking – the unwanted, painful, suppressed ones. If it makes sense for you: The first list is the feelings and thoughts that you want your suppressed feelings to be replaced with, and the second list is the ones that you are letting go of. 

The thoughts and feelings can certainly be different, I am listing here those that usually come up with most of us. So make your own list if that helps. (Or bookmark this page if it is good enough. It will come in handy.)

What I want

• I want to feel my self-worth.
• I want to know that I can do whatever I want with my life. I don’t have to set strange limits for my own life.
• I want to feel proud.
• I want to be my True Self. Fully. The most liberating feeling.
• I want to realize that I have not done anything wrong. 
• I want to realize that there is nothing wrong with me. And thus I don’t need to be fixed.
• I want to be active and not care about my actions too much.
• I want to feel strong.
• I want to help people to be less ashamed and anxious. 

What I don’t want to feel or think

• “I have done something wrong and there is a problem. Something is my fault.”
• “I feel lonely.”
• “I am in a panic.”
• “People are so stupid and careless around me.”
• “I feel depressed, or sad because I have a sense of loss inside. I should have gotten something or something should have happened but it didn’t.”
• “I feel empty inside. No connection to anyone or anything. (And now I have lost connection to my cigarette too.)”

Notes:

• Quitting smoking is all mental. 
• Remember: Nobody ever got harmed by releasing their suppressed emotions. 
• The more, deeper you allow yourself to feel your suppressed feelings, the faster you will go through them. 
• Anger is absolutely one of the main feelings that most of us have when quitting smoking. When it hits you, make sure you do not harm yourself or others. 
• Much of our suppressed emotions are in our bodies. For example, crying and shaking are healthy and very effective. 
• It is ok if you become inactive in the beginning. Just let yourself go through it at your own pace. 
• Do not try to ‘guess’ what feelings and thoughts will come. And do not try to control them.   
• It is ok if you don’t know what you are feeling, or why you are feeling the way you do.
• Do not exchange your smoking for another addiction! 
• If you are determined, that is probably more than half the battle. (Just an idea: If you become undetermined along the way then ask yourself why? Why do you want to stay dependent? What is it that you lack and find that your dependence will give you?)

Just like with the quick help for self-observation, I am not using bold, or too large letters should you need to open this page in a public place where it is not good if anyone sees what you are reading.

The strange thing about fear and time is that fear only exists in the past and in the future in my mind. How cool is this?: Any time I am able to truly be in the present (I personally use meditation) my fear is gone.Right the instant my thoughts start to wander, fear comes back sooner or later. If this is so then logic tells me that fear doesn’t exist, only my thoughts create it. Where it is less than cool – at least for me – is that I can very hardly release my fears: When I can truly observe it, get immersed in it, it is gone. And then it comes back. It is like a ghost, like a trickster.  I do have many successes, I do use many methods – like EMDR, meditation, journaling, phrasing my thoughts effectively, other trauma elimination tecniques -, but I am just not satisfied.  I guess I am between two worlds. Today I think that it has to do with decision. Which world do I decide to belong to? 

The right way to boost my self-confidence and trust myself is to know that I am much more than just how I know myself. What I know about my own Self is a minuscule fraction of me. My consciousness, my thoughts, my knowledge, my emotions are only the tip of the iceberg of the real me.

I don’t just put trust into this tiny part because I instinctively know that what is invisible to my thoughts is uncomparably bigger and more knowing. This is knowledge much closer to my true Self and brings such self-confidence that my ego will never be able to. 

The best advice for self-observation to work is to honestly admit that I don’t know what is the way out of my problem. I can only go to a certain length by thinking about my problems and the rest is up to my whole Self to sort out, not my thinking mind. 

If I can name my problem with self-observation that is fantastic, but I shall not expect that I will be able to completely transform it just by thought. It will actually even backfire to think that I am so clever that I can nail it with my logic. The exact opposite is true because it is my logic that keeps my problem happening.

It may be a trust issue. Or I may be a bit arrogant to think that I can solve my problem on the same level and with the same tool that I have created it with. 

True release is a miracle, my only job with it is to be honest about it.

Probably there is. Here is why. The world we live in is insane in many parts and so our mindset and thought systems got glitched too… This is the starting point. 

In order to recognize the insanity and twisted nature of the world we live in and also our twistedness we first must recognize it. This recognition is the suffering that we experience. And here is the underlying reason why suffering is needed: We are so twisted currently that we currently believe that suffering and being unhappy is normal. Phrased differently: Most of us find that suffering is needed, that it is normal.  Our Self needs this suffering – as a guide – to realize that our thinking is twisted. Once we realize that suffering is not needed it will vanish. Until then, self-development needs it.

The seemingly paradoxical image that the Self is looking at its own Self.