Addiction factors

QUESTION: Masters, I smoke marijuana and am trying very hard to stop. It seems the harder I try to stop, the more I smoke. Please, what energy is causing that? Please help me to get out of this habit.                                  ~Mark, Germany

ANSWER: Marijuana has become a friend, a comfortable hideout, escapism from the fear of your life. The mellow high and diminished sense of responsibility that the drug affords you, make it easy to continue running away from yourself. Whenever you don’t want to face anything you take the edge off your anxiety with a smoke. Feel a little fear of failure and the smoke will make you forget and not care.

When you try to stop smoking you fear that you will not be able to, so you take “one last smoke.” Then, after you get high, you get mad at yourself for doing it, for not having the courage to stop, so you hide from that shame in another cloud of smoke. Each broken promise to yourself makes you run deeper and deeper into the drug to get further away from facing the truth that you don’t have the courage to stop. The fact is you don’t really want to stop.

Your whole perception of the world for quite a while has been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. You are more fearful than ever because you have no idea what the world is really like, and that scares you to death. With your view of the world so skewed, you are unable to handle a total break from this drug without assistance.

Seek professional help either from a medical clinic, a drug counselor such as narcotics anonymous, or a hypnotherapist who will be able to let you access your sub-conscious mind, which isn’t tainted by the physical need your body has for this drug.