When “how” keeps us stuck: attentive medicine and breaking free from smoking

 

Photo by Vyoum Kushwaha. Smoking can be a deeply rooted habit tied to emotion, identity, and history. My journey away from smoking was not about battling addiction but about attentive presence—listening deeply to the body and mind. This story is part of how attentive medicine embraces healing beyond force or fear.

I was a smoker.

I picked up the habit in medical school — a place full of long hours, intensity, and unspoken pain. Many of us smoked. No one seemed to find it strange that the people training to help others live better lives were themselves clinging to harmful habits they didn’t understand and couldn’t stop.

Conventional medicine didn’t offer much.
Nicotine patches, which never replaced what I found in smoking. A medication that kept me awake for three days and left me flooded with disturbing dreams. And hypnosis — which, although helpful for some, didn’t feel right for me to consider. I didn’t want to manipulate myself. I wasn’t trying to force a change.

I wanted to understand.

And that’s where things began to shift — not because I found the right tool, but because I found a new kind of attention.

The first time I ever smoked a cigarette, I was still a child. It was offered to me by my aunt, who was just seven years older than me. We were spending the summer at my grandmother’s house. My parents were very often away, and the responsibility of looking after me and my little brother often fell to my aunt — who herself was still an adolescent, caught in a role she hadn’t chosen.

We were playing, laughing in front of the mirror. She offered me a cigarette. I was captivated by her beauty, her blooming adolescence. In that moment, smoking became associated in my mind with becoming — with growing up, being free, stepping out of childhood and into possibility.

But the first time I myself chose to smoke a cigarette — the first one I lit with my own hands — was years later, around age 17 or 18. I had just had an argument with my grandfather. I felt shaken, sad, alone. I walked out onto the terrace, took one of his cigarettes, lit it, and smoked. And something happened: I felt alone, but not lonely. It gave me a moment of conscious breathing — inhale, exhale — which brought about calm with it. Later, I would notice how this mirrored some of the breathing exercises people recommend for anxiety — though of course, smoking is not a form of self-care. But the rhythm, the pause, the inwardness of it — they had a resemblance.

From then on, smoking came in and out of my life. I could always stop when I was pregnant, breastfeeding, or caring for very young children. But eventually, it would return — usually in moments when I was alone and didn’t want to feel lonely.

It wasn’t just a habit. It was linked to fantasy — of being free, of being outside of rules, of being adult. And that fantasy wasn’t created in a vacuum. I grew up with advertising that linked smoking to courage, seduction, power. The Marlboro man. The confident, self-possessed smoker. In my very gendered upbringing, the people who smoked — my father, grandfather, uncles — all represented authority, safety, control. Women were encouraged to study, succeed, and be independent — but underneath that was, in my view, an unspoken belief that we still needed a man to complete us. Smoking became part of that imaginary: a tool for strength, a way to claim space.

But then something shifted.

I encountered the writings and talks of Jiddu Krishnamurti — the only person, at that point, whose words truly spoke to the reality I saw in and around me. He wasn’t just talking about addiction per se. He was talking about habit. He was questioning whether change is even possible through effort — whether asking how can I stop? is already part of the trap. Because the question how is a search for a method, a technique, for knowledge — and knowledge is always of the past. But addiction is the past. It’s the mechanical body, repeating what has already been. So how can the past heal something that the past itself created?

And that opened something in me.

I also found resonance in Alan Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, not because of the technique he proposed, but because he acknowledged something that most medical frameworks didn’t mention: the central role of fear. Not just fear of what smoking might do, but the fear of what might happen without it.

So I began to look — not to quit, but just to see.

Each time I craved a cigarette, I asked myself what I was really feeling. What I noticed was that beneath the craving, I was often hiding boredom or tiredness. I realized there was a part of me that wanted to leave a situation but stayed out of politeness or habit. I was covering up parts of myself—the true me—with a social mask.

I looked at my fears: the fear of illness, cancer, ageing skin, bad breath, being unattractive, being rejected. The fear that I might never stop. The fear that the craving might never go away.

And something powerful happened: I surrendered to those fears.

Not with despair — but with honesty. I allowed them. I stopped saying, this must not happen. I said, maybe I will smoke forever. Maybe I will get cancer. And I sat with that. Without resistance. Without escape.

From there, I began to watch. Every time I lit a cigarette:

– The temperature in my mouth
– The dryness
– The heartbeat rising
– The breathing — in and out
– The brief stimulation, the crash

I watched the difference between the fantasy and the fact.

And over time — with no fixed plan, no quitting strategy — something changed. The fantasy lost its power. The habit lost its grip. And eventually, smoking fell away.

It wasn’t a battle.
It wasn’t a decision.
It was just the result of deep, sustained attention.

And this is what I mean when I speak of attentive medicine.

Not a new technique. Not a rejection of conventional tools. But a different approach altogether — one that doesn’t try to fix or suppress, but watches. One that doesn’t search for control, but allows understanding. One that begins with presence, and ends… wherever it ends.

This story is not a method. It’s just one example — my own — of what becomes possible when we stop trying to win, and start simply paying attention.

I share more about this on my website — including how attentive medicine came to be, and why I believe healing cannot always be imposed from the outside.
→ attentivemedicine.org