(Clearwisdom.net) It is common knowledge that smoking harms one's health. But how many people quit smoking because of this reason? Quite a few smokers have tried to quit, but only a handful of them were successful. Most of them still smoke as much as before. Why is it so difficult to quit smoking? Because they have developed an addiction, and if they do not smoke, they feel terrible. This withdrawal feeling is not easily alleviated. Some smokers are able to refrain for a few days with great willpower, but in the end they cannot help it and start smoking again. To quit smoking is extremely difficult for these people.
However, after learning Falun Gong, many have found it easy to quit smoking and it was very natural and painless, even for those with strong addictions.
When the practice first began spreading, some people began to listen to Fa lectures by Master Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, with a cigarette in their mouths. Gradually, their addiction went away naturally – even they themselves did not realize it was happening. Chen Jingwu worked in the Haigeng Sports Training Center of Kunming City, Yunnan Province. He used to work there as the cafeteria manager and assistant head of the marketing department. He mentioned the following in his experience sharing article: "How did I start to practice Falun Gong? It sounds quite mystical, because I was attracted to the mysterious power of the Fa. One day when I was home, I saw a book on the table called Zhuan Falun, authored by Master Li Hongzhi. I picked it up and read several pages, but did not really understand anything. The next day at home, I saw three videotapes. My wife and child were not home at the time. I picked up one of the tapes and put it into the video player and started to watch it. That tape contained the seventh lecture of the lectures by Master Li in Guangzhou. I watched it quietly by myself. When I heard Master Li lecturing about smoking, I was amazed and thought that what he said was very reasonable. I had smoked for over 20 years, and suffered a lot, but I had not been able to quit. My chest was always congested and the phlegm I spit out was very dark. And then as I continued to watch the tape, I felt a warm current flowing from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. It felt strange, as this phenomenon had never happened to me before.
"After I watched that tape for one and a half hours, out of habit I lit up a cigarette. After puffing on the cigarette, I immediately felt terrible and wanted to throw up. I was murmuring, 'How come today's cigarette is so hard to smoke?' Therefore, I put it out in the ashtray. Thus, my smoking addiction, which had lasted for over 20 years, was gone. As of today, for the past 13 years, I have not smoked one single cigarette. During this course, no man-made controls were used and it felt as I never had smoked before."
Chen Jingwu stopped his smoking habit very naturally and felt great after quitting. He said: "I felt like I never smoked before." Almost all Falun Gong practitioners, who quit smoking had a similar feeling. The Minghui website (Chinese version of Clearwisdom) published an article on February 3, 2004, in which the author wrote about his experience when he quit smoking and drinking alcohol. He wrote the following:
"At an early age of only a little over six years, I began to smoke. My smoking addiction was so strong that I smoked only very strong cigarettes. On January 8, 1999, I started to practice Falun Gong. In the evening of January 14, 1999, I listened to Master's lectures in Jinan on CD. When I heard Master saying 'When you smoke a cigarette again, it will not taste right.' I picked up one Shilin brand cigarette and inhaled several times and noticed that it was really not very tasty. It tasted awful and it was definitely not the good smell of a cigarette. Therefore, I put out the cigarette in an ashtray; meanwhile I looked at the clock and noticed it was 11:10 p.m. Thus, I remembered the day and time of this wonderful, mystical event.
"Before that I had never thought about quitting smoking. I was even smoking cigarettes while listening to Master's lectures. When I listened to the lecture about quitting smoking, I had a curious thought and tried it. Before I obtained the Fa or at the very beginning when I started to practice Falun Gong, if somebody had told me that I needed to quit smoking in order to practice Falun Gong, at that time, I definitely would not have tried to practice cultivation in Falun Gong. However, I quit smoking cigarettes, which I had been addicted to for 25 years and without even thinking about quitting before. My friends all thought it was truly incredible for me to successfully quit smoking. Back in the old days, someone tried to convince me to quit smoking, but I told that person: For me to stop smoking would definitely not work. When I was very young, because of my smoking, my father hit me several times, which almost resulted in my death. Even with that, I still did not stop smoking. But now I quit smoking so easily, even I myself felt that the way I quit was very special, very mysterious, and incredibly easy.”
Recently, I read an article about a person who had just started to practice Falun Gong, but he had not decided to quit smoking. However, shortly after her began practicing Falun Gong, whenever he smoked a cigarette, it did not taste right and smelled awful. He thought that maybe he had purchased fake cigarettes. So he opened a new case of cigarettes and later another one, until he had tried a cigarette from each case stored in his house. They all had that indescribably strange taste. Each time he puffed one, it made him want to throw up. He asked his friend to try his cigarettes and his friend said: “There is nothing wrong with these.” By then he realized that he really needed to quit smoking.
One Falun Gong practitioner who attended Master Li Hongzhi's lectures had some supernatural abilities and described his experience about smoking as follows:
"Master also helped me to get rid of my very stubborn smoking addiction. I had tried to quit smoking over 20 times and each time I broke over 20 lighters, but none of that helped me to quit. Since I started my cultivation in Dafa, I wanted to stop smoking. I held out for one morning, which was agonizing. When I could not stand it anymore, I started to look for cigarette butts in my room. I found two in the ash tray and another one on the balcony. I used the tobacco of these three cigarettes butts and rolled them in paper and puffed once, and it was so tasty. In the afternoon, I could not find any cigarettes butts in my room, so I planned to buy a case of cigarettes downstairs. Just at that time, it seemed like some smoke drifted from the hallway into my room. The smoke was one and a half meters high above the floor. The front of the smoke cloud was thin and to the back the size became larger. The smoke drifted into my room, directly toward me and then into my nose and mouth until it was all the way at the bottom of my throat. That irritating smell made me very nauseous but I could not throw up, and I felt awful. From then on, whenever I thought about smoking, a cloud of white smoke instantly entered my throat and made me nauseous. Therefore, within a few days I no longer had any desire to smoke. A dozen years have passed by and I have not smoked a single cigarette. Whenever I smelled someone smoking, I could not stand it. As Master said: "...if you truly want to practice cultivation you should quit smoking from now on, and it is guaranteed that you can quit."(Zhuan Falun) What Master said really works and without Master's help I would have never been able to stop smoking."
Without the use of any force or special techniques, Falun Gong enabled people to quit smoking without them even being aware of how it happened. Nowadays people try all sorts of methods to quit smoking including medical treatments, but get few positive results. However, Falun Gong has successfully enabled numerous people to overcome their smoking addictions, which is hard to explain with modern medicine and science.
Therefore, anyone interested in Falun Gong or who is stuck with a smoking habit, which they cannot get rid of by themselves, especially those who have gotten warnings from doctors that they must quit smoking for health reasons, should find the book Zhuan Falun and read it. Perhaps quitting smoking will not be as hard as you imagine
