Quit Smoking

Nearly everyone knows that smoking can cause lung cancer, but few people realize it is also a risk factor for cancer of the mouth, voice box (larynx), bladder, kidney, pancreas, cervix, stomach, and some leukemias. Smokers often say, “Don’t tell me why to quit, tell me how.” There is no one right way to quit, but there are some key elements in quitting smoking
successfully. These 4 factors are crucial:
• Making the decision to quit
• Setting a quit date and choosing a quit plan
• Dealing with withdrawal
• Maintenance or staying quit

Making the Decision to Quit
The decision to quit smoking is one that only you can make. Others may want you to quit, but the real commitment must come from you. Researchers have looked into how and why people stop smoking. They have some ideas, or models, of how this happens.
The Health Belief Model says that you will be more likely to stop smoking if you:

• Believe that you could get a smoking-related disease and this worries
you
• Believe that you can make an honest attempt at quitting smoking
• Believe that the benefits of quitting outweigh the benefits of continuing
to smoke
• Know of someone who has had health problems as a result of their
smoking

Do any of these apply to you?
The Stages of Change Model identifies the stages that a person goes through in making a change in behavior. Here are the stages as they apply to quitting smoking:

• Pre-contemplator - This is the smoker who is not thinking seriously
about quitting right now.
• Contemplator - This is the smoker who is actively thinking about quitting but is not quite ready to make a serious attempt yet. This person may say, “Yes, I’m ready to quit, but the stress at work is too much, or I don’t want to gain weight, or I’m not sure if I can do it.”
• Preparation - Smokers in the preparation stage seriously intend to quit in the next month and often have tried to quit in the past 12 months. They usually have a plan.

• Action - This is the first 6 months when the smoker is actively quitting.
• Maintenance - This is the period of 6 months to 5 years after quitting when the ex-smoker is aware of the danger of relapse and take steps to avoid it.
• Where do you fit in this model - If you are thinking about quitting, setting a date and deciding on a plan will move you into the preparation stage, the best place to start.
Why should you quit? Each smoker has his or her own reasons; here are three good ones:
Your Family. Your family needs your financial and emotional support. If you die prematurely from a smoking-related illness, who will do all the things you do for your family?
Your Kids. Kids exposed to secondhand smoke at home are more prone to colds, ear infections and allergies than children of nonsmoking parents. By age 7, they may be shorter than their friends, lag behind in reading ability and have behavior problems. Worse still, they will likely become smokers themselves.
Yourself. It’s never too late to quit smoking. Right away, you’ll look better (no more yellow teeth and fingers), feel better (good-bye hacking cough, hello vitality) and enjoy life better (flowers smell sweeter, food tastes better).

The Next Move: You know why you want to quit. Now choose a date and put a big red circle on the calendar. Every night before going to bed, state your reasons for quitting out loud 10 times.<read more>

Masturbation

Christian beliefs about masturbation:
We have not found any biblical verses which deal directly with masturbation. However, the practice is widely condemned by Evangelical Christian groups. Five articles on the subject are described below. They use very different approaches to develop their position. Two of the articles raise the threat of eternal punishment in Hell for the over 90% of men (and probably a lower percentage of women) who masturbate.

Masturbation is a form of adultery:
Life Bible Class teaches that masturbation is a violation of one of the 10 Commandments (“Thou shalt not commit adultery.”) They refer to the writings of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:4: “The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.” LBC comments: “In other worlds, the wife’s body belongs not only to her, but to her husband, and similarly the husband’s body belongs not just to him, but also to his wife. This is an application of becoming one in marriage. Thus all forms of sexual experience out of marriage is sinful, just as all forms of self-oriented sexual activity in and out of marriage are sinful and lustful rather than holy,
loving and pleasing to God... Thus, fornication, masturbation, homosexuality, pornography etc are sinful and a violation of the seventh commandment [which condemns adultery]...The overarching principle to remember is that sex is for MUTUAL satisfaction and enjoyment within marriage ONLY.”
Masturbation is sinful because of the sexual fantasies it generates: True Life Stories appears to teach that masturbation is not a sexual sin of the same class as fornication (e.g. pre-marital sex) “But it’s sinful when accompanied, as is so often the case, by sexual fantasies and impure thoughts.” It is also a sin when it becomes habit forming. They recommend diverting sexual energies to re-focus on “the service of God and of others.”
(Jesus is recorded as commenting on sexual fantasies in Matthew 5:28 as noted above)

Masturbation is a form of impurity and uncleanness:
RBC Ministries admits that the Bible has no specific references to masturbation. However, they believe that habitual self-pleasuring is contained within the catchall terms “lasciviousness,” “impurity,” and “uncleanness” They give no reasons why masturbation falls under these categories of sin. They cite some Biblical references: Leviticus 15:16-17; Mark 7:20-22; 2 Corinthians 12:21; Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 5:3-5; Colossians 3:5. The Galatians and Ephesians are particularly serious, because they state that such people
“will not inherit the kingdom of God.” They will be headed for Hell fire when they die. On a positive note, they reject the concept that sexual desires and feelings are intrinsically evil. That, they believe, is an ancient Gnostic heresy.

Masturbation is addictive and a misuse of sexuality:
Christ Unlimited Ministries (CUM) concludes that God created sexuality in order to be enjoyed only between two heterosexual, married spouses. Since masturbation only involves one person, it is an abuse of this gift of God. Masturbation is addictive; the individual craves “increasingly extreme acts to maintain the same degree of excitement.” [The author of that essay does not provide any proof of this assertion.] Masturbation usually involves
fantasy which is condemned in Job 31:1-3 and Matthew 5:28. The author offers a multi-point program for overcoming masturbation: Confess the sin to God; confess it to your pastor or another committed Christian; reject anything that aggravates the sin; seek deliverance from fellow Christians who provide a healing ministry; don’t give up.<Read more>

Masturbation - "Right or Wrong"

I’ve been collecting the information for this page over the past 5 years. I’ve drawn from a combination of sources, including the Bible, my experience as a former sex addict and correspondence with thousands of people involved in various stages of sex addiction. I honestly have not found one long term benefit of masturbation, yet plenty of reasons to refrain from it. Regardless of whether you are a Christian or not, I encourage you to thoughtfully consider the below points about masturbation and how it affects us.For those people taking our Freedom from Masturbation study, the below points should help bolster your desire and commitment to seek freedom from the habit.Non-spiritual points about masturbation:Masturbation is addictive! I encourage anyone who doubts masturbation is addictive to see how many weeks or months they can go without masturbating. As with drug addiction, masturbation requires an increasing amount of stimulus to achieve the same level of pleasure. This often leads people into searching for more and more sources of things to lust after to feed their craving for masturbation (ex. porn). Left unchecked, this progression can result in debt, sexual crimes, perversions and other harmful effects. Masturbation conditions our bodies to respond to self-stimulation, which is self-centered. This damages our ability to relate to another person sexually. Sex is a relational experience, where we give attention to another person’s needs at least as much as to our own. If we’ve been serving our own desires habitually, we may find it difficult to give our partner the attention he or she deserves. Masturbation conditions our bodies to respond to fantasy more than reality: Sexual arousal causes powerful hormones to be released that cause emotional bonding between the person and the stimuli. The hormones reinforce the thought patterns and memory associated with the stimuli. The result is that we become sexually oriented toward whatever we’ve been looking at/experiencing when we’ve been masturbating.
For example, a married man who has been masturbating to pictures of blond women may find it hard to get excited about his brunette wife. This could ultimately lead him to seek a sexual experience mirroring his fantasies outside his marriage.The truth is that reality and fantasy rarely match up. For example, porn usually features people with perfect bodies who tirelessly pursue sexual adventure. Real people don’t typically function like that, and often the acts depicted in porn aren’t as enjoyable as they may look. People who continue to load their minds with these fantasies will inevitably start to believe they are true.For example, a man who has been masturbating to pictures of sadomasochism may start to believe that women enjoy being beaten up during sex. When his wife refuses to help him act out his sado-fantasy, he could become belligerent. He may even try to force her to do it anyway, believing the lie that once she experiences it she will like it. Masturbation causes sexual imbalance: Masturbation stirs up our sexual emotions and trains our bodies to seek a sexual release more frequently than normal. Sex is an important part of many people’s lives; however, common sense tells us that there should be a balance between sex and the other activities in our lives. Masturbation disrupts that balance by training our bodies to expect gratification more frequently than normal. The reality is that most of us don’t have time and/or opportunity to be having sex 3 or 4 times a day. The imbalance between reality and fantasy can likely drive an addict further into a masturbation habit.<Read more>

Dealing with Change

Dealing with Mood and Attitude

It seems like no matter what area of life we are in there are always some people who are difficult to get along with. They are either exceptionally prickly, or don’t seem to care less, couldn’t be bothered, or are remarkably self-centred and inconsiderate. We wonder “What’s with these people?” “What planet are they living on?” “Do they go out of their way to be especially unpleasant and uncooperative?” “How can someone be so insensitive - are they blind? What needs to happen for them to get the message? What’s wrong with them?” They have the potential to take up an enormous amount of our time and energy and we can find ourselves continually in conversations with others about their shortcomings. In doing so we use a lot of the planet’s oxygen, and it doesn’t change a thing!
Life is not happy for us when we are in their company. We find ourselves out of options, resigned that things will not improve, and experiencing continual frustration, which is not good for our own well-being. So what can be done? We want to suggest a different approach, one that concentrates on how we are observing. This is based on the following premise: We do not know how things are, we only know how we observe them.
Each of us has our own perspective on the situations in our life, and that’s all we have - our perspective, our mindsets.
Our perspective is our interpretations.
We react, respond and operate from our perspective, but we are very rarely aware of the perspective we have of someone and how that drives our behaviour.
One of the most powerful forms of learning we can engage in is to take a look at:

• How we are observing things in the first place
• How come we se things the way we do
  

By being willing to inspect our perspective we are then in a position to address the following question: “What is it that makes someone difficult for us?” But let’s take a look first at what our perspective is made up of. Essentially it consists of assumptions, which is how we think things are, how they should be, and how they could be. The basis of these assumptions is the standards we live by and how we expect others to be consistent with these. Our tandards and assumptions are the basis of our opinions, and we knit our opinions very coherently into a story. But we rarely, if ever, observe this fundamental process of how our perspective is formed, and if we were to slightly adjust some of our assumptions, we would have a different perspective and different ways of behaving.
What makes someone difficult for us is that they don’t live up to our standards and expectations, and we are not able to influence them to do so. That pushes our buttons, because our standards define our dignity and integrity and where and how we make a stand in life. And when our standards are “violated” we have an emotional response, which can become a long-term and entrenched response (a mood) that we live from all the time in our dealings with difficult people.
Moods colour how we see life, and we find ourselves in negative moods, which are powerful enough to trap us into always having the same perspective. Our moods live in our body, so we also have a physical reaction, reflected in our breathing, muscle tension and posture.<read more>

Dealing with Bitterness

Bitterness is loss frozen in resentment. Bitterness grows out of our refusal to let go when someone or something is taken from us. Perhaps it grows from the literal loss of a loved one or of a job, or income, or relationship. Sometimes it might be more subtle and grow from the loss of a reputation, or social position in a group, or control. Whatever the cause,
bitterness grows out of unreleased loss. Whenever we lose something or someone significant we often feel the following thoughts and emotions over a period of time as we grieve over that loss:
1. There is often denial. ‘This can’t be happening to me. I will wake up and it will go away!’
2. There may be shock and numbness.
3. There is often guilt. ‘I did something wrong. I’m being punished. This is my fault!’
4. Perhaps there is depression, especially when a death or loss of career is involved. ‘This is so awful. Life is now meaningless. I can’t cope!’
5. There is almost certainly anger. ‘My world is changing. How dare anybody come and change my world? Why should it happen to me?’
6. There is almost certainly bargaining. ‘If only I hadn’t said that ... made that journey ... If only he/she hadn’t moved got promoted ... moved away ... bought that ... This loss would not have happened. If I could change the circumstances I could lessen the loss. I could have prevented it!’

The final stage of grieving is to be able to let go.
These feelings are part of the normal grieving process. We don’t just feel them and then it is OK. And we don’t necessarily feel all of them, or feel them in any particular order. But they are part of the emotional and intellectual territory of grieving that we often revisit, with varying degrees of intensity, during a loss.
For some people this normal grieving process may take months, and even years, depending on the significance of the loss. Most people learn to eventually let go of what they have lost and move on, but bitterness grows up when people refuse to let go and cling on tightly to the anger and bargaining (and probably the depression) of the grieving process. They won’t let go and break out of the cycle, or they feel they can’t.
In the face of death we sometimes continue to rage against heaven and refuse to face the reality that the person is gone and that we are powerless to do anything and that although we can’t see how, meaningful and productive life can eventually go on. In the face of unemployment we sometimes rage against the employers and refuse to accept that they are not going to change their minds and that there is very little (if anything) we could have done about it, and that although we can’t see how, meaningful and productive life can eventually go on. In the face of a body that is noticeably marred by the effects of sin in a fallen world, we rage against the Heavenly Father who gave us life and bargain about how things could have been different. We refuse to face the reality that we are powerless to do anything, and that although it may seem awful now, meaningful and productive life can eventually go on. When faced with the pain of difficult parents, children, partners, pastors, in-laws, colleagues, or unwilling singleness or childlessness, we rage against the
God who loves us and bargain about how things could have been different. We refuse to face the reality that we may be powerless to do anything, and that although we can’t see how, meaningful and productive life can eventually go on.

What are your Tendencies

Work quickly through the following 20 questions, selecting an answer that most nearly describes your response to people or situations. The responses provided won’t always describe you exactly or cover the myriad emotions and reaction that are generated within each of us. When you read each question, ask yourself,” In general, which of these answers usually would apply to me?” Move through the questions rapidly, trusting in your
intuitive response, which is usually the most accurate.
1. I like to help people
1) Understand the proper facts
2) Enjoy themselves
3) Accomplish a task
4) Feel better.

2. I rarely hear myself say
1) “I will do it immediately”
2) “I will give this careful thought and study”
3) “I will do whatever you say.”
4) “You are wrong.”

3. I most desire to
1) Understand
2) Have fun
3) Conquer challenges
4) Forge closer relationships

4. I would describe myself as
1) Thoughtful and deliberate
2) Friendly and energetic
3) Goal oriented and driven.
4) Loyal and committed.

5. I have the most difficulty with
1) Operating at a rapid pace for extended periods
2) Following up every little detail
3) Being patient with others’ procrastination and weakness
4) Asserting myself

6. I enjoy giving people
1) Correct information
2) A laugh
3) A challenge
4) A helping hand

7. I could easily put together a long list of
1) facts about a given topic
2) my friends
3) my goals
4) my values

<cont'd>

Letting Go

“Holding on to pain, hurt, anger, and disappointment manifests itself in our bodies. The end result runs the gamut from chronic illnesses to life threatening diseases. Sooner or later, our baggage causes our bodies to give out.
When we spend our time focusing on negative people and negative experiences, we end up missing opportunities and blocking our blessings. We can’t see the future because we’re too busy living in the past. Meanwhile our perpetrators go on living their lives; oblivious to the hurt they’ve caused. So why are we really hurting? How many relationships
have come together on crutches?

Most women know they have no business getting involved when there are unresolved issues within. Still, due to fear of being alone, or of ‘missing out’ on a good man, we cover our wounds with tight hairdos, beautiful clothes, and a fake smile. Forging ahead into an alliance with someone who has no idea we’re still hurting over what that so-and-so did to us in 1995, or over the father that never came home. As time passes, the wounds get harder
and harder to hide.
When they’re finally exposed, he is history! In the grand scheme of things, the only thing that is stopping us is us! True, we have no control over what others do or say to us, but we can control our reactions. And as for the baggage, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
We all have issues. The shame is not in having baggage, it’s KEEPING it. So to all my Bag friends, search yourself. Be honest. Ask yourself What’s in your bag, and then do whatever you got to do. PRAY,CRY,SCREAM,GO TO CHURCH, GO TO THERAPY... Do whatever it
takes. Just let it go. Let it go, let it go!<download pdf>