I STARTED SMOKING as a teenager. After about 15 years, I wanted to be free of cigarettes. The smell of smoke on my clothes and on my body had become offensive to me, yet I couldn't seem to break the habit. Using will power to stop smoking just didn't work. I'd quit for a time but then pick it right back up again when I felt I needed something to calm me or when I was in a social situation where smoking made me feel more sophisticated.
Then I began reading the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. I loved what this book explains about my real nature as being entirely spiritual, lacking nothing. In accord with the teachings of the Bible, Science and Health shows how God, divine Mind, has created man and woman as its own pure, sweet, perfect, and satisfied spiritual ideas.
As I read Science and Health, and as I thought about the practical spiritual ideas it explains, I discovered I simply didn't want to smoke. In a short time all desire to smoke left me entirely and has never returned. That was 35 years ago. Instead of my giving up smoking, the belief of myself as an unsatisfied, indulgent, material being gave up on me because I no longer believed that false concept to be my nature.
