When I was a teenage dope smoker for a Saturday night to be good I had to get stoned.
Of course I'd have preferred to get laid, but that was not something I believed would happen*…Easier to smoke (this is another kind of zombie article).
At parties you could easily find me hidden in a corner at the centre of a dense cloud. Friends and scavengers would visit me, happy to trade a bit of their cool for my charas. It became a part of my identity, Ed the head….
Parallel to this I was a keen Taiji student. I didn't smoke before class. In some ways the two blended to gether in my identity as an alternative person. In other ways they were very, very separate.
In Taiji I discovered a deep sensuous pleasure in breathing simple air, in standing, in the dance of signals around me. I was sharp, light, peaceful, agile and alert.
Smoking usually left me sluggish, heavy, out of sync, super self conscious and slightly paranoid.
I know that this is not everyone's experience, and some people will say I was smoking the wrong stuff…Possibly… but I smoked a lot, often at the source as I travelled across Africa, Asia and the Carribean, there were my early attempts at horticulture…not to mention my Dutch ancestry.
99% of the time Taiji felt a lot better than tetra hydra cannnabinol. It still took some time before I dropped smoking…. Who would Ed the head be without his spliff? How would he meet people without his stash? What about the 1% that was really good? What would happen to my superlative rolling skills?
I continued to smoke out of nostalgia. I smoked because I wanted the shared social ritual.
These days when I'm around people smoking I enjoy the smell, but what I miss most is the chance to roll. The skill that was so tied up with the ritual has stuck with me the most persistently.
I did not think beyond what that social ritual was meant to achieve.
The social ritual was there to create trust, channels for sharing, closeness, wonder, possibility. Our lives are full of social rituals that seek similar results. I lacked a way to say no to the surface ritual, and still honour the people, the hopsitality, the memories, and the desire for connection.
The Intimacy Experience is a social ritual too. It's goal is to share this quality of oppenness and wonder with a bare minimum, with nothing extra. It is not oppenness in exchange for anything. There is no need to perform, conform , worship, intimidate, seduce or be pleasing. It is a direct invitation to be with another in presence, in deep and authentic appreciation.
And in those moments of deep appreciation that cross the border between the habitual and the extraordinary something happens. The reflex need to perform, conform, worship, intimidate, seduce or please loosens.
In wonder at the extraordinary (most extraordinary because it is there all the time and we overlook it, like my old trade of Taiji for THC) there grows a subtle distance between awareness and habit. It happens naturally, without effort until that old constricting habit falls away like a snake shedding its used skin to expose the shining velvet smoothness below.
The old skin falls away because something clearly better is ready to take its place.
If you have a habit that you would like to shed contact me. Like you I want to see the brightness beneath.
*I aplogise to any woman that I knew back then who did believe it would happen. Blinded by beliefs and hash I missed your signals, did not feel equal to your beauty, or was to paranoid to get off my arse and respond to your gracious invitation. You feature among the deepest regrets of my life even if you have completely forgotten my existence 
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