Hello and welcome to episode 34 of the Quit... Vaping podcast. As always, guys, I'm your host, Andrew Cipriano. And before I get going into today's topic, it's talking about loving yourself into quitting. It's kind of a fun topic. I just want to tell you some things about my life because I feel like I don't do that very often.

And I think it's important. So as you guys know, I'm a life coach. This Um, upcoming month on September, I'm going to my very first mastermind with the coach school I've certified through called the life coach school. And I'm going to be surrounded by coaches in real life and talk to them. And I'm very, very excited to do that.

It can kind of be like living in a vacuum sometimes when you're going after your dreams and your dreams are kind of specific and other people around you don't really understand them. So I'm really excited to be around other people who are life coaches who are doing this stuff. And I just think it'll make me.

Just have a community. And I'm really, really excited for it. And then in addition, I'm working on another course right now called how to love yourself with herpes. I was diagnosed in 2018 with general herpes when I was dating my ex boyfriend. I actually don't know who I got it from. And for about four years, I completely shamed and hated on myself until I found the life coaching tools that literally liberated me and showed me what it looks like to love myself unconditionally, no matter what happened in my life.

And it was from that foundation, actually, that I was able to put myself back into the dating world, disclose very honestly and not make anybody else's reactions mean anything bad about me. And then also, as you guys know, these same tools help me to quit vaping. So in today's episode, I want to talk to you about loving yourself into quitting, and this is the only way to quit.

This is like, seriously, I really mean this. You can try to white knuckle it and hate yourself and beat yourself up and shame on yourself and feel guilty and nasty about vaping and try to like health, scare your way into quitting, but it's not going to last. And if you do, it's always going to come from a negative place.

And eventually you're going to want to vape because you feel so negative all the time. So as I've talked about a lot in this podcast, vaping, although you may not be aware of it is an emotional problem. The reason that we do anything. In our life or don't do anything is because of an emotion that we're feeling one that we want to feel or one that we don't want to feel.

So when it comes to vaping, we want to do it to feel better. And if you ask yourself some basic questions, like why do you vape? What are the benefits? You're going to get to this truth very quickly. Like, Oh, I just want to do it to feel this way, or I like it. I feel secure. I feel calm. So the reason that we vape is to feel differently than we do.

And a lot of people. When they want to quit vaping, they come at it with shame or guilt. And a couple episodes ago, I talked about this, but I want you to understand that when you try to shame yourself or scare yourself or guilt yourself into stopping an action, what ends up happening is you actually create more of that same action.

And let me give you an example. So when I was wanting to quit smoking cigarettes, when I was 18, I tried to scare myself by like literally looking at my dad's life. I use my dad all the time in this podcast. I think I painted him in a negative light, but in terms of smoking, like. I've never been a fan of it, and I've never really seen it in a positive light for him.

I love him, he's a great person, but, um, I used to look at him and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I don't want to end up like that. My skin, the cough, like, I don't want that to happen. And I tried scaring myself. But what I didn't realize back then when I was 18 years old, is that when I use scaring to try to change my behavior, like, I end up doing things to avoid fear.

The reason I was vaping so much is because there was a bunch of negative emotions in my life that I wasn't dealing with. So adding on fear on top of the negative emotions, Just made me want to vape more and people do this with shame all the time. Let's look at another example. A lot of people when they want to lose weight, they try to withhold loving themselves until they lose weight.

They say to themselves, I don't love my body. I will not show love to my body. I'm going to wait to love myself until I weigh a certain amount of weight and I have abs. But what you don't realize is that when you don't love yourself. You end up not taking the actions you would take toward yourself if you loved yourself.

Well, it's like, let's look at it logically. How does someone who really genuinely loves himself and their body treat their body? Well, they probably don't overeat, they probably don't eat garbage y food, they probably go to the gym because they like their body and they want to honor it. Well, these are all the things we're not doing when we're living our life through shame and guilt.

vaping, it's like the only way that you can do it in a healthy way that's forever is from love. That means that I actually think it's better for you to love yourself unconditionally as someone who vapes than to shame yourself into quitting. Because from the foundation of unconditional love, I promise you, if you want to quit, it'll be so much easier and it'll be permanent.

And you get the best of both worlds. Remember guys, I'm a Hannah Montana fan. You get the best of both worlds. You get to love yourself now and you get to quit. Or you get to shame and beat yourself up, you get to white knuckle it, you get to try to quit and then you get to succumb to all the emotions and the resistance and the willpower that comes with hating yourself into quitting and changing your behavior.

So I want you to imagine a situation like if you were a parent. And you had a kid who was, let's say like picking, I used to lick my lips, oh my gosh, but let's say like picking their nails. I had the, I was that kid you guys with like the crusty lips when I was younger, a lot of anxiety, didn't know how to deal with it.

So, um, let's say you have a, like a kid who's picking their nails, right? Are you going to come at them and shame them and judge them? You shouldn't do that. That's gross. You're ugly. That's nasty. Of course you're not. You say, what's going on? You're like, grab them lovingly by the hands and be like, Hey, let me talk to you.

Is there something you need to talk about? Like, let me help you figure out what's going on. Are you getting bully? Like, I love you so much. I want to make sure that you're okay. See, do you see what's different about that? You don't judge the person. You ask them with curiosity what's going on for them.

What if you treated yourself the same way? That's exactly what love is. So many people try to judge themselves. They wake up in the morning, they hit their vape, and then they go, Oh, I shouldn't do that. I'm, I'm useless. I've, I've tried quitting a hundred times. Never going to work. You're just garbage. And what happens because we talk to ourselves like that, because we feel those emotions, guess what?

We vape more. Because we're already using the vape to escape ourselves. So when we're being nasty to ourselves, we really want to escape. What if next time you hit your vape? You don't judge yourself at all. You just ask with complete curiosity. By the way, judgment and curiosity, they're complete opposites.

So if you're judging yourself, you can't be curious. And guess what? You don't learn when you're judging. You only learn with curiosity. It's the only way you can learn. If you, and I want you really fast, I'm going to go back to this. So imagine a situation where you have someone in your life judging you, right?

Like my mom does this all the time. My mom, my whole life has always made a judgment about what I should and shouldn't be doing with my time. And what do I do? I get angry and then I push back. So, the thing that she doesn't like that I do, like smoking weed when I was younger, if she judged me for smoking weed, I ended up hiding it from her, and then doing more of it to spite her.

Well, we work in the exact same way to ourselves. When I wake up, and I eat something nasty, and I sit there and beat myself up, what's gonna happen? I'm gonna go eat more shit that's nasty. Because at least I can escape that, and it feels good. I know I'm not gonna treat myself well, well at least donuts taste good.

That kinda feels like a happy buzz. It's like, what if instead, next time you hit your vape, next time you eat a donut, whatever it is, that you Excuse me, whatever behavior you want to change, but in this case, we're obviously, obviously talking about vaping. You hit your vape and you ask yourself, Hey, no judgment at all.

What's going on for you? Why do you think that you just hit that? Was there something going on in your body before you hit that vape? Like, is there something going on? Is there stress? Like, what are the thoughts in your head before you hit it? What's the emotion in your body? And again, no judgment. Like, of course you're using nicotine to get out of those emotions.

I've never been compassionate enough with myself and given myself the tools. By the way, get the course, LOL. And I've never given myself the tools and been compassionate with myself enough to learn why I'm vaping to begin with. When you treat yourself like somebody you love, I promise you, you start to act and treat yourself like somebody you love.

So, it all starts in your thoughts though, right? You have to decide, instead of judging, you're going to be curious and compassionate. You're not going to beat yourself up if you vape. You're going to understand that compassion and curiosity is actually the only way to learn about why we're having the behaviors we're having.

And then from that foundation, we can start to pay attention without judgment. Right? Remember no judgment. I still, you guys, I still use these tools in my life every single day. I promise you they work. And you know what's so funny is that if you do this, you actually start to love yourself more. Like I know that if I overeat on the weekends or I drink more alcohol than I said that I was going to.

It does happen sometimes. I am a human being. If that happens, I know for a fact I'm not going to beat myself up on the other side. And you know what's the funniest thing about it? Because I know that, I end up being in much more control over the actions I take. I rarely drink more than I want anymore. Or than I intended to.

I rarely eat more than my body needs anymore. Because I know there's no shame involved with any of it. Even if it happens, I'm going to look at it with so much curiosity and compassion. And that allows me to look at it right now with curiosity and compassion. The only emotion you're ever going to feel is the one you're currently experiencing right now in the present moment caused by a thought you're thinking.

That means that you can never feel any past shame or future shame. That means that in every single moment before or after you hit your vape, you don't have to feel shame. You can choose to be curious and compassionate with yourself and I promise you that is the loving foundation that's going to make this work permanent and it's going to also lay the foundation.

Remember, remember I talked about this, like it's not just about quitting vaping, it's about laying down the foundation of self love, actually allowing yourself to be seen with your emotions without judging. That's the skill set that allows you to actually go after the life you want and become the person you want to become.

I promise you the highest version of yourself is never going to shame or judge you for any of the actions you're taking or if you've taken in the past. This work is all about evolving, and I think that evolution and its core is all about learning how to be completely seen and present and aware. Well, that's all about loving yourself, baby.

So let's start today. Before you hit your vape today, or after you hit your vape, pay attention to what the emotions are in your body. And if you have no idea what an emotion is, well, I'd recommend you get the course, because it'll tell you how to actually allow emotions and feel them. Um, it goes pretty deep into emotional work.

But, if you don't know how to allow an emotion, it's literally a vibration in your body. Like every single person right now can pause this podcast, take a deep loving breath for yourself and just explain to yourself in the best way that you can. Maybe it's not perfect, but Hey, we're learning. It's a practice, right?

Emotional works of practice. Where is there vibration in your body? Is there tightness in your chest? Is there a heaviness in your throat? Ooh, that might be Shane. Is there buzzing in your hands? Maybe you're a little bit anxious right now. That's okay. Let it be there. Be seen with it. Before we can start to change the emotions in our body, we have to understand the ones that are currently there.

I want you to think about your body like, kind of like a garbage can. I don't want to think, okay, that's a really bad example. Let's say a recycle bin. Okay. Let's do recycle bin. So imagine a full recycle bin. And then somebody comes out and like, tries to dump a bunch more paper and plastic in it. Oh, sorry.

We separate those in the Americas. One sec. This is a really bad example. Okay. So imagine a recycle bin that's full of paper. We'll just do paper and somebody comes out and the recycle bin is full and you're just dumping paper on top of it. You're like, no, no, no. I'm going to, this is loving paper. I'm going to dump loving paper on top.

It's like, wait a minute. We haven't emptied out all the stuff that's in it before. Let's get rid of all the shame and the judgment. Let's empty out this receptacle and then we are going to have space to fill in all the self love. So before you start practicing like really feeling love and everything, I recommend that you start to understand what's currently in your body that isn't loving.

That's the work. And I promise you, if you do this for a week, if you do this for two weeks, if you sign up for the course and learn the practice of doing this, um, on a more intricate level, then you'll, you'll start to understand why you're vaping so much. And you're going to start to realize that a lot of the emotions in your body surrounding vaping, they're not loving and that you can feel love right now, regardless of your nicotine level, regardless of the people outside of you, regardless how much money's in your bank account, you feel love right now by bringing awareness to your body.

Allowing yourself to feel the emotion, whether it's positive or negative, letting it pass, and then choosing some really loving thoughts about yourself that feel really good. And from that foundation and from that practice, doing that regularly, that is how we quit vaping. And then you'll see something that's really funny and you don't like me when I say this, but then you'll see it's not even about the vaping and that the vaping is a symptom of this, this emotional work that needs to be done.

It's so funny how this works. I love you guys so much. So now you start loving yourself because you don't need anything external to feel that emotion. I promise you. Also, by the way, hint, hint. When you can do this for yourself, you get way more intimate in your relationships and you stop relying on other people or other things outside of you, nicotine people, whatever it is to make you feel good.

This is the work. This is it. This is the most important work you can do in your life because this lays down the foundation for you to actually be able to go after the things you want and actually become the person you want to become all based on love. It's a win win. Literally, you get to love yourself.

You get to feel really good. You get to just be there with yourself, be seen, vaping. And then you get to feel so good about doing that, that it actually makes you feel even better about the loving thoughts that you started with. And then it's a, it's a feedback loop, right? Oh my God, I can quit vaping. What about now?

What can I do now at this time? And I feel better about myself and I don't need nicotine to feel good. It's like, what kind of big goals are going to come out of that? Oh, I promise you all the goals that you've been really wanting your whole life. That's when those are going to start to feel very, very, very real and achievable.

So this is a great podcast. You have to quit with love. If you don't quit with love, then you need to go somewhere else. This is not the podcast for you. And I say that with so much love, by the way. So also if you guys want, the course is amazing. Check it out. Um, I've sold a bunch of them now. I'm getting a lot of good feedback and yeah, I'm actually talking to people who have, have been taking it and trying to, um, make sure that everyone's getting what they need and it's been going really good.

So I really hope that this helps you. I'd love this episode, no pun intended and quitting with love is the only way to do it. So I'll see you guys next week. Thank you so much for being here. I'm very, very excited to be at my mastermind and I will let you guys know how it goes. I'm totally going to sing karaoke, by the way, I'm going to sing, um, Holden out for a hero by Bonnie Tyler.

I've been practicing it and I'm going to rock the shit out of that. So I'll see you guys next week.