Time to Heal: Grief, Loss and Cigarette Smoking by Bonnie Baty

I attended a book intensive with Inspirational Book Writer’s last month to write my first stand-alone book and thought I would share a condensed snippet of one of the stories within it.

I had been a cigarette smoker on and off from age 13 up until 38 years of age. It was what I considered to be my vice. For a few years, I had a strong interest in medical intuition, and I knew that smoking which related to the lungs was connected to grief.

After the loss of my father to a heart attack when I was 13 years old, I struggled with the grief of his death for many years. I always believed this to be the catalyst for my taking up smoking.

The day I found out he had passed, I had been sitting in science class at high school next to a close friend when she happened to randomly ask what I would do if my father died.

I wasn’t too sure how to process the question and replied, “I don’t know, he’s not dead yet”. It was only minutes later that I was asked to go to the school office where I was informed that my sister, who I was expecting, had arrived to pick me up. We were due to get our parents from the airport as they were scheduled to arrive home from a three-week vacation to America.

We never did make it to the airport. Nobody mentioned anything to me in the car but on arriving home and wondering what was going on, one of my other sisters came to me with the news that dad had passed.

I felt myself go numb and was taken back to the conversation I had with my friend in science class only moments before.

My grief was strong, and in my adolescence was bereft of the skills of how to navigate and process the big loss that had occurred. I began acting out and stopped listening to the advice of my mother.

A few months later, I attended a birthday party of a friend where lots of alcohol was available and I had gotten paralytic, so much so, that my I was put into a bedroom where I went to sleep on the floor.

I’m not sure how long I was out for, but I woke to someone booting me in the lower back really hard with their boots on. At the time, this person was making a mockery of the situation and laughing with a friend of his who was also standing in the room. This went on for a while and too scared to do anything, I froze up and took each kick as it came.

I realised I knew the two men in the room, not personally, but due to their popularity. The guy kicking me, happened to be the star kicker of a local rugby team.

25 years passed by, I feel I had healed the grief of dad’s loss and had come into the space of acceptance some years prior. Whilst sitting on the bed in our spare room, I happened to be scrolling my Facebook news feed when I came across an article shared by a friend.

I opened the article and as I was reading through, my body reacted with a well of unshed tears which started streaming down my face. Unable to control the tears, I felt what I could only explain as a moment of spontaneous healing that had been triggered by what I was reading.

The article told the story about a man being charged with grievous bodily harm for attacking another person whilst in an unconscious state. The man, who also went on to become an international sporting personality, was the same man that attacked me whilst I laid sleeping, drunk and helpless on that bedroom floor all those years ago.

Not only did I feel the cellular shifts taking place in my body during that moment of spontaneous healing but I also got flashes of the cycle that plagued this man and his family… something he endured and was now carrying on. I felt every bit of his generational pain and in that moment, I only saw and felt absolute love for him.

I never felt the need to pick up another cigarette after that moment.

To find out more about Bonnie’s intuitive guidance cards and to keep in touch with her debut book due to be launched in November, please visit: www.bonniebaty.com