Knowing Yourself
Throughout a life, we accumulate habits. Some work for us, other’s don’t. And the key to a good life is being able to nurture those habits that work for us, and weed out the others.
Trouble is, we often don’t notice those habits that don’t work for us. We’ve lived with them for so long, they’ve become a part of what feels normal. And because we don’t notice them, we often don’t examine those habits until they become a problem.
But even then, because some of our life problems arise from habits that are once or twice removed from what seems wrong, we can’t even identify them. This particularly applies to emotional issues, which often have their source in life experiences we’ve long forgotten.
And life keeps us running, so we never get a chance to stop, and look inwards, into the forest of our underlying habits, so we can identify those which have become dysfunctional. So we keep running, and because those habits are a part of our sense of ‘normal’, we keep putting up with the stress they create in our lives – until the habits eventually make us sick or sabotage us in some way.
So it makes sense to begin identifying those habits before they create unnecessary problems – and this is where meditation and mindfulness are useful tools. In taking some time each day to step out of the business of our life routine and turn our attention inward, we become aware of habits that are not working for us.
As I’ve said in previous posts, when these dysfunctional habits arise in meditation, we mistakenly regard them as obstacles to meditation – but they’re not. They’re opportunities to finally deal with a problem which, though we may not be aware of it, exists in our life.
These apparent obstacles may be simple things like boredom, or an inability to focus – habits easily adjusted with meditation practice. Or they may be body tensions we had not noticed before, or emotions, or nagging memories and so on. Whatever they are, with our attention turned inwards and resting on the breath, we become aware of these things – in the comparative stillness of meditation they show themselves and allow us to mindfully adjust the architecture of what we are, and how we act in our life.
For example, as a child I developed a habit of slouching when I sat in a chair – a seemingly minor quirk. For the whole of my early life, it seemed not to be a problem – it was just one of my physical idiosyncrasies. It wasn’t until I reached the age of forty that, being a writer and sitting a lot, I began to experience back pain. At first I didn’t make a connection, until one day as I was meditating, I noticed that my slouching posture was stressing my lower back and realized that my slouching habit was beginning to injure me.
But it didn’t end there. I also noticed it was distorting the way I was breathing – because instead of using my back muscles to stay upright, I was using the muscles around my belly, which was putting a lot of tension around my breath.
And that was only the beginning of what I discovered.
Shortly after, I was practising walking meditation and I noticed my slouching habit extended there as well – I was walking with a slight stoop, which was causing my hips to push forward slightly – which in turn was putting unnatural stresses, however subtle, on my knees, in which twinges had begun to appear.
I realized then that my life-long habit of slouching, though barely noticeable in the course of daily life, was creating all kinds of minor problems which would, as I aged, become all the more extreme.
So I began the long process of adjusting the habit.
I began making sure to keep my back straight when I sat, particularly during meditation– encouraging my back muscles to keep me upright, with my belly relaxed.
And when I walked anywhere, I kept adjusting my posture to be more erect. As I did this, I noticed my body make a whole chain of ensuant adjustments. With my posture upright, my shoulders naturally adjusted back, and that opened up my chest, which caused my breathing to deepen, and so on.
All I had to do was to remain mindful of which habits were pulling at me so I could gently, and persistently counter them, and over a month or two the changes became instinctive.
That is, they became my new normal.
This new vigilance encouraged me to keep weaving mindfulness practice into my daily activities so I could keep on this process of habit readjustment. I began to examine each action I made – from how I picked up a glass, to how I climbed the stairs and so on. It became a new fascination, seeing how I could re-jig the way I was doing things to be more efficient.
As my body slowly changed, it became more relaxed – and I realized that my seemingly innocuous slouching habit, and all the tensions that arose from it had one more effect. As subtle as they were, they had been influencing my mood as well. The sensations of tightness in the muscles around my belly, and the tight breath it caused was ,through a weird feedback loop, being interpreted by my mind as anxiety.
This too, dissipated as I adjusted the underlying postural habits.
I’m sure, had I left all these habits in place, their effects would have worsened as I aged – because it is the nature of habits to compound over time. The more they are enacted, the deeper they get and we no longer notice them. So when secondary effects arise, (such as my sense of anxiety from the habit of slouching), we often don’t make a connection between the habit and its effect.
It’s these kinds of things that we become aware of when we meditate – and it’s mindfulness that helps us to adjust.
I’ll give you another simple example, one of many – again, of a habit that began in childhood and compounded with age – which I eventually changed with mindfulness.
I grew up in a home where my parents fought continuously, and often violently. The physical effect of this was, I had a habit of keeping my shoulders riding high, instinctively keeping my head down as if preparing to be struck. It was something which, in my early life, I never noticed. It was my ‘normal’.
It was many decades later that I began experiencing chronic pain in my shoulders and neck and jaw. By this time, I’d begun meditating, so as soon as I noticed the tensions that were causing the pain, I diverted my attention from the usual contemplation of the breath to examine the sensations in those areas – accepting the aching I felt there while keeping my attention steady without reacting.
Over time, the first thing I noticed was no matter how much I was allowing the tight muscles in those areas to let go and relax, they wouldn’t. It seemed like they’d been tight for so long, they no longer knew how to let go.
The other thing I noticed was, the primary tensions in my neck and shoulders were causing the collateral tension in my jaw – but it went further than that. Those tensions were also creating tightness in the muscles in my face, and around my mouth. And it didn’t stop there. I noticed the tension also spread to the muscles in my temples and behind my eyes. And all these things were so subtle I would never have noticed had I not been made aware of them during meditation.
So, over a week or two, as I kept mindfully readjusting – encouraging the muscles in my shoulders and neck to let go, eventually they learnt to relax. And as they relaxed, so too, in a kind of domino effect, did all the secondary tensions relax as well – in my jaw, around my mouth, my temples and behind my eyes.
And once again, I realized my mind had been interpreting these tensions as anxiety – and now the physicality was changed, so too, the mentality responded – I lost the subtle sense of anxiety I’d always lived with.
So you see, meditation and mindfulness are not just about changing the way we use our mind. It’s also about re-adjusting the way we live in our body which, with mind and body being intimately interconnected, is an aspect of mind.
These examples are the most simple I could describe, but there are many more – all of them involving seemingly benign habits, both mental and physical, which create larger problems than what is immediately obvious. And the process of noticing with meditation, and then adjusting through daily mindfulness is a way of becoming aware of those habits and unravelling them.
Everything we are is a habit, from liking ice-cream, to how we walk and talk, to the kinds of emotions we feel, and the opinions and actions we’re likely to exhibit. We’ve learnt these things throughout our life. Even those genetic habits we inherited from our ancestors – behavioral tics and innate abilities – though they’re deeper, they’re still habits.
As such, if they don’t work for us, like any habit, they can be changed.
But to be able to change any habit, we must first know what it is, and how it is enacting itself in our life– and that requires us to stop the roller-coaster of life for a while, turn our attention inward, and become aware of our internal environment – which happens naturally when we meditate.
Once we’ve identified the habits that aren’t working for us, we need to practice mindfulness in daily life to keep readjusting the way the habit is enacting itself.
And we change.
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
– Andy Warhol
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