Breaking the habit
There is some preamble here so please bear with me, but this article looks to consider our habits, why it can be so difficult to stick the change, and ultimately what we can do about it. It will be the focus of our next Mental Fitness Community event on Thursday 6th June where we will explore some practical mindful tools to help break the habit of being ourselves where it doesn’t serve us well.
So, to the preamble…
I have long felt that mindfulness has a bit of a PR problem. This might be down to its relative origins in the west where it is often unconsciously attributed to the hippie trails across India and the seeking of enlightenment, often coupled with psychedelics, beards and beads. There is also the challenge that mindfulness has in describing itself succinctly to audiences who are not already sold on the personal development and self-care band wagon. Mindfulness is experiential, practitioners say, the only way to truly understand this thing is to practice it for yourself. They then invite us to focus on the experience of eating a raisin or to close our eyes and focus on the breath. And all of this is true and valid but if you are a sceptical westerner or one of many for whom the idea of “alternative” approaches sends a shiver down their spine with fear for the integrity of mental “can do”, attitudes, then this is likely to not move you any closer to embracing the opportunity provided here.
Back to the habit…
When teaching and talking about mindfulness I try and make it as practical and real world as possible because ultimately that must be the merit on which any tool stands or falls. Does it work when you need it to? It is worth observing how automatic it is to feel differently when we are in a different environment. When we change the context in which we find ourselves we are more likely to be open to new experience, be it positive of negative. This is the purpose of something as simple as going away on a holiday. It forces us to shift our mode of being in some manner whereby we can release ourselves from a number of the routine tensions of our lives. This is the same effect you find in rehabilitation centres; people are taken away from their normal environment by which they can free themselves sufficiently of the contextual anchors that they might be able to make key changes with the right support. This is also why many people fall back into their old patterns soon after they return home and are unsuccessful in reintegrating the changes into their day to day lives.
Sam Harris says something to the effect that we are experts at being almost exactly who we were yesterday and this something about ourselves that is well worth remembering. We are absolutely creatures of habit, and this doesn’t just apply to our physical behaviours and the mundane routines of our daily lives but also to our mental patterns, our reactions to ourselves and our reactions to others. One of the primary reasons that making change of any kind last in our lives is so difficult is the sheer weight of our habitual behaviours and mental patterns. Want to lose fat and gain muscle? It is going to take consistent, deliberate effort. Want to repair a damaged relationship? It is going to take, consistent, deliberate effort… In the absence of this commitment, we invariably fall back into our well-trod mental routines.
Taking the fluff out of mindfulness…
Mindfulness is the quality and attitude of deliberate attention by which we are able to notice our drives, impulses, routines, and automaticity. We can then bring the attitude of curiosity to the experience and see what unfolds for us. Fundamentally it is a skill by which we can become more attentive to our patterns of behaviour in order that we might be able to interrupt those patterns if we wish to. It brings the experience of a shift in the pattern of our lives whilst being exactly where we are. It doesn’t guarantee we will succeed in making the shift, and this is where complimentary, supporting psycho technologies can be very beneficial, but it is the foundation on which we build the possibility of effective change in our lives.
Back to the start…
And this brings us back to the beginning in that this is something we can only grasp so far intellectually; to actually experience it and therefore understand it, we need to do it. You wouldn’t expect to tell someone who had never surfed how it is to surf and leave them satisfied that they know all there is to the experience of surfing. Everyone will say you can only really appreciate it as an experience if you try it, and mindfulness is an experience in the same manner. The toolbox of mindfulness includes practices which focus on the breath, the body, sounds, taste, touch, smell and sight and these tools are all variations to practice the ability to return to the quality and attitude of deliberate attention. Paying interested attention to the breath can feel lovely, and it can help us to quieten the mind, but this isn’t the point of the practice, the point is to discover that we are not our next thought, feeling or bodily sensation and that these experiences don’t have to define the moment which we are in. This is the revelation of the experience, but again, it isn’t enough to understand it intellectually, any more than reading a book on sex is a substitute for the real thing.
So, here is the invitation…
Practice a mindful approach, as often as possible throughout the day, practice noticing the quality of the moment found in the moment you are in. The more you practice the more the experience will unfold and more you will become aware of the automaticity of the experience of your life and that maybe, you might be able to make some of the shifts that you want to.
If you would like to practice some of these skills, we will be exploring them at the Mental Fitness Community on Thursday 6th June at 6pm so we hope to see you there!
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