Mastering the art of mindfulness or awareness is one of the most powerful things you can do to change an unwanted habit. It is so tempting to dive in and try to find solutions to something that we don’t like about ourselves or our behaviour. Unfortunately, that kind of trying and striving is often a fundamental component of the habit that we are trying to change.
This is because habits exist as part of behavioural patterns or loops rather than a behaviour in isolation. For instance, in every time you do the habit there is likely to be:
A trigger
The habit itself
Things that happen as a result of the habit
An emotional response to doing the habit
An emotional response to the response
So say the unwanted habit is eating chocolate in a compulsive way. The whole pattern might be something like this:
The trigger might be hunger, seeing chocolate, an emotion, an event or certain person or maybe a time of day.
You eat the chocolate.
You change your biochemistry and you will have an increase in blood sugars, a release of neurotransmitters and then maybe a crash in sugar levels.
You feel some kind of emotions initially, maybe pleasure followed by remorse.
Next you feel a second level of emotions, maybe guilt or anger with yourself. This is known as the second arrow in the Buddhist tradition. The first arrow is doing the habit and the feelings from that, but the second arrow is the one of blame or shame that you shoot into the same wound. This arrow is the most damaging and it keeps us hooked into the pattern.
Here is why.
When we keep repeating that second arrow, we create a core feeling of shame, blame, guilt or whatever it is we tell ourselves. This feeling resides deep inside the mind and body as internal feeling state that is very uncomfortable and largely unconscious. This is known as a vritti and generally people people develop unconscious strategies to avoid feeling it. But of course, doing the habit only creates more vritti and perpetuates the entire habit pattern or samskara which looks like this:
We experience the vritti- the core feeling of shame/blame/guilt and we try to ignore it or make it go away.
An external trigger happens and offers mind a distraction.
You eat the chocolate which is the distraction.
You change your biochemistry and you will have an increase in blood sugars, a release of neurotransmitters and then maybe a crash in sugar levels.
You feel some kind of emotions initially, maybe pleasure followed by remorse.
Next you feel a second level of emotions, maybe guilt or anger with yourself which adds to the vritti and starts the cycle all over again.
But because so much of this is not conscious, it becomes a mystery and we ask ourselves:
“Why am I constantly eating chocolate when I know it makes me fat and unhappy?”
This is where the practice of observation or noticing comes in. When we take time to observe the pattern without accepting or rejecting, trying to make sense of it or trying to fix it, the magic happens. We are able to see the habit clearly and gain insights and understandings about why we are doing it. We demystify it.
When we hold Yoga poses for a longer period of time, we begin to see the patterns in the way we stand, retract, slump, open or breathe. Holding the poses creates the tapas or heat that ‘burns off impurities’.
The same thing happens when we begin to observe our vrittis with curiosity and equanimity. When we stay with the discomfort of the Yoga of noticing, the tapas begins to unravel the patterns and digest them. No action is required. It is the action in inaction. If we can do this even for a brief moment, we begin to change the samskaras and when we keep repeating this mindfulness, gradually we are able to dissociate from the patterns .
The key is bringing a quality of loving kindness to the practice of noticing our habit. This creates space for the habit pattern or samskara to be fully seen as it is. We are required to:
stop labelling or comparing
stop defining what is wrong
stop making up stories about it
stop trying to manipulate or fix it
and stop shooting the second arrow!
This is not a comfortable process, tapas creates heat as it burns away the patterns and things begin to change. But if you experience this discomfort, that’s a good thing, it means things are and can change. Stay with it.