Some Thoughts on Bad Habits

        Breaking a bad habit is challenging. There are many spiritual perspectives on habits. It has been said you are just perfect as you are, but if you are gluttonous, or haunted by a loud obsessive thought pattern, or perpetually in the pain of an emotional habit, in truth you are in misery. The Buddha did say life is suffering and the epitaph written was carry the cross but this is a new day and we are not settling well with being enslaved by bad habits. Habits are deep, ancestral, historical, customary, traditional, daily, physical, mental and emotional. When you are young a bad habit is just a trifle but if you go forward through time with it, the day will most likely come that you wish you could stop the habit but you can’t. You have dug deep into the trench and it is no longer a groove or groovy. You may notice how a bad habit is a distraction that keeps you from constructive and creative action; how you may feel torn in two, i.e. should I really be_____this again? Don't I know this will not help me feel motivated to ______?  Ok. Why not? Just one more time won't matter. Tomorrow I will______ And then you may notice how you are beating yourself up for what you just did perhaps while  on your way to the medicine cabinet.

To some degree the habit pendulum swings from feasting to fasting; maybe a wide, slow swing or one where you feel you are getting on with your performance on the stage of your life but you constantly get the hook of the habit! Jerked around. It’s habits that have brought the world to a state of squalor instead of splendor. There may come the point of a saturation where you just can’t take it anymore and you just drop the habit. It is said that the paradox of it is that you just need a decision to drop it. But you probably won’t know this until you experience this and drop it. The symptoms of bad habitual tendencies may be those such as anxious shallow breathing, a blood pressure spike; or there may be depression, drowsiness or a flight into lethargy, low energy or sleep. There may be rapid eye movement and a scattered mind. These are all indications that you are not consciously conscious and you are on automatic pilot. If you have not arrived at that saturation point where success is not guaranteed, get proactive with meditation practice. It is proving time and again to be helpful because in and of itself it is a kind of habit that is helpful to your mind and body, the home of your habits. Meditation calms you and positively affects the biochemistry of habitual tendencies. It helps you to be sharper in your choices for positive, self - supportive and self healing action.  It helps you be persevering when you feel you have failed. Become a gold miner meditator of yourself and dig deep within for the freedoms of being you and being more at peace with your circumstances.

Meditation Habit