Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
How Do You Change Habits
AllbuddhaBound
Veteran
Change the behavior first, or the thought/belief that creates the habit? Changing behaviors is so difficult. It takes a lot of effort and willpower. It just seems like a struggle to consider it. Then, changing a belief works short term but the more we see ourselves behaving according to our habit, we give up on the belief and we go right back to the status quo. Any thoughts on how Buddhism approaches behavior change?
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
But if it's more along the lines of "stop criticizing others" then it may require a bit of a mental shift.
Oh this is a good quote: "First we make our habits, then our habits make us." -- Charles C. Noble. I think it touches on how karma (our actions) can create positive or negative results in ourselves and others - if you continually choose actions that tend to create negative results (e.g. binge drinking, theft, slander, manipulation) then your life will gravitate towards the negative. However, the opposite is just as true.
This just reinforces the habit for most people.
Question the underlying intention and motives behind such habits.
Usually it is basic dissatifaction. Out of that fear and ambition.
What is the antidote? Just stop and sit with all that movement. Movement for your habits arising in body and mind. By just sitting we can either entertain the habits or we can learn to live with them without actig them out.
Recognition of the habit forming in the body mind is key. You can start to see the seeds of potential habit forming. And from there you exercise a vow to the highest form of yourself. Could be god or the buddha or to kindness, etc. investigate what it would be like to live with a habit but not to exercise it.
In such way the energy of the habit allows one to have an object of inquiry. That is the invitation. Can we embrace the imperfections? A habit is a formation. Prior to the formations is peace. Can we recognize the subtle peace?
Then we bring attention towards peace. Then habits come and go. But the invitation is always that which we are attracted or repelled by. It is the most dangerous thing and at te same time where liberation shines through.
Just some thoughts.
Look, if you are wounded by an arrow, and you pull out the arrow and heal the wound, is there anything lacking?
What we are really avoiding is peace. We think if we stop grasping, we'll just dissolve into the ether and nothing will be left of us. A lot of Buddhists even teach this as the goal.
Is there life in the void?
Hello?
Habits are our resistance to life's fluidity.
Whether one considers the habit to be healthy or not, they delude.
Habits are identities most common building blocks and the ongoing bolstering of our ego's position. One can only drop a habit by being prepared to let go of a part of your identity/ego.
From the Buddhist perspective, the hard part is not so much the dropping of a habit, rather, the meditative facing of whatever inertia initiated that habit. Without facing it's initiating inertia, a dropped habit is simply replaced by another with our next moment of lax concentration & mindfulness. Dropping a habit might only involve ceasing to continue participating in the habit but keeping it dropped requires the willingness to reside in the often unsettling space that results from it's absence.
My original intent of this post was to find ways to stop hurting self, not pursue utopia.
A good way to loosen attachment to habits is to try to find the essence of what good they do for you, and what pleasure you get out of them. When you find neither essence, habits become less compulsive.
What I said above seems confounding, but the point is that there's no blueprint for enlightenment, no on off button you can press, there's just guidance and support. And that it's ok not to get all the answers you want when you want them.
Getting into Buddhism brought with it a greater sense of ease, a stronger ability to focus on every moment as just that moment - instead of thinking that my bad habit defined my perceived self (or my self perceived by others). I reminded myself constantly that I was where I was supposed to be in any given moment.
However, over the past two years or so, some of the habits I have strong aversions to have been increasing in my life.
So now I'm trying to balance a single-goal checklist with increased meditation. Gonna see what happens here. I'm just trying to be curious about it.
But we still have to try our best in the first place.
We'll have to agree to disagree about the point. Though reality is on my side.
Agree with you here too: effort is just effort. Effortless effort is just effort. Except nicer.
But I think what you're doing here is testing out some ideas of yours, and that's ok. Just keep an open mind about why people practice Buddhism - it's easy to pick out all the negative aspects of religion and define the whole thing that way, but that would be your loss.
What is dissatisfaction?
Can you answer for yourself, before words?
But in the end he became so exhausted that he stopped under a Bodhi tree, and did not move for many days and nights, though the lord of death and his armies were encircling him in wrath.
And when the Buddha finally arose, the armies were gone, it was as if they had never existed at all; he couldn't find suffering, and he never found it again.
@AllBuddhaBound - good luck with your initial inquiry. Sometimes trial and error also works wonders, others might suggestion meditation or books.
_/\_