Inner Practice: Harnessing Habits or Letting Habits Harness You?
We are but creatures of habits.
As large a scale as your daily ablutions and regime, to the microscopic level of your synaptic connections in your body. As insignificant as the choices you make for lunch, to as impactful as your perceptions and principles.
In fact, you are your habits.
But are these habits serving you or harming you? And if the ‘bad’ habits are causing you to suffer, are you aware of that in the first place? Thereafter are you able to break the ‘bad’ habits and replace with new ‘good’ ones?
In TCM treatments, simply put, what we are trying to do here is to break the habitual cycles, vicious ones of course. When you are in pain or structurally misaligned or fatigued or emotionally disoriented, and this goes on for weeks, months and even years, it can come to a point when you may not even realize you are in pain or imbalanced. It is not that the illness is not there anymore after some time.
It is that you have gotten used to being ill or imbalanced,
so much so you even feel comfortable in the dis-ease.
However, this can only pave the way to further imbalance and worsening of illnesses if you do not do anything to correct it. Illness and imbalance don’t correct themselves, especially when the body has lost much of the ability to do that by itself due to aging or the external imbalancing factors are stronger than the body’s rebalancing capabilities. In fact, the body may be in the ‘comfort zone’ of ‘imbalance’ that it is happy to stay in that state. But the question is: is this habitual pattern doing any good for you?
I always advise my patients that we all need that extra external help when it comes to illnesses, especially chronic ones that have already stayed with you for a significant period of time. Breaking of vicious cycle patterns in illnesses and diseases takes time, effort and perseverance. And it is not going to be comfortable as you are taking the body out of its ‘comfort’ zone of dis-ease’. But you got to break it, reverse it and bring it back on track at some point, because major illnesses can accumulate and develop from these minor imbalances. Either you have some self awareness to realise something is not right and seek help from there, if not that is one of my job and ability as a TCM doctor to tell you what is wrong with you that you are totally unaware of whilst you are in your vicious habitual state, then take action to break the vicious cycles happening inside you.
Once you are back on the right track and healthy habitual states, you are comfortably happy, healthy in mind and body, NATURALLY without you even having to put in any effort as per say. Because your ‘good’ habits are now taking the wheel.
We are but creatures of habits.
Are you harnessing your habits or are the habits harnessing you now?