Bodymind: Habits

How much of our experience is driven by involuntary tendencies and habits? Understanding the nature and essence of habit in our lives is an essential task. Habits are both inevitable and unavoidable. They are a medium of perception; a complex network of filters that influence how we interpret and orient ourselves to everyday life. The effect of an involuntary pattern of behavior can be positive or negative. However, for learning to evolve we must be fully aware of and develop the ability to evolve the habits that influence us.

What is a habit?: The are various senses of the word habit. One of the most common senses of the word describes habit as a repetitive and involuntary pattern of behavior that operates outside of our own awareness. In this sense, a habit is something that is controlling, or at least influencing, our thoughts, feelings and actions. The collective version of a habit is a practice, custom or tradition, all of which describe routines used by groups of people. All habits are forms of confinement.

An addiction describes a kind of habit that originates in a physiological and/or psychological need for a habit-forming substance. However, all habits are in an important sense an addiction. Regardless of the specific nature of a habit, the brain always produces specific chemicals in response to specific experiences (or more accurately our own unique interpretation of experience); chemicals do not need to be introduced externally for an addiction to develop. In other words, we can be addicted to our own thought-patterns and emotional responses. All habits therefore have a physiological as well as a psychological foundation; the physiology and psychology of a habit are a single unified entity. All habits are bodymind phenomenon.

An addiction also involves the idea of compulsion or compulsive behavior. When we are addicted to something we feel an seemingly irresistible attraction to act often in irrational ways. An addiction is the space in which we can know something is wrong yet continue to perform it time and time again. This reenactment can range from a dependency on a narcotic, to a dependency on a specific emotional response. In the midst of an addiction, knowledge becomes frail and all too often fails us.

Why do habits matter?: Learning, or at least education, is often thought of as a process of acquiring knowledge, skills, and/or attitudes. Mysteriously, the significantly more powerful idea of habit is largely ignored. Learning, in its most essential sense, does not ignore habit as a target for our faculties perception and awareness.

How many people that might be considered advanced in their knowledge, skills and attitudes fall victim to irrational habits and addictions? How is it possible that we can know how to act in the best interests of self and others, yet all to often fail to do so? Understanding the nature of our habits is a prerequisite to understanding knowledge since it is through the lens of habit that we both apprehend and comprehend.

How do habits relate to learning?: How do habitual routines of thought, feeling, and behavior, support or undermine our capacity for learning? Everything that we think, feel and do is in some way touched by the influence of habit. Habits are learning environments that offer the possibility of changing how we choose to experience the world around us.

Habits deter learning if they serve to create a limitation or confinement of experience. That is, if the lock us into certain kinds mode of experience while deterring us from exploring other modes of experience. In this sense a habit is a limitation and a source of experiential imprisonment. Education is a habit from which we have not yet recovered.

If the habit is unknown to us, in other words we consistently enact the habit without knowing we are doing so, then we are in effect acting mindlessly. In a sense, we don’t really know what we are doing. Awareness is the capacity of mind that serves to reveal a habit and expose it to our powers of observation. Without the ability to become consciously aware of the habits that control us, the possibility of advancing our learning is at least impaired if not completely devastated.

Habits therefore form an important environment or medium for learning; they are both an essential classroom and trusted mentor. The interface with our habits is our power of awareness, that ability to train our attention inward in order to observe what is really happening within ourselves. A habit exposed is a triumph of learning.

Learning Habits: Habits are a necessary condition of living. Without them our minds would suffer from persistent overload and we would be mentally and physically incapacitated. Some habits are beneficial while other habits are detrimental. Any habit we are unaware of is a problem as well as an opportunity for advancing learning. The intersection of learning and habits involves the following notions:

• Learning must serve to help reveal our habitual responses in life, otherwise we remain victim to mindless routine;
• Learning about habits involves: a) revealing them through awareness; b) altering or creating them through intention; c) eliminating those habits that do not serve us; and d) manifesting new forms of action and behavior;
• Learning, without understanding how our own habits influence and affect us, impairs our ability to interpret our experiences in life;
• Any habit is simultaneously a physiological and psychological entity;
• Culture is a significant source of habit formation and dissemination. When we undo habits we are also undoing our cultural conditioning.