My habits have always seemed to be barriers to my heart's desires. Eventually, I realized that it would be a good idea to actually research what's known about habits so I've been in that process for awhile now. I have learned a lot, and the more I learn, the more I find I need and want to learn.
Here's what I think, so far, about "bad" habits:
- I don't believe bad habits happen because I'm a bad person. I believe they serve a purpose. They developed because, unconsciously, I thought they were helpful. Overeating is an example. Eating pleasurable foods is a great antidote to emotional pain. I unconsciously used it as a tool. A better way would be to notice when I have emotional pain and learn how to comfort myself in ways that don't have such negative consequences.
Here's what I think, so far, about "good" habits:
- I believe that forming "good" habits is a lot harder than we believe. I was taught that you just start doing what you should be doing anyway and not make any kind of a fuss about it. Well, so far in my life I haven't met anybody who has done that. Learning to form new habits is an art and requires study and support from others. The formation of habits, new research indicates, has evolved as a survival tool. For example, we can't possibly think about everything necessary to drive a car. The process of learning is to a large extent dependent on putting the actions necessary into unconscious mind.
At this stage of my life, one of the most important tasks I've taken on is to discover how to build a life that I enjoy and that has meaning for me. Building that life is simply building a series of new habits. Simple. Not easy at all.
Several years ago I took a seminar on "mindfulness," and they told the students that most of us go through life like robots, operating mainly unconsciously. We often give almost no thought to how we feel, what we're thinking, what we're doing, why we're doing what we're doing, what's going on around us - mindlessness.
My mind was usually worrying about what I "needed" to do next and what terrible things were going to happen if I didn't, my personal shortcomings, what somebody else was doing or not doing. I was either living in the future or the past. It would have been extremely unusual for me to actually notice my body, my feelings, or my environment.
When I heard that mindfulness was preferable to "mindlessness," I wasn't sure why it was. I really thought it was just how human beings were and there was really no choice in it so why does it matter anyway. The answer to "Why does it matter, anyway?" was that when I lived in my head, thinking about the past or the future, I was totally missing the present - which is where my life is actually lived. It would be possible for me to go to my grave without ever having really participated in the life I have been mysteriously given! It's also possible, however, to make a choice to live in the here and now and actually experience my life.
I realized I didn't want my life to have been about housework and whether I was pretty enough and whether I had enough money, and whether the people in my life were doing what I wanted. Those were the things that revolved in my mind every day and were, therefore, my life as I was living it. Yuck!
They mentioned that the choice to live mindfully was one that had to be made - not just daily but moment by moment. It's a very difficult discipline. However, I can testify that as I continue to make that choice in my life, I continue to be more and more in touch with my heart and the love in the universe. What else could be more important?
Ah, insight! It's so exciting! It promises a new life and new happiness!
But here's the thing - it's temporary. Usually. There are a few exceptions but mostly it's temporary.
For example, I just finished reading Cheryl Richardson's book, The Art of Extreme Self Care. She's divided the book into twelve months with tasks to do each month. She's actually presented me with a plan for improving my self care. However, it's up to me to decide what I will do to improve my self care on a daily basis and then remember to actually do it.
As a life coach, I've learned that I'm not the only one who has trouble making a plan and then remembering to carry it out. The call of my unconscious routines seduces me. So, I post sticky notes everywhere to remind me to floss, to call friends, etc. I set the alarm on my phone to remember to do evening meditation.
For me, planning is not a complicated process. I've read many, many books on the subject of planning and some of them are long and detailed. I got lost and gave up. So now I just brainstorm a list of possibilities and choose what seem to be the best ones. (Brainstorming just means spitting out all the stuff that comes to mind without judging.) Then I put the best of the possibilities on my to do list every day.
I deeply believe that simplicity works best for me and for a lot of other people too. I also deeply believed, even before reading Cheryl's book, that taking care of myself is my first responsibility and if I do a bad job of that, nothing else is going to go well.
Clutter exists in time as well as space. No one ever told me that. I had to figure it out for myself. There are innumerable time-wasters that can clutter up my life. With the advance of the internet and electronic devices, we have many more time clutter problems than before.
I thought the way to get rid of time clutter was to figure out what to eliminate, but even though that sounds logical, it's actually backwards. It doesn't work the way eliminating material clutter does.
With material clutter I can just make a pile of stuff I want to simplify, and then divide it into: 1. a pile of trash 2. things to give away or sell and 3. things to put away. With time clutter I just use what I've learned about what moves my heart and put those things into a time slot. Of course, that means heart activities will crowd something out, but once I know what the heart activities are, I find it really easy to see which time clutter things need to go.
It works just fine for me to check email and Facebook only once a day and use that time to write posts for my two blogs. I've completely given up ironing. I still have a little ironing board but I just use it to iron labels on my daughter's clothes and to let company iron their stuff. It's a lot easier to do dishes as I go along rather than making a big production of it once a day.
When I'm living from the heart, writing, taking pictures, spending time with people I love, cooking new dishes and just enjoying my peaceful life easily crowds out stuff that really doesn't matter in the long run.
I believe that many of us just get up every morning and do what's in front of us to do - chores, work, sleep, eat, dress, errands and on and on. Every once in awhile we might have a minute where we think about what our life is about, but it's probably unlikely that we think of ourselves as the a creator of a work of art, but that is what we are whether we realize it or not.
We are either creating our lives consciously or unconsciously. In order to create a beautiful life, we are probably going to have to become conscious of what we're doing. That sounds so simple! In my experience it is simple, but also one of the most difficult things I've done.
Let's say that we've already done the work of discovering what a beautiful life looks like to us. (This work is of the right brain and definitely not the left brain.) Then what happens is that we forget about it in a day or two and then go back to our normal, unconscious way of doing things.
So how can we make sure we remember that our lives are a marvelous gift from our creator that we can make beautiful every single day? When I take a step back from my daily rounds and think about the gift I've been given, I know that if I were my creator, I would be sad that the life I gave is being used as an unconscious round of chores. Maybe it's as simple as writing down and memorizing an intention every morning.
If I set the intention every morning that I am creating a beautiful life today and honoring the fabulous gift I've been given, my to-do list miraculously changes. Ideas often come to me about how I can make that day a beautiful day. Other ideas about actions I could take to lay groundwork for even more beautiful days in the future.
Intention has great power. It gives me the opportunity to tune in to my creativity. It provides the energy to take action. Inspiration stems from it. Certainly it is worth the two minutes it takes to focus each morning.
Cheryl Richardson who has written several books that focus on self care, always adds the modifier "extreme." She says that her reason for that word is that just regular self care isn't nearly enough - especially not for women. We tend to think that self-care is taking our vitamins and exercising - things we will get to as soon as we get everything else done. But there's a lot more to self-care than that.
Luckily I started watching Oprah in the 1990s and Cheryl was a regular guest. As a result I started buying and reading her books. I may have all of them. I was amazed at the kind of self-care she was recommending - things like a weekly massage, leaving the office during lunch and going for a walk outside. Ideas like that were completely foreign to me at the time.
Cheryl convinced me that if I wanted to have a good life I had to put extreme self-care at the top of my to-do list, not at the bottom. So I began to try to do it. What a struggle that was - a war with myself and my mind.
I felt guilty and anxious when I took time to care for myself. Then I heard her speak at a university conference, and she said that you would know you were on the right track when you felt guilty. It was just a sign that you were going against your programming which was exactly what you were going to have to do.
Eventually, Cheryl said, you would get used to caring for yourself and the guilt and anxiety would go away. She was right. There are other benefits to self-care besides a higher quality life - other people enjoy the new you - lighter, happier, and more fun.
My love for simplicity came to me both naturally and slowly. A very, very long time ago I came across information about the way Japanese people arranged their homes. I had a book of pictures that my aunt and uncle brought back from Japan where they were stationed after World War II.
The simplicity of those homes seemed perfect to me; the way homes ought to be. So maybe the desire for simplicity was just innate in me. As time went on I was overtaken with the messiness of raising children. There's not much desire for simplicity in their hearts and minds and I lacked the energy to even try to create it. In addition, there's a good chance I have attention deficit disorder and am a basically messy person. So, for most of my adult life, my environment was cluttered to the max.
The effect of the clutter was that I felt stressed by it. It caught my eyes and attention constantly and although I always felt urged to do something about it, I was always on my way to do something more important.
Then more time went by and I had a 60 hour a week job and a sick husband who was not motivated to put things away. So the clutter remained and was only dealt with if I was having company. What usually happened was that I worked like a dog to get rid of the clutter on the day that company was coming and then was so tired while they were there that I fell asleep in my chair while they were visiting.
In my search for an easier life I eventually came across the concept of doing tasks in tiny short bursts, a little bit at a time. By setting a timer for anywhere between five and fifteen minutes, I was able to deal with clutter over a period of time. So in this latter period of my life, my environment is pretty simple.
It really is worth the small amount of trouble it is to spend five to fifteen minutes a day keeping things fairly simple. The result is that the inside of my head is quiet when I move through a room. There's nothing in my way. There's nothing to do in that room. I enjoy the spaciousness and clear surfaces. The fewer things that are in a room, the more I can enjoy the things that are in the room.
It makes a much easier life for me with time and energy for the things that are important. For me there is much beauty in clear, simple spaces.
