Video Transcript

Welcome to the first section of the habit series.

In this series I’m going to explore a lot of different aspects of what habits are, what supports habits, and how we cultivate habits.

Before I start going into some of the basic foundations that this first section is going to cover, I’d like to invite you to take a moment to consider the word ‘habit.’ What associations do you have with the word? Do you notice any sort of judgment or emotional content? How do you use the word in your life? How the people around you use the word?

I'd like you to get a sense of what your starting point is with some of the language that I'm using. My intention to expand the language we use and expand our ideas about habits. We tend to use the word ‘habit’ in our language and our culture in a very oversimplified way. Habits are often used to describe very specific behavior patterns that are usually dichotomized into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ I imagine even by reading that, you can think of some of the general ideas of what constitute ‘good’ and ‘bad’ habits. You likely also know there are a lot of stories, ideas and strategies out there since you ‘should’ get rid of those bad habits and have more willpower for those ‘good’ habits.

My intention is to invite you to soften some of these narrow ideas that we can tend to have. In reality, habits are not so simple and black and white. There's far more complexity than we have in our current understanding and that we can fully apprehend through language. As this series on habits is shared through language, it shares those limitations with the hope to still to broaden our understanding of habits, providing you with a more expansive notion and support in how you want to move and be in your life.

A basic premise that underlies all the things that I’m going to be sharing about in this series is the idea that essentially we are embodied movement, meaning that all of our experiences in life are through the movements of our bodies. This idea counters some common notions of the separation of mind and body and the belief that things like abstract concepts have no connection to the corporeal. Developments in neuroscience, linguistics and quantum physics have demonstrated that this is not the case. The way we’re able to conceive and understand things is through the experience and movement in our bodies.  On a quantum level we've discovered and know that life is essentially energy moving and its this moving energy and interaction between moving energy that we experience form and structure. Quantum physics have also been uncovering the complex interplay of movement in all aspects of living, moving, feeling, thinking and speaking. We experience and engage with others and the world through the movements of our bodies, our sense organs, our neuronal pathways, physiological processes, etc.

As this is a simplified overview of some of these concepts, I’m happy to have a deeper and more academically rigorous discussion if you’d ever like! And to keep it simple for now, I’d like to invite you to consider that from the moment of inception we experience life and expand into life through movement, starting through physical movements. After we're born, we begin to engage in social movements, linguistic movements, and cognitive movements. Our bodies, brains and lives are continually expanding through the movements that we make. There is an inherent impulse to make the movements we do although this reason doesn’t need to be conscious. We can really see this by watching a baby as they start to create some of their initial physical movement patterns.

We are these amazing creatures that we can create and reinforce so many patterns of movement. We're designed to create them in a way that we don't have to pay attention to them all the time. There is an impetus for a life supporting orientation to the movements that we create and reinforce. The simplest way to see this is by paying attention to how babies move and seeing how focused they are on what they are doing. The continue to practice certain movements until those movements become habitual and unconscious. That's essentially how we’ve created all these complex patterns of movement in our lives. By patterns of movement, I mean the most basic patterns that include walking, sitting, speaking, eating, and breathing as well as our complex emotional, nervous system, relational, social, language, and thinking patterns. These patterns are created in tandem with each other from when we are babies, which is why I noted at the beginning that the way we use the word habit is generally oversimplified. Even our most basic habits – that is habitual patterns – have all of the components of our experience (such as the internal patterns within our physicality, our physiology, our nervous system, our emotional patterns, as well as the complex ways that we move our bodies). No pattern we make is ever just physical movement but rather it's interrelated to all the layers of patterns that we've created and reinforced in our lives.

The fact that we can create and reinforce and not have to think about these movement patterns that we make all the time means we have the capacity to do so much more in our lives. Going back to babies: if you watch a baby learning how to stand, learning how to walk there's such intense focus on exactly what they're doing as they learn and start to master these patterns. As we master them, we don't have to pay attention anymore, we don't have to think about what we’re doing and it becomes habitual. Can you imagine having to think about how to walk every time you walked? If we had to think about everything we did, we wouldn't be able to do very much in our lives. It's pretty incredible you know we have this natural impetus to move and to create life-supporting patterns of movement and to not have to think about them.

There are many factors that influence how these patterns get created. Some patterns that served us at a certain point might not be what serve us anymore. Yet since they're largely unconscious, shifting them can be challenging. The oversimplification of our understanding of habits intensifies this challenge. We may have some patterns that we see as ‘bad habits’ - usually things that we know in some way are not ideal for our health yet knowing this is not often enough to shift those habits. If you have any habitual patterns you're struggling with, I’d like to invite you to have some compassion for yourself. I like you to acknowledge that there are life-supporting reasons for all the habits that you've created and that practices are multi-layered and complex. The establishment of these patterns is often the product of years of practice. And this idea of practice relates to any new movements we want to make in our lives – new patterns require practice, they’re not something we just do once.

I’d like to distinguish between the ideas of awareness and practice. These two things are important in how we shift our movement patterns. Awareness of the patterns that we are making and the awareness of patterns that we do want to make is critical but not enough on its own to change a pattern. Failing to recognise this can leave many of us feeling shameful or guilty if we believe that because we're aware that we have a habitual pattern that we want to change should be enough to change it. It’s not. We don't tend to change movement patterns through awareness alone. What we need is the practice of the patterns that we do want. This is where we use the capacity we have to be conscious and to direct our attention (while knowing that most of our awareness patterns are also habitual).

The fact that you're engaging in this material means that you want to bring your awareness to and have more understanding about your habits, where they come from, what they are, and what's serving you and not serving you about them. You have openness to beginning or continuing practices of what you want more of in your life – whether those are thinking, feeling, doing, being practices or some combination. Through the rest of the series, I’m going to go more specifically into some of these aspects and for now, I invite you to take in and begin to percolate with this idea of how we are an amazing collection of wonderful, complex movement patterns. That we have the capacity to create and reinforce and expand these movement patterns is a pretty amazing and incredible aspect of being alive. I’m excited that you're on this journey with me to explore this in your own life and see how these ideas can help support you in cultivating more of the movements, more of the experiencing, more of whatever it is that you're desiring in your life. Stay tuned for part two of this series as we go further into these ideas and the tools that can make a difference in our lives.