Changing our habits can be easy, but it’s usually not. The habit is perpetuated by an emotion pattern, and battling the emotional pattern is almost always (always?) unsuccessful, it is more deeply rooted than our desire to change. So to truly change, we need to approach the problem from another angle.
I’m indebted to the Krishnamurti Foundation of America for a recent newsletter describing how one of their workers dealt with an smoking addiction. This story is elegant in its simplicity and in the practical application of Krishnamurti’s suggestions. The worker struggled with and against a smoking habit, but after a long struggle was unable to break free of it, in spite of a strong desire to do so. So he resolved to accept his habit, but to follow K’s suggestion to be choicelessly aware of the issue, letting go of the demand for a resolution.
Whenever he smoked, he simply observed himself smoking, how it made him feel, the benefits and the drawbacks, without judging himself, and without trying to change. He was choicelessly aware. Over time he noticed that the attraction to smoking decreased, it just didn’t seem to fit anymore, then it become no longer worth doing. The addiction was ended, not by battling it, but by a detached observation of it.
It appears that by sidestepping the trap of being emotionally charged about something, but adopting a detached and almost clinical observation of it without trying to change it, we invoke a higher form of mind that can act according to different rules we don’t understand.
