Zen Habits

All of this suffering because of my Childish Mind’s desire to be special. To be someone unique, honored, respected, loved. Which is a very normal desire, to be sure . . . but what if we could let go of this need to be special? What if the Self that we put above all else could be forgotten for a minute, and we could just be in the world and enjoy the world and not worry about the Self?

I was mad because I wanted the person to be the way I wished them to be. Why couldn’t they just be that way? Then I realized how crazy that was, to expect other people to be the way I wanted them to be. To expect the world to behave the way I wished it would. To expect reality to match up to my ideals, as if my ideals were more important than anything else.

it’s not the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer, “it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening.” So the suffering isn’t created by the other person’s actions, or our failure to stick to a habit, or bad external circumstances . . . but by the Mind Movie we’ve made up about those things.

What I learned from this was to always lower my barrier to entry for habit change. I started meditating by just doing two minutes a day. I started eating healthier with one small change (vegetable at dinner). I started decluttering with just one small surface that only took a few minutes. I paid one small debt. The smallest step you can possibly take is the best way to start.

repeatedly failed to create the running habit, because I learned that it’s very easy to start big and then fail. This happens almost every time.

Drink a glass of water in the morning.
Have a cup of green tea in the afternoon.
Eat one fruit with lunch.
Do five pushups.
Do yoga for two minutes.
Meditate for two minutes.
Go for a five-minute walk.
Write for two minutes.
Declutter for two minutes.
Stretch for one minute.

The first step in that process is to pick a change. Just one. While most of us have multiple changes we’d like to make, all at once, I’ve learned from repeated experience that trying to do multiple habits at once is a beautiful recipe for habit failure.

The only way to truly learn about change is to do it. You have to try something, make mistakes, correct those mistakes, and increase your understanding through this process of trial and error. You can’t just read about change and understand it — you need to put it into action.

It wasn’t until I successfully changed a habit (quitting smoking) that I began to understand how change works. Then I applied those lessons to running, and ran a marathon; then to eating healthy, and lost more than 60 lbs.; then to decluttering, and got rid of all my junk; then to debt, and became debt free; and eventually to much more.

By creating the habit of mindfulness, I learned to see what was going on, to deal with the frustrations, and to be able to make more conscious choices.