Day 148, More Thoughts on Continual Habits
Day 148 Record Keeping SRHI = 79
Day 116 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 81
Day 62 Bodyweight Exercise SRHI= 74 (3 bridges, 30 sec plank)
Day 162 Eating SRHI = 56
Good sleep, bleary wakeup. Still feeling incredibly depressed, lethargic, life-drained. Ego and endurance depletion.
More Thoughts on Continual Habits
In this post I outlined a classification system for habits. Continual habits were habits that should eventually take hold of you all the time. I stated something like posture, but having read more into it, I think posture might not be one. All the corrections for bad posture often involve daily exercises that strengthen ligature and musculature with the end result of general better posture.
But others come to mind. In some forms of meditation, the object is to continually be in a specific state. The manuals talk about first getting into that state, then extending it so it eventually covers everything.
Continual habits seem to bleed over into habits of omission. When you have the urge to smoke or drink or bite your finger nails, it’s an urge that assails you constantly throughout the day. You sit that urge out long enough and it passes. You continually do that and the urges subside to nothing. You become a “not smoker” or “not finger nail biter” all the time.
Perhaps the best example of this is muscle memory. In the martial arts you practice and practice and finally you start to do moves without thinking.
My question is: at what point exactly does it turn over? Where is that point where it flips over to being a part of who you are from having to practice at it in discrete instances?
When I was doing continual (or dynamic) meditation it at first started to become automatic. But then it become more and more difficult to maintain that level of self awareness - the state of catching oneself falling off the wagon - and the habit imploded. But for a moment it was incredible - it was like being an entirely different person. And what was interesting was the numbers - the SRHI progression was extremely different from normal habit progressions.
Last night I was reading about lucid dreaming - one technique to get them at night is do reality checks while awake. Constantly doing them while awake will eventually get you to the point where it’s closer to your identity, close enough so that you will do them while asleep. One source said to start doing them 20 times during the day.
This seems very similar to a continual habit - where the instances of practice flip over to a more core sense of self where you maintain the practice continually. AND testing lucid dreaming seems to be a good way to test that change over. A test I’ll have to think about doing at some point in the future.