What does it look like to Break the Habit of Being Yourself?
What does Dr Joe Dispenza really mean when he speaks about breaking the habit of being yourself? What do you actually have to do? Where do you start? Do you simply need to meditate every day using one of his meditations? Is there something more to it? Or is there another way entirely? And what does it all mean?
What is means is that the old way of operating that you’re used to is replaced with a new way. It doesn’t mean that you must change your personality or change your physical habits, although you might. What it really means is that you’ll change how you engage with your thoughts and which thoughts you actually choose to think.
The habits you’re trying to break are those responses to situations and those emotional habits that seem automatic and beyond your control, but are actually all habitual ways of being that you’ve developed, but no longer serve you.
An easy example is how you act and respond when driving your car. Are you enjoying yourself or are you stressed out? Do you think that driving is a pleasure and a wonder of technology or an unfortunate necessity that magnifies the inconsiderateness of humans living in society? Do you end up experiencing a lot of road rage when you drive or is it a relaxing experience for you? If you’re closer to the road rage end of the spectrum of experience you might be convinced that this is a fact and a reality of driving, but what you’re asked to consider is how exactly you’ve come to experience driving in this way. Likely it’s a combination of inherited beliefs and an accumulation of experiences that you chose to interpret and perceive in a particular way. This is a habit you can break.
The first step to breaking this habit is by becoming the observer of yourself. When you are so used to road rage you barely notice that your reaction comes with a choice. You have become a person who gets road rage because of what happens to you. But that is never true. You never do anything because something happened to you. Everything you do is because you made a choice, however unconscious, to perceive and interpret a situation in a particular way. If someone cuts you off while driving, and you respond with rage and vengeful thoughts, this is your choice. No matter how hard that is to accept!
So, if you can first begin by observing yourself and your reactions, then you can create a brief moment of space to notice how you’re thinking and feeling in that moment. This is the true work to breaking the habit of being yourself. In those few moments of space that opens for you, you can observe your thoughts. It is here that you might find yourself thinking “Everyone is so inconsiderate.” That thought is also habitual. But is true? Do you have to think that? Can you make a different choice? You could. You could think instead “That guy’s in a hurry, we’re all so busy these days.” That thought is a very different thought to the first. In the former you’re a victim. In the latter you feel connected to the humanity of yourself and others. The emotions that associate with each of them is also very different. And the energetic vibration they both carry couldn’t be more different.
Yes you can do the meditations each day. But they are just one way to open this space to allow an observation and reflection. You don’t need to do them but you do need to get into the habit of observing yourself and opening the space to take a look at your thoughts and to have the opportunity to choose a different thought. You might like to try keeping a record of this for 40 days to see what you uncover.
As you observe yourself more and more you begin to see the large variety of choices you could make in each moment. This is where you break the habit of your usual self. This is where your power is born. This is where you transform.
