Identification with habits and routines

Setting up systems for the way you practice and execute can be helpful, many times but not all the time. They are helpful to provide a clear roadmap of actions. When you start training yoga, resistance training, a martial art, or anything else, systems allow you to know what to do and how to do it. You initially start with some types of movements, or parts of movements that provide a taste of the discipline.

You then integrate them into other movements, and then integrate multiple movements, or "progress" into seemingly more complex expressions of the movements. You may assemble those "progressions" into a program that provides clear guidance on what to do. This is helpful and often necessary to start and allow momentum to kick in so you begin knowing the possibilities of now and then.

With equal power, systems and structures can become a prison; a seemingly safe harbor that serves no one but your sense of insecurity and reliance on something external to avoid the scary, silent, void, spacious internal states.

You can make them "routines," not noticing them anymore because they have become the default and you take them for granted and lean on them fully without realizing it. The mere thought of removing them scares you because you would get to face the void, stillness.

This can be the case with establishing habits. It is often argued that a habit that becomes part of your identity is a positive achievement, because you have now fully incorporated that thing into you.

Say, you make yoga practice a habit that you practice every day, and now you are a yogi! Congrats! Look at how enlightened you are! And what an incredible change you have made physically and mentally during this period!

Now take that away - what or who is left? A rethorical question, and one worth considering, particularly in times of change that shake past identities, habits, ways of identifying with the world.

“What would be here now if there was no problem to solve?”