GETTING OUT OF A RUT, BREAK THE HABIT OF BEING YOURSELF

Last week I wrote about flow state, how to get there and how to stay there. But what do we do when we feel like we're stuck? When we feel like we're in a rut that we just can't get out of? 

Throughout my life and even now as someone who teaches wellness full-time, I struggle with periods of depression. Periods where I feel like I don't want to leave the house and all I wanna do is sit inside and eat lots of food (food is my drug of choice). I find myself wanting to disconnect from everything and from everybody. 

I can remember back to my last corporate job opening my eyes in the morning and the first thing I did was let out a four letter word and it wasn’t Yayy! Knowing that I had to wake up and go through essentially the same patterns that I had gone through the day before and the day before that, essentially living just to get to Friday and then on Sunday night dreading Monday morning.

It is so easy to get stuck in the habit of being ourselves. Doing the same things, going to the same places, saying the same things, eating the same foods, even doing the same workouts or yoga practice can become repetitive and fail to bring us joy. 

As we start to wire these patterns into our brain and into our bodies, it's natural to fall into a rut, to lose the feeling of joy. And if joy is the ultimate expression of creativity and enjoying life, where time literally seems to fly by, then a rut would feel like the exact opposite. Time begins to creep by and we don't feel any joy or any excitement for life and this often causes us to reach outside of ourselves to find some sort of stimulation. This may look very different for all of us but we tend to know when we're there making those decisions. It’s usually something self-destructive and it is usually accompanied by a feeling of guilt or shame afterwards. 

In the same way we begin to memorize and hardwire the same behaviors, we also start to memorize the same thoughts. We literally start to become addicted to our ways of being. So every time we go to work in the same way, following the same routine and then when we get there we have the same negative thoughts about the same people we see every day. We become ingrained and entrenched in this vicious cycle of thoughts, emotions and feelings.

It is in this way that our environment starts to dictate who we are. Our personal reality is now creating our personality. You may be reading this going “well yeah that's great, I would love to quit my job but how exactly am I supposed to provide for my family how exactly am I supposed to change my environment without all the other things I have to consider?”

Well if you’re lucky like me, you get fired from your job, have an existential crisis and then decide to become a yoga teacher in the most saturated and competitive market for yoga teachers in the world. That experience of being fired really forced me to step back and look at the choices I was making and look at the thoughts that I was having to do what I call a “self audit.” I started to see what served me and what didn’t. We all have this opportunity every single day, we just have to take the time to start to look at our thoughts, our decisions and the corresponding emotions. 

The body itself is objective, meaning it doesn't know the difference between a thought and an experience. Maybe you don't even get to work before having the experience of fighting with your boss or coworker. You're in your car when you start to think about the email that was sent to you yesterday and how inappropriate or triggering it was. Then you begin to formulate in your mind how you'd like to respond, telling off your boss and sharing your feelings with your coworkers. Before you even know it, you're clutching the steering wheel and your heart starts to beat faster. you literally transport yourself into the fight and the argument that hasn't even occurred yet. Your body releases a cocktail of chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol and it's as if you're literally having the experience before it happens. Do this enough times and you'll surely get stuck in a rut, you might even call this your life. 

Condition your body enough times to these chemicals and you become addicted to them. Hardwire that for long enough and your personal reality has now created your personality as someone who hates their commute, their boss, their job and maybe even says things like “fuck my life” more than once a day.

So if that is true, that we can create an experience from thought alone before it actually happens, shouldn’t we then be able to do this in a way that takes us towards the ways we want to feel? A way that moves us towards the thoughts, feelings and emotions that will get us into flow? 

Think about a time that you had an amazing fantasy, or try having one right now. Close your eyes and think about a vacation you are going on, or a dinner party you have coming up, or even a sexual experience. See how by just thought alone you're able to elicit certain responses from your body? The release of these chemicals and these hormones probably made you feel happy, joyous, calm or even created certain physical reactions in your body to prepare you for the experience. 

You might be saying “well that all sounds great but I can't exactly spend my days at work or with my family in constant fantasy or people will start to wonder, ask questions and possibly have me committed.” 

Like solving so many problems, the first step is usually to identify that there is one. If you can catch yourself when you start to go down a thought pattern that's worrisome, fearful or even destructive, we start to shorten what is called the “refractory period.” The yogis would call this “Dukha” or suffering. In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali talks about how we all suffer and it is a necessary part of life. The goal is to learn from our suffering and shorten the period of it Yoga Sutra II.16 heyam duhkham antagam

So how do we do it? 

The first and most simple way that I have found it's by simply closing the eyes and taking a few rounds of deep breaths. Try to really feel the expansion and contraction of your body and stay with your eyes closed, noticing your breath as long as it takes to get out of your current thought pattern and to feel a noticeable shift in your body. Notice if you're clenching your face or jaw, or where you might feel tension in your body.

Withdrawing from our senses (a.k.a. removing the external environment) and using our breath (a.k.a. becoming more aware of our internal environment) we immediately make an important shift towards feeling better. The breath alone has an almost infinite number of capabilities to help us shift our bodies and our emotional state. 

Most of us don't know that over 60% of our body's ability to detoxify itself occurs with respiration and 80% of fat loss comes through exhales. by closing our eyes in any activity and bringing more attention inward, we become more focused on the experience.  If you've ever seen a musician who is really feeling in flow and in the moment, you might notice that they close their eyes. It might seem like their instrument is an extension of their physical body. 

Another great way to break our current state of being is to move. Anyone that exercises, be it running, lifting weights, practicing yoga, playing sports, etc. knows if there's an undeniable feeling of joy and euphoria that comes with moving our body. 

When we begin to move our bodies, we begin to move energy and since we are 99.9999% energy and only .00001% matter, when we feel stuck, when we feel like we're in a rut, a natural way to begin to move out of it would be to physically move out of it. 

By focusing our attention and intention on this action or activity, it is also natural that we have less capacity to think about other things. When we move intentionally, we achieve more than just physical benefits, this can impact our nervous system, our digestion and even our immune system. This doesn’t have to be a full workout or yoga class, just a few minutes of mindful movement can completely shift our thought patterns and completely reset our body.

There is an amazing study where a bunch of 70+ men were brought on retreat and were asked to act and play as if they were 20 years younger. After just a few days, they showed signs of reduced inflammation and diseases, many of their medical measurements improved and many threw down there canes/walker and began running around. Intention matters. 

If at points we can even close our eyes and become more aware and focused on our breath, the benefits multiply. (this is why your yoga teacher is always telling you to notice and control your breathing!)

After some time you may begin to notice that you're catching your thoughts and shortening your refractory or suffering period. This is a wonderful step in the right direction! But now how do we move from shortening the period that we linger in suffering to the next step of not having any negative thoughts  at all.

Well in my experience that requires a heck of a lot more work and the power of meditation. 

Herein lies our ability to start to break the habit of being ourselves. When we take that process of self audit and make it even more intentional and a daily part of our lives, we go from the observer to the creator. 

If we can replace our traditional morning regimen of get up, go to the bathroom, shower, make the coffee etc. with just a few moments of mindfulness with her our closed, (maybe some light music and intentional breath) we can start to set the table for how we want to feel we can begin to create the motion to draw in the experience rather than waiting for the experience to elicit the emotion. 

This is a precursor to shifting our entire day, our outlook, our personality and then our environment.  It is manifestation in action. By getting clear and intentional in how we want to move through the world, and most importantly how we want to feel as we move through the world, we will begin to send a clear signal out into the field. 

Since we know that everything is energy, the same way a TV antenna or radio antenna turns energy into forms our senses can experience, so to can we turn thought to experience by turning on our receiver. As we move through our day it will therefore become more apparent the things that don't elicit the feelings that we want to have the ways we want to move through the world. 

We can become more aware of the people, the decisions and the physical places that take us away from our intention. This is a wonderful start. 

So what if we could then book end the day by taking some time at night before we're ready to sleep to close our eyes and scan back over what happened during the day and do our self audit in a loving and intentional way. What if we gave ourselves credit for where we did wel,l where we had moments of victory of moving towards our goals and our ways of being. Could we look at ourselves compassionately for the moments that we fell from grace so we could ask ourselves how we would shift that with the opportunity to start again with a new day? 

It has been my experience that these practices are where we start to see huge shifts, first in ourselves and the way we interact with the world, and then as a result where the world begins to interact with us. The stronger we broadcast our signal (the way we want to feel) the more we start to draw the experiences, people and opportunities towards us.

When our intentions are clear we may not know the details but the universe has an amazing way of finding just what we need at just the right moment. 

On the flipside, if I'm a bit wishy-washy or I slip in my practices, I start to get wishy-washy responses. When I become less clear about where to put my energy, about my purpose, the refractory periods feel longer. 

When I'm in flow I notice I can go days at a time without negative emotions. everything shows up at the right moment, it’s like all my traffic lights are green. I can operate clearly with a little sleep, no caffeine, and it feels like I have energy to accomplish anything. 

usually when people come on our retreats I invite them to look at their screen times on their cell phones to see how long they use apps that maybe don't serve them, instagram or Facebook for instance. I ask them to consider how much time they spend reading the news and essentially how much time they place on the external environment. I haven't found a single person yet who says it's less than 20 minutes and in many cases it can be multiple hours a day. 

How would we feel if we shifted at least some of that time towards drawing attention inward. Towards doing the self audit. Towards becoming creators of our own reality rather than victims of our environments. 

Whether it's taking a few minutes at the book ends of your day or taking a full week or more to join a retreat, the more we take a moment to pause to look at her thoughts and our decisions the more we realize how they affect our emotions and our actions. How is the best version of you thinking, feeling and moving through the world? How can you become more of that?