Stuck in a rut

We have had an uncommon amount of snow early this winter that has stayed around much longer than usual, turning our roads into ice-rutted gauntlets. Driving around town through these slithering tracks got me thinking about how we often get stuck in ruts in our daily lives – tracks that were often set down much earlier in our life.

I have applied this idea through a kind of personal ritual. Come each spring, once the weather begins to warm and the days stretch out towards summer, it’s time to shed my winter coat. I start by throwing out all my old eating habits. It’s a lot like cleaning my garage by first taking everything out and setting it on the driveway. Then, picking up each piece and the old memory it holds, I decide if I still really need it or not, placing it back in the garage, or discarding it in the dump pile. In the end it is those old memories that are hardest to let go of. When it comes to food, it is even more difficult to release the memories that began in childhood like the smell of bacon sizzling on the skillet and the warm taste of pancakes and maple syrup. Food can be a comfort, as well as a living repository of our personal history.

The irony is that two thousand years later, when engineers were designing the dimensions of the Space Shuttle booster rockets, they had to make the diameter of the rockets small enough to allow them to pass through tunnels that had been built to accommodate the standard gauge rail.

At a more personal level, it’s the tracks of old habits laid down long ago that keep us being more or less the same year after year. And what’s worse, most of us aren’t even aware that we’re in a rut. If we do find ourselves stuck in an unhealthy one, it’s not so easy to get out of. Sometimes it’s like trying to get out of a snow bank. The more we hit the gas, the deeper we dig ourselves in. That’s exactly what happens when people berate themselves for not having enough discipline to quit an unhealthy habit and change their lives. They only get stuck deeper in their helplessness because discipline sets up one part of the self, the part that wants to change, against the part that wants to stay the same. Every time an addict tells himself he’s going to quit and fails, he spirals down deeper into low self-esteem and impotence. In a war with one’s self there can be no winners.

To shift tracks and set a new direction for your life requires learning a new skill – one that is deceptively simple, yet powerfully effective – to awaken from your life-dulling habits and carefully observe the many choices you make each day. Although easy to say, it is not easy to do. Many of my patients find the centered-breathing techniques I teach have many positive effects, including calming the mind so that one can directly observe subtle fluctuations in the mind-body process. Because the entire body works in terms of feedback, when you provide yourself with this high quality information, the body can regulate itself with optimal efficiency.

This natural intelligence is always operating, only sometimes we like what it is saying and sometimes we don’t. When things are going our way we feel like The Force is with us and when it’s not, we feel like it has abandoned us. In addition, we have a strong tendency to demonize the things that get in our way, or as is more common in modern life, we medicalize it and call it a disease. For example, unruly kids at school are often diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, people who are shy have a social phobia, women who are edgy have PMS, people who drink too much have alcohol dependency syndrome, and the list goes on.

While conventional medicine has an important role to play, it is even more important to decipher what our natural intelligence is telling us so that we can find our way back to a state of health and learn how to sustain it for the long run. For example, if one undergoes back surgery for a herniated disc but doesn’t address the underlying postural and emotional factors that led up to the condition in the first place, back problems are likely to continue.

Here are some things you can to do to get out of your old ruts:

Take an interest in how you go about your day; how you eat, talk,stand, and breathe.
Do the same with your thoughts, allowing the unconscious chatter to become conscious.
You may be shocked by what you discover but suspend your self-judgments or else you’ll distort what you see.
Take the advice of Sun Tzu in The Art of War, “Keep your friends close, and keep your enemies closer.” In other words, befriend your demons.