Habitual Patterns

This week’s words are from the Insight Meditation teacher Trudy Goodman in an article from Lion’s Roar magazine.

The habitual patterns that arise in us seem to have a life of their own, shaping our behavior into contours of isolation, anxiety, self-criticism, addiction, or other self-destructive habits. These patterns make us unhappy. They are obstacles to what we long for in our lives and might even cause us to give up our goals and dreams in despair.

The good news is that we can become aware of how we get caught in these patterns and learn to move through experience with more love and wisdom. The process of getting stuck in patterned thoughts and feelings happens quite mechanically. The gateway to freedom is to understand this compassionately. In this, meditation is our best friend, allowing us space to relax and receive other dimensions of our being.

The most fundamental pattern that we all have is ignoring impermanence – denying the fact that everything is always changing and can’t bring lasting happiness. We humans imagine that the self is continuous and permanent, even though it isn’t and we aren’t.
Intellectually we know this, but it just doesn’t feel true.

…This is where our mindfulness practice helps. Practicing meditation with loving awareness, we begin to see change as a constant. We see that we can’t breathe in forever – we have to breath out. This inevitable rhythm is independent of what I want or who I am or what pattern has me in its grip. With mindful awareness, the ebb and flow of breath, the birth and death of experience, become clear. This is wisdom – seeing the way life unfolds so lovingly in us, as us.

Our habitual patterns of thinking and reacting have shaped us for decades. Meditation allows us to become aware of how and when these patterns become active in our daily life. That awareness is the first step to creating the space we need to choose to respond, rather than react to what life presents to us.