JacobBlog!

If you want to sustainably change your behavior, frequently, you can’t just throw most non-intrinsically problematic but undesirable habits permanently and absolutely out the window. Instead, you have to come to an understanding with them. For instance, if you are trying to wean yourself off of decadent chocolate cakes, it usually is impractical to follow an assertion like “I will never eat chocolate for the rest of my life” long-term, nor is it productive to do this. Most of the time, you’ll just swing back to your resting state after your unconscious cedes that it’s too difficult to make a change, and even if you manage to follow through, chocolate cake is tasty and it isn’t bad for you except in excess, so depriving yourself of it for the rest of your life would actually be detrimental to you anyway. Instead, you have to come to an understanding with chocolate cake, acknowledging its value in a balanced way. Only by doing this can you prevent it from consuming you, which in turn will lead to you actually consuming less of it.

Destressing and gaining the plasticity to remove bad habits. You know how when you are doing viparita dandasana headstand for the 1st time and your fingers feel strangely unstable, wiggly? This is how a child feels about life, and is a privileged portal into your plastic past. Everything feels equally awkward, so you have the freedom to choose where you’re going to grab. How do you decide this? Why did not simply collapse back down? You have to have reasons why you are doing the pose in the 1st place, otherwise you might as well just do nothing but satisfy your animalistic sensory desires and be and id-driven robot instead of the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. To decide where to move your fingers, you follow these reasons, and you can bring yourself to the post perfectly. Your face might be contorted at 1st as you’re exerting yourself, co- contracting muscles to try to work around the problem, but soon you realize that that is silly and that is only taking more energy to do this. Then you do it perfectly, and efficiently. Since unproductive stress is simply mental co-contraction, keeping your reasons straight when you get into an unfamiliar position of stress in a place outside of endurance exercise or yoga class can help you avoid it just the same. Doing yoga, Falun Dafa, or endurance exercise teaches you to keep your reasons straight even when you are not in the class, and it allows you to summon them to your aid right when you need them in any circumstance.