From Bad Habits to Sacred Rituals

If you are like me living in a city that has a seasonal weather change, then you are looking forward to transitioning from Winter to Spring. You may be anticipating putting away your coats, scarves and gloves, and basking in the smell of the rained-on earth and new colors sprouting up from the ground. Perhaps you are looking forward to some of the rituals that mark the Spring and Summer months – the planting of flowers, spring cleaning your home, preparing lighter meals and celebrating holidays that fall in April through July.

Celebrating religious and seasonal holidays seem to be some of our more common shared rituals. Some of us celebrate Passover or Easter with a visit to Church or our families home for a seder – and others of us look forward to discounted chocolate at the grocery store! In Chicago, I look forward to the Spring flower shows at Garfield Conservatory, and at Macy’s Department store and get ideas for my own outdoor patio. However you mark the seasonal change, these rituals are essentially our culture’s sacred habits.

According to Dr. Judith Wright in her book “The Soft Addiction Solution”, many of us have 100’s of rituals we do that we do not realize are just the opposite of sacred. These rituals she calls “soft addictions”, and they tend to numb us and rob us of time, money and our consciousness. The purpose and intent of our soft addictions are essentially the same as the sacred rituals we do so meaningfully at other times of the year. They are an attempt to sooth us from life’s anxieties, disappointments and transitions. (I could go very deep into the spiritual purpose of the ritual, and I suggest you do a google on this topic and allow yourself to follow your interest to learn more.)

What is a ritual but “an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner” according to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary. When applied to religion it makes sense – Catholic Mass and most religious sermons are highly ritualistic. A determined order and set of acts repeated again and again, over and over through millennia. However, isn’t this also true for our soft addictions? Think about what you do when you get home from work when you have had a hard day? Or when you wake up and you may not be feeling that excited about what lies ahead of you? Or when you have unplanned time ahead of you? Most of us engage in activities that numb us, eating unconsciously, turning on the television, looking at our phones….all these habits of our unconsciousness are labelled as soft addictions. And we do them again and again, repeating them so they are so well rehearsed that it is hard NOT to do them! (http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8195)

If we can begin to see these soft addictions as rituals we have built to deal with life’s anxiety, then perhaps we can create new rituals which do not also numb us. Let’s look at some of our daily transitions where we are vulnerable to soft addictions: sleep to wake, home to work, work to home, and wake to sleep.

Waking up consciously can be a challenge – as the mornings grow darker and colder it can be harder to get out of bed. I have begun to put into practice a really easy Ayurvedic practice upon waking up: splashing my face with open eyes with water 7 times to balance my energy and using the element of water to wash away the night. Imagine if you had a ritual to do in the morning that you enjoyed doing that put you in touch with nature – it’s a little more attractive than dying to make that first pot of coffee and hauling your carcass into the shower?

Going home from work is also a time when our fears about the day ahead likely cause us to be distracted as we walk into our place of work, and a few of us have a ‘being late’ soft addiction that create worry and rush. I tend to like quiet and a clean space before I deal with my emails and other people, and if I have not cleared my workspace the night before, the ritual of organizing my space and lighting a candle is helpful. You might also say a mantra to yourself, or read a position or inspirational quote to start your day.

Transitioning home from work is also a danger zone for the softly addicted. The day’s challenges and unfinished business with work relationships and tasks linger and long to be finished and completed but are often not. Why not create a ritual of talking through your day with someone on your way home, or even do something as simple as taking off your shoes to transition from the outside, and washing your hands to purify yourself of the day as you come into your home.

And putting ourselves to bed consciously is surprisingly difficult for many of us. I coach a handful of executives who are extremely productive during the day, but cannot relax and put themselves to bed. The pull to read through articles on our cell phones, browse social media, or other random tasks keeps us from having good sleep and effects our next day. So many studies show that doing things like getting to bed at a regularly time, meditating, taking a bath, eating nothing after 7pm, plugging your phone in somewhere else, is helpful, but so challenging to get ourselves to do.

All of these things take dedication and hard work, but they are so worth the pay off. Just pick one tiny little ritual to add in instead of trying to limit your soft addictions. Think of this as a sacred celebration that can happen every day and not just once a year as in our holiday and seasonal rituals. If we can begin to add in beautiful, meaningful transition habits and see them as important as the rituals we do as a culture to celebrate our seasons and holidays, we will be a much more in touch and satisfied culture.

Are “boys” a soft addiction?

I was in a conversation today with a talented and attractive young single woman. She shared how enlightened she became realizing that for her, boys were a soft addiction. It might seem strange to think that boys can be a soft addiction, but it’s really not.  The definition of a soft addiction is a ”seemingly harmless habit that zaps our time, money and energy”, and these habits that we do instinctually are trained in our brains to try to get our needs met. These habits don’t work, they don’t meet our needs, and we just deepen the groove in our brains – the neural pathways-  that keep us doing the same thing over and over with the same unsatisfying result.  

This woman talked about how she would spend a lot of her time thinking about these boys she was meeting, sending text messaging, and fantasizing about the future with these boys, but then was unsatisfied with the actual dating encounter. I thought about how much I’ve grown in my own dating life and how I’ve really cut out a lot of the unsatisfying bullsh*t that can go along in the dating process. But, really, I do relate. I still play games – softly addictive ways of being- in my dating life. The biggest one for me is the soft addiction of avoidance and ommitting the truth. I routinely avoid sharing how I really feel and what I really want in relationships. It is such a habit for me that it takes writing down what I want to say, telling a friend that I plan on telling my date these things, and even then it takes a lot of chutzpah to do it! At least once a week after a phone conversation with someone I’m dating has ended, I force myself to call back and share what it was that I was really feeling and what I really wanted- otherwise that which I’ve ommitted blocks the intimacy that I am trying to build. 

Underneath these soft addictions are unexpressed feelings and deeper hungers. For me, I feel fear and excitement, and experience a hunger to be loved, to be seen, and to matter. I think that’s why I do what I do – the silly wiring in my brain has be thinking that if I share what I want, I won’t get it, and then for sure I won’t be loved. I would bet that the young woman I spoke with was feeling angry about the back and forth superficial text messaging, and a hunger for genuine connection, and so spent time in her fantasies where she could create the relationship that she wants. We talked about this and shared that we are trying new ways of relating to these boys/men, telling the truth, expressing our feelings – in text messages to start – and then in real face to face interactions. This is what it takes to rewiring our brains and start to meet our deeper needs and hungers.

So, I think that boys, or men, certainly can be a soft addiction, but more important it is the ways of being when we are with boys/men that is the issue. Boys and men are great! The soft addictions that we engage in during the dating process is the problem! But isn’t it cool that we can use boys and men to see how different we act, catch these patterns and then change them?

Any thoughts?

Maturation, a friendly concept for food lovers

I have been either on a diet, absolutely NOT on a diet, or thinking about what diet I should go on since I was in fourth grade. As sad as that is, I know I’m not alone, yet what a seriously crazy way to live. It’s odd that there is so much obesity (I’m about 15-20 pounds overweight) and the answer is to diet or maybe have plastic surgery, but it doesn’t really work. There is something clearly so wrong this is picture.

I’ve been reading the book “Food Swings” by Dr. Meltzer http://www.amazon.com/Food-Swings-Life-Changing-Connection-Well-Being/dp/1569246823 and things that I am currently learning and have known for a while clicked in place. The past three months I had made a conscious decision and declaration to transform my relationship with food, and so have been applying neuroscientific concepts to my eating patterns, examining my habits, and reading about the development of psychological coping responses (Anna Freud’s mature vs. immature responses).

Dr. Meltzer wrote about the Mommy – Daddy diet, or,  the foods and ways that we were trained to eat as children. By trained, I mean that these ways of eating are HARD-WIRED into our brains and it takes huge conscious intention and coaching to RE-WIRE our brains. The Mommy – Daddy diet is immature, it is from our childhood, we need to grow up and make different sorts of food choices and have different reasons for eating than we did as children. I ate for soothing, comfort, reward, and for control. Now, I’m all grown up, and, well, have been doing the same thing to my own ondion!

So, I have started rewiring my brain to make mature decisions. It is totally awesome. I have been thinking entirely different about the my patterns and reasons for eating. It’s lunchtime – do I go to the nasty Flamingo greasy grill for a patty melt and fries? Well, I used to when I was feeling angry for not having a break and wanting to reward myself for a long work morning. But, wait, when I think about it, it is so not a reward as I always feel bad about myself after I eat that food, resentful that I had it, and in a slump from the grease and carb overload. So, I walk on by to the Fox and Obel and get a deliciously prepared salmon burger with sweet potatoes in a lovely environment with a friend. That is a break. The added bonus is the food is better and makes me happier, the food lover that I am!

And when I want chocolate, my old pattern would be to acknowledge that chocolate will make me fat so I shouldn’t have it (as my parents might have told me), so I buy it anyway and gulp it down quickly in a sort of odd hiding manner. Now I have learned about the benefits of chocolate that is not processed and how it affects the brain (see the Food Swings book), and so I buy a high quality piece and enjoy it and notice the effects in my brain and it enters my body. Yum! Chocolate!

Oh, and the other cool thing is that my clothes are looser…but since it’s more immature to obsess about the number on the scale, I’ve chosen to not weigh myself and just enjoy what I’m learning!

Has anyone else made a shift like this, or want to make a shift like this?

Rarely do we quit smoking for health…

I had been smoking cigarettes for about 9 years before I decided to quit. I had several attempts before I figured out what would work for me, and I was surprised that the reasons it wasn’t for my health. I just read this article http://www.buzzle.com/articles/reasons-to-stop-smoking-why-should-you-quit-smoking.html and was surprised that many of these reasons were health related. I did not quit because  smoking is bad for my health. THe extreme warning on a pack of cigarettes does not deter from the millions of addicts’ desire to have another cigarette.

My reason for quitting was because I wanted to know myself, and every time I had a cigarette I was taking myself out of the game of life!  Through tracking every time I had a cigarette, I realized that most of the time it was because I was having a feeling – mad at someone, hurt by someone’s comment, needing a break, and even wanting to celebrate. But getting away to have a cigarette was actually squelching all these feelings, and I never got to know why I was feeling the way I was feeling. I just formed this habit that  kept me feeling wired, buzzed, and numb.

 I made my One Decision (see www.judithwright.com)  to know myself and to know what I was feeling. I realized that if I wanted to live a life of any meaning and significance, I had better be aware of what I was feeling from moment to moment. This is what I focused on, and using tools to help me quit smoking, I was able to do this with success.

The powerful decision I made to know myself worked better for me than worrying about getting cancer in the future. This is one of the moments in my life that I remember as a milestone in my growth and I also remember how difficult it was. If I made it through quitting, I can make it through anything.

If there are any people who have quit smoking, why did you do it? Is anyone with me in not doing it for health?