Breaking Old Habits, Making New Ones

Habits aren’t just behaviors — they are neural patterns.

Neurons that fire together wire together. Every time you think, act, or feel the same way, the same neural circuits are fired by your brain. Eventually the circuits become automatic, becoming a neural groove.

Meditation helps you interrupt these automatic patterns. By sitting still and observing your thoughts instead of acting out your thoughts, you are weakening the neural circuits. Over time, you can reprogram your mind by making new patterns of thinking and acting.

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom" - Victor Frankl

Before changing your response, you have to acknowledge the thoughts. Sit with yourself, observe your thoughts, and create a gap between yourself and your thoughts. In that gap, there is freedom.

Be aware of your emotions. Keep calm and breath deeply. What emotions arise? What emotions are repressed? Concentrate on your body and your body’s responses to your thoughts. What is hidden will rise to the surface.

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.” - Madeline L’engle

After you’ve quieted the old self, you can create a new self. Through the process of visualization, you can imagine a new self into being. Imagine the version of yourself you want to become, the identities you want to be adopt. See yourself thinking, feeling, being that new self. Feel the emotions — of gratitude, confidence, and freedom.

Rehearse this daily. Habits come through repetition. You empower yourself to break free of old habits and form new ones through conscious change. Change is not immediate; it is gradual. Often you do not see the change in yourself until you reach the breakthrough.

But once you break through, you reach true freedom.

You have the freedom and power to become a new you.

So, what do you choose? The old path or the new one?