Old Cliches Die Hard

Old habits die hard. There ya have it. My opening line is a cliche. Merriam Webster says a cliche' is a phrase that has become overly familiar or common place kinda like a habit. It just rolls off your tongue without much thought and so it is with a habit.

Habits, whether good or bad, just cruise around in your hippocampus making ruts akin to the Oregon Trail. Once they are there they are there. We get into the groove of our habit and mindlessly go about it's particular task. We get in a rut. We become cliche'. The good news is we can get out of a rut. Brain researchers tell us that we can create new pathways that can bypass those old roads. We just have to make a conscious effort to do it. And there's the rub, "WE HAVE TO BECOME CONSCIOUS"

Personally, I thought I was doing pretty good at being conscious or as we say it being present. Not. At Mayo we worked with some meditation, guided imagery, deep breathing and a professional who teaches a technique to rid the body of tension. In class I discovered that I "wear my shoulders like earrings", I hold my breath a lot and when I walk my upper body is ahead of lower body. In other words I was getting a head of myself. I didn't even know! During meditation my mind was our for a walk without me.I wasn't being present. I was unconscious of my actions and those very actions were causing some undue stress on my body. I had me some habits to rehab.

But there's that cliche' "old habits die hard".  In truth habits never actually die they just get replaced by other habits. It's like the Oregon Trail which is still there, still visible though eroded, softened with time. We've learned new ways of travel since then, built new roads. Still the trail is there to remind us where we came from and how far we've gone. We'd never take our new car out on those trails and still we travel them in our minds. What's up with that?

I'm in the process of building some new roads and like any construction project it takes time and effort. I have an ornery crew on this project. They like to do things they way they've always done things. There's a lot of mind to change. Luckily I don't have to engineer this project. Mayo did all that. The map is there the paths are laid out and I just have to follow them and lay in new road an inch at a time.

Peace
Karen