What To Do About Bad Habits

When we are not having enough joy in life, we will make up for it with compulsions and bad habits. If I am feeling active, engaged and alive in the world, I have no need for doom scrolling, over (or under) eating, repetitive thoughts, getting lost in regrets, getting drunk, gossiping, or whatever else might hit the bad habit spot. When the soul is hungry enough it will find dinner somewhere. If it can’t be good food, then bad food will suffice.

 We often think of self-improvement as picking the no-food option over bad food. It is the squeamish legacy of our (or somebody’s) Puritan ancestors. If I am dieting, I try to force myself into literal and emotional no-food, which seems to do not much more than turn snacking into the most utterly compelling activity in the world; if I am meditating and trying to pay attention to my breath some mission control center in my brain quite firmly decides that daydreaming is just the right thing to do, and even though my meditation teacher tells me to chill and just watch the wonderful cavalcade of my thoughts, I suddenly turn thinking into the Great Satan. Too Bad! I cry, as I try to force the square peg of rationality into the round hole of my actual being.

 If I wasn’t enveloped by my mental or physical bad habit, what would I be doing instead? In order to put the bad nourishment of the bad habit to one side, I need the good food of something else. This is where it gets tricky. I know what that good food might be – something like a fulfilling 6:00am yoga class, the exhilaration of a morning swim, that long sought-after regular meditation practice, joining a book club and then reading the book, the options are endless, but I often torture myself more than ever by feeling guilty for ditching the class and rolling over for another hour’s sleep.

 The art of life, let’s call it, is to find the particular yoga class, book, etc. that I find genuinely compelling. Then what we call self-discipline becomes relatively easy, and the good food becomes an attractor in my life, a refuge as they call it, not something I make myself do. That requires a more a diligent than usual search for what hits my particular spot. Wild swimming in a pristine mountain lake does not do it for me, though for someone else it may be just the ticket.

 Keeping the food metaphor going, would you go on a dumpster dive if you were literally starving? Most probably. I remember a news story of two men in Damascus during the war there, and they had not eaten for several days after government bombing of their part of town. As they searched through the rubble of bombed-out houses they found a rather ancient cake that was beginning to go mouldy. One of the men described this sudden, unexpected sweetness after weeks of survival food as the most delicious meal he ever had in his life.

 Certainly, in the spiritual and emotional realms we are all eating the mouldy cake of repetitive thought patterns, self-blaming, other-blaming, addictive consuming and so on, almost every minute of every day. They have their own sweetness. To resist this cake, you may have noticed, is virtually impossible. You best do it by finding something more enticing. Who would dumpster dive if they were offered a table at the restaurant? Our mission is to find good spirit restaurants that work for us. As a foodie obsesses over the best menus in town, we can become “life-ies,” connoisseurs of life chasing after the most nourishing, community-making, fulfilling activities we can find. Compulsions fill the spiritual vacuums of our life; fun drives out compulsion.   

Psychedelics can be a very good restaurant, giving us a ‘taste’ of wholeness. Whole people don’t do fractured things, and for a few hours or moments to be whole is a delight. After the medicine I can gather myself, gradually, gradually over time, getting to know fractured me more intimately, and so helping him/her/them, as we say, “heal.” Heal suggests there was disease or injury while wholeness suggests a reorganizing or an addition of missing parts. I think here reorganizing is the most useful word. Something gets fractured, shattered, and seeing how the jigsaw puzzle will look when it is back together is invaluable. But we do not just become whole for ourselves, as ourselves alone we are a small portion of another fragmented thing; we become whole as a devotional duty to the divine.