One fine winter day Piglet saw Winnie-the- Pooh walking round and round in a circle. Piglet asked Pooh what he was doing. Pooh answered that he was tracking something. He pointed out the tracks in the snow and Piglet wondered if it could be a woozle. The two friends made about four rounds of the copse of trees and Piglet was getting more frightened because there were a lot more tracks now. Maybe there were a few wizzle or who knows what. Piglet made an excuse that he had something to do and made a hasty exit, glad to be out of danger again. Christopher Robin who was sitting up in a tree watching them, came down and said, “ Silly old Bear, what were you doing?” Pooh realized what had happened and said, “ I have been Foolish and Deluded…”
This cute story is not unlike a lot of us; we keep thinking the same thoughts over and over, creating neural pathways, habitual patterns of thoughts that frighten us, we are fooled and deluded by the tracks we make in our own minds. We keep following these thoughts looking for the boogey-man until something or someone like Christopher Robin comes along and shines the light on what we are doing. Just like Pooh, we are deluded by our own habitual scary thought patterns.
Someone once said, “Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.” We fall into bad habits without really meaning to. Our experiences create pathways when signals are sent between our brain and neurons or nerve cells and these are called neural pathways. We come hard-wired with a lot of neural pathways at birth and we keep creating new ones with every new experience. When we habitually do something we keep following the same neural pathway, which becomes deeper the more you do it. Just as water follows the same channel, until that channel is blocked and then creates a new channel to continue flowing, so too when we feel blocked we create a new outcome by channeling our energy in a different direction.
Breaking bad habits takes a lot of effort. We first have to get ourselves out of the entrenched neural pathways of the old habit. As we are creating new pathways for the new habit, we come upon much resistance, creating blocks in the pathways, like blocks in the water channels and new pathways have to be created until the new habit becomes entrenched. It is said that it takes at least twenty-one days to form a new habit.
In my post Change The Channel I mentioned that sometimes we create our own mental prisons and the more we hesitate to do something about it, the more difficult it becomes. It’s like Pooh and Piglet, getting more frightened as the tracks got deeper. When we become frightened and don’t like our life as it is, we need to stop and examine the kind of thoughts that go around and around our minds. This is such a new concept for a lot of people. We are not taught that our thoughts create our reality. For example if we keep thinking that we are unworthy, we keep following that neural pathway and keep attracting the experiences that reinforces our unworthiness and therefore we decide that the world agrees with us.
Marcus Aelius Aurelius said, “ Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.” Noticing our thoughts is a victory in itself, since we are unconscious of these thoughts because we have been thinking them for so long. That’s when healing begins, when we can separate ourselves from our unconscious thought patterns and begin creating new ones for what we really want. These new thought patterns must be practiced until we create a new healthy pathway.
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