Have you ever lost a significant amount of weight through dieting? You feel good about yourself and likely you feel healthier and are proud of the result of your efforts. However, over time, you drift back into the old ways of eating even though you are aware of how your old eating behaviors will affect you.

The same experience can apply to your thoughts too. How do you jump the well-worn track in your brain function that permanently focuses you on transformation, not just temporary change?

What is it in the ‘old you’ that just does not want to let go?

Some conditioned responses like breathing are good because they get you through a day without having to think about every action. For example, we breathe as a result of our body’s conditioned responses to physiological changes and communications that are invisible to us.  Imagine if we had to consciously act every time we took one of the 20,000 breaths a day that keeps us alive!

Then, there are other types of conditioning that are reactions to learned behaviors which are not as life affirming. These reactions seem to have a mysterious infinity in them that makes them hard to change. That is the reason we drift back into old eating habits or live in a continual battle with having the ability to resist being tempted to eat that piece of chocolate cake!

As the video below implies, that seducing force behind our conditioning is difficult to understand and manage.

Eckhart Tolle’s perspective on these ingrained ways of being that are just as unconscious as taking those 20,000 breaths each day and why sometimes habits or conditioning is so hard to break.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I44AMQ0ADsk

Interesting food for thought that can help you understand what it means to overcome conditioning that is buried deeply in our psyches. Breathwork can be an elegant approach to moving into a different way of living and staying there. It can do battle with the forces within you.

Breathe, be free

John