Awesome post by Rani Jeyaraj on breaking bad habits with yoga

Break your bad habits

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It is better to let go of negative habits or better still transform them into positive habits.

Don't label yourself based on your negative behaviour, but try to let go of it

So you slept in again and didn’t make it to the morning yoga class. You tell yourself it is okay and decide to go for the evening class. Then your colleagues make a dinner plan and you skip the evening class. So you tell yourself, “I will be regular from tomorrow.” But dinner ends late and once again you find yourself hitting that snooze button. But you wake up feeling terribly guilty and tell yourself that you will go for the evening class and the cycle begins all over again.

Don’t be too hard on yourself; we have all been there and done that. Everyone has repetitive behavioural patterns: perhaps you are always late, or you keep losing your temper, or you constantly interrupt people when they are talking. We put labels on ourselves based on these patterns.

But these are just habits, not who we really are. Often, habits emerge from some experience that we have had earlier in life – if your parents never listened to you when you were growing up, you might find yourself interrupting people because you are desperate to be heard; if your first boss had a bad temper, you might find that you also raise your voice with your employees.

The impact of these experiences could be small or large. Either way, it is better to let go of negative habits or better still transform them into positive habits. The philosophy of yoga refers to these patterns as Samskaras. From the moment we are born, we are interacting with the world. This interaction leaves impressions or imprints on our mind. These impressions influence or colour our life.

These patterns are sometimes positive, but often, as mentioned above, the Samskaras are negative and they hinder our evolution and progress.

Yoga is the tool we use to break these Samskaras and liberate ourselves. The holistic practice of yoga leads to the ultimate liberation, Nirvana, or if you are not ready for that as yet, simply liberation from bad habits or negative patterns of behaviour. The approach is simple:

Build awareness Sometimes we are not even aware of our negative samskaras. Yoga teaches us awareness of the body, the breath and of the mind. When our minds are more alert, it is easier to see our behavioural patterns.

Self-Study Once we identify our negative samskaras, we use the technique of svadhyaha or self-study to understand more. When do we react? What are our triggers? We learn to identify the source of these negative habits. Meditation is a very important tool in this self-study.

Letting go Once we are able to identify our behaviour and its source, yoga teaches us to let go. Just as we learn to let go of the physical body when we lie down in Shavasana, so we can let go of the chaos in our minds.

Live in the present Through asana practice and meditation, we learn to live in the present. In this moment there is no past, no future. So there can be no trigger, no worry and no reason to behave in a set way.

Connect with your true self It is in this present moment that we see our true selves, beyond all the roles and labels, beyond the influence of the past and the desires for the future. So next time you decide to sleep instead of going for your yoga class, think again. You are not simply missing a yoga class, but missing a step towards a happier life.

Power of habit and daily routines for success

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/22/manage-your-day-to-day-99u/

We seem to have a strange but all too human cultural fixation on the daily routines and daily rituals of famous creators as if a glimpse of their day-to-day would somehow magically infuse ours with equal potency, or replicating it would allow us to replicate their genius in turn.
But, a well-engineered daily routine anchors the creative process.

Only by taking charge of your day-to-day can you truly make an impact in what matters most to you. I urge you to build a better routine by stepping outside of it, find your focus by rising above the constant cacophony, and sharpen your creative prowess by analyzing what really matters most when it comes to making your ideas happen.

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.

Frequency  helps facilitate “bisociation” — the crucial ability to link the seemingly unlinkable, which is the defining characteristic of the creative mind.

You’re much more likely to spot surprising relationships and to see fresh connections among ideas, if your mind is constantly humming with issues related to your work. When I’m deep in a project, everything I experience seems to relate to it in a way that’s absolutely exhilarating. The entire world becomes more interesting. That’s critical, because I have a voracious need for material, and as I become hyperaware of potential fodder, ideas pour in. By contrast, working sporadically makes it hard to keep your focus. It’s easy to become blocked, confused, or distracted, or to forget what you were aiming to accomplish.
[…]
Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project. When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.

Alexander Graham Bell, who memorably wrote that “it is the man who carefully advances step by step … who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree,”

Step by step, you make your way forward. That’s why practices such as daily writing exercises or keeping a daily blog can be so helpful. You see yourself do the work, which shows you that you can do the work. Progress is reassuring and inspiring; panic and then despair set in when you find yourself getting nothing done day after day. One of the painful ironies of work life is that the anxiety of procrastination often makes people even less likely to buckle down in the future.

“It’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome,” “The days are long, but the years are short,”  “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”

Everybody who does creative work has figured out how to deal with their own demons to get their work done. a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way they want to because their strategies are broken. The strategy is simple, I think. The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way. Tchaikovsky (“a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.”) E. B. White (“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”), The notion that I do my work here, now, like this, even when I do not feel like it, and especially when I do not feel like it, is very important. Because lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it. And that emotional waiver is why this is your work and not your hobby.

 http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/09/the-science-of-productivity-animated/

“Studies have found that the most elite violinists in the world generally follow a 90-minute work regime, with a 15- to 20-minute break afterwards.”

When we look at some of the most elite musicians in the world, we find that they aren’t necessarily practicing more but, instead, more deliberately. This is because they spend more time focused on the hardest task and focus their energy in packets — instead of diluting their energy over the entire day, they have periods of intense work, followed by breaks. Not relying on willpower, they rely on habit and discipline scheduling. Studies have found that the most elite violinists in the world generally follow a 90-minute work regime, with a 15- to 20-minute break afterwards.