Today we're talking about habits are choices.
Habits don't start out as habits.
One day you make a choice and the next day you make the same choice and over time this becomes the groove you follow.
It may be a good groove or it may be a very toxic groove when you feel you can't get out of.
A habit is a choice made over time.
If you want to change make a new choice.
Switch to a better groove.
The universe.
Now everyone listening here has habits and these could be habits around food,
Could be habits around drugs and alcohol or substances,
It could be habits around pornography,
It could be habits around shopping or sleeping or exercise or all the social media,
All these various kind of compulsions that we have.
And what the universe is reminding us here is that even if you're in the throes of a pretty deep habit,
Maybe you even have an addiction at this point,
The addiction did not start out as an addiction.
It started out as just something you experienced.
So for example I'm in Oregon so I'll use this example.
Say you started using cannabis when it became legal in Oregon.
I think that was a couple years ago and then suddenly now you're using cannabis every single day and you realize that that's become a habit.
It's a habit that you didn't have a couple years ago.
Or say you five or six years ago got a smartphone and you started using all the features of the smartphone as you load it up on,
You know,
You have your Instagram there and your Facebook there and you have your news feeds and suddenly you realize that you've become addicted to scrolling through your smartphone and it's become sort of a habit that you use when you want to disassociate from where you are.
You just sort of jump into internet world I guess.
So what the universe is saying is that yes these might all be habits or addictions now and those are just two examples,
So many examples,
But at one time you didn't have these habits or addictions.
At one time you were living a different way,
Especially with the internet.
We didn't used to have that.
We weren't all plugging into this sort of group thought.
We were reading books or we were finding reading newspapers.
We were finding our information in a much slower way.
We did not,
If we checked the newspaper again for that day,
We weren't going to find something new popping up.
We were going to find the same news and so this idea of especially the internet providing this immediate hit every time you go there's something different sort of.
I mean we think it's different it's just the same old stuff rehashed with different images.
Anyway the idea is to think back to when your particular habit or multiple habits started and it's okay to understand why you're doing them or doing it.
That's useful but it's actually not not the point.
The point is just to recognize that you can shift a habit.
You can just change it just as you did when you started it.
You can go back to that day the day you got your smartphone and went oh look at all this social media and sort of dropped into that world and you can remember the day before that when you didn't have a smartphone.
When you were either too young or they hadn't been invented yet or whatever whatever place in life you're in and you recall a time when your mind was more free.
Your mind was really different when you didn't have that habit of checking in with lower consciousness group thought.
Just recalling that or maybe you started you know drinking because you were anxious over some aspect of your life but you can recall a time when you didn't drink.
Maybe you were not old enough to drink or maybe you had never drank before or you know just on and on and on.
You can remember this time when you were not involved in that habit and you realize that as we go through our lives you know we have different things.
For example when I was 12 I was obsessed.
I was addicted to horses right.
So that was a kind of addiction of interest or an obsession.
That was my habit at that time.
I was just everything was horses and of course that was a stage that I don't I don't have that now.
That was a habit that was part of my life.
That was a growth passage but that's not there anymore and I'm sure you can each think of you know whatever your obsession was at that time and realize ah but I don't I don't carry that further.
Maybe at one time you were in love with a particular person and that person was everything.
You were addicted to them and then over time that relationship ended and now here you are years and years later and you're not addicted to that person anymore.
That isn't your habit anymore.
We think that habits rule us but in fact we change all the time and we're always dropping old habits and moving on to something different.
We're always growing.
Habits don't start out as habits.
One day you make a choice and the next day you make the same choice and over time this becomes the groove you follow.
If you're struggling with things you've set in motion,
Remember you can choose.
You can choose to set something different in motion.
