Mindful Monday - Of Habit Energies

Here it is #MindfulMonday already and I want to share something with you that I've been directing my energy towards a lot this week as part of my inquisitive nature to learn more about myself and why I am the way I am, behaving the way I do.

In fact, I just finished writing a post What Shapes our Lives the other day.

Something interesting that came up was the concept of "habit energies"
For those of you that have never heard of that, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a wonderful document "Habit Energies - Transformation at the base" where he describes it as

Habit energy is an important term in Buddhist psychology. Our seeds carry the habit energies of thousands of years. The Sanskrit term for habit energy, vashana, means "to permeate," "to impregnate." If you want to make jasmine tea, you pick jasmine flowers, put them in a box together with the tea, close it tightly, and leave it for several weeks. The fragrant jasmine penetrates deeply into the tea leaves. The tea will then smell of jasmine, because it has absorbed
the perfume of the jasmine blossoms. Our store consciousness also has a strong capacity to receive and absorb "fragrances" or "scents.
This impregnation of our consciousness, the habit energies carried by the seeds, affects our patterns of seeing, feeling, and behaving. The seeds in our consciousness manifest not only in a psychological form but also as the objects of our perception -mountains, rivers, other people. Because of habit energies, we are not able to perceive things as they truly are, We interpret everything we see or hear in terms of our habit energy.

Because our consciousness can be impregnated/permeated it is wise to chose who you spend time with and to know yourself well. Then you can take conscious awareness and work to maintain that connection to yourself.
Build a mindful practice so you can be aware of what you are absorbing and how it is effecting you, what seeds you have lying within. It's that observation of our habit energies that allow us to transform them. Also create new, more functional habit energies.
At first it takes effort to make those changes for it isn't natural yet. Just like getting in the habit of doing anything, like daily hour of writing or brushing your teeth after every meal, it takes repeated practice and doing it until it too becomes a habit energy.
Mindfulness is the key here to be aware when we are falling into an old habit and the effects it is having. Let's say you want to take better care of your body. If you know you want to instill the habits of eating wholesome foods, getting adequate sleep and exercise, if you are aware and mindful throughout the day you will notice if you are on track or not and you can make the changes to stay on track.
Eben Pagan taught me a lot about what it takes to create healthy habits (I took his Wake Up Productive course) - check out what he has to say...

It seems that negative habits are quicker to form than positive habits, why that is I do not know but if we recognize and embrace our negative habits, being aware of them, than we can transform them.

Did you know happiness can be a habit energy too?

In fact @freedomtribe has a Happiness challenge going on right now until May 29th where folks are asked to share their happy place and proceeds will be going towards @LittleDisciples breakfast program to feed Indigenous Venezuelan Children.
See the original challenge post for official rules and entry: https://steemit.com/freedomtribe/@freedomtribe/the-happiness-steem-challenge-creating-happiness-for-hungry-indigenous-venezuelan-children-loads-of-steem-prizes-to-be-won

Now if you have this happy place, how easy would it to be to create a happiness habit energy! If you visit it regularly and soak in the happy feelings, then when you want to cultivate happiness you can evoke some of that experience/those feelings and learn how to connect with it better.

Cultivate those positive habit energies, keeping away those negative ones which often end up causing suffering.

Practice mindfulness, and you know that although we have the best intentions to make these transformations it is much easier if you have support.

I would like to cordially invite you to Mindful Life community, which resides in the @naturalmedicine server here. We run group meditations and support each other as we grow through conscious awareness. With much love!

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