Increments

Increment: “A usually small amount or degree by which something is made larger or greater” (Merriam-Webster)

I think an awful lot about the formation and development of people’s habits. In my job, one of my deep areas of interest and study is about what beliefs and habits benefit students most. In my personal life beyond work, I have devoured books like Mindsets, The Tipping Point, A Whole New Mind, and The Power of Habit; and lately I have been actively working on shifting a few of my own habits. I have learned that habits reveal what you value.

Organizationally, this is pretty obvious. Schools, businesses, boards, working groups, and communities often have explicit norms or agreements about how they interact, and you can tell a lot about what the group values by the agreements they have (or don’t have) about how they approach their work together.

However, I find that it’s a little difficult to take an honest look at some of my own habits and realize what they reflect about my values. What do I choose to do and not do? With whom do I spend my time? How much effort do I expend on each action or interaction? What standards of quality do I have?

When thinking about yoga as an eight-limbed path, I recognize that I am entering the second stage of this path: self-study, which includes turning inward and concentration.

In one of my favorite yoga texts, Meditations from the Mat, Rolf Gates describes turning inward this way: 

“In my own life, this was the point at which I began to…cultivate and honor my own intuitive powers…. We can start by simply becoming aware of the process by which we arrive somewhere. Note the moment, the point, where your experience departs from resistance and moves into understanding. Begin to witness how it is you gain wisdom from your actions.”

Wow. This is big. I have read those sentences so many times, but understanding what they say, and then to applying that understanding to one’s life are challenging. For me, observing and reflecting on some of my habits has been a concrete entry point into self-study. Two habits I’ve been cultivating in the last several months are meditating most days and doing asana practice four times a week. Last week, I wrote about my resistance to meditating. The funny thing is, after writing it down, my resistance was diminished and my meditations came more easily – I had shifted into a place of understanding, shifted from compliance to engagement just by noticing and reflecting on where I was with the habit.

Our teacher Jeff said, “Minor adjustments can lead to big change.” He gave us the metaphor of an airplane making a tiny course correction to end up at a wholly different destination. I hang on to this idea of incremental change like a lifeline as I make slow, yet steady growth.