Developing a wholistic approach to life requires that we acknowledge how our habitual behaviors dictate our choices and encourage our actions. When we function on “auto-pilot” in our reaction to life’s presentation, we may not be optimizing our response and our expression may not foster a sense of harmony with ourselves and our surroundings.
In order to have some control over our habitual responses, we need to understand them. To foster the habits that add value to our lives and discard our negative habits. Replacing them with new habits that will be more beneficial to our goal of realizing collective unity. But developing new habits can be difficult due to a basic innate mental resistance to new and sometimes difficult undertakings.
We tend to start something new with great enthusiasm and find that change comes easy in the beginning. But as the demands of change become difficult, we inevitably loose our enthusiasm and momentum. I find may times we build change into a kind of a mountain we have to climb and we talk ourselves out of the attempt through various mental constructs (you know what they are, this is too hard…this takes too long…this is not working…). They are typically the same excuses applied in varying ways to different challenges.
In an attempt to break down the Mental Resistance, develop a WHY. Why are you attempting to change? It is this WHY that will keep you going after the initial motivation of the newness of change dissipates and it will guard you against those pesky high expectations. When the expectation is to read a book, meditate for 30 min or run 3 miles, it may be easy to do once, but our mind will tell us it is too hard to sustain as a habit so we will quit or maybe not even start.
So, what we want to do is break the big habit that we are resisting down into a smaller, more manageable task. This where the 2 MINUTE RULE can help. By using this simple rule, we can begin to train our mind to see that the habit is easy. So, if we want to read a book, read for 2 min each day. Meditate, meditate for 2 min each day. Run, run for 2 min. each day. Your goal most likely can not be completed in 2 min., but the habit can be started in that time and reinforced through repetition and practice. Because, once you start doing something, it is much easier to just continue.
In Buddhism the topic of Right Effort is one aspect of the Eightfold Path – one of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the original teachings. Right Effort exhorts us to prevent the arising of “unwholesome states” and generate “wholesome states”.
And what is right effort?
Here I arouse my will, put forth effort, generate energy, exert my mind,
and strive to prevent the arising of negative mental states and habits.
Here I arouse my will, put forth effort, generate energy, exert my mind,
and strive to maintain wholesome mental states and habits that have already arisen,
to keep them free of delusion, to develop, increase, cultivate, and perfect them.
This is called right effort.
You can see that the Buddha gave us a tall order in his original teachings. This is why, I believe, the 2 MINUTE RULE is the perfect tool to help us achieve the Right Effort the Buddha so compassionately taught us to deliver to our own lives.