Breaking Your Habits – Living Consciously

Sadhguru's teachings on conscious living offer profound insights into breaking free from unconscious patterns and embracing life with awareness and intentionality. His wisdom guides families towards liberation from ingrained behaviors.

Q: They say habits die hard. Do the qualities you develop in the cradle only die when you do?

Sadhguru: Let us look at this from a different perspective. A habit is formed essentially because it brings a certain ease to your life – it makes parts of your life automatic. You do not have to think about it. You can do it just like that.

 Naturally, as a part of a human being’s defense mechanism, we form habits because, unlike other animals, we have not come with many of our traits fixed. You notice just a little bit of difference between one dog and the next. They have their personality, but most of their traits are fixed. But almost everything is wide open for a human being. Because of this, as a child, you try to form a defense pattern where you try to create your patterns.

Shaking Off the Patterns

Every child creates certain habits for the sake of survival. But generally, children shake these patterns off as they grow, depending upon the level of awareness you create around them. Either by exposure or through education, children change dramatically – they go out for three years and when they come back, their parents cannot recognize them anymore. Everything about them has changed because of exposure.

 It is those who are engrossed in self-preservation who cannot drop their old habits. Those who are looking for excitement and adventure will drop their habits very easily because they are always remodeling their lives in whichever way is needed for the situations in which they exist right now.

 Above all, if a person takes up a spiritual path, his habits will drop because there is no such thing as good or bad habits. All habits are bad. They may be instruments of survival at a certain stage, but once you have grown up habits mean you are learning to conduct your life unconsciously. That may look safe, but it denies your life in so many different ways.

 

 

Habits and Karma

Spirituality is the fundamental tool to break all unconscious patterns that we have within ourselves. What we refer to as karma is also just this. Karma means you are unconsciously creating patterns for yourself, not only about your behavior but about the way life happens to you. If people examine their lives, the very way situations happen, the way opportunities come, the way they meet people, all of it is in certain kinds of patterns. This is simply because of the kind of karmic patterns you have created.

 A spiritual process means you do not want anything to happen within you unconsciously. Conducting your life unconsciously is not an intelligent way to live. Whether you picked up the habit in your mother’s womb or even before that, it does not matter. If you are seeking evolution, if you are seeking liberation, you have to break all your patterns – not good, not bad, but all. You do not have to wait until the grave.

 Even if you go to the graveyard, your patterns will not break. Karma goes beyond that because you do not break these patterns by losing your body. So, it is extremely important that when you are alive you strive to go beyond these patterns.

 If you demolish the patterns, you will handle your life consciously. For example, I am speaking now – I can speak either habitually or consciously. That is a big difference. It does not matter if I just sit and gossip, still ten thousand people want to listen because every word is uttered consciously. Whatever the content of what I am saying, people still want to listen because every word is coming out consciously, and that has power. If you take every breath in and out consciously, suddenly your breath has a different kind of power. Every movement in your life, if you make it consciously, every single movement has tremendous power. If you want to know the power of life, you have to be conscious of it, otherwise it does not even exist for you.

 Ranked among the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and a New York Times bestselling author Sadhguru was conferred the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India in 2017, the highest annual civilian award, accorded for exceptional and distinguished service.