when you dismiss those urges without acting on them repeatedly, the urges eventually go away. Without urges, and from a state of mind that allows you to rest in the truth about your essential nature, your habit is a thing of the past.

Habits are excellent distractions from inner experiences we don’t like and, as I’ve said many times, they provide helpful information, a reminder that we should step back and allow our mind to naturally quiet.

although the lower brain is certainly skilled at producing urges, it is not capable of acting on them. Decision making and complex muscle movements require the more sophisticated abilities of the higher brain. That means that no matter how strong an urge might be—no matter how insistent the inner lizard may sound and no matter how many urges it

What if the scenario is completely different—not only does your habit have nothing to do with what you lack, but also your urges provide information that’s actually helpful?

Falling back into habitual behavior is the rule, not the exception, and it means absolutely nothing. It is a reflection of the fact that your mind got very full and busy—nothing else. Although I have no concerns, my clients, on the other hand, are typically mortified. They want to know what happened and why their change didn’t stick. They become

Your habit is alive because you have an urge that feels worthy of action. The more consistently you act on urges, the stronger and more frequent they tend to become. You also become more accustomed to acting on your urges rather than stepping back and letting them fade. The antidote to acting on your urges is seeing the truth about them. Despite

It’s never that you can’t or shouldn’t do anything. If something occurs to you that looks helpful, by all means, do it. That inclination to act may be your wisdom. Please, follow your own hunches. Doing something might look like taking a pause before you act on your habit, or noticing your inner lizard’s favorite tunes; or it might look like going

viewing them as meaningful and important was the only way they could possibly hurt him.

It was just a fleeting thought; an invitation to step back and be less in action, not more.