Week 4 - Changing habits one at a time

Final week of the first month has gone well. I've given up meditation and weightlifting for trying to build my ILP with baby steps. That is, getting up 6 am every morning, including weekends. Extremely useful: I feel so happy and so much more in control of myself than before.

What I used to do was force myself to engage in practices in order to be happy. Now I feel a tide turning. Why not try to do stuff to make myself happy in the first place, and build practices around that? I might be a bit shaky without the grounding effect of meditation, but at least I'm not feeling the Parent "shoulds" ordering the whole of my being as if from the outside.

I've really come to appreciate the emphasis of the Gurdjieff Work on building will before engaging in esoteric practices. Meaning that one must try to get some sense of order in the inner chaos by, (1) seeing the chaos and (2) creating a "deputy steward" who orders the chaos by assining every little self to their own place. In my own life that means figuring out the bottlenecks of my personal growth.

Although man is a many-storied-machine, with body, mind, spirit, and shadows all as one, I've found it tedious and troublesome to try and engage them all at the same time. What I see to be the sly man's tactic is -although acknowledging them all- to tackle one "bottleneck at a time". Starting with the 80/20 'neckers.

Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 principle means that 80 % of our results come from the 20 % of our efforts. I have seen that getting up early is way, way, way more important than mediation, weightlifting, reading comics...whatever. If I sleep in, all the rest is just repairing damages. So my first practice for making Integral Life a habit, is to get up early for a month to lock in the habit. So far, so good. Applying the 80/20 to my ILP seems to be the way to go.

Here are some random suggestions for effective change of habits:

1) One habit a time,
2) The worst bottlenecks first;
3) Doing what feels uncomfortable next,
4) Rewarding the inner Child by celebrating small wins
5) Finishing what I start.

All this is good for building the character needed for self-mastery that is needed for further growth. To try to tame the lesser hippie in me for the higher Hippie to manifest, that's gotta count for something, right? ;)