Breaking Free from Autopilot: A Mindfulness Journey

Ever wondered what it would be like to step off the relentless treadmill of daily routines and habitual reactions, especially under stress? Peel back the layers of your day-to-day existence with me, Don Thompson, as we confront the autopilot mode that often dictates our actions. This week's podcast is a deep dive into the inner workings of our minds, scrutinizing the patterns that control us and how we can break free to embrace a more mindful approach to life's challenges.

Join us as we venture into a week-long exercise of self-evaluation, equipped with the teachings of mindfulness experts like Sean Fargo and Garchen Rinpoche. We'll explore the transformative power of observing our actions with a beginner's mind, viewing adversities as opportunities for growth rather than obstacles. Prepare to be enlightened on how to recognize stress-induced habits and respond with patience and awareness, all while learning to integrate mindfulness into the very fabric of our daily routines.

Based in part on the work of Sean Fargo. Music: Ty Simon - 'Newborn'.

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Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:26

Hi, don Thompson here and welcome to today's podcast. What I like to talk about today is the idea or problems that can arise around habits, or you might say operating on autopilot, and habitual routines of course help us get through the day. We all have our routines that we go through. Perhaps you have a certain way of fixing your breakfast in the morning or preparing for the day, laying your clothes out and getting things ready for the day, getting your shower and getting ready, and so on and so forth. So you have your habitual routines that you go through. But the idea here with this podcast is to take a look at that and to take a look at our habits and our routines and to see if maybe we can apply a little bit more mindfulness to them, to look at them in a way that allows us to be mindfully aware of the fact that we are sort of on autopilot really a lot of the time. Or we can fall into these patterns, these habitual patterns, and while they may increase our efficiency during the day, they also have a downside, and the downside is that we can fall back into negative patterns that might be counterproductive. So you might be working on your mindfulness and feeling rather happy about it. You feel like you're making some progress. Maybe, when you get into a particular stressful situation, you might lose your temper. You might revert back to old patterns or old ways of looking at life that you thought, well gosh, I thought I got rid of that, but no, in fact you haven't gotten rid of it. It's still with you. So what we want to do with this reflection is to think about that, to think about our routines and our patterns and our habits, and to work through them mindfully. So what I'm going to propose is that we take a week, the next week, to look at our habitual routines and to analyze them really, to look at them mindfully.

Speaker 2: 2:35

As said, routines in our daily lives can help us get things done efficiently and oftentimes more quickly, and we rely on these automatic responses instead of taking the time to stop and think about what we are doing, but we do them really, operating again on autopilot. And by operating on autopilot, this can at times, from a mindful perspective, be counterproductive. This is particularly true with stress and anxiety, and when you condition yourself to automatic responses related to stressful situations, you might impulsively react to something. As I mentioned before, you might lose your temper, or something like that. Based on past conditioning, these old habits can arise, and the mindfulness response, or mindfulness, brings to the table the idea that we can choose. And that's the beauty about mindfulness it allows us the freedom to realize that indeed, we have a choice in terms of how we react to things. So this is really, in a sense, you're bringing your mindfulness practice into your daily life. As we've talked about in other podcasts, this is an aspect of that. So what mindfulness helps us to do is to focus on what we're doing and why we're doing it. So if you look at things with a beginner's mind, if you see things as fresh and new, as if you're seeing it for the first time, you may see that there are other possibilities available to you outside of your habitual reaction to things.

Speaker 2: 4:16

Adversity often causes people to freeze up with apprehension and revert to these conditional responses. Stress, adversity you know bad situations. They trigger us, you might say, and the thing to do is to be mindful about that and then realize that truly, mindfulness can help you to deal with these situations by looking at them differently and to viewing adversity as a challenge. Altmas is a teacher. Garchin Rinpoche oftentimes talks this way when he talks about his adversaries. He praises them as his teachers because they teach him patience. He's these adversarial situations, or what we might perceive as adversaries in our life. They teach his patience. They're an opportunity to help us learn and grow, instead of shutting down and operating an autopilot, you know, just reacting to them in a sort of routine fashion. We can look at it in a different way.

Speaker 2: 5:18

What I'd like to propose for the week you know, the upcoming week here is that we do a self-evaluation, to maybe journal a little bit about this. Do you have habitual patterns that are resulting from anxiety or stress? For example, do you bite your nails when you're nervous? Do you shake your leg? Do you, you know, drum your fingers on the table? Do you eat more? You know? Do you turn to the food? You know, when you're under stress or anxious? You want to look at these things during the week. That's what I'm proposing for this talk is that we look at them. You know, just take a week to take a look at them and do you say things that you wish you hadn't? You know, when you're upset, you continually repeat certain actions to get temporary relief from obsessive thoughts. So you want to write these things down in your journal. You want to write down any habitual patterns that you have that come to mind. I would, you know, suggest you consider your responses to the previous questions. So, again, you know you just want to really consider them and you want to take a look at and note and journal about any habitual behaviors that could be contributing to your stress and anxiety. And you might be, for example, staying up late instead of getting a good night's sleep. Do you run yourself ragged, trying to do everything for everybody instead of taking care of yourself? I mean, these are patterns that we can fall into and we want to be mindful of them.

Speaker 2: 6:56

You again eat unhealthy fast food or food that's, you know, not so great for you, in order to save time, rather than eating healthy, well-balanced meals, and you want to write this down in your journal. You know, note it that you're perhaps not eating as good as you could. And what can you do to, you know, to mitigate that, to work against it? Maybe you can switch to organic. Maybe you can go to your local organic food store and invest a little bit more money. It might be a little bit more expensive, but it might be worth it, if you're not already eating organic to switch to that. I believe in organic foods, I truly do so.

Speaker 2: 7:38

To sum up here, people are creatures of habit and that's the unfortunate downside of being a human being is that we oftentimes are creatures of routine and habit and sometimes that could be beneficial. You know, you can actually make a healthy habit of something. You can make a healthy habit of eating healthy. You can make a healthy habit of getting regular exercise. And again, as we've noted, as we've started to look at in this podcast, other habits might be detrimental, like not getting enough sleep and overworking or overdoing things, and most of us have fallen into these kinds of traps and we've gone through this and we know that these patterns. So what we want to do is take some time to mindfully look at them, bifurly, look at these patterns, and to apply mindfulness to our lives so that we can help. This helps us identify really these patterns that are giving us issues, you know, in our lives and in looking at them we can see opportunities to make changes and that's a great thing.

Speaker 2: 8:44

So, again, over the next week, what I'd like to propose here is that we make a conscious effort to be mindful about our habits, both healthy and unhealthy, and to notice if you make any different choices. With this awareness, you know, by just becoming more mindfully aware, to finally becoming mindfully aware of particular habitual situations, can you change them. They might be good and you don't need to change them, but they might not be so beneficial and they might be. You know something that you want to change, something that you want to work with and move away from and look to. You know, create a healthy habit, perhaps out of a what used to be a bad habit. So the bottom line here is I just like you to consider all these things and then think about you know how they can be applied to your life and help you to move forward in your life in a more positive fashion.

Speaker 2: 9:45

And the goal of mindfulness, the goal of all of this stuff, is really to help ourselves, to help ourselves, but also to help others. And if we help ourselves, we can, you know, form the foundation through which we can be a benefit for others. If we don't do you know these kinds of practices and apply it to ourselves through our own lives, it means that we're not going to be as effective as we could be in terms of benefiting other people and helping other people and bringing a positivity to our life and to the lives of others. You know, we try to ultimately lead towards leads us. You know, this practice leads us to a state of compassion, a state of compassion and loving kindness. It helps us to realize that if we benefit ourselves, we can benefit others. If we form this sort of matrix of benefiting self and others, then we can really help the world. You know, it's, it's a there's a wider impact that we might not see. It's quite astounding, actually.

Speaker 2: 10:47

I'll leave it at that and thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your time, as always, and I think this was a pretty good talk. Actually, I sort of liked it. I'm probably going to do it myself. You know, there's a couple of habits in there and maybe I can look at myself, you never know. So thanks again and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye you.