Declutter Your House of Habits
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It's spring, and that means it's time for spring cleaning. Time to open up the windows, bring the light in, do some dusting, clean out what's not necessary anymore, perhaps rearrange the furniture or even get some new furniture. It's just like spring cleaning is the natural thought after so long in the darkness. A messy house is obvious.
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at least more obvious than our messy House of Habits that we have. So this episode is going to look at our House of Habits, our internal world that could use some decluttering. Welcome to the Expand Your Ability Podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwinghammer. This show looks into what it means to be human, to have a body.
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to live with and update our habits so that we can improve our relationships. Alright, so our house of habits, what do I mean by that? I think for most people, most of the time, their house of habits is really cluttered. Imagine going through your home and just stuff everywhere. Old bills, old letters you haven't opened.
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There's the cookie bag that you left out. There's the clothes you haven't gotten to the hamper yet. Maybe you have a bunch of clothes in the hamper already. Imagine what it's like to walk around this kind of house when it's all cluttered. And maybe it's not that hard to imagine. I know it's not. For me, I'm not the most cleanliest person around.
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But you can sense how when there's more clutter, more things, more objects that all call to you as something that needs to be addressed, and if you're sitting in this house filled with clutter, it's not the easiest room to navigate. It's not the easiest room to focus, not necessarily. So all of our...
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flutter calls to our attention, comes to our mind as something to do. something that helps me is like if i clean up, i can, okay, clear out my mind. if i'm going to work here, where should i have my pencils? where should i have my notebooks? what arrangement will best serve me? do i need a space that's away from...
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distractions? Do I need a writing space that's not right next to the computer? Possibly.
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So let's take this metaphor a step further. So inside of us is a house of habits, a house of habits of thinking, moving, feeling, sensing. In a therapeutic context, I've seen it described as your emotional baggage, this bag that you carry behind you, filled with all of your history.
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And you can think of this house like that. You have the rooms where you have your childhood. You have your reactions to your parents, to school. And your ways of learning how to move and feel safe in the world. And this house can get quite cluttered because whoever really teaches you how to declutter old habits. Right. Declutter old habits.
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A lot of the emphasis is on making new habits, which is very important because you need new habits to replace old habits. But how do you declutter old habits? A few episodes ago I talked about the self-image, and here again is the self-image. The self-image governs your every act. What does it mean to declutter it?
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Okay, if you go around this house and there's all this clutter and you want to do this one specific action, but on your way there you're distracted by, well, I got to take care of this and I got to take care of that. There's these cross motivations. This is what Feldenkrais called it, cross motivations. In an action you have multiple other...
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intentions going on at once. Here's another example. Let's say you are on the baseball field and it's time to hit that ball and get a home run because your team needs that point. And as you're about to do this, you think about impressing your coach. You think about what it might mean to fail, to miss, to choke, right? You think about impressing
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that cute girl in the audience who you like. All of these motivations coming into this action creates a cluttered action. And it's the responsibility of the player to quiet out those other voices to be with the action and to execute the action. This baseball analogy happens...
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in every action of our lives, even the small ones when we're not being observed by other people. Because in our imagination, we act in relationship to other people even if they are not here right now. And this happens in a conscious way, where we know how we're acting, and an unconscious way, where we have no idea.
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Well, how exactly we are acting in this moment that we carry on this need for perfection, for getting it right, for doing a good job. Perhaps there's the pressure of having to earn an income. And so you feel that tension in your low back or that constriction at your throat or the tightness in your belly as you act.
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There's a sense that you could fail. You fear the consequence. All of this becomes layered and layered and layered clutter that obscures our action. You know this when you look at someone who is stacked and cluttered with all of these anxious thoughts. They often look like they're
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bent over their desk, they got their hand on their forehead, they're really tight, bringing their arms close to themselves, maybe they pace around. To be clear, none of this is to be judgmental about any of these actions, it's just normal, it's part of our experience. But you can also imagine that the baseball player who is beset by a
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all of these thoughts, all of these tensions, as he steps up to the plate feeling this smallness, I mean from the outside, would you imagine he's graceful under pressure? The act of hitting that ball requires precision. The action is really hitting the ball with the appropriate amount of force at the appropriate angle.
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that it flies really dang far. unnecessary physical tension, emotional tension, detracts from that action. so really pure action, really clear action, is what's needed to execute. what are the small ways in which you get yourself smaller, or tense, or your mind
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races with unhelpful thoughts. when does that happen for you? those are habits, or you could say responses to the environment that you have learned and are possibly out of date. that could be updated. that could be decluttered. how do we go about decluttering our house of habits? well,
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The first step is to bring with you a sense of kindness and compassion for yourself. You could get all hard on yourself for having a cluttered house, and well here's the thing, it could not have been any other way. As you grow and mature and reflect and come to a greater understanding of your life, you will see the negative of the past.
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and being hard on yourself doesn't help. Being judgmental to yourself doesn't help. I know at times it's really hard not to, because, well, that's that other thing, that judgmentalness, that interpretation of how you are as not good enough is another habit to declutter. And so these habits
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interrelates and can get tied up. Practicing compassion, kindness for yourself is a big piece. And then watching for when you do that thing, whatever that habit is that you're interested in. Perhaps it's the way you tighten your throat. In what company? In what situation?
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What is it that evokes that response? And can you find a way to settle that response? Here's the gnarly thing. That habit is going to happen many, many times as you become aware of it. Early on, there's a sense that it runs you more than you run the habit.
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and that can feel very difficult. but that's okay. as we become more and more aware there's a window that opens up between the stimulus and the response, the habit. and as that window opens up you can feel all that emotional content that emotional tone that comes with that pattern that sort of internal sense of
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I need to do this response. And as you open up that window, sense that tone, sense that action arise in you, then you develop bit by bit the ability to say, no, I'm not responding this way. No, I'm going to do something else. And that something else at first might be to just sit.
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and not move, to be with that feeling. This at times can be very much easier said than done. So please take your time and give yourself plenty of room to explore and to be with and to give yourself kindness. Moshe Feldenkrais, when he taught at Amherst back in the 1980s,
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He said that a part of this work that he teaches is that you have to clean out all of the old rubbish that interferes with your activity. It's everywhere in our activity. It's the primary ways of moving that we have adopted that we just have no idea we're doing. And so in the awareness through movement practice
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as you make these movements that are devoid of context, right? You're not practicing hitting the baseball. You're not practicing throwing the ball. You're not practicing the activity that you wish to improve. You are actually practicing the fundamentals of movement beneath those activities that don't have an emotional tone associated with them. They don't have the sense of
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accomplishment or perfection, all these images that we have in our daily activities. So by removing that sort of tone, we can engage with the habits more cleanly, figure out what they are, and develop new habits. These updated habits become more and more integrated into our lives. And as we declutter,
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and clean up, that creates greater clarity for our mind. Just like when you walked around the cluttered house and everything calls your attention, distracts your mind, those cross motivations. As your house becomes cleaner and cleaner, your ability to think more clearly improves. Your ability to become more aware improves.
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your ability to catch that moment of a habit, that way of responding in a quick snap judgment to your partner, or when you need to confront your landlord on something and all you want to do is shrink into a ball and disappear. or maybe it's how you get stuck trying to finish that essay.
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you run yourself ragged going in circles about word choice or structure when you really need to just execute. Your house of habits is a metaphor for your self image, your self image that all encompassing you, your sense of self, your beliefs, your ideas, your, your history that governs your every action.
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So if you think about it as a house that's cluttered with debris, old stuff, stuff out of place, that you can begin to think about decluttering, organizing, cleaning up, becoming aware of all the shadows and bring some light in. Because sharing what we learn is so important to learning, I invite you to share some of the ideas
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You've learned about here with your friends, with your family, with your loved ones. What resonated for you? Did anything surprise you? Did anything catch your attention? Talk it out with a friend. And I'll leave you with a question here. When you think of your house of habits, what comes to the forefront most clearly? What are you interested in cleaning up?
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and possibly refurnishing. One more thing before I go. I have this short guide you can check out. It's called the 9 Surprising Benefits of the Feldenkrais Method. The Feldenkrais Method by its design is to surprise you. As the work helps you become more aware, you get surprised. Oh, I didn't know I was doing that. Oh, I didn't know I could do this.
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This was my response to questions I was getting around what are the long-term benefits of the Feldenkrais method. I hope it's helpful for you. Thank you for your attention.
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