17. How to build a healthy habit - Abhyasa and Vairagya

So for this subject, we can look to Patanjali and investigate what he wrote in his great text on meditation and how to work with the psychology of the mind.

One of my favorites, and I think one of the most important sutras in the whole text, are on what he defines as the pillars of how to achieve success in meditation.

He defines the actual behavioral traits you need to follow in order to have success in this path and in this process of meditation.

But we can also look at these suggestions from the bigger picture of how to simply condition the human mind successfully, and through that, change our behavior.

He's essentially giving instructions on what we now call neuroplasticity, the ability to change our habits and create new ones, the mechanisms in which we can make a habit into a behavior, and then finally that behavior into an ingrained characteristic, something that becomes more like a second nature and a natural thing to do rather than an effortful chore.

And, and here it is.

Here's what he says the two conditions are if you want success on the path of meditation, or really to condition the mind in any way that you want behaviorally.

He says abhyasa, meaning practice or repetition over a long period of time, and vairagya, which means non-attachment throughout the practice.

And we'll go into the details of exactly what these two things mean.

Let's take just a little step to the side for a moment, and I'll introduce an analogy.

Picture a gardener, someone tending to a plant, and that plant is gonna take time to grow and produce fruits.

Now, there's the daily watering, just showing up again and again, whether or not anything visible is happening yet.

And then there's the other part, the more subtle part, which seems obvious here, but needs to be made clear, and that's not to dig the seeds back up every couple of days just to check on its progress, and not yelling at the soil for being slow.

Just tending to the seeds and then letting go of exactly when and how the growth arrives, knowing that the tending will produce the growth.

And so here it means practice.

We've got consistency to water and tend to the plant daily, otherwise it'll die off.

And then the second part is non-attachment, meaning you're not in control of the timeliness of the fruits, no matter how badly you want them.

The fruits arise just from the daily tending with care, no expectation of exactly when the fruits will blossom, and no criticism of the growing period with nothing to show for it.

And that's really the whole formula in miniature.

But now let's go properly into where it comes from and why I think this is the most important thing that Patanjali says on how you can find success in creating consistency with meditation and really any other habit you wanna build.