Q&A 3 – Why are unwanted habits part of our perfect design?

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Traditionally, we think of our unwanted habits as problems. They need to be fixed and eliminated. They are a sign of a flawed character.

What if that isn’t true? What if we are designed perfectly and our unwanted habits are pointing toward that innate health?

Transcript of Episode

Hello Explorers!

Welcome back. This is episode three of the Q&A episodes of Unbroken podcast. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor.

As I mentioned last week, what I wanted to do in this first few episodes that I’m calling Q&A episodes is answer questions that I had at the beginning of the exploration of this inside-out understanding. If you would like to pose a question, please do that, I’d love to answer your questions. And you can do that at alexandramor.com/question. So please shoot me an email of using the form on that page and I’ll be very happy to answer your question on a future Q&A episode.

As I mentioned last Monday, what I want to talk about today is our divine design. So the question that I might have posed a few years ago would have sounded something like this:

I’ve heard people say that our unwanted habits, and our cravings are actually part of our divine design, and they’re not a problem. How is that even possible?

So that’s a such a great question. Thank you for asking. And here’s how it looks to me, here’s what I understand at the moment.

We are as human beings, we have very what people describe in this understanding as a kind design. So we’re designed perfectly well. And we all have innate health and innate well being. And at our core, at our essence, we are peace, we are love, we are calm, and a very good feeling.

One of the things that’s happening when we’re experiencing an unwanted habit, even though it can look like something like self sabotage – I mean, that was something that I felt. I must hate myself, I must be doing something terrible to myself. Why would I do that? – when I experienced my unwanted over eating habit. I would get really caught up in that kind of thinking, trying to dig down and figure out why I didn’t like myself so much that I was doing this thing that I hated.

Saying it out loud, like that so succinctly, I realize now it doesn’t make any sense. But that was my innocent misunderstanding at the time. Unwanted habits that we have our never sabotage, they’re never something that we’re doing because we don’t like ourselves. We are, as human beings always, simply trying to feel better, to return to that place that we know is innate within us that that natural state of calm and peace and well being.

To me, what it looks like is that the experience that we have of unwanted habits is an instinctive drive, to help ourselves to feel that way, to feel even a little bit closer to peace and calm. And because it’s so instinctive, because it’s so apparent in people all over the planet, there’s not a single group of people who don’t experience that compulsion. Everyone experiences this.

When we look at that, that tells us that therefore it’s something built into our design. It’s just not a matter of our cultural upbringing, or our geographic location. It has to have something to do with the way that human beings are designed. Unfortunately, I think what’s happened in the old paradigm of psychology, which was more of a pathology based understanding, where we’re viewed as being broken in these places, and we have to be fixed, this inside out understanding or the 3 principles as it’s also known takes the opposite view.

Sydney Banks articulated this back in the 1970s. Lots of other wise people have articulated it as well, he kind of pulled it all together. What he saw is that we are always innately whole, and well. And so what that leads us to see then, is that an unwanted habit a craving, is, actually it’s two things:

1. It’s ourselves wanting to comfort ourselves and to feel those feelings of peace, which I talked about a minute ago.
2. And then it’s a second thing as well. It took me a long time to really see this. It’s actually that feeling of craving, or what I call it the drive to overeat. That was how I felt that. It was a really unwanted feeling. And it was a tremendous amount of pressure. The only thing that would relieve it would be to eat the foods that I wanted to eat. So that feeling is actually a call from our divine selves, our innate well being. All it’s doing is reminding us that we are entirely whole and entirely well, and that it’s just that we haven’t seen that for ourselves insightfully yet and fully.

And, again, it can seem like quite a paradox to say that, and to hear it. I’ll just speak personally, until I started to see for myself that that was the case it really looked like my cravings, my overeating, was a problem, like it was as a serious problem that had to be fixed. It was causing me to gain weight, it was causing my blood pressure to go up. How, I would think to myself, is this not a problem? But it really isn’t. It is as simple as that.

It’s a call from our innate state of well being just saying to us, hey, just a reminder, you’ve forgotten who you actually are. I’ve heard lots of great quotes that really sum up this thing that I’m explaining now, not very succinctly. And one of my favorites that does it so succinctly is from Dicken Bettinger:

“Tension reminds me that I have everything I need.”

I just love that so much. I think about it quite often. So anytime we feel in our bodies a state of tension, a state of feeling kind of crunched up, like things just aren’t right. It could be in the case of having an argument with a spouse or being angry at somebody in traffic. Or it could be the feeling we have where we have an unwanted habit, and we’re wanting to set it down. But it keeps cropping up again and again.

We keep feeling the feelings of craving and of wanting to participate in that habit. That tension is that call from ourselves saying, you’ve forgotten who you are, you’ve forgotten that you are innately well, innately whole, that you have innate well being and resourcefulness and resilience. And so that’s what this understanding is trying to point us toward.

That’s what we’re exploring always when we talk about this understanding that no matter what the circumstance, no matter what the situation, no matter how long you’ve had a bad habit, no matter how many unwanted habits you’ve switched from one to the other. None of that has had any impact at all, on your divine engineering and your well being.

And in fact, the persistent nature of those cravings are exactly the thing that point to how well we are built, to how perfectly we are designed. It can look like quite a paradox, but it’s really, really beautiful once you start to see it.

I’ll leave it there for today. If you have any follow up questions, anything you want me to expand on about that I’ll be very happy to do so. So you can just fill in the form at alexandraamor.com/question, and I’ll be happy to answer your question on a future episode.

Thanks very much for listening. I really appreciate it. I’m sending you lots of love. Take care, talk to you soon. Bye.

Photo by Waranont (Joe) on Unsplash

Transcribed by https://otter.ai