To repeatedly take PAUSE with intentional & purposeful (mindful) awareness, we can ready ourselves to interrupt the reactionary chain of our ‘habit energy’– a highly conditioned & incessant tendency to keep moving, running, thinking, talking and filling up space- a ‘churning’, ‘chattering’, and ‘impulsive’ mind that entrenches us to be everywhere else but fully present. It is through our abiding awareness- a practice of ‘staying with it’ that this reactionary force or ‘shenpa’- the impulse or urge- the ‘undercurrent’ of the habit energy can be diminished. It’s like observing the sensation of a bodily itch– the impetuous feeling- without scratching.

At first, it is very difficult for us to catch the impulse of the habit energy in our sensing or feeling state as it happens so quickly from stimulus to reaction. This form of precision awareness takes practice and a lot of patience. We will never just turn off the habit energy switch. The relapses will be with us throughout our lives regardless of our practice and our determination. Again, it is through our renunciation that helps to shape our outlook on this path… loosening up our attachment to our reactionary patterns and the habit energy that fuels them… experiencing them fully without getting hooked, and without acting out or repressing them.

Over time, our concentration & awareness will strengthen & deepen allowing us greater energy to naturally, effortlessly interrupt our chain reactions before they even start. With confidence & trust, our fear to let go transforms in awareness and opens space to fearlessness. Conscious awareness gives us all the volitional freedom to either intensify the charge of the habit energy, or to diffuse it.

This purposeful (existential) work of dismantling and transforming our habit energy may create a sense of  agitation and uneasiness as our free attention and open awareness interrupts the reference point of the reactionary pattern- our storyline– the thoughts, perceptions, notions of who we think we are. Consciously abiding this process can be rather painful especially when the undercurrent– the impulses of our storylines are powerfully and magnetically compelling- as they work to keep us hooked to who we conceptually think we are.

With gentle persistence & perseverance our abiding attention ‘to know’ can penetrate our storylines as our self-observing awareness sees through what hooks us and keeps us stuck in this undercurrent of ‘habit energy’. When we invite open space or ‘emptiness‘ into our awareness, there arises many possibilities to respond in new ways to our experiences. Awakening to our self-perpetuating patterns of mind, we come to realize it is only our storylines that limit our nature, and lure us into repetitive, reactionary cycles to support & sustain their existence. Seeded with non-judgmental observation, this open space in our awareness allows our neuroses to flow to the surface to be recognized and to be transformed…

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