Negative habits hobble your happiness

"To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be." —Miguel De Unamuno

A close friend I've known since we were both youngsters called me to announce that he and his longtime live-in partner were going to call it quits and go their separate ways.

"We just cause each other pain and sorrow. We are not good for each other, and I have no love for her in my heart whatsoever," he declared.

I remained silent and listened to his story regarding the latest dispute that triggered his decision. After about three minutes, I reminded him that this was the exact same story I had heard many times in the past 10 years, so I was already intimately familiar with all the details.

He chuckled, stopped talking and took a deep breath, and I knew he understood immediately that I was not trying to be intentionally cruel or unsupportive. I was simply calling him on his ongoing habit: an addiction to a toxic relationship.

In the past 10 years, he and his partner had created a relationship where, as unfulfilling and painful as it had become, it was easier to stay in it, developing a tolerance and numbness to the toxic emotions each felt toward the other (and themselves) than to break the habit they'd become to each other.

This got me thinking about how we all are subject to developing habits that can become unhealthy and addictive if we are not conscious and aware of what we are creating.

Staying stuck in a habit or addiction is the ultimate form of immediate gratification because the behavior creates a diversion that redirects the flow of creative life force away from our true feelings (and having to deal with them) and toward mindless activities. Those activities often result in unproductive lifestyles, unhealthy bodies and relationships filled with sadness, pain and suffering. It doesn't have to be that way.

A part of us dies when any negative habit becomes a mindless activity, especially when we continue to do it because it's easier or less painful than leaning into the discomfort of change. In the process, we unconsciously become numb to life. It's as if we are sending a message to the universe that we are not really interested in being fully engaged in being alive.

Any negative habit is simply the creative energy of life seeking fullness of expression, albeit in a misguided manner. We lack the awareness that negative thoughts repeated over and over again, day after day, year after year, become ingrained in our unconscious mind, where they lie below our field of awareness and take on a life of their own.

This is the fertile soil in which habits grow into addictions. It does not necessarily have to be in the area of human relationships either; it could be with habits we have formed in our relationships with work, food, sex or any other substance or behavior.

Regardless of where it shows up in our lives, the energy that drives most negative habits and addictions is the need to avoid dealing with how we really feel about ourselves and life in the present moment.

As an example: While some people may feel as dead in their job as my friend does in his relationship, in a strange way, it is safe and comfortable living in the security of conditions that don't demand change, growth or risk in the present moment.

Habits tend to suck us into unconscious living patterns. That is not how we were meant to live. You were not given life to be an unconscious, helpless victim of your habits, nor were you meant to suffer and simply endure an unrewarding life.

Each of us has the responsibility to be a fully conscious, continually evolving being and to have dominion over our egoic mind rather than be enslaved by it. To be a fully conscious being means one has to make conscious choices.

In other words, if you believe you are stuck in the energy of an undesirable habit, in order to set yourself free you first have to own the fact that you have actually given your power to the undesirable habit. At some point that was a choice you made. Perhaps now is the time to choose another way. You can choose to take your power back.

Choose today to live fully on purpose. Remember, habit energy has no life of its own, only the life you have given it.

Dennis Merritt Jones is a local life purpose coach, spiritual mentor, keynote speaker and author of the book "The Art of Being: 101 Ways to Practice Purpose in Your Life." Contact him at www.DennisMerrittJones.com.