Bust a Groove!

You probably know, intellectually at least, how this works. When you feel abandoned because your friend hasn't called you in two weeks, you might understand that it isn't because he's stopped liking you. You may even realize, especially if you've done some therapy, that his silence is triggering one of your old samskaric grooves—perhaps a childhood memory of abandonment. But that doesn't necessarily stop you from reacting. Samskaras are powerful, which is why knowing better doesn't always change our behavior. There's a weight to those accumulated impressions. They are, on a daily basis, the reason why we think and feel the way we do.

That's both good news and bad news. The bad news about samskaric grooves is that as long as the negative ones are in place, it's hard to escape the limitations imposed by our personal history. The good news, however, is that we can change those grooves. The brain is so fluid and malleable, so prone to take and hold impressions, that when we keep leading it into new pathways, the accumulation of new insights, practices, and experiences will eventually overwhelm the old ones, and even, given the right circumstances, eliminate them entirely.

The Wake-up Call
I recently had the opportunity to watch one of my students going through this process. Dale, a magazine editor, routinely took out her frustration at work by criticizing her subordinates. One evening she read a book by psychologist Scott Peck, in which Peck defined 'evil' as "using power to avoid spiritual growth." As an ex-Catholic, it was the word 'evil' that got her. She saw that her outbursts at others came from precisely the impulse the book was describing; she was off-loading blame onto other people rather than looking at the sources of her own pain and frustration. That night, she lay in bed, filled with confusion and remorse, asking herself, "What can I do to change this?"

To break a pattern in ourselves, we often need some sort of shock, a wake-up call from outside. That's because inner patterns tend to self-perpetuate. Unless something comes along to wake us up, show us our pattern, or push us out of the trough, we'll often go on looping around in the old grooves forever. The aftermath of such a shock creates a powerful field for change.

In fact, any moment in which we acutely feel the need for change is fruitful. When people ask me how they can change the qualities in themselves that create suffering—qualities like anger, or intense jealousy, or fear—I like to paraphrase the poet Kabir: It's the intensity of longing for change that does the work.

That night, as Dale lay in bed, she decided to treat her anger like an addiction, and ask for help. The next morning, at the daily office touch-base, she told her co-workers that she realized her temper tantrums were difficult for everyone and that she wanted to stop having them. She asked them to help her by giving her a signal when they saw her being harsh. They agreed. After a few days in which the signals came several times an hour, Dale realized that when she was being coercive with others, she spoke in a particular tone of voice.

Make Your Break
At that point, she came up with an internal self-inquiry process that any of us might find useful for breaking a samskaric pattern. Here's how it worked:

Dale would pay attention to the tone of her own voice, and notice when it sounded coercive or angry. Then she would recall the feeling that had come up just before her voice changed. She realized that her urge to say something harsh or cruel always started with the same set of feelings—part anxiety, part frustration, but more surprisingly, a kind of self-righteous feeling of excitement and power that she rather enjoyed. That sense of power would impel her to raise her voice and say things that made other people wilt.

Once she'd identified the feeling, she began to try and recognize it each time it arose, before she acted it out. Then, she'd stop and ask herself a question, like "Do you really want to say what you're about to say?" or "Are things really the way you think they are?"

Because of her burning desire to change, and her willingness to work at it, Dale found herself on a transformative fast track. Within weeks, her co-workers were commenting on how much nicer she seemed, how much easier to work with. "I was so much happier," Dale said. "I think it was the first time in my work life that I felt people actually liked being with me." In fact, for a while, she felt sure that she'd accomplished a miracle, an instant turn-around in her way of being.

It turned out not to be quite so simple. But Dale had actually stumbled on one of the basic formulas for inner transformation or breakthrough. First, she'd received a wake-up call. She'd let it penetrate, and she'd discovered in herself a powerful motivation. Then she'd asked for help in making her desired change—in this case from the people around her. Third, she'd found a method, self-inquiry, that enabled her to identify her patterns so that she could become aware of exactly which behaviors and reactions she wanted to change. There was an essential yogic principle at work; just as the Yogasutras counsel, Dale was combining practice with strong aspiration, and the result was allowing her to bypass her old samskaric grooves, and create new ones.