Mini Habits – Ayurveda

#learningIsAGift ?
#rituals of #theBeautifulJourney 

At the end of March 2018 I’ve finished an introductory course on Ayurveda from Smart Majority. Ancient practices fascinate me and I believe I can find inspiration and knowledge for a healthier life style in them. Ayurveda is the traditional Hindu system of medicine, teaching about the body as a microcosmos and the energies governing it and it provides practices for staying healthy, e.g. meditation, exercise, customized eating, breathing techniques.

Knowing the theory is all good, but my desire behind doing the course was to actually find something I can apply in my life. Whilst there is a lot of information in the course that still needs to sink in, I’m starting small, thinking of the things I could do as mini habits, things I can do easily, without much willpower and motivation, and that can still give me a feeling of success, an easy win, and a sense of progress.

If you are stuck at identifying what could constitute a mini habit, a technique, inspired by the world of software development, could be DTSTTCPW – Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
Another technique could be False Faces, described in Michael Michalko’s book, Thinkertoys.

While the False Faces techniques involves a step to reverse all your assumptions, i.e. to state the opposite of what you are thinking, how I’d use the False Faces technique is to think at the range of things that could exist at other end of the spectrum of my goal, where it is not quite achieved, but there is something of it there. So while thinking that practicing Ayurveda means always eating according to your dosha (Ayurvedic body type), meditating, exercising every day, managing your emotions, staying positive, cultivating nurturing relationships, ensure your environment is healthy as well and many other details, you ask yourself how would your Ayurveda practice look like at the other end of your goal’s spectrum, where you are not doing all of that. Well, just as a short example, that might be:

• I meditate just 5 min/day
• I do just 5 squats/day
• I have one dosha specific ingredient in my meal in a day
• I only cook one Ayurvedic meal per week/month

Then you take this “opposite” of your big goal and turn it into something you keep doing – a mini habit.

Now, moving on to my first set of Ayurvedic mini habits 🙂

• Wash your face with cold water in the morning
• Drink a glass of water in the morning before you have any solid food
• Try chewing your food 32 times
• Drink when thirsty, not while eating
• No iced or hot drinks while eating
• Do not mix milk and bread
• Don’t have too many sweets in the morning
• Do not eat more than you can hold in your cupped hands, per meal
• Spend more time outdoors
• Do exercises, move your body more
• Stretch every 2 hours
• Open curtains to let the energy flow
• Go to sleep early (10:00 – 10:30pm)
• Wake up early (6am ideal) or wake up with the sun

Not from an ayurvedic source, I’d still add to this list:

• Take at least 2 breaths before taking another bite

I have chosen these ones as they are really small things to do, many of them tied around things that I need to do everyday, so they do not introduce many new activities for which I would need to make time and find the motivation, but only change how I do some of them.

Change is not necessarily easier, I know, and although the chosen set of mini habits looks like a reasonable set to aim for, looks achievable for me, it is not necessarily easy to e.g. go to sleep early. This one alone might require significant changes. Personally, I get sleepy around 10:00/10:30pm, but to go to sleep at that time I must have finished what I wanted to do that day. But there are only that many hours in the day… so I must prioritise, have some rules for the evening to help me accomplish that. For example, I don’t start watching a series episode later than 9pm as most of them are around 45 min and I would not want to go to bed straight after “screen time”, nor to start something that finishes later than my desired hour for going to sleep.

I don’t get all of these mini-habits right all the time, but they bring to me a sense of awareness that somehow keeps me motivated to stick with them even after not doing them perfectly or missing them. For example, I don’t always chew everything 32 times, but having succeeded at it and having seen how different it is to how I would have eaten in the past, it creates this “mind blowing realisation” effect of what a big difference it makes that even when I am no longer sure whether I’m at number 17 or 26 (it’s harder to count when listening to someone speak :)), I am already chewing my food more than I used to. And that’s progress.

Change and habit formation take time, patience and being kind to oneself, being understanding of the process (with successes and failures). Thinking of this helps me stick to my mini habits.

The following are not mini habits anymore. These are other activities that support an Ayurvedic inspired life-style or any, let’s say, active, fitness driven life-style. They take time, motivation and discipline.

I do try to move my body more:

Started more than 1+1/2 year ago:

• I do indoor rock climbing once or twice a week
• I take dance classes once a week

Started after the end of the Ayurveda course:

• Sun Salutation ritual every day, 15-20 min, a few breaths in each posture
• Foam rolling at least twice a week
• Every weekend with good weather, I take a longer walk
• Every day I don’t do rock climbing, I do a few exercises in the afternoon, either HIIT Yoga Fusion or Booty Core Exercises or a few leg raises and squats. I add ankle and wrist weights and, to relevant exercises, resistance bands.

For my Sun Salutation, the important thing for me was to get started with something while I learn more about yoga and eventually create my own sequence. So I have taken a routine from Mind.Body.Green. and added the downward-facing dog posture to it. While doing the postures it is good to know their meaning and give your mind something to think about while doing them, turning this sequence into a movement meditation.

Here is a summary for my Sun Salutation that I use as a guiding checklist:

• Mountain pose – be present in your body
• Chair pose – being fierce, being comfortable in difficult situations
• Forward fold with shoulder stretch – gaze inward, unlock your ideas of what you want
• Preparing pose – visualize yourself living your dream
• Warrior 2 – finding ease within effort, being effortless
• Power pose – confidence, with an open heart
• Wide-legged forward fold with shoulder stretch – let go
• Downward-facing dog – your memory, concentration, hearing and eyesight improve
• Long-arm low-lunge twist – focus, determination
• Standing forward fold – relax while your body and mind absorb the practice
• Standing backbend with arms raised – there is room for me in the universe, I am like an arrow, like a fluid
• Mountain pose with arms pressed – thank you to the universe, the universe is within me

I would add:

• Tuck your belly in especially when rising back from the folding postures

Now, what would be the “opposite” of these exercising related activities? What could be a mini habit you could pick up and do with regularity, so it could eventually build up into more? For example:

• Stretch every morning after you get out of bed – just add a few more conscious stretches to those you already naturally do in the morning
• Do 5 squats + 1 push-up a day
• Every day, take a short walk around your house or your office building

I’ll end here for now. I’m interested in identifying mini habits for better nutrition and once I’ve done that and applied them for a while, I’ll be back to share them.

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