Habit body

Invisible as it may be, our Habit Body is our very best friend. It records and remembers every daily routine so our waking mind doesn't have to relearn every daily habit all over again, every morning, when we wake up. REF HERE
Habits are reactivity set on automatic, behavior conditioned to repeat. As Richard Bandler of NLP says, "human beings learn thru forming habits" (online book promotion video 2011 for his 2008 book, Get the Life You Want).
The phrase “habit body” enables much more direct address to habits we wish to access and upgrade. Upgrading dysfunctional habits on any level, is a sturdy definition of personal-spiritual growth REF to HT.org.
Why we have a habit body
According to the Three Selves model 3S 1 REF HERE, by design the human psyche revolves around you, the conscious self. The idea is to free up your attention so you can apply it to making healthy decisions and more conscious choices in life.
If you had to also breathe consciously, also blink your eyes consciously, also digest your food consciously—you would have virtually no time to think thru the complex decisions and choices life presents us with. Our habit body frees the conscious self to spend more of its time and energy thinking, planning, navigating, deciding and choosing.
A habit body, a lower helper self, is a good deal for us, so when faced with repetitive situations, like tying our shoe laces or washing the baby, we can respond today and tomorrow, the same way we responded yesterday, without having to think thru every detail each time. Our habit body excuses our waking, conscious self from “re-inventing the wheel” every day.
Origins
The origins of the idea of a habit body probably go back to Buddhism, probably in connection with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Clairvoyant observations were evidently recorded of a body of habits continuing on independently, for a short time, after the death of individuals.
The phrase “habit body” resurfaces in modern times after the convergence of NLP and muscle testing. By 1990 interested lay persons and practitioners were enabled, with practice, to navigate to, identify and address, invisible habits, on any level PACME. Your Habit Body, An Owner's Manual did not appear until 2010
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Habit-Body-Owners-Manual/dp/1449953301/refla_B007SNVG46_1_8?ieUTF8&qid1344183742&sr1-8
The habit body is clearly synonymous with the inner child from the 1970s-1980s. “Habit body” simply reframes the topic, shifting the focus to how 90% to 95% of our behavior is based on habits, as Bruce Lipton suggests in his videos in 2011 and ongoing. Clearly the therapeutic uses of addressing the habit body directly are manifold.
Ways to address the habit body directly
The habit body can be addressed directly thru the following methods:
- Gestalt two chairs technique. Less skill is needed to experiment with this.
- Self-muscle-testing, kinesiology testing, including dowsing. More skill is needed to experiment with this.
Changing habits using the habit body model
Direct therapeutic altering, modifying, upgrading and redirecting of habits is possible, given sufficient muscle testing and counseling expertise.
'Always use love all ways' is the recommended context when exploring the habit body as this is the firmware of human beings. If you break something—you're responsible. Deliberately altering and upgrading habits is performed successfully primarily by trained and skilled practitioners with extensive counseling training and high emotional IQ. Both Gestalt and NLP caution “inner ecology” is a real consideration and must be acknowledged, checked for and worked with for safe and effective change work.
Anatomy of the habit body
In an apparent paraphrase of Rudolf Steiner, we can say: Virtually everything making us truly human is invisible.
For example our values are invisible. Honesty, forgiveness and curiosity are all invisible. To paraphrase NLP, what makes us most truly human “cannot be carried in a wheelbarrow.” Like many aspects of being fully human, habits while invisible, are highly patterned and conditioned REF HERE TO 3S 1 ]]]]]; therefore, habits are "visible" to thinking.
We have habits on three levels of consciousness simultaneously:
conscious <> subconscious <> unconscious
This suggest how two-thirds of our habit body is NOT fully conscious.
In the first few pages of Study of Man (1919) ]Rudolf Steiner observed how the human psyche is spread out over a range, over a continuum of frequency.

Waking <> dreaming <> sleeping
This threefold model suggests how we have habits on three frequency levels:
Waking ~ We are most awake in our minds, eyes, face and hands. There is little here we are NOT aware of in these areas, while awake. Habits active here include how we talk, chew food, do our homework, housework and other deliberate tasks, decisions and choices. Examples of conscious habits are paying the rent, taking the kids to school. In these habits we are most awake, have the most wakefulness; therefore, the most ability to make choices and alter our own habits. Conscious habits take the least effort to change and upgrade.
Dreaming ~ we are dreaming in our blood, skin, muscles and digestive organs. We are partly aware of them, partly unawares. Habits active here include most of our sensory channels, especially the five animal senses and our kinesthetic sense of well-being. We "dream" here. We never fully know how we see; we never fully grasp HOW we feel what we feel. We can only take these percepts in, assemble them according to our habits, and call this reality. In this Steiner is very close to thinkers proposing "we dream our reality;" and to General Semantics-NLP, which proposes what we call "reality" is no more nor less than our habitual way of assembling sense percepts into sense-memory-constructs we can engage and interact with.
Sleeping ~ we are most asleep in our bones and small intestine. These are organs that work best far apart from the rapid change and choice-making of the waking mind. Habits active here include blood cell formation, nutrient assimilation, tissue-building.
Examples of SUBconscious habits are how we dream at night, how much feeling we can consciously tolerate, how we feel about ourselves, other people, the world and God. We are less awake here; therefore, we have less ability to make choices and changes here. These habits take considerable effort to change, upgrade and purify. Mostly SUBconscious issues can be addressed in talk therapy and increasingly in muscle testing sessions.
Examples of UNconscious habits are who we think we are, and basically all assumptions about what is real about ourselves, other people, the world and God. In these habits we are least awake, least conscious; therefore, we have the least ability to make choices and these habits take the greatest effort to upgrade. Without Grace, these habits typically take years to change, upgrade and purify. Deeply UNconscious are very difficult to addresses directly without direct clairvoyant perception and/or with muscle testing.
Examples of UNconscious habits are closely integrated with “who we think we are.” Unconscious habits are closely integrated with all our assumptions about what is real in ourselves, other people, the world and about God. In our unconscious habits we are least awake, least conscious, with least ability to make choices and changes. These habits take the greatest effort to alter. Without Grace, these habits can take years to change, upgrade and purify. Navigating to UNconscious habits require either direct clairvoyant perception or muscle testing and usually some of both. Since these parts are frequently inarticulate in the extreme, muscle testing is one of the very few options for learning about and communicating with them.
Mostly SUBconscious issues can be addressed in talk therapy; including, the whole area of Games People Play and Scripts People Live. [Less awareness-harder to change the habit. Habits existing in delta brain wave frequency are the deepest and require considerable effort to acknowledge, address, change, upgrade and purify.
How new habits form
Each new behavior, learning to ride a bike or cook an omelet, requires a training period, where approximations are encouraged and intelligence is gathered about what works and what does not.
Intelligence on the new behavior is transferred and conveyed from the conscious self to the basic self in the following way. When a new behavior is approximated for the first time, for instance as a child putting the cap back on the toothpaste, this intelligence sinks down in frequency, away from the conscious mind, and towards the frequency of the body and unconscious. This is by design. If the new learned behavior is accessed at least occasionally, it endures. Now we call this “a habit” and we don’t have to think--or think very little about--about performing it. The sum total of all these learned behaviors is our “habit body.”
How to change a habit
To change a habit, the prerequsite is willingness to change or heal. Willingness to heal is worth assessing at the outset. Only habits we have high willingness to heal are worth the effort to address and attempt a shift. With at least minimal willingness to heal, small changes, consistently applied, over time, can alter, adjust and migrate any habit from point A to point B. Tho force and coercion will work, to dominate, oppress and control is the least effective approach because it creates new additional issues to clear later. As in childcare, the most effective approach is the nurturing parent, kind counselor who also demonstrates healthy boundaries and healthy self-discipline.
“Habiting” per NLP and William Glasser
As both NLP and William Glasser, author of Choice Theory suggest, many nouns are more usefully viewed as verbs, as a process. The noun we call a “habit” is more usefully viewed as a process: habiting. We go thru life “habiting” new behaviors. We assemble a new set of behaviors; such as, how to bake a cake from scratch, how to prune fruit trees, etc. Over time, with repetition, the basic self picks up the sequence and in time, it becomes more and more automatic.
We automate our own behavior, transferring and delegating simple tasks to our "invisible butler."
By the time we are five years old, we have thousands of routines and behaviors, including language, lodged in the sub- and unconscious as habits. Welcome to your habit body.
Habits compared with "stimulus response"
One of the few things left standing from the earliest days of experimental psychology, is Pavlov’s stimulus-response (S-R) experiments with dogs.
S-R proposes when something is done to us, we react. It says we always react because something is done to us. If we feel cold, we move closer to the fire. If we are hungry we move towards food. If we are punished for stealing from the cookie jar, we stop stealing. If we are driving and we see a red stop-light, we stop.
Behaviorism (1920s-1950s) took this up and ran with it, proposing the entire human psyche must be reduced to cause and effect, stimulus and response. The idea that the human psyche could and should be reduced to mere external causes prompting internal reactions, was a foundation of 19th and 20th century scientific-materialism.
S-R made a profound impact on the formulation of both factory production, learning theory; and thenceforth to efforts to centralized and standardize public K-12 education, in the early decades of the 20th century.
Skinner was not fond of Freud's innovations. Skinner wanted something much more radical. He disliked the abstractions “desire,” “goals,” “pleasure” and “values.” He found these “soft” ideas unscientific. Skinner broke through the navel-gazing of 18th and 19th century European philosophy to a much more direct approach in psychology. He limited psychology to the realm of the sensory, the tangible, the objective and the measurable. In the early 20th century, we can surmise Skinner was rebelling against the sometimes vague, sometimes patently subjective, sometimes idiosyncratic and sometimes absurd definitions and explanations for mental-emotional activity, common in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Skinner's approach was counterpoint to the fuzzy moral abstractions of politically powerful churches in the two centuries preceding him. Skinner rode the pendulum swing of the early 20th century, away from both religious preaching and moralizing and the fuzzy abstractions of early psychology. He rode the pendulum back towards objective, external sense-based thinking. In this he prompted a lot of useful new rigor in the “soft sciences.”
William Glasser takes on B. F. Skinner and rectifies “choice”
William Glasser is the chief refuter of Skinner and places choice above reactivity as determiner of our behavior.
William Glasser takes on Skinner and operant conditioning head-on in his Choice Theory . Glasser says, yes, we do respond to pain and pleasure. However the tail does not wag the dog.
Take driving a car and stopping at the red light. It’s intellectually dishonest to say, 'The light turns red, so we stop the car.' The light does not come into the car and move the pedals to stop the car. It does not. The environment does not control us to this extent. We stop at the red light because we do not wish to get a ticket; we do not wish to have an accident. We stop the car because we don't want the consequences for breaking rules. We choose to stop at the light. In driver training, if not earlier, we learned stopping at a red light on a busy street was by far our best choice (paraphrase from Choice Theory and classroom conversation with Glasser at CSUDH, 1990).
Reactivity, habits, choice--how about all three?
Skinner was correct: reactivity is real and highly determinant. Pavlov’s dogs really do salivate at food; and, at bells for food, if trained this way. Glasser was correct too: choice trumps reactivity any time we make that choice and follow thru with our intention to change behavior.
Useful contrast exists between reactivity, choice and habits. The consequences of reactivity are greater than choice in the realm of walking into a bakery or a kitchen with delicious food cooking. The consequences of choice are greater than of habits and reactivity in the realm of therapy, self-healing and personal-spiritual growth. Bertrand Babinet points out unnecessary reactivity is our chief obstacle to personal-spiritual growth (Healing the Inner Family, 1997).
REFS
Your Habit Body, An Owner’s Manual 978-1449953300
You Have Three Selves, Vol 1
978-1475268775

You Have Three Selves, Vol 2
978-1475274004
Study of Man: General Education Course (2004)
978-1855841871
Games People Play 978-0345410030 (1996 edition recommended)
Scripts People Live 978-0802132109 (1994 edition recommended) Claude Steiner
Changing Lives Through Redecision Therapy
978-0802135117 (1997 edition) Mary & Robert Goulding
Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom
978-0060930141
Healing the Inner Family, 1997).

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