Two of my favorite suggestions from Yogananda’s How-To-Live teachings involve training the nervous system – daily! – to explore life beyond one’s habituated neural circuitry. This seems much easier when we are young, when so many experiences are new (and our habits have not yet cured into concrete!) but seems especially important as we age. If you can follow these tips, even occasionally, you will notice an increase in mental flexibility (‘neural plasticity’) and experience much more inner freedom. In all likelihood, you will probably also have a lot more fun!
Every day, Yogananda says ‘do something you have never done before’. And he also adds: ‘Every day, try to do something you think you cannot do.’ If it’s been awhile since you have tried either these, you are not alone. For anyone who has ever tried to change them, the ‘octopus grip’ of habit on our lives and consciousness is legendary: there is hardly a more formidable opponent you will ever meet in life! The beauty of this particular advice is how it speaks to our sense of adventure. Are we all going to the grave, however many days from now, bound by the same oft-repeated thoughts and actions that hold us today? Have we become “psychological antiques” as Yogananda calls it?
It is wonderful (and comforting) to get good at something; to become skilled; to feel confident in what we are doing; and especially lovely, to be perceived in this way by others! All that is fine of course except, if we stop going new places, stop learning and growing, stop being willing to be a rank beginner at something for a while, we are pretty much sleepwalking through life. Just today, can you go somewhere you’ve never been? Can you try something you’ve never tried? Can you abandon what you have always been for what you might learn to become? Our ‘comfort zone’, left to its own devices, will tend to contract practically indefinitely, until it suffocates us!
The impulse to expand our horizons is writ large in every human heart, and well worth heeding. If you give this advice a try, please let me know how it goes! And here is that beloved poem:
The Noble New: by Paramhansa Yogananda
Sing songs that none have sung.
Think thoughts that ne’er in brain have rung.
Walk in paths that none have trod.
Weep tears as none have shed for God
Give peace to all to whom none other gave
Claim him your own who’s everywhere disclaimed
Love all with love that none have felt
And brave the battle of life, with strength unchained.
