Consciously Cultivating Flexibility

It's easy to become trapped in habitual patterns that do not serve you well and promote inflexibility. Therefore it is very helpful to consciously cultivate flexibility by relinquishing things in your life and creating new patterns of thinking and behaving.

Practicing flexibility creates flexibility in your nervous system by challenging your brain cells to make new associations. The neurons in your nervous system and the choices in your life are engaged in a continuous feedback loop. In your willingness to try new things, your neural networks become more flexible and open to new perceptions, interpretations, and choices, which in turn support new interneuronal connections.

Here are a few suggestions of things you can do to break out of your habitual behavioral patterns. Try them for a week and observe what happens to your body and mind.

- Change your diet
- Change your exercise program
- Change your route to work
- Change your bedtime
- Meditate longer
- Buy different clothing
- Wear new colors
- Listen to different kinds of music
- Stop wearing a watch
- Wear your watch on the other wrist
- Go out to lunch with someone new
- Try a new restaurant
- Change your opinion about something or someone
- Call a friend you haven't spoken to in years
- Answer the phone differently
- Change your voice mail message
- Read a book that you usually wouldn't consider
- Watch a different television show
- Listen to a different radio station
- Take a new class

Let go of old ways and you will feel renewed. Learning to be flexible means learning to access the most flexible domain of your being - the field of timeless awareness underlying your mind and body. This is the field of infinite flexibility on a daily basis through meditation. Have the conscious intention to think and act flexibly. Practice letting go whenever holding on is no longer serving you.

  Deepak Chopra: excerpt from 'Grow Young, Live Longer'