Stop Pushing the Boulder: Another Way to Shift Old Patterns
Learn why the Sisyphean struggle to change often fails and how understanding your "burden" is the real key to lasting transformation. Consider why discipline and habit trackers fail to change you.
When I’m working with a pattern in my life, I am working systemically. Any habit is anchored in a worldview and a self-image. I behave in the ways I behave because I believe I am a person who behaves that way.
I was taught to be that person by the systems that shape this reality: my family and its epigenetic heritage, cultural context, economic class, the formal education that I received, the friends I had as a teenager, the internet content I consumed.
The whole imbroglio makes my patterns and habits.
There's a lot of talk about habit, discipline, and regularity in wellness circles. Some may go as far as to say that habits rule your life. If you don't have a process for consciously choosing and shifting them, then you are on autopilot, running someone else's program.
There are hundreds of pop-science and spiritual books on making and breaking habits. Even the Brihat Trayi (Great Trinity), the classical manuals of Ayurveda1 offer a simple methodology. The idea is tangible, incremental change.
The principle is this: simultaneously and progressively reduce an undesired habit while replacing it with a desired one. It’s so simple that I asked an AI to generate a graph of how it works.
But systemic patterns aren’t something that we can map them to an X-Y axis.
There is no way that I can forcefully will myself into reducing my habit of addictive behaviour, or my habit of long-term chronic autoimmune illness, by replacing it with a “healthy” habit. There are major patterns of disharmony at play here, and they are much bigger than you are.
Do you know the old story of Sisyphus?
He calls out the abduction of a river spirit by Zeus, thereby incurring Zeus' wrath, and is punished in his afterlife. In the underworld, he must push a great boulder up a hill. At the very moment he reaches the summit, the stone rolls back down to the bottom. His struggle is endless, and his labor is meaningless.
This archetypal story is often used to describe frustrating, borderline futile attempts to make progress. We try to change a habit, but right when it feels like it’s settled into our daily rhythm, the boulder rolls right back down the hill. But what if Sisyphus changed his strategy? What if, instead of pushing the boulder, he sat at the bottom of the mountain and got to know his burden?
If Sisyphus’ boulder rolls down the hill, does it crash? What if he lets it? What if the King of Corinth took his predicament in stride?
Imagine that instead of repeating his task focusing purely on his goal, the outcome, the boulder sitting atop the mountain in Hades, he got curious instead about how he’s doing his task. Our friend could learn to examine his posture, the way he stands, the gait of his walk. He could learn who he is in relation to his overseer, Queen Persephone. He could use the mirror of his days to ask himself: is this true? Is this really who I am?
Each step could be an opportunity to re-examine the most fundamental aspects of how he shows up physically, a process that dovetails into a new way of showing up emotionally and psychologically.
There's another crack in the myth of Sisyphus' endless labor.
The poet Ovid imagined a moment when Orpheus descended into Hades and sang a song of such impossible beauty that it stopped damnation itself. In that instant, the mechanisms of the underworld paused.
And Sisyphus, arrested by the music, stopped his struggle. He didn't push. He didn't strain. Ovid writes, inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo—"and you sat, Sisyphus, on your rock."
In that pause, no pattern is so entrenched, no curse so eternal, that it cannot be interrupted by a moment of presence. It suggests that even Sisyphus could choose to sit with his burden rather than endlessly fight it. Sisyphus' self-image could change, even in the midst of his accursed circumstance. He saw himself as greater than the sum of his parts, how he perceived himself to be, and what he could imagine was possible for his (after)life. He simply sat on his rock to listen.
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Perhaps this metaphor seems trite, too wordy, or too vague. The key point is this: it can change. Nothing has to remain the way it is now. All ways of being, all habits, all patterns, can fade away with time and a life lived to that effect.
I’ve been wondering lately about my own capacity for change. It’s one thing to change, it’s another to accept that change within myself, and it’s an entirely different affair to live that change in relationship with other people. Any change undertaken internally will invariably defy the expectations of the people around me. At a given moment, how many people see me for who I am? If I don’t see myself for who I am, how can I expect it of anyone else?
For any change to stick, you first needed a visceral understanding of why. Why did I stop drinking coffee? It was wrecking my digestion. Why did I stop drinking alcohol? The hangovers were no longer worth it. Why did I stop using pornography? It was destroying my relationships. The motivation had to be real and deeply felt before the management of the habit became possible. What’s more, I had to admit I needed help, and seek it out.
Shifting a pattern is a long game. Embedded in my experience are all the systems that shape me, as well as my traumas and my beliefs. Patterns become deeply entrenched because I once relied on them to protect me, but now they're overcompensating and causing more harm than good.
The process of change itself is a deep neurophysiological adaptation. The body is entrained to repeat certain behavioral patterns and will repeat those patterns because they serve some perceived function. To change it requires more than just willpower; it requires disruption and a new direction.
The habits of the body, mind, and heart are a woven fabric. A tug on one thread affects all the others. Any desire to change will be most effective when it is supported by well-balanced actions in all realms of daily life.
I have journeyed from a self-image of a sickly, dejected, depressed, and angry person—collapsed and hunched-over, defined by the fundamental thought, "I am sick."
My experience shows me that change requires three things:
Recognize and accept my situation as it was, to the best of my ability.
Desire change—not necessarily "I want to be better," but simply, "I want to be different."
Learn through trial and error what works for me and what doesn't.
So where does one begin?
Right where you are, today, by asking yourself “who am I? What moves me to pause?”
Comprising the Caraka Samhita (internal medicine), Sushruta Samhita (surgery), and Ashtanga Hridayam (eight branches of Ayurveda)