We had the fourth meeting of our Willpower Instinct Meditation Book Group at Yoga Bliss.   We came together for gentle yoga practice, meditation and discussion of the third, fourth and fifth chapters in the Willpower Instinct:  I Will, I Won’t, I Want:  What Willpower Is, and Why It Matters.  In these chapters Kelly describes how our brains mistake the promise of reward for happiness.  We chase satisfaction from things and find they are empty – even harmful.  She says that if we are to have self-control we need to need to identify the false promises of reward and aim ourselves toward that which has true value.

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We had the third meeting of our Willpower Instinct Meditation Book Group at Yoga Bliss yesterday.   We came together for gentle yoga practice, meditation and discussion of the second, third and fourth chapters in the Willpower Instinct:  I Will, I Won’t, I Want:  What Willpower Is, and Why It Matters.

In these chapters author Kelly McGonigal explores willpower as a biological instinct.  She suggests ways of choosing and framing our challenges in ways that truly motivate us to choose wisely.  She cautions us against viewing our challenges as measures of moral worth.  She observes that we often reward ourselves for doing something “good” with an indulgence of doing something “bad”.  She asks us to consider how we identify ourselves:  Are we the person who needs to be controlled? Are we the person who is inspired and dedicated to pursuing a goal?  Our perceived identity informs our choices for better or worse.

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We had the second meeting of our Willpower Instinct Meditation Book Group at Yoga Bliss yesterday.   We came together for gentle yoga practice, meditation and discussion of the second and third chapters in the Willpower Instinct:  I Will, I Won’t, I Want:  What Willpower Is, and Why It Matters.

In these chapters author Kelly McGonigal describes the willpower as a biological instinct that evolved to help us protect ourselves from ourselves!  She also compares it to a muscle that tires from use and regular use makes it stronger.

In our gentle movement practice we explored Kelly’s premise that self-control is a physiological state or in yoga-speak a body/mind state.  We began by simply focusing awareness on our current state:  bodily sensations, experience of energy and quality of heart and mind.  We attended to how these expressions of life changed with breathing, moving and pausing.  Kelly describes the self-monitoring system that attends to our thoughts, emotions and sensations that works to keep us safe from ourselves by detecting impulses to act in ways that undermine our wellbeing.  She calls this capacity the pause and plan response.  We cultivated this state by slowing our breathing, by moving intuitively and by pausing to experience a sense of equanimity.

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 We had the first meeting of our Willpower Instinct Meditation Book Group at Yoga Bliss yesterday.  This is truly a “yogic” book, in the sense that yoga is an awareness practice or even a way of living a conscious life. We came together for gentle yoga practice, meditation and discussion of the first chapter in the Willpower Instinct:  I Will, I Won’t, I Want:  What Willpower Is, and Why It Matters.  Author Kelly McGonigal begins her book by asking whether you are clear about what matters most to you.  This “I Want” is where we find our motivational power – the fuel we need to cultivate the resilient ability to either do the “harder thing” (I will clean the house) or to refrain from doing the “impulsive thing” (I won’t eat donuts for breakfast).

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