Lojong Practice Journal: Don’t be so predictable

The 59 slogans through a social justice lens

The slogan ‘Don’t be so predictable’ is about noticing our habits and choosing to do something different—something much easier said than done. As we cultivate awareness, we start to see how often we act without thinking. This can be embarrassing and bring up a defensive response. Self-deception runs deep. It’s always easier to see patterns of unskillful behaviour in others than it is in ourselves, but it’s a worthy practice because what is habitual in ourselves is what is habitual in society and cultures. When we interrupt personal habits, we are also interrupting systemic habits.

My life-long practice of interrupting habitual patterns of thought, speech and action began because I knew I needed a better way of responding to the anxiety disorder I’d been living with for seven years. There was no denying that my predictability only functioned to make the anxiety I was experiencing worse, not better.

Learning to notice and interrupt habits that fed cyclical anxiety helped me see my experience of mental illness from a much bigger view. My predictable responses weren’t my own personal invention. Larger societal messages about mental health, wellbeing, and self-care, all contributed to why I made the choices I did. My choices were grounded in shame, a sense of unworthiness, and the belief that I needed to be ‘fixed’, rather than finding a way to heal.

My habitual responses to anxiety (and depression, for that matter) not only made me feel worse, but reinforced a belief that there was something flawed about me for feeling bad in the first place. Understanding the beliefs behind my habitual patterns helped me not just do something different, but understand why it was important to interrupt the pattern.

Not being predictable does not mean being chaotic or random. It means questioning what is being served when we do the same thing we have always done. Do we want to serve a culture of silence, of shame, of division? Or do we want to serve a culture of awareness, of curiosity, and of growth?

As I’ve continued this practice and my awareness has grown, I apply it to other ways I’ve been socialized. There is a lot of predictability, for example, in white body supremacy. On a systemic level, it’s playing out all the time, teaching, repeating and reinforcing the habitual patterns of racism. When it comes to challenging this larger social construct, I look at my own predictable thoughts — thoughts very intentionally planted in all of us as parts within the system — and do something different.

The predictable thing might be to stay silent when I hear a micro-aggression from another white person. It might be choosing not to share a story of when I’ve confronted racism within myself because it’s embarrassing. The predictable thing has often meant justifying why I’m a ‘good’ white person, instead of looking deeply at the ways in which I contribute to covert racism. The predictable thing is to insist on not being a racist, instead of actively working at being an anti-racist.

Being unpredictable means going against the status quo — challenging our ideas about who we are as human beings, and what we are capable of. Not being predictable on a personal level is how we can model that we are neither good nor bad, but simply human and always capable of being better. Let’s all be less predictable together.

Lojong Practice Journal Index — Commentaries on all 59 Lojong Slogans through the lens of social justice & collective liberation

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