Fingernails, Math and Meditation by Sei-in

(Typed on the float plane ride from Vancouver to Victoria)

Hmmm....

Let's see... I recently turned 40. I have been practicing with the Victoria Zen Centre for about 5 years. When I was a kid, I started biting my fingernails. I am not sure how old I was, but I know that I was biting my nails in elementary school. Let's say I started at 10 years old. This means that by the time I came to start practicing Zen, I had been biting my fingernails for about 25 years (40 years old now -started with VZC 5 years ago - started biting fingernails at age 10).

For 25 years I bit my fingernails all the time. I would bite them when I was happy. I would bite them when I was sad. I would bite them when I was excited and when I was scared. I bit them until they hurt and even when the started to bleed.

Of course, I tried to stop. I would try to get myself to stop biting them. But then I would go see a movie and find myself already biting them, without ever being aware of having started again. I never sought outside help to stop biting them (I hear that hypnosis works...), but when I was little, I remember my mom putting some foul tasting stuff on my nails so that I would hate the taste and not bite them.

This didn't work. I got used to the taste and just kept biting them. My sister stopped and my mother stopped when I was still living at home, but I did not. I continued biting my nails long After leaving home.

I learned how to hide biting my nails. I learned how to hold my hands so that people could not see my nails. In general, I didn't do it where other people (except those very close to me) could see.

So for 25 years this happens. For 25 years I bite my nails. Then I start practicing with the Victoria Zen Centre. I learn to meditate (having never done this before) and start a daily meditation practice.

I have tried a lot of things to process my intense emotions and nothing has worked as well as meditation. From the first time that I sat, I found meditation to be extremely powerful in processing emotions, reducing stress and generally making me a nicer guy to be with (my wife will certainly agree with that).

After about 6 months of practice (usually sitting at home for 25 min per day, 6 days out of 7), I looked at biting my nails and just realized that it wasn't very effective. I was biting my nails to process emotions and it didn't do a very good job. Or perhaps a better way to say that is, meditation did a much better job. Of course I had heardball of this before, but one day I just saw it differently.

It is hard to describe how it was different. It was just different. What had made sense as an activity before (biting my fingernails), no longer made sense. It seemed like a bad idea, even though I had been doing it for over 25 years. Now that I had a much more effective mechanism for dealing with stress, it just didn't make sense to bite my nails.

So I stopped.

After 25 years of habit, I just stopped.

It has been 4.5 years since that realization and I haven't bitten my nails since. Well, that isn't completely true. There have been a few times when I did bite the nail on one finger on one hand. But then I would catch myself and stop. Why am I doing this? I know that it doesn't work too well. And then I would stop again.

In hindsight, I think that two powerful things have worked to support me. One is the initial insight where I saw something that I had heard for many years completely differently. It is almost like seeing the same thing from the top, instead of the bottom. Now it makes complete sense. The other thing is the awareness of my present moment that comes with regular practice. I know that since I have started meditating, I have become much more aware. That awareness has helped a lot if I fell back into my old habits. Through that awareness, I could quickly adjust my actions.

So there is my story of how a habit pattern which was reinforced over 25 years was changed on one day and one clear insight.