The Tao of Habit Formation – How Persistence Shapes Perception and Perception Becomes Destiny
- Brainz Magazine
- 14 hours ago
- 10 min read
Written by Justin Edgar, Coach
Justin Edgar is a life and breathwork coach and creator of The Art of Creative Flow, blending entrepreneurship, education, and mindful somatic practice to help individuals, leaders, and teams move beyond struggle and burnout to reconnect with clarity, vitality, and purpose.
In this article, we delve into the Taoist perspective on habit formation, drawing from Lao Tzu's timeless wisdom. We explore how thoughts, repeated actions, and attention influence perception and ultimately shape our character and destiny. Through understanding the mechanisms of the mind, we can shift our habits, challenge limiting beliefs, and create a more empowered and mindful life.
I. The Taoist chain: From thought to destiny
There is a short sequence of lines attributed to Lao Tzu that has echoed across centuries:
It is often quoted as moral guidance and encouragement toward better behaviour, cleaner speech, kinder action. But read carefully, and something deeper reveals itself. This is not a sermon. It is a description of the mechanics of the mind, of consciousness in action.
Lao Tzu is not telling us what should happen. He is describing what does happen.
The chain begins not with action, but with attention and the one who is watching. Then with thought. With the subtle, often unnoticed patterns that arise in the mind long before a word is spoken or a deed is done. Thoughts are fleeting, yes, but they are not inconsequential. Repeated often enough, oriented in similar ways, they begin to leave a trace.
Words are thoughts given structure. Deeds are words embodied. Habits are deeds repeated until they no longer require deliberation.
And here quietly, decisively, we arrive at the hinge of the entire sequence. Habits are where the transient becomes stable.
Thoughts flicker. Habits persist. And persistence is what shapes both the field of awareness and the lens of perception through which the field itself is viewed.
A habit is not merely something we do. It is something we return to. A groove worn into the fabric of awareness by repetition. Over time, these grooves become the default pathways through which perception orients. They determine what we notice, how we interpret, what we expect, and what we dismiss without ever consciously choosing to.
Character, then, is not a moral trait so much as a perceptual posture. A stable orientation toward the world, forged through countless small returns to familiar ways of thinking, speaking, and acting.
And destiny, far from being some distant, fated endpoint, is simply the world as it appears through that posture, encountered again and again.
Seen this way, Lao Tzu’s chain is not about control. It is about cultivation. It suggests that if we wish to understand the lives we are living, we must look not first at our circumstances, nor even at our actions, but at the habits of mind that quietly shape how reality shows up for us at all. And from here, the real inquiry begins.
II. The lens that thinks
To say “watch your thoughts” is already to assume something easily overlooked, that there is an awareness present before the thought arises.
Thoughts do not appear in a vacuum. They arise within a perceptual field within a lens that has been shaped over time by what the mind has learned to trust. This lens is not something we consciously choose in most moments. It is the background orientation through which experience is filtered before we have time to reflect on it.
Modern neuroscience often refers to this background orientation as the default mode network, the collection of habituated beliefs, assumptions, and narratives that quietly govern how we interpret the world when we are not deliberately directing attention. But the phenomenon itself is ancient and immediately recognisable. It is the sense that this is just how things are, this is who I am, this is what’s possible for me.
It is important to see the order clearly. We do not first have a thought and then perceive the world. We first perceive, and from within that perception, certain thoughts arise.
Perception, in its most fundamental sense, is simply being awake. A raw openness to experience. In the beginning, this openness is largely undifferentiated pure awareness meeting sensation. From here, something subtle but decisive occurs: felt resonance. Certain experiences carry a charge. They matter. They attract attention. We feel drawn toward them or repelled by them before we can explain why.
This felt resonance is the soil from which intuition emanates, as the cognitive means by which we derive intelligence from a source beyond ourselves.
Only then does interpretation appear. Thought gives form to experience. Imagination begins to name, frame, and organise what has been felt. Meaning takes shape. And when a particular interpretation is adopted when we decide, consciously or unconsciously, this is what this means attachment forms. The thought is no longer just an idea, it becomes a belief.
Belief is not merely something we think. It is something we trust.
When a belief is returned to repeatedly rehearsed, reasoned with, and justified, it is assimilated. It becomes familiar. Comfortable. Known. Over time, this familiarity hardens into what feels like certainty. The belief moves out of conscious deliberation and into embodied memory. It becomes part of the default orientation of the mind.
This is where habit truly lives. Not simply as repeated behaviour, but as a habitual belief, as a trusted way of seeing. The mind no longer needs to actively think the belief, it thinks from it. And because the belief now shapes the lens of perception itself, it quietly influences which thoughts arise next, which possibilities feel plausible, and which interpretations seem obvious.
The loop closes as a spiral of return. Perception gives rise to thought. Thought, when trusted, becomes belief. Belief, when repeated, becomes habit. And habit reinforces the lens through which perception occurs.
This is why certain thoughts feel so convincing, and others barely register. An anxious lens generates anxious interpretations. A defeated lens struggles to imagine growth. A mind that has learned to believe “I’m not smart,” perhaps through early schooling, comparison, or repeated disappointment, will often remain loyal to that belief long after it has ceased to be true. Evidence to the contrary is not so much rejected as quietly overlooked, because the belief has become familiar, trusted, and woven into identity. What limits us here is not malice or lack of intelligence, but a kind of fidelity to what has been known. Even suffering, when it is familiar, can feel safer than the unknown that might bring resolution to our pain.
As Carl Jung observed with characteristic clarity: until the unconscious is made conscious, it will rule our life, and we will call it fate. The default mode network is precisely this unconscious rule-set. It governs not just behaviour, but the very horizon of what we imagine ourselves capable of becoming. And yet, this is not a cause for despair.
Because what has been learned can be unlearned. What has been trusted can be re-examined, and what has been habituated can be outgrown. Not through force, but through awareness.
When we begin to notice our habits of mind, not to judge them, but to understand them, something subtle yet profound occurs. Perception broadens. The field of awareness widens just enough for the belief that has been shaping our experience to come into view. In that widened space, the belief is no longer total. It can be examined. And where there is examination, there is choice. What once felt unquestionable can now be held lightly, revised, or gently released as something more truthful, more life-giving, and is allowed to take its place.
This is the deeper invitation hidden within Lao Tzu’s chain, and it is from here that real cultivation begins.
III. Persistence as attention
If habits are formed through repetition, then repetition itself deserves closer examination. What, exactly, is being repeated?
At the most fundamental level, persistence is not a matter of effort. It is a matter of attention.
What we attend to repeatedly becomes familiar. What becomes familiar begins to feel trustworthy, and what feels trustworthy is gradually taken to be true.
In this way, attention is not merely a spotlight that illuminates experience. It is a formative force. It determines which thoughts are rehearsed, which interpretations are strengthened, and which beliefs are given the time and energy required to take root. This is why persistence shapes perception.
A belief does not become habitual because it is objectively accurate, but because it has been attended to often enough to feel reliable. Attention feeds belief. Belief, once fed, begins to organise attention in return. The loop tightens.
Language plays a quiet but decisive role here. The words we use both inwardly and outwardly are not neutral labels. They are carriers of emphasis. Each time we name an experience in a particular way, we train attention to notice certain aspects of reality and ignore others. Over time, this naming does not merely describe the world, it conditions how the world is perceived.
To speak of ourselves as “not creative,” “bad with money,” “too sensitive,” or “just not that kind of person” is not simply to report a fact. It is to rehearse a belief. And every rehearsal strengthens the habit of seeing from that position. In this sense, words cast spells upon the psyche.
This is why persistence is inseparable from attention. We do not become what we think once. We become what we return to.
The inner narratives we repeat, the explanations we favour, the stories we tell about who we are and how life works, all of these act as training grounds for perception. They teach the mind where to look, what to expect, and what to dismiss as unlikely or irrelevant.
Importantly, this process is rarely deliberate. Much of what governs our attentional awareness happens automatically, in the beliefs inherited through family language, cultural norms, early education, and repeated emotional experiences. By the time we are adults, many of our most powerful beliefs are no longer experienced as beliefs at all, but as common sense. They become the background of experience itself, quietly directing thought, expectation, and choice without ever entering our conscious view, where they can be contemplated for veracity and usefulness.
This is why cultivation, as Lao Tzu frames it, is not about imposing new rules on the mind. It is about becoming intimate with where attention habitually rests.
When attention is continually drawn toward threat, deficiency, or comparison, the perceptual field narrows. Life feels urgent, constricted, and effortful. When attention is allowed to rest more often on curiosity, appreciation, and possibility, our perceptual field widens. New interpretations become thinkable. Different futures begin to feel plausible.
Nothing has been forced. Attention has simply been redirected.
Seen this way, persistence is neither virtue nor vice. It is a neutral power. What matters is not that we persist, but what we persist in attending to.
And this returns us, once again, to agency not as control over thought, but as stewardship of attention.
IV. The return to agency
If perception shapes thought, and habit shapes perception, then agency does not begin where we are often taught to look for it. It does not begin with willpower, nor with positive thinking, nor with the forceful replacement of one idea with another. It begins with awareness.
More specifically, it begins with a willingness to notice where our attention habitually rests, and to become curious about the beliefs that have quietly earned our trust through repetition.
Agency, in this sense, is not the ability to control the mind. It is the capacity to relate to it wisely.
This is why the invitation implicit in Lao Tzu’s chain is so gentle. He does not urge us to stop having thoughts, or to think only “better” ones. He simply invites us to watch. To observe the movement of the mind with enough steadiness that patterns begin to reveal themselves. And when patterns are seen clearly, they loosen their grip not through resistance, but through understanding.
One of the simplest and most powerful places to begin is with habit itself and in particular, with the thoughts we return to most often.
This brings us back to the beginning of Lao Tzu’s chain: watch your thoughts.
Not all thoughts, but the recurring ones. Especially those that leave us feeling diminished, constricted, or somehow less than. These thoughts are rarely random. They are the surface expressions of deeper belief systems, assumptions about who we are, what we are worth, or what is possible for us that have quietly shaped the default patterning of the mind.
Seen this way, self-defeating thoughts are not personal failures. They are signals. They point us toward beliefs that may once have served a purpose, but now stand in the way of greater wholeness, empowered choice, and the flourishing of our creative potential.
A powerful moment of agency arises when such a thought is met not with resistance, but with curiosity. We might gently ask, “Is that so?” or “What if I’m wrong about this?” Not as an admission of inadequacy, but as an opening to the possibility that a truer, more life-affirming understanding may exist.
This requires a particular kind of courage: the courage to sit briefly in uncertainty. To allow a belief to be questioned without immediately replacing it. To hold an idea lightly enough that it can be examined, rather than defended. This is where kindness toward oneself becomes essential not as indulgence, but as the very condition that allows honest inquiry to occur.
Over time, as beliefs are held with less rigidity, the frame itself begins to change. And as the frame changes, so do the thoughts that arise within it. Recurring thoughts become less punitive and more instructive. Inner dialogue softens. Attention is freed to move toward interpretations that are more useful, more accurate, and more aligned with lived experience.
This is an agency that applied well. Not the forceful elimination of unwanted thoughts, but the ongoing willingness to update the beliefs from which those thoughts emerge. An understanding that the mind is not fixed, but responsive, and that perception itself is shaped by what we repeatedly give our trust and attention to.
As this process unfolds, character is no longer something we strive to perfect. It becomes the natural expression of a lens that has been clarified. And destiny, once imagined as something imposed from beyond us, is revealed as the cumulative result of how we have learned to see.
This is the quiet power hidden in Lao Tzu’s teaching. This power reveals itself through the liberation of one’s mind as we unshackle ourselves from the ideas of limitation embedded within the default programming of our internal belief system.
Read more from Justin Edgar
Justin Edgar, Coach
Justin Edgar is a life and breathwork coach, speaker, and creator of The Art of Creative Flow, a transformational program helping individuals, leaders, and teams move beyond burnout and reconnect with purpose, creativity, and resilience. With a unique background spanning financial markets, Montessori education, wellness entrepreneurship, and somatic practice, Justin brings rare depth and insight to his coaching. His work empowers clients to harness clarity, intuition, and creative flow as tools for personal and professional breakthroughs.
