Paramhansa Yogananda wrote in His book, Man’s Eternal Quest:
To eradicate a habit of long standing you must apply the full strength of your determination in counteractivity until the bad habit is worn out. Most persons don’t have the necessary patience. But everyone should feel encouraged by this truth: whatever you have create or done, you can undo.
Apply the full strength of your determination in counteractivity.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So if one decides to give up a bad habit, then there is a sort of thought-pattern vacuum because one is trying to get rid of thought patterns (for habits, after all, are thought patterns), and since nature abhors a vacuum, this is the right setting for the same thought pattern to come back.
Swami Kriyananda said, based on Guruji’s teachings, that any give-up must be accompanied simultaneously by an uptake. A give-up of a bad habit must be accompanied by the uptake of an opposite, good habit. In this way, one replaces harmful thought patterns with beneficial ones, and changes the course of how one thinks, and therefore, how one behaves.
One of the important things Master gave, which we can use to make this change is affirmations. Affirmations help us to impress a particular truth upon our thought patterns, and by embedding this truth in our thought patterns, to change them, thereby changing reality. Heres a link to an earlier post about Affirmations.
Jai Guru!
The Legacy of Paramhansa Yogananda 