What If Behavior Isn't the Beginning of the Story?

I have a confession to make.

Despite practicing yoga on and off since the early 2000s, it wasn't until 2015 that I really began to understand how profoundly my mind influences my behavior.

Ironically, I didn't learn this through yoga.

I learned it through corrections.

In 2015, I attended training in Effective Practices in Community Supervision (EPICS), a model designed to bring evidence-based behavioral interventions into the hands of practitioners. One of the core components of EPICS is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The model is elegant in its simplicity. A situation occurs. We have thoughts and feelings about that situation. Those thoughts and feelings influence our behavior. Our behavior produces consequences.

CBT taught me something important:

The way we think matters. It can influence the decisions we make, the relationships we build, and ultimately the lives we create. I still believe that. Years later, I encountered another idea through Eckhart Tolle's book A New Earth. Tolle suggests that we are not our thoughts. Thoughts arise, pass through us, and often disappear. We can observe them without identifying with them.

At first glance, these two perspectives seem different. One teaches us to examine and restructure our thinking. The other invites us to step back and observe it.

Yet both are ultimately asking a similar question:

What shapes human behavior?

Additional thoughts emerged…

Why do two people experience the same situation and respond in dramatically different ways?

And what shapes our perception before a thought even arises?

For nearly twenty years, I've explored these questions through corrections, coaching, yoga, and more recently, Ayurveda. I’ve also noticed how different my assessments in Ayurveda are now as a practitioner compared to my initial interactions with people on supervision as a parole officer. One is grounded in risk, needs, compliance and conditions. The other is grounded in curiosity, who is this person sitting in front of me right now.  Each discipline uses a different language.

In criminal justice, we have become remarkably sophisticated at identifying risk. We assess it. Measure it. Categorize it. Develop interventions around it. These efforts have contributed important knowledge to the field. Yet I increasingly find myself wondering if risk is only part of the picture. What if we became equally curious about the ecology from which behavior emerges?

When I say ecology, I mean the full internal and external environment influencing a person's experience. Often these are lumped together in either the responsivity area of RNR or as basic needs. I would offer that either way, there needs to be a much more expansive view of these environments. 

External ecology might include:

• Housing

• Employment

• Relationships

• Education

• Community

• Access to quality resources (ie: food)

• Safety

• Day to day routines

Internal ecology might include:

• Quality of sleep

• Type of digestion

• Physical health

• Stress

• Energy levels

• Trauma and trauma exposure 

• Substance use

• Constitution (prakriti)

• Current imbalance (vrikriti)

• Grief 

Two people may have similar resources on paper. Both may have housing. Employment. Transportation. Family support.

Yet one person may be exhausted, reactive, impulsive, and overwhelmed.

The other may be grounded, reflective, patient, and steady.

Traditional assessments may identify similar needs. Yet something important is happening beneath the surface. This is where Ayurveda offered me a fascinating lens. Ayurveda describes three fundamental qualities of mind known as the gunas.

Tamas reflects inertia, heaviness, dullness, and resistance.

Rajas reflects movement, striving, ambition, activity, and turbulence.

Sattva reflects clarity, balance, discernment, harmony, and wisdom.

These qualities are constantly shifting. They are influenced by food, sleep, stress, relationships, environment, and countless other factors. In other words, they are influenced by ecology.

This perspective became even more compelling when I encountered the concept known in social psychology as the Fundamental Attribution Error. Human beings have a tendency to explain other people's behavior through character while explaining our own behavior through circumstances.

Someone cuts me off in traffic?

They're reckless.

I cut someone off?

There was a blind spot.

I'm running late.

I didn't see them.

In criminal justice, this can become: They're dangerous. They're manipulative. They don't care.

But another possibility exists.

What if behavior is not simply a reflection of character? What if behavior is also a reflection of ecology? What if the qualities being cultivated within a person's mind are influenced by the ecology surrounding them? And what if those same mental qualities influence the ecology they help create?

An individual operating from clarity, balance, and discernment may build very different relationships, routines, and environments than someone operating from chronic agitation, fear, or hopelessness. The ecology shapes the mind. The mind shapes the ecology. Both are continually influencing one another.

This question has led me to wonder whether we might expand our traditional understanding of behavior.

Perhaps it looks something like this:

Ecology + Mental Qualities (Sattva, Rajas, Tamas) + Prakrti/Vrikrit

↓

Situation

↓

Perception

↓

Thoughts and Feelings

↓

Choices and Actions

↓

Outcomes

↓

Future Ecology

Under this framework, behavior remains important. Accountability remains important. Consequences remain important. But behavior is no longer the sole focus. Instead, we become curious about the ecology producing the behavior. We become curious about what is feeding imbalance. And what might support greater balance. We can see there are many points to intervene. And the intervention can be both in community supervision and also as a preventative practice. 

For decades, much of my work has focused on reducing harm.

Increasingly, I find myself interested in another question: What helps people thrive? What creates vitality? What supports balance? What allows the best parts of a person to emerge?

Because if ecology shapes the qualities of the mind, and those qualities influence perception, behavior, and outcomes, then perhaps one of the most important questions we can ask is not how we punish imbalance, but how we cultivate wellbeing.

Especially when many of the imbalances people carry were never entirely their own creation. Trauma. Poverty. Violence. Neglect. Isolation. Generations of unresolved suffering. None of these remove responsibility.

But they do invite a deeper level of curiosity.

The more I study both corrections and Ayurveda, the more I find myself returning to the idea of wholeness. When we begin with risk, we often become skilled at identifying problems. When we begin with balance, we become curious about the entire ecology surrounding a person. Beginning from wholeness changes what we see. Because if you begin with wholeness, you're much less likely to reduce someone to the most problematic thing (or things) they've ever done. You become curious about the person beneath the behavior. The ecology beneath the outcome. The conditions beneath the imbalance. And perhaps that curiosity opens the door to a different set of questions.

Not only:

"How do we prevent harm?"

But also:

"How do we cultivate vitality?"

"How do we support balance?"

"What helps people thrive?"

What if we learned to see behavior not as the beginning of the story, but as one expression of a much larger ecology?

Perhaps that is where the conversation begins.