The Jain philosopher Haribhadra Sūri, writing in 8th-century Gujarat, observed that most people treat their spiritual practice like a lamp they carry only when it's already light outside — active when conditions favor it, abandoned when they don't. His insight about what he called *yoga* in the broadest sense — any disciplined sequence of acts that transforms the practitioner — was that the habit itself is not the behavior. It's the relationship between the behavior and the conditions that make you capable of choosing it. Behavioral scientist Wendy Wood's research on habit architecture arrives at the same place from a different direction: what she calls 'context-cueing' means your habits don't live in your will, they live in your environment, and when the environment shifts, the habit doesn't transfer — the *cue-response bond* does. What this means practically is that a habit you've built inside one set of conditions (a particular gym, a specific morning window, a reliable desk) is not portable. It's bonded to its birthplace. The actual work of durable habit-building is not repeating the act — it's deliberately, occasionally, practicing the act under friction: different time, different location, different internal state. That's how the cue-response bond becomes broad enough to travel with you rather than requiring you to return to it.

Name one habit you'd describe as solid — then identify every environmental condition it silently depends on. What happens to it when one of those conditions disappears?

Drawing from Jain Philosophy of Practice synthesized with Behavioral Habit Psychology — Haribhadra Sūri — Yogabindu (c. 8th century CE), on the conditions-dependence of transformative practice; synthesized with Wendy Wood — Good Habits, Bad Habits (2019), on context-cueing and habit architecture