On Discipline

I decided to post outside of my usual tarot spiritual memoirs today, to mix it up a little.  Fun?  Fun!

I have lived both highly disciplined, and completely undisciplined periods of my life.  I've had times where I worked three jobs, or worked full-time while attending school full-time and volunteering.  I've run two marathons, and competed in 5 sprint triathlons and one olympic-distance triathlon.  My mom often said when we were little, "Sometimes we have do to things we don't want to do," to get me to do my chores, and I lived the first 28 years of my life holding tightly to that concept and grinding my way though challenging, and sometimes nauseatingly uninteresting tasks.

Did I mention my training with the Federation?

I've always done this with a belief, an understanding, that if I nobly put my nose to the grindstone, there'd be some kind of payoff.  If I worked hard, I'd not only get promotions, and move into positions of higher authority and respect, but get better pay.  If I exercised and ate well, I'd not only have a strong, healthy body, but would feel vital and full of energy.  If I followed God and said my prayers and read scriptures daily and went to church and served, etc., I'd feel connection and closeness with God.  That's what I believed, so that's why I pressed on.  Overall, I was very disappointed.  My labors never seemed to have a payoff really at all, and when they did, they didn't sate me, they didn't satisfy the debt of effort I'd put in.

So naturally, I became jaded.   :)

I live today with minimal commitments and minimal goals and ambitions.  I don't force myself, for the most part, to do things I don't want to do.  I just do whatever I feel like, and if that means laying in bed all day, I lay in bed all day.  If that means watching a lot of TV, I watch a lot of TV.  And more often than I would expect, I get these moments of energy where I'm up for washing the dishes, scooping the cat box, going for a walk, or playing with the kids.  And, to be totally honest, I still don't feel sated or satisfied.  Hmmm... this isn't what I want either.

A few months ago, I was talking to some friends of mine, and I asked them what they thought of discipline.  These friends and I share similar spiritual perspectives, and I wanted to know, in their opinion, what role discipline played for them in spiritual practice.  Let's say with meditation.  Meditation, by nature, is a practice of discipline.  It's very boring and difficult to sit silent, unmoving, and unthinking for longer than like 30 seconds.  So by engaging in meditation, I'm buying in to the payoffs of discipline.  But when discipline makes me feel like I'm "going through the motions," or I get resentful because I really don't feel like doing the task but force myself to anyway, the whole point is lost, right?  How about when I see no fruits or outcomes from a practice, and I don't enjoy it overall, do I discipline myself to mindlessly drone on, or call bull-shit on the practice to prevent myself from entering a state of brainwashing?  Where's the line here?

One of those friends, Crystal (not my sister), made an interesting point to me.  The root word for discipline is the same as for disciple, and comes from a bunch of different meanings through the development of language, either dealing with military training (yikes!), punishment or correction of wrong behavior (yikes!), or instruction and education (yay!).  Let me just copy and paste the etymological roots from an online dictionary:

discipline (n.) 

early 13c., "penitential chastisement; punishment," from O.Fr. descepline (11c.) "discipline, physical punishment; teaching; suffering; martyrdom," and directly from L.disciplina "instruction given, teaching, learning, knowledge," also "object of instruction, knowledge, science, military discipline," from discipulus (see disciple). Sense of "treatment that corrects or punishes" is from notion of "order necessary for instruction." The Latin word is glossed in O.E. by þeodscipe. Meaning "branch of instruction or education" is first recorded late 14c. Meaning "military training" is from late 15c.; that of "orderly conduct as a result of training" is from c.1500.

Source: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=discipline

Um ... none of that up there seems remotely healthy, except maybe the "instruction given, teaching, learning, knowledge" part... 

But relating discipline to disciple, as I understand the word disciple, feels a little more reasonable.  Disciples follow because they want to.  And because they want to, the payoff is in the following itself, not in the expectations of an outcome down the road.  Let's say you have a furry little kitten rolling around on the ground in front of you, and you can't help yourself, you must pick up and snuggle that kitten.  And whether the kitten mellows out and purrs, or scratches your eyes out, you're not disappointed in yourself for trying because you were compelled to do the action, without an expectation of outcome.  The point was to touch that kitten's furry pelt, not to make a best friend for life.

Tell me you aren't compelled to touch his mutated-extra-toed foot!

This extends to another one of my favorite topics, beyond cats ... food.  We don't eat coconut shrimp sushi with mango sliced on top with a side of sake because we expect it to give us superpowers ... we eat it because the moment it hits our tongue we get our reward.  The reward is the action itself.

I guess this could be called "living in the moment."  And it is actually that same concept, except discipleship also indicates standing for something.  

What are my core values and aspirations?  Take time to identify them.  Then, how do I live those right here, right now?  This is how we differentiate discipleship from hedonism.  Discipleship stands for something, it has core values it uses as a litmus test for every action, for every moment.

I created a graph to show all of these relationships.  (Awesome, right?!?!)

So when it comes to a difficult but possibly meaningful task:

1. Eeyore would say: "It's going to fail anyway.  What's the point?"  Futurized negative expectations, no values to fight that.
2. Laziness would say: "Maybe," then do nothing.  At least they're acknowledging how they feel in the moment to a certain extent, but no values to make that mean anything.
3. The hedonist would say: "How soon will it bring me pleasure?"  The focus on right now says they're living in the moment, and to their credit, a dedication to pleasure is a type of value. 
4. Old-school discipline would say: "I'll do it even if I hate it, because I believe in it, so it's bound to pay off in the long run."
5. The true disciple would say: "What do I really care about in life, and who do I want to be?  Will doing this thing be an expression of those two things or not?"

I think those two sentences are the key:

What do I really care about in life, and who do I want to be?  Will doing this thing be an expression of those two things, or not?

Note that we aren't asking if doing the thing will "bring us" what we care about in life or "make us" who we want to be.  We're asking if the act itself is an expression of who and what we aspire to.

Now, how do I get myself to a place where I ask these questions every day, all day?  It's hard to remember these questions before making decisions, and keep myself focused on what I really care about and who I want to be.

There's only one answer: I discipline myself into it.

Just kidding.

But seriously, I think a way is to maybe put up reminders (or something similar) to ask the questions, and if you get in the habit, it's something that will work for you.  If you don't, don't worry about it.

Here's a paragraph I LOVE from A Course in Miracles:

"Decisions are continuous.  You do not always know when you are making them.  But with a little practice with the ones you recognize, a set begins to form which sees you through the rest.  It is not wise to let yourself become preoccupied with every step you take.  The proper set, adopted consciously each time you wake, will put you well ahead.  And if you find resistance strong and dedication weak, you are not ready.  Do not fight yourself.  But think about the kind of day you want, and tell yourself there is a way in which this very day can happen just like that.  Then try again to have the day you want."

--A Course in Miracles, Ch 30, Section I,  Paragraph 1.

It's not about "discipline" ... it's about deciding where you'd like to go today, what you'd like to see, then doing whatever creates that.  When options come up that would take you in a different direction, if you know what you want, you won't be interested in the distractions.  But if you're not really dedicated to what you think you want, you may find it worth pausing to see what the other options are.  All of this is ok.

The real way to progress, the real key to it all, is to find out what you want: who you want to be and what's important to you.  If you are really clear on those things, the rest comes.

Do I know this because I live it, or because I read it in a book, or because I made it up?  Well, I know I hate old-school discipline, and that my lazy-hedonistic-Eeyore faze is burning out - those two things I know for sure.  I also know that this theme is pretty consistent across most self-help/spiritual books I read.  I also know that when I make my decisions based on where I want to be and who I want to be, I don't feel as pressed to "justify" the decisions, either to myself or others.  That alone brings a lot of peace to my over-caffeinated mind.  So I'll roll with this for a while - it feels good.  It feels right.  It makes a lot of sense, especially in the context of cats and food, so I'm down with expanding the application.

I do have to admit, it's scary to say "who I want to be" and "what I stand for" because it's changed and evolved so many times in my life that I hate going down that path again (Eeyore!).  But I think in the past I was focused more on details than the big picture.  So I'll focus on the big picture, and allow it to stay fluid and open-ended until I feel more settled with it.  Of course, I'll let you know how it goes.