It’s all about balance

First of all, thanks to all the peo­ple who com­mented after last week’s arti­cle. I’m pleased to know that these arti­cles are impor­tant to you. Just as a side note, our 10^th anniver­sary of writ­ing these arti­cles got missed com­pletely (it was back in May.)
Hard to believe — that’s a lot of writing.

Any­way, I want to unpack the whole self-discipline idea

One of the things I’ve noticed is how quickly self-discipline gets hooked with some kind of tor­ture. In other words, the ego, ever look­ing to main­tain the sta­tus quo, imme­di­ately starts rais­ing all kinds of red flags.

The most typ­i­cal is the, “But, it shouldn’t be this hard” argu­ment. As if the cos­mos is set up so that, like a juke box, we press a cer­tain but­ton and, because we want to hear it, out comes only that song.

As we end­lessly say, what hap­pens in real life is just the oppo­site. You can push the but­ton as often as you want, and occa­sion­ally or even often the “right” song will play. How­ever, quite often you will push, and noth­ing hap­pens, or you push and some­thing com­pletely unex­pected hap­pens.

And those odd twists of real­ity might even come in groups.

What hap­pens, hap­pens. It doesn’t mean any­thing, and assuredly doesn’t mean you did some­thing wrong. It also does not mean that the cos­mos screwed up. What is means is, “This is what is hap­pen­ing right now. Deal with it.”

This is where self-discipline comes in.

I’ve been hav­ing an e-mail con­ver­sa­tion with a new Aus­tralian friend, and was talk­ing about self dis­ci­pline. I wrote:

“Let’s look at it his way: what kind of effort was involved for you, as a kid, to learn to ride a bike? If you were like me, you fell a lot, and then rode but didn’t know how to stop, so you fell, and then later, when you didn’t pay atten­tion, you fell. But once you learned, it stuck.
Same with learn­ing to walk, to run, etc. We for­get that it was dif­fer­ent and chal­leng­ing. How­ever, we per­sisted. This was self-discipline. There was noth­ing force­ful — it was sim­ply doing what was required.”

Now, imag­ine think­ing, “I won’t bother to learn to ride a bike until I need to ride one.” What hap­pens? Well, some­thing “bad” hap­pens and you leap to your bike, jump on, and promptly fall on your ass.

This is how most peo­ple live their lives.

Boy, this is start­ing off well!

They get into a mess (or messes) and then attempt to do some­thing dif­fer­ent to fix it. Mostly they fail because they have not had time to mas­ter the new way of being, or they decide in advance that the effort is way too much.

On the pos­i­tive side, this is also the AA model—the approach taken by peo­ple who use hit­ting bot­tom as the impe­tus to think about doing things dif­fer­ently. Painful, painful.

Far bet­ter, like learn­ing to ride a bike, to sim­ply start, for no other rea­son than to start. You start with­out drama, because you sim­ply want to learn to do an new thing. In this way, the drama is elim­i­nated from the process of being self-disciplined.

Remem­ber, no mat­ter how “bad” things are, the only way your life will change is if you do.

Despite all the whin­ing about “It’s difficult—it’s chal­leng­ing.” Of course it is! Wait­ing for “things to change” for exte­nals to coöper­ate, for oth­ers to get their act together is a mon­u­men­tal waste of time. Things are as they are, oth­ers are as they are, and none of that is under your control.

What is under your con­trol is how you live your life.

So, let’s look at some things you can do, right now, to begin to shift your­self off of dead centre.

1. It begins with language

OK, lan­guage is key. And that’s not just seman­tics, he says with a grin.

Exam­ples of silly language:

1. “How can I get ahead? This sit­u­a­tion is putting so much pres­sure on me, and the dead­line is stress­ing me out. I’m in pain, and that’s shut­ting me down and depriv­ing me of enjoyment.”
2. “My hus­band is an idiot! All he ever does is mis­be­have, and that makes me angry. And when he makes me angry, I have no choice but to yell at him, cut him off, and demand that he change.”
3. “My kid mis­be­haved, so I yelled at her. What else could I do? I have to teach her right and wrong.”

Now, I hear vari­a­tions of these all the time. In each case, such lan­guage comes from “ego,” which is invested in 2 things:

1. blam­ing exter­nals, and
2. keep­ing you stuck (and there­fore pre­dictable, as your ego hates change.)

The begin­ning of exit­ing this drama is to change your lan­guage so as to dis­em­power your ego.

Zen, by the way, is not about elim­i­nat­ing the ego. It’s about learn­ing how it works, so that you can stop doing its bid­ding. The ego no longer is able to pull the wool over your eyes, and you stop liv­ing under its illusions.

So,

1. “I am choos­ing to see my life as I always do when I feel stuck. I am putting intense pres­sure on myself, and blam­ing the sit­u­a­tion. I am spend­ing so much time blam­ing the sit­u­a­tion that I’m behind on a dead­line, and I’m stress­ing myself over this. I’m dredg­ing up painful mem­o­ries that sup­port my belief that some­thing is hap­pen­ing to me, shut­ting myself down, and doing every­thing I can to deprive myself of enjoy­ment.“
   Then, “So, I’ll have a big breath, let go of the sto­ries for a minute, and do a bit of work on the project.”
2. “My hus­band is not behav­ing accord­ing to my fan­tasy, and I am mak­ing myself quite angry that he won’t live his life the way I want him to. I use anger to try to manip­u­late him into doing what I want, and if anger doesn’t work, I up the ante by refus­ing to have sex with him. Rather than work on my own life and issues, I make it “all about him,” and con­tin­u­ally demand that he spend his life mak­ing things bet­ter for me. I never, how­ever, con­sider doing the same for him.“
   Then, “So, I’ll have a deep breath and tell my hus­band how I am upset­ting myself, and then let him know what I will choose to do next.”
3. My kid is a kid, and kids say and do ‘kid-things.’ Some­times she doesn’t pay close atten­tion, and stuff hap­pens. My ego gets involved, and I lash out and yell.“
   Then, “So, I’ll have a breath, and rather than yell at her, I choose to invite her to notice what she’s doing, and to come up with an alternative.”

Woe, or woe are I!

2. Drop the “but… it’s hard!”

This really is a follow-on for the above point.

The norm with behav­ioural shift­ing is for the ego to clev­erly list off all the rea­sons why the shift will be either

a) hard,
b) take a long time, or
c) require some­one else to do some­thing first.

So, lis­ten to that ego voice with com­pas­sion, have a breath, and shift some­thing.

Remem­ber, you learned every­thing you’ve learned by actu­ally doing some­thing. Now, we’re work­ing on learn­ing and enact­ing new behav­iours to coun­ter­act what you’ve learned that does not work. This means, quite sim­ply, that per­sis­tence, with­out whin­ing, is the only way through the silliness.

3. Stop mak­ing excuses

Sim­i­larly, you’ll need to notice how quickly you excuse con­tin­u­ing to enact ways of doing your life that you say you want to shift. Again, notice how quickly you blame either the behav­iour of oth­ers or “genetics.”

This is your crafy lit­tle ego, set­ting you up to stay stuck.

After all, if some­one else has to do some­thing first, then you excuse your­self, and sit back and wait.

Same with genet­ics, only “more so.” If you think you can’t con­trol your tem­per or your com­plain­ing, or what­ever, because that’s what mom or dad did, again, you’re stuck, only this time, per­ma­nently. It’s con­ve­nient to try this, and with it comes the explicit or implied, “That’s just the way I am—you’ll just have to put up with it” gam­bit. When I try this, Dar­bella just laughs at me.

Stop mak­ing excuses, make another choice, and do it.

Right now. Pretty soon, all that “genetic block­age” baloney will be a dis­tant memory.

Next week, we’ll look at some or all of the remain­ing ideas.

4. begin a practice

5. be your­self — accept yourself

6. open your­self up

7. use “don’t know mind”