The dis­ci­pline to look inside

I do want to con­tinue to encour­age you to com­ment on these arti­cles. That being said, I’ve had issues with the links at the bot­tom of the arti­cle. The eas­i­est way to go to the online ver­sion of the arti­cle is to click on its title, above!

So, here we go with the last few self-discipline ideas.

As I said last week, this is a hard sell for most, as there is the mis­taken notion that life is “sup­posed to” be easy. Exer­cis­ing restraint and dilignece is not the norm.

First, let me unpack restraint.

We all do stuff we later regret. The point of hav­ing the sen­sa­tion of regret is to fix in our minds the neg­a­tive con­se­quences of the errant behav­iour. Con­tend­ing against this is our ego voice, which is hell bent on get­ting us to stay stuck while end­lessly repeat­ing the silly behaviour.

Restraint is stop­ping doing what does not work.

As opposed to jus­ti­fy­ing it, blam­ing some­thing or some­one, or just plain doing it again out of spite or stubbornness.

It’s much the same with the 4 items to fol­low. Each requires dili­gence to prac­tice and restraint to resist com­ing up with 10,000 excuses.

Just as a note, most peo­ple exer­cise restraint by using it to resist doing what they need to do. In other words, they know, for exam­ple, that being more open and hon­est would be a good thing, and they then gen­er­ate a long list of excuses to resist mak­ing the change. So, again, most clients I know stay stuck not for lack of under­stand­ing, but rather out of resist­ing the new, the scary of the chargy.

4. begin a practice

Now, this can actu­ally be any­thing, but we need, des­per­ately, to be com­mit­ted to some form of “train­ing dis­ci­pline.” I’m fond of east­ern approaches, such as yoga, med­i­ta­tion, tai, chi, and the mar­tial arts.

Using med­i­ta­tion as an exam­ple, it does no good to fid­dle at it. You gotta do it reg­u­larly — most cen­tres sug­gest no less than 5 times a week. The point, how­ever, (and this applies to all the items on the list,) is not to grimly sit there, suck­ing up pain.

The point is to sit, while observ­ing yourself.

The same could be said for any of the above tech­niques. I notice at yoga class that I am often quite deeply “into” the pose — into the feel of the energy flow. This is dif­fer­ent from watch­ing other, men­tally grip­ing about the length or depth of the pose, won­der­ing what’s for din­ner, etc. If I go there, and I do, briefly, I find that my con­nec­tion to myself dis­ap­pears into the thought of “other things.”

The point of a dis­ci­plined prac­tice is to become aware of our bod­ily sen­sa­tions, and the work­ing of our minds. In other words, none of these prac­tices “quiet the mind and still the body.” Quite the con­trary, one becomes aware of the end­less flux and low of life. One begins to actu­ally notice the moment-by-moment-ness of liv­ing. This in turn helps us to grasp life (and oth­ers!) loosely, and then to let go.

5. be your­self — accept yourself

Some­times I hate what I see

Because we’ve all been brought up in “judge­ment–land,” it’s no won­der we are so hard on our­selves. This approach has sup­port in Freudian cir­cles, and remem­ber, Freud was pretty much the fore­bear of mod­ern ther­apy, and mod­ern, West­ern culture.

I was talk­ing with a client the other day, and he men­tioned that a Freudian he knew spent an entire sem­i­nar encour­ag­ing peo­ple to fig­ure out which par­ent was to blame for their inabil­ity to cope. My approach is different.

I sug­gest that my clients notice when they are doing stuff that gets them lousy results, and then to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. Now, it may well be, for exam­ple, that a client learned to yell from his dad, but this is totally irrel­e­vant to what one does now.

The authen­tic per­son sim­ply says, again and again, “Yes, I have a propen­sity to (what­ever,) and this time I choose not to.”

That is the accep­tance part.

I want to know who I am and what I tend toward, and my rea­son for dis­cov­er­ing this stuff is to accept that this is a part of me. The self-discipline part is that, despite the propen­sity toward, say, crit­i­ciz­ing oth­ers, I can choose, this time, and again and again, another path.

Being your­self is enact­ing yourself.

There are whole aspects of our per­son­al­i­ties that never see the light of day, usu­ally because some­one, some time, told us they didn’t like that aspect. I encour­age you to be much more exper­i­men­tal with your per­son­al­ity, your skills and your desires.

6. open your­self up

We sug­gest body­work and breath­work, but really, any­thing that allows you to drop your guard­ed­ness and resis­tance to self-revelation would be a good thing.

This is what hap­pens work­ing with a good Zen teacher or a com­pe­tent ther­a­pist.

These rela­tion­ships pro­vide the end­less oppor­tu­nity for dia­logue and revelation.

Same with mak­ing a total hon­esty com­mu­ni­ca­tion pact with your inti­mate part­ner. The door to who you are remains tightly sealed, from the inside. Only you can open the lock.

This requires self-discipline because self-revelation car­ries with it the poten­tial for dis­ap­point­ment. Nonethe­less, being will­ing to let down our walls is essen­tial for learn­ing about what lies just under our con­scious awareness.

In body­work, there is the poten­tial to learn about your emo­tions and feel­ings, tight­ness and charge. And boy, does that stuff scare a lot of peo­ple. I kind of laugh, because I know that this kind of work is essen­tial for being whole and hon­est. Yet, again, let­ting oth­ers know what’s going on “in there” flies in the face of what we have been trained to do.

All I can say is, find some­one you trust, and do it.

7. use “don’t know mind”

“Don’t know mind” is exactly what it sounds like. It’s actu­ally a lifestyle choice - I choose to stop myself from think­ing I have a clue about any­one else, and I acknowl­edge that I really don’t know all that much about myself either.

I acknowl­edge a life-walk of learn­ing more about myself in the only way I can –buy dig­ging around inside, non-judgementally. With assis­tance, with hon­esty, and through let­ting oth­ers know what, pro­vi­sion­ally, I have discovered.

Every­one else must be let off the hook. You do not know what’s up for another, and never will! Not only that, but if some­one tells you what’s up, you imme­di­ately fil­ter that through your own expe­ri­ences, and what you end up with is your expe­ri­ence of what the other per­son went through. This is not the same thing!

This does not get bet­ter with prac­tice. The best you can hope for is to lis­ten, to store the data, and to thwart your rush to judg­ment. “Hmm. So that is what is up for you. Thank you for shar­ing” is about the best any of us can do.

Instead, remem­ber that stuff and expe­ri­ence “just is.” See, hear, expe­ri­ence, and move on. In the end, noth­ing much is hap­pen­ing, anyway