“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts. ”Buddha.
So you’ve made a commitment. Maybe it’s taken you a long time to make that commitment, but you’ve now done it. And you intend with everything you have and you know yourself to be, to follow that path of commitment wherever it may lead. (Not all commitments outcomes are exactly as we had dreamed, but all commitments will lead you on a journey of discovery – either to the result you had imagined or something entirely different – whose destination you couldn’t have arrived at had you not made that initial commitment).
The Discipline Tool
A tool critical to following the path of commitment is discipline. You will need discipline for several reasons.
Whatever erroneous beliefs that are in the depths of your unconsciousness that you haven’t yet allowed to surface and be healed and released, will continue to throw roadblocks in the way of your moving in a direction that threatens those beliefs. The roadblocks will take the form of resistance, rebellion, procrastination – whatever it takes to distract you from that inner commitment.
If you aren’t aware that this can happen, you will be off course before you can say, Jack Robinson.
These distractions can be very cunning – you won’t realize till later that this is what happened. In a sense, those buried beliefs are fighting for their lives; they think they are there to protect you from some threat that might or might not have been real, a long time ago.
These beliefs are embedded in deep, long-held neural pathways that, like a river rushing through a canyon with rock walls, can seem as though they are there to stay forever. But they aren’t. Your job is to catch them in action and release them. A catch-and-release program is all you need.
Identifying Distraction Beliefs
Here’s how they will look.
You start on your committed pathway.
Something really important comes up that you have to deal with first. Is that really true?
You have a new brilliant idea that you must check out with a bunch of research – you are really excited about it, and it takes over your day.
This excitement can make everything else in your life pale in comparison, especially the commitment you started with.
You daydream, wasting precious time when you could be doing other, less stimulating things in your day.
You get extremely fatigued.
You get allergies out of the blue – (yes, physical problems can be distractions created by the mind too).
You get ill, maybe back or neck pain.
You’ll do anything except invest time in your commitment; procrastination takes hold (often as an apathetic or delaying emotion).
You become aware of a brain track, a conversation, going around and around in your mind.
You distract yourself by eating, TV, busyness, sleeping, partying, etc.
You … (add your own).
All of this is the decoying of the mind, whatever it’s causes. The solution is disciplining your mind to bring it back to a present moment focus and your commitment, recognizing that the distractions aren’t who you really are – they are a function of buried brain tracks.
So what IS discipline? And what do you think about the need for discipline?
Where do you fit in the debate about the value of discipline? What do you think about the need for an unformed mind, like a child’s, to be disciplined, or for a dog to be under control? Certainly, when you see undisciplined children, you wonder about the value of discipline, and yet there are justifiable arguments that too much discipline breaks the spirit.
Organizations such as the military depend upon discipline, at times being a matter of life or death. A highly trained Navy SEAL team can move as one entity in an operation, which it could never do without each person having intense self-discipline along with team discipline.
Dictionary definitions vary, and include “training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement.” The word ‘discipline’ is taken from the Latin disciplina, meaning “teaching or learning” and comes from the root Latin word discipulus, meaning pupil or disciple.
Discipline often means training or forcing the mind, (or the subject), to do something it wouldn’t otherwise be doing, mostly with the intention of a positive outcome, but often poorly administered.
Rebellion – Because I Can
As a child, I associated my mother’s discipline with having to do or be something I wasn’t doing or being, and not knowing why, just that it was “because I said so“! My father would say upon my questioning ‘why?’, “Don’t do what I do, do what I say“. Not knowing why I should do or be something seems to have been my downfall. It so often resulted in rebellion: not for any good reason, but just because I could, because the discipline felt as though my wonderful, free-spirited, natural self was being fenced in, limited, held down, held back.
Freedom of Spirit
I look at my dog Jazzy, bounding through a field of wildflowers and I know the freedom of a spirit set free in joyous and full expression of Life.
I also see that she has, alongside her free spirit, a guardian angel in the form of me, to look out for her and not allow her to get into trouble where she might hurt herself. I discipline her to be safe, happy, and healthy. I make sure her diet is healthy and that she doesn’t get too overweight; I make sure she has her vaccinations on time and that she is groomed and walked, and played with and loved.
And life is good for us both.
Harnessing Energy for a Greater Purpose
Let’s say there is a beautiful, crystal clear mountain spring bubbling up in a wide open meadow. The water pours freely and abundantly from this spring and runs out into the meadow in any direction where the level is lower. Some of it is soaked into the ground, providing much-needed nourishment for the grasses and flowers growing there. Some of it washes out the softer earth, which then forms a channel in the ground for the water to run along: a stream or bubbling brook. There are no limitations on where the water that is pouring forth goes, other than the law of gravity and the softness of the surrounding earth.
Along comes man with a mind, a clear mind. Man’s mind says, “If I build a canal, I can then harness the power of this water as it flows and builds momentum”. In time, man’s mind devises further methods, such as dams and hydroelectric machinery, to harness the water, which in turn creates electricity to be used by many people. The innate power of the water is disciplined to create something larger than itself. It is still the same water with the same properties.
In the same way, we can harness our own energy – the energy that is who/what we are; that can neither be created nor destroyed. This energy is the true Self, not the mind-created little self the mind thinks it is. We access this Self through the Present Moment, and that requires constant discipline.
The clear mind is one that is aware and conscious. It isn’t rebelling for the sake of rebelling, or because it likes or doesn’t like something. It doesn’t need to be in control. It just needs to be in harmony and alignment with Life Itself and to be willing to be guided by that Presence.
Rebellious Thinking ISN’T WHO I AM!
The discipline needed here is the discipline to recognize that “This thinking isn’t me” until the mind gets it. It is the discipline to bring the mind back into the Present Moment from the past or the future, where it tends to stray.
When we let our minds run unchecked and undisciplined, they will run on automatic, which is why we say it is so important to live in the present moment. Unchecked, our minds gravitate to the past: guilt, or the future: fear, worry, doubt, which keeps us from the only thing we really have, which is the present moment.
If you think about it, even planning for the future takes place in the Present Moment and is most successful when unconscious beliefs aren’t running the show.
Creating New Brain Tracks
Learned thinking, beliefs, and behavior that run in the unconscious background are what I call brain tracks – more detail here.
Supporting a fresh commitment starts with establishing new habits or brain tracks.
If we become conscious of our brain tracks, then we can learn to dissociate from those that don’t work and create new ‘brain tracks‘ that serve us better, just like the walls of the river canal that now carry the power of the water to be used for greater purposes.
The first step is awareness – awareness that our brain is on automatic and will fall into the old ways of thinking and distraction until such time as the pattern is interrupted. Becoming a ‘Rat Catcher‘ which I wrote about here – is a good way to approach this step.
Mind will rebel. That’s what it does. So, rather than try to make major changes all at once – too big a bite of the apple will set you up for failure – (especially if this new commitment is very important to you) here are some tips to help with the discipline of consolidating new habits.
Very small steps. A little at a time. Sneak under the radar of unconscious fears.
Consistency – a little bit regularly keep the pot simmering. A lot, occasionally, means you have to boil the pot from cold every time which uses a lot more energy and leaves room in those idle times for resistance to move in and take over.
When you become aware you are indulging in a distraction, say that’s not me, take a deep breath, and move on. You don’t have to analyze the cause. Just knowing that’s not me is enough for the moment. You may have to repeat often if it is an intense situation, but that’s what it takes.
Don’t make yourself wrong. Accept this is what is happening, and move on. Keep it simple. Don’t allow I should/shouldn’t have. Just – this is what is.
Acceptance of the process. Don’t resist and rebel. Instead just recognize.
No matter the degree of difficulty or the time it is taking, it helps to remind yourself what you are doing and why.
You are learning to discipline mind to live in the Present Moment. In the Present Moment lie answers, inspiration, solutions, peace of mind, and acceptance.
Becoming a Disciple
Then there is the word disciple, one meaning of which comes from Wiktionary: A person who learns from another, especially one who then teaches others.
I like to interpret this as my mind learning from my Higher Self or Presence. When I still this mind, I experience the Now. I am able to see, hear, and know the truth, and the truth sets me free. I discipline my mind to become a disciple of Life Itself.
I kept hearing a bible phrase running around in my mind about ‘entering through the narrow gate’. So I looked it up. Here it is, and it makes perfect sense with regards to the need for disciplining the mind.
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.
Guard your thoughts. Unchecked thoughts are the broad gate. Discipline those thoughts if you want to succeed in your commitments.
Remember the Buddha’s wise counsel: “Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts”.
