For very long time, my first associations with the word self-discipline were the words must / should do, obligations, constraints, willpower, forcing myself while going through uncomfortable and painful stages... No wonder that a rebel inside of me was sabotaging all my plans to introduce more self-discipline!
I cannot blame only that rebel voice reacting as soon as I tell myself that I must do something. There was often a tight knot of beliefs, convictions and also contradictions, in big part subconscious and not verbalized. Some items that I can identify now were focusing on the goal rather on the way towards it, wanting to skip the steps by putting extra effort in the beginning to get there faster and… overdoing it. And often, as soon as the goal felt too far away and I didn’t enjoy the journey bringing me there, I labelled it “boring”
Another pitfall was distraction: other appealing options popping up or sometimes just mundane things that gave me comfort of familiarity. Or putting myself under pressure and expectation to create something wonderful from the first tries on or to master a skill very quickly and anything below perfection would be disappointing. And as perfection is same as the infinity in mathematics – one can only trend towards it, without ever reaching it – there was unavoidably some disappointment. And to make it more complicated, sometimes I didn’t really want those things for real but I was just influenced by others and believed it would be good to do it for whatever the reason
Some help to loosen this tight knot came on one of the last days in a video from Yoga with Adriene, where Adriene says that in yoga self-/discipline is seen as a tool which helps us to access what otherwise would be inaccessible (I think she worded it slightly differently but that is the message that stuck to my brain). Those words gave me a new perspective on discipline – much more liberating, empowering and constructive: I don’t have to be disciplined, but I can if I want to! If I want to experience something new, something what otherwise I wouldn’t get a chance to reach and live it!
I was thinking that while holding the crow yoga pose for ten seconds longer – no big deal but it gave me a lot of joy, as I reached a point that a couple weeks earlier wasn’t accessible to me. You would say that obviously practice makes the master – nothing new or special here, but for me this change from perspective from the “must” to the “can” was very helpful and that is the reason I wanted to share it with you
Fairy Travels 