Discipline

evolve-mma.com

So much good advice/so many truths of life are unfortunately often manipulated to mean something that serves to uphold the white supremacist capitalist cishetero patriarchy by people in power, instead of something meant to help us transcend it.

Discipline is one of those things.

Under capitalism, workers are a means to an end. There is no care or consideration, there is no empathy or even a second thought about the fact that your life force is finite—in fact, that’s part of the reason things work the way they do! So they can use you up as close to your death as possible, so The State doesn’t have to take care of you for very long once you are no longer a “productive member” of it. Never mind that you dedicated your precious time and energy to providing a service to your community (every job is a service, every job helps things run! No labor is unskilled or unimportant). We are conditioned to view ourselves in terms of what good little workers we are. This programming starts in school—which is why schools are run the way they are.

You know that phrase love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life?

That is categorically untrue.

There is no labor that doesn’t feel like labor. Some might be more enjoyable than others. We might be better suited to some more than others, but at the end of the day, work is work. Yep, even a “dream job.” If you love what you do and you don’t have good boundaries, what you love will burn you out just as much as that day job you hate so much. That’s why it’s so important to reconsider our relationship with work.

Discipline is one of the most powerful tools you can learn to use on this journey of life. Discipline can get you everywhere. Having the patience, persistence, and clarity of vision to follow through on your goals is truly a gift. However, the way we are taught to perceive “successful” discipline isn’t sustainable. If discipline comes at the expense of a life lived in balance, then it isn’t going to last.

Discipline is, by nature, sustainable. Discipline is a marathon, not a sprint. Part of connecting your intuition to your ability to commit (to a change, a task, a goal, a partner, anything) is being a student of your SELF. Learning your process, learning your triggers, learning what energizes you and what depletes you. This self-knowledge leads to self-love and self-compassion because you become able to see yourself clearly (flaws and all) and can hold space for your multifaceted humanity without the burden of shame. Without shame, everything feels lighter and brighter, and the intuition gets louder, and the current toward your highest good gets stronger and suddenly find yourself flowing with it.

The power of really knowing yourself is that you can release unrealistic expectations for yourself (and others tbh) that you may have been carrying around since childhood. Consider the ways you perceive yourself as a failure or falling short. Ask yourself where did this expectation come from? Does it actually have anything to do with me? Do I even want to achieve this thing?

Because of the expectations of capitalism, we have a tendency to expect way more out of ourselves than we can actually accomplish. Even those who really seem to have it all together and are able to get an impossible amount done every day are probably struggling. Burnout comes for us all eventually (if you aren’t able to take good care of yourself). Everyone expects themselves to give 100%, One Hundred Percent of the time. We may expect ourselves to never call out of work, or never cancel on a friend, or never turn down a gig, or never stand up for ourselves, lest we lose everything.

Readjusting the benchmark for your expectations of yourself is actually a really revolutionary thing to do. Say, you work retail and you decide you need to take your break every shift, even though your boss always acts like a nightmare and you’re worried you’ll be replaced by someone who doesn’t need a break. Well, you might be. But if we all collectively agreed to honor our humanity and release the cultural brainwashing that tells us we aren’t entitled to what we are owed, everyone would feel comfortable taking their break, then bosses wouldn’t feel so empowered to exploit the labor of their underlings, just as their labor is exploited by the people above them on the class hierarchy.

Understanding how much you actually have to give to something is the beginning of a boundary, and boundaries are the gifts that keep on giving.

Discipline is a choice, and it isn’t always easy, but everybody’s expression of discipline is unique to them. All it’s really about is returning to the things you care about after mental health breaks, burnouts, and other difficult situations you may be going through. It’s really just about returning to your practice, your faith, your self-care, over and over again. Remember, from a bird’s eye view, that non-linear journey of healing does tend to have a linear trend, it’s just slower and more fucked up than everyone wants it to be.

When you feel as if you have gone off course, say to the universe

If I should go off course, bring me back in a beautiful way.

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