Discipline is pain with a dose of empathy
Pain should not give us purpose in life as this is not it’s role. However, the role of pain is to discipline and educate our minds.
Discipline of the mind is one of the hardest things we can accomplish in our human existence. In yoga practice, there’s a beautiful topic that brings awareness into how our minds work when it comes to focus. Dharana is one of the 8 limbs of yoga practice. Like any practice, these limbs serve as rules to organize the work on the body and mind on the mat, but many of the lessons here are applicable in any life situation as well.
Today in my yoga class with my favorite teacher in Yagoy Studio in Amsterdam, he started the practice with a quote from the Dharana limb explaining the role of a single point of concentration. In my design work, I often practice zooming in and out of perspectives. Being able to focus on one single point during your practice of meditation is a remarkable way to practice zooming in with our minds to the point that we can silence at the highest level possible our noisy loud mind. However, being able to focus like that comes with great challenges. We get distracted! But just like the new book of Nir Eyal says, we should be Indistractable. The way to start doing that is by understanding that FOCUS is not the same with being INDISCTRACTIBLE. Quite the opposite. The key to being able to focus better is not to never be distracted but to be able to acquire the discipline of coming back to your point of attention regardless of how many times you fail to keep your concentration.
As I saw in class today, 1 of the 5 men who joined our class left after 10 minutes. He was sitting next to me and probably felt that he can’t get his poses well because I was not keeping up with the class that well today. You see, I practice yoga not because I am perfect at making every pose, but because I want to practice compassion towards myself and keep trying to improve myself in all ways. On top of this, since my bike accident last week, I am still sore from the injuries and my palm is still healing from the wound which makes it difficult to do even the basic downward god poses at this point. But my classmate today was puffing during the practice because he wanted to achieve perfection. He could not settle for less. His ego was telling him that he needs to get it right or he will be a loser. So he abandoned the class before he could practice what Gregory was telling us at the beginning of the class about the discipline of bringing back our awareness whenever that goes away because we get distracted. We can’t get perfect poses and suffer from that if we practice compassion and we keep pushing ourselves to continue despite the imperfections.
The GRIT and the EGO paradox
At this point, there’s another topic that comes up from the experience of the guy in my yoga class. He was a guy with a lot of grit. He wanted to push forward, but he saw no chance of winning at this game so he gave up. There’s a lot to learn from this if you think about how many people are struggling with the guilt of giving up half-way through a process ( regardless of the context ). People hate losing and their ego will drive some of them to extreme perseverance situations, even when that might not be the best solution. Being able to have grit healthily is something that has to do more with your ego than with anything else. Once you understand your ego and your drivers, you can tam the ones that come from a position of scarcity an only choose to cultivate the ones coming from abundance. Your ego plays both a good and a bad role in the decision-making process. You will feel pain whenever you need to quiet down your bad ego and let go of pursuit because it doesn’t serve your goals anymore.
Grit, as explained in an article I recently resonated with, is associated with enduring from a place of strength and that connects to our ego because it gives us pride. But pride is so ephemeral. It’s like fairy dust you blow into the air. You immediately know it’s nothing that will lead you to long term success or deeper meaning. It does, however, serve the purpose of bringing you dopamine and maybe some adrenaline too if the grit involves risk-taking and highly unhealthy behavior to maintain the perseverance. That’s why I find it so wrong when I hear people saying that they keep themselves busy to stay productive. This is exactly the kind of toxic grit I am talking about.
You don’t just stay busy to be productive.
You work on your productivity by understanding how you function better without combining it to the idea that busy is good and getting stuck into the ego feeding loop of wanting to persevere into being busy despite not having the performance results you want.
The pain
Understanding that pain comes from shutting down your ego will be your biggest learning about discipline you can ever get. Ego, as described by Freud is the product of your early childhood when your reference to the world if formed and is primarily influenced by your parents or caretakers. The ability to dig back into those times and see the context of your ego formation will enable you to determine when you are most likely to feel pain in the process of getting discipline in your life. Discipline in different areas will affect different parts of your ego. As a result, some people will be easily disciplined in some areas of their life and will keep on getting clogged pathways for other areas. Let me explain with some examples of disciplines and how they conflict with ego areas.
The disciplines in life and their respective ego areas and pains
- Of your schedule — will come from your ability to take feedback in early childhood and be patient and postpone gratification ( the Marshmellow test is an excellent read untangle the role of delayed gratification) If you can structure your schedule well and stick to it you will find the gratification in the process which requires you to think of a prize in the absence of it at the beginning of the process. Since we only form an abstract mind around the age of 12, this concept needs the be taught in experiential ways before this age.
- Of your love life — of course, that is formed also in the early days when we learn to love our parents despite our ambivalences between hate and love for them. Accepting that we can both hate and love our parents will teach us that we can love our partners even if they fail to meet our expectations at times. We can’t persevere in forming deep connections if we dismiss people after the first red flag. We learn the acceptance of the imperfections they have and we persevere into loving them despite the challenge. However, too much perseverance with someone who keeps on disappointing becomes toxic for us.
- Our financial situation — having a discipline of how we spend money is something very few of us learn in early childhood. Yet, most of our behavior patterns towards money are formed in the context of how our parents think about money. If we are raised in a scarce mentality, most of us will be on the conservative side of spending money on a regular bases and would overindulge as soon as the occasion appears.
- Our health — having a consistent routine and preventive attitude towards illness is something that holistically requires focus at all times because it’s so easy to get distracted and follow pitfalls in this area. Also, our bodies are fragile already from all the somatized psychological trauma we carry with us since our early days to be able to hold up to all challenges we expose to every day.
- Our self-care- Both mind and body need our perseverant check-up of potential distractors from our goals. Every time we set up a new goal in our life, it will take energy and resources. If we don’t take care to refill the resources we’ve used, this will become our main enemy.
Being empathetic towards oneself is something most self-help books today promote and talk about to the degree that they transform some people into narcissists as they would thrive at performing to show their ego without looking at how they achieve that performance and what costs are involved behind the scenes. However, the purpose of empathy is not to allow yourself linger on bad behavior nor to provide you with the comforting thought that you no longer need to put any work to improve because you are “good enough”. The true purpose of empathy is to help you find the balance between a spartan discipline and an empathetic and nurturing self-esteem. As seen in this article, the author thinks self-help books are promoting a culture of narcissism and improving yourself through a discipline would become a part of this equation. However, since I started reading self-help books while also practicing yoga I realized that improvement has its limits. Sometimes, body limits, but in the case of compassionate yoga, it’s more about the mind that allows softening the ego by not letting every thought that arises to take over and disrupt our discipline. Going back to your initial point of focus allows you to let the space between stimulus and response increase in value. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist, said: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
Being able to acquire the discipline or routine of doing things for ourselves in different areas of life comes with the great benefit of keeping a general focus on your life goals and with the pitfall of not offering you enough adrenaline for new and out of the ordinary events if you are not being empathetic about the dosage of that discipline. The more disciplined and rigorously planned life you have, the less time for unpredictable and newness in your life which ultimately makes you dissatisfied and discontent despite the effort of a perfect performance and discipline of performance.
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