1 Feb 2010
Discipline
Who needs Miss Whiplash when we have our own mistress of pain - the guilt ridden ego – to convince that we will never make it, unworthy of making it and therefore don’t even bother trying. If you have, or have had, the discipline of self destruction or repeated guilts then you have the knowledge and experience of practiced discipline. This can be a useful benchmark – Do not despair – recycle your past – everything is valuable. So many people think they don’t have enough discipline to carry out a task or project, especially one connected to arresting addictions, when in fact they have been practicing discipline for a good deal of time, however misplaced.
I was 6 years clean before I embarked upon a course of Rebirthing Breathwork and in my quest for solution to on-going health and emotional issues I stumbled across my first book on the subject by Jim Leonard and Phil Laut called :
REBIRTHING / The Science of Enjoying All of Your Life.
Published in 1983 I found myself 5 years later reading the chapter on DISCIPLINE :
" Any time you decide in advance to do some particular thing in some particular way at some particular time ( which you must do if you want to accomplish so much ), then you may have a desire to do something else when that time comes.
Discipline means staying with your plan and integrating that cross-current desire. Discipline is a virtue that is cultivated with repetition and is one of the great privileges of being a free human being. Indeed it is impossible to be free without it. Some people think that freedom means the freedom to satisfy their desires, but that is just slavery to desire. Real freedom means being able to choose where you are going with your life and then going there.
Discipline means knowing what your goal is and then doing what it takes to achieve it. Discipline and Rebirthing go hand-in-hand. Without a certain amount of discipline you can never integrate anything because every pattern of energy has an accompanying desire; if you just go off and satisfy that desire you are unlikely to integrate that pattern of energy. At the same time, Rebirthing makes it much easier to have discipline because it allows discipline to be enjoyable rather than merely suppressive ".
Rebirthing is also called conscious connected breathing because the cycle of breath is continuous and disciplined. A deep inhale right through your body up to the chest and out on the exhale in a soft, non-pushing, gentle way for around an hour. Rather like a waterwheel this disciplined circle of energy builds into a rhythm of being in touch with your emotional body and spirit that dwells within. It’s purpose is to cleanse, wake-up and heal emotions trapped in the body, sometimes since birth, often without inspection. It literally brings you back to life. After 11 years I healed my body & soul of an incurable virus using this regular breathwork as meditation practice. Check out my Breathwork page on this blog for an unusual experience of Rebirthing, but perhaps not how you would read about it in new age books.The other Miss Whiplash we need to look out for is the evil twin of discipline – procrastination. For many, this tactic has become disciplined in in-action, a useful ploy in avoiding failure by halting success. Codependents often need drama in order to survive, to be plugged in, electrified or crucified. Doing nothing, then doing everything or waiting for the whiplash of circumstance to provoke the next mood. Even depression is a discipline. Learning to go back to life itself, the circular breath, in times of stress is acknowledgment of observation, and a problem noticed is a problem halved. The discipline is in the detail.
I write this blog as a practiced discipline not for people to read it. I’m selfish this way – I do it for me, having convinced myself through lack of education that I was not academic, or a wordsmith. I tried to write a book a few times, people have been harping on for years, but none of it gelled. I just wasn’t disciplined enough. So the idea for this blog was to learn how to eat an elephant a bite at a time. In less than a year, with all my other blogs I write over 2000 words a week now. I have no great plan or any blogs prepared in case of emergency. I just do it regularly, to the best discipline I can afford.
I have learnt to drop perfectionism and the lash.
I suggest you do the same.
Thank you very much for this – im trying to do some breathwork. Hopefully I can build up the time I spend doin it.
My emotional pain came up as grief just over a week ago when I found it painful/overwhelming to say goodbye to a friend I had been working with. It has been a confusing time. My guess is that I have difficulty when someone I love leaves me which happened in my childhood.
lots of love Jackie
Jackie
February 2nd, 2010 at 9:38 pmpermalink
This was one of the most useful things I have read in recent history.
And possibly the most useful. 1st time I’ve seen my own most self-destructive patterns of behaviour so succinctly spelled out.
Lafang
February 12th, 2010 at 2:11 ampermalink