The decision has been made: no sugar or caffeine this month. A decision you’ve taken to clear your body from inflammations, reduce your stress, and stabilize your energy levels. A decision you’ve taken to be free from these negative consequences that have been harming you, out of self-love — despite them coming from things you truly enjoy.
Can you do it? Or do coffee and sugar have such power over you that you are their prisoner?
It could be anything. Alcohol, gluten, cigarettes, social media, email checking. It is not only about things you wish to stop but also the things you wish to bring into your life: meditation, exercising, writing that book. More dance, more art, more love. Can you go for it — or do your current habits and ways keep you hostage?
A key aspect of discipline that I love is the recognition that you are much stronger than you give yourself credit for.
What Do You Want to Be Free From?
As a healer, coach, and spiritual mentor, I often meet people interested in transformation and growth, because they look for liberation: they want to be free from the status quo, know their purpose, realize their full potential with joy, live fully, and experience deeper love.
At the same time, they tell me they have a hard time with discipline, daily routines, and practices. Tough love time. Let me tell you one thing:
Without discipline, without self-mastery, you will never be free.
What do you want to be free from?
First and foremost, you need to understand the prison you are in. What is it that is keeping you from experiencing the life you want?
You can’t free yourself from something you don’t even know what it is.
“And God said “Love Your Enemy,” and I obeyed him and loved myself.” Kahlil Gibran
You are your own prison. Here’s an example. If you can’t master your eating habits and exercise you are a slave to tiredness, sickness, and emotional eating. If you can’t master serenity, anxiety will overtake you. Whatever you wish to change, to heal from, to say no to, these are all aspects of your prison. This is what keeps you where you are.
Mind you, many people are not looking for freedom. They can’t even see their prisons, let alone consider them to be a bad thing. If this is your case, this article is not for you.
The reason why you are not free in the first place is lack discipline. Lack of discipline keeps you in jail, for your will is no match against what you are trying to change in your life.
I know the way I write makes it all seem easy as if it was all a matter of will alone. Mind you, we do need to heal different layers of us to get there. Much ego has to be dissolved, despite knowing that we never get to dissolve it completely.
Yet, even the smallest changes and healings require some level of discipline, of commitment, and any improvement in our discipline can greatly increase the frequency of our lives.
Temptations will never cease. In fact, the more we grow, the bigger temptations become. The more we grow, the more responsibility we gather — and with that, the bigger the temptation to walk an easier path. No wonder the stories of Buddha and Jesus include how all kinds of demons tempted them to stop.
Self Mastery
The only things you can truly fully control in this life are your thoughts and actions. If you can’t control them, you create a prison. At the same time, if you dedicate yourself to being able to control them, you can greatly improve all aspects of your life.
Control and discipline don’t mean repression. Control means your ability to recognize a thought or action and consciously choose to change what you think or how you act. Repression, on the other hand, is an unwillingness to recognize a thought or feeling, leading to dissociation and hiding these from oneself.
It is crucial that we begin to identify the multiple prisons we are in. Can you list five of yours?
Here’s another example. That dream project of yours never becomes real because you never feel like working on it. If you only do things when you feel like doing them you are a slave of your feelings: your feelings control what you get to do and don’t. It is by being able to do what we truly want despite how we feel that we get to override our narrative and create a new reality.
It is truly about inner strength: not about force and aggressivity, but about alignment, which is crucial to create a life with solid foundations.
Without discipline and self-mastery, you are constantly saying yes to distractions, ego trips, and escapisms. This way, it becomes impossible to build the life you long for, as you are not committed to it.
To be disciplined brings in responsibility. No one wants responsibilities, and therefore no one gets to be free.
My 10-week program Reconnect & Recharge is the perfect way for you to develop discipline as you devote yourself to your transformation of more clarity, inner peace, and joy in life. Learn more here.
Softness vs Harshness: Love Requires Discipline
In a world where things can easily be too harsh and aggressive, we look for softness and ease. We go to the other extreme of the pendulum, again, bringing another distortion.
Spiritual and personal growth brings love and sweetness, but not only. It brings inner union and invites us to stand strong against what doesn’t serve us, fostering a healthy inner warrior: inner strength.
It comes from an understanding that love is much bigger and more complex than we think: sometimes it is loving to be kind, and other times it is loving to say a straight No to what is not good for us and remove the weeds. Love wants you to grow, and if you cannot say yes to what makes you grow and no to what doesn’t, then where is the love?
Discipline is utmost devotion to yourself. It is a sign of love. It is a sign that you are in charge of your life. Your. will directs your life, and not your thoughts, desires and emotions.
Your will is an attribute of your soul, whereas your thoughts, emotions, and desires are always changing according to the weather and are part of your ego. As we grow, we want our soul to take more and more command of our lives — and, in this way, make the ego smaller and clearer.
How Does This Work?
Discipline starts with clarity: you can only be disciplined if you know what you want, and what you don’t, what is good for you and what is not good for you, for you need to decide what is in and what is out of the question. From there, you can make conscious commitments to yourself.
Discipline is sustained through discernment, as you identify what is breaking your commitments to self and refrain from them.
Discipline nurtures seeds so that you can nourish a beautiful garden in your life, and create your vision. Things don’t change overnight due to discipline — but over weeks and months, they change immensely. It is by your daily habits that the flowers in your life grow strong.
Lack of discipline come from core wounds that need to be taken care of and healed. Discipline brings freedom, and freedom doesn’t come for free. You earn your freedom by overcoming your prisons, not only once, but ongoing.
The Power of Daily Practices
When you commit to spiritual practices and daily habits, two things happen:
- N1: The practice changes you, it changes your energy field, bringing about the desired transformation, such as health, physical strength, or inner peace,
- N2: You foster discipline and willingness as you keep showing up daily.
You need both things to be free: the energetic shift of the habit, and the discipline.
Because even if you transform yourself by a miracle, by magic, without discipline you can’t sustain the change.
If you can’t sustain freedom, you fall back.
This is what happens to many people after a healing session, a detox period, therapy sessions, or a ritual you name it. In such events, many experience something big, a great moment of clarity. Yet, they can’t sustain it because there’s a lack of discipline.
In moments that we feel great, we feel as if we were invincible, and don’t see how easily distractions and ego traps sneak in. As a result, we fall back to our old ways.
With this, discipline becomes an important foundation of a mature life.
The mistake many make is to start already with too difficult and strenuous habits that they can’t possibly sustain for long periods. You can start softly, and increase progressively, rejoicing in your accomplishment as you keep up with your word day after day.
The more you work on your discipline, the more your willingness and confidence will also grow.
Nothing Is for Free
In this universe, everything operates by energy. The only thing that doesn’t take energy is death. One must breathe, and a heart must keep beating. Effort is required. Life takes energy, so we better make peace with it.
Now, effort doesn’t mean hustle. We can operate with more softness and ease, in higher frequencies — but actions and energy will always be required of us, and it won’t always be easy. There is no constant.
Here, you take and you give. There’s no such thing as only receiving. That is the wish of a child who wishes to be served only and doesn’t wish to grow up and be part of the whole. Thinking you can have all freedom without any counterpart is a utopia.
That’s a social wound we have, for growing up with parents who had a harsh life and did not rejoice in their work, for they had too many responsibilities that had nothing to do with their real purpose, and brought them bitterness. We wish to never grow up. We created a negative association with responsibility and effort when it could be a positive one: we get to do all of these things to improve things and create a better reality for us. This needs healing.
Spiritual growth is not about inner peace as much as it is about change, about you becoming who you truly are, stepping up to it, with all the blessings and responsibilities that come with it — so that you finally GET TO BE YOURSELF AND LIVE YOUR PURPOSE.
That’s why growth entails so much work. The paradox is that true inner peace comes from that: from being that part of the whole, which requires you to embody your divine self fully, surrender, make full use of your powers, and commit to your responsibilities.
The more you awaken to be one with all, the more you are faced with your role in everything. The mission of love is a big one, that requires all sides of love — the softness and the warrior, with utmost devotion to life.
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