How (not) to be disciplined

On the problem of overcoming yourself

“Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals as objects.”

― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

I asked people what they wanted to read about this week and this word came up multiple times:

Discipline

Discipline

Discipline 

That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about too. Discipline, as our world has handed it to us, is heavy. 

The default take on discipline says that it’s the morally superior path to greatness via more control. (See for example, Stephen Pressfield. His book The War of Art almost ruined my creative life for years. See also: guys like Alex Hormozi who worship self-punishment and can kick rocks as far as I’m concerned.) This view says, make yourself into a well-honed object of work. You are a chaos gremlin that must be tamed. Nothing gets done without the commitment to constantly overcoming yourself.

The opposing view, reacting to all this, says that discipline is a painful, impossible, maybe-sometimes-aspirational-around-New-Year’s standard. “Maybe we should just all take it easy! After all, we suffer plenty just being alive.” I’m very sympathetic to that point of view, because schools and institutions generally run on the “you are chaos and must be controlled” paradigm and we’ve all suffered for it.

But I am not against discipline as such. I am against the twin ideas that a) discipline is about control and b) control is necessary. Discipline does not need to mean any of that. I’ll get to what I think it means in a minute. (Spoiler: I talk about this more in my book which comes out in January.) 

The first big problem with the default definition of discipline is that it defines a person based on what they do. As in, a “disciplined” person is someone who does a thing despite adverse circumstances. A person who faces challenge and pain and does it anyway. Wow, we say to the person who eats celery at the ice cream party. How disciplined. How in order you are. How impervious to chaos, calamity, and circumstance. (To be honest, I used to JUDGE THAT KIND OF PERSON so much, which was a projection of my own shadow around control. Go figure.) 

The point is, any identity that is about doing-or-not doing is too fragile to be useful long term. For example, I don’t believe “a writer is someone who writes.” (Have you ever heard that or something similar?) If that were true, you would cease to be a writer every time you put down your computer or pencil. What a recipe for angst, for distrusting any part of the process that isn’t visible, for running from the very act you love because it stops loving you back when you stop performing.

What if discipline is about 1) a commitment to curiosity about something over time and 2) practicing discernment around this field of curiosity. After all, the root of the word “discipline” comes from “disciple” — it is about learning.

Let me give you an example of how this kind of discipline has shown up in my own life lately:

Relatively recently, I stopped drinking after years of angst about alcohol. I’m not working a program, nor am I calling myself sober, I’m simply not drinking right now. I have no idea where this decision will take me, or if I will make a different decision tomorrow. I literally woke up one day and said, “I’m done with that.”

For about a week I had an app that counted the days since I’d had a drink. Every day it told me what health benefits I might see that day, like better sleep and more glowing skin, and I liked that little dopamine hit. Then I deleted it because I didn’t want to pay for it and because I didn’t want to focus on what I was not doing. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve wanted to stop drinking. But it is the first time I felt like I was making a free choice, and not a choice to punish myself for bad doing or try to control myself because I was naturally terrible and chaotic. 

No, this time I was actively choosing my sleep and my sense of peace in my body, because drinking was messing with my stress hormones. I finally wanted be a loving student of my own body, not a master over it. 

That took me a while. I walked a long road before I could say, I might be someone who can and wants to to feel calm and centered on the regular. That was not my identity before — at all. I preferred to be someone who was fun and flexible and not uptight. I won’t go into why that mattered so much to me, but this is just to say, drinking was the most efficient way to could feel close and relaxed around most people as an undiagnosed neurodivergent person who was convinced I was broken and didn’t fit in. Once I learned the rules of drinking with people, I thought “Great! I know how to do this. All the edges I normally feel between me and the world go blurry. This is perfect.” And it was, until it wasn’t.

Was I undisciplined before? No, I was very disciplined about trying to connect with people. That’s the only way I knew how to do it. I was very disciplined about feeling chill (which is different from centered and calm). I chose that over what was, at that point, only an abstract idea of not drinking.

Then little by little, I saw clues that I was almost ready to shift my relationship to drinking because my relationship to my own body was changing. In an active imagination meditation I did a few months ago, I saw a poisoned chalice that I knew represented distraction that sat between me and myself. I logged that away: “Oh. I probably will need to stop drinking at some point,” then I didn’t for a while. Until I was ready.

Did I need discipline to stop drinking? Kind of! But not in the control-and-willpower kind of way. I needed the discernment to choose what I wanted to learn: how to be a more embodied, centered version of myself. And that that choice didn’t happen with willpower, but time, curiosity, and safety.

I think when we relate to discipline as a free choice that comes from safety, it feels like this inner discernment: saying this and not that, right now. Not because that is bad and wrong, but because we get to make a choice out of love and curiosity.

Discipline feels less like control and more like a choice about what matters in this moment. Then that choice just becomes a fact about your life. 

If you are feeling undisciplined, there is something else that’s demanding your attention, your discipline. 

What is it? What needs are being met there? What else are you being disciplined about that takes you away from the thing you think you should be disciplined about (like your creative work)?

Aiming for discipline itself, in my experience, doesn’t lead to the commitment I was looking for. Wondering what I am currently being a disciple of does. 

What are you studying? Is it your boss’s moods? Your bank account? Trying to stay ahead of what might happen in the future?

You already know how to be a disciple. There is no need for force. What if you get to freely choose what to study out of love?

Love,

Maria

P.S. There will be some fun new ways of working with me soon, so keep your eyes peels