Discipline Training

The largest bulk of serious shamanic or occult or even mystic training for the first years isn’t in visualization, prayer, ceremonial magick, or anything like that.  It is in discipline.

Depending on the tradition, the details vary, yet in all, the exercises are often mundane. Get up at dawn and do a ritual to the sun. Do it six times a day.  An hour of devotion to Jesus, whatever works for someone. Set a specific time and train yourself to be your own alarm and suddenly remember it at that very moment. (You can teach yourself this through self-hypnosis also. I used to be good at it when younger.) Some disciplines call it things like ‘mindfulness’.

Make commitments to yourself through the day that at a given hour and minute you will do thing-X. It can be as stupid as raising your arms and whispering woot! woot! at your ceiling — the point is, you commit to doing something, you pay attention, and you DO IT. Not a couple minutes later when it’s more convenient. Not earlier to get it done. Not doing something else, or something “close enough or good enough,” or just not doing it.

The letter of the law: have the discipline to command yourself. Reality is only ours to command insofar as we recognize that it is us, and so if you cannot control yourself, that’s the end of it.

There’s a reason self-discipline is in the lead. Many reasons. In the beginning, not just because it leads to practice, the base of developing skills and expanding arts, but because it directly affects character. And in the end, not just because it might make you better at something, but because you might be in a great deal of danger, from psych destabilization to negative entity interactions to kundalini overload, without it.

In short, it sounds like something to help you, but is actually something to save you. Ignoring this part of shamanic development is part of what leads to the stories about the magician’s apprentice who [insert their bright idea followed by a grisly end here].

***

How much active inner-work time is needed? Well it depends, doesn’t it. Can you do inner-work while doing other things, graft it onto your reality? If so, some can be absorbed into that.

After that, the question is: how much do you actually want to get done?

And after that, the questions are: How much energy restructuring can your body take? How much identity restructuring can your identity take? How much revision of mental models can your mind take? How much destruction of paradigms and release of attachments can your heart take?

Because it’s not just about what sounds good on paper. It’s not just about wanting to evolve. As the driving maxim goes, “I can only go as fast as the car in front of me.” Well, you can only develop as fast as your body, identity, mind and heart can absorb and allow and recover from.

And that’s where discipline comes in.

***

Discipline is what gets you up at some ungodly hour to lift that iron and still have an extra hour for inner work.

Discipline is what takes you through eating what makes your body and mind feel good and have strength, things that provide nutrients and don’t provide addictive effects or weakness.

Discipline is what makes you keep your environment clean enough that your near energy fields are not filled with chaos.

Discipline is what makes you spend the minutes, not just hours, of your day in a focus that serves your greater good. Doing the rosary, a magick ritual, a kata, instead of Facebook. Doing a quick body-med instead of idle chatter.

Discipline is what makes you put time into practicing your arts and skills, both to develop them and to feed that part of you that needs the energy to flow through you, flow through them.

If you short-sleep, discipline is what makes you find the time, make the time, to take a nap in the day, so you are not sleep deprived, so your body and mind can finish the work necessary on so many levels.

Discipline is what makes you wrap up your life activities at an early hour so you have time to get more inner work done.

Discipline is what makes you get your ass to sleep in time to get up at that ungodly hour of the next morning.

Discipline is what keeps you healthy, keeps your immune system strong, keeps your mind clear, keeps your body flexible and the energy flowing, keeps your mundane life arranged so it doesn’t negatively impact your inner work, and in general, is what makes it possible to have a real degree of inner work going on at all.

***

I have known, both closely and loosely, many people in my life who were exceptionally constructive, successful people. They considered that entire list above to be a basic requirement of their daily life. I admire the hell outta that.

There’s one fairly consistent thing about them, as a group: they were highly accomplished.  They’ve ranged from olympians to ballerinas, from authors to martial artists, from bodybuilders to world-record setters, from soldiers to psychics to scholars, but at the core they all have this in common:

1. They were highly focused on what they wanted from life and what that translated to on a daily, even hourly basis. They were also highly aware of the importance of “focus:” that positive focus, intentionally designing your beliefs, practicing optimism the same way you might weightlifting, “keeping your head clear,” is a whole art of its own.

2. They were self-disciplined to the extreme. They often did not fit in well with others, despite that at core they were intelligent and funny and social, but because they lacked the degree of unfocused and even self-destructive behavior that most of our culture considers the norm — and, most notably, lacked the willingness to waste time. They understood that willpower starts at 60 seconds, 5 carbs,  1 more rep, an extra half-hour. They understood that even the little things matter. Yes, they might like you, but no, they do not want to sit around at a pizza party with you for the entire evening after that softball game or late-night work shift, for so many reasons.

3. They were good to themselves. They understood that their physical and mental health were the foundation from which everything else was made possible. They grasped fully that discipline upon oneself is not a hardship and not a punishment of oneself, but an honor, and a service to self. This is the difference between a highly successful well rounded human and a workaholic, like I have been most of my life: They defended their sleep, their food, their focus, and their time, the way mothers defend their young.

Social butterflies, they were definitely not.

Many people have at least one of the above. As a workaholic I always had the second–less the first, very little of the third. I believe getting these three together in a person makes all the difference. It is fairly difficult to be truly healthy, truly focused, and unusually skilled at something, without all this.

***

I have begun to think that nearly every problem I have in my life can be chalked up to a lack of self discipline.

This is a little bit ironic, since most of my life, this is something I’ve had a strong handle on. I’ve maintained schedules and responsibilities (and serious lack of enough sleep for extended periods) that would put most people into serious illness or nervous breakdown.

I look back on some periods of my life and am almost in awe of my amazingly disciplined dedication–and somewhat in regret of how hard I drove myself and how, in some respects (like metabolism) it really messed me up. Because the being good to self, and discipline including health and self-protection, those parts were lacking. I can easily take doing something to the extreme to the point of self injury, and then tell myself to quit whining and keep on keeping-on.

So somewhere along the line, this apparently changed in me. I am still disciplined about work. I do what I must related to being a single mom. Outside those–and even those can’t compare to my younger-life version–I seem to have abandoned the concept entirely.

I have the interest, the natural talent, and some basic skills, in many things in life that I would like to put more investment into.  Some, like music, writing, and some form of athletics from weight lifting to team sports, are pretty important to my health and development on several levels. I don’t do any of them. Oh sure, once a year or two, I get inspired and do it a lot. For a few weeks maybe. And then not much for the next year. Or two.

Because I let myself delude myself that I don’t have time. Get up, push the kid to get ready for school while I make her breakfast, quick shower – brush teeth – dress – feed cats -  then work till afternoon, kid is home, get the kid through chores, get the kid through homework, make dinner for the kid, get the kid through bath, spend a little time with her doing something, then get her into bed, and meanwhile do what work I can between all those things. Then it’s bedtime for me too.

I can stay up later, and be sleep deprived. I can try to spend that time doing jMeds (jungian/shamanic exercises), tekMeds (body visualization exercises), prayer, or even lifting some weight, but I don’t do it well or much because I’m tired — and then I’m yet-more tired the next day, and after a few days running it’s not even possible anymore. Then half my weekend is sleep, and not feeling energetic enough to do much else. But if food is good and exercise is even minimal and regular and sleep schedule is decent, that improves.

***

But then I look at that more critically and I think, I’m just fooling myself here. That is not really true.

The kid is 14. She can get herself ready. She can make her own breakfast or, I should be eating it too, so it’s not just doing it for her. She can do her own homework with occasional help. At least she can do it quietly beside me if she wants. As for spending time, well we could make a date to do that, say Tues and Thurs nights for 2 hours — one movie or 2 hulu shows — and some on the weekend, and that would still leave me with 3 nights a week and one weekend night totally free. She would be fine.

She is not a small child anymore, and she is over-dependent on me. She needs to spend more time reading, doing art, playing with the keyboard, something that is not nearly sitting on me, insisting we watch movies or I pay attention to her. I want her to have some of that, but it doesn’t have to be every spare minute of my life– which it HAS been.

Work is just work. I do it too much because it’s there, and since I work remotely I’m a little paranoid about any potential perception that I’m not getting enough done. But the reality is I do not need to spend as much time working as I do. If I am totally dedicated during the day, and if I pitch in during ‘unusual’ periods of crisis — rather than interpreting everything no matter how trivial as a crisis — that would free up a lot more of my time.

And I could delegate. There are plenty of things I do that I could kick out to others to do. My desire to just do everything because it’s cheaper/better/faster is my problem, that doesn’t make it a truth. The reality is I put work as my 100% focus outside my kid and I trash my life dedicating myself to it. That is not really serving me. Our culture supports and admires workaholism which makes it more difficult to see it for what it really is: it’s a lack of focus on self and lack of considering the self worth taking better care of and making more time for. It’s one thing to shift to that focus temporarily for a surprise or a brief seasonal rush. When it’s a long season or chronic, that’s different.

I could do some inner work on my lunch break (esp since I don’t normally eat lunch). I could do it in the morning before either of us get up. I could do weight lifting when I’m off work, anytime before making dinner. I could do inner work while she is doing homework or while she is in the bathtub or when I loan her the computer for certain homework.  I can do prayer in even seconds and rosary in even a single minute of time.

There’s a whole laundry list of things I could change in my life. I could greatly improve my immediate environment, I could insist on more of a structure to our sleep and waking times, a better planned schedule for our menu, cooking, chores, errands, and things like that. If all these things were about WORK, this would already be a no-brainer. I am one of those weird people who, you see their work space, and it’s incredibly organized, labeled, color coordinated, clean. Then you walk into their house and it’s a cluttered mess. I have a housekeeper weekly and my house is still a mess, how pathetic is that. (Granted my 14 year old is more help than folks without kids can imagine.)

The two areas are very different for me, or they were until I began working from home. It started with my workspace being in the back largest room and it was a lot like work, though slightly less impeccably clean. But over time that has changed, and the two lives have integrated more, until now I don’t have a workspace at all — I use my laptop and seldom print anything so I just sit wherever is comfortable  (at my weight, that is not a chair, which cuts off the circulation in the back of my legs). The two parts of my life have ‘integrated’. But I don’t think that’s good really. I think I should re-establish a workspace, a visual calendar, some posted grids of work, and have ‘working hours’ to the degree possible and when I’m off work, be truly OFF WORK.

***

Once upon a time when I was really, really focused, even seconds were a given. I prayed all the time.  Or I would just imagine myself centering, imagine that I felt in touch with my soul and a sense of the divine, until I was out of time again. I paid attention to my thoughts and dissolved the brief ever-negative daydream scenarios. I managed my focus to the positive, to faith, to optimism. And my reality and my life reflected that eventually. I had a sense of genuine happiness I couldn’t have ever imagined before then. My life had a degree of smooth and positive synchronicity (and ‘instant karma’ — where I could see within minutes, sometimes seconds, how a shift in my thoughts affected my reality) that was astronomically improbable.

But it was more work than anything I’d ever done in my life.

As I was doing such massive inner work, it came with a level of inner-exhaustion that is indescribable and not touched by sleep. I ‘overtrained’ on the inner work and when I got pregnant, basically crashed in burnout, and my focus changed to a lot more negative — which is to say, a lot more like “normal people” have in our culture, where political cynicism and the X-Files and social politics, that kind of thing is part of the normal daily flow. The astonishing amount of power I had to bring about reality to my focus changed as a matter of self-preservation.

The Narrator told me that, later.  I was griping inside because my reality sucked and so much had changed. He said my focus changed first, and just like before, I was seeing the results of my focus. Our focus is basically the request list for our reality, the projection inside into the outside. So like most of us, I was getting exactly what I asked for… but not what I wanted.

Which is what I have now. I am disorganized in my personal life. Even when my house is clean it’s too cluttered. I don’t have any decent schedule–work/school forces me to a little, but not so much. There is tons of room for improvement.

***

Because I need to give IG the two focus-periods a day I said I would. And I need to give Tek at least 4-5 a week, my health and my desire to improve my metabolism somehow–which is directly related to inner body health–plead for it. I need to at least touch base, breathe-with, my Aeons daily, and each of the Largers — I’ve only met 3 so far, I haven’t a clue how many there are but I got the clear vibe from one that there’s more I didn’t know — at least once a week. That doesn’t even start on wanting to do inner work on elements, body parts, tarot, and so on. And even that doesn’t touch wanting to work on the inside concerning major issues in my life.

Not to mention I want to get back to writing music, playing guitar and singing, I want to get back to my writing especially the fiction, I have a coding project related to RV I want to focus on…

Now it’s not that any of these meditation elements need to take forever. Even an hour once (especially twice) a day could cover all of those sometimes. Long meds are usually a result of problem energies I’m having a hard time staying focused for. But let’s be fair, if I wasn’t sleep deprived, plus past my bedtime, or my brain isn’t ideal because of bad food choices, I’m distracted or far too beta because I’m doing it at a time not ideal in the midst of other stuff — if all those elements were not the issue, there would be a lot less of that. So if I had a clear schedule, and I was entrained to this work at certain times, I feel I could accomplish a great deal more in whatever time I DO have, even if some days that is not a lot.

If it was work, I’d already have done it. I’d already have a schedule I stuck to with discipline. It wouldn’t even be a question.

So why does my personal life have to be so poorly planned and disorganized and lacking in accomplishment, compared to my working life? I have to think it’s because I consider work important, and I haven’t really considered myself important. My workaholic behavior much of my life makes that kind of obvious.  I joke that “I live to serve” but it’s really true, I do. The problem is that my body and personal and spiritual life deserve service too, not just my business life. Rearranging my priorities seems necessary.

Nero has told me plainly that until I put more work into the simple visualization exercises he gave me, he can’t do more work with me, because there is a level of ability to hold focus I don’t have. IG keeps repeating to me that consistency is so important. Tek all but waxed poetic when talking about my need for more body meds. The Private Oracle told me it was important to regularly be with the Aeons, and that some of my more bizarre/lousy side-effects were from my life–the life which takes discipline to support the body-mind well enough to be strong enough to handle some major energy work and psyche restructuring going on all the time.

I’ve seen, the last six months, the effect of not having consistent decent food, consistent decent sleep, consistent decent exercise, or good quality focus, within meditations, and within my results.  Sometimes it’s just poor results — but sometimes the results start down the path to that sorcerer’s-apprentice archetype. Yikes.

So I think it’s time to get my act together. Plan a schedule, a  menu, and stick to it. It’ll be extra work due to my teenager (children ought to be subtitled Ruiner Of All Plans and Nice Things until they’re about 20) but it’s possible.

I think maybe this is what separates the ordinary people who meditate, from the people who are actually capable of getting to some point of development where, you might say, their shamanic skillset and spiritual development is (comparatively) advanced. They are the highly accomplished, sometimes even olympians, of inner work (and as a side effect, of outer reality).

I want to be like that. I feel like I am qualified to be there. I feel like it is part of my destiny and what’s expected of me, to be there.  I feel like there is this huge universe of potential with my name on it, that is calling to me. And I can’t get to it because my shoes are untied or something. I see that being there is only partly about the spiritual work. It’s only partly about having a great deal of courage to confront and work with things that bring you panic and fear and more. It’s only partly about being willing to radically restructure your identity, forever repeatedly, and be able to integrate that and not go nuts from it.

To a great degree, it is also about having the unusual degree of self-discipline required to be highly successful in just about anything. I believe it’s time I got a little more serious about making this so.

***

I was once describing this shoji lamp I have, that is ‘four panels of light’ that a med with The Four once looked like. It’s dark now and I haven’t fixed it. In the description I actually said something I realized perfectly explained the dynamic on the inside, too.

I just can’t get it integrated so that the supporting structure can hold the light inside.

And the Private Oracle said, more recently, but I think it’s the perfect answer:

You need to invest a bit more effort into your physical life–into your body, your surroundings, your physical movement, your emotional movement. Increasing your meditation, and making it more consistent, that is a good thing, but you need the balance and strength that the other things will provide.

P