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 negative addictive thinking, 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. I have been Rebirthing now for over 25 years, and clean of all drugs, including alcohol, for over 31 years, so I must have obtained discipline along the way.
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.
BLOGGING : I learnt to write blogs as a practiced discipline not for people to read them. 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 around blogging 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.
David Parker
