Why Discipline Matters

Yesterday I had a disagreement with a vendor I buy supplies from. I was pissed most of the evening, and by the time I went to sleep, I felt clear. Then I sat down to meditate this morning, and there it was, fuming, right on schedule. I spent most of the sit spinning stories of vengeance. Not exactly what the Buddhists call skillful means.

That's what a daily practice does. Because you do more or less the same thing each day, whatever walks in with you has nowhere to hide. Practice is a mirror. It puts you face to face with your stuff whether you're ready to see it or not.

A dedicated student of mine had been working on his backbend for years, and he was complaining in class that it still lacked the mobility a practitioner at his level should have. We stayed with that for a while. What surfaced wasn't a stiff spine. It was anxiety, and not just about the backbend. It ran through everything: work, relationships, all of it. The backbend was one more place he was trying to outperform the feeling. He didn't need a deeper backbend. He needed to meet what was driving the need for one.

The comparison game moves onto the mat with everyone. She's better than I am. I'm more flexible than him. I wish my body looked different. The content of that conversation doesn't matter much. The feeling running it does. The mat is one of the few places quiet enough to catch it running.

People ask how long it took me to be able to stay with the painful stuff without turning away or distracting myself. It depends on the feeling. Grief and boredom, I've gotten better at staying with. Anger, you read the first paragraph.

Discipline matters, but not because practice fixes any of this. It doesn't, and it isn't supposed to. It keeps you in the room with what you'd otherwise outrun, one morning at a time. Tomorrow I'll sit again. The vendor may be waiting.