Why Discipline Matters
When we show up to practice, we're saying, "I could just watch TV or sleep a few more hours. I could give in to inertia or the anxiety or sadness or boredom, but I know that I am more than this.”
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.
The Saturn Return: Ages 28 to 31
Most of our 20’s are spent trying on lots of different masks. We pick up ‘the partier mask’ and then put it down. Then we try on ‘the professional mask’ and then put that one down. During the ages between 28 and 30, we take a few masks that do work and fit and refine them into a persona that works for what our soul needs to learn in our 30’s.
A 28-year-old client came in feeling overwhelmed. He kept saying things like, "There's not enough time in this life to accomplish what I want." And, "I know I'm meant to be doing more meaningful work, but I'm scared I won't make it up the mountain, or that I'll fail."
Listen to the second one again. He didn't say he had no idea what to build. He said he was scared he wouldn't make it. Under the pressure to be something there's a second clause: or else I'm nothing. He is 28, and he is already keeping score that way.
He is also, textbook, in his Saturn Return.
The Saturn Return is an astrological event. Saturn comes back around to where it sat when you were born, which for most people happens somewhere between 28 and 31. It doesn't land once and move on. It lands, goes retrograde, lands again. It works on you over a couple of years, and the mood of it is serious.
Most of our 20s go to trying on masks. The partier, the professional, the philosopher, the adventurer, the lost one. You pick one up, you put it down. Nobody expects much of it, and there's some freedom in that. The Saturn Return is when the trying-on ends. The pressure arrives: be something. Go back to school. Get married. Have the kid. Or freeze.
The usual advice at this point is to keep the few masks that worked and refine them into a persona you can wear through your thirties. Most of us do that, and some of it helps. What nobody mentions is what happens to a mask that keeps working. It stops coming off at the end of the day. You stop noticing you put it on. Wear it long enough and it isn't a role you picked anymore. It's who you tell people you are.
I call this the performance trap. It runs on a contract that says worth is something you earn, not something you have, and it moves in right at this age, because for a moment there's no settled performance covering the question.
I still think this period is good news. Saturn asks you to build a structure, and a life does need one. The question is what the structure gets built on. My client can build his around the work he wants to do, or around not being nothing, and from the outside those two can look identical for years.
So the work here isn't picking the winning mask. The masks are fine, and you'll need a few. The work is noticing who's under them before the next one gets glued on. At 28 the glue hasn't set. That question is the loosest it will be for a long time.
He's still scared he won't make it up the mountain, and I keep asking him who told him that's the mountain.
I wrote a book about that. I’m Chad Herst, a coach and licensed acupuncturist (LAc) in San Francisco. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I'll send it to you.