The 'Meta-Discipline'
- Misia
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
a discipline that strengthens all disciplines
We all know how it goes, that relentless cycle of putting the effort in with all hopes of your discipline making the wave that will make the difference you are looking for, before losing the will again and falling out of habit.
The cycle that loops over and over without progression, and makes you wonder what you are doing wrong.
Let's say you are trying to build a workout habit, you know you feel better on the day when you exercise and it helps you to reach your longer-term goal of a healthy body. When you are in a routine, it feels good. You might think there is no reason why you shouldn't stick to this discipline, but eventually the day arrives where you lose the will, you just feel too tired or wish to comfort yourself with a softer day before slipping back into your old habits again. Later on you pick it up again and the cycle continues.
This can apply to any discipline; we often ebb and flow in a cycle of finding the grit and falling into familiarity, and it can be frustrating to feel helpless to this pattern when we wish to grow. What can we do to push ourselves just that bit further?
It must be you who pushes through and creates the change. No one else can do it for you… But what if there was a way to make the push feel more natural? Not just for one thing but for literally everything you want to achieve or build on.
The cycle is always mental, your willingness to go out and achieve what it is you wish to achieve, your belief in your own ability to achieve it and your ability to adapt and grow.
There is one commitment you can implement into your routine as the quality of your awareness and focus deepens, you gain clarity of what these changes mean to you, and you strengthen your will.
It's a simple discipline, and it only takes around 15 - 20 mins a day and you can really do it anywhere as long as you have the space and time without distraction. This meta-discipline is meditation.
So just how can it create such profound mental change?
Awareness
When you are able to sit with yourself in awareness, you become more aware of the unconscious systems of your thinking.
With time as your practice deepens, you are able to go deeper, understand the more inner workings of your mind and what unconscious biases are influencing your conscious actions.
As Jung famously said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.
It is often these unconscious biases that make it difficult for us to step into change, even if we know the change is good for us, as deep down we still have an attachment to old beliefs and data from experiences that we have outgrown.
Focus
Probably one of the most well-known things that meditation is known for is its ability to deepen your focus.
One of the most popular and simple meditation methods rooted in Buddhist philosophy and now used in many clinical settings for its therapeutic benefits is something called a single-point meditation.
Just as it sounds, you focus on one object of focus the whole time. Most of the time, this is your breath, but it can also be a symbol or phrase of what it is you wish to attract in your life (this is also a very powerful mental rewiring technique). As long as you try to direct the entirety of your awareness into this one focus point and let everything else dissolve around it, you are doing it right.
If you are just starting in meditation, perhaps you may find that you struggle with this; it becomes uncomfortable as your mind flicks from one topic to the next, and you feel out of control.
Perhaps you find thoughts of things to do naturally or comments on the past. This is your unconscious programming becoming revealed to you, and it's the act of coming into awareness of the thoughts that are coming to the surface and gently redirecting your breath back to that single point that becomes stronger with time. As this strengthens, you gain more control of your mind.
The more you are able to hold your awareness onto a single point, the more that you are able to focus deeply on the tasks you set out to achieve without distraction and the more likely you are to follow through on your other disciplines.
Emotional Clarity
Meditation helps give us clarity in what is meaningful to us by bringing unconscious content to the surface and helping us to slow down enough to process it into more tangible information.
How can this help us to keep meaningful habits? Well, everything that we do is for a reason. When we are disconnected from that reason and from what it means to you, we can lose the will.
When you can connect to what the disciplines you are trying to implement into your life mean to you with clarity, they can feel more pleasurable to achieve if they are really meant for you.
This practice is one of the best things that you can do for yourself; it's not one act for one goal, it's a ripple that shapes every aspect of your life for the good.
It's not just your ability to hold your awareness on your breath; it improves the quality of the entirety of your inner architecture. Some might think, why would I put my energy into a meditation practice when I can put that energy directly into my goals? But they don't realise, it's the meditation that will break them out of that cycle (or at least create a more positive shift in it) and give them the ability to go deep.
Find the grit to invest your time and attention to a meditation practice and the grit for everything else will become more natural.
Thank you for reading 🌀🧘
If you wish to go deeper, explore our many mental alchemy resources.
and as always, open to discussion in the comments
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