Discipline (Part 1)

When I first began calling myself a songwriter, when I first began healing from 10 years of bulimia, I despised the word “discipline.” I thought that everything that had damaged me was due to that word. In a sense, I was right. When I couldn’t stop my bulimia on my own, I thought it was a lack of discipline. As a matter of fact, there were many people in my life who agreed. My college boyfriend would say, “Just don’t eat so much and go running with me!” I remember reading The Road Less Traveled at some point during college. One of the first sections of that book is titled “Delaying Gratification.” And I thought “Ah! That’s it! I just need to learn to delay gratification!” The problem there is that bulimia is an addiction. Though I can now understand and embrace “delayed gratification,” back then I was steeped in an eating disorder, and any attempt at this was pointless.

After college, I moved away from my hometown of Fairfax, VA to Asheville, NC. I used my first years in Asheville to recover from this massive eating disorder. I worked with massage therapists, acupuncturists, homeopaths and energy healers to let go of this thing I had known for so long. Discipline was not an option at that point. Delaying gratification was not an option. I was not a whole person. The only agenda was listening to my body and my heart. Even though I was writing songs at the time, I refused to call that practice discipline. I called it “showing up.” I called it “courage.” But discipline was anathema to me. People who had “discipline” were like my college boyfriend, who seemed to magically go through life sans emotion.

Discipline Lite

If you’re on my mailing list, then you’ve read my new year’s emailers about resolutions. I don’t like new year’s resolutions. They fall under the same category as giving stuff up for Lent. This always seemed kind of dumb to me. I still have stacks of old journals from high school (yes, this is what inspired me to write Mary Catherine’s Ash Wednesday Journal Entry), and I was reading them aloud to a friend. We both couldn’t stop laughing at how each year, my resolutions (stop cussing, give up M&Ms, exercise everyday for two hours) invariably were the same exact list as my Lent list (stop cussing, give up M&M’s, exercise�Ķ) at which I had obviously not been successful the first time. Apparently, the Lenten idea of giving up material things in order to remind myself of the suffering of Jesus was not nearly as appealing as weight loss and self-improvement�Ķ

A few years ago, I decided that rather than resolving to do things, I would choose a word to focus on during the new year. And judging by the volume of responses I get from my new year’s emailer, I think this idea strikes a chord with lots of people.

The first year I did this, I chose “gratitude” because I realized that I had a very hard time recognizing the gifts contained in this amazing world of mine. And I spent the year gently practicing gratitude. I kept a gratitude journal every night before going to bed. That practice made me pay attention to and deeply appreciate random things — an angle of sunlight on some tulips on my kitchen table; the phone call from my friend Steve instigating a hysterical discussion about the ineffectiveness of the luggage carts in St. Louis airport; the look my dog gives me in the car when she puts her chin on the console. (It tells me that I am, in fact, the best human ever to walk the planet.)

The next year, my word was “generosity,” and I never left a hotel room without leaving a tip for housekeeping (I keep up this practice to this day), I paid the tolls of people behind me (which, for some reason, freaked me out, especially in New Jersey), I looked for little gifts to give to friends. Picking a word a year has been kind of “Discipline Lite” for someone like me who had such a hard time with discipline.

Self-Discipline

About three years ago, my then acupuncturist Jean Hardesty (Jean has since moved to Norfolk and I recommend her highly) told me about a Prosperity Workshop that she had taken. I was going through fear about releasing my next CD Right Outta Nowhere on my own label because of the debt involved in making a new CD. I went to the workshop. The class met once a week for eight weeks. On the second week, the teacher, Barbara Waterhouse, was teaching the Eleven Principles of Prosperity. One of the principles was “self-discipline.” It made my entire body tense up. “Gross,” I thought. “These people are nuts.” When Barbara introduced the concept, the first thing she said was, “When I say ’self-discipline’ I’m not talking about getting up and jogging for an hour in the morning. I’m talking about how you talk to yourself. Do you perpetually sink into drama at the drop of a hat?” And she continued the discussion by describing all of the ways we take our minds into reactionary behaviors, and all of the ways we damage our selves and our lives by doing this. In her descriptions, I saw myself clearly. I call it my Inner Eeyore. At the end of the class we were asked to pick our weakest of the Eleven Principles and work on it. My area was clearly self-discipline.

Now, I have not been a big huge “just think positive!” kind of person. I do, however, recognize my own propensity for negativity. I call it the Crash And Burn Approach To Anything That Happens. Or, for those acronymically inclined: CABATATH. If nothing else, it certainly doesn’t hurt to shift out of this habit. (This is true especially if you’re an environmentalist. If you don’t like pollution, trying looking at what’s floating around in your own head.) That’s what I wanted to do.

That week, I had a great opportunity to explore self-discipline. And the result was huge. Months before this, Steve Seskin had told me that his business partner had played one of my songs for a major-label artist, and that the artist had really liked it and taken a copy home. Then the artist had called and asked for a lyric sheet. No one had heard anything since.

(A little note: I’m a songwriter without a publishing or record deal. It’s not all that common for one of my species to have a song covered by a major-label artist. So this was kind of an exciting thing for me.)

A few days after the “self-discipline” lecture, I was talking with Steve on the phone, and I asked what was going on with the song. Steve said he didn’t know but that he’d call his office to find out. He called back later and said, “Well, we haven’t heard anything in many weeks, and the office said that usually means an artist isn’t interested in the song. Oh well.” When I got off the phone, I tried not to be disappointed but ultimately CABATATH (really, I just made this acronym up as I was writing this) became my state of mind. I began debating whether or not I should head off to get my MBA and give up songwriting altogether because clearly I wasn’t cut out for this career – and on and on and on. Within minutes, my head was slinging low like Eeyore, and I was a tail-pin-with-a-pink-bow away from saying “Thanks for noticin’ me.”

After a few minutes, I remembered my “self-discipline” concept. I grabbed my journal and commanded myself to write every bad horrible negative thought I could think of. After I had my list of 14 things, I approached each one with the question “Is this true?” And really, none of them were. And the one that had most triggered me (“If we haven’t heard from the artist in a few weeks, then that usually means they’re not interested.”) was sheer speculation. I wrote down the facts right next to the drama statements. One of them was “We haven’t heard anything.” That’s all. I told myself not to translate the rest of it.

But here’s the thing. When you’re an emotional and/or insecure person, doing an exercise like this is physical. It’s physical. I had to work, and work hard, at keeping my mind from slipping. My business-minded friends who marvel at the idea of writing songs and being an artist don’t get this. They seem to automatically know how to think clearly. I don’t. So this was an earth-moving experience. It felt like I was trying to rip a steel door out of one wall, and then put it into another wall, so I could enter and exit from a different space.

After that, I went out for a walk. I stayed present and refused to let my inner-Eeyore get the best of me. After about 25 minutes of noticing flowers and feeling the bad stuff slip away and knowing that I was going to be okay no matter what, I arrived home. As I walked in the door feeling totally fine, and completely safe in the world, my phone was ringing. It was Steve. He said, “This is the weirdest thing.” The artist had just phoned the office and said she was going to record the song.

Now, the triumph of this story is not the happy ending. The triumph is that at that point, I really had let go of labeling the ending at all. I had gotten myself to recognize that I get to choose how I perceive any situation. I wish I could report that I have continued to triumph 100% of the time, but I can’t. I still slip up. But that was a huge lesson to me in recognizing the disease of this addiction to the Crash-and-Burn-Approach and recognizing that I had an option, and it was up to me to choose it. That is the essence of discipline, and it was a great lesson.

I’m not sure where we pick up this habit of seeing the down side of every situation. The world is certainly filled with well-intentioned Eeyore types. I call it your “default position.” The idea of using intention and discipline to shift that default position may seem phony at first, like a paste up job. But try it once. It’s deeper than “positive thinking.” It’s changing your default position. After some practice, I’ve gotten pretty good at doing just that.

Tagged as: Discipline, Living Consciously

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