Considering discipline on the cusp of a new year.
In the middle of a day, I found myself hungry. Starving. Didn’t realize I’d waited so long to eat, but here I was: compiling a meal while almost crawling out of my skin with desire to ravage it. Then I took a slow, deep, smooth breath in and out, and calmed myself and the hunger urges down. I took my time, made a beautiful meal, and considered hunger.
To clarify immediately, this is not about food insecurity and hunger. This is about appetites and urges. And hunger.
Hunger is necessary. There would be no people without hunger. And it’s a gift, a compelling need that reminds us: we are alive! Appetites wake us up, motivate us, drive us to action. When the actions aren’t controlled because we are only semi-conscious while taking them, we are enslaved by our appetites. That creates challenges to living a life of our dreams.
We want to achieve goals for our health, well-being, satisfaction, and enjoyment. But if we spend our time reacting to endless urges, we default to our base appetites for bad food, unhealthy/unhappy sex, mind-altering activities like excessive drugs, alcohol, media, and all kinds of distractions including negative and unhealthy thoughts.
We consume, digest, and live unhealthy thoughts when we don’t notice them or address them. If our unhappy thoughts tell us we are inadequate, weak, unlovable, and lacking in some significant way, we believe we are not enough. Fear of “not enough” leads to “too much,” when it comes to appetites.
In the quest to consume, we avoid the very hunger that guides us. We prematurely stuff our faces. We spend money and energy recklessly, without consciousness or consideration. Worse yet, we lose a connection with the precious time of our lives. It slips away with nary a notice by us. We run around the planet disconnected from our lives, maybe staring at a screen/clicking on a mouse for the dopamine rush—like a dying person clicking on their morphine line. We are consumed by our own consumption, urged by our urges—even as we may regret those very choices as we make them.
We are confused, but only because we aren’t paying attention to our inner experience. We think we are weak, but strength is merely a practice in observation. Engaging discipline helps shine the light of observation inside, where there is much to learn and more to untangle. Inside is the only place where life happens, which is why it’s the only place change can happen.
When instituting discipline to achieve goals and manage our hungers, there are tips that support us in the process:
1. Choose specific goals or activities, and don’t take on too much at one time.
2. Plan! Imagining in advance the challenges helps us prepare. It may help to write a detailed plan for how to manage the anticipated challenges, with positive rewards built in.
3. If you have tried before and failed, congratulations! You learned from that, so consider those lessons this time.
4. Keep trying and practicing. Change is a process—bad habits are years in the making.
5. Return to your motivation. Keep a list handy of the reasons why you want to change the habit.
6. Keep a journal to sort through the process, especially when setbacks happen.
7. Remember this is a learning opportunity, so failure is the teacher. Adapt and keep trying.
8. Be grateful for the wisdom that inspires you to grow, learn, and change. This is the stuff that makes life exciting.
9. Keep an eagle eye out for negative self-talk. When it crops up, pay attention and remember, that's just an old, useless, and untrue story.
9. Break it down, one moment at a time. There is only one moment, and this moment is manageable, comfortable, and simple.
As we shift our gaze inside, away from the infinite temptations of the outside world, we discover all we need: awareness. Awareness is the superpower that guides us to the lives of our dreams.
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