Today I wanted to talk about discipline again and the view that anything good in life requires discipline.
Many of the bad things that you do in life also require discipline. A lot of the habits that you have need a lot of discipline to establish. If you are a smoker, I wonder how long it took you to actually start smoking and to be comfortable smoking.
I wonder how long it took you to get used to the taste of alcohol. It took me years just to get to like the taste of Beer and Guinness. I used to have to put sweetening agents in it to give it a different taste.
When you look at quitting drinking, it is going to take to time and discipline to get over the fact that you can’t drink anymore and that you can’t use alcohol as a tool anymore. It’s going to take discipline to build the life that you want outside of alcohol and I guarantee if you put the hard effort and discipline into this … that your life after alcohol is going to be awesome.
I don’t say that word too often. It is just a tripe word to most people, but to me, awesome is the way I feel in general, not every day, but in general when I compare my life now with before I quit. Before I quit, my life was just fucking boring. It was boring and disastrous and whatever else the alcohol was doing to me – I was going nowhere.
Now it’s just like I feel like my life is always on the up, always onwards and upwards, always, and that for me is awesome.
I woke up this morning and had a shitty pain in my back, just horrible. I could hardly bend and stuff. I haven’t done Yoga for a long time and have started to cease up.
Last week I had a cold, a really bad flu and I haven’t had a flu in ages and I know it’s because of the way I’ve been treating my body over Christmas. Over indulging in crap foods, eating lots of Biscuits and Cakes. I’ve got a really sweet tooth and the more of this stuff you eat, the more you want to eat because it is not satisfying your system. Your body is still craving for the good food that it wants. There is no nutrition in it. Your body still wants nutrition, so it’s like – eat, come one, eat more, eat more. Anyway, different thing but I’m just saying in general, my life feels completely awesome in general.
Discipline is not that hard to do, it’s another one of these habitual things that we get out of the habit of – having discipline in our lives – and you can build that habit again. You can build it bit by bit and by pushing through with things that you want to do.
From the perspective of having change or building a new life, it’s as I always say, you take it slowly. You do it bit by bit, you do it stage by stage. It’s not that much more, it’s not that difficult then to apply the discipline to it and to build up discipline.
Discipline is like a muscle. If you work at it, it builds and strengthens. If you stop working at it, it disappears and I think that’s what drinkers do, because it doesn’t take discipline to drink.
In order to relax through meditation or yoga, you’ve got to have a certain amount of discipline, in order to sit down and do it.
In order to eat good food at home that you’ve prepared yourself, you’ve got to put the effort in. You’ve got to have discipline to do it. It’s a lot easier to go, I’m hungry, I want to eat now, I want to satisfy the hunger and I want to go out to McDonalds and get a Burger.
I don’t go to McDonalds but I have my own version of that instant gratification. I have oven chips and cover them with tomato sauce and stuff like that, you know, it’s just an easy thing to do instead of spending five to fifteen minutes, having the discipline to cook. I am getting better but it is a slow progress. I don’t mind that. You have to take things slowly like that.
If you look at a child when it’s learning how to walk. It doesn’t do it overnight. It had to first crawl and then it has to stand up and then it has to walk around on the furniture. It’s just got to go through so many different little step by step progresses and it takes a while to get there but eventually … it gets there. There’s no bullshit with it. There’s no, I can’t do this. There might be a little bit of frustration every so often but at the end of the day, the Baby is going to walk, unless there is a physical disability that prevents it from working, that child is going to walk.
That Child is going to talk. That child is going to learn it’s multiplication tables. The child is going to learn to ride a bike and all these different things that we all have done and require discipline to do but we forget about. We forget that we are disciplined individuals.
If we didn’t have discipline as a species, we would have never got out of the primordial swamp.
It’s a natural thing for a child to do that. It’s not a natural thing for us to drink so it should be easy, it should be one of the easiest things in the world to give up, because we know at heart that it’s wrong. That it’s wrong for ourselves individually. Not fucking morally wrong but it’s wrong physically. Wrong in any sense of the word, if you are looking at growing your life – it’s wrong.
Things like going to the Gym, that requires a lot of discipline, because it’s not natural. Doing sit ups and press ups is not natural. Have you ever seen a Wild animal doing press ups? A Tiger or a Lion, big strong animals. Have you ever seen them doing press ups? No! Because they don’t need to do it. They haven’t got down to that stage yet.
It’s just that we put so many obstacles in our way. We sit down at jobs. We sit down at the TV, so we have to invent these false ways of getting exercise. We eat junk food. You never see a wild animal eating junk food.
There have been studies where they’ve been seen outside massive Hotels in Africa and places like that. Places where garbage has been dumped, obviously with left over food, at Rubbish Depots or wherever. They’ve watched groups of baboons for instance, finding out where this food is and then just hanging around there and just eating this food and not living their lives like they should be doing and all these animals then get the same diseases as we’ve got. High blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, heart attacks, all these things, obese, and that’s the way it is.
If you think about things from a natural point of view and try and bring yourself back down to that. It’s impossible to do it fully but you can bring a lot of that natural stuff back into your life. Getting out walking, stretching in the morning. I love yoga because I think it’s a natural thing to do. When a Cat or a Dog gets up in the morning, they have a big stretch. I think yoga is just the more intelligent way of stretching because you are stretching a lot more of your body.
Anyway, that’s it for today. If you have any questions leave them down below. Take care of yourself and keep the alcohol out of your mouth.
“Self-Discipline is like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
Good message, but you’ve got several typos. I resonate with many of your vibrations, BUT…I finally learned how to limit my drinking!! So happy I can now have only a few beers or share a bottle of wine with a friend. It is possible Kevin; it just isn’t very easy…not by a long shot. But I kept trying. I kept screwing up. And now I’m finally here.