The Power of Discipline: Mastering Your Life, One Habit at a Time
This post is all about how you can use discipline for personal transformation. You’ll learn that self-discipline is the key to creating positive habits that foster personal growth in body, mind, and Spirit.
The Five Pillars for Successful Personal Transformation
First let me share that discipline is one of the five mental qualities Bikram Choudhury stressed to all his teachers and students alike that were required to be truly successful in life. Since I’m sure you’re curious, the other four qualities are faith, concentration, determination, and patience. And it’s Bikram’s emphasis of these qualities that were the genesis of my idea to create these mantra cards for my students. After all, we all want the benefits of discipline for our personal transformation.
Use Discipline to Rein in the Monkey Mind
When we want to succeed we have to be able to rein in the monkey mind, the unruly mind. Creating and maintaining order in our thoughts and behavior is what self-discipline is all about and this is no easy task. We won’t have any kind of positive personal transformation without disciplining the mind first.
This is why Bikram Yoga is designed to use the body as the mechanism to train the mind. All of the challenges inherent to the class force us to be disciplined mentally and physically.
Personal Transformation: Replacing Old Habits with New
Often when we’ve made a decision to create change and set out to make it our reality, the old habits resurface and do once again as they’ve long been doing. This can be discouraging and it takes discipline to not let that discouragement take over such that we give in to the old ways. Let there be no doubt that personal transformation requires discipline.
The Bikram Yoga class is a microcosm of the macrocosm of our life overall. We get to discover the mental conditioning, habits, and behaviors that we operate through. This is what’s gotten us to where we are now. With this newfound awareness we get to choose to use discipline to create the personal transformation we desire.
Habits: The Fabric of Our Lives
Your life is the product of your habitual behaviors. Habits get programmed in by repetition like when you learned how to tie your shoelaces or drive a car. It’s challenging in the beginning. But the more you do something the better you get at it until eventually it becomes automatic and you don’t have to think about what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Your subconscious mind takes over and simply runs the program for you.
The process of consciously programming your subconscious mind requires discipline. When you want to learn something new you have to practice it over and over and over again until it becomes second nature. This same process can happen unconsciously as well, the results of which become our bad habits.
Breaking Free: Use Discipline for Transformation
And what do you do when you realize the habit you’ve developed, like drinking two glasses of wine every night, is not serving you and won’t help you lose the extra weight you’ve been putting on? That’s just one example, my friend. I am not saying it’s your problem but it is a common one that I’m using as an example.
Changing or releasing your bad habit requires massive discipline especially if it’s reached an addictive level. Beware that there will be no change to your life without utilizing the discipline required to transformation your habits.
Tricks for Turning Bad Habits into Good Ones That Stick
There are some tricks though that are very helpful. Ever tried to break a bad habit cold turkey? How long did it last? Saying to yourself, “I’m not going to do that ever again!” still has your attention on “that”. Let me suggest that instead of just trying to stop the bad habit in and of itself, that you find something good to replace it with. As you focus your attention with discipline on practicing that new habit over and over and over again until it takes hold, the other one will wither away from disuse and lack of attention.
Routines Run Our Lives: Transform them with Discipline
Our everyday lives are governed by our habits and routines. We wake up in the morning and go the bathroom. We have coffee, eat our breakfast, and take a shower. Most of us probably pick up our phones and start scrolling even before we’re out of bed. Examine all of your habits and routines and determine which are healthy and which aren’t. All it takes is a little discipline to transform the bad to something good.
The easiest way to anchor in a new habit is to mix it into one of your healthy routines that’s already well established. It’s kind of like a mentor with an arm over the should of the mentee. We all need support when establishing discipline for personal transformation.
The Disciple Within: Dedication Breeds Mastery
Discipline comes from the same root word as disciple. I see it as meaning to devote the time and energy into the study of one subject matter, one discipline, long enough to truly master it. Yes, often that comes by studying under one master as Jesus’s disciples did, and this happens to brings up a story from when I went on a tour in India led by Bikram and his wife Rajashree over the year end holidays in 2004/2005.
Personal Experience Creates Desire for Change
This was early in my years of teaching Bikram Yoga when I attended every one of his Advanced Seminars and trips for several years. I knew that it was the only way I would be able to take class and learn directly from him repeatedly in a concentrated period of time. Plus, I got to continue my disciplined practice of the yoga, be with my family of other fellow yogis, and it was continuing education so tax deductible. All in all they were ideal vacations for me.
From Student to Disciple to Master
Discipline: The Key to Transformation
By reading this post I hope you’ve discovered the power of using discipline for personal transformation.
