Surya Posted August 21 (edited) Anyone got some advice on how to cultivate it? I am, by nature I think, extremely low on it. Prob 98 percentile or something crazy. First step is dopamin detox, I believe, but advice on that as well as other steps are welcome. Another thing I think is crucial is finding work that are somewhat in tune with my nature, instrinsic motivation. Wish you a good day Edited August 21 by Surya 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Lairg Posted August 21 (edited) Give up the pharmaceuticals and take up gardening. Caring for plants will move your attention away from your own desires. Getting your hands in the soil will ground you The nature spirits (lesser devas) will help heal you. Effective meditation can follow later Edited August 21 by Lairg 3 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Lala Nila Posted August 21 Atomic Habits, by James Clear is an excellent book to help build discipline. ask ChatGPT to summarize this book for you if you don't want to commit to buying, although I highly recommend. Dopamine detox is a great idea, identify the triggers, find small solutions to counter it. Don't be too hard on yourself, especially if you fail. It basically states that discipline is built over small increments over time and you build on those increments each session. So instead of saying I'm getting off the internet entirely, start small and say "I'm going to limit my browsing time to 3-4 hours today in total" then go from there. Or instead of committing to a chapter a day for a book for a month, start smaller- "I'll read 10 pages a day for for this week" I also agree with Lairg, get outside, spend time in nature, feel the soil with your hands and the breeze on your face. I also like motivational speakers- David Goggins and Jocko Willink words seem to kick my butt in gear when I'm getting lazy, especially when training. I like confrontation and harsh words at times, so that might not work for everyone 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
liminal_luke Posted August 21 This is what I´m doing lately: Practice — WOOP my life. So far, so good. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Surya Posted August 21 Thanks to you all.. @Lairg I live in an apartment, BUT, i happen to have some carrot, dill, chilli and spring onion seeds laying around. I think it is a great idea, really. On giving up the pharmasuticals... certainly, I do not even know why I use it and keep using, when... it is just dumb on so many levels haha, but yeah. @Lala Nila So, Ive been enjoying your blog posts. This morning, we studied the following verse: https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/4/25/62/ I am a little tired now, so the exact talk he gave after the reading, I do not recall entirley, but the importance of showing up, asscociating with the good, listening to the wise, reading vedic texts daily and developing a higher taste as the way to drop bad habits, stood out to me. Like, lets say you eat a lot of junk - the solution isnt to quit eating, but to get the taste for better foods. And this can be found in the company of the wise. So, I read you do jappa, right, I am supposed to, as well. When you think about it, it really is the simplest thing in the world, but for whatever reason I am extremly inconcistent with it, even tho I have experimental knowledge of its beneficial effects. It is not like they ask me to do it to torture me, uknow. So I asked him where the resistance might come from. I belive he said it was due to material conditioning... When I am in good company or a place that has that sacred vibe, doing my duties becomes so much easier, and my mind a lot calmer. And yeah, in regards to this: 5 hours ago, Lala Nila said: I also like motivational speakers- David Goggins and Jocko Willink words seem to kick my butt in gear when I'm getting lazy, especially when training. I like confrontation and harsh words at times, so that might not work for everyone https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/17/15/ So yeah, if one is being judgemental or hard on me when I hardly know them, ofc I dont like that. BUT when it is done intelligently, by one you recognize as a teacher and with the intention to help, go for it. One should be humble as grass, he told me. When someone steps on it, it doesnt get hurt. It simply bends down and rises right up again afterwards. 5 hours ago, Lala Nila said: Atomic Habits, by James Clear is an excellent book to help build discipline. Grazie 5 hours ago, liminal_luke said: This is what I´m doing lately: Practice — WOOP my life. So far, so good. Thank you. 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
steve Posted August 21 I find martial arts training to be a wonderful way to cultivate self-discipline. Running and weightlifting are also good but nothing beats martial arts for me. 3 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Lala Nila Posted August 22 2 hours ago, Surya said: Thanks to you all.. @Lairg I live in an apartment, BUT, i happen to have some carrot, dill, chilli and spring onion seeds laying around. I think it is a great idea, really. On giving up the pharmasuticals... certainly, I do not even know why I use it and keep using, when... it is just dumb on so many levels haha, but yeah. @Lala Nila So, Ive been enjoying your blog posts. This morning, we studied the following verse: https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/4/25/62/ I am a little tired now, so the exact talk he gave after the reading, I do not recall entirley, but the importance of showing up, asscociating with the good, listening to the wise, reading vedic texts daily and developing a higher taste as the way to drop bad habits, stood out to me. Like, lets say you eat a lot of junk - the solution isnt to quit eating, but to get the taste for better foods. And this can be found in the company of the wise. So, I read you do jappa, right, I am supposed to, as well. When you think about it, it really is the simplest thing in the world, but for whatever reason I am extremly inconcistent with it, even tho I have experimental knowledge of its beneficial effects. It is not like they ask me to do it to torture me, uknow. So I asked him where the resistance might come from. I belive he said it was due to material conditioning... When I am in good company or a place that has that sacred vibe, doing my duties becomes so much easier, and my mind a lot calmer. And yeah, in regards to this: https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/17/15/ So yeah, if one is being judgemental or hard on me when I hardly know them, ofc I dont like that. BUT when it is done intelligently, by one you recognize as a teacher and with the intention to help, go for it. One should be humble as grass, he told me. When someone steps on it, it doesnt get hurt. It simply bends down and rises right up again afterwards. Grazie Thank you. Thanks for that quote! I believe that your teacher is correct- in a spiritual setting, yes this method is beneficial. But, sometimes we need we also need a hard lesson and hard language to motivate us or just to help us see through some illusions, the wise person will know the differences in setting and when to apply it. I love this grass analogy quite a bit! 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
yugenphoenix Posted August 23 (edited) On 8/21/2025 at 6:07 PM, steve said: I find martial arts training to be a wonderful way to cultivate self-discipline. Running and weightlifting are also good but nothing beats martial arts for me. Amazing advice from a man with many worn shoes on the Way 🙇 I wholeheartedly agree! Running, especially recommend trail running, it’s my main “practice” as I feel such a connection out in the mountains and rivers and stones and trees with Being, thru my body’s feelings, breathing, motion, sights of amazement in such beautiful surroundings, it’s a real Shen Gong practice for me 🙂 I also endorse weightlifting and body weight exercises like pull ups, pushups, dips, and sit ups done as super sets. Any physical activity done in moderation is good for your energy cultivation. Running will make you go thru your pain cave and into a place of deep strength if you let it 👊 And of course taking pain is the first step of you want to practice the martial arts. With @steve here the Dao bums for sure has much strength with very positive advice and direction 🙏 Edited August 23 by yugenphoenix 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
yugenphoenix Posted August 23 (edited) On 8/21/2025 at 3:50 AM, Lairg said: Give up the pharmaceuticals and take up gardening. Caring for plants will move your attention away from your own desires. Getting your hands in the soil will ground you The nature spirits (lesser devas) will help heal you. Effective meditation can follow later Agree with you! I hated gardening! And my mother (before she died) and my wife love it! Then my wife made this thing in our yard called a “forest garden” (if you don’t know it just Google it 🙂) and I watched it shape, then began helping shape it into a hidden grove, with fruit trees, herbs, flowers, a stone fire pit. It’s an amazing peaceful, quiet, place filled with such beauty and CHI. And I love digging in the dirt now and helping things grow. Seeing the insects and connections, feeling the sun, the delicate wind, and tranquil rains. It’s a full practice in itself 🙏 George Harrison was a devout Hindu practitioner all his life and he retired from fame and lived as a recluse in a mansion surrounded by 7 vast gardens which he spent his days slowly “cultivating” 🙂 Edited August 23 by yugenphoenix Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tommy Posted August 24 (edited) I first looked up what self discipline means. Google responded with AI, ... To be "self-disciplined" means you have the ability to control your own actions and impulses, allowing you to work hard and behave in a desired way without external prompting or supervision. It's the capacity to pursue long-term goals by managing your emotions and weaknesses, choosing what is right or beneficial for you even when faced with distractions, temptations, or difficult feelings. So, if I give advice or external prompting then it isn't self discipline? Is it?? One's ability to choose a path and follow it in spite of difficulties and temptations. So, it has to be a choice one makes and follows?? If I choose to stop smoking then I have to have enough discipline to stop? I quit a long time ago but still have dreams of smoking once in a while. My wife was a big motivator in quitting smoking. I do believe that the environment has an effect upon one's habits. Much like the experiment scientist did upon rats. Held in bare cages with two bottles of water. One bottle with plain water and the other laced with cocaine. The rats drank from the one laced with cocaine consistently until they died. Another scientist looked at the experiment and decided to give the rats the two bottles but also offer companionship of other rats. A place to rest and play. With the better environment, the rats stayed away from the cocaine laced water. So, my belief is that if your environment is conducive to the things you want to achieve then you will do so. If however, your environment is not then you will struggle all the way to losing yourself. My only advice is to determine your goals and seek the environment that will best suit your success. Good luck to you. Edited August 24 by Tommy 3 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Surya Posted August 29 Thank you, Kristoffer and Amogha-drkk 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Sanity Check Posted August 31 It is easy to be disciplined. What is hard is knowing what is important. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Surya Posted September 3 (edited) On 31.8.2025 at 4:40 PM, Sanity Check said: It is easy to be disciplined. What is hard is knowing what is important. Not paying bills from the bank is important, spending time in good company is as well : ) edit: and BHAKTI 🤩 Edited September 3 by Surya Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
markern Posted September 3 I think you mean that you would score in the second percentile if you are low on discipline not the 98th. That would make you super disciplined. I actually scored at exactly the second percentile in conscientiousness on the Big Five and have turned that around to being a very orderly disciplined person in many areas of my life so I think I can speak well on this. Today I'd probably be at the 60th percentile, maybe 70th, in total. In many areas of my life I would probably even score 95th-99th percentile for order and self control now. I think the most important advice for building self discipline is to start VERY small. Start with baby steps with small daily changes of something that you are quite certain to be able to do. Then keep it up until it sticks. Then you add another thing that requires some discipline until that sticks and so forth. Over time those very small changes add up to a lot and eventually you get momentum and a sort of confidence in your ability to discipline yourself that will make further progress much easier. Aiming for larger changes quickly too often fails and then kills motivation. Jordan Peterson has some great videos about the power of small changes. Search for JBP and small or incremental change. I'll tell a bit about how I built order in my life. I found it helpful to develop sort of specific areas or zones of order in my life while just accepting that many things were and would for a long time remain, in chaos. One of the things that got really orderly in my life first was how I managed my backpack. I almost always bring it when I leave the house. I keep so much in it. Because I often forgot to put in one or more items I really needed, I started to focus on thinking through whether everything was put in it when I left the house. I also made small routines such as I always have a pen in it and if I ever take the pen out it always goes straight back in so that I don't have to check every time if I put it in. I also started always having a pen that "lives" where I usually sit in my living room so that I don't really need to take the pen out at home as one is always already handy where I mostly sit. I got clear routines for how I repacked my backpack if I wasn't just going out to do things in the city, but If I was going hiking or to the gym. That way always had what I needed and could pack it quickly without needing to use any mental energy on it. Once the backpack was an area of order in my life I started to focus on my bedside table. I wanted things there to be neat and to have clear ideas for what I put there at night. And I started to have exact placements for where I put a glass of water, my cellphone and a lotion I sometimes need to put on when I woke up at night. This way I could grab anything I needed in the dark without turning the light on. This too became a sort of zone of settled order in my life where things functioned smoothly without any thought. I started to always make my bed in the morning and I bought really nice bedsheets and a really nice blanket to keep on top it it. I developed a morning routine with clear time slots. 20 min to wake up with chit chat with the woman I live with or being on my computer, the into the shower, then qigong, then eat, then leave the house by a specific time. I eventually changed 20 min on the computer doing whatever to only allowing reading serious newspapers such as FT, NYT, WSJ because I found ti was better for my brain to start with that than social media. I then did a super thorough tyding up of my room. Everything there was a mess, lots of things should have been moved to the basement or thrown away and I needed to organize things properly. I decided to work on it 20 min each day. Eventually I got through that and my room got super organized. Everything has its logical place and it is quite easy to keep order there. Very little energy is spent finding anything whereas I used to have to search for a long time for many items because they could be hidden anywhere in my mess on the floor or the mess in the closet or under the bed or who knows where. I then bought really nice plants to make it nicer. I developed lots of routines for things such as shopping. I figured out what I needed to buy at the cheap store and what I had to buy at the more expensive store and started to track what I had in the fridge so I could avoid impulsive buying. I went from everyday sort of panicking on the way home because I didn't know what I had in the fridge and then impulsively buying what I thought I might need in the expensive corner store to almost always being well stocked and buying most of what I needed in the cheap store. This actually gave me a lot of peace of mind and going from chaos to order in this area of my life made other changes much easier. It used to be a daily chaos force that reinforced for me how chaotic and disorganized I was. Which undermined other attempts at order and self control. I found that the best way to approach a long list of changes that need to be made is to start with the changes that once you've made the change you don't need to keep doing anything. So for example throwing away something that needs to be thrown away or buying something is a one time thing while getting into a habit of eating well or taking your vitamins requires daily effort. A related category of things aren't done once and for all but once you've done them you don't have to do them again for a really long time. By focusing on doing things that once done didn't need to be continuously reinforced I got a lot of headaches removed from my life without really needing to achieve continuous discipline. Some of the things I focused on doing was: Replacing my fire extinguishers, finding the bank with the best interest rate, buying a new computer, fixing something about my insurance, giving away old clothes to the Salvation Army, throwing away all old electronics I didn't need, selling old DVDs, buying drawers to have under my bed to have more storage space. Getting a bunch of things like that done really helps to give a feeling that your life has progressed and that you have more self control. I started to stock up on a bunch of items I could buy cheaply in a bulk buying store so very rarely had to do extra shopping for items such as a specialized tooth paste I need, deodorant and a bunch of other things. I started to religiously write down anything I needed to do at a certain time in my calendar at once when I found out it needed to be done. If I don't do it at once I often forget to put it in later so it has to be an inviolable rule. I also made a to do list where I put everything that needs to be done at some unclear point in the future and I look at it regularly to see if there is anything I could do this day or week. I started enjoying being able to cross things of and my brains reward system now craves that. I found that while I was almost always on time I almost always stressed myself by waiting until the last minute to get up and get ready to go. I've worked on that for a few years now and am finally started to get really good at starting to prepare for when I need to leave in good time and then actually leave in good time. I've also found that it gives me peace of mind, and is good for my nervous system, to not only leave in good time but leave extra early so my nervous system has absolutely zero reason to stress about maybe being too late for the subway or dentist or whatever. The waiting time I fill with reading books or doing something on my computer. I find that it is very helpful to connect an action that requires discipline with transition points in the day. So you do the thing, say a qigong routine, right after you get out of bed or as the last thing you do before you leave the house or right before lunch or straight after getting home or right before bed or right before watching the news etc. It requires less willpower to do it then and the transition point serves as a very solid reminder of what you are supposed to do. I find that rather than just trying to develop self control in all areas of life it is often beneficial to start by prioritizing three things that have very strong indirect effects on discipline. Mostly by just making you feel better, stronger and more balanced. They are sleep, exercise and cultivation. It is probably beneficial to start by prioritizing sleep as number one, gross exercise as number two and cultivation, as in qigong and meditation etc., as number three. If sleep is off, everything else will be difficult. Any sort of discipline will be much harder to achieve. So look into all the advice on how to work with that. Take melatonin and follow sleep protocols and get a falling a sleep track to listen to etc. The second order of priority should probably be exercise for most. The benefits are huge and the way it makes you feel good will make disciplining yourself in other areas of life much easier. Is long as you choose the right kind of exercise you are also probably going to learn to enjoy it while also practicing discipline by doing something a bit difficult on regular basis. That can serve as a sort of "zone" of discipline in your life that once established starts to expand into other areas. Because the results are almost guaranteed as long as you just do it, I put it higher in the order of priorities than energetic and meditative cultivation because those don't necessarily give immediate results for everyone. While the most important thing is to establish some form of exercise it is probably good for developing discipline in life in general to have some of your exercise be something that at least some of the time really challenges you with regards to how much physical pain and mental effort you are able to exert. Learning to handle that pain and anguish has huge transference effects IME. Handling other tasks I have resistance to becomes so much easier. The discomfort experiencing during exercise is great equanimity training. As mentioned by someone else in the thread martial arts training probably has especially strong discipline training effects. Once a base of gross physical exercise is a part of your life the priority goes to cultivation. Incorporating that into your life will often help with discipline in all other areas. The way it changes your energetically towards more balance probably transforms you energetically into a person with an easier time disciplining yourself. The way it develops mindfulness helps you see and work with all the thoughts and feelings that come up when you try to discipline yourself. The concentration developed through cultivation is also extremely beneficial in developing discipline and focus in what you do. Learning to put your mind where you want it and staying there makes discipline so much easier. I think for a lot of people trauma healing is an essential part of developing discipline. Some naturally are disposed to have less self control but my observation is that a lot of people are just externally chaotic because they are internally chaotic because of trauma. When the trauma heals, self control naturally starts to surface. In terms of reading there are three things I would recommend. The book Six Pillars of Self Esteem by Nathaniel Branden is really good at helping you develop self control and just has a very original way to approach that and self esteem and that I think is extremely valuable. Nest self help book I ever read. Stoic philosophy aims very directly at developing self control on a deep level. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a very well researched paradigm not just for working with things such as anxiety and depression but for changing dysfunctional behavioral patterns. Interestingly it is inspired by stoic philosophy. Finally there is an effortless way to develop order and discipline in your life and that is through intuition and internal listening. You might find that once something deeper in you points you in certain directions in life then developing discipline and order in those areas becomes effortless, or at least much easier. Sometimes personal chaos isn't really about lack of discipline in ones character but about being on the wrong path in life. Once something deeper in you tells you that what you really want is this thing and how you really like to do things is that way or this way etc, things fall into place much easier. Intuition can also point the way to what is the exact right thing to start doing something about now or what is the way to go about it. The subconscious just knows so much more about us and can "calculate" much more complex things about us than the conscious mind. So it might figure out that the right way for you to get more discipline in your life right now isn't any of what I said but maybe finally learning the piano because that will develop a routine for you that you will be passionate about which can form the basis for other healthy change. Or maybe it will tell you that you actually need to go to a bootcamp with ex Navy Seals to scream at you while doing grueling physical challenges in order to break through your resistance to discomfort. Or that what you really need is to start doing the Feldenkrais method because that is what will actually help the most for you right now in removing some blocks that makes you have an impulsive mind. Or whatever. So try to listen and be open to both intuitions about what to do and what deeper parts of yourself have to say about your direction and priorities in life. They might make it all much easier. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Surya Posted September 3 Bless you all. This thread I will study and work with, and use to make plans. Not seriously, because I am not, but sincerely, because I am. Thanks 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites