resistance and discipline

I woke up this morning, at whatever unholy hour I usually wake up because of the dogs here barking at unauthorized cats, or in solidarity with the dogs barking in the surrounding square mile--usually 3-4am. On a good night, they don't bark right outside my window.

My mid-sleep mental state is usually pretty mellow, but today I was experiencing my resistance to teaching. I wasn't satisfied with the lesson I've been running all week, but then there's just...resistance. So I was angsting, and scared, and nervous. And practicing. I'd get anxious. I'd see the anxiety, laugh because it's the same performance anxiety I've always experienced, and pinch it off at the root and let it float away. Every time I'm faced with the risks of performing somehow, I feel this: with all my singing, with aikido tests, but even more so when I acted, because I don't reliably remember lines, and with acting, it's all me. I'm right there, the thing that people are staring at, it's my turn to carry the thread of the performance all by myself and holy crap.

But I push through it, and I get up and do what I'm doing, and (now, at least, after years of growing up and aikido and Zen practice) I'm very present in what I do, and it goes well.

I find this duality-of-mind fascinating. I've been trying for months to write an essay on discipline, unsuccessfully, because I have trouble articulating what discipline actually means in practical terms. The reality of it is that on one level, I often don't want to go to aikido class, or sit zazen in the morning, or whatever; and then, most often, I do it anyway, because...why, exactly? The reasons have varied over time, and in my reasons I don't find any thread of continuity to excuse my eccentric behavior of spending 3 years sitting relatively still every morning for 40 minutes, or 7 years of doing aikido 3-4 times per week.

Except, maybe, there's sort of a direction. Not an ideal, not a target self-image, not a target self, but an...impulse, a motion, an attraction like gravity. I intuitively sense a pattern of how I want to be in the world, how I want to move and intersect with everyone else's lives, how I want to relate to other people, what I want to be able to do to respond to their needs, and my own.

I think discipline is to set aside the most transient of our desires and insecurities, our daily contortions to seek pleasant things and avoid unpleasant things, to work for the growth of something bigger, something we feel is important than our moment-to-moment comfort. When we learn we can do that for something deeply important to us, we learn we can do it for anything we choose: we discover our power to make choices and steer ourselves, despite our habits of mind telling us to stay on the couch and eat an entire bag of Trader Joe's Cheese Crunchies.

(Shut UP.)

I don't know. What do you think? What does discipline mean to you?