DISCIPLINE ~ THE KEY TO FREEDOM

What separates the successful people from everybody else? Is it “Habits.”  I like to call them “Rituals.”  What are your rituals—Physical? Emotional? Intellectual? Spiritual? What Disciplines have you developed?

If you are physically fit, you would have the ritual (habit/discipline) of working out and eating well.  Emotionally angry people tend to get angry.  What energy do you find yourself practicing most of the time? Intellectually, where do you seek wisdom? Are you growing, or are you in a slump?  What books are you reading? And Spiritually, what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away?  Can you be alone with yourself—and do you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments?

The “world” tells  us to do what makes us happy.  I see teenagers, drinking, over eating, over spending, indulging in promiscuous behaviors, and I see a suicide rate that is 5,000 times higher today than it was 10 years ago.  Why?  They are doing the things that can bring pleasure, but yet they are not fulfilled.  Life offers many experiences, and if experiences alone brought wisdom and fulfillment, then elderly people would all be happy, enlightened masters.  But the lessons of experience are hidden.  Like most people, we’ve been taught to gather information from outside ourselves from books, magazines and experts.  We may hold many facts and opinions and have degrees that validate us, yet we know little about ourselves.  I want to know if you can disappoint another person to be true to yourself;  if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.  I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.  I want to know if you can see the beauty even when it is not pretty every day.  At the end of our lives it won’t matter if you have a BMW or drive a Hyundai, or if you have a 500,000 house or a 5 million dollar house.  What will matter is how you make people feel if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and help another person up.

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