markern

How deep stance do you practice?

Where does Damo admit this?

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.

I have suffered from Qi deviation issues for years because of being severely ungrounded. I had to stop all practice for several years. The last year or so I have been able to restart a bit by doing 15 min of qigong a day. Either the 8 brocades or the six healing sounds and a session of TRE in the evening. I want to investigate more grounding exercises to try to find something that can help me further along. In general a lot of qigong and energetic exercises make me worse. Even those that are supposedly grounding. Though some work in a balanced way in moderate dosages. If you know any, please suggest whatever grounding exercises you know. Both energetic ones, such as a qigong movement, or more pure physical ones that aren't really designed to work with energy but still l has the effect of grounding energy.

One exercise that does work really well for grounding me is deep earth pulsing. Unfortunately I get pains in my knees and calfs when I do it. I have Bectherews disease, which makes me easily get pains in joints. But something kinda like deep earth pulsing but a little bit different might not damage my knees.