It becomes effortful to *not* do it. It pulls you in and demands you keep working.
Discipline is fighting yourself.
Wasted energy. Wasted creativity.
Put that instead into figuring out what you actually most want.
Solve problems in doing what you want with reason, not force.
It sounds cute and simplicistic — like meaningless motivational self-help talk — but the world really does work this way.
Problems really are soluble. What's stopping you really is conflicting ideas. Force is trying to reach answers/truth using brute authority instead of reason.
"I've tried everything! Self-discipline, Beeminder, social media time-outs, Tony Robbins, waking at 5am... Nothing seems to work!"
I learnt this skill even exists as a thing in 2018.
(CFAR introduced Gendlin Focusing, then I heard the body is practically relevant to emotions ~somehow~, and that intellectuals like me have a blindspot about that. Humph!)
Sucked at it for 2 years.
2/
I found Gendlin Focusing very difficult at first.
First, it was hard to find sensations in the body at all. Or I’d catch one and it would flit away.
Words dominated my mind instead.
Then, the only way I could hold on to a feeling was intensify it until it was overwhelming.
3/
Never mind particular frameworks, what are some the most fundamental concepts and skills for happiness and free thought?
Thread on some I’ve found
👇
[P.S. You can see why it’s hard to claim one framework will solve all your problems.]
1. Ability to think any thought, rather than have your mind flinch away from it.
Found in…
- Buddhism: equanimity
- Art of Accomplishment: impartiality; non-resistance
- Alexander Technique: expanded awareness
- Karl Popper: non-authoritarianism
- TCS: non-coercion
2. Not having your conscious explicit mind interfere with your subconscious inexplicit mind.
Found in…
- Alexander Technique: non-doing
- Kahneman: System 1/System 2
- write drunk edit sober
- life-threatening sports like BASE jumping
- improv
- Ian McGilchrist’s whole deal
A lot of people think introspection is unusually error-prone, subject to confirmation bias and making up stories, with no way of being verified or refuted.
This is false—if you have the right instruments.
1/
There are multiple ways to verify/refute introspective conjectures.
The most foundational is Gendlin Focusing.
(It can be learnt in 70mins via the audiobook Focusing by Eugene Gendlin. Though it may take some practice. The book includes a guided session.)
2/
In Focusing, when you find a story (word or image) that is accurate to how your psychology is set up—or genuinely solves a problem you have (indicative of there being real problem in the first place)—you get a “felt shift”: a physically felt sensation of “yeah, that’s it”.
3/
Alexander Technique is simply an approach (really it’s a set of techniques) for getting out of being stuck in your head.
1. Gets you out of being stuck (thinking ground to a halt, or tunnel vision)
2. Gets you out of your head and back into the world (feel alive, expansive)
1/
Traditional Alexander Technique does this via freeing up your body*:
When your body is tense, it’s not just doing that by itself; 𝘺𝘰𝘶 are tensing your body.
So the body is an easy place to see if you’re successful doing the free-and-alive thing, and to work fine-grain.
2/
[* And unfortunately, a lot of traditional Alexander Technique teachers 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 know how to work with the body. They know it has mental effects too, but indirectly. If you do get a traditional teacher, try asking them to teach you “inhibition” & “non-doing”.]
3/
🚸 Children are creative, fast-learning, alive and vividly present.
Something happens which shuts those down as we enter adulthood, so only a small number of people make progress.
I claim we all can.
1/
How?
The first thing I found was philosophy: Popperian epistemology, and in particular the work of @DavidDeutschOxf.
It was a powerful framework that seemed to melt problems.
It brought the clarity of reason, the hope of optimism, and the virtue of human progress.
2/
From Deutsch, I discovered the concept of inexplicit ideas —
Ideas you aren’t conscious of, but affect you.
They’re subject to reason but work differently: you can’t criticise them directly (since they aren’t in words), but you can alter the environment they evolve in.
3/