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Or: How I stopped trying so hard and learned to love the process

Discipline has been a really tricky thing for me for pretty much my whole life. When I was younger, grade-school age, I had this thing where I never really conceptually understood a lot of big, important concepts like discipline or critical thinking or stuff like that. I knew that they were important and something that I should strive to exhibit, but I never really got my head around how I was actually supposed to do that. In my mind, they were very regimented things: you either had the skill or you didn't. This went on to screw me over in many ways--I never really learned how to properly study, for instance.

It took me an embarrasingly long time to realize just how much of discipline is malleable, is adaptable, is intuitive.

But let's start back at the very beginning. Like I said, young Naiad never really got a chance to understand what discipline actually means. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines discipline as, "control gained by enforcing obedience or order; orderly prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior." Sounds pretty strict, like I thought it was. But M-W also links discipline with self-control: "restraint exercised over one's own impulses, emotions, or desires." This connection is how I believe discipline evolves from a buzzwordy, abstract concept and into a practical, applicable skill. It's a thing you do, a perpetual practice, not a thing you inherently do or don't have.

With regards to one's spiritual practice, I've got a bit of a pet theory as to why folks (including myself, to be clear) often have trouble incorporating new tasks/habits/routines into their daily, weekly, or monthly lives. Call me crazy, but I've got a feeling it has something to do with the "intent is everything" mindset that is so prevalent, particularly in magical spaces. I'm not going to get into my full take on that right now, since it probably deserves its own post, but at the end of the day I think it boils down to the idea of magic or being a witch turning into an abstract identity that you can just claim, rather than something you do, a practice. I think it creates a mental barrier where one feels like there's less of a need to actually do things in their practice, because they're a witch or a pagan or whatnot whether they do these things or not.

I'm not making any sort of moral judgement here--it's something that I bought into for a very, very long time. But after a while, I began to question why I was calling myself a magic practitioner at all, when I wasn't, you know, practicing any magic. I would think about it a lot, talk about it with others, write about it for my old blog, but I fell sorely out of habit of actually doing the damn thing, and my skills started to atrophy because of it.

Firstly, it's important to remember that self-control is reliant on the self as a base. You can't will yourself to do stuff that's physically impossible for you to do. Likewise, it's also rarely productive to try and just brute-force yourself into a habit or practice. If it goes against the grain of every other thing in your life, it's highly unlikely to stick. Trust me. I've tried. A lot. But it helps way, way more to be realistic about how a new practice can reasonably fit itself into your existing life.

The way that I've phrased it that makes the most sense for myself is finding the path of least resistance. What's the way of incorporating this new habit into your life that will cause the least amount of friction with everything else? Can you stack it with other habits, to form a routine? Can you set alarms or reminders so you don't forget? Can you make mental cues for yourself? The biggest one for me was recognizing that things don't need to be done at a specific time of day, even if they're often associated with one--it's why I brush my teeth in the mornings, right after getting out of the shower, instead of trying to force myself out of bed in the evenings to do it. Doing stuff at a "weird" time is better than not doing it at all.

The wheels of the path of the least resistance can also be easily greased by finding ways to make these new practices fun. Make them spark joy! Obviously that won't be entirely applicable for everything--some stuff needs to be done regardless of whether or not it's fun, but in those cases, it can still help to find some way to make them more bearable. I'm a huge fan of the 2-minute rule: I've gotta start the thing and do it for at least 2 minutes. If I really can't manage any more than that, then I can stop after the 2 minutes. But usually I end up doing it for much longer!

This doesn't mean that forming new habits won't still be uncomfortable sometimes. New habits that are more physically or mentally involved will probably require extra work to make, well, work. I face mental resistance when trying to do basically anything new--I'm a textbook Taurus, forever stuck in my ways. I think there's a middle ground to be found between completely resisting the discomfort of change and becoming a full-on martyr to the discomfort, which also isn't ideal. What some folks call the "discomfort zone" is where the most productive change occurs, in my experience, but the discomfort is not so much as to put me in danger or burn me out. The goal is to be sustainable, not perfect.

Let's work with a practical example, and one that I'm actively working on right now: trying to start a meditation practice. It's something that's eluded me for fucking years, no matter how hard I try. So I'm trying to take my own advice and build the routine more intuitively, instead of trying to base my practice on what someone else is doing. I take stock of my other spiritual routines, which I would ideally tack meditation on to: in the mornings, after I'm out of the shower and dressed for work, I recite off some quick prayers for my gods; in the evenings, after dinner, I do some light cleansing, sometimes paired with a movement practice, I put out offerings for my allies, and I pull an oracle card. My evening routine is already pretty stacked, and it takes place at a point of the day where I'm already basically running on empty. In the morning, though, I still have around an hour of free time to work with before I have to go make my lunch and head out the door for work, so that seems like a better time to sit for meditation. It has the added benefit of helping me clear my head before work, instead of ruminating on how much I don't feel like doing everything that I need to do that day.

I'm still very early on in this new process, but it by far feels more in tune with my existing practices than what I've tried to get up to in the past. I remind myself that timing is arbitrary--if I fuss over picking a perfect time to meditate, I'm probably going to forgo the practice altogether, so it makes more sense to just slot it in amongst my existing practices, when I don't really have to think about it.

And above all: you shouldn't have to go through all this work alone. It will almost always be better for you to talk with someone about it, even if it's just to spitball ideas, share progress, or celebrate the small wins you achieve along the way. Finding an accountability buddy or a group of people who are working towards similar goals, so that you can motivate each other and hold one another to your goals, is even better. You could make a groupchat, form a team on a habit-tracking program like Habitica, or even just commit to interacting with one another's social media posts on the topic.

All of your habits, including (and in my opinion, especially) your spiritual ones, should work with you and for you. You should be getting at least something out of them: it can be as mundane as learning a new skill, or as abstract as providing an additional layer of meaning to your life. Where it falls on that scale doesn't super matter, but there should be something that you can pinpoint that makes the whole thing feel worth it to you. Why are we bothering with any of this if not for that? We're not witches or diviners or pagans because we have to be, right? We do it because it gives something back for all that we put into it. And I promise you, actually doing the thing will give way more back to you than just thinking about it.