The word discipline is closely related to training. Take young soldiers, for example—the most essential quality they’re taught before heading into battle is discipline. They must be trained to face terrifying situations with composure and clarity. Part of their discipline includes taking orders, following structure, and aligning with the values of their team: honor, valor, and courage. These ideals serve as powerful motivators, especially for young people who may not yet possess discipline on their own. In truth, discipline is taught. It’s not innate in a newborn or young child.
The kind of discipline I’m talking about isn’t about punishment or breaking a child’s will. It’s not built through fear or anxiety. Real discipline emerges when we rebuild our self-esteem and when survival, health, and long-term well-being become our highest priorities. For example, brushing your teeth every day is a discipline. What motivates you is the desire to keep your teeth healthy, and what makes it easy is the fact that it’s been a habit since childhood—it’s automatic. But the disciplines we need for self-help—like meditation, breathwork, therapy, or exercise—require us to dig deeper into the resilient parts of our personality. And here's where we run into paradoxes.
Take breathwork: it’s simple to explain how oxygen supports mental and physical health, and how shallow breathing worsens anxiety while slow, deep breathing can calm us. We know this. And yet, for some reason, we struggle to maintain the discipline. Why? Because we're still operating in an anxious state. Anxiety pulls us away from these practices, and before we know it, time passes and the discipline fades from our routine.
So how do we break this pattern? The hard truth is—not everyone will. Not everyone develops the mental fortitude needed for consistent self-care. Some people are lucky enough to have supportive influences—friends, mentors, teachers—who hold them accountable and motivate them. Others turn to spiritual practices like deep prayer for strength and guidance. For many, faith is empowering. Some may find their guide in a compassionate guru or in sacred communities that use rituals, plant medicine, meditation, singing, and dance to reach deep layers of consciousness and healing. These practices can temporarily quiet the ego, usher in deep parasympathetic states, and connect us to the mysteries of existence—states we rarely reach in our normal, anxious minds.
Then there are people like me. I was built to endure extreme emotional and mental stress. Instead of breaking, I coped through addictive behaviors—workaholism, sex, spending, adrenaline, conflict, travel, dangerous sports, screen time—you name it. My generation took much longer to realize the importance of breathwork and anxiety regulation. Today, in 2025, we’re flooded with awareness. Social media is saturated with conversations about anxiety, triggers, and healing. Philosophy has gone mainstream. Even neuroscientists are talking about meditation. And doctors—who once smoked in their offices—now recommend relaxation techniques to manage blood pressure and heart health.
What those doctors were really trying to say back then, in their limited language, was: You’re stressed. You’re too identified with your ego. You’re reactive. You need to learn how to relax. That’s what they meant by, “Take a vacation.”
Now we understand more. Breathing exercises are the fastest way to bring ourselves out of the fight-or-flight response and into the present moment. Slow, deep inhalations calm the heart rate and move us from the stress response into the rational, thoughtful part of the brain—the prefrontal cortex—where intelligence, morality, and character reside. And beyond the science, when we enter that relaxed state, we connect to something deeper: consciousness, awareness, maybe even a sense of the divine.
This is powerful stuff. The more relaxed and aware we become as a species, the more we begin to understand the nature of existence. We’ll never understand everything, but we can certainly be better informed and more self-aware than generations before us. That’s the nature of evolution—each generation improving upon the last.