Self-discipline

An exploration of flower essences you can use
for cultivating and enhancing self-discipline.

Self-discipline is one of the most important qualities to have if you want to create the life you really desire. It is the capacity to overcome your perceived weaknesses and the ability to pursue what you want, even when those around you or your own inner insecurities attempt to derail you. You need self-discipline to control your five senses. You need it to manifest any project, fulfill a desire, to fuel self-development, or master any skill. Self-discipline is required in every aspect of living.

What does it take to be self-disciplined? What can we do to enhance this vital quality? If you are tempted to brand yourself as having no self-discipline, I want to challenge you to do a simple contemplation.

Think of something that you do well. It might be connecting socially with others, a specific talent or hobby that you love to perform, maybe it is cooking, or perhaps it is something at work that you take great pride in doing.

Once you identify one thing that you do really well, think about what it takes to do it well. There was probably some sort of preparation or learning curve when you first began doing it. There might have been a lot of practice, trial and error, mistakes that you made so that you would reach your level of proficiency.

The impetus that kept you interested in developing that talent is your foundation for self-discipline. Every one has the capacity for self-discipline, and we each have different issues with its cultivation. How can we uncover our natural tendency for self-discipline and extend it to all areas of life where we want it?

The Foundation

Self-discipline rests on the foundation of priority. What are the priorities in your life? Do you put yourself and self-care at the bottom of the list? Whenever you think of starting a new self-care project, do you tell yourself that you just do not have time in the day to devote to one more thing? Any day can be an opportunity to reevaluate and reestablish.

What are the things that occupy the most time in your day? Make a list of the things that you do on a typical day. Then, ask yourself if your self-care project is less important than each item you have listed. You may find that there are things that you like doing but are less important than your self-care project. Think about what your prime concern is when you contemplate where you want to exercise self-discipline.

Conscious Awareness of Your Intention

Another thing to consider is interest. If you think you should do something but you are not really interested in doing it, you won’t be very successful in following through. Your intention is not really behind the action.

One of the first things you need to ascertain is if your desire to implement self-discipline with a particular project is because you think you should, or because you really want to. Intention is resolution or determination to implement something. Intention is the energy that brings an action into existence and sustains the effort required to keep it going. There are many things that we find interesting in life. Yet when we contemplate the possibility of committing to a particular action, we may find that even though it is interesting, it doesn’t mean that all parts of our being are aligned behind the idea.

If your soul, emotions, physical energy, and intellect are not all in alignment with the idea, your intention is not fully there. Cliff Rose is the flower essence to use that helps you see and understand your intention. It helps if you always mean to manifest something, an idea, a discipline, an action, yet you never follow through. It’s as if you have the ideas, but the full-blown desire is not behind implementing them.

Cliff Rose can help you become clear about what it is that you really want to manifest, separate from your interest in something that doesn’t carry enough passion to fuel determination and resolution. Clarity and the ability to make a clear intention are the gifts of this small white flower of the Rose family.

As you manifest the actions of your self-discipline, you must like what you are doing. If you take the necessary actions but your inner dialog is one of resentment, healthy self-discipline will not develop. For example, if your intention is to practice yoga, you need to show up on your yoga mat with the attitude of joy and gratitude for the practice. Cliff Rose can help anchor you in the joy of your intention as you take the actions that support it.

Inner Courage and Discipline

Once you have an intention to commit to a particular action, you often need to overcome your inner doubts that you can follow through. Activating & Honoring the Warrior Formula is excellent for helping you with exactly that. This composite formula is wonderful for helping you uncover the courage it takes to overcome your inner enemies.

Anything that keeps you from following through with your resolution can be faced and put in its place. It takes courage, focus and the willingness to look within. Activating & Honoring the Warrior Formula can help you see where the inner enemies lie and face them squarely and firmly.

This formula helps us activate our inner archetypal warrior and access courage, resolve and focused masculine energy to conquer our inner enemies and overcome obstacles, difficulties and shortcomings, so that we can be all that we can be.

Resolve

Sometimes self-discipline is stymied by something that you can’t quite put your finger on. You want to do it, yet somehow there is something blocking your resolve to do it. Desert Broom is the essence to use when there is an indescribable block that stands in the way of your intention or your desire to do something. The essence helps all parts of your being line up and support each other in unity.

Sometimes we see all the possibilities but not one strong way. At other times we may see one strong way and not all the possibilities. Desert Broom helps us find an inner unifying force, a centered purpose, and the feeling of being gathered together. It brings us clarity and a feeling of pure resolution.

Resolution is the key word for this flower essence as it relates to self-discipline. It helps you attain a state of readiness to take the next step. It supports you in feeling unified, gathered together, and centered in yourself.

Self-organization

Those who feel that they lack the ability to organize things can be helped tremendously by Staghorn Cholla Cactus. Usually some sense of organization is necessary to establish self-discipline. There are often steps you need to take to establish what you want to achieve.

Many folks are challenged by the concept of organizing things. Others are too organized, so they strangle any spontaneity or joy out of their actions.

Staghorn Cholla Cactus is the essence to use for all issues of self-organization, whether you are challenged by the concept or overly organized. This lovely cactus essence brings security and faith in your innate capacity for self-ordering. It helps you use soul-impulse to direct the organization rather than your ego. It supports you in allowing yourself to be “shaped” and remodeled by the universe, in alignment with your soul purpose.

Keep it simple and organize yourself to succeed. If you are committed to eating well, be sure you have healthy food on hand. If you want to practice yoga on a regular basis, have your yoga clothes and accessories ready to use and accessible. Whatever your self-discipline goal, take the steps necessary to be in a state of readiness to support your discipline. As you prepare what you need, have the awareness that you are providing support for yourself and your goal. When you have the attitude of joy and support, the tasks become acts of loving care.

Taking the First Step

In the beginning, you have to make an extra effort to establish the routines or actions that are required to fulfill your intention. The fruit of this effort shows up after some time when the actions and their results create an automatic desire to continue the effort. The momentum of your actions and their beneficial results makes you want to keep on with the program and it requires less self-effort.

For many people it is the first step that is the most difficult. Even if you know what you want to do, you may be thinking too far ahead to what you want it to look like in the future. Then you may either not know what the first step is or feel unable to take it. Sometimes the first step looks too insignificant when compared to your idealized vision of what it will become.

Scarlet Morning Glory is a flower essence that helps you get going and begin to actualize your intention. This is the essence for those who tend to think about what they will do in the future but don’t take the steps required to get there now. Every great journey begins with one small step. Scarlet Morning Glory helps your ideas translate from your thoughts into the fire of movement. It ignites the principle of movement so you get going and make the future potential come into present reality.

Do It for Today

It is easiest to create self-discipline by taking small steps. For instance, if you want to start practicing meditation, start with ten minutes a day. Be consistent, not time-consuming. Create a very simple and attainable goal and congratulate yourself when you reach it. If you find that something is easy to do, you will be able to expand it if you want. Give yourself permission to just do the discipline today. Don’t think about tomorrow or next week.

Sometimes we get caught up in doubts about how to sustain the action in the future. Other times the internal dialog is about how we should have done it yesterday.

It is so much easier to just do it today. You can decide tomorrow about tomorrow. When you do it for today, the decision you make is for the present and is much easier than deciding things for the future. Everything seems more manageable when you commit your time and energy for an action right now.

If you have difficulty remaining in the present and tend to be thinking of the past or the future, use the Crisis – Desert Emergency Formula. This essence brings you into the present moment where you can make decisions for the here and now.

Honor the self-discipline you have created: If you want to create a half-hour meditation practice but you really don’t have half an hour on one particular day, honor your discipline by showing up for ten minutes, just for that day.

Using the Crisis – Desert Emergency Formula can help you recognize small successes in your process of establishing self-discipline. It supports you in noticing how great you did today. A pat on the back to yourself today goes a huge distance in ensuring that you show up again tomorrow.

Overcoming Distractions

Another challenge to self-discipline is the tendency to allow others and their needs to distract you, to pull your focus away from what you instinctively know is where you need to focus your attention. A simple but very effective flower essence to help is Hoptree. This flower essence helps if you have a tendency to become distracted by others’ needs and give up on what you need to do to help yourself. When distractions of any kind pull your attention away from what you need to focus on, Hoptree can support you to get back on course.

There are always numerous people and things that seem more important, but you need to prioritize your needs in the midst of daily life. Hoptree can help you put your needs in the proper order and stay firmly directed by your inner guidance. If you set your purpose as finding resolution with a healing project, or a healthy routine, or something else, the essence can help you stick to it. It assists you in sorting out where your focus is best placed in relation to your goal.

The Five Senses

The insistent demand of the five senses create one of the biggest distractions to establishing self-discipline. We live in a material world that appeals to our five senses. We are bombarded every day with enticing opportunities to satisfy our desires. If you want to establish a yoga practice, for instance, and at the appointed hour you think of how great it would be to eat some chocolate and watch a movie instead, satisfying this urge may win out.

Cardinal Flower is the essence to use for establishing self-discipline over the five senses. This flower essence can help you turn the desire that originates from the senses into another usable type of energy. Desire is energy. The greater the desire, the greater the energy behind it. Cardinal Flower can help you consciously transform and redirect this energy in the direction you want. You decide how to expend the energy, how to direct it, instead of your five senses deciding for you. The essence helps you consciously choose to channel the energy from your sensate desires to power your intention.

Easily Discouraged

One deterrent to self-discipline is discouragement. Sometimes we get in a funk, we see things negatively, and this attitude snowballs and attracts difficulty. Purple Aster is the flower essence to use when your hard-working efforts create the feeling that you are isolated, that your progress is small and difficult. This attitude may also bring up feelings of inhibition and a sense that maybe you really can’t do it after all.

Purple Aster can help change the feeling that you are expending a lot of energy running after a goal into the feeling that you are allowing the goal to pull you along with it. You drop the frustration of struggle and allow the universe to support you fully. This essence helps you see and celebrate every small victory as an important part of the whole process.

Over-disciplined

Once you have gotten into the self-sustaining beauty of self-discipline and you begin to see results, be careful not to develop a taskmaster attitude. How can you keep it light and lovely? Especially if you had any taskmaster role models as a child, you may be tempted to push yourself when it would be wiser to back off. If a little is good, it doesn’t mean that more is better.

Self-discipline has a natural ebb and flow. Some days it may be better to do less or even skip the action completely. There is an innate wisdom within you that, when given the chance, will show you just how much to apply yourself and when to lighten up. Prickle Poppy helps you flow with the natural rhythms of work and play, of efforting and rest. This is the flower essence to pull you out of an overly controlled, rigid attitude that is detrimental. It can help you relax the effort and enjoy the process more.

With a little flower essence support, you can overcome obstacles to creating any kind of self-discipline. When you are clear about your intention, find the joy and excitement in taking an action, overcome any inner obstacles in your way, learn to pat yourself on the back for each success, and learn your own natural flow of effort and rest, you can master self-discipline.

Selecting the Most Appropriate Flower Essences

Not every flower essence mentioned above will be appropriate for every person’s specific needs. Different people have different issues around self-discipline. The process itself of exploring and contemplating your self-discipline issues is important. It is the foundation for successfully selecting the most beneficial flower essences. Usually, careful self-examination can clearly show you which of the above flower essences are most appropriate for your particular needs.

Though you can use more than one flower essence together, you probably will not need to use all of the ones mentioned here. After contemplating your relationship to this issue, select the flower essences that apply for you, or use an intuitive method to select among them. (For more information on how to do this, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.) A general guideline is to use four drops at a time, four times a day, in water. However, it is fine to follow your intuition and use them as often as you like. Most people find that they tend to use them more often in the beginning and less often towards the end of the cycle. Unless otherwise indicated, a cycle is usually two to four weeks. [more]

For information on how to clearly evaluate the effects of the essences you have used, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.

List of the Flower Essences Mentioned in this Article