Han Mi Martial Arts - Damascus
Discipline vs obedience
Again, this is such a good one. Compare and contrast. It's the difference between mere obedience or being a disciplined person, having discipline. Let's talk about it. Matt Thompson, Raising a Warrior, Han Mi Martial Arts.
This is a great topic. I wrote a book a while back for drum set players, and I actually wrote about this in that book. And then on top of it I'm reminded of Whiplash and these things. This is a common thing to go over in taekwondo. A lot of what's called traditional martial arts. There's bowing and there's yes sir and all of this. And I do that in my place to a degree, because that is the culture, and I don't want somebody to leave my place and go to another place and be lost in the culture. But at the same time, I have seen at some of the martial arts schools that I myself have studied at take that the wrong way.
Discipline. Let's take that to the word to be a disciple. That means a person of learning and study. Obedience. Well, you have to do a lot of research there. It's obey. You're doing the thing you are told.
Inherent in that is one is that's a thoughtful person. It's a person who's reflective. They're looking at their behavior, their place in the world, how that influences the world around them. That's a disciplined mind. It's not attentive because somebody forces it into a box. It's attentive because it's curious. It's interested. It has love in its heart. And the other one is obeying. They're obeying because something is imposing itself. It's limiting. It's a fear-based mindset a lot of times. I better do this or else. So that's really important.
In the Raising a Warrior book I wrote and in the stuff I went over in just regular classes, it becomes pretty obvious that there's two motivating factors that really hit people in life. Fear versus love. You can say, oh, but jealousy, and that kind of goes back to fear. Curiosity, that kind of goes back to love. So I think a lot of it sums up to those two motivators, and obedience and discipline strikes me as that same relationship.
It's not that obedience is wrong, but it's limiting. If a person feels pressure, they can pay attention, but they can only pay attention in like a straight line. Think about if you're fearful, right? You can sprint great if you're afraid. It's effective and you're going to know what's happening right in front of you, but that's not the best fuel to use to try to wake somebody's head, to grow, to question, to learn, to improvise. You can't really function so well. And if you do in a fearful environment, it's almost out of rebelliousness.
So if you're trying to teach your kid how to have a joyful life where they're asking questions, learning, self-motivated, trying to do something on their own, if you're feeling like you have to obey, you're probably not going to initiate much. You're just trying not to get whatever it is you're afraid of to happen to you.
Obedience is great if you're trying to get your kid to get out of the way of oncoming traffic. I'm going to say it's not so good for life day-to-day. We want them to walk in curiosity, playfulness, conversation, love on their day-to-day life. And so if you compare these things, you should arrive at that.
I'm also reminded of A Clockwork Orange. They have him strapped in that chair and they put his eyes all open and they're conditioning him. So he's obeying his conditioning even outside of his own thoughts. And there's that one scene where he starts to have a breakthrough and he goes, "It's a sin. It's a sin." Beethoven never hurt anybody. And I love Beethoven. And then he says, "No, no, boy. You really should leave it to us." I felt that scene. It's kind of like that. And at the end, I don't know that Alex was a better person at the end of that. The book's different than the movie, but I digress.
So love. Discipline means a studious mind. A studious mind is a pretty impressive warrior.
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