Tag: Discipline
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A right discipline: Daily practice
A right discipline is not a regime that one imposes upon oneself from without. A right discipline begins with lived experiences of what is best, of intimations of the elongation and prolongation of what is best. Taking the idea of prolongation seriously, a right discipline makes explicit to one how it is possible to maintain oneself in…
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Reconsidering discipline and discipleship
Let us begin with Henri Nouwen’s careful reflections on the mutual dependency of discipline and discipleship. Discipleship, he writes, calls for discipline. Indeed, discipleship and discipline share the same linguistic root (from discere, which means “to learn from”), and the two should never be separated. Whereas discipline without discipleship leads to rigid formalism, discipleship without…
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Cultivating discipline: A forthcoming manual
I’m beginning to think about the contents of a short guide, Cultivating Discipline, which I’ll likely be using in some upcoming educational workshops. One chapter, I believe, will be on spiritual exercises, which I plan to arrange according to categories. Pierre Hadot suggests that a spiritual exercise is a meditation aimed less at informing the pupil about…
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The rigor of meditation practice
There is a rigor involved in meditating regularly that calls me back to meditate well before dawn in spite of the passing desire to stop or the urges to make an exception today. The rigor of a meditation practice emerges only for the one who, like the Pyrrhonian skeptic, would not live according to dogma.…
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On the discipline of eating: Open questions
What is it like to put food in your mouth? To chew slowly? To look around and see warmed others beside you? To look down and find long-limbed wine in your glass? To have picked the vegetables, now in your mouth, thick from your garden? To have cooked the masticated sinews for hours beside those…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 