The Nature of Discipline

Most people don’t associate discipline with love, they associate it with fear.

When I was a child, discipline was a kind of enraged or malicious lashing out: not to shape or form or prevent future problems, but as a punishment for annoying an adult or because you happened to be close enough to get to when an adult was annoyed. Discipline, in essence, as an abusive and violent punishment which an adult justified after the fact with something about you. You were too loud. You said the wrong thing. You were the wrong thing. You may not ever have heard of the rule you broke, but you’ll be told you should have known.

And worse, in my experience, a calculated and malicious attempt to harm me, to ease the things which tortured the adults in my life.

That is not discipline. There’s no guidance in it outside the fear of that person and what they could do to you, outside the fear of provoking violence by mistake or ignorance.

There is no love in it, no knowledge of you or your character applied to helping you understand a lesson. There is no hope in it, just fear of it happening again.

When the spirits come to discipline, they wear the shape you expect—if all you have is the experience of discipline as violence and abuse, you expect to be severely punished, and they will do whatever they need to for you. It is only (usually) in retrospect that we can recognize anything else, if we do.

The nature of the spirit is love. That love adapts to you, to lead you onto the next lesson and on to the divine.

You can find violence in the spirit, if you need it. You can find a seemingly abusive parent in the spirit.

You just won’t find a neglectful one. Even when you think they aren’t paying attention, I assure you the spirits are.

Understand this: the fact that the spirit meets you where you are is, in fact, proof of the nature of the spirit. Discipline need not be any of those things.