View Single Post
Old 01-16-2014, 12:28 PM   #1
Dalaran1991
Location: Paris
Join Date: Nov 2012
Posts: 64
France
Offline
How can Aikido teach you discipline if you love it?

I've been training for over 2 years and am currently a 1st kyu. Train about 11-13h/week for a year and a half, recently had to cut back to 10-11h because I'm doing salsa.

When I talk with people about doing martial arts, they all seem to admire it for the fact that it teaches you discipline, and how it will help me learn dance and basically anything else in life, because discipline is very useful.

Well, I do admit that I love training so much that I never miss any class (except when schoolwork takes precedent) and I do crawl out of bed at 8am on saturdays to train. Even when I'm sick. The thing is, I don't think it's because of discipline, but rather passion. Discipline means sticking to your plan/routine even though you DON"T like it. In my case I love training than anything else in the world. Probably also because my dojo mates are great. But I'm not doing it out of sheer discipline. I do it because I love it. Even though sometimes my whole arms are blue from yonkyo The pain is rejuvenating.

I'm feeling like I'm missing out on things. Every bit of self-help advice out there tell you to train your discipline to get your life together, and so often you hear "do some martial art to train discipline". But I don't feel like I'm getting that part of Aikido.

What do you think? Is there a way I can alter my training to make it more disciplined?
  Reply With Quote