Falling in Love with Discipline AND FUN

Childish discipline and serious fun, too. Fun. Seriously.

My friend and former co-worker from Chicago just told me that he’s 20,000 words into a novel. Last we talked about it, he was 3,000 words in. He hasn’t been advertising it to anyone, nor bragging about his future accomplishment; he’s just been quietly grinding. Honestly, whether his novel turns out to be any good seems secondary to me. What’s primary, and what inspires me, is the ability — the discipline — to simply do the thing. In this age of information supersaturation and its ensuing goldfish attention spans, how many of us truly have the patience and discipline to write a novel?

My inner child certainly doesn’t. For years now I’ve toiled in frustration as a child within me has been at war with a drive to be disciplined. Hundreds and hundreds of times I’ve written out an impeccable plan or morning routine, only for my child to promptly say “fuck this” and abandon it. Hundreds of times I’ve said “this is the last joint,” only for my child to rebel yet again. The plans and declarations of sobriety became something like subconscious masochistic weapons, hammering my self-esteem with each failure and discouraging me from even trying to be disciplined. I haven’t given up trying, and I will never give up, but the score in the battles of the past few years is something like: half-man cultivating discipline - 4, inner child - 420.

Now it dawns on me that maybe the problem was never really a lack of discipline. I’ve been extraordinarily disciplined in the past, e.g. while in school, while studying the Survivor casting process and while doing silent vipassanā retreats. Maybe the problem actually lies in the last paragraph I wrote, in which I wrote about “I” as something separate from, and something at odds with, my inner child. My inner child is basically my true nature — playful within the game of duality, not taking anything too seriously, making fun priority number one. To think that I could ever overpower the inner child — the primal force of nature — is the folly of ego. The ego has taken ages to learn that it must work with nature rather than against it, but recently something has clicked: the child demands play. My true nature asks me now to take a break from being so damn serious.

Does dropping my (ironically comical) seriousness mean I can’t be disciplined? Or, might there be a playful, fun way to be disciplined? I’m learning from one of my best friends in Ecuador (Kim, the future Light & Shadows collaborator) that daily discipline can absolutely be fun, that exercise movement is essential and that anything is possible. Kim possible. Seriously, I just need to take a moment and honor the fact that this man once went to the weekly “ecstatic dance” here in Vilcabamba and did backflips there while on five grams of mushrooms. His light is astoundingly bright, and he inspires me. His shadows are also there, though. As I’m writing now, he just told me that last night he took LSD, Mushrooms, MDMA, Cannabis, red wine and ketamine all at the same time, “sending it,” as he calls this maniacal practice of going wild with a half-dozen drugs at once.

For both of us, drugs have been the main way in which the inner child rebels, and talking about this has brought us both a lot of self-understanding. Namely, we’ve come to understand that we need to grow up. At the same time, we have to honor the needs of the inner child, and bring some fun into this growing up process that tends to feel oh-so-serious. If we don’t make the life purpose of the adult into a bright playground for the child, the child will just drag us back to a dark playground, like that of drug addiction. If we want to be serious adults, we paradoxically must have fun with it. Kim finds the fun in anything and everything, and so it’s no wonder I’m learning from him at this critical juncture of life. I learn from him as he learns from me — a guy who entered this world full of drive and purpose, wearing a business suit (with sandals) to kindergarten, planning a math tutoring camp in his “home office” for his elementary school classmates. My mom nixed the idea of making money off of my fellow seven-year-olds, but nonetheless birthed and nurtured this soul who barely even knew his inner child before he was four years old and already dealing with very adult situations (drugs, divorce and parents’ stuff). I survived a chaotic childhood because I had to, because I felt I had some oh-so-serious purpose, and in the process my child got lost.

I saw this lost child in a powerful dream. In this dream I had a few months before drinking twenty cups of Ayahuasca in January - February 2022, my shaman Luis told me how he was going to guide and help me. He was wearing a white surgeon’s coat, pulling green gunk out of me on an operating table and telling me that I might not like seeing the ugliness of some of the stuff coming out, but that I could trust him and trust the process. Once the surgery was over, I transformed into a powerful lion, playing and roaring and running through the jungle. In this lion’s body, I ran to a clearing where I saw myself at about seven years old, and then things got serious again:

On little Spencer’s face was the most demoralized, deadpan and simultaneously somber expression I’d ever seen. He was wearing feathers around his head, holding a crossbow, and with utter seriousness, he cocked an arrow in the bow and turned it toward his (my) father. He fired away, killing his father in cold blood.

To reconnect, I had to see the disconnected fallibility of man younger than most children see it, and I’ve had to unlearn much of what I received from my paternal lineage. I’ve had to burn through the immense karmas carried by a man who loved me deeply and truly, but was so lost in alcohol and cultural poison that he couldn’t show me how to be Reiman. And, more recently, I had to find a Kichwa shaman in the Amazon jungle who is the same age my father would be if he were still alive, and through working with Don Luis, learn who I am in more depth.

Being Reiman meant creating a new life in Ecuador and working with Don Luis, but it also meant “breaking up” with Luis, renegotiating my relationships with plants and refocusing on everyday life. In my everyday life I’m now running a business bottling water from a river on land bordering the Podocarpus National Park, creating jobs, learning Spanish and growing, all while still working with plant medicine and rebuilding my meditation practice.

The practice of my life has been learning patience, and the theme of my Ecuadorian life has been: “poco a poco.” Back when I was meditating hardcore in the U.S. and Nepal, I wanted (my misinterpretation of) the “instant enlightenment” spoken of in Zen. I tried to stuff my inner child into a Buddha box and tell him to shut up as I transcend the human condition. Denying the child’s existence so that I could live like a disciplined monk did have its benefits, but it also muddied my heart with rigidity. It was just as imbalanced a spiritual path as floundering in a never-ending sea of plant medicine with zero discipline in everyday life. Now, I’m finding the middle way between these upward and downward paths, between discipline and fun, between transcendence and daily life in saṃsāra. I’m letting go of outdated monastic ideals, like enlightenment being something “other than this,” something beyond life here on earth. I’m letting go of making decisions as a child would, while at the same time bringing my child along for the ride as we fulfill an adult purpose.

When clarity about that purpose started coming in January 2021, I felt excited to finally have an inkling of where I was going, but I forgot to bring the child along with me. During the stint in the jungle that began in 2022 and felt something like one 45-day Ayahuasca journey, I had a dream showing me exactly this: I saw my uncle, a former role model of mine, wearing a pinstripe suit and striding aggressively into an office with outlandish seriousness. Within the office, though, he found a bed rather than cubicles, and on the bed was an exceedingly goofy guy. The two men, both reflections of myself, lied on the bed together, and GG (the goofy guy) started teasing my uncle: “I always felt so bad for the devil,” he said playfully. “It must be really hard to be totally committed to a purpose and not have any fun.” When my serious uncle wasn’t receptive to GG’s teasing, GG continued goofily: “well okayyyy! I wish you SO much luck with your VERYYYYY… IMPORTANT PURPOSE!”

Now, only a year and a half later, I’m understanding the lesson of the dream. Friends like Kim have helped me get it. Even though a lot of Vilcabambans have pressured Kim about his own purpose, whether trying to suck him into serving them or trying to push him into serving medicine in ceremonies, Kim has stayed true to his childish impulses. He’s never stopped having fun, he’s never started taking himself too seriously, and in staying true to his inner child, he’s stayed true to himself.

I have more and more responsibilities these days, but rather than making identities out of those responsibilities, I’m remembering the kid. Before he donned a business suit, he would have rather identified as a flying and crowing chicken taco than as a businessman, because a flying and crowing chicken taco is funny. That lost child can be found, and he can show me how to do business in the flying, crowing way that nourishes fun. I can step up for the people counting on me and deliver, because I can bring fun to daily disciplines like meditation and exercise.

Fun allows me to actually do these disciplines, and upon actually doing these disciplines, I find that my inner seriousness lightens. Taking life lightly, working deeply on Light & Shadows becomes the child’s bright playground. Playing in my work, the child’s bright playground becomes the man’s bright purpose.

Anyway, I hope my friend’s novel doesn’t suck. May humans and crowing tacos alike create what’s worth creating.