Forget Discipline, Practice the Art of Devotion
Learning how to love yourself well
I grew up believing that love and devotion were one and the same. And while they’re deeply related, they’re not the same thing, and the distinction between them might be one of the most important things a person can understand about their relationships.
Love can expand and contract. Deepen or fade, depending on circumstances. Love at its most raw is about feeling — the electricity of connection, the expansion of the heart, and the sense that someone matters to you in a way that’s hard to explain.
But the practice of devotion is a choice and it lives in your actions, not your feelings. It shows up when circumstances fluctuate and honors a treasured bond.
The word, devotion, had been popping up again and again in conversations to the point that I finally started paying attention to it and what it was trying to teach me.
I had a couple of friends who were expecting their first child, and as a mother to twin girls, they asked me for my pearls of wisdom. With my girls now in middle school, I’ve had the time to reflect back on that entire period and ponder… What do I wish someone had told me back then? Honestly, I felt like my husband and I were still kids ourselves in our 20s and white knuckled the first few years of their life with the rest of our extended families all overseas. Everyone was quick to point out the best diaper cream or car seat but not one person gave me any emotional roadmap for just how much it was going to demand from my capacity to show up every day, often every hour, with unrelenting devotion.
And in those conversations with friends, I found myself saying that one of my biggest regrets was this — that there is very little footage of me being a full-time mother raising those girls. So I told my friends to set up their phone and occasionally record themselves preparing the bottles, making the meals, sat on their breast pump, running the bath, reading the bedtime story, stroking their baby’s hair during their first stinking cold, the endless laundry, the vomit, the poop, the tears. All of it.
Because it’s in those small, seemingly insignificant moments, that life is truly happening. The practice of devotion is taking place. Those are the tangible efforts of your unconditional love.
No one will record it for you. See it as an act of love for your future self.
Now I don’t want to limit this post to the confines of experiences within motherhood so I use this as a general illustration. And I wouldn’t have wanted those videos to seek validation from anyone else, including my children, that I ‘did my job’. It would’ve been to remind myself that I moved from the heart, I showed up for the people I care about, and I trusted in my ability to do difficult things from a place of honoring a sacred bond.
Being a mother is an often thankless job. There is no promotion, no pay rise. No pats on the back or the option to walk out and quit at 5pm after a rough day. So as I sit here, as a woman with little evidence to document those years, it almost feels as if the time didn’t really exist. Because it wasn’t witnessed. It wasn’t truly acknowledged or appreciated by the correct person — myself. Maybe that’s why so many of us later in life feel profoundly unseen, unheard, invalidated and invisible. We can so often project that feeling onto a partner and believe the blame lies with them, but if we dig deeper, we can trace the roots back to the truth that we have been abandoning ourselves all along.
That realization hit me like a ton of bricks.
A few years ago, I found myself wallowing in swamp of resentment. I had everything I thought I wanted: the marriage, the beautiful home, financial security, the family. Yet I was moody. Creatively unfulfilled. Constantly snappy for no particular reason. I no longer wanted to live in the confines of the domesticated gilded cage I had essentially built for myself.
Now I don’t regret being a stay-at-home mother during those years as my relationship with my daughters is very special. However — I was hyper aware the kids were going to grow up and leave. I was getting increasingly distant from my partner. What about me (the real, soul-level me)?? I could feel myself spiraling in an existential panic.
It felt like my love energy was flowing out of me but I felt constantly upset or disappointed that it didn’t feel like it was being reciprocated. The answer didn’t come immediately, but in time I learned how to create and sustain that flow...
At one point in my spiritual journey of transformation, I was deep in meditation and my spirit guides showed me how I was continually setting myself for disappointment. I could not control if and how another person would reciprocate love and devotion. But I was shown energy flowing in an infinite loop between me and my work and the message was clear: when you pour that devotion into your purpose and your passions, it will always flow back to you. It was another reminder of the fundamental lesson, which is the greatest relationship you will ever have is the one you have with yourself.
Devotion is a lifelong commitment to yourself, to your dreams and your goals. Devotion shows up in the small things. Devotion shows up in the small efforts that you take towards becoming that person in your long-term vision. Your ‘higher self’.
And I think this is where it is important to make a distinction between devotion and discipline. TikTok Creator @spiritualsweta has a nice way of explaining this:
Discipline is an energy of obligation, pressure and control. Devotion is an energy of love, freedom, patience and understanding. When you make that switch from a discipline mindset to devotion, you are shifting something very deep inside. When we are driven by the concept of discipline, we are trying to stay consistent by being very rigid. But when you are devoted to something, you see the long-term vision and you are completely locked in on that thing, no matter how your relationship changes to it over time. Because over time, a lot can change. Your life can change. Lock in on who you are trying to be and show up through repeated and conscious behaviors.
“Discipline is rigidity in consistency, devotion is freedom in consistency” - @spiritualsweta
And maybe that’s why devotion is so easily observed through raising a child — it isn’t a short-lived act. It is a slow, methodical, repetitive practice of nurturing. Of pouring yourself on a literal cellular level into a vessel of pure love and creation. And you see what devotion can mold and take shape to bring into your physical reality and take up space.
I practice devotion when I am running on the treadmill. I tell myself: this is devotion. When I am downing my vitamins or drinking a shake full of nutrients: this is devotion. Every time I sit down to write. Or meditate. Or take a walk. This is nourishing myself. This is mothering myself.
Apply that same essence to a business you want to start or an artistic passion project you chip away at it as one act of devotion a day. Or week. Purely out of love to yourself. You deserve the same level of devotion that you pour into others. No one is going to do it for you. Over time, the behavior will compound and you will shape something tangible into your 3D reality that did not exist before.
The treasure is found in the daily actions that are feeding your soul, your art, and soothing that ache in your heart for a life well-lived and fulfilled.
That ache wants recognition. It’s yearning for your devotion.