trigger warning: sensitive content inside | (key word: internal motivation )
MAR 14, 2026
“When the sun rose the next day, people in the village found her naked, half alive and half scorched outside her home. After what must have been a terrible fight, she had been doused in kerosene and set alight by her husband. They came to fetch me, and I took her to the hospital, where I was told that there was nothing they could do. She would not survive. But the baby, I begged, save the baby. Please save the baby. What I did not know is that if you burn a woman on the outside, it burns the baby on the inside. That was the day I devoted myself to my work.”
Our small group drew ragged breaths over empty metal plates from our wooden tables and chairs in the communal dining hall, the air thick with stunned silence from the story. It was the seventh of fourteen days at the ayurveda centre, where I had come to soothe the delicate electricity of my mind.
She was a Catholic nun in her 70s who came every year for a week to recharge and have a little holiday. With her was a small entourage of elderly German women1, donors to the 72 orphanages the nun founded across India.
Ok, wait, I started at a particular point of the story arc, so let me quickly give you some context. For ease, let’s call the nun Sister.
In her early twenties she was living in a convent in South India when a young pregnant woman came to the door late one evening, begging for somewhere to stay. But the nunnery did not allow visitors, however much she pleaded. She had to turn the woman away.
The next morning the villagers found her.
After that day she made a private vow to herself that she would never again turn someone away when they asked for help. It was a decision that did not go down particularly well with the rest of the sisters, who were her only family. She had taken vows of obedience. There was no structure, no funding, no plan for what helping people would actually look like. But her devotion ran so deep that she was willing to be ostracised to follow it.
She began asking for help. She told the story to anyone who would listen. Slowly, with the generosity of strangers and the support of a few brave allies, she managed to buy a small piece of land and build the first structure on it. Over time her fellow sisters began to support her. Donations grew. The work expanded. Five decades later, that ramshackle beginning has helped thousands of women get off the streets and out of bad marriages, and their children to be educated across the country.
Listening to her recount the story, there were plenty of moments of self-doubt, fear, desperation, and uncertainty. There were obstacles and disagreements and years where progress felt impossible. But underneath all of it was one thing: devotion.
Years ago someone suggested to me that it might be more useful to think in terms of devotion rather than discipline, and the idea lodged itself into my life where it has remained ever since.
Discipline is one of those virtues modern culture practically worships. It conjures images of control, grit, people forcing themselves through routines with a kind of stoic determination. The language around it has a specific tone and feeling. Discipline your body. Discipline your mind. Do the thing whether you feel like it or not. It belongs to athletes and soldiers and productivity systems and the entire industry built around optimisation and self-mastery.
NB: I do use discipline from time to time. For example, sometimes I need discipline to integrate a new habit, but once the habit settles into my life it often softens into devotion, an act of care for myself or for others. More on that soon.
Devotion lives in an entirely different part of the emotional vocabulary. It belongs to religion and art and care. We speak of devotion in the context of prayer, or lovers, or the quiet fidelity someone has to a craft they have practised for decades. A devoted person returns to something not because they are forcing themselves but because they feel drawn back to it. There is a softness to the word, but also a kind of gravity. You don’t white-knuckle devotion. You move toward it gently, with care.
What makes the distinction interesting is that from the outside the behaviour often looks identical. The disciplined writer writes every day. The devoted writer also writes every day. The disciplined person wakes early, takes the walk, practices the craft, repeats the ritual with impressive consistency. The devoted person does exactly the same thing.
The difference is almost entirely internal. One experience feels like compliance, with the faint threat of punishment. The other feels more like participation in something you love.
Discipline does have its place. There are moments when you need a little structure to introduce something unfamiliar into your life, the way you might gently guide a plant in the direction you hope it will grow. But once the habit settles in, once it becomes part of your days and life, the effort often softens into devotion. What began as discipline slowly becomes an act of care, something you return to not because you must but because it matters to you.
Which might also explain why discipline works beautifully for a while and then, for many people, begins to collapse under its own weight. Force is an effective motivator in short bursts. You can push yourself through a surprising amount of resistance when the stakes feel high or the reward feels close enough to touch. But force inevitably creates friction, until the thing you’re doing starts to feel strangely heavy.
Devotion behaves a little differently because it isn’t really about force at all. It’s about relationship. A gardener doesn’t return to the garden each morning because they have mastered the discipline of gardening. They return because tending the soil feels like participating in something alive. We feed ourselves and the people we love not out of discipline but because we want to nurture something. The act already holds its own meaning, which makes returning to it feel less like effort and more like a natural continuation.
Seen this way, devotion quietly reframes the entire idea of consistency. Consistency in the language of discipline often sounds mechanical, almost industrial. Maintain the streak. Don’t break the chain. Do the thing every day. The energy behind it is urgent, tense, as if one missed day might undo the entire effort. Devotion feels different. Less like maintaining a system and more like tending a living thing. You come back to it not out of fear that something will break, but because the relationship itself is still alive.
Discipline asks how do I make myself do this.
Devotion asks what do I care about enough to keep returning to?
Thinking back on that meal in the dining hall, the thing that moves me most is that Sister never once spoke about discipline. She didn’t talk about perseverance or resilience or the endless challenges it took to build all those orphanages across a country. She told the story of a single moment she could not forget, and the vow she made to herself afterwards.
Everything that followed has grown from there. Not from force. From devotion. Which is perhaps the simplest way to understand devotion. Not forcing yourself to do something every day. It’s finding the thing you care about enough that you keep coming back and facing whatever it takes.
As a complete aside, most mornings these women would line up at my breakfast table asking for help with whatever small thing had mysteriously stopped working on their phones. Being the youngest person there by at least a decade, often more, I somehow became the resident tech support. This mostly involved being handed a phone with great seriousness and quietly reversing a setting that had been accidentally tapped at some point the day before.