Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Discretio
Order the day by moderation — balanced food, rest, work, movement and prayer in steady rhythm, avoiding both excess and deprivation — so that body and soul are kept in the dynamic balance (discretio) that Hildegard called the ground of health and clear vision.
Discretio: Order your day by moderation and steady rhythm — balanced food at regular times, consistent sleep, work alternated with real rest, daily movement and time in living nature, and one fixed point of prayer or stillness. Avoid both excess and deprivation. Each evening, ask gently where you were in balance and adjust tomorrow by a degree. Balance is the mother of the virtues — and it is kept daily, not won once.
What it is
Hildegard was not only a visionary but a practical healer who wrote a medical treatise, Causae et Curae. Its governing idea is discretio — balance, measure, moderation — which in the Benedictine tradition she inherited was called “the mother of all virtues.” For Hildegard, health was not a fixed possession but a dynamic balance to be kept daily: between food and fasting, work and rest, waking and sleep, activity and stillness, body and soul.
She listed discretio among the four pillars of a vital life (alongside subtilitas, viriditas and ratio). The practice is to order your day by moderation in steady rhythm — neither indulging nor depriving — so the whole person is kept “in tune” enough to live, work and pray clearly. It is the least dramatic of her practices and, by modern lights, the soundest.
The Method
Reconstructed from Hildegard’s discretio / balance teaching in Causae et Curae and the Benedictine ordered day:
- Take moderation as the rule, not zeal. The aim is the middle path: enough, not too much, not too little — in food, drink, work, sleep, and even devotion. Excess and deprivation both unbalance the person.
- Eat with measure and regularity. Simple, balanced food at steady times; stop before stuffed; favour the fresh and “green” over the heavy. (Treat her specific food lore as historical, not medical — see Safety.)
- Keep a steady sleep rhythm. Regular hours of rest and rising. Hildegard’s monastic day turned on fixed times; the regularity is the active part.
- Alternate work and rest. Build the day as a rhythm of meaningful work, then genuine rest — Benedict’s ora et labora, prayer and work, in measured turns rather than one long depleting push.
- Move and be in the living world. Include bodily activity and time among growing things; Hildegard saw body and nature as part of the soul’s balance, not separate from it.
- Anchor with prayer/stillness at set points. A short fixed practice — a sung line, a silent pause, a returning to God — at one or two points of the day keeps the soul’s side of the balance.
- Review each evening with gentleness. Briefly ask: where today was I in excess, where in deprivation, where in balance? Adjust tomorrow by a small degree. Discretio is corrected daily, not achieved once. (Sourcing note: Hildegard taught balance as a medical-spiritual principle, not a fixed schedule; the steps render discretio into a doable modern rhythm and deliberately leave out her specific humoral remedies.)
Source & Lineage
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) folded the Benedictine virtue of discretio — measured moderation as the “mother of virtues” — into a whole-person medicine in Causae et Curae, framing health as the balance of elements and humours within a cosmos where the human being is a microcosm.
That humoral-cosmic framework is pre-scientific; what survives intact is the practical wisdom of a moderate, rhythmic, body-and-soul ordered life.
The Traditions' versions
The move — order daily life by measured moderation and steady rhythm as the ground of clarity and wellbeing — is widespread, but Hildegard’s is distinctively a whole-person, body-and-soul medical balance (discretio) inside a monastic rhythm:
- The Rule of Life / whole-life devotion (William Law) — ordering the whole day under set hours and themes.
- Daily disciplines (Jim Rohn) — small consistent daily practices compounding into a life.
- Sharpen the saw — renewal (Covey) — deliberate balance and renewal across body, mind, heart, spirit.
- Householder yoga (Lahiri Mahasaya) — sustaining inner practice woven through ordinary daily life.
- Askesis — training soul and body (Musonius) — Stoic training of body and soul together through measured habit.
Common refinements
Turning moderation into a strict rule-set. The point is balance and flexibility, not a rigid code; over-tight rules breed scrupulosity. Discretio includes being gentle with yourself.
- Confusing deprivation with virtue. Hildegard warned against excess and against deprivation; under-eating or over-fasting is as unbalanced as indulgence.
- Taking her remedies as medicine. Her food lore and cures are historical artefacts. Keep the rhythm; ignore the prescriptions (see Safety).
- Going for a dramatic overhaul. Discretio is corrected by small daily adjustments, not a heroic reinvention. Change one thing, hold it, review.
- Dropping the soul side. A balanced body without any contemplative anchor is only half of what Hildegard meant; keep one small daily prayer/stillness point.