Happy Halloween! Today also happens to be the final day in October, and all month I’ve been practicing the paramita called discipline. I wrote the other day about how the impression I’m left with is that discipline is beautiful. And part of what’s beautiful is that it’s practical and do-able and reachable for us. A great example of this is the four gates.

The four gates are four questions we can ask ourselves before we speak, or post something on social media, or respond to an email. You may have heard them before as the three gates, or the three sieves. As a parent of two teenagers, I know they’re used often to help teens think through the way they interact with each other. Here are the classic three:

• Is it truthful?
• Is it helpful?
• Is it kind?

Taking the time to pause and ask ourselves these questions is a wise practice. We often find that the words we were considering putting out into the world are destructive, harmful ones. They won’t fix anything, and they often make things worse. We avoid a whole host of problems- lying, bullying, rejecting, hurting, exaggerating, gossiping- when we limit our speech to the words that pass the three gates test.

I don’t want to be greedy, but I love the addition of the fourth gate, which comes from Lama Surya Das. (I’ve been slowly reading through Das’ book Buddha is as Buddha Does for the Paramita Project and highly recommend it.) The fourth gate is helpful because it puts the other three questions in proper context. The fourth question is:

• What’s my motivation or genuine intention here?

It’s a HUGE step in the right direction to control our actions. If it keeps us from saying something unkind or untrue, we can feel so proud of ourselves. But when we ask this fourth question, we also address what’s really going on in our own hearts. Why did I want to say that? What part of me feels threatened? Is that a true fear, or an imagined one? Why am I not feeling open-hearted toward this person or situation?

When we begin to ask these deeper questions, we start looking at the story behind our actions, the emotions that may be driving us. And when we start to understand those things, we can begin to create and live into better, healthier stories for ourselves. We can raise our awareness. We can become mindful about our motivations as well as our actions. And that is a powerful, profound shift in awareness.

As we seek to be people who avoid harm, do good, and benefit all, these four gates are worthy of our reflection. Consider jotting them down on a sticky note and putting it somewhere you will see it often. Put it on your phone as a daily morning reminder alert. The more we pay attention, the more we become the soul ninja we’re born to be.

You can read all my posts on practicing discipline here.