What is the discipline of desire in Stoicism?

Pierre Hadot's reading of Epictetus, in The Inner Citadel, organizes Stoic practice into three disciplines: assent (how you judge impressions), action (how you act toward others), and desire — what you allow yourself to want or fear in the first place. The discipline of desire is arguably the most demanding of the three because it asks you to retrain your wanting, not just your judging. Epictetus opens the Enchiridion's second chapter with a warning built into the structure of desire itself: “he who fails to obtain the object of his desire is disappointed, and he who incurs the object of his aversion wretched.” Desire and aversion are promises — desire promises you'll get what you want, aversion promises you'll avoid what you dread — and both promises are broken constantly, because most of what people want, including health, reputation, other people's opinions, and outcomes, isn't actually within their control. Epictetus's remedy is blunt: “Remove aversion... from all things that are not in our control” and, more radically, “for the present, totally suppress desire” toward anything external, redirecting it only toward what is genuinely up to you — your own judgments, choices, and character. This is the same territory the dichotomy of control maps out, but the discipline of desire is its emotional application: it is not enough to intellectually sort things into “up to me” and “not up to me”; you have to actually stop wanting the things in the second category, or disappointment is guaranteed. Chapter 8 of the Enchiridion states the payoff directly: “wish events to happen as they do... and your life will go smoothly.”