[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

Knowing we are going to die, how, then, shall we live? The livings, indignities, and dyings depicted throughout Healing America’s Narratives and this series of posts offer examples of how not to live. As an antidote, Chapter Eleven of the book offers the potential benefits of paying attention to who we think we are, the stories we choose to tell and how we choose to tell them, the impact we have and how we are impacted, what we might not see — including, but not limited to, Shadow — who our people are, the inevitability of our death, and how we are in relationship with all of it.

To truly pay attention in this way, some level of healthy self-discipline is required — not the discipline of the angry parent wielding a belt, but the discipline that helps us move forward when things are difficult. In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck defined discipline as “the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems,” and he characterized “these tools [as] techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work through them…learning and growing in the process.”¹ Peck’s toolbox contains four essential tools: delaying gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth/reality, and balancing (learning to discipline discipline).² These tools may seem obvious conceptually, but they must be embraced and embodied if we are to benefit from them in this third decade of twenty-first-century America.

Briefly, delaying gratification requires that we engage what is painful before we, and often in order to, experience what’s pleasurable. Do the hard thing first; get it out of the way. Dr. David Schnarch and Dr. Steven Hayer³ use the term clean pain to refer to our ability to delay gratification and move into the pain of difficult circumstances when we know something must be done, even if we’re not sure what it is. Dirty pain is what we encounter when we try to avoid what is necessary, uncomfortable, and uncertain. The clean pain of delaying gratification often leads to learning, growth and healing narratives; the dirty pain of avoidance or denial tends to lead to increased suffering, a lack of resolution, and illness narratives.

Accepting responsibility requires that we honestly own what’s ours — that we accept and engage those problems that are ours to solve. It is at the heart of healing our narratives and owning and integrating Shadow. It requires that we do the difficult work of wisely and compassionately discerning what belongs to us and what belongs to others. It challenges us to be present to and move beyond the harmful belief that either everything, or nothing, is our responsibility.

Individual dedication to truth or reality (used synonymously here) requires that we know what we mean by these words; collective dedication to truth requires that we agree on these meanings or at least honor each other’s meanings. Our working definition for these essays is Parker Palmer’s view that “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.”⁴ So, truth is an unfolding part of the infinite game; it is a conversation to which all are invited⁵ — not the domain of one individual or group — and it is important and welcomes and requires both deep feeling and healthy rigor.

Finally, balancing invites the disciplining of discipline and avoids obsession, rigidity, and inflexibility. It allows us to take a day off, to rest and recover, to eat the icing (or even dessert) first, to recognize that sometimes good enough — even if that phrase gets caught in the throat or knots the stomach — is more appropriate than best, great, or good.

Another model of discipline that can be useful comes from retired college basketball coach, Bob Knight. Knight also described discipline as having four components: Do what has to be done. Do it when it has to be done. Do it the best you possibly can. Do it that way all the time. I won’t do a point-by-point comparison with Peck’s model. My experience is that each of these models has value in the practice of self-discipline.

Love is also required if we are to truly pay attention, and we’ll explore it in a future post. In the absence of love, there’s a good chance discipline will either be ignored or manifested in unhealthy, punitive, subjugating ways — whether self- or other-directed.

1. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth, (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1978), 17–18.
2. Peck develops each of these in detail on pages 16–78.
3. Dr. David Schnarch and Dr. Steven Hayer, in Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, (Central Recovery Press, 2017), 19–20.
4. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, (Jossey-Bass, 1998), 104.
5. The idea that “all” are invited is important, and it needs to be qualified. A more accurate characterization might be “all who are authentically dedicated to truth.” An example: Trump strategist, Steve Bannon, argued that it was the media and not the Democratic party that was the “real opposition” and that “the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit” — which Trump, Bannon, and others did quite well. Michael Lewis, “Has Anyone Seen the President?” in Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, (Brookings Institution, 2021), 163.