Discipline. There is no survival without discipline. There is no overcoming anything without discipline. In a lovely book by Scott Peck called, The Road Less Traveled, he speaks at length about this idea:
“Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.”
We never really forget how discipline shapes us, those often traumatizing experiences when discipline enacts its force upon us, searing into our consciousness the fundamental lesson. But these lessons - the entire experience of encountering and solving problems, of error and correction, suffering and overcoming - is precisely where life has the fullest meaning. It’s literally written into the fabric of our DNA, millions of years of human advancement testify to our learning and discipline.
It is with great pain and deep cost that humans balk at discipline. Yet, over and over we do. We deny. We wait. We ignore, repress, neglect, and remain purposefully ignorant. People fail to find the discipline to overcome their problems everyday, throughout their day, and those accumulated failures ripple out in ever widening spheres of negativity and loss of power.
Over and over I see my clients come face to face with their challenges and decide they would rather suffer the pain of remaining the same than face the likely fear and possible suffering that might come through change. To change one's identity, to shift a personality through concentrated effort and discipline is perhaps the greatest act of human courage and evolution anyone can undertake. It’s hard because suffering is hard. It’s easy to blame others - our parents, our boss, our spouse or children, our work or government. Just peer back into history to find the culprit, run the street corner and shout some name into the concrete. Humans routinely lack the tools of suffering to meet the challenges of life. So, given the life or death consequences of living without discipline, just what do we do? What are the disciplines, the “techniques of suffering” that enable us to prove overcoming again?
We need more training, a continual practice with these techniques of suffering to live with ongoing, empowering discipline. Yet, it’s the pain these disciplines introduce that make them so unpopular. Can’t I just drink? Can’t I just buy another house? Can’t I just unconsciously transfer my pain and disease on to a lesser, more available target? Can’t I just be a victim again… at least I know how that works?
Working with discipline and the requisite techniques of suffering are difficult and unpopular, but they are also and so often, so simple… that even our children are able to do them with time. Children are able to delay gratification for the simplest of rewards, yet as humans move through the stages of growth from child, to adolescence, to adulthood without enlarging this technique of delaying gratification, we suffer. If we are never instructed to pray and meditate these inner capacities to meet the world never develop and over time atrophy until our death. If our parents have failed to impress upon us the vital necessity of community and we fail to enlarge and care for our communities, we suffer. If we constantly baulk at shaping a vision for our life, refuse to apologize when we injure, or fail to forgive when we are injured, we suffer.
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