The Shape of Inner Strength
The question of the week is, “What is the Secret to Inner Strength?”
I can’t or won’t answer this question because the question is for you to ponder, but I’ll ponder it with you.
When I hear inner strength, I think of discipline and a strong will. This is what inner strength shows up as (not the secret). In martial arts and meditation we are very interested in developing discipline and strength of will. The reason is because it’s not easy to come by; otherwise we wouldn’t need to talk much about it or work on it. If everyone had plenty of inner strength, the world would look like a very different place. It seems like society and our evolution are working against us in this regard.
Our society is definitely organized in a way that rewards hard work and inner strength, but it also rewards laziness and lack of discipline far more often. We are constantly bombarded with tiny reinforcements to eat poorly, veg out in front of screens and generally give into our vices.
This isn’t only the fault of society, of course, but the way that society has evolved to play to our existing vices. Junk food and substance abuse is everywhere. Our phones and social media are more or less a series of dopamine hits that reward scrolling and watching 10-second long nonsense videos.
Choosing How We Evolve
Humans sort of evolved to be lazy. That is, we evolved to be efficient with our energy, which can turn into finding the quickest and easiest rewards and falling into corresponding habits. Of course we also evolved to explore, invent and undertake massive projects, but those efforts and their corresponding far-off and large rewards are often waylaid by the quick fix. So maybe a place to start searching for the secret to inner strength is those harder to come by yet more satisfying rewards.
A big part of our practice is, in essence, reshaping evolution. In self defense I use the example of flinching when someone throws a punch at us. Simply closing your eyes and making a face doesn’t go very far towards defending against a punch. So we practice side-stepping and ducking. These things seem unnatural at first, but after years of practice they become our natural response to an attack. We are basically choosing how we evolve.
Replacing Instinct with Discipline
We can choose to evolve in countless ways. This disciplined evolution is a long and powerful process. Over time, we can reshape the way we respond to all kinds of situations. In meditation class last Thursday I spoke about the fight, flight, freeze response. We evolved to move immediately into one of these modes when facing a threat, even if that threat is verbal/social rather than physical. This is a useful response, otherwise it wouldn’t have evolved. Yet it is clearly suboptimal.
I spoke about how I got into fight mode with my wife and spent the whole morning poo-pooing all her ideas. Logic and empathy went out the window. My immediate response, my first thought regarding anything she did was to find a reason she was wrong. Now I was eventually able to recognize this and create space, then apologize and move on. Years ago I probably would have spent the whole day in fight mode. Years from now I hope it only lasts moments, or not at all. Meditation and reflection breeds self awareness. Physical practices like sparring in Kung Fu or rolling in BJJ help us recognize our fight, flight, freeze response and work on replacing it with something more useful. We realize when we are slipping into unhelpful states early on rather than after we are completely taken over by them. Then we can pause and choose how to respond.
Get to Work
A life filled with disciplined response is difficult to build but massively rewarding. A strong will is the result of massive effort, yet that effort is dwarfed by the benefits. How will you evolve from today on? Will it be an accident, the result of society’s priorities, or your own? Get to work!
