I
Today, I went to BJJ practice after a nearly two-week hiatus. I didn’t plan to take such a long break, but, unfortunately, I don’t always possess the discipline or commitment to make class regularly. I’ve been making some serious grappling progress in the six months since I’ve started; I’m able to get out of most basic binds quite easily, and I’ve even been able to tap out a couple fellows.
Ju Jitsu brings out in me a healthy masculine energy that I’ve had difficulty cultivating anywhere else. One part of it is the opportunity to deploy my body in ways that generate power and leverage. Another part is a unique sense of intimacy: one minute, I’m starting deep into the eyes of someone attempting to choke me to unconscious1, and the next minute, we are hugging after a good match.
Today, though, I got thoroughly owned. Not only did I get tapped out by every opponent, I was completely winded. I could barely stand up straight at the end of open mat: my head was spinning, my eyes darted among the bright lights of the dojo, and my heart drummed desperately trying to restore oxygen to my brain. I felt my rib cage as a prison, encasing my lungs, who struggled to dispel the excess carbon from my body accumulated in previous half hour.
After my third contest, my friend pulled me aside and shared something kind and profound: “You are quite a competitor. I can’t overcome your strength, but I’ve noticed if I can get you past the 3 or 4 minute mark, your endurance tanks. And then I can dominate you. That’s your biggest weakness.”
Strength without endurance.
II
I’m pretty close to being able to count on my hands the number of months before I turn 30 years old. My last decade-and-a-half have occurred in roughly two cycles of similar shape, both filled with enormous growth, but even more turmoil and resentment. I’ve come pretty far, especially in the last three years, but I wish I had more to show for myself at this age.
In certain ways, this is a consequence of me being unserious.
I need to start being serious.
I don’t think I have much of an option left, anyway.
I’m not making a grand announcement of any sort2. I think it’s actually foolish to make a serious commitment to a ‘particular thing’. ‘Particular things’ tend to be proxies for other more ‘important things’, and those are proxies to an even deeper ‘who you are’. My experience tells me that if you hide behind such things – by placing them above who and what you are – the universe will root them out quite quickly. Maybe you can get away with burying yourself in the mud if you don’t have any awareness. But even a slight bit of awareness renders ignorance and deception a non-option on a long enough timeline.
Serious also does not mean being weighty and severe; serious means, in the @visakanv sense of the word, playful and committed.
For me, in particular, it means not relying exclusively on brute strength anymore. It means building endurance. The previous types of ‘endurance’ I’ve cultivated won’t do, however. It can’t be:
The type that swims competitively for four hours a day for multiple years, but without any spirit, and is borderline anorexic. That breeds impotence.
The type that earns a ton of money, almost certainly by making society worse, and gains too much wight by eating terribly to cope with the stress. That breeds lethargy.
The type that accepts consistent abuse from my construction manager because, “he’s incredibly skilled, where else can I learn such important things?” That breeds contempt.
Being serious means the foundation for my endurance must be joy. Anything less than that makes room for excuses, and I’m out of excuses.
III
If you are a spiritual practitioner3 with a decent amount of experience, you will tend to notice that spiritual practice traverses essentially a cycle of stages roughly correlated with Maslow's cycle of learning.
An example of how this patterning might play out is as follows:
As a child, you are praised for being intellectual, but shamed for being artistic, by various authorities over you. Since, as a child, you are entirely dependent on authority (e.g., parents) to meet your needs, you develop a ‘positive personality’ that sharpens your intellect, and disown your artistry, relegating it to the ‘shadow’.
As an adolescent – as you individuate more – you fuel this ‘positive personality’ into success, status, connection. You may become a really studious person, or start a club for nerds, or invent something technical and brilliant. At the same time, to avoid ostracism, you may disown your own artistry even further: sneering at the band geeks to fit in.
As a young adult, after accumulating a series of wins, you hit a wall where your ‘positive personality’ no longer delivers the goods. One or many load-bearing pillars of your identity collapse: a career that burns you out, a romantic partner that exhausts you, a community that feels stale and stagnant. Your intellect can’t move you out of the game you’re trapped in.
As a more mature adult, you bring the process of light – developed thoroughly for the one side of you – back into the dark to illuminate the shadow you’ve disowned (and integrate it back into your being). This is what healing trauma is. The inner artist is set loose and finds its healthy place relative to the tenacious intellect.
Of course, there is a lot more detail needed to describe the motions of this journey, but for lack of patience, I’ve laid the basic foundation.
IV
Strength is matter of deploying force whereas endurance is a matter of withstanding pressure.
There were many points growing up during which I felt weak and powerless. In response to this, I learned to endure my circumstances as a way of mitigating suffering. Keeping my head down and refusing to make waves is a strategy that got me through numerous unpleasant realities.
Over time, this approach stopped working; too much passivity accumulated in a way that I could no longer ignore. I forgot how to manifest what mattered. In response to that, I had to learn to develop initiative. This meant taking charge of my intentions and directing them outward.
While this has resulted in many leaps forward, it too has produced an impasse, as my rolling partner lovingly pointed out to me. If I am to take the next step, I must choose to be savage in a way that is sustainable.
This is what becoming serious means to me.
Strength with endurance.
Or maybe I’m just coming out as a full-blooded masochist, who knows? Choke me harder, daddy.
Alright, so exactly what do I plan to take seriously? Among other things: dating, income, truthful expression, community, religion, projects.
This is one of those phrases that is basically, “What the f*** does he mean by that”? There is not a simple definition, so the easiest answer someone who has picked up certain spiritual techniques – loving-kindness, radical acceptance, shadow work – and learned to apply them.