Commitment to exercise - it's training in will, discipline and fortitude

 

It’s true that The Inspired Warrior focus of practices are predominantly mental in nature, working with our mental and emotional habits, our psychology and so forth. Our whole reality is predicated on the functions and habits of our mental processes and attendant feelings and emotions, but we are also physical beings. Exercise and an active lifestyle are just as important aspects of our experience.

 

The physical dimension of our life is not separate from the mental and emotional side. They are profoundly connected and if we invest in our physical health as much as we invest in our mental and emotional health and evolution, we will know an all encompassing health and wholeness that we could never have imagined.

 

There’s a vitality and vigour that comes from being active, the energy expended in the pursuit of health and fitness is returned many times over, it is an investment that keeps paying dividends. We may feel too tired to exercise, but often this can be apathy and laziness.

 

Paradoxically, the focus of this article is to address how exercise can be used as a direct mental training, not that this is separate from the physical. Please do read my dedicated article 'Exercise for Life' which covers more broadly the topic of exercises’ profound benefits.

 

My own transformation actually started with exercise, in a very real way, it was the primary catalyst of an ongoing unfoldment of positive changes that continue to happen to this day. It’s also something that powers strong motivation and connection to practice because of the energy and vitality it creates.

 

Throughout the traumatic time of my life and the depressive period that followed, I became desperately unfit and put on considerable weight due to being almost entirely inert. When I reconnected with a desire to live again, not just exist, it started with a firm decision and commitment to get fit and lose some weight.

 

I thoroughly scrutinised my diet to eat more healthily and decrease my carbohydrate intake to recommended weight loss levels. At the same time, I started a light exercise regime that consisted of a light ten to fifteen minute jog every morning and a thirty minute walk in the evening.

 

I increased and added different physical trainings in a natural and progressive way over the next twelve months. As I got fitter and my mental states improved, I also increased the intensity in a natural and intuitive way, enjoying the rigour of more strenuous physical training as my body became conditioned for it.

 

What came as a surprise to me was the way in which I started to notice how the strenuous activity of exercise affected my mind. If I was feeling apathetic, or if I was struggling to keep up the pace, excuses and rationalisations would arise to not exercise, to stop, to slow down, anything to create an exit from the pain.

 

This taught me something very important that applies to all aspects of life, physical and mental. That it’s our will power that allows us to accomplish whatever we want. If we want to achieve something, we either push on with our will and get it done, or we give up because we allow some aspect of our thinking or emotions to convince us to stop.

 

Exercise is one of the direct ways in which to come into contact with our will, come to understand and see it. We can use exercise to manufacture adversity to find out what our mind does under pressure. In life, we may not get to experience these conditions very often, so it is a very valuable practice.

 

The activity of pushing oneself physically, means you come into contact with the pain barrier, and our fraught relationship with it and adversity. Through exercise, we can familiarise ourselves with pain so it ceases to be the big boogeyman in our life. We see that it can be broken through and understood through a closer relationship with it. This translates to our life in general, it shows that we can endure almost any pain, whether it is physical, mental or emotional.

 

Exercise gives us the experience of adversity in controlled conditions, so we can repeatedly push ourselves out of our comfort zone, continuously cultivating a mindset of extending ourselves, even if only by a percent or two. This then becomes a habit where we are even invigorated by this constant strength training, excelling and bettering ourselves on a constant basis.

 

At this point it’s important to point out that you should be circumspect about your current state of health and fitness if you are considering starting an exercise regime. If there is any doubt about that, always consult the advice of a health care professional and carry out a physical health check, especially if you haven't exercised in some time. This is even more important as we get older especially if we haven’t been active throughout our lives.

 

Due to my dieting in the first three months of exercise, I was also struck by the fact that undertaking this dietary and exercise regime was really a mental game. As part of my dietary plan, I only ate two meals a day, the second which was lunch, was around 2:30 to 3:00pm in the afternoon. I didn’t have any food cravings before that, but they would hit me at night when I would usually be eating dinner.

 

In resisting these cravings, it was very valuable to see how they would assault my mind, urging me to fulfill the desire to eat. When you undertake the practice of discipline and not give into insistent urges, you learn about their modus operandi. Perseverance shows you that you can actually do it! These cravings will disappear if you pay them no heed or distract yourself from them in a healthy way.

 

This is what I did, I’d either ignore them completely or have a cup of herbal tea without any type of sweetener. The cravings would completely disappear as quickly as they came into being, and what it taught me was that the cravings weren't about a real physical need for nutrition, but a want, about habitual sense desire.

Another huge benefit that comes from committing to an exercise regime is that it teaches us about discipline and what it means to commit to something. Commitment is about the decision to make that activity non-negotiable, extraordinary circumstances withstanding. Discipline is the practice of that commitment, we decide on our action plan and we stick to it.

However, this isn’t about becoming a prisoner to some burden we have to service.

 

Commitment to something means that we believe in what it is we’re committing to, we’re on board. We have a strong enough confidence in the reasons we want to commit, so there’s a decent level of positivity at the outset. If we aren’t really convinced, we will probably fail.

The solution to this is connecting with the inspiration, reasons and benefits of the activity, why we want to do it in the first place and we stay connected to that vision as much as possible. We cultivate a sense of confidence in our action plan and that it will succeed. We don’t allow doubt or the thoughts of failure to even enter our minds.

 

This is why diet, exercise, literally anything we want to achieve in our life is about mental training. Everything that stands in our way originates in our mind. Once we fully accept this and take complete responsibility for our life, we just have to commit to learning how to utilise our mental strengths to achieve our goals. We stay inspired and motivated, in other words, we remain conscious of all the reasons we want to achieve our goals.

 

In that, we exercise self control and discipline. When we do this, we come to know ourselves. We see all the ways in which our mind will wrestle against that discipline, the way it will scream, beg, entice, undermine, rationalise to get what it wants. Once you get a handle on the practice of self discipline, your life becomes yours, you build this inner strength, a voice of confidence and certitude that commands the smaller self, and ceases to be waylaid by wants and whims, but serves the higher self.

 

Another aspect of commitment and discipline that we can become aware of is that what we do in life can be expressed as priorities. We are what we do, where we invest our time. Even if we are mostly acting unconsciously and from habit, we still do what is most important to us in that particular moment, even if it's a responsibility that we don’t particularly like.

 

So, this begs the question, what are we prioritising in our life? What are we giving the most of our time and energy to? Committing to something is about being convinced that it is of utmost importance, and that our life is better off because of it, so then the commitment becomes easy.

 

All these practices build mental fortitude which enables us to traverse adversities, difficulties and temptations to veer off our chosen track. We become solid, dependable characters and someone who can be relied on in a pinch. We can remain calm and astute in any situation and be the voice of reason when the mood is going sideways. Fortitude is a great quality that comes from all our practices and attempts to strive and master oneself.