Having the Heart of a Warrior

Today in America we pause to remember the brave individuals who have laid down their lives to protect those of us at home. Throughout history these people responded to the call to war, left their families, took up arms, and died protecting you and yours. These honorable people are warriors.

You, however, are not.

Not, anyway, just because you study HEMA. I know for a fact there are many in our community who have served in the military, who have engaged in combat, and are indeed literal warriors. However, their status as a warrior is because of their having engaged in actual combat, fighting in which they very easily could have been killed, not the historically reconstructed and overall fairly safe “fighting” we do in the context of HEMA.

Parenthetically, allow me to add that to the modern definition of a warrior being a combat soldier I would also add law enforcement officers. While they may go years without ever shooting their gun in anger – they may go an entire career without doing so! – they go to work every day to defend and protect others with the knowledge they might have to literally fight for their lives at any given moment. To me, that serves as an adequate reason to include these fine folks in the definition of actual warriors.

So, I will say it again. You are not a warrior because you study the fighting techniques of historical warriors.

That does not mean you cannot develop a warrior’s heart. Doing that is something altogether different and is something you can do regardless of your paid employment. Not only can you develop a warrior’s heart, I believe you should develop a warrior’s heart to improve an overall sense of empowerment in your life.

In my work as a therapist, I take a pretty combative approach. I’m a fairly combative person to begin with (hence my immediate and intense attraction to our beloved martial art!) and I really encourage my patients to look at life as a struggle, as a daily fight to be engaged in and overcome.

This is obviously not presented in a depressing manner or to make them feel overwhelmed by life, but rather to clear aside what we’d call the “Heaven's Reward Fallacy” cognitive distortion. In this specific thinking error, people think life is supposed to have happy endings and everything works out perfectly and the good get rewarded, almost like they’re living in some damn Disney princess movie. The more my patients accept the fact that life is a fight, that they are the only ones who will fight for the life they want, the more empowered and assertive they can become. In time they start to plow through the obstacles life throws at them.

Kind of sounds like a warrior, doesn’t it?

And this is what having a warrior’s heart – or a warrior’s mind, if you prefer that – boils down to. It’s not about what life throws at you, but rather the thoughts you have about it and how you choose to respond. It’s about whether you see yourself as a victim of circumstance or as those circumstances being just other challenges for you to overcome. It’s whether you’re rigidly focused on a plan or flexible when things fall apart around you. It’s all about how you think of your own power over yourself compared to your lack of power over the environment.

Does that sound good to you? If so, read on. I’m going to make some suggestions about how to change your thinking to feel more empowered and more warrior-like. These suggestions come mostly from my own training and experience as a therapist, although some come from various other sources I found here, here, and here. 

Life is a Fight

We have to go back to that concept I mentioned earlier: Life truly is a fight.

Life is a fight for every living creature on the planet. It is a struggle just to stay alive, to get enough food, to not become food for something else, to survive harsh winters or forest fires or disease. As modern humans, we are luckily spared a great many of these concerns, but life is still a struggle for all of us, and we must be willing to take up that fight.

Every day we must be willing to put on our armor, take up our weapons and our shield and go join the fight that is life. Every day we must be aware of what our thoughts are, we must find ways to overcome the challenges life is throwing at us, we must remind ourselves of our own power. We must be willing to fight.

But of course, we need not fight alone. Reinforcements, by way of our family, friends, religious convictions, etc., can always and should be called upon when we need them. Fighting through life is hard; it’s so much harder to do it alone.

Now, you might be reading this and thinking this is exhausting. That you can’t do it, or perhaps that you don’t want to fight. You’re right, it is exhausting. Getting up every day, managing all the nonsense life throws at us, maintaining an empowered and healthy mindset through it all is indeed quite taxing. 

But ask yourself, what is the alternative?

What normally happens when one surrenders in the face of an enemy bent on the annihilation of their foe? They get overrun and ripped to shreds. In this case, the unexpected challenges and changes in life is the enemy. You might not want to fight, you might find it taxing, and I don’t blame you, but the reality is we have no real option but to put on that armor, take up our weapon, and face the enemy again, and again, and again.

This willingness to fight continually all boils down to how you think. In his book Unleash the Warrior Within, former Navy SEAL Richard Machowicz sums it up nicely when he writes, "Being a warrior is...about being so prepared to face a challenge and believing so strongly in the cause you are fighting for that you refuse to quit." That, my friends, is thinking like a warrior. 

You’re a Tank…or a Byzantine Cataphract!

Whichever allusion you prefer, it means the same thing.

You know only one direction: Forwards. You move forward with agency, alacrity, and resolve. You run into obstacles, but you don’t allow them to stop you. You achieve your goals and objectives relentlessly, regardless of how many times you need to approach them. You just keep moving forward.

Furthermore, you are heavily armored, so whatever other people throw at you it just bounces right off. This is an extremely important aspect of having this tank mindset because I can guarantee you people will throw stuff at you.

You’re too skinny. You’re too fat. You don’t work enough. You work too much. You’re too tall. You’re too short. You don’t do that curl right. You don’t do Krump right. You should have gone to college. You should get a better job. You should get married. You never should have gotten married. You’re not smart enough. You’re not good looking enough. You’re not talented enough. You’re not…enough.

I could go on and on, but by this point, everyone can relate to what I’m talking about. These little shots people take at us can take their toll. It can sting if it’s one random shot someone takes at us, but we’re usually able to brush it aside. But when it’s a constant barrage of these shots, especially when it comes constantly from a parent, sibling, spouse, or some other person close to us, it can not only take a toll but it can all but shut us down.

So, seeing yourself as this heavily armored war machine means the little darts folks throw at us all the time simply bounce off. Yes, clearly it takes time to develop that mindset, but once you do these words become meaningless tripe. They become the equivalent of trying to stop a tank (or the aforementioned cataphract) that is bearing down on you with spitballs.

That’s how powerful these words will become to you in time. Words that bounce off your armor. That and nothing more.

You Have Steel in Your DNA

It's usually at about this point when I'm teaching these concepts to patients that they politely start to zone out, or even challenge the realism of this. They question the power thinking has over our emotions, over our ability to feel empowered. They question how realistic it is to expect them to change their thinking in the midst of their troubles. They doubt they have the power or stamina to think like a warrior. They point out that their suffering is magnificent, and no degree of thinking is going to change how they feel, nor make them eager for the next day's fight.

So it is also at about this point that I educate patients on Viktor Frankl and who he was.

For anyone reading who might not know who he was, Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist living in Austrian during World War II. In 1942 he and his family were deported to a ghetto, and then in 1944, they were subsequently sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was processed there then sent to a slave labor camp. His father had died of illness previously in the ghetto; his mother, brother, and wife were all killed in concentration camps.

Yet despite his suffering, he realized that he still had the power to choose how he reacted to this nightmarish situation. In his famous book, Man's Search for Meaning, he notes how he watched otherwise relatively healthy men give up on life. They would lay down to sleep at night, bitterly lamenting how their life had become nothing but an absurd shell of suffering and pain, and never wake up. They would quite literally will themselves to die. 

He chose to reject that thinking because he recognized his life still had meaning. He had meaning, the war and the guards and the camp and the SS be damned! He saw that he couldn't control the major geopolitical movements of the world, nor could he control a war, nor a seething hatred aimed at people for religious and ethnic reasons. But what he could control, the only thing he could control, was himself and how he chose to react to what happened in the environment.

He later wrote:

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."  

He also wrote:

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

And finally, most famously, he wrote:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

I love to share Dr. Frankl's story because I personally find it awe-inspiring and empowering, but also because it helps put things in perspective. The patients I work with are suffering, indeed they are. Perhaps you are too, right now, with something in your life. But the absolute fact of the matter is that our sufferings in modern America pale in comparison to the suffering of those who survived the Holocaust. If Viktor Frankl can maintain a healthy mindset that helped him survive the very pit of hell, then we can use these skills to manage our own lives, to feel empowered, and to take on that daily fight. 

Though fundamentally a man of peace, Dr. Frankl was also clearly espousing a very warrior-empowered mindset. This has been backed up by additional research. In his book Warrior Mindset, Dr. Micheal J. Asken writes, "...up to 90% of successful performance is attributed to psychological skills. Rarely is that number reported to be less than 40%. This comes from talking to military personnel, police officers...and other emergency responders who engage in life and death situations."

You, my HEMA friend, are so much stronger than you give yourself credit for. You already have the power to think like an indomitable warrior inside you, you just need to find it and unlock it.

Fear is the Little Death

As I've mentioned before, the above quote is from Frank Herbert's book, Dune. I have personally come to despise fear because of the way I've seen it crush so many people's lives, to force them to live in tiny little cells of angst and anxiety. 

But though linguistically the opposite of fear might be fearlessness, that's not the case in real life. Here in our actual existence, the opposite of fear is courage. Courage is that skill, that mindset, that tells you even though doing this or that might produce a sense of fear within you, you will not allow that to stop you. 

Though you may feel fear, you will not honor that fear by doing its bidding, and instead will go forth courageously to do whatever the fear is holding you back from. You might honestly have a strong sense of fear, but you will tell yourself that you are stronger than your fear, stronger than those little nagging worrisome thoughts to combine to create the fear, and you will move forward. 

That, my friends, is courage. You can see that it is not the absence of fear. It is recognizing the fear, allowing it to pass through you, and then moving forward to complete your objective. 

The most powerful thing you can do to help facilitate this, I believe, is to develop a healthy I don't care attitude. 

What I mean by that is to recognize that in all our lives there comes a point where the path we're on takes a sudden curve. There it disappears behind a corner into an inky blackness, into which we cannot possibly see. People, first of all, struggle with that notion in and of itself, so you need to simply accept that reality. 

But once you do, the next step is to develop that I don't care attitude I referred to. This is healthy because it's not nihilistic, nor does it diminish the gifts we have, and it certainly isn't suicidal. It is pure empowerment because what you're now saying is that you don't care what is waiting for you around that corner; it might be a three-headed dragon, it might be a tiny lizard, you do not care. Whatever it is you will manage it courageously. 

When you are truly able to develop that mindset it is so empowering. It allows you to not worry about whatever is waiting for you and instead allows you to march forward with confidence and purpose, knowing you will manage everything life throws at you. There will be times when you need to call on your resources and supports; no problem! Remember what I said earlier about calling in reinforcements. 

And, honestly, there will be a time when whatever is waiting for you around that corner is bigger than you are and it will fell you, but either way at that point our concerns are over. So until then, move forward with confidence and power, not caring a whit for whatever is waiting for you tomorrow, or next week, next year, or 20 years from now. 

Because, to someone with a warrior's heart, it just doesn't matter.

⚔

Alright, my friends. Today's blog post about thinking like a warrior, though you may not literally be one, provides a nice basic primer you can use to start laying a foundation for empowerment in your life. Though I'm passionate about this subject and could literally write a book about it, I'll wrap it up here.

To my American friends, I will wish you all a happy Memorial Day; I would also ask that in between the cookouts and the yard work and the swimming today, you pause to remember what today really means. It's not the unofficial start of summer, it is a day to give honored remembrance for the many lives cut far short so that you might have the freedom to enjoy the peaceful life we now have.

To all my readers I would ask that you find ways to be more assertive, to feel more empowered, and to live a life of courage in everything you do. You can be a pacifist utterly dedicated to peace and yet still have goals in mind that you pursue with passion and agency, letting nothing ultimately stop you.

Stay loose and train like a warrior.

-- Scott

All photos: U.S. National Guard photo by Terra C. Gatti of the 2018 Region II Best Warrior Competition May 18, 2018, at Fort Pickett, Virginia.