6 Immaculate Insights After 100 Days of Warrior Initiation ⚡️
Personal and transpersonal reflections on the WARRIOR100 experience.
📍 Coordinates: Buenos Aires, Argentina. 🇦🇷
🎧 Music Pairing: Horizon – End of Time.
📖 Reading Time: ~8 minutes.
🧉 Housekeeping: A grand welcome to all who have joined this journey recently! Thank you for being here. I will do my best to honour your inbox. My writing revolves around my core interests: Zen, Self-Mastery, Bitcoin, Psychedelics, Cultural Architecture, and Serious Play. I have been quiet for a few weeks, landing in Argentina after two weeks of Apotheosis Retreats and closing out the WARRIOR100, our 100-day initiation for modern warriors.
“The One remains, the many change and pass
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.”
– Percy Shelley
⛩️ We made it…
The WARRIOR100 has come to a close.
100 days—over 3 months—of 2 hours/day Warrior training.
It was remarkable. Surpassing any expectations I had. It’s always a good sign when you can impress yourself with your own experiences.
45 minutes of physical training. 45 minutes of concentration meditation. 30 minutes of studying a hand-crafted warrior curriculum. A daily integrity audit. Every day. For 100 days. I had ~80 complete days, with a smattering of partially complete days, while taking ~3 weeks toward the end to intentionally pause and direct my attention on facilitating 2 plant medicine retreats.
🤸🏻 Physical Training.
The physical training was the most profound, challenging, and beautiful discipline for me.
I have tended toward the conceptual, cerebral, and psychological domains for most of my life, often neglecting my physicality as a result.
This discipline changed everything. My body is considerably stronger, and my body composition looks and feels better. My flexibility has greatly improved. But more importantly, I feel better in my body. I feel more embodied. Without a shadow of a doubt, I trust my physical strength, mobility, stamina, and resiliency more.
Beyond this, I rekindled a deep passion in pursuing the discipline of yoga, and am excited to dive into this more earnestly next year. Daily physical training is now a non-negotiable part of my day, and I am sincerely grateful that happened.
🧘🏻 Concentration Meditation.
We created a custom meditative progression for the group based on the teachings in The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa John Yates.
The end goal is access concentration: the ability to hold your attention on the object of meditation without deviation. It is incredible to feel progress in mental training develop. Sometimes you leap overnight, other times it feels like you’re starting again from square one.
My consciousness is clear, my attention span has increased dramatically, and my awareness is in my control.
When I began on Day 1, even 45 seconds without succumbing to distraction > forgetting > mind-wandering was a challenge. Now, 45 minutes pass with relative ease. All within 100 days. I’m hungry to keep going, and looking forward to moving into Stages 4-6 of this framework.
📝 Warrior Curriculum.
Our curriculum covered the virtues and values of the Warrior archetype in its fullness.
Everything from discipline, service, mastery, integrity, honour, purpose, tribes, resilience, and more were covered. Learning from ancient warrior cultures and the shining examples of the Warrior spirit feels like a cheat code. Centuries of wisdom are compressed into weeks of learning.
The length of the experience—100 days—provided the perfect opportunity to discover a growth edge, and immediately begin to embody these values at a deeper level. This crescendoed into the opportunity to put it into practice when I facilitated 2 weeks of intensive plant medicine retreats, bringing these values into deep service for the group and the individuals’ healing journeys.
I switched my reading to a collection of Warrior-themed books, which felt like an extra boost of psycho-spiritual rocket fuel. Books I read during this experience included:
The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa John Yates.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa.
The Way of the Samurai by Inazo Nitobe.
Warrior of the Light by Paulo Coelho.
Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa.
The Dokkodo by Miyamoto Musashi.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
🕵🏻♂️ Daily Integrity Audit.
While the physical training provided profound transformation, the integrity audit was my ultimate discipline.
Reviewing the day’s events, highlighting areas where I wasn’t showing up as I wanted to, where I said something I didn’t mean or held back from saying something that arose was acutely painful at times. Seeing all the ways I’m still full of shit, still holding back, still playing it small; painful reflections from a non-judgemental mirror.
There were some glorious moments in it too. Noting where I had risen to the occasion, stood my ground, or made a difficult decision to follow what was most true and aligned.
Day after day, breath after breath, working to take corrective action, to bring my life into deeper alignment with my values, was transformational. It is a slow cooker, an identity-level death and rebirth process.
Going through the integrity audit, paired with an ongoing commitment to doing better the next day, helped me arrive more deeply in myself, cultivate a richer relationship with myself, and build a foundation of unconditional self-worth and positive regard that I can already see manifesting itself in my life. Integrity is bitter medicine, but it works wonders.
🔥 The Warrior Initiation.
More important than the 4 disciplines that comprise this challenge, is the person you become by making the commitment and following through with it.
A 100-day initiation is no laughing matter. It’s a comprehensive psycho-spiritual overhaul.
A few things stood out to me as kind of meta-truths or principles that emerge when undergoing an initiation like this:
Perfection is Childish: Aiming for perfection, or leaning on the excuse of “I can’t do it yet because I’m a perfectionist,” is a hallmark of immaturity. The mature Warrior shows up and does it anyway. Perfection is unreachable, aim for excellence instead. However imperfect—however messy—you can always do your best. Perfection is the excuse of an idealist who has not yet entered the arena of life fully. It is a safety mechanism and an egoic cop-out from truly humbling yourself and putting in the work.
Suffer with Dignity: It is always possible to suffer with grace and dignity. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl outlines 3 ways one derives meaning in life: through work/deeds, through relationships/experiences, and by enduring unavoidable suffering with dignity. No matter how tired, how beaten down, or how energetically drained you are — it is always possible to stand up straight, pull your shoulders back, take a deep breath, and move forward proudly, to the best of your ability, with neither complaint nor regret in your head or on your tongue. After months of daily physical training, it’s easy to complain, to make excuses, to sigh and moan, to wait for someone to come and save you. This experience helped me unlock a new level of Self-Mastery, to suffer silently, with all of the grace and humility that is our birthright as human beings. Suffering is an unavoidable part of the human experience, but it is always possible to bear this with decency and composure.
Comprehensive Transformation Requires Time: This work will not be done in a 2-week sprint or a 30-day challenge. It needs time to knead you like bread. To get into every psychological nook and cranny and work it’s medicine. Even now, after 100 days, I feel like I am just beginning. I can recognize the depth and profundity of the evolution that has transpired, I feel it in my breath, my bones, and my thoughts. Give yourself patience and grace, but do not stop.
Momentum Changes Everything: While this was not new to me, it reached a deeper level of embodiment. Waves of momentum carry you far beyond willpower. Building momentum takes time (see previous point), serving as an upswell of favourable winds, filling your sails and making it easier to press into deeper and more challenging material.
Intention is Action: Intention is an action. The spiritual force unlocked by stating “I intend to practice meditation diligently until the timer goes off,” cannot be overstated. The difference is night and day. Setting an intention for deeper integrity the next day, to stay focused on the training session, to embody the lessons, to return attention to the breath focuses the gravity of your Being behind it. Intention is a lighthouse guiding you through the rough waters of experience and the constant demands on your attention.
Discipline is True Self-Love: This was a tough lesson to learn, but I’m glad it happened. Discipline—when approached in a non-judgemental way—is an act of genuine self-love. It is loving yourself enough to see the vast potential inside of you, waiting to be unlocked should you but attempt to refine it. Discipline has Grandfather energy: firm, but loving. It is the driving force that takes your life from possible, to probable, to actual. Discipline is one of the greatest and most loving gifts you can give to yourself.
A final note on the linchpin that enabled all of this: community and camaraderie.
Knowing I was not alone in this was paramount. Trusting that my brother and sister Warriors were also in the mud with me, going through this same process, imbued me with an invigorating lifeforce each day. I would not have had the same experience had I tried to do this by myself. How do I know this? Because I’ve tried and failed at this for years. The tribe dynamic is crucial.
Thank you.
Thank you so much to everyone who trusted us with this experience, and who gave their energy to creating this sacred container. Thank you, I love you, well done. 🔥
There are more lessons, insights, experiences, and wisdom to share about the WARRIOR100 and our 100-day containers. Those will come in the essays that follow.
For now, thank you, I love you, be well. 💛 EB.
If this resonates with you, if you’re hungry to find the freedom within discipline, to earnestly pursue the path of Self-Mastery — our flagship experience, the HERO100, begins anew in ~1 month, on January 14. It’s going to be our most potent container yet. I hope you’ll join us.
“There are only two mistakes along the path of Self-Mastery: not starting, and not going all the way.” — Shi Heng Yi, 35th Grandmaster of Shaolin Temple Europe.