📍 Coordinates: Mississauga, Canada. 🇨🇦
📖 Reading Time: ~7 minutes.
🧉 Housekeeping: We’re dropping the Warrior100 September 1st: a 100-day initiation into serious warrior training. It’s going to be f*cking amazing. You can use ‘SERIOUSPLAY’ to get that secret handshake discount and be in a group with me for the entire experience. See you there. ⚡️
“To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so, they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties.” — Sogyal Rinpoche
My entire adult life I’ve been inspired by a kind of Warrior that is extinct in modern life…
I call them the holistic warrior.
Warrior-Philosophers like Socrates.
Warrior-Kings like Marcus Aurelius.
Warrior-Monks like the Shaolin.
Being a Warrior is about so much more than just being a skilled soldier or pawn of the military.
The Warrior Archetype is a vitalizing, driving, activating force. It emphasizes the holistic development of an individual across body, mind, heart, and spirit.
In a paradoxical twist of fate, despite the atrocities that shadow warriors have committed throughout the centuries of human history, the periods where warrior cultures have ruled also had the greatest emphasis on virtues, values, character, and nobility.
Chivalry for the Knights. The Bushido of the Samurai.
“To seek the perfection of the warrior’s spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, our manhood.” – Carlos Castaneda
Warriors set incredibly high standards for themselves and train every day to reach them. They chart their own path, making no exceptions or excuses.
There are many things about the holistic warrior I admire, but these stand out to me the most:
1. Total Commitment to a Transpersonal Cause:
“The warrior is always first a servant… The warrior does not serve because they cannot lead; they know that a person cannot lead if they do not serve.” – Erwin Raphael McManus
I used to think discipline was the hallmark of a Warrior. This is not true. Discipline is only a tool.
The true defining characteristic of a Warrior is their total devotion to a cause greater than themselves.
True Warriors are always in service of something.That might be an ideal (Truth, Honor), or it might be a people (the Kingdom, the King, the Country, or the City).
Warriors are defined by their total commitment to a transpersonal cause. They commit and submit their lives in the service of something greater than themselves.
2. Cultivation of Virtues & Values
“Let us be, then, warriors of the heart, and enlist in our inner cause the virtues we have acquired through blood and sweat in the sphere of conflict—courage, patience, selflessness, loyalty, fidelity, self-command, respect for elders, love of our comrades (and of the enemy), perseverance, cheerfulness in adversity and a sense of humor, however terse or dark.” ― Steven Pressfield, The Warrior Ethos
Once a Warrior has committed themselves to their transpersonal cause – they train.
They train so that they can honour their commitment. So that they can be the last wall of defence for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful from the forces of entropy and evil.
“The true warrior fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him” — G.K. Chesterton
In service of their commitment, the Warrior becomes the best they can be.
They train and cultivate virtues and values like courage, honour, integrity, discipline, nobility, service, mastery, presence, and focus.
More than mere skill with a sword or fighting techniques, the Warrior becomes fit for service by cultivating themselves. In today’s day and age, I hear very few people, if anyone, discuss the virtues they are trying to cultivate.
Indeed, concepts like honour and integrity are nearly extinct. It is the Warriors’ ferocity that cultivates these.
3. Emphasis on Holistic Development of the Individual:
“It is only after a person surrenders achieving “The American Dream,” and annihilates any personal thought of living exclusively for material gain that a person commences a journey worthy of a spiritual warrior, a glorious destiny of self-realization in lieu of pursing the opulence of a gilded life.” ― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
It was the Shaolin Warrior-Monks who first domesticated the camellia sinensis plant – what we now know as tea.
Shaolin Monks cultivated the practice of tea for two reasons:
So that they could remain calm yet alert (Zen) during periods of meditation.
So that they remain open-hearted, cultured, and connected to nature.
Particularly evident in the Warrior cultures of the East, there is a strong emphasis on the holistic development of the individual.
Any undeveloped parts of an individual are susceptible to corruption and ossification. You are only as strong as your weakest character link.
Nowadays, I see so many people so disciplined at the gym, who are strong physically – but who will never sit in meditation for even 5 minutes, for fear of what their mind will do to them. Indeed, many of us wouldn’t even be able to sit in meditation for 5 minutes, our concentration and self-control having diminished so greatly.
The true, embodied, integrated Warrior must develop themselves across Mind, Body, Spirit, and Heart.
Each area helps support and correct the others. And yet this kind of training – one where you train the body just as hard as you train the mind. Where you study philosophy and ethics just as much as you spar in martial arts. This kind of holistic development is gone! Where does one find it outside of the monastery now?
This imbalanced and underdeveloped training of the individual is at the root of so many of our individual and collective problems today.
Strong body but weak morals.
Strong philosophy but weak body.
Deep concentration but no virtues.
Our society is degenerating, whoring itself out to the highest bidders. We are weak, fat, lazy, and lethargic. The most technologically developed culture of all time, and approaching the most morally bankrupt culture of all time.
We must return to the holistic development of the individual.
4. Recognition of the Immanency of Death:
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” — Kahlil Gibran
And there is truly one driving force that animates all of these previous characteristics: the living recognition of the immanency of death.
Death is the vitalizing force of the Warrior.
Not one of fear, but one of passion.
Warriors are HERE, NOW.
They are ready, they have already sacrificed themselves to their transpersonal cause, and they live with the reality of death at all times. This is the vitalizing force — the animating fire that allows them to cultivate their virtues, surrender to their commitments, and press forward in their journey of self-mastery.
Warriors do not run away from reality, nor do they avoid the fact of Death. Warriors embrace this and use it to vitalize every moment of their being.
The True Warrior Initiation: the Warrior100.
“Warriors don’t rise to the level of expectations, they fall to the level of their training.” – Archilochus
In searching for a way to cultivate the holistic warrior in myself, I’ve created it.
I have obligations in my life currently, I can’t drop out at this time and join a monastery. I needed a middle way, some balance. Modern monastic training. A modern Warrior initiation.
Now, it exists: the Warrior100.
It addresses each aspect of the holistic warrior: mind, body, spirit, and heart. By completing 4 daily disciplines, for 100 days straight – we will train the virtues, values, characteristics, and commitments of true Warriors.
Body: 45 minutes of physical training.
Mind: 45 minutes of concentration meditation.
Spirit: 30 minutes of study/reflection on virtues/values.
Heart: Ongoing commitment to tell the truth and act in integrity with your values.
2 hours a day. Every day. For 100 days.
It is going to be intense. It is going to demand a lot from you.
It is also going to give you things that you cannot get elsewhere. It will train skills in your that you cannot buy your way into. It will give structure, purpose, and order to your existence.
Your body will become fit, strong, mobile, and capable. Your mind will become clear, sharp, focused, and calm. Your spirit will be refined, purified, aligned, and integrated. And your heart will open, becoming more courageous by living in harmony with the truth.
I invite you to join us. We are doing this together. It will be glorious.
I hope to see you there, partner.