The Path of the Spiritual Warrior

The spiritual warrior is someone who treats every hardship as training rather than punishment. In this short clip I unpack that idea and how the Stoics turned adversity into an advantage instead of something to merely survive.

It is taken from a longer workshop, a bonus module inside my course Stoic Anxiety Mastery.

Stoic Anxiety Mastery: stoicanxiety.com

Free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: stoicchallenge.co

The Stoic Vault: stoicvault.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

And this quote by Marc Aurelius from The Meditations to me encapsulates this very idea. And it's it's it's kind of counterintuitive. And no, not many people think like this, but it is a very powerful way to think. So he writes, How unfortunate I am that this has happened to me. Not at all. Rather, how fortunate I am that although this has happened to me, I am still unhurt, neither broken by the present nor dreading what is to come. But something of this sort might have happened to anyone, but not everyone would remain unhurt in spite of it. Remember then that on each occasion that might lead you to grief, to make use of this idea, this is no misfortune. To bear it nobly, rather, is good fortune. So what he's saying is that when something quote unquote bad by most of our standards happened to us, that is not actually bad. In fact, the ability to handle it skillfully with skillful means, that is good fortune because it's an opportunity for us to practice virtue. And this is what the you know people talk about the spiritual warrior. What is the spiritual warrior? The spiritual warrior is someone who's training, who's you know, practicing mindfulness, stoicism, doing various kinds of practices, so that when they do meet difficult circumstances, they're able to act courageously and turn the misfortune or the grief into something positive. So there's a Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron. She writes about she actually looks forward to experiencing things like depression and anxiety because she can then use it as practice. Um, so it's it's it's a very counterintuitive thing, but most people they want to get rid of these emotions. When she feels it, she's like, oh, okay, I can be mindful of this, I can really sit with it, I can explore it. Oh, where is this emotion? What color is it? Where is it coming from? And then by doing that and really sifting with it, she can learn to overcome it and to master it. Another quote by Seneca on the same theme. Toil summons the best men. The Senate is often kept in session the whole day long, though, all the while every worthless fellow is either enjoying his leisure at the recreation ground or lurking in a tavern or wasting his time in some gathering. The same thing happens in the world at large. Good men work, spend, and are spent, and they do so willingly. Fortune does not drag them, they follow it and keep step. So this is a very, very anti-victimhood mentality. The Stoics were totally against you know having the mindset of I'm a victim of my circumstances. Um, in fact, they say that fortune does not drag good people down, instead, they follow it and they keep up with it. The key idea here is that yes, suffering isn't great. You know, some people like to romanticize about suffering, you know, like I don't know, like you tell people you're you're like certain spiritual people that you're having a really great day and they don't want to hear about it. You tell them that you're having a difficult day and they kind of like latch onto it, you know. They really, they really find like suffering to be like a juicy topic, which is fine, you know, it is. But Nietzsche's point isn't that suffering in itself is great, but enduring and overcoming it is an opportunity to exhibit greatness. Endurance is greatness. Uh, and we know this because of the movies that we watch. So there are some notes here. Imagine you go to the cinema, right? It's I don't know how expensive it is these days, but you pay money, you buy popcorn, you get a drink, and then you sit there and you watch the film. And then the story is the main character gets everything they want for two hours. It's just like, really? Like that's it. That's the film. You know, there's no struggle, there's no challenge, there's no conflict, there's no drama, there's no overcoming. It's just, yeah, the main character wanted to get this mission, achieve this mission. Okay, they get it within three minutes. It it would be a terrible film. Like the essence of good drama is conflict. It can be internal conflict, external conflict. And so one of the frames that the ancient Stoics had, and this is a frame that I want us to explore too, and uh, they thought they weren't necessarily religious, but they played around with this idea that there was a stoic god. Okay, now you can be completely like an atheist, you don't have to believe in any gods to play around with this frame. And they sometimes thought that this Stoic God wanted to push them into challenging situations, just like we want to push our favorite characters into challenging situations when we watch them in a film or a TV program, because ultimately we want to see them overcome the conflict. Okay. So, you know, think of the TV shows and movies you like. You want to see the characters struggle, but eventually overcome. And so they would sometimes play around with this idea imagine if a stoic god had presented this problem to me and they were out there, you can call it nature or the universe. How would I overcome this, like a character in a play or a film that I like? And they say that could be a useful frame that completely changes how you experience setbacks and suffering.