Reclaiming The Warrior and Its Shadow

Foreign.

Welcome to the man talk show Training for men, answers for women. I'm Connor Beaton and today we're going to talk about reclaiming your warrior and the shadow of your warrior. So I've wanted to talk about this because one of the most popular series that I did about, I think about last, last year, about a year, year and a half ago, was a four part series about the king, warrior, lover, magician, archetypes. And I've recently been talking a lot about ending the war on yourself that a lot of us are sabotaging in our life. That we are sabotaging because the warrior within us is out of control, right? Part of us is constantly going to war with ourselves and we can, when our inner critic is out of control, when we feel like we are attacking ourselves verbally, mentally, emotionally, sometimes in physical ways where we drink too much or we do too many drugs or we are excessive in our porn consumption or sexual predilections. And so in this way, when we feel like we are out of control and we are doing harm to ourselves or attacking ourselves in some ways, it is the warrior within us that is unruly, that is untamed and untrained. And so this episode is going to be a deep dive into a little bit about what the warrior is, the shadow of the warrior. And then I'm going to talk about ending this war on yourself. And this is for men and women alike. But guys, I'm going to men, I'm really going to specifically focus in on you. And ladies, you can take a lot from this as this is sort of a universal, right? We all have a warrior archetype within us, but this is going to be a very masculine approach to this. So let's dive straight in. We really learn to abuse ourselves from others. We learn from a parent, from a sibling, from society, from classmates, from ex partners, ex girlfriends, boyfriends, how to go to war on ourselves. And this is what I talk about, this is going to war on yourself. This is the shadow of the warrior. And there are a few parts to the shadow of the warrior that we need to understand. So first is the coward. And secondly is the grandstand or bully. So these rules play different parts, right? The coward within us is going to constantly want to sabotage us through almost not sadistic means, but skillfully being the victim, skillfully playing as if we cannot embark on the things that we know we are capable of. So the coward within us, the coward which is part of the shadow of the warrior who will consistently tell you that you are not enough that you shouldn't. That you shouldn't ask for that person's phone number, that you shouldn't engage in the conversation at work, that you shouldn't speak up against injustices, whether that's within your work environment, within the relationship, within your family system, within your friends. That you should play small. So the coward in. In within the shadow of the warrior will undermine your decisiveness, it will undermine your adaptability, and it has a very skillful way of making you feel small. And that's often because there has been someone in your life that has made you feel that way, that has sort of pushed you into this corner. And so part of the warrior is this reclamation of stepping out of the coward, stepping out of the shadow of that person, stepping out of that abuse. Now, the other side is the grandstander bully, and there's two more parts to the shadow of the warrior that I'm going to unpack here in just a moment. But we have to move through the coward and move through the grandstand or bully in order to. To move out of. Move out of this space. Because this, the grandstander bully and the coward are really parts of the hero archetype. And the hero archetype is sort of like the first phase of entering into the. Into the warrior. So many of us will go through this initiatory process in our life where we will sort of idolize and revere the hero. And this happens because the warrior part of us is immature, right? The warrior in our fullest hasn't come into a sense of initiation or maturity. So we have to first see the coward and the grandstand or bully within us to move through those parts, to then meet the other parts of the warrior shadow, which I'm going to talk about here just in a second. But the grandstander bully really is the part of us that is disrespectful. Disrespectful to us, disrespectful to others. And he is sort of the antithesis of the coward, right? The grandstander bully is the one that pretends to not give a shit and is quick to go online and strip people down verbally and acts in this very grandiose sort of way that loves to, you know, quote, unquote, call other people out or put other people in their place and often does so from this sort of air of righteousness, right? That's the grandstander bully. That his mission is so superior that he morally justifies just complete and utter bullshit, right? This is where we see a lot of Narcissists, a lot of people that maybe aren't narcissists, but get categorized, categorized as narcissists because of this sort of righteous, immoral behavior. So that's the grandstand or bully. Next, once we sort of move past the hero and we are starting to initiate ourselves into the warrior and his maturity, we will see the saddest, or the sadist, however you want to say it, potato, potato, and the masochist. So let's just talk about these pieces a little bit. So as. As we've kind of alluded to, men who start to cultivate the warrior archetype will often have the ability to create separation. And that separation can be separation from other relationships. It can be separation from other people's desires for them. It can be separation from what other people want from them. It can be separation from sometimes their emotions that can actually compartmentalize going to battle. And these aren't necessarily bad things, right? The warrior needs to cultivate separation. And in working with our own past abuses or traumas or shame, we actually need to be able to separate ourself from the wound that we've experienced in order to work with it. And this is. I think Carl Jung has a great quote on this where he says something along the lines of, we cannot heal what we cannot separate from. Okay? We cannot heal what we cannot separate from. So if we are too close to it, if we're still enmeshed with that wound, we are not able to work with it to heal it. So the warrior is incredibly important because the warrior within us allows us to create some separation from these aspects of our lives that are hard, that are challenging, that we need to be able to work with. And while this detachment, while this separation provides us as men with a much needed sense of focus in our lives and a much needed sense of capability, it can become a permanent state, right? We can get stuck in this separation. And so part of the shadow of the warrior is that we can become completely detached emotionally. We can become completely detached physically, sexually. We can become detached from the people in our lives in very sort of excessive ways. And we see this a lot when men sort of come into therapy, when men come in to do the work, they start listening to this podcast, or they come out to a men's weekend, or they join the alliance. And I hear things like, I've been numb for years. I just haven't felt anything. My wife will break down crying, and I've said something that's hurt her. I know I've attacked her verbally. Or I've said something that's harmful to her, and I feel nothing. And I feel nothing ever about it. I just am not tuned into it. And so that is an unhealthy shadow, right? That's the sadist that we feel nothing. We literally cut ourselves off from feeling anything in general, and it almost turns into something that we enjoy, right? So a true sadist is a person, this is the definition, who derives pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from inflicting pain or humiliation onto others. So the unhealthy warrior will start to move into this place where he almost enjoys watching other people's pain. And so this is. We have a big culture of this online, right? Many people watch constantly. Other people being harmed in. In really sometimes violent ways, right? It's like violence porn, right? Has become a thing. And this is the shadow of the warrior manifesting itself through online. And other examples of this are almost like soldiers, for example, who have gone out, been deployed, can find it very difficult to adjust when they come back home to their family lives and to their society and to their family friends, because those relationships are very emotionally driven, right? There's an emotional connection that the soldier has had to disconnect from in order to survive, in order to be successful in his mission. And so these types of individuals, and this is how I'm going to tie it into relationships. So the shadow of the warrior, when in the sadist mode, is really disgusted by weaknesses, right? Really disgusted when he views other people, especially people that are close to him, to be having any form of a weakness. So if a partner says, hey, I'm disappointed by something, or I'm really sad about something that you did, or I'm hurt by something that you said, the sadist within the shadow of the warrior can feel a sense of disgust and repulsion against it and will want to push that person away even further and lacks the empathy, lacks the connection to compassion to be able to bridge the gap. And so we also see this show up and how I also see this show up in a lot of men who have the sadist version of the warrior archetype in the shadow of the warrior is workaholics. So men that start to really get lost in the warrior archetype because again, the warrior is a very important part of our society, of our culture, and of our own personal psyche. This archetype is incredibly important, as I said before, for being able to stand up against the different parts of ourselves psychologically that are detrimental, right? So the warrior is required to stand up against your own sense of inner critic. The warrior is required to. To stand up against the victim within you. But how this shows up for many men within our culture and society traditionally is that they have sort of turned into these workaholics and they lose themselves, right? They'll lose themselves in the mission, and it will become their only sole form of purpose. And they will sacrifice their health, their relationships, their family, their children. They'll sacrifice anything and everything for this one focused goal. And it can become very much like an addiction. So this is a part of the shadow archetype of the warrior. The other side is the masochist. And the masochist is a little bit. Quite a bit different from the sadist. So the masochist is sort of like the. The passive shadow within the warrior archetype. And its attributes are sort of similar to the cowardly part of the hero's shadow, right? It is the part that almost enjoys being powerless, almost.

Identifies and is consumed by being this sort of pushover in life and will find ways. So if you find yourself being like, oh, this kind of sounds like me, the masochist, anyway, you will sort of find ways and enjoy being cut down, losing, right? Being humiliated, feeling like a failure. And it will actively sabotage to create this sort of pain continually in order to feel that sense of, I'm not good enough, right? So this is very indicative. A lot of the men that I've worked with over the years who maybe had a father figure who was quite abusive to them or a man in their life that was quite physically and verbally abusive to them, will often exemplify this part of the warrior shadow later on in life. And so I wanted to bring these shadow parts out because they're important to understand. So how do we reclaim our inner warrior? How do we reclaim our inner warrior and move through this? The saddest and the masochist. How do we start to end the war on ourselves? Well, we do this by going to war for ourselves. It's a very simple reframe, but there's a lot of work that goes into it, which I'm going to lay out for you. And by the way, at the end of this podcast, I'm going to give you some action items that are going to help you curate and cultivate a deeper sense of warrior within your life. So stay tuned for that. But how we do this is by noticing where we are going to war on ourselves, and we go to war for ourselves. Because normally we would be at war with ourselves, right? Normally we'd be attacking ourselves for anything that's wrong, anything that we're not doing to perfection, but instead what we need to do is go to war for ourselves. So this is sort of taking a stand. This would mean that we find our why within the act of taking a stand for ourselves, that we literally find a deeper sense of purpose as a man, first and foremost in going to war for ourselves. So if you feel like you're someone that doesn't have a clear sense of purpose, a clear sense of direction, a clear sense of meaning in your life, pick up the sword, pick up the spear and the shield and the helmet of going to war for yourself, for your own life. Because the reality is, is that if you are out of integrity, if you are living in the shadows of the king, of the warrior, of the lover, of the magician, if you feel like you are lost in life in some way, you need to go to war for yourself, right? And we find this purpose. We find this mission. We start to fight this war and this battle by setting boundaries for ourselves. We find meaning in tending to our own words and letting them be true and honorable, and letting them be solid rather than destructive and not worth a damn thing. We find freedom and focus as a man when we are tending to our own pain, learning from our failures, and being of contribution to something that is greater than ourselves. And all of these parts, all of these aspects, not only bring meaning to us, but they ignite the warrior in his fullest. It starts to ignite the flame or sort of warm.

The inner materials and lights the torch within us. That allows us to go to battle for ourselves rather than constantly attacking ourselves or others. So why is this? Because this is the mature masculine. This is what the mature warrior stands for. And in shadow work, the warrior archetype represents our power to defend and expand our territory. The warrior archetype represents our power to defend and expand our territory. Now, this isn't a bad thing, right? Because.

When the warrior is in his fullest, when he's in his most genuine, potent and embodied form, he is in action for and pointed in the direction of protecting and expanding both his inner and his outer territory. So let's define what those things are. So first and foremost, his outer territory is constituted of his body, his home, his temple, and his relationships. And he tends to these, his outer territory, through the protection of and expansion of his realm. Now, notice very closely that when he is doing so from a place of the sacred warrior, it is always from the place of reverence. And in the words of Francis Weller, reverence is the energy of protection, conviction, compassion and love. Right. Reverence is the energy of protection, conviction, compassion, and love. So notice here that protecting our outer territory and expanding our outer territory is not about waging war on other people. It is not about robbing or pillaging or stealing or consuming other people's territory. It is actually about protecting and expanding our own territory alongside the territory of others. So the warrior in his fullest is able to meet other people, able to respect other people's territory without needing to sort of invade. I think the misconception about the warrior is that he is somehow harmful, that he is somehow detrimental to society, and this is simply not the case. It is the shadow of the warrior that has been let loose and run rampant. And so we need more mature men, more mature warriors walking the ground who are able to take moral stands against the shadow warrior that is very clearly prominent within our culture and society and within ourselves, most importantly. So let's describe the inner territory. Because the warrior, in his fullest must also, in shadow work, tend to his inner territory. And this is the realm of his psychic identity. This is a man's sense of self or ego. And this is also the realm of the divine, the realm of the spirit, where awe and wonder reside, where reverence for one's own innocence and the innocence of others and the innocence of the world takes precedence. So the warrior's job within the inner realm is to set boundaries with the inner critic. It's to set boundaries with the victim so that they are not running rampant. Right. Much like we are seeing in Cancel Culture, we sort of have this battle externally within our modern media and within our modern culture, where we are seeing the critic and the victim battling it out day to day. So the warrior is the one that needs to step out of the shadows and set boundaries with the critic and the victim within ourselves. Notice how a lot of us get caught up in the trap of seeing these archetypes out in the world and constantly trying to set boundaries with them when we feel out of control with our own. Notice how many times you launch into. And this is where the trap is. You launch into trying to set a boundary with somebody else's critic or somebody else's victim, or calling them out for. For it, rather than tending to your own inner territory first and foremost. So again, the warrior, the warrior's job, the warrior's mission when it comes to tending to the inner realm is to set boundaries with the critic, set boundaries with the victim, and the shadow, which is always trying to attempt to sabotage and collapse the Inner kingdom. So just imagine your inner psyche, your inner experience, as a form of a kingdom where there's many different players, there's many different entities all sort of vying for power. And the warrior, when it is in its fullest, is actually protecting us, protecting the self, as many in psychology and in the spiritual realm would call the transcended self. Right? The truest version of us is actually protecting and maintaining order within the inner kingdom. So how do we access the warrior? How do we access our inner warrior and start to allow ourselves to embody this archetype within our inner and outer territory? Well, we access it through the gateway of anger. And anger, this may be sort of jarring for some people. That may be new to my work. But anger.

Is not the villain in our story, right? Largely, anger has been vilified in our culture, and we can see the results seeping deep into politics, into commerce, into science, and into academia, where everywhere that we look, anger is sort of unbridled, right? It's not clean anger, it is unhealthy, it's destructive and is tearing down major institutions of our time because it is not clean, because it is shadow anger. It is aggressive, it is hostile. It is and has been anger has been largely in our culture, manipulated, contorted, and weaponized by priests, politicians, porn stars, and the most popular celebrities for alternative agendas. And so the reclamation of your inner warrior, the reclamation and the stepping into and the embodying of your warrior at its fullest, at its peak, is the reclamation of your own anger. Because when our anger is not claimed by us, it is claimed and controlled by others, other people's narratives, other people's stories, other people's belief systems and values. And it is easily manipulated by other people because we are not in touch with it, because we are scared of it. And I would probably say that the thousands of men that I have worked with and women that I have worked with over the years, when they step into the ring with me, when they step into the arena with me, one of the things that they are the most scared of is facing their own anger. It terrifies them often because of the narratives and the stories that have been told to them about anger or because of the anger that they have seen and experienced at the hands of the people who should have been protecting them, right? We have a history, we have a human legacy of unhealthy anger doing damage in our culture and our societies. And so our anger needs to be tamed, right? Much like learning how to train a lion, a man must be Able to look his own predator, to look at the dangerous part of himself dead in the face and have the strength of wisdom, have the strength of grounding, of peace and equality above all else, to be able to say, you are not going to harm anyone.

This is what all of the sacred warriors have said. This is what all of the sacred embodied warriors have fought for, have stood for, and have aimed at, and have pointed at. All of them have said, anger is not the villain. Anger is a tool that we can use. Even the most spiritual of people found ways to work with and alchemize anger, right? Christ, the Buddha, every single one of them, at some point in their journey, embodied anger and was able to use it in a way. So part of this, part of the reclamation of our anger is to notice what our relationship with the anger is. Are you someone that grew up in an environment where you were told that being angry makes you crazy? Right? A lot of women hear this. As soon as they start to get angry with a man, they're called crazy and it's infuriating to them, right? We have dysregulated and disowned feminine anger within our culture and society. We've told women for generations that their anger doesn't have a place. And so when a man sees anger from his woman in the relationship, he doesn't know what to do. He's terrified of it, right? He seems unruly because he can't treat her anger like he would treat another man's, right? And this is where men struggle to compete with women, especially in modern day workplaces, because there is a challenge. As soon as they're challenged by a woman's anger, it is increasing, incredibly threatening to a man. And a man can very quickly collapse in the face of a woman's anger and devolve into a sort of very aggressive, very, very aggressive form of the warrior, right? And very quickly, like very, very quickly, you will notice. And men, I really want you to hear this part. Notice how quickly you move into the shadow of the warrior when your woman's anger comes up or when a woman's anger in your life shows up. It doesn't have to be your partner. It can be your mom, your sister, it can be a woman that you work with, it can be a woman that's randomly in a Starbucks that you meet. Notice how quickly you move into the sadist within you, the part that justifies cutting itself off from any other emotional connection. There's no empathy, there's no compassion. We very quickly move into that space because we do not know how to receive a woman's anger because we have largely tried to cut it out of our society, and now it is coming out in unhealthy ways. Right? This is part of the cancel culture, is that the feminine energy, the feminine anger has come out, has risen out of the ashes and sort of said, like, enough, we're going to destroy some shit until you start to listen. And so for us as men, part of this is starting to reclaim our own anger, to not be so terrified of it, but also to. To not move into a place of aggression. Right? There's a huge difference between anger and aggression. And the warrior is able to distinguish the two. The warrior is able to understand when and where in very rare moments, that aggression is actually required, Right? And usually that aggression is required in moments of defense, of defending his inner and outer territory. That's when the moments of aggression are acceptable and welcomed. And we can create some distinctions around that. But most of the time, what we're needing is clean anger. Clean anger moves through the heart of a man. Clean anger sets boundaries and is in the form of protection for himself, for the morals, for the values of all those around him. So in order to do this, we must make meet the predator within us. We must meet the dangerous part that is within us. I've talked about this before, and it usually gets a really visceral response from some men. But I'll say it again. Every man has an incredibly dangerous part within him. Every man, I don't care who you are, I don't care the life that you've lived. I unequivocally and fundamentally believe that every single man, unless you are some sort of spiritual anomaly and guru, has a dangerous man within him. And to not know that dangerous part of you is to not know the predator that is active in sabotaging your own life, that is active in collapsing your own boundaries, and that is active in empowering the inner critic and the victim to going to war within your inner and outer territory. So this aspect of us is almost universal. It's a part of the collective unconscious and the collective psyche, as Carl Jung would have said. And this part of us, it is the part of us that is also dangerous to both us and the world, but also imperative for us to learn how to work with. So I'm going to wrap this episode up by giving you some very clear action items for reclaiming the warrior. And I would encourage you because I'm going to give you several of them. I would encourage you to choose one and work on it for a minimum the next seven days, okay? Choose one and work on it for a minimum of the next seven days. So number one to reclaiming the fullness of your warrior is set firm boundaries, not aggressive boundaries, not rigid boundaries. But let your no mean no. And get comfortable with just telling somebody no without an extreme amount of justification, without an extreme amount of apologizing or pathologizing, why you can't do it. Just let your no be a no. Just say no, that's not going to work for me, or no, I'm not going to do that, or no, I can't do that, full stop, period. Secondly, train, sculpt and hone your body as a sacred weapon. Okay? That might be a very interesting concept for people, but I'm going to read you off a quick little quote by Socrates who said, no man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable. So in this way we treat our body both as a weapon and as a temple, right? We see the duality to it. We don't pretend that our body isn't capable of incredible feats, that it isn't capable of harmful actions. We treat it as such, we respect it as such. And in that we create a temple within the body. Secondly, and by the way, how we do this, how we do this training, how we do this sculpting is by engaging in very physical activities. Hiking, rock climbing, martial arts, boxing. We engage in training our body by doing triathlons, by going to the gym, by pushing our edge and our limit physically, by doing breath work, by getting deep into the physical part of our body, maybe through meditation and seeing what our body is capable of. Number three is making.

Decisive decisions, AKA stop shooting all over yourself. So this is about knowing exactly what direction we want to go and allowing ourself to cultivate a deeper sense of healthy and powerful decision making. By making a decision and if it is the wrong one, learning from it rather than shaming ourselves constantly for it. So we have to again comes back to number one, set firm boundaries. Sometimes those boundaries are going to be with you, it's going to be with your inner critic that wants to should all over yourself. So maybe for the next week, if you are that type of person who shames and shoulds yourself for what you should or should not have done and makes yourself wrong for your own decisions, set a goal, set an aim to not should yourself and a boundary, a very Firm, firm boundary to not should yourself for the next seven to 14 days and then catch yourself in the act, tell your friends you're going to do this, commit to it, get into a group of men like, join the alliance. You know, do get into a group of people who are going to hold you accountable to not making, not shaming yourself and not shitting yourself. So make decisive decisions. Next is cultivate a discipline. Now, this one's very closely linked to training and sculpting. But the discipline here is about moving from moving out of the shadow of discipline. Because for most of us, discipline has been a punishment, right? You think about how your parents created discipline in your home. Maybe there was none, right? Or maybe there was a sort of physical discipline that happened, right? So when you were bad, when you did something wrong, you were physically disciplined. And so you've learned over the years, your psyche and mind have learned over the years that when you do something wrong, you discipline yourself verbally, emotionally, mentally, right? So you may be continuing on the legacy of the physical, emotional, verbal abuse that you experienced in your childhood or the neglect or the abandonment. You may be carrying that on and continuing that cycle, cycle and calling it discipline. So discipline is not a punishment, it is a practice. And as a practice, we need to infuse play into it. We need to infuse joy into it, but we also need to infuse conviction and rigor into our discipline. We need to approach it with focus. And this takes time, right? So whatever your discipline is, whether it's morning meditation or cold showers or breath work or yoga or working out or going for a run, infuse that discipline with the practice mentality and infuse it with a little bit of play and a little bit of rigor. And that dichotomy, that duality, will allow you to cultivate a discipline and heal your relationship with it. Because when we have an unhealthy relationship to discipline, we have an unhealthy warrior within us, guaranteed. If you have grown up in an environment where discipline equals punishment, you will surely have the shadow of the warrior. The sadist or the masochist will be very prominent in some part of your life, specifically around your habits, and specifically around connecting and intimacy and communication in partnership. So I'm going to leave that one there. So cultivated discipline next is know your non negotiables, all right? Know your non negotiables. This is great within relationships, this is great within your friendships, within your family, within your business environment. Really start to curate. What are my non negotiables what am I not willing to to entertain or engage with at all? Maybe a non negotiable. Maybe you have non negotiable around alcohol. Maybe you have a non negotiable around dating people that are addicts, right? Just start to curate what your non negotiables are within your life, within your relationships, within your health and within your inner kingdom. Okay? What are your non negotiables that are required for you in order to lead yourself properly? Because again, all of this is coming back to leading ourselves. Next is engage and activate the primal energy or material within you. So what I mean by that is that we all have this primal part of us, right? This primal aspect. Just like in your brain, you have the lizard brain, right? And that lizard brain is connected to a very primal part of you and that's connected to your nervous system. So when we go into fight, flight or freeze, that's the primal part of us trying to keep us safe or trying to fight to keep us in survival mode. So what we want to do is we want to engage this part of us actively, we want to meet that primal part of us. Because for many of us and for many people that are disconnected to the warrior archetype, the primal part of them has been disowned and disavowed and seen as a villain. So they haven't actually started to work with it, but it is oftentimes the part that is causing them to feel completely out of control, right? I hear this all the time in relationships. When a man continues to lose it, right? He loses his temper, right? He doesn't lose his temper. He has disconnected from his own sense of consciousness and the sort of predatory primal energy within him has come out. The sadist has come out a little bit and he has justified his own actions of attacking somebody that he loves. So we need to work with and start to, to start to work with this primal energy and material within us. And we can do this through again, cold water immersion, we can do it through martial arts, through boxing, we can do it through breath work. I use breath work and cold immersion because I meet that part of me and I use boxing as well. I do a lot of boxing, but it helps me meet that part of me that is sort of ferocious, right? That has a really primal fire to it. And that part of me, when curated in a healthy way, can be incredibly powerful for creation, for business, for relationships, for leadership. So starting to curate that part and getting uncomfortable, but actively meeting that primal material or energy within us. I have two more the next one is practice essentialism. So part of the warrior is about decluttering, decomplicating de rolling from these other parts of our life, but practicing what is essential for us. Now, this might mean that you get rid of some of the things in your apartment that no longer serve you. It might mean that you cut back on some of your social connections, because some of them aren't serving you at all. They're actually holding you back. They are hindering you, right? There are people in your life that you have there simply because you are afraid to put yourself in new situations and meet new male or female friends, okay? So start to declutter your environment. Start to declutter your social environment, and start to declutter your mental environment. So this means working on letting go of poor habits of unhealthy thinking processes, of unhealthy beliefs that are certainly holding you back, and practicing essentialism externally and internally. And lastly, this might sound a little bit interesting, but become a disciple of death, or said another way, practice momento mori. Momento mori. And Memento Mori is an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. And Memento Mori actually maybe didn't originate from becoming very prominent in the 15th and 16th century. And it was a very common practice for Catholic monks at that time to meditate constantly and almost daily about their own mortality, about death itself, remembering that death will inevitably come and that our fear of death, because fear is viral, right? Fear is a form of a virus that just inhabits our mind and contorts our soul and contorts our actions and causes us to spiral and turn ourselves into pretzels to avoid things that could potentially go wrong. And most of us have become so addicted to fear itself. Fear of failure, fear of getting it wrong with a partner, fear of not being good enough, that we stunt our own capacities. We stifle our own creativity and passion and purpose. And so in the practice of mori, in the practice of remembering death and remembering that you will die, die, inevitably, we can start to see how to live in a more free way. And for the warrior, this is essential. For the warrior, the facing of death is the charging of his battery. The facing of death is the charging of the warrior's battery. This is the thing that helps him come alive and feel alive. And this is why practices like breath work, like cold immersion, like martial arts, bring us more into contact and in a way, bring us closer to death, because we experience the finite aspects of our body, of our social connections, of our relationships, of our mind and we are able to gaze in awe, in a little bit of wonder, into the unknown, into the abyss that is the darkness of death. And when we do that, we can free ourselves from some of the infinitesimally small bullshit that we deal with on a day to day basis. The reasons why you don't apply for the job or reach out to the girl, the fears and insecurities of not going out and spending time with those friends, or not reaching out to that person that you respect and want to interview. Or not connecting with a friend online or in person and embarking on the journey of taking a really nice long road trip along the west coast or doing things that scare you, like skydiving or bungee jumping or, or climbing mountains or whatever the case may be. So in becoming a disciple of death, becoming a practitioner of maury, of remembering that you will die, we start to look at our own life and we start to look at our fear of death. And when we see that, we see the grandiosity, the sort of bigness, the infinitesimal aspect of death because it is so unknown, and our problems become smaller. Our fear shrinks in the face of death. Our fear of these small moments of fearing the conversation with our father or our mother, or fearing the conversation of asking for a raise with our boss, suddenly those things shrink and pale in comparison to the fear that we sometimes experience when witnessing and pondering our own fate of mortality. So this has been an episode all about reclaiming your warrior. And there's many parts in here. I would encourage you to maybe go back and listen and take some notes if there's certain pieces that stuck out, but to execute and action one of the action items for at least the next seven days. If you found this podcast to be helpful, to be enlightening, then share it with one person. Man it forward, man it forward, and share it with one person. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off. Thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to our conversation next week because I have a special guest coming up. So enjoy your week and reclaim your warrior.