Your 2022 Guide to CULTIVATING THE FIRE IN YOUR STOMACH!!!!!
Use daily practices to cultivate an unbreakable and unwavering spirit!
I’m sure if you follow me and read the things that I talk about you will come to realize that there is something I talk about very often.
Igniting the fire that resides in your stomach, I often say that 1000 suns burn in my stomach.
What is meant by this? This directly refers to a person’s spirit. Their will. The ambition and drive that they carry with them on a day to day, moment to moment basis.
If you look at our society, a lot of people do not have this type of spirit. An unbreakable and unwavering spirit that gets them through any and all things. This does not have to be the case though. Anyone can CULTIVATE this type of mindset and this type of mentality. Do you think I was born like this? No. I had to CULTIVATE it through experience, practice and perspective.
Just as a Farmer must cultivate the land in order to build it up, the human, the warrior must cultivate their spirit in order to build it up.
How do we go about this? This is a multi faceted question with many different answers. It is obvious that you should be getting daily movement in, eating real food, seeing sunlight everyday, etc. Those all go towards building a spirit because your spirit can not flourish if your body is not well taken care of.
For the sake of this post I am going to choose to put the nutrition and exercise aspect of it on the backburner.
What we are going to focus on:
Gratitude (The backbone of my entire life)
Resiliency
DISCIPLINE (It makes a man. Discipline. I can’t say this enough)
Gratitude
My entire life is built off of gratitude, seriously. Gratefulness for each passing moment, for each experience, even for every single trial/tribulation and failure. The good & the bad. The beautiful & the ugly. Grateful for it all. It brought me to where I am currently. Are you starting to get it anon? Everything that happens to us happens for a reason.
You want to set your belly ablaze? The quickest way to get to it is through gratitude.
The process to cultivate an attitude of gratitude is easy to start. But it is important to note that implementing this does not matter if you do not embody it in your mind and your actions.
Start simply. WRITE DOWN THREE THINGS YOU ARE GRATEFUL FOR EVERY MORNING. Write down real things. Don’t be superficial with this. What are you REALLY grateful for today? Right now?
That’s just a start. A lot of building gratitude in your life is perspective. Are you reading this right now? That’s something to be grateful for. You are ALIVE. Each moment you are simply ALIVE is a reason to be grateful. When you wake up each morning and take your first breath, you should be filled with gratitude that you made it to another day and have the opportunity to work towards what you want to work towards. Even if the odds are stacked against you (they’ve been against me for a long time.), who cares? At least you are alive to have the odds. Be grateful for the challenge of surpassing those odds.
This ties in with my faith as well. I am immensely grateful to my Creator for every moment that I am here on this planet. Change your perspective anon. Bad things happen to you? No. Blessings happen to you. They brought you here now.
RESILIENCY
When you create a fire out in nature the elements can diminish the fire. Rain might put the fire out, a strong wind might reduce it to embers and coals. Such is true for your spirit. You are going to be dealt challenges and problems in life. Your partner might leave you, you might suffer an injury, lose someone important to you, the list could go on forever.
Resiliency is all about handling these challenges. Weathering the storm. One of my favorite songs ever is “Can You Stand The Rain” by New Edition (Go listen to it right now). Are you tough enough to stand the rains of life? Because at times, it is going to be a monsoon and if you aren’t prepared you WILL drown.
How tough are you? How much can you handle before you break? Are you even breakable?
Cultivating resiliency in your life is fairly simple too honestly. Personally I CULTIVATE IT BY DOING SOMETHING THAT SUCKS EVERY SINGLE DAY. This is part of the reason why I push cold exposure so heavily. BEING COLD SUCKS. That is why it is important we must do it.
I walk outside in the cold every day in shorts and no shirt for 30 mins - 1 hour. This is partly for the health benefits of cold exposure but 90% of it is to build resiliency of the mind and body, thus cultivating it in my spirit. When it isn’t cold outside I take a cold shower every day. This is just one way I build my mental toughness up.
We do the things that suck, the things that we don’t want to do because we have to. In the grand scheme of things a cold shower is easy. But it prepares you for when you have actual challenges in your life that you need to surmount. If you can do something that sucks every day you surely can do what you need to do in your business, etc.
When the chips are stacked against you, you must be able to fall back on your mental toughness to see you through the finish line.
DISCIPLINE
Part of building gratitude in your life and building resiliency is by being a disciplined individual. You have heard this before. Discipline is everything to success in any area. You want to be big? You have to be disciplined enough to show up and train and then eat properly and also sleep properly to recover. You want to build a business? You have to show up and work on that business. You want to write a book? You have to sit down and write every single day.
The same is true for our daily practices. I show up for my cold exposure every day no matter what. The same is true for my meditation practice. Every day. No matter what. Even if it has to be shortened, it still happens.
Why?
To build discipline. A warrior must be disciplined. We are all warriors in some capacity, so long as you live a lifestyle befitting of one.
A warrior must show up to train each day, even when they don’t want to. A warrior builds their spirit through discipline. They show up each day.
The discipline that you build by showing up for your practices daily is what builds your spirit. This is because things like this work in a compounding fashion. You might make the decision to walk every single day. You set out on this journey of walking every day and you are successful in doing so. Then one day you decide that you are also going to journal every day. You start to do that and are successful with that as well. Then you add in breathwork. Then meditation. Then reading daily. It’s a snowball effect and the momentum catches on quickly.
You see what I’m saying anon? Making CHOICES that improve our lives requires DISCIPLINE to actually make the CHOICE to do it. EVERY SINGLE DAY! EVERY SINGLE DAY! EVEN IF YOU DONT WANT TO! YOU STILL SHOW UP! EVERY SINGLE DAY!
That’s DISCIPLINE! That’s the separating factor between a bum and a warrior.
You and I are both humans (me less so, I’m seriously built different. Refer to below image, made by @bowtiedgreasemo. When cars hit me they dent), so it is inevitable that your discipline will falter at times. But do not let it falter for too long. You messed up today? So what. Don’t mess up tomorrow. God willing, you will be given another opportunity.
Finding what you are passionate about is also important too. It is much easier to be fired up when you live for a purpose. For me that purpose is martial arts and fighting, but it’s deeper than that. That isn’t the only thing that lights my stomach on fire moment to moment. What really does it? Helping people.
I am a cultivator by nature. I cultivate things in myself and in others. This is what I have been called to do.
When you live your life in service to others you start to see things a little differently. Interacting with you all and providing motivation and inspiration to you all daily has really reminded me of this.
I don’t just walk around all day hyped up running thru walls and what not for no reason. I do it because I have a reason to. It helps people. It uplifts people. Which in turn uplifts me.
It’s like alchemy. Turning something lesser into something higher. I aim each day to do this with everyone I interact with and everything I interact with. That is what sets my belly on fire. That is what fuels the THOUSAND SUNS that burn in my stomach! When you improve the parts, naturally it improves the whole.
Thank you for reading this today, we all know that 2022 is going to be a wild ride. Put yourself in a better position to achieve your dreams by dedicating yourself each day. Set your heart, set your stomach and set your life ablaze each day in pursuit of your dreams. You won’t regret it.
I will leave you with a poem that I wrote a while back:
The mountain does not tremble and shake when the Billy Goat climbs its surface. Neither too shall you, For the challenges are your Goat and you are sturdy enough already to withstand it.
GOD BLESS YOU and GO AFTER IT in 2022.
Fighter