DailyJim: Fighting through to love

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Monday, August 5th, 2024. I missed last Thursday. This is becoming a habit, probably because I like dancing on Thursday nights and I forget before, and then afterwards I definitely forget. Today I wanted to talk about this concept that I just came up with, talking with a friend, to fight through to love or fighting through to love um and it's come to me recently because what i so i've been working on emotional self-defense for many years uh wow almost 10 years probably nine years and for quite a long stretch recently i've wondered if i should stop working on it or stop teaching it because it was about responding to just like one punch you know if somebody punches me me, what happens, you know, emotionally punches me, rejects me, accuses me, blames me, ignores me, compliments me, things like this. And I found that I got really good at that. And it was causing almost more conflict in my life because I was interacting with people who weren't necessarily good at it. And I would say one thing and they would feel so offended that the conversation would just end. Or they would attack me, like attack me with some sort of hate or whatnot, like, oh, you're such an idiot. Or frankly, you're such an asshole, or you don't care about anyone but yourself, or you think you're better than everyone, or you're the most egotistical person I've ever met or da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And then often run away. So either block me or just disappear and go quiet. So it tended to be a lot of the push or like punch and then run. or run away.

But what I've been noticing lately is that in interacting with people, if I frame it less as emotional self-defense and more like emotional combat, where it's kind of this idea that conflict is pervasive and quite pervasive and quite consistent, then. How, then maybe it's not just about self-defense and getting punched once. Maybe it's about how long can I stay in the fight? So if you've ever taken a physical self-defense class or martial art, they'll often tell you that most fights, especially in the real world, don't last very long. They last 10 seconds, maybe, maybe 30 seconds. I think they say 30 seconds is a really long time for a fight. Typically it's one or two, three punches, and that's the end of the fight. fight. And yet when we think about emotional fights, they can go on much longer if we have the capacity to continue fighting and to fight, almost fight cleanly. Maybe that's a better way to put it, teaching people how to fight in a clean manner. So if you look at boxing, a lot of times when people box, there are rules on how to box or even with martial arts, there are rules on how to engage with each other. But even in street fights and some of these things, there's still kind of a hidden code, I think, of what you should and should not do to each other. Obviously, there are laws about what people are allowed and allowed to do. Frankly, mostly not allowed to have street physical fights. So there are ways to fight in a clean way. There are ways to fight in a more productive way that I would say would lead to this concept of coming back to love. So now getting in in a fight with somebody and if I start calling them names or I start ignoring them, that can make, that could escalate the conflict and maybe they throw punches back at me. They say, screw you, you don't care about me and they start making all these accusations and the conflict can escalate in a way because maybe I'm punching with hate and they're punching with hate and then maybe I punch with indifference because I start ignoring them and then they punch back with hate and they get louder and then I punch with more indifference, I give them even more of a silent treatment.

But what I'm thinking about lately is that a lot of us just don't have a lot of endurance to stay in these fights. And that when we don't have the endurance to stay in the fight, when one punch knocks us out, or somebody taps us and then we throw a haymaker and knock them out, that it's very hard for us to get through the fight and get to the love on the other side. Because what i've seen often especially lately is that i mean life is conflict man i want something and somebody wants something else or i'm split internally about one of three or four things that i want and sometimes when we just ignore the conflict it can grow and it manifests it stays there and then we grow the division but if we have the courage to actually go through it and the skills to go through the fight, to take one, two, three, 10 punches and still stay in the fight, and not give up. Almost like the old movie that depends on your generation, but Rocky Balboa, he got knocked down. And I remember, I think it was Mick or something was in the corner. He's like, get up, Rock, get up. That was a very horrible impression, but you can watch it on YouTube. And this idea that.

Staying in the fight, taking punches, staying in the fight, and not trying to defeat the other side, but just trying to stay in the fight together so that together we get through the mess, we get through the conflict, and we come out of it loving each other. Or at least I come out of it loving the other side. But ideally, we come out of it loving each other and recognize that we're both in this together and we're fighting together. And I just think a lot of us don't have training in this. We haven't seen it a lot, perhaps. And the example I often talk about, as I look at the time, speaking of conflicts, don't want to go over 10 minutes again. The example I often talk about is in families and how in the household we often maybe see our caretakers fight, maybe our parents, guardians, whatever. We see them fight. We see them start the fight. Maybe we see them shout at one another, or we see one person shout and the other person go quiet, or maybe we see them exchange side eyes and huff and puff and have kind of passive aggression towards each other, some sarcasm. But then we don't tend to see the full fight now maybe it doesn't continue maybe it doesn't fight through to the love doesn't fight through to the resolution but i think often maybe it does it just happens behind closed doors often in the bedroom and so i think as children we often don't see too many examples of these fights carrying through to resolution we just see kind of the initial inklings on them.

And maybe often in society we tell people, ah, stop fighting, stop fighting, stop fighting, without realizing that we have to go through the fight, we have to go through the mess, we have to go through the tension and the conflict to get through it.

Otherwise, we may not get through it and we may just be stuck. It's like if you're in, okay, I'm going to come up with a horrible example, a metaphor that doesn't really work, but something like if one is in the mud, then you have to go through the mud. You can't just stay in the mud because if you stay in the mud, you're stuck. Or maybe a quicksand's better. No, it's quicksand. You have to keep moving. If you keep moving, then you're fine. But if you stop, you sink. Oh, man. Anyways, you get the point. The point being that we have to move through these things. And if we just stay there, it actually can cause more problems. But a lot of us don't have the courage or, again, the skills to move through, to fight through it, to get to the love on the other side. So that's what I'm thinking about today and just being grateful that, one, I've practiced a lot of these skills. And two, just excited to talk to more people about it this way. Because, man, how much of life is basically just because we're afraid to get into a fight, an emotional fight, and we're afraid we're going to hurt the other side. We're afraid we're going to get hurt without realizing that sometimes we can go through it. Yeah, maybe we'll get hurt a little bit, but we could build some really beautiful things if we have the strength to get through it. So, yeah, if you're curious to learn more about this, please reach out to me on the Gym and Friends Forum, and I would love to talk to you more about that. Gym and Friends Forum is simple, friends.gymcliver.com. If you can't spell my name, just look it up in the title of the podcast. But yeah, talk to you all soon.