Making room for a better practice

The Dormition of the mother of God is an important feast day in the liturgical year, offering a profound theological example of the second coming and the bodily resurrection of all believers wherein the righteous ones will go to Paradise to be in a glorified state with God, forever.

“It is truly meet to bless you, O Theotokos, ever-blessed and most pure, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the Cherubim, and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim, without defilement you gave birth to God the Word. True Theotokos we magnify you!”

This post is not about such high theology or my love for the blessed virgin, though. This post is about the sweet science and the outcome of this two week fasting period.

My grandma introduced me to MMA when I was about twelve and since then I have loved all things fighting consuming books, podcasts, and even that terrible Channing Tatum movie. I spent an entire summer with her where we watched a woman’s kickboxing tournament.

She loves kickboxing.

My grandma instilled a love of martial arts in me at a young age; it brought us together in true Southern fashion of watching people beat the crap out of each other. My grandma would yell at the television some obscenity in between her coffee that she kept microwaving because she forgot to drink it while it was warm. I would spend my summers at the farm learning MMA moves and fighter’s stats.

One summer there was a pack of dogs that came to the farm, and I named them each after my favorite fighters. My grandma hated them. She hated a lot of things. She was an angry woman back then, might still be… But she loved watching fights, and she loved me.

I started boxing in 2018 after a stint in New York where I was dealing with the loss of a friend and reuniting with an old comedy buddy who had stopped pursuing stand-up and was busy getting sober and working out. I went with him almost every day because I had never worked out before, and I felt better than I had ever felt in my life. I credit him with helping me at least see what sobriety had to offer; he was also the first person, maybe the only person, who ever told me I was an alcoholic.

Takes one to know one.

I got back home from New York and began boxing, every day I was at the gym: weightlifting, running miles, and then boxing or kickboxing (all fueled by a triple shot of espresso and exactly nothing else). I was getting really good at it, too. It was during this period where my body dysmorphia was more secret than my drinking problem, but both were becoming a real issue. It did not matter, though, I was boxing for the first time in my life, and I loved it.

It was a great time regardless of how I was showing up at the gym. This is also a testament to my own functioning alcoholism where I was able to get up at six in the morning every day to go box despite feeling like I had been hit by a freight train.

I tried absorbing as much about boxing as I could in those early days of eating, sleeping, and reading all things fighting and through this research I was led to the Russian Orthodox Church for the first time, Russian boxing is supremely hardcore and while this was not the turning point for me and Christianity it opened the door to the beauty and mystery of this most holy tradition.

There might not be a simpler (or better) life than boxing and God.

When I moved to New York, officially, I tried finding a boxing gym, but the one thing movies get really wrong is that no matter how the gym looks it is always expensive to become a member. So, I stopped boxing for a while, but nonetheless I was converted forever into a lover of boxing; I would hang out in Queens by the MMA and boxing gyms, I’d go to DUMBO and walk through Gleason’s gym or just stand outside and wonder what it was like to train there.

Stand-up mattered less and less.

I just wanted to box. But it was cheaper to just be stubborn and drink away my paychecks at this open mic or that show while all I wanted to do was hit something really, really hard.

I started this fast by walking away from relationships that serve only to amplify my anger and resentment. Letting them go while I try and focus on myself and, of course, the blessed Theotokos, and through her—Christ. What has emerged from my fasting period is this drive to pick up my gloves in a real way, again. I have been gravitating toward muay Thai videos and watching clips from the movie “Warrior,” hands down one of the best movies about MMA and guaranteed to make me cry.

And just like that I’m hooked again. Without bravado, without ego, without a desperate need to run away from what I no longer feel the need to hide, it is still there: boxing. Sometimes we think by letting things go they’re gone forever and so it is easy to cling tightly to things we love without realizing that we are suffocating them and by smothering them we cannot see them clearly. So, it’s this feeling of fresh air that I can reengage with this love boxing that revealed through abstaining from meat, dairy, and toxic relationships.

It’s easy to say fasting is a pillar of the Christian life, but it is quite another to see its fruit be born from experience. A reorganization of the spirit.

I couldn’t tell if I wanted to write a love letter to combat sports or to my grandma, but they’re both entangled in my mind as having the same impact and presence. It is not like I am trying to connect with my grandma by throwing jabs, hooks, or even teeps. But I think it has more to do with her influence that has made fighting the only sport that I really want to sink my teeth into, the only sport that matters because of how much she would get into the bouts we watched together. I mean, football is cool and all, but nothing is better than watching your grandma cheer on a huge takedown to ground and pound in the octagon.

Seriously, what’s better than that?

My relationship with fighting has always been one of escapism, fighting through resentment toward comedy, fighting through disordered eating, fighting while sweating vodka and a bad home life on the mat… Even earlier this year I started boxing every day, again, because I was in a bad place mentally. Fighting was my way of channeling all my frustrations and problems into a seemingly healthy outlet but doing nothing about processing them. But now, I consider fighting my way of walking the Royal Road if the Holy Cross.  

I can appreciate that what I was doing before was the correct orientation of body but incorrect position of mind, they were not linking up and instead of one informing the other they both were being pulled apart in a dichotomy of spirit. There was no sacrifice for one model of being for the other; it was a life lived in indulgence, trying to have the cake and eat it, too. It reinforced a dissociative state instead of helping to cultivate discipline.  I could not find my body with my mind because it was blasted to oblivion by drinking and poor sleep and cigarettes and no food while it was clearly a refusal to be within the body because of trauma.

It wasn’t boxing out of love, it was fighting out of hatred for the body because the body is the reason that I am in such a mess, emotionally, from getting used and shit in my earlier days.  It’s payback because there’s no one else to blame for my problems; they’re my fault therefore I have to punish myself through physical exertion (destruction). It was boxing from the standpoint that I had to prove to myself that all the times I was hurt or abused in the past  were isolated incidents, that a particular memory or trauma just was… an outlier—and to prove that I must show the world that I can do whatever I want with my body; I am in control and fighting is a good way to establish control and dominance.

I couldn’t get my way in the past so I’m going to get my way now.

None of this is Truth. None of these modalities carry the cross. It’s all a refusal to be alive. It’s trading one addiction for another.

The Royal Way, however, has no time for pointless self-destructive indulgences because the road of the Holy Cross means that all of those passions and directionless addictions are channeled toward an aim, and that is to the glory of God. Transformation is possible as long as we carry what kills us—this is the point of the cross, the reason Moses lifted the serpent up in the wilderness that those who were afflicted by the flying serpents would be healed, just as the Son of Man was lifted up, “that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:15).

I cannot change the fact that I have an addictive personality, one that longs for intensity and, yes, suffering.

What I can change, though, is how these personality traits are oriented in my life. I mean, like I’ve been saying the acholic on my shoulder isn’t a demon, it’s me, so how can I best carry this bastard that will do me some good?

Enter the Royal Way of the Holy Cross: this means carrying that which kills us instead of allowing it to do so, finding joy in what wants us dead—confronting the mystery of the cross is to face death, squarely, and carry it. We can run from it as much as we would like, we can run for a long time, but all roads lead to the same destination.

Boxing is the physical embodiment of my spiritual struggle between the void and the Kingdom. There is no respite from this war because I can never escape who I am or what’s happened to me, so instead of giving into the cyclical patterns of suffering I use my anger, my intensity, and my trauma to suffer the hardship of training—there is suffering that leads to death and suffering that leads to fullness of life. The wisdom to know the difference between the two is one thing, but choosing to live with the latter is quite another.  

I do not have the luxury of living any differently, my head is too messed up, too excessive, wanting to… wanting to destroy me at every turn—it receives no quarter. My addictive, intense, angry qualities have made my life a struggle without the need of external devils whispering in my ear pushing me to fall, but these qualities are also exactly the type to help channel my focus into a razor-sharp lens where I am dialed in, disciplined, and diligent.

I have an ex-girlfriend who called it my ‘crazy brain’ and maybe it is crazy, but it’s a crazy that is being used for the highest good, summum bonum.  

Sobriety is figuring out just how much ‘you’ are the problem in your own life, accepting that we don’t go away magically by putting down the bottle, and then finding ways to work with our problems, transforming them and seeing them as blessings.

The Royal Way of the Holy Cross, applied to fighting, is shedding the self-flagellating aspects of the sport, the self-mortification for punishment’s sake that only reinforces suffering and has little to do with getting proficient at the artform.

The Royal Way is an easy yoke and light burden,

“If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:4-6).

I love fighting, my grandma loves fighting. It is our favorite sport; all things fighting, MMA, boxing, kickboxing, muay Thai, BJJ, and on and on. It’s all our favorite. And to love something is to approach it with love, to practice something it must be done with love or else it will boast, it will grow arrogant and rude; it will become irritable, and it will keep record of all wrongs.

Every single bad cross, or slow hook, every sloppy southpaw lead kick just makes things unenjoyable if we’re giving ourselves a hard time for not getting it perfectly.

How the hell do you improve with that kind of mentality?

The Holy Cross in relation to fighting becomes carrying what it is and not what it could be; martial arts are hard enough on their own and when their used inappropriately they become a dangerous tool to use against yourself, not to mention others. We’re pushing to become better which, within the world of fighting, grows in relation with our humility.

This fast has not only allowed for the re-emergence of my love for combat sports, real love—appreciation and admiration—but more so revitalized a want to learn everything with a beginner’s mind. I can throw a nasty right hook, sure, but where is my control?

How can I improve my speed?

How can I increase my endurance?

Power is fine, but not if you can only last four out of twelve rounds with a heavy bag. 

Most importantly, where is my body?

Am I in it?

Do I feel it? What do I feel?

How’s my focus? Am I looking with my eyes or am I looking at memories playing on loop in my head?

Breathe… Remember to breathe.

The Theotokos has been with me for the past two weeks in more ways than one and by her walking with me and her Son’s guidance a lot has been revealed, a lot has come to me by the grace of God as a result of intentionally letting go of ways of walking that do me a disservice rather than help me see reality for what it is and walk in love.

I don’t want to use martial arts as an escape. I do not want to get better at martial arts because I need to prove something to someone who hurt me, or hide something about myself, or because my body deserves to be flagellated for existing at all.

The Royal Way is an intense model of living, carrying what kills us instead of allowing it to lead us astray toward the wide gate that is destruction, but to find the narrow path is to let go of the push and pull that taints the things that we love. Even prayer can be corrupted if we do it out of self-appeasing egotistical reasons.

The re-emergence of my love for boxing comes at the expense of why I’ve thrown myself into it for the past five years which was from an addiction standpoint and now I want to throw myself into it to really do it… It’s strange to say because I feel both mentalities look similar on the surface—intense, disciplined training, but the difference is in the approach and how we approach things is how we arrive at them.

I do not want to allow my love for the sweet science to be poisoned by my addictive, self-seeking intensity because to be the best is to die to the self and let love change us.

Sure, there is a part of me that will always want to compete in some way with boxing, that is not unhealthy, though I’m not sure where or how to begin with that, but that’s not the reason I want to get better…

I want to get better at boxing because I love it. I want to get better at boxing because my grandma loves it. I want to get better at boxing because I want to marry the mind and body, develop focus, humility, and discipline. I want to get better at boxing because I want to get better at breathing. I want to get better at boxing because I want fighting to become an extension of my prayer life.

I want to get better at boxing because with time, dedication, and patience I can get really good at something I love for love’s sake…

Seriously, what’s better than that?

Si comprehendis, non est Deus   

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