Strengthening Your Street Boxing Spirit

A free spirit can command the body and soul. As earlier explained here, in exhausted
moments, your mind and body can still do excellently if your spirit is strong. Defeat is sure once
the opposite becomes true—the spirit being controlled by what the body and mind feels and
wants.

How do you strengthen the spirit? How do you feed it to nourish it?

Western fighters can be very scientific and systematic in street boxing. Yet, many Western boxers feel a
lack of something. And they believe they found the answer in Eastern mysticism, because their
science cannot tell them how to feed the spirit. It cannot give information on something that it
cannot explain.

As earlier mentioned here, spirit is where courage and the other great virtues are deep seated.

A free spirit, therefore, will be able to release these virtues especially in critical times.

One way of strengthening and freeing the spirit is through meditation.

a. Eye meditation - Stand in a quiet place, preferably early in the morning, and focus on
small details—a bird in flight or standing, a walking ant, things in a leaf, bees at work, the grass,
or the slow breaking of dawn. Just watch. Lessen your mental activity. If you can, try your best
not to think of anything. Don’t let your mind wander. Enjoy what is unfolding before you. Do
this for 10 to 15 minutes.

b. Breathing meditation – With open or half-closed eyes, look afar and slowly do deep
breathing. As you inhale through your nose, imagine that you are inhaling all the pure oxygen in
the atmosphere, and imagine it to be going into your nose, your brain, your lungs, and down to
every limb, and finally to your feet, turning them into steel. Hold your breath for a short while,
and then release it slowly, imagining that every carbon dioxide in your body is being taken out.
Repeat the cycle 40 times.

Eastern monks of long ago were said to have very strong spirits due to these prolonged
meditations. One legendary figure, Bodhidharma, was said to have traveled on foot from India to
China through the Himalayas (almost impossible even today), and overcame the difficulty by
meditation—making his spirit strong to overcome the weakness of his body. In China, he was
said to be champion in all fighting challenges he was dared with. This may just be a legend, but
Buddhist monks in Chinese and Japanese monasteries were known for their perseverance,
courage, and stamina in doing athletic feats that made them also invincible in actual battles great lesson when boxing for the street.