Spartan Christianity

Most people are carried around by their emotions. They are pulled by them as if the emotion is a horse that has not been broken. If you have seen footage of a herd of wild horses, you know they run free and relish that freedom. When men capture them and try to domesticate them there is a process where the animal is completely resistant to being controlled. It concentrates all of its power into ridding itself of the rider who would subjugate it.

But given enough time, the horse will surrender and learn to obey the commands of the rider. You can learn to do the same thing with your emotions. Even though your emotions currently run free and wild, you can learn to put bits in their mouths and turn them where you want. You can be the one in charge of your emotions rather than having your emotions be in charge of you.

Working to control your emotions is painful at first. It contains the risk of being thrown from the horse and injured.

Many riders cannot hold onto horses and are thrown off. They break arms or legs and sometimes sustain more serious injuries. There is a basic, inherent risk in attempting to break a horse. It is the simple risk of pain. Since we are humans are trained from an early age to avoid anything painful, we continue this trend by avoiding the pain of personal change. Rather than gritting our teeth, accepting that attempting to change ourselves will be painful, we instead sit content in our own mediocrity.

Instead of turning our focus inward, pursuing personal excellence, we say that where we are is “good enough”, though there is no such thing. One of our many responsibilities as men is to shoulder difficulty for some greater good. And I argue to you that outside of God the greatest good is the improvement of the self. Because without the improvement of the self, you cannot take care of your family, lead others or accomplish all the other tasks that society imposes upon you. While some people focus on their families and on everything but themselves, you must learn to focus on and improve yourself. By doing this you will bring much greater value to others than those who focus exclusively on others without ever bothering to improve themselves.

The man who focuses only on his family is limited in how well he can truly serve them. Your ability to serve others is limited by your skill level. Take some time and invest in yourself and alter you will be of greater value to others.

Improve yourself by taking a firm grasp on your emotions. You cannot be moved by external events. This is the state of mind you should be training to achieve. The man who is unmoved by external circumstances is like a mountain or the stony cliffs facing the ocean. People build homes and castles on mountains or even on the edges of these stony cliffs because they trust their strength. You need to be the type of man who is the stone, who is the unmovable rock face on the ocean’s edge. With that degree of self-control, you provide a sense of peace and security to everyone around you. They all begin to relax and feel calm because you, because of the man who is the leader, the man who is in complete control of his emotions and cannot be moved by circumstance.

Most men choose not to control their emotions. They are pulled around by them because it is easier to do so. As hard as life is when you are pulled by emotion, that period of time where you work to break the horse of emotion is even more difficult than that. But on the other side is absolute freedom. You have the power of the horse combined with the power of self-control. This makes you the free, independent man who has the strength to stand on his own.

With that newfound power, you can concentrate it into any facet of life that you want.

You have harnessed the horsepower of emotion, now all you have to do is decide what to do with that limitless energy. Will you continue to work on yourself or perhaps concentrate more on that career? Whatever you decide to do, you can do it with newfound energy and focus. You are no longer losing energy through the leak of emotion.

As a man in perfect control of yourself, your energy system is flawless and perfectly sustainable. You cannot be moved by external events and on top of that, you have massive personal power. The benefits that come from being able to control your emotions cannot be understated.

Also understand I do not mean that you should not feel emotions. I am not trying to rob you of your humanity. Again, you must learn not to divorce emotions completely, but rather to use them as fuel.

Embrace the pain of change.

All change is difficult because we are reconstructing who we are all the way down to our brain cells. When changing who we are, we literally change at the cellular level. We adjust the way our hormone and emergency systems respond to events. By being in control of our emotions we limit the time we spend being stressed or in fight-or-flight mode. That not only saves buckets of personal energy but is inherently masculine to the core. The ability to resist emotion, control it or be unmoved by external circumstance is a demonstration of strength. 

Be disgusted by others who have no emotional self-control.

One of the ways to continue to be motivated on the path to any change is to be disgusted by others around you who show no regard for emotional control. You can apply this to any type of change you want. Before anyone misunderstands, I am not saying that you look down on others or hate them for their actions, but rather that you simply be disgusted by the action itself. Love the weak but hate weakness.

You can apply this to diet and training by being disgusted at what the majority of people in the world decide to do with their bodies. Rather than training them and taking care of them, they live sedentary lives and pack on enough fat to last them a year-long famine.

Learn to be disgusted by people who show a complete lack of emotional control. Recognize it is total weakness and effeminacy and promise yourself that you will never be like those weak men. This is critical: you need to have a goal to aim at combined with something you want to avoid if you want maximum motivation for change. Most people do not spend enough time developing the appropriate anger and disgust at particular actions, so they simply wallow in their lifestyle. Many men live in obesity, pornography addiction, and mediocrity because they do not have the proper amount of hatred for those things. Not that simply having hatred is a cure-all for conditions, but it is a very important piece of the recipe.

Hold on tight and be persistent during your change.

You may be thrown from the horse. That is okay, remount and work again. Breaking a horse is about breaking its will and making it willing to obey a master. You also have to break your need for comfort, and your desire to be mindlessly pulled by emotions and external circumstances. Take ownership of your emotions then dominate them.

No more are you content to live a life where you are not in complete control of everything. You are unwilling to live a life dominated by emotion. Understand though, that this change will take a great deal of time as any change does. It starts with awareness of emotionalism and finishes with the complete subjugation of emotion.

Maintain gains – the consolidation.

Whenever we learn something new, there is a period of time where we are consolidating the memory and organizing it so it can be retrieved later. There will be a moment when you break the resistance of your emotions and everything seems easier to control. It is critical that at this moment you do not let go of the control you have over your emotions. You have to consolidate that victory and cement it so that it becomes permanent.

Do not be the man who finally loses all that weight and then falls right back into his old habits of overeating and laziness. You have to maintain your gains; this is of critical importance. Everything in life has to be maintained simply to mitigate the effects of the law of entropy.

Feed and water the horse. Keep up with your victory over yourself and maintain the virtue of self-control.