Do you know the sanctification of your flesh? Do you know the marriage of muscle and mind in their grace and greatness?

I’ve been training for 12 years.

I love lifting, and I love my body.

If you’ve only seen my YouTube videos, then you might not know my lifestyle beyond being a book nerd, but the truth is that I’ve always felt untrustworthy of fat academics and emaciated spiritualists who miss the message on both sides of the anti-materialist spectrum.

Ask yourself this question: “How deeply does my soul descend into my body?”

Physical vitality isn’t necessarily the most accurate measure of mental and spiritual vitality, but my personal experience is that more health creates more health at every level: your soul, your embodied soul, is a vitalising force which penetrates and permeates your identity in all aspects from flesh to spirit.

I’m not talking about six packs.

You get where I’m going, right?

If you’re feeling triggered, please hold back on your projections - don’t layer your words on top of my words - pause, slow down, and allow the space for my heart-based enthusiasm towards the world of strength and conditioning.

I care about this community, and I want us to be healthier - much healthier, as defined in deeper and broader demonstrations of health.

Bodily confidence and spiritual vitality are an inside job, and I truly believe that we cannot bypass the most obvious and objectifiable measures of mental health and spiritual strength.

If your eyes are open, then you can see.

You can see if somebody is healthy or unhealthy.

Yes, there are inspirational monks who have achieved immeasurable power through the pathway of renunciation. They have lived a life contrary to my words and convictions.

Yes, there are benevolent leaders who carry excessive and unhealthy weight because they’re spending their time leading others in service.

But you’re neither of these archetypal outliers, you’re scrolling YouTube because you’re distracted and it’s my responsibility to call you to a higher standard of self love and physical vitality because you’re not the only one who suffers when your body is fragile, sick or otherwise weak and untrained.

Mental fortitude is a foundational concept in self development, and self actualisation is a stepping stone on the pathway towards self realisation and, ultimately, self transcendence.

There is a spiral of development, and you will not attain the integrated vision if you have yet to fall in love with the earthiness of your humanness in motion.

Your best ideas are seeded in cognitive space.

Your deepest insights reach into the upper realms.

And both of these sentences are extension-based, distance-closing metaphors: your energy is reaching - inwards, outwards, in many directions - and integration looks a lot like energy in action.

Do you realise how much more powerful you will be if you establish your higher aspects in a body made beautiful through the everyday dance of discipline and recovery?

Don’t settle for fake-love.

Don’t neglect your temple.

This is the unconscious, anti-materialist agenda: it’s the idea that physical is lesser than mental - that physical identity matters much less than mental identity - which makes the mind a faultless scribe for ungrounded opinions of its own physicality despite the absence of any significant, or sustained, feeling of beauty in the flesh or heart.

I don’t believe the claims of the anti-materialists - it’s easy to see their empty words evaporate at the embodied level of self integration; and the misguided stories of fake, mental love are scattered against the clarity of the innermost light which knows the truth of the body and knows you were meant for more.

Bedtime bandages for fragile egos, little lies for the chronically dissociated and the collectively delusional: our sickened flesh suffers, our souls linger above our temples, and there is no sanctification in sight.

Is this what love feels like?

Jordan