© SinoAmerican Books 2010. All rights reserved.
What is Toughness?
Mental/emotional toughness means the ability to resist distortions of thought caused by failures, conflicts, tragedies, and even good fortune.
Behavioral toughness means the ability both to control one’s actions and to break through limitations to behavior, such as shyness and fear.
Physical toughness means possessing the fitness that among other things helps us withstand the stresses of everyday life, resist illness, and enjoy the huge variety of leisure pursuits modern life has to offer.
How Does One Become Tough?
Your first step to becoming tough is to go for a long walk and count every single fall of your right or left foot.
There is of course more to becoming tough than that simple exercise—but not much more. The basic pattern of the exercise, a mental activity performed in synchrony with a physical activity, is common to many body-calming, mind-toughening, and even enlightening techniques.
The true profession of man is to find his way to himself. [Herman Hesse]
Who is Tough?
We have all seen people who possess a natural toughness that we commonly call “iron will;” and we may have met people who live tough lives through spiritual inspiration or who have been toughened through the exercise of authority or the experience of adversity. The less common, though perhaps more frequently wholesome, route is through exercising the mind into obedience. I believe that whatever kind of toughness we seek, it is best achieved in the same way as any skill, through practice and study, that is, through training.
...there is no interference with the user’s personal beliefs that he or she does not wish to change, since the proposed set of exercises is a methodology, not a mystical, religious, or philosophical system of any kind.
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