"What is not faced within is still carried as a deep personal pathology."
(James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul)
I often talk about how the kind of physical effort that pushes you to your limits, with all of its psychological benefits, can also be used as a sort of escapism. How you can use the rush that it gives you to escape the internal troubles you should be addressing.
And I admit that I often used it for that purpose.
But for David Gogging, doing ultra-endurance races to the point of breaking his body is not a way to escape his demons. For him, it is a way to put himself in a position where he has no other choice but to face them.
And it would be easy for some hyper-intellectual who believes the foolish idea that physical effort is a superficial thing to dismiss this and say that David Goggins is not being honest, that he is just another person escaping their problems through unnecessary physical effort.
But I am here to try to prove that, whether you are interested in pushing your body to its limits or not, there is something to be learned from this man.
I’ve been reading a book on Jungian psychology since last week, and I am still reading it, so my memory of some core Jungian ideas couldn’t be fresher than it is. And listening to a recent David Goggins appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was like listening to a Jungian psychologist who uses running as his introspection tool. And a Jungian psychologist who likes to swear, a lot.
In one of his letters, Carl Jung observed that "the work of the soul" consists of three parts: "insight, endurance, and action." And, according to him, psychology can assist only in the provision of insight. After that comes, as James Hollis put it, "the moral courage to do what one must and the strength to bear the consequences."
What I’ve noticed with Goggins is that, instead of books and therapy, he used physical suffering to gain insight and arrived at many of the same conclusions that Jungian psychology provides.
That’s why I would like to try to take some of the Jungian ideas that are often covered in abstract language and bring them closer to you by using this ultra-running savage as an example.
(In the rest of the text, when quoting David Goggins, I won’t be omitting the swear words because I want to keep it authentic and not change his phrasing.)
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