7 Of Bruce Lee’s Mental Exercises
Bruce Lee’s mental exercises were something he practiced every day to maintain his skills in philosophy and martial arts. He was best known from the screen, but he was much more than that. He was actually a teacher of the art of living.
Bruce Lee is considered the martial arts’ foremost representative in the Western world. Before him, not many people knew about these practices, which involved the mind to a greater extent than the body. It was Bruce Lee who made them popular all over the world.
Bruce Lee’s mental exercises were routines that allowed him to strengthen his body, his soul and his general life. He took a notebook with him everywhere he went where he wrote down his thoughts and the information he wanted to remember. This notebook showed the world Bruce Lee’s mental exercises.
One of the most important mental exercises he performed every day was to strengthen his willpower. He believed that the will was the force that decided everything else in life. To exercise his willpower, he set daily goals.
Bruce Lee knew the powerful effect that emotions have on behavior. He knew that positive emotions strengthened the soul, while the negative ones weakened it. That is the reason why he always worked with his emotions.
His goal was to transform the negative emotions into something that had a positive effect on his surroundings. At the same time, he continued to promote positive emotions more and more because that was where, according to him, personal strength lies.
Bruce Lee performed mental exercises to develop his ability to reason and draw logical conclusions. He always tried to filter his thoughts so that he could make good decisions.
Imagination is what allows us to design and create mental scenarios. We often use it in the wrong way as we only feed our fears or dream of our personal goals. When you do this, you do not use your imagination to its greatest potential.
For Bruce Lee, imagination was a fundamental component of any action plan. The reasoning and logic give us a purpose and a goal that we should follow. The imagination makes us see all the ways we can achieve what we want.
Bruce Lee tried to focus on the power of the will, the emotions, the logic and all the personal resources to achieve the goals he had set.
Memory is a tool that allows us to remember what we are fighting for. It also reminds us of the paths that lead to achieving a goal, and the emotions and thoughts that one must take into account for this to happen.
For Bruce Lee, there was a bigger goal in life, the main goal that precedes everything else. This main goal comes from the deepest part of ourselves: the subconscious.
Bruce Lee’s mental exercises were therefore based on navigating the subconscious in order to succeed in discerning the intuitive image that contains our main purpose in life. By thinking about that mental picture every day, you will be able to gather all your personal resources and use them to your advantage.
The subconscious also played a major role in Bruce Lee’s mental exercises. He believed that consciousness had a deep relationship with the ethics of action. In his notes, he wrote that one of his desires was to “combine justice with grace in my judgments” in order to distinguish right from wrong.
When he had made clear what was good and what was not, he promised himself that he would do the right thing regardless of the will consequences that this entailed.
