The Joyful Warrior Blog
Life’s challenges often have us ping-ponging between seeking happiness and strength. This blog is here to help you balance the two and help you laugh while you do. (All coming from someone who had PTSD, told jokes for a living, and will definitely never have typoos).
Check out some mindfulness tools, and resilience tips, get hot takes on life and #adulting from a comedian, or snuggle in and read a story from one of my many adventures.
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photo: Michelle Mishina
Joyful Resilience in Action
Whether it’s a hardcore survival adventure or sharing primitive solutions in modern life, my YouTube channel is your VIP pass to the Joyful Warrior life and behind the scenes of my own adventures (and mis adventures, if we’re being honest!)
After Grit Comes Grace
Life is full of challenges and sometimes we harden ourselves in response. So how can you balance grit and grace? Overcoming, and accepting?
As I close my time on the Kumano Kodo trail (finally with shoes on after two days barefoot) I think about the values our culture places on grit while attempting to balance goodness and joy.
Adventure Tax
I'm not above eating questionable street food in a third-world country. I love it, and when you're stuck at an airport all day it's better than overpriced foreign imitations of Pita Pit and KFC. I never understood people who go to foreign countries only to eat and drink the staples of America. It all begins with an idea.
A Pace of Mind
For as long as I can remember I’ve hated running. It hurts. It’s dumb. I’m slow, and a lifetime of competitive martial arts makes me associate it with dropping weight for tournaments, hangry and anxious. When I was growing up, I had the annual opportunity to watch the fittest humans on the planet pushing beyond limits of capability in oh-so-glorious glistening sweat, 8-pack abs, and legs as chiseled as Mt. Rushmore when I volunteered to hand out water and vaseline at the official Ironman competition in Kailua Kona, Hawaii.
A Crack in the Stillness
I know better than to mistake the dormancy of the volcano and the quiet solitude of this place with inaction. I know nature well enough to know there is always something happening beneath the surface. I grew up practicing tsunami and earthquake drills, watching coconut trees get toppled by hurricanes, and people getting lost at sea because of invisible currents. I have known for as long as I remember that silence and inaction do not equate to stagnancy.
Panic Attack In Paradise
Unless you’ve experienced true anxiety first hand, it really doesn’t make much sense, and it’s difficult to understand how one person can behave so dramatically in a seemingly normal situation. That’s why in January of 2015, I was glad there was no one else in the parking lot. It wouldn’t have made any sense to them how I somehow damaged the 2010 Camry my Aunty let me use while I stayed in Grandma's basement.