Mindset of Overcoming: Character, Body, and Freedom

“Yes, the burden is very heavy and breathing is hard. Do not lower your hands, do not bend the knee. You will set a new fate in place of the old one.”

As we change outwardly, we change our way of thinking! ⚕

In psychology, philosophy, and bodily practice, overcoming is not a single act of effort but a long-term orientation that shapes a person's character, body, and life path.

Thought, habit, character, fate.
Exercise, training, season, life.

Overcoming as a process of character formation

Blood and sweat — to training as to a beloved job. No thought of, “I'm tired, maybe that's enough?!”
Years pass, and for others you have become an example, because it matters so much to give people faith.
Look at yourself: who you were and who you became!
Grass will not cover over our road to the gym.
A life made of inspiration, motivation, results.
Will and reason. Train. And simply believe in yourself. Everything will come — just not at once!

As with character and one's attitude toward life, so with the body: years, decades may be needed before change becomes visible. And the only way not to give up is to fall in love with the process itself. To love difficulty. To form an overcoming mindset. To accept a certain belief or motor program that, in moments of despair and decline, can guide you almost automatically.

The body as a trace of psychological orientation

Strength is the ability to overcome external resistance through muscular effort.
Overcoming: what became my leitmotif — as necessary as it is unavoidable.

“Freud realized what great writers and dramatists had always known: the study of character is connected with the study of the forces that motivate human actions. How a person acts, feels, and thinks is determined to a considerable degree by the specific nature of character.” (E. Fromm, Personality and Character)

A person's fate is their character, and character is formed in activity and reflected in the whole outward appearance of a person.
Freud recognized the dynamic nature of character traits, as well as the idea that the structure of character expresses a particular way in which energy is channeled through the processes of life.

There are different ways of channeling energy: sitting in a bar, alcohol, sex, rebellion, rallies.
Over time, however, a way of channeling becomes fixed as a behavioral pattern, much as a motor skill is formed. And this way of channeling energy — this psychological orientation, this intention — is reflected in the structure of the body.

Kretschmer argued that body type was connected with character type and even with mental illness.
Thus, in that typology, pyknic body types were associated with manic-depressive illness, while asthenic and athletic types were associated with schizophrenia.

“The character of an individual, manifested in a typical pattern of behavior, is reflected at the somatic level in the structure and movement of the body. The totality of muscular tensions may be regarded as a Gestalt, as a whole, as a way of movement and action that is the body's ‘expression’ of the organism. Bodily expression is the somatic manifestation of typical emotional expression which, on the psychological level, represents character.” (A. Lowen, The Physical Dynamics of Character Structure, p. 20)

Shadow, freedom, and the cost of avoidance

The problem❗

I remember a dialogue ten years ago, in that Finnish town:

“Who are you?” I asked roughly. “What are you doing here? And why do you call yourself my shadow? I don't like you.”

“Forgive me,” the shadow answered, “that this is what I am; and if you do not like me — well! I praise you and your good taste.

I am a Wanderer who has long followed at your heels; always on the road, but without a goal and even without a homeland; so that, in truth, I lack only a little of being the eternal Jew, except that I am not eternal and I am not a Jew.

What? Must I always be on the road? Carried away and driven by every wind?

But you I followed and pursued longest of all, and even when I hid from you, I was still your faithful shadow: wherever you sat, I sat too. Together with you I reached for everything forbidden, the worst and the farthest; and if anything in me can be called a virtue, it is that I feared no prohibition...

I chased the most dangerous desires — truly, once I walked through every crime!

‘There is no truth, everything is permitted’ — that is how I persuaded myself. Into the coldest waters I plunged with heart and head.”

Thus spoke the Shadow. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 506)

And what now❓

Dostoevsky is often paraphrased as saying: “If God is dead, everything is permitted.”
Freud said: “Our God is Logos.”
Logos tells us that there are limits, but those limits are self-created. We erect them on the basis of experience and knowledge.

Freedom as a limitation of degrees of freedom

“We possess an enormous legacy in the work of the great Russian physiologist Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein, where it is brilliantly shown that human material action — living movement — is possible only in the presence of excessive degrees of freedom. On vast experimental material Bernstein showed that the uniqueness of each such action is the result of overcoming objectively existing excessive degrees of freedom.”

Let us look at the stages through which a motor skill is formed:

1. Processing information
2. Taking dominant motivation into account
3. Using memory traces
4. Forming a motor program
5. Implementing the motor program

At the first stage, excitation covers large areas of the cortex and activates a large number of muscle fibers.
⬆ number of degrees of freedom in movement — this means ⬇ control and impaired coordination.
The program is unstable and variable.

Stage 2: excitation becomes concentrated; muscle fibers and neural centers not involved in the motor act are switched off.
⬇ biological cost of the work
⬇ psycho-emotional background

Stage 3: stabilization and automation of the motor program; additional stimuli are no longer noticed.
⬇ activity of cortical regions
⬇ number of consciously monitored elements
⬆ awareness of motor sensation
Consciousness is freed from secondary details and concentrates on the result.

It is similar in life. In Vyborg, at the first stage, when excitation seizes you, the number of degrees of freedom increases. The range of actions you might take is enormous — and that is wonderful — but you are thrown from side to side, losing coordination and stability...
The road becomes blurred...

And now they tell you: “Come on, this is freedom — buy condoms and lube, then we'll stage a performance in fashionable fancy masks.”
After all, God is dead — everything is permitted!
“We'll introduce half-tones into their black-and-white movie.”

And rationalizations and psychological constructs will help justify the action by saying that life is an experiment.

Yes — except it does not work that way.

The stage is different now. St Petersburg State University...
The provincial crust is slowly being erased from memory.
“There is a bird and a seal on the doors. A secret sign. Looking at the sun, I clenched my fist until it cracked.”

Freedom is the awareness and limitation of degrees of freedom.

“Yes, if you have a forehead, there will be bumps.” But banging the same place again and again will eventually grow horns that will keep you from passing through the narrow gate.

If there is a path, then you must give up walking other roads. Not because you are unable to take them, but because you respect the path you chose.

But what about the Shadow? Yes, it is needed; more than that, precisely these trials and difficulties, evil and vice, make us stronger if we overcome them.

Overcoming as an alternative to avoidance

Every day we have a choice: Avoid or overcome❓
Life throws trials at us, driving us with the whips of time: how much time do we have left to live❓

“And hiding our tears, we boldly challenged it, taking two jobs while holding two children in our arms.
We loved, made plans, washing medicine down, giving our fears only to invisible winds.
And we knew for certain: the sun would enter the forgotten kingdom where trouble forged a giant out of a human being!”

We can repress problems and wall ourselves off from them, but they will still come in dreams. You cannot run away from them even to Bali.

And only struggle:

“The struggle of the forces of life, directed toward the preservation and continuation of life, against destructive and negative impulses. The more a person is aware of the latter, the more capable they are of struggling with them. Not only Will and reason participate in this struggle; the whole emotional sphere becomes involved. Thus, in a personality inclined toward sadism, struggle against sadism can develop a genuine feeling of kindness that becomes an inseparable part of character and frees the person from the need to act as their own Watchdog, constantly holding themselves under control through sheer will.

Thus, as a result of productive struggle between good and evil — evil itself becomes a source of virtue!

From the standpoint of humanistic ethics, the real ethical problem is not between suppressing evil and indulging it: both are merely two aspects of the same dependence. The real ethical alternative is not between those two, but between suppression and indulgence on one side and productivity on the other. The goal of humanistic ethics is not to suppress vice in the human being, but to productively use the principal capacities inherent in a person. Creating conditions for the development of productivity — first among them, recognizing that the unfolding of capacities and the growth of every personality is the goal of all social activity.

The human being is only an end and in no case a means for anyone or anything. This productive orientation is the basis of freedom, dignity, and happiness.”

Of course it begins from within and first determines a person's relation to themselves.

The appearance and strengthening of struggle — of an overcoming mindset — can be formed through training activity.
That is what we are going to investigate in the master's thesis🔎.
And by talking with those who train regularly.📢

Overcoming is not suppressing the Shadow and not running from it. It is the capacity to include difficulty in growth and limitation in freedom.
This is how character is formed — character that appears in the body, in actions, and in fate.

The mindset of overcoming is a choice: to live not by avoiding, but by becoming.