Before I was a martial arts instructor, before I built any kind of brand, I was a barefoot kid with dreadlocks standing at the bottom of a mountain in Scotts Valley, California, asking a group of Korean Christian women if I could use their monastery to pray and fast for three days.
They didn't want to let me in. They figured I was just another homeless hippie passing through. My friend Angel convinced them we were serious. They took me to a Kmart, bought me new clothes and a sleeping bag, and showed me to a two-room cabin with no bed. And I fasted.
The first day is hunger — real, aggressive, all-consuming. Your body screams for fuel. Your mind fixates on food. Every smell gets amplified, every thought circles back to eating. I used that discomfort to drive me toward prayer instead of away from it.
The second day is closer to war. The hunger is still there, but now it's competing with something else — a clarity that starts pressing through the noise. You're too tired to perform, too hungry to pretend, and the masks start slipping because you don't have the energy left to hold them up.
Somewhere between the end of the second day and the start of the third, something shifts. The hunger doesn't fade gradually — it just leaves, and in its place comes a kind of awareness that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't lived through it. Colors sharpen. Sounds clarify. My craving for cigarettes — I smoked at the time — disappeared completely, like fog lifting off a windshield.
Years later, during a season of recovery, I was swimming laps at a facility in San Juan Capistrano and had committed to praying for an hour every day while I swam. About three minutes into one of those sessions, something interrupted me — not a voice exactly, more a realization that arrived already fully formed: you are doing all the talking. You are not listening.
I stopped. Sat with that. And decided to just listen instead. What arrived wasn't something I'd memorized or read off a page — it was Psalm 1, showing up whole. I'd walked through every kind of counsel by that point — addiction, rage, self-destruction — and that psalm wasn't comfort. It was a mirror, and a map.
Meditation is listening. Prayer is talking. That distinction became an operating principle I still carry. Most of us pray by talking at whatever we believe is listening — making requests, performing spirituality, reaching for the right words. What that mountain and that pool both taught me is that the real power sits in the silence after the words run out, when you stop telling God what you need and start paying attention to what you already have.
Every breath practice and reset I've built since traces back to that mountain in Scotts Valley and a cabin with no bed. Power doesn't come from what you take in. It comes from what you're willing to put down.
If a structured reset is something you want to try for yourself, the Warrior Reset Fire Edition ($47) walks through a version of that same discipline in a format anyone can start today.
