Having de-noised the mind and grown our presence, we arrive at the third, most practical part of the Same Method: Creating vigor, the felt sense of energy and aliveness.
Vigor is about feeling full of energy, both mentally and physically. Energy that you need for the final step of the method, before we get into action.
Secondly, and according to modern research, the body and mind are much more intertwined than we initially thought.1 Hence, creating vigor is a key component to bolstering a healthy mind, a strong sense of Self, sensitivity, physical and mental resilience.
Elements of vigor and physical awareness
Vigor is the product of a trained physicality that encompasses posture, openness, resilience, strength, physical awareness and liveliness. Let’s go over them one by one.
1. Posture
The body’s posture affects our mood and felt sense of power, and shapes how others perceive us.2 An open, neutral posture, that’s not “contractive”, is therefore an immediate way to influence both your mind, and your stance in the world.
2. Physical Openness
When the body, its muscles and tendons are tight, we more easily become tight in the mind as well. To maintain a certain degree of flexibility and openness allows one to think clearly, and release stress more easily. That’s why we aim to create a strong body that is also open, flexible, active, and relaxed.
3. Physical & Mental Resilience
Most good things in life require sacrifice. Stepping out of your comfort zone, learning a new skill, starting a business, putting yourself out there, getting rejected; such things are all highly uncomfortable experiences… yet they’re also the very situations from which we grow the most. Hence, by training the body’s resilience through uncomfortable, physical hardship, the mind’s resilience follows.3
This is the beautiful thing about the pursuit of physical excellence: We can all learn to get comfortable in the uncomfortable, which liberates us to pursue our life’s work and grow our existential courage, no matter how intimidating it gets.
4. Physical Awareness
Each body works in a different way, has different needs, and reacts differently to varying situations. Hence, by cultivating physical awareness by getting to know your own body, you can more easily learn how to carry yourself with energy and lightness.
How do you walk? How is your weight distributed over your feet? What does your body need when it’s tired? When it’s restless? Or how it processes emotions?
5. Liveliness
The purpose of your body is to be alive, to engage in the act of living, to radiate energy and spirit. Therefore, engaging in frequent exercise that gets you to break a sweat – gets you blood-pumping – gets you out of breath and trembling on your legs – is one of the most amazing bodily sensations: it is a sensation of being truly energetic and fully alive.
Balance, Lightness & Strength
Our idea of a healthy and capable body is captured beautifully in the metaphor of the archer wanting to hit his mark: to do so, he needs strength to draw his bow and arrow. But the precise and deadly force of the archer can only manifest by releasing the tension and the arrow with it, making the archer a force to be reckoned with.
To be clear, we don’t intend to train people into becoming archers, but rather, we aim to help people become capable of hitting their marks – metaphorically – for which a body that is capable of power, balance, and letting go, is one of the greatest assets to have.
Lightness In The Feet
At Qué Será Retreats, we train vigor through various exercises based on our training as mime / performance artists, in which physicality and physical awareness are central themes.
Exercises include Chi-Kung, stick balancing, movement, retro-walking, endurance training, stretching, posture, standing and walking exercises. These all contribute to how we move through life, how we connect with ourselves and how we relate to the world around us.
A practical example, derived from Chi-Kung, is to walk without sound: In general, when we are stressed, we tend to walk more heavily. We stamp our feet more into the ground as to assert a sense of control. However, this physicality enforces stress in both the body and the mind.
Therefore, the matter of how to deal with stress becomes less of a theoretical one, and more practical: By walking with more lightness in the feet (literally, by trying to make as little noise when walking as possible), we can reverse-engineer a body that returns to a state of relaxed activeness.
Thus, walking lightly influences our state of mind which, in turn, also returns to a state that is more light, open, strong, and relaxed.
Continuing to #4: Honouring the Self
Understanding the necessity of vigor as a quality for life, we can continue to the final pillar of the Same Method, namely, the pursuit of Honouring the Self.
Footnotes
- Wilson & Foglia (2013): Embodied cognition — review of evidence that bodily states shape mental processing ↩︎
- Elkjær et al. (2022): Expansive and contractive postures — meta-analytic evidence that posture affects mood and felt power ↩︎
- Qiu et al. (2025): Physical activity and psychological resilience: a systematic review and meta-analysis ↩︎
