Adults get very good at staying inside the rooms where they already know what they’re doing.
But what happens when competence becomes armor?
In this episode of the Orthodox Health Podcast, Dr. Mike & John make the case for keeping at least one place in your life where you are still genuinely a student... where somebody else knows more than you, correction is unavoidable, failure is possible, and you occasionally have to say:
“I don’t know. Show me.”
Using Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as the obvious laboratory, they unpack why losing can reveal the ego, why competence can become part of our identity, & why becoming highly skilled without becoming unteachable may be the harder discipline.
They also dig into the Orthodox distinction between humility and humiliation, false humility, confession, fasting, embodied asceticism, St. John Climacus, St. Isaac the Syrian, St. Anthony the Great, Abba Dorotheos, & why modern life can leave us increasingly optimized... but increasingly uncorrectable.
Because eventually life makes every one of us a beginner again.
The goal isn’t to stay bad at something.
The goal is to remain teachable.
Chapters:
00:00 Coming Up
00:54 Orthodox Health Intro
02:23 Why Adults Hate Being Beginners
11:42 When Competence Becomes Armor
19:12 BJJ, Losing & the Ego
29:46 Humility vs. Humiliation
39:01 What Orthodox Humility Actually Looks Like
48:08 Modern Life Makes Us Uncorrectable
53:28 When Life Makes You a Beginner Again
56:06 Become Competent Without Becoming Unteachable
1:01:51 Remain a Student
Work with Dr. Mike
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Intro & Outro Music: St. John of Chicago Orthodox Church Choir (Arkansas) - Please support their building fund by buying the whole album here
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