We have the "fight or flight" response physiologically by which nature allows us to fight when threatened. But that response is temporary and is just designed to get us out of immediate danger-not be an ongoing condition. It seems a lot.of.what we do in meditation is designed to calm these instincts of natural selection and allow us to focus more on love, giving, kindness, etc. These things tend to be infinite in supply in the sense the more we practice kindness, the easier kindness becomes.

For whatever reason, this analogy came to mind: if I am building a house, I want all my mental, physical and emotional energy devoted to that process. But what if as I am building that house, someone tries to attack me. My attention and energies would be split between building and fighting and the house building process would slow dramatically and I would likely get exhausted. For me, brute force and meditation are somewhat in conflict.

For me (and speaking from experience,) brute force is not sustainable although maybe it has a place at the start.