12-4-23. Morning thoughts

Hi, Steven Barnes here. I'm just doing my morning thing. Let me turn on the lights here. I'm still experimenting with different ways to do this properly, so I can serve you better. But we've got 26 days left. This year. I've got 26 days left in the love fest, which is focusing on taking care of ourselves so that we can take care of others. Most of the problems that people get come from serving others before you take care of yourself, and that ends up embittering people, and it's. It's sad to see. So where you want to start with is five times a day. This is my. My morning. My morning cup. You're doing 60 seconds of deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing, right? If you do that, the rest of the things that I'm talking about makes sense. If you don't do that, frankly, they may not make sense, because the chances that you're going to get caught up in your stress are huge. And when you're in that stress spiral, it's difficult to care about others. It's difficult to have any hope. A lot of things become really, really hard. I'm streaming this from Zoom so I can get that. I can have my virtual background, which is kind of fun. Streaming this from Zoom so I can get that. So I'm gonna say hi there. I had a. You know, just a lot of stuff happens. Life goes on. And yesterday I. As I often do, I was sort of, you know, tooling around Google, and I looked up somebody that I used to know, a friend, a former friend, someone who betrayed my friendship. I don't want to be more specific than that, but it was a complicated and painful situation. And this person passed away a year and a half ago. And I don't know of what. I don't know how they died, but my feelings were interesting to me because there was a lot of pain and there was betrayal. But this friend who betrayed my friendship, I found that what I remembered was the friendship more than the betrayal. I found myself automatically thinking about the things that we shared or the things that I learned from them, the good times. And I suppose that's possible because I feel totally safe within myself. I know I'm going to take care of myself. So I don't need to be afraid of this person. I don't need to be afraid of what they did. It doesn't mean anything to me. It doesn't define me. And I can focus on what was good, and I can feel regretful that there are ways in which their life was wasted. Sad, tragic in some ways because this was a person of who had talent. You know, I won't go specifically into what arena this person's talent was because I have no interest in identifying characteristics. But I guess what I wanted to think about was that I was happy about my automatic thought pattern, that I automatically went to the positive side of this. Because when we look back on our lives, we inevitably have a choice of whether we remember the good times or the bad times. And the choices we made of what we remember, what we bring up influence the way we feel today, the way we feel every day. It's. When I think about it, I think about what, what might have been, about the mistakes that they made, the small mistakes that I tried to help them with and they could not accept help. And really it's not my place to help them. This is an adult human being. But I still wanted to, I still wanted to be of whatever benefit I could be. And it does hurt a little. There is regret, there's no sense of guilt, no real sense of loss to myself personally. But do wish that this person had been able to, well, frankly grow up in some critical ways, take responsibility in some critical ways. They couldn't do it and that is unfortunate. It's an imbalance of that child, adult self. So let me convey to you my sort of morning ritual for engaging my child in adulthood. Before I wake up in the morning, before I get out of bed, before I even sit up to meditate, I will feel my heartbeat in my chest. It's the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I look for my heartbeat. And then I visualize my child self safe within my heart. And sometimes I bring in a mentor, someone who keeps who I think would keep my child very safe. Dawn Callan, my very, very dear and martial arts mentor, very sweet lady. And she sits with my child just fine. But then I go from my heart down to my gut down to my belly brain. And this is important. Most people, if they go for their heart, the next thing they're going to think about is their head. No, no, no, leave the head for last. Dawn would like to wake up the belly brain in the heart and the head. Sri Chinmoy, my spiritual teacher would say heart and then body and then head. So that's, I like that better. So my body, my belly brain is represented by my adult self. That's survival, that's taking care of basic things. That's money for instance, it's protecting the home for instance. So I go from my child self who's in my heart to my adult self. I see. Is my adult self fully engaged? Am I taking care of everything I need to take care of to handle the adult world? If I do that, I have my heart, I have my belly brain. I go back up to my heart and I say it's good for me to open it to the world I am now capable of sharing with the world without putting myself in a risky position. From that position, I could hear about an old friend who betrayed me and think about the friendship and cherish the friendship more than that sense of this person tried to hurt me and tried to hurt people I care about. I don't need to hold on to it. The fact is I won and they lost and I wish it hadn't been that way. The only thing I know is that I could not afford for this person to win. Heart and then body and then more heart open. And from that position, feeling totally safe, I can open up my mind and think about how can I find abundance and how can I serve the world? So from love, survival, expanded love, abundance and sharing with the world. I like that. I mean, it's kind of fun that I have the Eightfold path up there on the Virtual today, the book that I did with Charles Johnson on Buddhism's Eightfold path to enlightenment, that on one level is just about how can we be in the world with integrity and love and growth in a way that can slowly peel away our ego cocoon in a balanced way so that we can perceive the world without filters. I think one step is being able to handle your own fear and pain so that you know that you're safe, so that you can look at people and when they behave badly, you know that they're coming from a sense of fear and lack. It's nothing personal. They don't know you doesn't really exist. You don't really exist in their world. You're just a projection in their mind. Still hurts though. So I've got to take care of myself. But I wanted to share these thoughts with you as you walk your path. You take care. Bye bye. Oh, and if you'd like to come on Saturdays, which is the big weekly fire dance meeting, Sign up at www.stephenbarnslist.com. bye bye.