Answering Questions

Greetings, Steve Barnes here with the Sunday edition of Life Writing Live. As you'll notice, I'm still working out how to make arrangements properly and how to set things up. So bear with me over the next couple days and hopefully we're going to get some more consistency in here. As always, if you find this particular session to be useful to you, be sure to share it. That's how we know which sessions are useful and which ones are not. As always, this is brought to you by Life Writing and I'd like you to take a look at the new course that we have, the Warrior's journey course, at www.realwarriorsjourney.com. so listen, let's take a look. Basically what I did today was I asked people if they had specific questions and if you had specific questions and you got those questions in to me before noon. I'm going to keep trying to do these between noon and so we can get together more regularly and we can have these conversations which are very valuable to me. I think that so many of us are kind of shut in right now and it's useful for us to be able to see each other. So it's like, hi there. So let's kind of get into this and see how much good we can do today within a relatively compressed time frame. So I can get on to the rest of my day, you can get to the rest of your day. But we've had this opportunity to visit together again. My name is Stephen Barnes, New York Times best selling writer, black belt martial artist, and most importantly, husband and father. The importance of these three things, the balance between these things cannot be overestimated. There's no way I can rank them in terms of importance, except that there is urgency, for instance, to being a dad. My kids need something. I have to be there for them right then. I have to drop everything and take care of that because some things simply have to be taken care of right then. But all three of these arenas are of equal importance to my heart. They just require different amounts of attention, different amounts of energy, different amounts of sacrifice or dedication. But it's like the lady said, parenting isn't difficult. It's just daily. The same thing is true with these things. None of these things, the writing, the martial arts, the being a husband and father are that difficult once you have made a commitment. This is just who I am. This is just what I'm going to do every day. This is just it. I've made my decisions. I'm cutting off all other options. So let's Take a look at how we can discuss anything that connects to one of these three arenas and everything. I can make anything connect to one of those three arenas. So it's going to be relatively easy for us to do that. So let's take a look. We had some questions today. So where am I today? I'm at home here in Southern California, self secluded in the home with my wife and my son. My son is probably still asleep. He's staying up until 2 o' clock in the morning, 3 o' clock in the morning, gaming with his friends. And that's the way he deals with his stress. And that's fine by me. I let him sleep tomorrow. Starting tomorrow, he's going to have to start doing schoolwork. We've been keeping him doing homework every day during the week so that he stays a little bit on his schedule so that we don't have. It's not too much disruption for him. This is an old picture of him. This is so old. My God, he was so little and cute back then. What happened to him? He's like 6 foot 3 now. It's just like oh my God. And wants to wrestle with dad, you know. So it's like, why do you keep in shape, Steve? Why do you work so hard at staying in shape, Steve? Because my son ambushes me every chance he gets, that's why. So there's that. And then with Tananarive, I make sure that I check in with her every morning. Every night we have our rituals during the day, you know, in the morning it's mostly just, you know, hugging and giving, having gratitude for having a chance to be together and that we're safe. And frankly, there's a tremendous amount of gratitude that we managed to find each other in life because we had a very narrow window of opportunity within which to find each other. And life was kind in that sense. So I never miss an opportunity to tell her how much I love her and how important she is to me, how important this family thing that we're creating is to me. And that's one of the things that I allow myself to free associate here just a little bit. If the magic formula says that gratitude is one of the most important things, if you have a zero in gratitude, the whole thing falls apart. Your life just falls apart. So if you have a hard time thinking of what you have to feel grateful for, ask yourself what you'd miss if something went catastrophically wrong. Are there people that you love? Your health, your finances, having a roof over your head. If those things were taken away. Would you miss them if they would be missed? If you lost them, then it makes sense to give gratitude for them now. There's always that gratitude thing. So that's kind of where I am right now. There are more specific questions that I can answer. Just turned in a story for a company that does short audio productions. Got paid a dollar a word for that. That was kind of fun. I am still working with the Dawn Callan Warrior's Journey course and developing the structure around that and caring for those students. I do that every day. I am jiggling my workout routine a little bit. There's some things that I would like to accomplish there. I just need to make sure that my body can recover from it. Recovery is as important or more important than pushing myself. When I was younger, the most important thing was pushing myself. Now the most important thing is being sure that I can recover from having pushed myself. So it's still that yin yang symbol, but I have to be more conscious. It. I can't be presumptuous about it. I can't take it for granted. My health is arguably my most precious possession next to my family. And so it behooves me to take good care of that. So let's see. That's where I am today. If you need any more specificity, let me know right there. And by the way, hello, Julius and hello Doucet, Little John, Tony Armstrong and Judy Comeau and Valdina rush and Mike McLean and Jerry Jackson and Christopher Wallace and John Throw. Just, you know, and hey, Joel Eisenberg, always good checking in with a good dude. He says, well, it's always good being here for the good people. I really enjoy this. You're my tribe. You're the people who think the way I do about enough things that we can have these conversations. So if you're enjoying this, send me some hearts and love. Kind of say hi there, like this, some thumbs up or something like this, just so that I kind of know that you're there. And let's move on to the next question. So somebody asked me what would I do if I was starting over from scratch in the martial arts and I wanted to get fit, you know, I wanted to, you know, martial arts for health and self defense. First of all, I would separate those two things out, that martial arts are not about health, they're about survival. So even though they have some health benefits, their fitness benefits, they're balancing your energies in different ways and psychological fits and so forth. Primarily, martial arts are about avoiding damage. And sometimes that involves conveying Damage to a target sometimes. So you are generating force and conveying it to a target. And the process of doing that is not necessarily healthy. There's lots of damage that you take in the process of learning it, the transferring rotary momentum to linear momentum. In other words, your body doesn't move in straight lines. The human body doesn't want to move in straight lines. It wants to move in arcs and circles. So what you have to do is you have to to generate force and spin a straight line off a circle. Doing that, it's always imperfect. Engineering wise, it's always imperfect. So there's always some damage to the joints. Now, over time, if you're very young, your body will heal from this, but if you do too much of it, you're going to need that hip replacement, you're going to need that knee replacement, you're going to. And so forth and so on. So if you focus on the performance aspect of things, you could have some problems. But Scott Sonnen, who I highly recommend@rmax.com did something he called the three dimensional performance pyramid. And I wanted to talk to you about that very briefly, because if you want to take care of your health, you have to understand the difference between health and fitness. So let's take a look at the three dimensional performance pyramid. So here you have a pyramid and the most important thing is health. I would say that you could actually have a level down here that's even more important, which would be sanity. Okay, but there's health and then there's fitness, and then you have skill and then you have competition, for instance, and then maybe use. So in terms of the martial arts, let's say that you'd want to start with your emotional health and you go from there to your physical health. Now, what I would suggest for your physical health is not martial arts. I would even suggest martial arts for fitness. Although martial arts has fitness and health benefits, it is not specific to those things. So what I would suggest here, if you have any questions at all, especially if I was just starting over again, I would say yoga, absolutely, hatha yoga. It is better for production of health, for the production of health and in some ways fitness, but certainly health, than any other discipline that's available broadly to the general public. But once you've got that health and fitness, fitness is a tricky thing. It is the specific adaptation to induce demand. The said principle s a I D. Specific adaptation to induce demand. Fitness is specific to your lifestyle and specific to the things that you want to accomplish. So the question is, who do you need to be in order to do the things you want to do, to fulfill your goals, your dreams, your outcomes in life, it's going to be different for everybody. It's going to be different at different times in your life. So what are. You know, I can tell you one thing that I would look into. If you've got the yoga, one thing I would look into very much is kettlebells. They are. They give you the biggest bang for the buck in terms of energy and time in and results out than anything I've ever seen. You can use them to develop every aspect of fitness. Strength, speed, flexibility, balance, coordination, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance. They're amazing. So if you were to start with yoga for health and meditation, and yoga also can help you provide that sanity thing to help you deal with the psychological stress, the emotional stress. Because ultimately what you're really about is having a life filled with joy. We can go back to what the Dalai Lama said about what's the meaning of life. Meaning of life is to seek joy. So in order to be joyful, you want to feel safe. In order to feel safe, you have to know how to deal with danger, self defense. In order to do that, perhaps you want to study a martial art. In order to do that, you need fitness. In order to have that, you need health. And that rests on sanity, emotional health. The danger that people have is they forget what they were trying to do up here. Now, you'll notice if you have emotional health, you might be able to skip these steps and go straight directly to joy. I mean, you can be joyful, you can be happy at any time. You can literally just learn how to focus yourself to be happy. And if you do that, then you're starting with the thing that most people end wanting. But it's also, you remember that you want health. Why do I want health? So I can be happy. Why do I want fitness? So I can be happy. Why am I studying martial arts? So I can be happy? Why am I learning to defend myself so I can be happy? Why do I want safety? So that all the danger and the fear is gone and I can simply live in joy. When you line it up like that, it becomes very easy to motivate yourself to do the things that you need to do to have the life that you want. Becomes easier for you to. Okay, so that's what I would do if I were starting out. I would do yoga and martial arts and I would supplement with kettlebells. Because the truth is that kettlebells can be intense enough that you can do them for 10 minutes a day, 10 minutes every other day, and get fantastic results if you're doing it right. Martial arts requires more time than that because you're building coordination and you're training your muscles and stuff like that. So there's a lot more stuff going on there. Yoga. I think you can get very, very good results from yoga in a half hour a day. And I would strongly suggest that people find a practice that they can get into and sink into. And don't just do it at a school someplace, bring it home. What you do at home is more important than what you're going to do in a school. See, let's see. Very. Far doesn't seem okay. Somebody asked the morning ritual. Do you have to do the same thing every day? No, not at all. I do my morning ritual using tai chi every day. But I could walk one day, I could do yoga one day. You could play around with it. The, the physical part of the morning ritual is to engage you with your body, which you must do. Otherwise, it's just concepts that float around in your head. That is a huge mistake that people make. They're not anchoring their dreams, their hopes, to the physical reality of existence. So therefore, it's easy for them to get lost in hallucination. If you're walking a mile, the mild doesn't care what you think about yourself. The mile doesn't care what your illusions about yourself are. The mile doesn't care about anything except it's just there. You either walk it or you don't. And if you're walking, if you're moving, one of the things that's beautiful is that when you're doing the morning ritual, you're going through the magic formula. The you have your map, you're taking action, you're feeling gratitude, you have clear intention, and you have confidence, courage that you can do this, that you can and should do this thing. If you've got all five of those things, you're in great shape. You're actually on the road, you're actually moving forward, even if it's just one little step every day. And to a huge degree, joy in life comes out of feeling like we're making forward progress. So as long as we're making forward progress, we feel good about ourselves. Okay? So if you are doing something physical at the same time that you're focusing your attention at the same time that you're chanting affirmations, then the voices, the radio voices in our head that will come up to try to distract us and try to dissuade us from making this forward progress, will try to tell us that what we're doing is nonsense. They say this is crap. Why are you doing this? This looks silly. What will people think? Those voices in your head? Always the voice is in your head. If they're saying, this doesn't work, and one of your goals was to exercise every day, and you're exercising while you do it, then you are doing something physically while the voices in your head are telling you that you're not doing it. You then become intimately aware that the voices in your head lie to you, the voices in your head lie to you, and you open the door to one of the most important realizations that you can have. You are not the voices in your head. You are the one living, listening to the voices. And by inquiring into, well, then, who am I? Then what is true? By making these inquiries, you are on the path of knowledge, that path being, who am I? What is true? If anything, you can connect to those questions, who am I? What is true becomes part of your spiritual journey because spirituality in that sense is the removal of all illusion. What remains is spirit. When all illusion, all lies, have been removed, you can make that inquiry with any action. And the morning ritual then becomes not just a matter of movement, affirmation, mental focus, but it is also a spiritual discipline in terms of helping you to differentiate between who you really are and the illusions that you have about who you are. Okay, that's important distinctions. So if you. If I do tai chi today, and I did, you know, some martial arts thing, you know, or I did some yoga or I went for a walk or I hiked on a trail, you know, it's still engagement physically and just fine. No problem whatsoever. All right, I'm going to leave the three gates until the last thing. And then the question about. About weight. In martial arts, if you want to lose weight, the primary thing that you have to do is to get your caloric output above your caloric input. That's the thing. No matter what people say, no matter what you try to do, if it's a matter of speeding up your thyroid, it's a matter of reducing calories. It's a matter of burning more calories one way or the other. You have to get your output above your input. The process of doing that can be difficult because there are emotional problems, There are social issues. I mean, I love eating what my wife makes for me. It's a way of sharing love. It can be difficult to say, honey, I'm not eating today, when she's cooked a meal. So you notice this little, I don't know if you see that. Can you see that on the screen? See where it says fast? That's actually, I'm actually doing that. I'm actually wearing that to remind myself and to not have to constantly remind her. I'm fasting today, hun. It's just as long as I wear this, I can't eat. Let me move that up. Yes, fast. So today is a fasting day. I can't eat today. If I eat anything, I mean even a peanut, I have to take this off. So there's a little bit of emotional and I'm competing with myself. I don't have to constantly be talking about it, it's a reminder. But one way or the other, you have to do that. Now this is the problem with the martial arts. The martial arts are not primarily about burning calories, although you burn calories on the way to learning martial arts. Martial arts fitness can be important there, but primarily it's a matter of coordination on a physical level and it's a matter of mental attitudes, focus, strategy, tactics, environmental awareness, courage, fear management, etc. Etc. Etc. So the better you are at martial arts, the less energy it takes to implement a particular strategy, to perform a particular technique. This is why the old masters can still do these things because they're not putting out much force anymore. So if the better you get, the less energy it takes. That explains all the big bellied martial arts masters who can beat the hell out of their young strong marathoner students. So martial arts are not ideal for losing weight, unless that's the only way you can motivate yourself to exercise. But if you could get yourself to separate the body composition question from the skill question. So you're going to do martial arts because you want the skills, you want to feel safe, it looks like fun, it's cultural awareness, it's community, you're getting together with your friends, whatever it is, that's all really good. You can actually use this to motivate yourself to do this. Why am I losing weight? Why am I going to undergo this discipline? Why am I going to fast every other day, for instance, which is what I aim at. Although there are many other forms of intermittent fasting, there's the warrior diet where you're fasting from, I think it's 6 o' clock to 9 o', clock, you're fasting and only eating between 6 o' clock and 9 o', clock or 7 o' clock and 10 o' clock or something like that. I forget what it is, but it is expanding the period of time in which you are not eating eating, so that a variety of positive adaptations can take place. The easiest form of it is just every other day you don't eat. The interesting thing about that is that it's actually easier to not eat at all than it is to cut down the number of calories that you take in because of a phenomenon called limbic hunger. It's the reason you can't just eat one Frito as long as you have no food there, the hunger is just sort of a constant hum. But the instant you eat anything, it's like the hunger wakes up. Wait a minute, food. And all of a sudden you've got a problem. If body composition is the issue, then I would suggest that you examine it separately. If you were to do kettlebell intervals, you know, using a Tabata protocol, 20 seconds of intensity, 10 seconds of rest in cycles, so that you're doing that for five minutes or ten minutes, trust me, once you've learned what you're doing, you can murder yourself in just 5 minutes, 10 minutes. And by doing it that way, you are jacking your caloric output. You're jacking your metabolic output fantastically, as opposed to LSD long slow distance, which is what most people do when they're walking or they're even running on a treadmill or a track, which is great for burning calories while you're doing it. The trouble is that running only burns. I forget what it is. It's something between 300 and 500 calories an hour. And a pound of fat is like 3,500 calories. So it takes somewhere between five and seven hours to burn a single calorie of fat. A single pound of fat. If you're doing LSD long slow distance, but interval training, intense intervals will jack your metabolism all day. You combine that with fasting and the weight will just drop off. I mean, it seriously, will. I'm not kidding. You can also use that Tabata protocol sort of thing with things like sun salutations or burpees. Any whole body activity, not just your legs, certainly not doing upper body curls or stuff like this. You have to engage your entire body so that your heartbeat spikes and then relaxes and then spikes and relaxes. That will raise your metabolism. Now, you do that for a relatively short amount of time. And now, so you're doing a little bit of yoga, you're jacking your metabolism so that you're burning more calories, you're fasting every other day or you're fasting every day within a certain window, so that you are. You've got your caloric output above your caloric input. That is the key. No matter what people do, no matter what kind of exercise, no matter what kind of diet, no matter what kind of medical discipline, no matter what kind of surgical intervention, all those things, no matter what kind of therapy you go through, no matter what kind of support group you join, the whole point is the physics of it have to be addressed. It's complicated because of the psychology and the biology and the nutrition and so forth, and the sociology and so forth. But at the level of physics, it's simple. So whatever else it is that you're doing, make sure that you always are looking at. How is this affecting the physics of it? How is this affecting the physics of it? Your body cannot break the laws of physics. It cannot. Cannot. So there will be a hundred new diet books out every year, but not one of them can possibly break that law. All they can do is give you different ways of addressing it. So keep your attention on that. No matter what fad comes down the pipe, keep your attention on that. Now, given that the other reason that you might not want to go into the martial arts specifically to lose weight is that fatty tissue is non contractile. It does not contribute to the motion. So therefore it is detracting from the motion and it will actually increase the wear and tear on your joints. As you are moving, you try to pivot and the additional weight does not help your knees. So if you are in the arts, I would say go into the arts, but keep health and fitness as separate things. Come up with some brief, intense program that enables you to address those things, and then go and practice the martial arts for fun. So you got your fitness over here and you're doing the martial arts for pleasure. The other thing, of course, is that if you get your endurance up, then other people in class are getting tired. While you're still fresh, you can focus on learning what the teacher has you doing while, well, they're huffing and puffing. And so you'll actually get ahead of them. It'll actually help you accelerate. So last thing I want to talk about today is the three gates. I touched on this. The three gates are three questions that everything that you say needs to pass. Is it true? Is it useful? Is it kind? Planking by the fleece burns. Ask about planking. Planking is a tremendous abdominal exercise and it's good for the lower back. I suppose you could do planking while you're Doing your. While you're doing your morning ritual, I suppose you could. Planking would not be an exercise that I would prioritize for weight loss. However, although it's very good for muscular endurance and it's very good for strength and it's good for posture, planking is a tremendous exercise. What you specifically want to raise your metabolism is intervals, preferably, preferably in the aerobic zone for over 12 minutes. There is a threshold that you cross 12 minutes. It's called the neuroimmuno endocrine response, the second wind threshold. Most people get into second wind between 12 and 15 minutes of the steady state activity, like running, hiking, something like that. When you cross that, there's a whole cascade of wonderful metabolic things that happen inside you. So I want that. If you can do. If you can plank for 12 minutes, you are a bad mofo. I mean, you don't need any recommendations from me, I'll tell you that. So planking is wonderful for strength and integration of the body. Fantastic exercise. I do planking myself with an unstable balance board. It's just murder. It's just murder, but it's great stuff. I'll do that with my wife. There's actually an unstable balance board. It actually has an alcove that you put your cell phone, you put your smartphone in, and you can play video games using the plank as your controller, which is fun. It helps keep your mind off the agony. But at any rate, is it true? Is it useful? Is it kind? It is obvious the value of this. If you're talking to someone else, is what you're saying the truth? To the best of your knowledge, is it useful to say, in other words, if someone has an ugly baby, it may very well be true that that is a hideous child, but what is the use of saying that to them? What is your purpose? What is your intent? Working backwards from the question of intent, why did you say this? Why and is it kind? Well, obviously saying that's the ugliest baby I've ever seen is not kind. It's not useful. It may be true, but it doesn't pass the other gates, does it? So if you do that, you will find that your interactions with people are much nicer. I mean, just much smoother. Okay, less confrontational. But what people don't think about is going back to that question of your internal dialogue, the voices in your head is what happens when you apply those three things to yourself. If you are constantly asking yourself, okay, we control our emotions with our body language, our body movement, our mental focus, what are we thinking about? And the things that we say to ourselves in our heads, right? So if we look at the part of that, what are we saying to ourselves? And you ask yourself, is that true? Is it true? If I'm saying to myself, oh, you idiot, you screwed up again. You always mess up. If you were to ask yourself, is it true? Do I always mess up? I just saw somebody just a few days ago, say, I've never succeeded at anything. Really. You seem to know how to type. Once upon a time, you didn't. You seem to know how to read and write. Once upon a time, you didn't. You seem to know how to walk and drive. Once upon a time, you didn't. So you're lying to yourself if you say that you have never succeeded at anything. All you've done is you've let the negative part of you cancel out all the positive things that you ever did. So by questioning it, by inquiring, is it true? Is my internal dialogue. Yes, Felice, Is my internal dialogue true? That's an initial gate. It's initial gate. So the next thing, is it useful? Is it useful to say that, you idiot, you can't do it? Is that a useful thing to say to myself? So let's say I say, okay, 30% of the time I mess up, and it's caused you a lot of pain in the past. That could be true. Is it useful? It's useful to say that if saying that motivates you to pay more careful attention, to be more conscious, to find new resources. It's useful if it helps you move. What, in the direction of joy? Remember, the point of life, the meaning of life is to seek joy. So if this is useful for helping you move in that direction, then yeah, maybe you could say, get up, you lazy bastard, somebody knocked you down. And you say, get up, you lazy bastard. And you say, is it true that you're a lazy bastard? Well, it's not entirely true because you worked very, very hard. You just got knocked down. Is it useful to say, get up, you lazy bastard? Yes, it can be. If saying something like that motivates you to act, then it can be useful. It's better if it's true too. Get up. If you don't get up, he'll win. Might be truer than get up, you lazy bastard. But get up, you lazy bastard might be more confrontational in a way that motivates you to act. The third thing, is it kind. Are you being kind to yourself? Are you remembering that at every moment of your life You've done the best you could with the resources you have at every moment of your life. If you can look at your own failings and realize that you tried your best, you really did. And at times when you did better, it's because you were able to tap into new resources. It was because you were able to do things in a different way. That's why you were able to succeed when you succeeded. Once you grasp that, it's much easier to be kind to other people. But if you're kind to other people but not kind to yourself, then you get to ask yourself, why not? Why am I nicer to other people than I am to myself? What's that about? Now I discipline myself more than I would ask anybody around me to discipline themselves. I. Because I love myself deeply, but I also know that I'm on a particular journey. The people around me are not necessarily on that same journey. So I don't have the right to beat them up in the way that I'll beat myself up sometime. I try to be supportive, but I also need to be loving and understand that we're all completing this journey of life in our own time, in our own way. So is it true? Is it useful? Is it kind? Not just in dealing with other people, but in dealing with ourselves as a way of asking ourselves, ultimately, who am I and what is true? To bring it all the way around, to circle it all the way around. Everything that we do is answering those questions. Who am I? What is true? Who are you? What is true about your life? What is true is that you have spent your whole life seeking joy. Everything you've done has been an attempt to try to move away from pain toward pleasure. You've done the best you could. At every moment in this talk is just about giving you some of the resources that my teachers gave me. I have so much gratitude, so much love for the people who helped me along the path. Larry Niven and Jerry Pornell. There's no way I can pay them back for what they've given me, except to be the best person I could be. My mother, who gave everything to me. Steve Muhammad, my chief martial arts instructor, who showed me how to be a man and showed me how to be a warrior. And Cliff Stewart, who disabused me of the notion that being a warrior was about jumping around and being an athlete. No, but he said to me once, when I was telling him how intimidated I was by the young warriors at this school, he said, steve, they weren't warriors. They were athletes playing warrior games. A warrior is someone whose word is good, who stands up for his community, who raises his own children. And I understood at that moment why these men and women had loved me and been kind to me. It wasn't that I was some great fighter. It was that I tried the best I could. I had genuinely given it the best I could every time. And that's what I try to do every time, every day. What I ask for you is to be gentle with yourselves. Love yourselves. Remember that life is about seeking joy. And remember that yourself is not confined to your skin. It's connected to your family, your community, your nation, the world as a whole. All right, that's today's talk. I would love it if you join the warrior journey community that we have going where we can support you more directly. Love for you to take a look at that@www.realwarriorsjourney.com. but most importantly, take care of yourself. Take care of your family. Be loving, be gentle, be strong. Take care. I'll see you soon.