Energy and Behavioral Modification

Sa. So I'm doing this a little bit differently today because I have a new ally. My goal is to assist 1 million human beings to become awake aware adults. That is, as I've said before, the outskirts of what is a useful mental set. The consciousness continuum goes from there to non dualistic thought, which starts becoming a little problematic in terms of dealing with other people. And then the other side of sustained non dualistic thought is that thing that is referred to as enlightenment, which basically is not even possible to maintain in the world. As soon as you start interacting with other human beings with the world, your ego gets back into it. You start preferring X over Y and you're stepping out of that. I mean, a truly enlightened being would have a difficult time seeing the difference between a bowl of ants and a bowl of rice. It's problematic and it's extreme. So I'm not going to worry about that. I enjoy being engaged in the world. But that question of being an awake aware adult human being, that is available to everybody and it's a useful thing for everybody. So anyway, my name is Steve Barnes and I'm the creator of the fire dance technologies and I'm a writer, martial artist, husband and father and teacher to a degree teaching in the sense that people seem to be interested in the path that I'm walking as I get certain kinds of results. And I kind of have a commitment to sharing as much as possible about that. So I have an ally today. I'm playing around with the artificial intelligence, trying to see whether or not what happens if I put a lot of my own thoughts and writings into a private AI that people can then ask questions of. Because sometimes people ask me repeated questions about certain things and I don't have access. I haven't, you know, there's not a Steve encyclopedia. But I figure that if every time I see something that people ask me and I can do a video about it, then I can feed the video into the AI and that question then becomes part of something that people can access 24,7 if they have an interest in it. And I can use it. Even if I'm on Facebook and somebody asked me something and I've dealt with that before, I could just ask the AI, bang, grab their answer and put it in there. We will see. I mean, it might turn out that that's not a good idea, but I'm going to see. So today the subject of energy came up and the question of how do you raise your energy? Well, if we look at the rapid planning method, the what is the how to raise your energy. The why is important because if you don't have a why, you're not going to change your behavior. So energy just makes everything better. It just does. You know, fatigue makes cowards of us all to a certain degree. Energy makes heroes of us all. It's the flip side of it. So protecting your energy is important, but in terms of personal evolution, there's a process called behavioral modification. And I forget the book that I learned this from, it was, curiously enough, it was on changing your finances. And they were talking about, they were talking about this. And the process for it, if I'm remembering correctly, is you identify. One, you identify the process, the aspect of your personality that you want to change. Two, you identify what you want to change it to. Okay, what's the new goal? Three, you raise your energy level. Four, you practice the new program and fail successfully. Five, you take the information that you learned from failing successfully, integrate it into your new approach, and six, start the process over again. This is really powerful stuff. And you can see why most people get stuck. Most people get stuck for the same reason that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Old dogs are tired. So if you want to change your behavior that is deeply ingrained in your personality, try this program. You know, try to try that process. Identify the new program. Identify the program that you want to change and find the new one. Raise your energy level, practice a new program, fail successfully, Take your learnings, start over again. But that takes us back to the question of how do you raise your energy? And the way I look at that, there are four basic aspects. Three of them are physical. One of them is kind of emotional, mental. The first one is getting enough rest. Are you getting enough rest? The average person needs between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. And you need to calculate how much you need. If you're not able to get that much sleep right now, then once again, intelligence is problem solving. Figure. Okay, I'm only getting five hours of sleep a night today, but by this time next year, I want to be getting eight or seven. And then you put a little time into it every day. You think about that. It's important. Do you know Google is your friend? Look up sleep and how to improve it and why it's important. The second thing is diet. And there are lots of different components to eating a positive diet. But the question is, what is high energy diet? What is fuel for your body? And in general, this is very broad. You're going to need to create your own theory about that. By both doing research and testing it in your own life. What I have found is that 3, 2, 1 seems to kind of work. 3 parts fresh fruit and vegetables to 2 parts complex carbohydrates to 1 part lean proteins with very little fats, salt or sugars. That's the ideal. And the, the, the average diet can be the opposite of that. You know, where the majority of people's caloric intake is fat salts and sugars. And that, of course, or they take in far more carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are basically just fuel. And if you take in more fuel than you're burning up, your body's going to store that fuel as if you were having bladders of gasoline strapped to the roof of your car. It's really very simple. And people don't want to look at how simple that is. Okay, so proper rest, proper nutrition, proper exercise. Now exercise. Here you want two things to increase your energy level. One, you actually want to deal with the mitochondrial energy engines in your cell. So that's going to require aerobic. It's going to require a balance of aerobic and anaerobic activity. Aerobic activity is the activity that you can perform at a level of exertion where you can talk but you cannot sing. Okay, you can talk, but you cannot sing. And you need to aim at, you know, I forget what the. What the amount that is the minimum. About an hour a week is the minimum. And about two to three hours a week is considered closer to optimal for, you know, walking, dancing, any number of different activities that are. That jogging, once you get, once your body gets used to it, the level where you can talk but you cannot sing. The other thing you're going to need is anaerobic activity, strength building, because you want to optimize the balance between your strength, your muscle and your body weight. Because clearly if you're carrying around weight that is not providing a benefit to your body. That's energy that you cannot then invest in your life in other ways. So you need to be careful about that. Flexibility work, like yoga, is basically a matter of de. Inhibiting the Golgi tendon organs. The, the little things that tell your muscles to tense or relax. So by teaching them to relax, you're actually increasing the efficiency of movement so that you're not fighting yourself. Otherwise, it's like driving a car with your brakes on. So that's for that mobility work is really good. And you can go to YouTube and put in joint mobility sonnen S o n n o n and you will Find a series of courses absolutely free by one of the smartest guys I've ever met who puts his attention into the physical. Scott Sonnet. Beautiful stuff. Only takes a few minutes a day. Great for getting your body to relax. Okay, so what you have there is rest, diet, exercise, and there are infinite gradations. And. And we can get really granular about that. And I'll answer those questions if you need to. But, you know, like I said, part of what I'm doing here is recognizing I'm going to get very, very, very busy, and I want to be able to continue interacting with people as much as possible. So we'll see whether or not this helps. This AI thing helps. The last major component is mental. In other words, you have to know your why we started with that, right? You have to. What are you going to do with the energy if you get it? What are the beliefs that you have about whether or not having energy is a good thing? You might believe that the more energy you have, the more people are going to steal your energy from you, the more they're going to try to suck you dry. That it actually is a benefit to be tired because it's the only way to get people to back off. If that's a belief, then you're going to want to take a look at some of the other things that we've got that have to do with learning how to protect your boundaries. Basically, that's, you know, you trigger your survival drive, you know, so that you can bare your teeth at people and say, no, back off. Really, really critical. And if you don't have that, you cannot blame people for stealing your time and energy. If you don't protect it, it's up to you to protect it. When you were a child, your parents protected you. Now that you're an adult, you're protecting you. What are your. What are you going to do with that energy? Are you going to achieve your dreams? You're going to help your family? Whatever you're going to do with that energy, talk about it in a way that increases your sense of enthusiasm and engagement. Yeah, I really want to do this. This is going to be great. And I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to help this, and I'm going to help that. Remember that the meaning of life is to move away from pain, embrace joy, and give service. So how does increasing your energy help you move along that continuum? If you know this, it's much easier to keep motivated. So that's kind of what I wanted to say today. I am really interested in people asking me questions to answer, because only if I know which questions you'd like me to answer do I know how to program the AI and, of course, I'm also working on my book on the magic formula. So you're helping me understand what is it that you need to understand? What it is that I'm saying so that you can test it and see for yourself whether telling the truth. I'm not asking anybody for faith. Faith is important. But I'm not asking you to believe in me. I'm asking you to be willing to try to invest an hour over two weeks to see whether or not the five minute miracle works. And if it does, then have enough faith to give me six weeks to experiment with the magic formula and then to integrate that with a morning ritual. And if you will do those things for a couple months, you will know whether or not this path is for you. It's not a matter of believing in me. It's a matter of actually testing it. So that's all I wanted to say today. I hope you can have a great day. I got a lot of work to do today, and I'll close this out as I like to close out my fire dance sessions with the Sanskrit expression that says that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Namaste. You take care.