Energy and the "Ancient Child"

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Steve here. Gonna type in a little bit. I'm continuing my experiment with the essays and videos kind of first thing in the morning while I'm still waking up. Just I think it's honest to let you guys see me when I'm. Before I'm fully compos mentis. Stephen Barnes here, creator of Fire Dance and author and father. Just talking about bringing in various concepts of balance to our lives. And today I'm going to be looking at the ancient child and energy that we've been looking at, the 90 day love feast. Tana Reeve and I loved it. We decided to continue it, but I wanted to deepen it. I wanted to make it available to people who are not in relationships or were not interested in improving their relationships with others, but wanted to improve it within themselves or to create a new relationship. And so I have to experiment with what that is. What if you want to improve your relationship with a child? What do you want to improve your relationship with a parent? And I think that all that stuff connects to the child self, the adult self and the elder self being in balance. I think I'm experimenting with it. So today I wanted to talk about energy because energy makes so many different things possible for us as human beings. And if I, you know, with your kind indulgence, I will go through what it is that I was thinking about this this morning. I'd like to dump out my ideas every day. I remember when I was discussing health and energy with Sifu Carl Tottenham. I remember that I visualized myself as 120 years old and still healthy. He suggested the opposite approach, to embrace the child self instead of the elder self. And it seemed to make sense to me. And I began to experiment with it. And I liked the results of that experiment. The subject of energy is such an important one. If you want to change habit patterns, you. You need energy. If you want to resist fear and discouragement, you need energy. Fatigue makes cowards of us all. If you want to achieve or accomplish in any arena, you need energy. There was a book called how to triple your energy that I read a long, long time ago. It had three concrete suggestions. It had to do with getting proper rest, getting proper nutrition, and getting proper exercise. It all makes sense to me. I did add another thought. Clear and motivating goals or intentions. Everyone knows that if you're exhausted, but there is a sudden emergency for someone that you love, you suddenly get the energy you need to cope with it. That's just happens. You jump out of bed and you Take care of a hurt child. So emotional focus can be a jump starter for the entire system. In other words, you wonder, how do I exercise when I don't have any energy? You create. You focus on the emotions, what it is that this is going to do. So let's look at this. If you won't fight as hard for your life and dreams as you would for a helpless child, there's work to do. The child self has your creativity, your playfulness, and your energy. A healthy child can seem to have only two modes. You know, go, go, go and sleep. Totally on or totally off. You have to learn how to modulate this. But it's kind of a cute thing to notice in kids sometimes. Number three. That great philosopher Mary Poppins said, in every job that's to be done, there is an element of fun. Find the fun and poof, the job's a game. Never do anything meaninglessly. If you can get out of an unpleasant task, do it or boring task. But if you have to do it, it's important to find some way to avoid pain and increase joy in connection with it. The substance of your life is time and energy. If you can find meaning in your task, even just I'm digging coal to support my family, that gives you energy. The most unfortunate people are those who lie to themselves that they have to work at a meaningless job. Ask why you're doing it and you'll often tap into something deeper. If it's awful, commit to leaving it at some period of time. You know, weeks, months, a year or two. But if you got to do it to support yourself or your family, to build a future, dream, find meaning and you'll find energy. 4. There are multiple ways to tap into the child's energy. Visualization. Listening to their advice and requests. You know when you're meditating. Heartbeat, meditation, core transformation, lots of choices. Find one. But let's tie into Fire Dance's approach, shall we? Fire Dance is most specifically the morning ritual of affirmation, visualization and emotional flooding, aiming at 1% growth per week in saluting. The magic formula. The magic formula going over that again is M MapR model. Actions, gratitude, intention and conviction. The mapper model. Who do you know or have studied who kept a healthy relationship with their creativity and energy, their childlike aliveness? Note if you could only think of people who got out of balance and hurt themselves. Your death drive. Something I'll go into another time, but let's say that you have one drive to destroy yourself, one drive to preserve yourself. And you have to keep Them in balance, you don't want too much of either one of them. Your death drive is playing tricks with you, preventing you from identifying and remembering healthy examples of balance in this arena. It's trying to keep you who you are, or it's trying to keep you headed toward a destination that you're genetically pre programmed for in the natural world. Once your children are 15 years old, nature is done with you. So you have to be very careful about that because it starts selecting for getting you out of, you know, everybody out of the gene pool. In that case, if you can't find a healthy model of the imbalance, you find a second model. One with one who has the opposing qualities so that you're in balance between the two. Executive function would certainly be one of them. If you can't think of that, find three models. One for body, one for career, one for relationships. You, your child self can healthfully sit in the middle of the triangle that these three define. If I chose Harlan Ellison as a role model, he'd be superb as a writing model. Superb. I might want to make sure to have a model for physical health. He kind of let himself go after the age of 45 and relationships so that he'd be ready for a Susan much earlier in his life. Even he felt that he'd wasted years of his life. Balance is critical, but you can model unbalanced people if you have others to compensate. Okay, second action. Every day there's homework to be done. Yep, it's true. But be damn sure you also take time to play. What can you do every day that is fun? Is the question. How can you connect with that fun sense? With movement, work and connecting to family? Gratitude. Who and what in this world are you grateful for? All the love, joy, success, health, connections. Celebrate every bit of it. Flood yourself with positive emotion. Some unfortunate people say that they have nothing to be grateful for. Would you miss your eyes and memory if you lost them? Would you mourn a lack of your Internet connection if you'd miss it if you lost? Only makes sense to be grateful that you have it. Gratitude is the antidote for fear, anger and all sorts of negatives. Be grateful you have committed to awakening your child self as well as the adult who will protect and nurture her intention. If you want to make a goal of improving your child adult connection, you can say this aloud during your morning ritual and simply choose role models who exemplify the states and results that you want. A 1% increase in amplitude and congruence of body, mind and spirit is a standard goal of mine. 1% increase in balance of adult and child selves would be a wonderful goal. Conviction or courage. You have to feel that your actions will decrease pain and increase pleasure. As you cannot predict the future perfectly, you cannot ask your child self to labor for months or years in pain hoping for some distant payoff. The trick is to find ways to be happy every day, to learn to give, to share, to love every day. In that way, your chop would carry. Water is itself a joyful process, but you also have to be constantly evolving. If you got struck by lightning before you reached your goal, you still had a good life. If you reach your goal, celebrate and ask what's next. Just as you would hug and hold your child every day, or heck, play with a puppy or kitten every day, there needs to be celebration. And if you look at the work that must be done, it's no worse than cleaning a cat box or changing a diaper. It's still joyful. Dirty diapers mean a healthy child. Work is just work. We decide how much joy we feel in life and when you apply this to your physicality, your relationships and your career, aiming at increasing 1% per week, having fun along the way, you can't lose. Living a life of energy, creativity, joy and love isn't so bad, is it? If you don't get to a million dollars, but write and publish stories, make friends, teach and share and learn, hang out with your heroes and have the sense of a progressive realization of a worthy goal while working to provide security for your child and family, Is that so bad? Isn't that really more than most people seem to get from life and it's under your control. If you connect with your child and act in accordance with the deep values of your elder self, which might be the three Gates or something else, you're prepared to embrace and sacrifice your ego in the service of. You've nailed it, man. You know that's. That's a good life. Make that connection and the rest is just techniques. So breathe. 60 seconds of deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing per hour, at least five times a day. Perform a morning ritual too. Perform a morning ritual of movement, speech and emotion, using the magic formula and aiming at 1% positive change. Seek the ideal balance of adult and child with the intent to become an awake, aware adult human being with a frisky, healthy child within your heart. None of this costs a dime. This is my daily practice. And if this path calls to your heart, you here it is. If it does not call to your heart, I wish you peace and joy in your journey, find a path that will work for you and come to Fire Dance on Saturdays. Every Saturday, noon Pacific, we meet for an hour, hour and a half and we workshop these things and we discuss these things and you can ask me any questions that you want and hopefully find a community of like minded people who will support you in your dreams and you'll find the link below. If you don't see the link, just go to www.stephenbarnslist.com. join up and I'll send it to you. Take care people and love you all. And I wish nothing but the absolute best life you can possibly have today and every day for the rest of your lives. Bye Bye.