Firedance 1-13

To record. And if you got it, baby. Okay, so we can share these. We can share this with other people. I mean, we are streaming it to Facebook, so it's recording there. But we want to be sure because this works best if you guys bring your issues to me. So we can say, well, how would we use these processes to deal with. Okay, so. Okay, so the first thing I want to do is. So let's see, just introduce myself, Stephen Barnes. And I'm the creator of the Life Writing and Fire Dance Systems. And I'm a novelist and television writer and martial artist. And more importantly than most of those things, husband and father. There is nothing that's more important to me than my family and my community, period. That's above everything. Anybody who knows me knows that's true. So it's not that that's always easy, but when your values are clear, it's easy to make difficult decisions. And my co host, luckily, just by fluke chance, she was supposed to be flying to Florida today. Tananarive. Her flight got booked, so she's still here. Tananarives I am here.

This is my avatar, not my camera because I wasn't expecting to be here, but I am excited to be here.

Great. Fantastic. That works. And Tananarive is my other half. And, you know, just. It is. It's scary. I've never really depended on other people. I always had this sense that I was going to have to do it all myself. And being married means partially surrendering to the need to need. The need to lean on the need to expand your definition of self to include another person. That terrifies me. And it's okay, I mean, to live slightly in the space of fear. I just heard a thing yesterday from an amazing, amazing lady who basically said that you have to be uncomfortable. You accept being uncomfortable in order to step into the realm of the possible. Your potential is on the other side of feeling uncomfortable about things. As long as you stay in the zone of comfort, you. You're never going to grow. Growth is uncomfortable. So what I would love for you guys to do is to unmute for a second and say hi to everybody. Get the energy going so that this. Hi, everybody. That's right. Hey, everybody. We have all survived another week. That is not a small thing. You understand that. Thousands didn't. So let's celebrate life and love and being and being able to share. And what I promised to you is that I've committed to doing this show for one year, for one year, until the end of 2023. I promise to move heaven and earth to be with you every Friday. If I'm not here, it'll only be because I am sick, which I rarely am, or I am flying someplace. I'm in the air, and I literally cannot be here with you. But I'm going to be here for one year. And what I want very much is for you to commit to yourselves for 2023 to be the best year possible, if possible, the best year of your lives. Who is willing to make a commitment to try? Raise your hands. Raise your hands. You're willing to try for 2023 to be the best year of your life? Great. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you 100% of myself every time I am here. So now you can you mute everybo because you can mute everybody. So everybody mute now so that T and I can talk and we can get into this and we will unmute you again later on. You'll have time for questions and things, but the first thing I want to do is get that energy up. Now, Tanara, if you had a question about energy, would you go ahead and throw me that question? Tananari okay, maybe she's.

Somebody muted me, or maybe I muted. But in any case, I did have a question about the difference between exercise, which I think a lot of us understand, and qigong.

Okay, great. So here's what you do. We talked last week about the process of behavioral modification to, you know, you want to change a behavior or an attitude of yours or, you know, primarily a behavior, because if you've got an attitude and it's a negative attitude or positive attitude, the way you know, you really got it is by looking at your behaviors. You know, if your behaviors are going to be driven by your emotions and your beliefs and your self image and things like that. So if you're going to change your behavior, what you do is you recognize the behavior that you want to change, you identify the behavior you want to change it to, you raise your energy level, practice the new behavior, fail successfully, which means you learn something for the process and start over again. So the most important piece of that process that people miss generally is raising their energy level. I think that that's the most important piece. So energy is really important if you want to change, because as we said last week, the reason you can't teach an old dog new tricks is that the old dog is tired. So raising your energy level is important. Now, there are four basic components about changing your energy level. We'll go over it very briefly but we'll go into it in greater depth another time. I want to focus on some particular aspect of this process every week. But the four things that you need to raise your energy level are briefly, exercise, diet, rest and focus. Motivation. We'll be talking about that a little bit more. We talk about some of those things a little bit more later on. But the difference between exercise and qigong, which is qigong is the energy system that operates inside the Tai Chi. Inside the Tai Chi form, exercise generally intends to increase your energy level, often by literally improving your biology, training your mitochondria to produce more energy on a cellular level, increasing aerobic capacity, increasing flexibility or mobility more so that you're not. You don't have as much resistance in your movement. So that's actually being more efficient in your movement. And that's where you start touching on qigong and tai chi. So exercise increases the amount of energy, but tai chi and qigong increase your effectiveness of using the energy you've already got. Okay, so it's like exercise is increasing the water pressure or running to the ocean. And qigong is. You're in the water, maybe it's a narrow stream and you're finding the. What's the deepest portion of the stream? Let me stay here in the deepest portion of the stream that I have. So it's not beating your body up. Exercise is often beating your body up. But things like yoga and Tai chi and qigong are about connecting the mind and the body in a peaceful, loving, nurturing way. Saying thank you to your body for giving you what it can. Your body, just like your mind, you have done the best you could with the resources you had at every moment of your life. Every moment of your life. And if you cannot say thank you to the body that you have, it might be a little beat up. My body is a little beat up. I'll tell you. Nobody gets through life undamaged. You know, you don't. You bark your shins against things, you make mistakes, you get your heart broken, you fall down, you know, you get some scar tissue in there. And so, you know, thank your body. Your body has done the best it could. If you had a horse that you had ridden every day of your life and that horse loved you and had done the best it could, and now that horse is a little lame. It's not as fast, maybe as it used to be, but it still would love to take you for rides. It still would love it. If you come and feed it sugar and take it out in the sun and you move Together. And that love is what it has to give you. That the gift of what it has is all it has to give you. If you can appreciate your body as the instrument that is taking you through life. If you can appreciate your heart, which has been buffeted by fear and love, but has done the best it could at every moment, if you could appreciate your mind that has tried the best it could to adhere to the rules that you were given to move you away from pain and toward pleasure. And if you can, then you're doing the best you can. And qigong is that sense of doing the best you can with what you have now. You start doing that and your stress level drops, your tension drops. You actually free up more of your natural energy. So there is that intrinsic aliveness that children have, and then there's the kind of brute force energy that adult athletes have and people who are driven by their motivations. And you know something? I love that stuff. I've had a wonderful time with that stuff. I honestly pushed my body to the absolute limit of what it was capable of when, you know, I was younger. And now I push my body to the limit of what it's capable of now. But the emphasis is more on recovery. In other words, before it was, how hard can I push myself now? It's how fully can I recover from having pushed myself? And you catch the exact moment when you've recovered enough to be able to push again, you know, so it's like you push, push, push, recover. Push, push, push, recover. If you do that. And this is true of our psychic selves, you know, our emotions, our spiritual selves, as well as our bodies. Our bodies in that sense are. Become a metaphor for change, that you can measure what's happening in your body, you know, in. In terms of how far you fast you run and how much you can lift and how much you weigh and your. Your fat, you know, muscle, you know, percentages and stuff like this. And you can measure how you're doing in finances, which is things like, you know, how much money you make, your net worth, how many customers you have, and so forth and so on. Like, I have a goal of having a thousand people in the finance program, because that's a nice round number that I can kind of wrap my mind around. And if I can help a thousand people and I can get. Encourage each one of them to go out and help additional people, then I can change the world. That's what I'm thinking. So those things are quantified, but the heart is not. It's much More difficult to quantify the realm of the heart in the same way that you can. It's hard to quantify the realm of the spirit. It's difficult. But if you can handle the things that can be quantified at either end, body in the mind, the career, then you have sort of created a groove that your energy can run down. You start developing a sensitivity to where you are in the process. So before we do our first exercise, because what I want to do is to start with qigong exercise. Are there any comments, questions, or requests that I can handle real quick? So if somebody raised their hand, if you got a comment, question, request. Otherwise, I'm going to lead you into a qigong exercise. So let's take a look. Anybody? Anybody? No?

Doesn't look like it.

Doesn't look like it. Fantastic. So if you can stand up, if you can, you can do this sitting down. Now, the core tai chi exercise. The core qigong exercise is almost certainly the chi ball, which is just. I'm sitting here with my knees bent, tailbone tucked under, shoulders neutral, head held as if I scream above. That's that posture. Okay, Rub my hands together until my palms start burning, and shake my fingers out.

Yeah.

Ooh. Now I get my palms close enough together that I can feel. This is nice. Today. I can feel the warmth between my palms. That warmth and that tingle. Make a nice chi ball. Make a nice ball of warm air between my palms. Let's do this for one minute, and then I'll move to the next exercise. Inhale through the nose. Exhale through the mouth. Breathe down in the belly. Make sure you can feel warm air. Relax. Feel the energy that you have. Feel gratitude for another week of life. If you were a billionaire, you were on your deathbed, you would give all your money for one more week of feeling as healthy as you feel right now. And when you understand that that is the greatest wealth that exists in the world is health, a sense of connection, a sense of possibility? All right, so we're going to take that feeling into an exercise called the triple burner. Now, the triple burner is we act as if we have a larger ball of air, and we're holding it here, and the first one is up here at the shoulder level. Relax the shoulders. Visualize and feel that ball of warm air, just for five breaths. Okay? Now you lower your hands until they're right about at the diaphragm. Five breaths. Relax. Visualize and feel that warm air like you're holding a beach ball. Okay, now lower. This is the last one. Okay, good. Shake it out. Getting in touch with the energy you already have enables you to find the thread, to follow the thread of consciousness and breath to the energy that you want. And you're going to need that energy in order to create the best year of your life. The best year of your life. We want you to have, you know. And if you don't know exactly what your goals are yet, a great goal would simply be to double your energy. You don't know how you're going to do it right now, but if you simply have that goal, then it's a matter of, well, how might I double my energy? What would it take to do that? How would I have to eat? How would I have to move? How would I have to rest? How focused would I need to be to increase my motivation? Those are all very, very good, solid questions. One of the things. And so before we go on, because we have a lot to cover today, I'm really happy about what we have for you today. But before we go on, any comments, questions or requests about anything in connection to this, this works best if you engage with me and tell me what is you need to know in order to go more deeply into this process. So any questions? Oh, there's a breathing question from Jesse. Jesse, unmute yourself, please. So I have training as a vocalist, so I never remember which. In a qigong exercise like this, what's the best way to breathe? For example, expanding your diaphragm on the inhale versus the exhale. Expanding on the inhale when you contract on the inhale. That's different. It's more sophisticated. I wouldn't want to teach somebody to do those sorts of things any more than I would teach Valsalva breathing or the kind of breathing that you do in Sanchin karate exercise and power lifting. Those are performance exercises. That is not about health. That's about performance and competition. Those are different things. The martial arts, for instance, are filled with exercises that are not particularly good for your health, but it's great for knocking the hell out of somebody. And so if you might die in the next minute, it's okay if you take an hour off your life at the end of your life in order to deal with this right now. And that really is actually kind of the trade off that is made performance as opposed to health. So in general, it's diaphragmatic breathing. Exhale on the contraction, inhale on the expansion. Do that and you've got your basic health stuff. And work with a teacher in person. Hands on you to go further Than that. What I'm going to teach are things that I know are totally safe. It's that place where safety and effectiveness meet. That's all I'm going to give you is stuff that is both safe and effective. There are things that are very, very effective that aren't particularly safe. Things that are very, very safe, but aren't particularly effective. We're working in the middle there. Okay. All right. There was another question, something about stances. Let's see it. Who? Whoever.

That's me. Kathy Fowles. Sorry.

Hello, Kathy.

It has a logo for my job.

Excuse me?

The logo you see is my job. That's why it doesn't have my name.

Okay, so I see Kathy fall.

Yes.

Okay, so, Kathy, what's your question?

My question is, as your arms are going down, are you sinking into the horse stance? Do you see a need to do?

Yes. Yes. Because when the arms are going down, you are contracting. Okay. Up, expanding. In general, during the Tai Chi form, there are lots of clues. There are some movements where it's a little difficult. Push to the corner. For instance, you are exhaling on an expansion in some ways. So you're not inhaling on that expansion.

Why?

Because that's one of those movements where you're actually striking somebody. And when you're striking somebody, even though there is an aspect of it that is expanding, you also want to contract your body into a solid mass. When you're inhaling, it's like you're creating a bubble in the middle. You're not as solid. So that's why in karate, they will teach you to time striking somebody until they're inhaling, because they're creating a bubble there. Boom. You pop the bubble. And you can really mess somebody up if you simply by timing when you strike them. So when you're doing Tai chi, understand that this, it is not combat. It's the dream of combat. It's a platonic ideal of motion. Applying that to actual competition is a different matter. The way we're doing Tai chi, it's efficiency in movement and health. You want to learn how to use tai chi for fighting? I would suggest looking into the Filipino martial arts or the Indonesian martial arts. They have some really interesting stuff that ties in very, very directly. Does that help?

Yes. I think I'm hearing you say, as you're lowering, you are sinking. Probably not seriously sinking, but, well, you could.

In other words, if I'm doing this just for kind of energy, then I'm probably just going to want to go just kind of. But if I Wanted to do this for exercise. In other words, remember we talked about how qigong is finding the energy you've already got, whereas exercise is bringing in new energy. It is tearing your body down so it can build itself back up. In that case, I might go deep. I might go. Yeah, I might really go deep. And stay down here. Now, you know, I want my legs to burn when I'm doing this, because I'm gonna force my body to rebuild itself. I'm gonna stay down here. Your legs, you're gonna tear your legs up if you do that. And if. If you tear your legs up and then give yourself the time that you need to recover, you. You give yourself the time you need to recover. Maybe you soak in a hot tub. You make sure to give yourself good nutrition. Your muscles, tendons, and ligaments get stronger. So.

And also, if I could just jump in for a second, you'll be the first to say that you know your own body, Right? So Mary L. Is saying in chat that her knees don't like squatting. And Ross is reminding everyone to keep the pain level below a 3.

See, as you guys move through the course, you become capable of coaching each other in the chat. Thank you, Ross. Who was the other lady who spoke up?

Mary.

Mary L. Thank you, Mary. Pain never goes above a 3. Preferably you don't take it above a 2. I don't mind a little discomfort, but I know my body, so I'm not. Basically, this is something I learned in yoga from one of my teachers when I was going through teacher training, a guy named Rod Stryker. He was a yoga teacher to the stars. He said, you're breathing. These exercises are all breathing exercises. And all you have to do to keep them safe is you never go more deeply into any of them than you can go while maintaining the thread of your breath. If your breathing begins to go, you're going to. You know, you're going too far. If you're holding your breath, you're going too deep. No, no, no, no, no. It's. As long as you stay within the thread of your breathing, you will be safe. There are three things that make up an exercise from one position. Your breathing, your movement, and your posture. And each of those is created by the other two. It is a triumvirate, the one that breaks down first, what you do, as long as you've got all three of those things, you're safe. If your posture begins to break down, if the quality of your movement begins to break down, or if the quality of your breathing breaks down, you are disintegrating your structure. And frankly, this is what you want to do to your opponent. If you're boxing, wrestling, martial arts, is you literally want to interrupt their breathing, change their structure, or impede their movement. That's literally what you want to do. It starts sending them down, what's called the flow state, performance spiral. And that is what creates the psychological illusion of the master moving in slow motion and the student moving fast. But he can't get to the master because the master is messing up the student's integration. The student has no idea. They think it's about speed and power. No, it's not. Speed and power are interesting, but they're actually created by a particular relationship between the two people, which is a subject that is sort of outside the scope of what we're talking about here today. But if what you want is efficiency and effectiveness in life, you might ask yourself, what is the analog for movement? What is the analog for structure within my writing or my business or my relationship, whatever. And you make sure you can push those things. But watch. When is the structure breaking down? You know, when is the quality of my movement breaking down? Breathing is the thread you follow. It is the canary in the coal mine. It is the one behavior which is both voluntary and. And autonomic. So that means you can. Every profound tradition in the world follows, uses the breathing in some way. You know, whether it's it's prayer that said aloud or chanting or dancing or movement, you know, yoga, pranayama, this and the other. They're all doing, messing with your breathing. They're all following that thread of breathing. So you can do that unconsciously or you can do it very consciously. Qigong and Tai chi are asking you to do it consciously. That with a qigong movement, your mind, your eyes, your movement and your breathing are all coming together at the same time. Anytime you do that, you're stepping into the profound. We had another question. Tinari. Did you sense a question? There was somebody. Let me see.

I don't see one.

Is there significance between eyes open or eyes closed? You know, I close my eyes if I'm meditating, but when I'm doing Tai Chi, like I said, if the qigong is the eyes, the mind, the breathing and the movement all together. But if you were to do the Tai Chi form with your eyes closed, you would go into the kinesthetic state more. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with exploring. What does this feel like with my eyes closed? Nothing at all. Go right ahead and try it you know and see. And what you're trying to do is to gain sensitivity so that you know, you, you. It's your machine, it's your car, it's your computer. You have to learn how to operate. I can give you general suggestions, but there's nothing wrong with playing with things as long as you don't hurt yourself. As long as you learned you won. Okay, let's see. There was another chat. Sharpens awareness on balance, for sure. Absolutely. And by working on balance in a structured and relatively artificial context, you are protected against sudden changes in balance that come unexpectedly in life. In other words, balance. In Tai Chi, if you lose your balance, there's nothing really wrong. But if you're walking on an icy sidewalk and you're thinking about getting to a red light, getting to a light before it changes, you better have your balance on automatic. Because with your attention off your movement, I got to get across the street. That's when you can slip and fall. It's when you're not paying attention to what you're doing. So what you're trying to do is you have one phrase of life where you are very conscious of what you're doing. And you're getting those skills at unconscious competence. You're learning, how do I move, how do I change? How do I do this? How do I relax? Deliberately? And you're moving all that to unconscious competence in the same way that you had a dozen different things to learn in order to ride a bicycle. But once you learn how to ride a bicycle, it's, look, ma, no hands. You don't have to think about it anymore. And that's the process in all the arts too, by the way, that we talk about in writing. We talk about the hero's journey and the chakras and characterization and theme and plot and this and that and the other. But art exists at the place where you know all that stuff. You know enough to do a basic draft. You know where you're not thinking about it. You can. You're. And you're not thinking about your fingers. You can't touch type. You can't kind of roll your eyes up and visualize a scene and type what's happening in the scene. As long as you don't know where your fingers are on the keyboard. So you practice where your fingers are on the keyboard until that's automatic. And now you can flow. And so all art comes from the place where you've taken technical things and move them to the level of unconscious competence. So there are a bunch of different Technical things involving life and success and movement that we are. Through the fire dance ritual, we are moving to the level of unconscious competence. The conscious mind is a teacup. The unconscious mind is the ocean. So you're one teacup at a time. What are the things I need to learn? Practice, practice, practice, practice. Oh, I know how to do that automatically. Let's move on to the next thing. And that's what you're doing. You're constantly in that state. Any other comments, questions, or requests before we go on to Octavia Butler? All right, so this is good. Like driving a stick shift. Amen. It's exactly like driving a stick shift. You drive in your neighborhood with mom or dad next to you grinding those gears. But then as soon as you can move those gears without really thinking about it very much, now you're ready to get out on the street and add the complication of other cars. As long as you don't know how to ride a stick shift, you stay in the parking lot, you stay on your street. But the idea is to get to the point where. Where you can drive stick on the freeway. And now you're singing along to the. To the radio and you're having a conversation and you're driving in the fast lane and cars are weaving in and out. And most of that stuff is just an automatic. In fact, you can kind of get to the point where you don't even remember how you got home. You know it was automatic. How many of you have had that experience of not even what happened in the last five minutes? Where am I? And you. And you were driving probably the best you. You've ever driven. You are driving at your very best because it's your unconscious mind that is the brilliant part of you. That's right, Marielle. You're completely correct. It is the autopilot that is the smartest part of you. So you teach your body, you teach your heart, you teach your mind. And you are moving everything to unconscious competence. And that's how you layer up one layer at a time. One layer. Time. And the fun that you. I mean, we're all adults here. So you've got a textbook on sexual positions or something like that, right? Until you forget the textbook. You're not making love. You're practicing. You're. It's. It's. It's USB ports trying to make. But as soon as you get to the point where the mechanics of it are subsumed into the poetry of it. Now you're communicating, now you're dancing. You can't cha Cha. As long as you're going 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1- 2, 3. It's, you know, it's. Once you get that movement, and now you're. You're moving together. Fred Astaire used to push his dancing partners to the point where, you know, it's like Ginger Rogers said, she hated working with Fred Astaire, but she loved the way he made her look on screen. That Barry Chase, another one of his partners, it's like he drove me, like, crazy. But then when they were actually moving during the television, during the television special together, he's whispering to her, now you're dancing. Now you're dancing. That's what you have to do to get into the zone where the child part of you can simply. Let's put on a show, let's tell a story. It's that child part of you that is the artistic part of you, okay? But the adult part of you has to get the component skills of whatever it is you're trying to do to unconscious competence. So the child is just playing with a bigger and bigger and bigger set of toys, a deeper and deeper and deeper well of toys. So that's what it is. The adult does the work so that the child can play. The adult does the work so that the child can play. Does that make sense? Do you understand what it is that I'm saying there? Okay, great. Because as you can probably tell, the little kid inside me is very much alive. The little boy inside me is still there. He's still a kid. He still loves dinosaurs. Oh, look at my trice. Look at my Tyrannosaurus tooth right here. You know, it's. It's like, oh, I've got a. I've got a piranha right next to my desk. Okay, piranha. What are you gonna buy today? Oh, you know, so it's because I have spent thousands of hours working on the skills that allow me to do my professional job without really thinking about it that much. That's. That's the advantage of doing the work. You do the work so that you can have the play. That's what it is. You know, there are so many different ways. Like I said, every. Almost everything I'm saying is a different version of the same thing. This is how we kind of walk up the mountain. First we have to identify the mountain. Where do we want to go? Then we have to talk to people who have been to the mountain, and then we have to do the work to get to the mountain. And we also have to be sure we enjoy Every step of the process. Because we don't know if we're going to get to the mountain life. You know, people get hit by meteors and it just happens. So make sure that every day of your life, that little girl, that little boy inside you is having a wonderful journey. And that's what I want for every one of you to outperform anything you ever did in, you know, in the light in life up until this period of time in terms of getting to know yourself and bringing your dreams to life. But also, I'm not saying that on December 31st, that's when you get to celebrate. I want you to celebrate every day. I want you to wake up every day grateful for another day of life and go to bed every night knowing you did the best you could to connect to your heart. And it was another good day, Another good day, and then another good day. You do that. It takes seven good days to have a good week, four good weeks to have a good month, 12 good months to have a good year. And you stack up the days, the weeks, the months, the years, and all of a sudden you're having a wonderful life. And that's what I want for each and every one of you, however you define that. Now, let me get this board back over here. I was experimenting with a thought because. Let's see, is this on there? Yeah, it's on there. So we've talked about the three gates. Is it true? Is it kind? Is it effective? This is a moral education in a box. I mean, just asking yourself for everything you do and say, is it true? Is it kind, Is it effective? Will straighten you out really nicely. And watch the people who will fight against the notion that being truthful, kind and effective is a useful way to be. People who don't think that being truthful and kind are efficient and effective in life, you better pay attention to them. They've just told you who they are. They have just told you who they are. They're willing to lie and they're willing to be unkind to get what they want. But those of us who commit to being honest and kind believe that being honest and kind is efficient and effective, that these things go together. So this is the three gates. These are the three centers. The body, the belly, brain here, the heart center, and the head center. In essence, the body is your warrior self, your survival, and also your way of determining what is true in the world. Physical movement doesn't care how you feel. That mile is there whether you walk it or not. It does not care. Your heart is where love and fear fight with each other. And you have to resolve those things in order to be kind. And your head is where you are, developing strategies and tactics that allow you to move through life with efficiency and effectiveness. You know, so you're, you're, you know, you know what is true and how can I be more loving? How do I relate to my fear and, and how do I move through the world with greater power? So in that sense, qigong is about efficiency and effectiveness. We're feeling you warm this up. And you, you can feel that when you can feel that. Now you take that into your Tai Chi form. How much do you have to relax to get that same feeling? You have to be so relaxed in your Tai Chi form that you're almost dreaming. It's that, ah, there I am. Yeah, there it is. And we're all carrying more tension in our bodies than we need. You should relax until your arms almost fall, until your body almost falls over right on that edge. And as if you are suspended by thick, by thick air, you do that. And now that same feeling, you take that into business, you take that into relationships. You give exactly the amount of energy that is necessary at this moment that is optimal at this moment. No more, no less. Just the right amount of energy. No more, no less. Learning to calibrate, that is of critical importance. You don't want to burn out. You don't want to use less energy than you need to get there. My very dear friend, Octavia Butler. Octavia was like a big sister to me for several years. I moved back to my mom's house after my mom passed away down in Los Angeles. And Octavia lived about half a mile away. So we frequently got together for lunch and dinner and taking her to bookstores and taking her to the library. And we talked a lot about life. We both understood that there were going to be obstacles to achieving what it is that we wanted. My obstacle there were the obstacles of any artists face. And anyone who's tried to make a living in the arts knows how tough that is. But I had an additional. We both shared an additional problem in terms of race. We were not, we were the only ones in the science fiction field. We were for almost 20 years. You know, Chip Delaney had left the field, you know, so as far as we knew, we were, we were it. And then she had an additional barrier of gender. So the question of how do you, how do you play your hand, how do you do this? How do you get where it is that you're going with grace and be Able to enjoy life along the way. And one of the things that we bonded over was not just the love of writing and the love of thought and a common perspective ethnically and in terms of where we had come from in terms of social positioning, but a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Let me see if I can. This book was written in. Originally, the, the principles in it were written in the late 20s. And I think that the book was published in like 1937. This was. There had been earlier books, but this is probably the major statement of what he did, which is to interview and study hundreds of really, really successful people who had started from with little and ended up being very, very rich and successful. And then asked the question, what do they all have in common? And both Octavia and I believe that if we could find the right people to model in that sense, we could get there too. And she used a lot of what was in there. Let me see if I can share my screen and put something up there. Yeah, I think I can. All right, so if you go to the. I think the Octavia's library is someplace.

In, in Pasadena, the Huntington Library.

Huntington Library, there are archives. Now I saw this for real at Octavia's house and so I know that this was what she did. But if you can read this, these are the affirmations that she wrote for herself. You can't read this very well, but you can find other copies of this on the Internet. If you just look up Octavia Butler affirmations or Octavia Butler Think and Grow Rich and you'll find this. It says, I shall be a best selling writer after Imago. Each of my books will be on the bestseller list at even lists, a bunch of different newspapers and so forth. And they will stay there for a long time and they'll make this amount of money. And what she did and what the book suggested is that she read these affirmations aloud twice a day. So imagine, just imagine, you know, Octavia reading to herself. You know, I will be a best selling writer I this and that and reading it with energy, with enthusiasm, with belief. Okay? So that's what Octavia did every day. Now another thing that she did was she would write down various. She would write down various things that moved her in terms of, of self development. So here's a statement. Whatever the human mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve Napoleon Hill. I thought that was Earl Nightingale, but maybe it's Earl Nightingale quoting Napoleon Hill. All right, and then it says that she has a list here of essentials of success, Motivation, persistence and determination, self discipline, imagination and creativity. Excellent. Specific goals, specialized knowledge, adaptability, responsibility, cooperation, self reliance, mental rehearsal, time management, concentration, sustained attention. You get it. Are you starting to understand that here is this brilliant woman willing to work far harder than most people are? I can tell you for a fact, Octavia was the most committed artist I've ever met who was not insane. She was not crazy. But she did, like an awful lot of extraordinarily high performing people decide that she was willing to sacrifice in order to accomplish something. Bruce Lee was also a devotee of think and grow rich. And you can see, you can see the exact same thing that he did. Writing out what he was going to be and the best start, biggest star in the world and so forth. Jim Carrey did the exact same thing. Went up to the Hollywood sign and shouted to his affirmation to the universe about the star he was going to be. Countless people have either referenced that particular book or referenced the techniques in that book to establish the belief systems that the habits, the understanding of the behaviors. Now there is a meme that I see running around Facebook of the real secret of the extremely successful is being born rich. You know, that's an advantage. If you can be born rich, that's great. You know, I can't deny that, but I have never studied rich people who are born rich. What I have studied is rich people who started at the middle class and below. That's 100% of my study because I was interested in how do I overcome the obstacles in order to get where it is that I'm going. Ross Merker said a bit late to change that now. Absolutely. I can't change my race, I can't change my class. I can't change, you know, any number of those different things. But I can ask myself, given those disadvantages, what are the behaviors, strategies and tactics that lead us to success. So I know for a fact that Octavia became Saint Octavia. She is now because she touched something so real within herself and had the skill to convey it to the public at the level of unconscious competence so she could create art that was based on technical and intellectual understandings. She had all the technique and the understanding of the science of it and the mechanics of it and unconscious competence. And now she can simply write poetry because she is automatically following those patterns. So does that make sense? Any comments, questions or requests about anything that we're covering right now? Because like I said, every week I'm trying to give you gold because the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go a little bit deeper into the first principle and think grow rich. And we're going to talk about how to integrate these things into your life. But I want to make sure that you're with me. So, you know, if you've got a question, raise your hands. Otherwise, unmute yourself and say yes, if you get it. Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. Good. Fantastic. That's. That's wonderful. Octavia would be. She was such a wonderful person. She really was. You know, she. For the record, Octavia. Octavia's opinion of my writing was that I was not pushing myself hard enough, that she knew I could be better than I was, that I was still playing games with it and still hiding out rather than really, really committing. And she was right. That's why she was above me as a writer. And I'm not saying that to put myself down. You know, I'm very happy with who I am as a human being. But when somebody puts more of themselves into something, they deserve to be better than you. And that's most of what I see with people are better than me at anything that I like. The people, the martial artists who are better than me, they put more of themselves into it. They deserve to be better. The writers. Absolutely. Clarissa, raised your hand. Unmute yourself. What can I do for you, sweetheart?

Now. Now that you see what she saw, what do you think the more would have been for you or is for you? When you say you should have put more or you want to put more?

I know. I can tell you exactly. I can tell you exactly what it was. I was afraid to own my ethnicity. I felt that I had to hide in order to survive. So I really played down some of my feelings concerning race and class in America because I felt. I was afraid that if I did not do that, I would not be able to make a living. And I actually had people threaten me. I actually had people tell me that if I did this, that my career would fall apart. I would be attacked. What they call right now, cancel culture. I had people walk out of conventions where I was giving a talk. If somebody asked me a question about race and I told the truth, people would get up and walk out. It's just like when James Earl Jones. Was it James Earl Jones? No, it was Samuel Delaney in an article in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, talked about how the. There was no racial diversity in Star wars, and people attacked him viciously because he was getting between them and their illusions, their fantasies. So here I am trying to figure out the only one of my kind in the world, as far as I knew, trying to figure out how to survive long enough for the culture to change, enough to support the visions that I had. And I was hiding. I hid behind Larry Niven and Jerry Porto. I tell you that absolutely honestly, I was making. I could make a lot of money if I would write books with these white guys who are wonderful to me. And that's how I was able to literally pay my mortgage and support my family. Well, one day, I'm having dinner with a dear friend of mine named Darnell Gadberry, black computer engineer. And I told him what I was going through and that I felt like if I expressed myself honestly, my career would suffer. But if I did not express myself honestly, I was betraying the little boy inside me, the one who looked out at the world and said, where am I? Who watched when worlds collide and saw that all the people thought worthy of being saved were white. You know, if. So, I was caught between can and can't. I knew that if I did not succeed in life, or I felt if I did not succeed in life, I would be crushed. But simultaneously, my mother, you know, the source of all wisdom and all that is good, and you know, the rules that I'm supposed to learn, my mother told me, quote, unquote, stephen, if you show white people how smart you are, they will kill you. If you want to know why I went into martial arts for 50 years, that's how much fear I had. That's how much fear I had. I had to get to a place where I did not feel afraid. And then I had to get to a place where I could deal with the world from love, because I was not going to let other people's poison into my life. I could not do that. So it's like, how do I do this? And Darnell looked at me and he said one of the most important things anyone has ever said. He said, stephen, eventually someone is going to have to start writing stories that include us. If not you, who. If not now, when and why would you want to write stories for the pleasure of people you wouldn't want to have in your house? And I knew at that moment that I had been hiding, that I had been a coward, that I had been lying to myself and the world about who I was and that I had to step out. And it was that realization that started me on the path that led me to writing Lion's Blood, which was the first book I ever wrote that I take approved of. I admit to having Let my fear control me. I was trying to survive. And I would like to think that because I was there, I opened a path that others had been able to walk. I did the best I could with the resources I had, but Octavia had had more courage. And I salute her and I honor her. And I'm so glad that I had her in my life. I wish that the person I am now had been able to sit down and talk with the woman she was then. Now I'm at a level of integration as a human being that could have had a very different conversation with her. I think she will always. There's a very good chance that I will never be as good a writer as she was. But I know that what I must do to be true to myself is to give it absolutely my damnedest shot. The only way to be true to her is to do the best I can do with the resources I have. And if I can, then I'm being honest. Does that answer your question? Excellent. Excellent. Any other comments?

Absolutely.

Yeah. I do believe that she hears me now. She knows that I love her and I love her spirit. And what is necessary for each of us is to deal with our own pain and have our own courage. If I can speak about the world I see and the fear and the pain that I feel without passing that pain to other people, I'm not asking anybody else to carry my cross for me. I will deal with it. I will give you enough of my pain to intoxicate you just a little bit, to inspire you with the possibilities of being awake. But I'm not going to give you enough to make you sick. That's for me to cover. I have the ability to do that. I will take responsibility for that. So I will be. The knot that I see, that I want to untie in my lifetime is the knot where gender and race connect. There are some very, very interesting things there that I think must be. Must be unwound for the human race to move to the next level. And black, white, civil rights, and male, female energies are, I think, at the core of this. We're reaching a transformation, transformative place where we're asking different questions about who we are as a people, who we are as human beings, who we are as men and women. What does it even mean to be black or white? What does it mean to be male or female? I think there is a vast amount of really valuable work to be done right there. So let's see. Tananarive, you know.

Yes.

Yeah. Just. If you. If you have any comments about that, there's something that I want to. To put up in chat. If you would talk to them for just a minute, that'd be great.

Hi, everybody. Oh, talking about. Well, anyway, let's talk about Lion's Blood because I see so much excitement in the chat about Lion's Blood. And we're not here to. To convince you to read Lion's Blood, but I see some of you have read it. I do think it is Steve's best work. And as a matter of fact, yesterday we did a Charleston Book Fair appearance, and I was asked which two books I would put in a time capsule or whatever, one by me and one by someone else. And I picked the civil rights memoir I co wrote with my late mother is my book Freedom in the Family. But Lion's Blood is the one I picked by Steve. So I think it does speak to integration, which is what we're all about here. And when we are afraid to look head on at our inner truth and afraid to share our inner truth, it really does hobble us. Even if it's not about writing. It could be in our relationships, it can be in our jobs when we have to sort of put that veil of. Of fake, I don't know, what do you call it? A false face on things. It keeps us from growing and sharing. Okay, is that good enough?

I think, yeah, it is absolutely good enough. Mary, unmute yourself, please, sweetheart. Mary? L. Can you unmute?

Okay. I'm trying.

Okay, good, good. I can hear you. What's up, sweetie?

When I'm, you know, a person of the 80s, the tech and everything, and one of the things we had in diversity training as a black woman woman, the consultant said in corporate, all women are white and all blacks are men. And so what was left out was the black woman. There was nobody speaking for us.

And that.

So hurtful.

It's not just hurtful, but I want you to take that pain. Are you a writer, Mary?

I. I believe I am.

Okay, so the question is, that is not a major part of. Of. Of your future goals. That's not something you're not trying to become a writer?

No, I would love. I would love to. I'm an encourager, so I would love to write and help people see the positives and work through the negatives and feel better. My ex used to say, it doesn't make any sense for anybody to wake up and be as happy as you are every day. I said, hey, it's your choice whether or not you want to get up on the wrong side of the House or not, I try to get people to see the positives, even in the negatives.

So let's take a look at that in relationship to lion's blood. So I have a tremendous amount of pain around some of those issues. If I resolve that pain now, I can tell a story about two young men trapped in a situation where they have to deal with the world. I have to integrate my feelings about, well, why are things this way? Why did Europe take Africa as opposed to the other way around, in a way that is universal, that is an expressive of universal human tendencies. If I believe in equality, if I believe in equality, then there isn't a lack on either side. It's just, this is what happens with human beings. So I had to deal with my stuff in order to write a book about a world viewed from a philosophical position where I'm not asking white people to feel guilty. No interest whatsoever in guilt. What I'm interested in is understanding and emotion and love, okay? Love and fear. I know what I'm dealing with. The fear is, you know, what if they want revenge? The fear is, what if we're awful for having done this? No, let's move out of that. And it's the same thing that you'd have to do if you were writing a book about relationships between men and women. How did we get to this point? What's going on? How can we move? Because if we understand what's going on, we understand how to move forward. So if you will resolve within yourself what you feel about that pain, you have to acknowledge the pain that you felt. But then ask yourself, how do we get to this point? So in one of the structures that I came up with years ago was for what I call social justice warriors, or people who want to be warriors for social justice, okay? And the way people have demonized that term makes me want to vomit. But what you do is the first step is to love yourself. That's the first step, to love yourself deeply, to know that you have done the very best you could with every moment, moment of your life. The second step is to love at least one other person. Loving at least one other person opens your heart. You begin to extend your own humanity to somebody else, at least one other person, okay? The third step is to understand history without guilt, blame, or shame. So ask yourself, how did we get to the point where men treat women the way they do, women treat men the way they do, black people treat white people the way they do, white people treat black people the way they do? How can. If you can get to the point where you can see how we got here. You're one of the people who can help us to a future in which the masculine and the feminine, the black and the white, all these different things, these dualities are being resolved. But you have to have the strength to do it. And that means looking within yourself, the shadow within your own heart and the.

Diff and how black people treat black people. I've been in the only in a lot of environments and I said, oh, I'm going to go into a black organization. And, you know, I thought it would be U Kumbaya and all of this.

I.

My rose colored glasses got smacked off my face so fast, I'm like, I had to go back to being the only so I could have some safety because it was dangerous in that organization.

That's right.

And the one thing I think about all the time, I said, why can't humans be as smart as animals? Okay. Because cats don't care what color fur you have. If you are a female, they're going to try to get some dogs don't care if you are a Great Dane or. Or a Chihuahua. The Great Dane's gonna try to get with the Chihuahua. That is that, you know, it's like, why can't.

And that Chihuahua is either a very lucky Chihuahua or a very unlucky one, depending on how you look at that. Exactly. Look, Mary, Mary, you're talking about the exact same questions that Octavia was asking. I'm telling you, these are the exact same questions. You're in exactly the same headspace, exactly the same heart space. Couldn't be better.

Wow.

This is why she studied animals, why she took a trip up the Amazon to study an animal ecosystem. She wanted to understand why are human beings this way? What are animals really like? How do I connect human behavior with animal behavior? How does this make sense? I could give you my answers, but no, you got to have your own answers. And what I suggest you do is what I would hope that you would do is to connect human behavior directly with animal behavior. We are not discontinuous, but we do time bind. We do think about what might happen tomorrow. We can. We can engage in abstract thought in different ways. How is it that our advantages in certain ways are disadvantages in others? What is tribalism? What is this? What is that? You have to figure this stuff out. And when you figured it out, let's talk. And thank you for bringing that clarity and that honesty into this discussion. This is a safe space for us to have this talk. Nobody's Going to attack you here. Not while I'm alive, period.

You put some Tai Chi on them.

No, I. Believe me, Tai Chi is what I'm playing. I play with Tai Chi. That is not what I have my rank in, okay? It's like, I had to be sure I was safe physically. And safety is not. I'm going to be secure. Safety is knowing that dying is okay if you're dying for something that you believe in because you have to die anyway. So warrior is actually looking for a good way to die. You know, threaten my family, oh, joy, I get to die today. You know, it's like.

Or you get to die or the other person gets.

No, no. Because the attitude is, I'm ready to die and I'm ready to take you with me. That's the attitude. That's the attitude that a mother has. If you threaten her child, whether she survives is irrelevant. Does the child survive? That position right there, that is the strongest position any human being can come from. You think Martin Luther King didn't know he was going to die? Gandhi didn't understand the cost. You think Christ didn't understand the cost? You got to be kidding. You upset the natural order. Your life is at risk. So I've made my peace with the fact that if I speak up about what I'm saying, somebody could take a shot at me one day. It could happen. And I'm a public enough person. People know where I'm going to be. But all I can do is at every moment of my life, be as alive and aware and loving as I can be and pass that to my children and give my wife every day all the love I have to give because one of those days will be my last. And I know that with every fiber of my being. And you cannot scare me by threatening me. All you can do is wake up the wolf inside me that has enjoyed practicing hurting people for 50 years. That part of me would love an opportunity to hurt somebody.

Oh, that's powerful.

I kid you not. You do not mess with my family. And you guys, my students who are walking this path because you trust me. You are my family. This is a lonely path. I am trying to create a tribe, okay? So I want to give each of you all you need to get out of the water. There are sharks in the water. Get on dry ground. Dry yourself off. Take a rest. Now turn around and throw life preservers to the ones who are down the water. Get you healthy. Then you can help other people get healthy. You understand what I'm saying?

Put your oxygen on fast, huh?

Put.

Put your oxygen mask on first.

That's exactly right. Put your oxygen masks on. That means getting out of pain to the zero point. Okay. It's all living things operate to move away from pain toward pleasure. Most people stop at the zero point. Well, I'm not hurt hurting anymore. They don't realize that there's joy beyond that. And when you do that, you're in the same situation as someone who is overweight by 100 pounds, loses 100 pounds, then goes off a diet and then blames the diet when they put the weight back on. No, you have to have a sustained ritual of action that every day of your life sets you up to have the best day possible. You understand what your long term goals are and then what the medium term goals are and what you need to do today to stay on that path. And the best way to do that is by following a role model. Each of you needs to follow a role model for a default Tananarivon. I are willing to be those role models for you because, yeah, of course there's a ton of things we have to do to improve and get better, but we genuinely love each other. We are genuinely having an adventure in our writing. I mean, life is really interesting right right now. We just got nominated for an NAACP Image award. I got nominated for a British science fiction award. We're about to start working on room on a new television series. You know, we may not be perfect, but perfect. It's not perfect. It's perfect.

Naacp. NAACP award again.

Again. Yes, that's true. That's true. It's not like I already have one of these. Let's do another one just like the other one. And if I lose, it really is so great just to be acknowledged. It's so great that people knew I was there. It's like, wow, thank you. I do the best I can every day. It's beautiful to get indications from people that, that they appreciate what you're doing. If you are willing, if you like this, if you want to be a part of this. First of all, I'm going to be here every Friday all this year until the end of 2023. I promise. I'm do move heaven and earth to be here and then we'll see after that. The more I can help people, the more I see people progressing. If this is useful, that I will keep doing this because I love this. You probably tell that. Either that or I'm like coked up like crazy, which I am not.

That's what you had and you called.

It your vitamin juice, huh?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's. There's nothing but good stuff in here.

This is. Yeah.

Mazel time.

But you know, one thing I wonder about, too, because I used to be a size 4, but I always saw myself as fat because I was heavier as a child. And I realized that we don't see with our eyes. We see through our eyes. Just like when you're driving a car, you have to shift your vision to see through your windshield or look at your windshield, like if a bug hits you. So I've been trying to work on my mindset so I can actually see correctly, if that makes sense.

Please change what you just said. I am working on my mindset. I have been working my mindset because what you just said, that was deep. That was great. That's not somebody who's trying. That's somebody who did it. That actually is a good perception. You need to journal that. You need to blog it. Start putting your thoughts out into the universe. Start blogging at least once a week. Do a major blog post. Just put it out there so that other people can start finding you. It takes time. It might take a year of weekly blog posts before you develop a readership. So get started. And that's also a record of what you're doing. You are thinking the right way. You're asking. As long as you're not asking other people to feel guilty about the things that have hurt you. As long as you're looking at this as, wow, this is what it is to be human. And it is not less than what animals are. If animals had more intelligence and could time it, they'd be behaving like us, you know, so it's. It's the downside. Yes. It was the Keeper that was nominated. The Keeper was nominated. Tanan Reeve. You took lead on that, so why don't you say a little something about that?

Oh. The Keeper is a graphic novel that originally was a screenplay. And we got very, very close to setting it up. I mean, I'll tell y'.

All.

Is this secret? I mean, this is not really a public conversation, but we really came close to setting it up with Jordan Peele and his company, but the studio said no. And this was back in 2019. So I was pretty heartbroken to go from, like, beyond my dreams coming true to, ah, nevermind in such a quick span of time. But then John Jennings, bless him, said, this will make a great graphic novel. And it came out last September, and I still kind of in shock that we were nominated for An NAACP Image Award. It was an accidental graphic novel. So very exciting. And it's about basically a young girl who's orphaned, living with her ailing grandmother. And the grandmother summons a creature to.

To take care of her and took lead on that project, which is why her name goes first on the book. And it's, it's terrific stuff. It is. We had a lot of fun doing it and I think it's, I think it's one of our better, better works. And it's fun to have that exploration over this year. There are going to be things happening with our family. Things happening. I'm in training to go to Manila in 2024 for a week long Filipino martial arts event. And there'll be a lot of career things and we're going to be sharing that with you. And if you find that the way we are discussing these things, the lives that we're living are inspirational to you and we're just a little bit further ahead of you on the path in these particular ways. We're sure that you're ahead of us in other ways. Maybe you'll be teaching us. You bring your reality in here and we'd love to hear it. Then we encourage you to join this community. You can join it by just showing up here, by putting your name on one of our lists so that we can communicate with you. We strongly encourage that you join the actual class so I can teach you Tai Chi, which allows me to sort of reach through the screen and actually work with your bodies. Because you got to work, work with your body. The level above think and grow rich, which encourages affirmations is to say those affirmations while you're in motion, while you're walking, for instance, that's do that. And then walk with power while you're chanting. Every day and every way I'm getting better or whatever it is you're doing, that becomes an incantation. That's a higher level. The Tai chi allows you to. It's not a brute force technique. There's a fantastic amount of technology. And if you go to firedance tai chi.com firedance tai chi.com you'll be able to join us. Now, an offer I wanted to make is that we also encourage, you know that the steps of doing this. You start with the five minute miracle, which is breathing diaphragmatically five times a day, once every three hours. You go from there to doing your morning ritual. You take one of those sessions and you expand it outwards where you include your goals. You do what Octavia did in that document. Except you also think, well, who are the people who could do these things? So you find role models who could easily accomplish the things that you want. And you visualize them. You feel your way into them. You, you're walking in their steps the same way children pretend to be mommy and daddy. That's why children learn so fast. They use their imaginations, step into it with their imagination. They speak their future into existence by acting as if they are these people. And that way they're saying, well, who would I have to become to have these goals? And they pretend to be those people. And that's how our neurology is set up things called mirror neurons that when you actually pretend physically to be the person to breathe the way they breathe, to move the way they move, then you're learning the fastest you can. And one of the things that you do after that is write in a journal. Now, I have written in a journal for years. I've got over a dozen, I've got dozens of journals that I wrote every week. I've been using one like this that Brendon Burchard creates. It's very, very nice. BRENDA burchard JOURNAL But I realized a week ago that one of the people who influenced me the most is a woman named Dawn Callan who taught a woman's self defense workshop called Awakening the Warrior within that I thought was so transformative and so powerful that I begged her to teach it to men. So it started just becoming the warrior workshop. And she did it for both men and women. And after she retired, she shared with me how she created these effects, how she did something so massively powerful. And we actually created a course called the Warrior's Journey. And part of that course was a journal. We actually created a journal called the warriors Journal. And because my emphasis has not been on that course for a while, I've let this be followed. These are printed on demand. And I realized that first of all, let me put this in the chat. But I realized that because we created it and because it's print on demand, I can literally work with the template to improve it and evolve it. So I'm starting to use this myself. And what I wanted to say is that if there's anybody there who is not in the fire dance program who joins the fire dance program by midnight tonight, I will send them a free copy of the journal. The rest of you, you might want to, we're going to keep the price so low. It's basically, I don't want to make any money on the Journal, there's no need for that. So we're going to keep that price very, very low. So. But if you are not currently a member, if you go to Firedance Tai Chi.com and join by midnight tonight, I will send you a free copy of the journal because we want you. And basically what this is is every single day you are asking yourself certain sets of questions. Every night you ask yourself other questions about the magic formula, the energy systems, the hero's journey, what it is that you need to take care of yourself in the primary goal areas. It is my expression with using life writing and fire dance and the warrior's journey to address what I think Brendon Burchard did really, really excellently with his journal. So that's all you have to do. I will find out, you know, who's signing up when I will personally buy you a copy and send it to you. So any comments, questions or requests before we close up today? Dennis Dickens said each of the new versions could follow the Think and Grow Rich format. You know, I will make sure the thinking. I will make sure that the things that are contained within the Think and Grow Rich format are integrated. Because, because the Think and Grow Rich. Think and Grow Rich was the first success book I ever read. And in many ways it's the grandfather of all of them. It is really massively powerful. And I will make sure. But we're going to be, we're going to be doing this. The first principle, all of that out of the way. The first principle of the I think it's 12 principles of thinker Rich is desire. Desire. So before you get to any of the other success principles, the question is, do you want it? How much do you want it? You need to get in touch with yourself. You need to get in touch with the part of you that is dying to change, that wants to change the world, that wants to give to the world, that wants to evolve, to have to be, to do. You have to get in touch with that bird desire. Now, the reason we don't touch that desire is because we don't have faith we can have it. So in order to let that desire out, you're going to have to touch the part of yourself that believes that it is possible for you to have to be, to do, to evolve. I'm asking you to trust me or find somebody you can trust. Just as long as you find somebody. Because the answers for how to get out of the box, written on the outside of the box. You're going to need teachers. What are we going to do tonight, brain? Yes. What are we going to do tonight, Brain? I'll tell you what I like to do. I like to. Before I go to sleep, I go into the hypnagogic state, which is that state between being asleep and being awake. And I will look back over my day and ask myself how I did. If everything was cool, I can just go to sleep. If I had a problem, problem, then I might bring in the role model who could solve that problem. If his writing would be Octavia or William Shakespeare or Larry Niven. If it's martial arts, it's Steve Muhammad or Don Callan or Chin Manching or Danny Innosanto, for God's sake. And if it's relationships, it'd be Steve Muhammad or let's see, who else, Dawn. Anyone who has. Who is further down the road in terms of evolution than me. And I would ask them, what should I do while I'm asleep? Help me come up with a solution. I will think about what the problem is as distinctly as possible. I need to know how to deal with my son, who needs to be communicated with. I need to lose weight. I need to finish, you know, I need to write, increase the amount I'm writing. I need to increase the amount I'm reading. I need to get out of this financial jam. Who do I know that could do that for whom? That problem would be child's play. And I ask them inside me to talk to me or to confer with the different parts of my personality so that in the morning I wake up with an answer. And the fact is, as far as I can remember right now, I don't think that's ever failed me. I'm trying to think maybe it has. But my honest estimation at this moment is every time I can think that I was able to define a problem and to define the person who was my internal mentor, who could solve that problem and ask them to come up with answers for me. I don't think I ever spent the night without waking up with an answer. Let me think about that. That's as far as far as I can see, that is the truth. Maybe the instruction on how to get out of the box on the outside because be part of the community is part of the instructions. That is certainly. Yeah, Wisdom is all is knowing that we can't handle everything ourselves and knowing who to go to for answers. That was Kurt that said that. Raise your hands, Kurt. That was a good one. You know, it's basically the answer is this. If you knew how to solve your problems, you already would have solved them. Them. If you have a problem that has been persistent, you might as well say, I don't know how to solve this. But simultaneously you have to have confidence that you have the ability to solve it. That I can learn. I can't do this, but I can learn. I'm not strong enough, but I can become strong. I'm not wise enough, but I can become wiser. I don't have those resources, but I can get them. Let me humble myself, empty my cup. Go to the teachers who have the answers and say, please, sir, teach me. In many ways. I had Larry Niven and Steve Muhammad, my teachers in writing and in martial arts, tell me that they had tried to teach many people. But the advantage I had was that I actually did what they said. I didn't fight with them. I didn't argue with them. I said, please, sir, teach me. And I did what they said. Find a mentor. You can trust me, Tananarive, or somebody else and humble yourself and take from them as they did with their teachers and their teachers did with their teachers. That is how we learn together. Then you will be able to turn around and teach us, inspire us. And I cannot wait for that day. Thank you. If there are no more comments, questions or requests, thank you so much. Unmute yourselves and say goodbye and wish everybody a happy weekend. Have a good week, folks.

Everybody.

See lots of wonderful things. I will see you next Friday. Raise your energy. Keep your dreams in your heart. Remember, the meaning of life is to be joyful and of service. And I'd like to close this as I usually do with the Sanskrit expression. It means that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Namaste.

Namaste.

Take care. See you next week.

This was awesome. Thank you so much.

You're so welcome. This is my joy. It is absolutely an honor for me to be here with you.

Me.

Take care. Bye bye.

Bye.

Bye.