Firedance 1-6-23

It.

Oh, boy. I'll tell you, trying to remember all the different steps I have to go through to set this up. Right. Hello, people. Ah, we'll get started in a few minutes. I'm opening things up just a little bit early. Just really appreciate people being here. Hello, Dennis.

Hello. We actually made it after the medical appointment.

Excellent.

Make me a co host, please.

Hello, co host? Yeah, I did make you co host. Oh, sorry. Yeah, it's okay. It's okay. And there's Eve Bola. I have not seen that name before.

Hello.

Hello.

Hang on, I'm not. I'm in my car.

Oh, well, that's a good place to be. It's just good to see your face.

Hello.

Hi.

How are you? And there's Mr. Johnson. This is great. Eve Bola. Did people used to tease you and call you by your first initial and last name?

No, actually.

That is so of a handle I have, and I didn't update it when I started the zoom call. My name is Emily.

Okay, Emily. Well, even so. Even so, Ebola would be the kind of teasing that somebody might very well practice. But. Oh, man. First of the new year, Is that right? Today is the first of the new year.

Wow.

Wow. So I think I've got everything. I think I've remembered everything. I've got the, the streaming, it recording, it got run of show. Okay. You know, it just gets a little bit more complicated every week as we're trying to find. Every week we're trying to get a little bit better. We're trying to understand a little bit better what it is that we can do to serve and have fun in the process. Very important. Gotta have fun. Ah, boy. Before we get started, does anything, anybody have anything they wanted to bring up really, really briefly? We got a couple minutes here before I'm going. I'm open to having a pre. Conversation conversation if that's useful. Consider that you're all in the green room.

Well, I've never been to one of these before, so I'm here to listen and learn.

And you're so welcome.

Maybe next time.

Absolutely. Just understand that the only reason we do this is that every week I figure that there's somebody who's going to come on here that I can do something positive for. Okay. That's it. If it happened to be you, I would be so happy. If you're just gonna, you know, watch and have fun while we're here, that's fantastic too. So just want you to understand what the purpose of this, of this is. And if there's Something I can do to benefit you. T Tenon Reef did you keep track of people coming in, please? Oh, she may have wandered away from the screen, so I will admit everybody. Boom. Okay. Because Tananari was a very, very busy lady, all sorts of things could have come up for her. I'm looking for some experienced Wilson Goodson experienced beta readers. Okay. So you want to join the life writing group and ask for beta readers. The life writing group on Facebook. Everything in, you know, fine.

And.

And make a. Make a. A request to exchange beta reading. There are some experienced writers on there, and so you know, you PM with them until you see you find someone who you consider to be compatible. One of the most important things you can do as a writer is to develop a circle of allies who can help each other. And if you're all at the same level, say none of you are. Are published yet, you can help each other as long as you're good readers. Okay. But what you want to do is slowly earn your way into the circle of the writers who are published. You do that and you're automatically going to level yourself up. That is how you level yourself up. When you get started in the martial arts, you're in the white belt class. What you want is to be invited into the green belt class. You'll get your butt kicked, but you're also going to get better. You're going to get better fast. So you know, the. The building up of your allies. Absolutely critical. And this is. It's so much fun to see all the people here. We're in the new year and things are going well. I'm so. I'm so grateful for this. And I'll. I'll talk more about that as we get going. T. Are you going to be able to show your lovely face on camera or are you being retiring today? Okay. T still isn't there. It's okay.

No, sorry, I was. I was muted. I was just waiting for 12 o' clock to pin our videos as the only two that would show.

Okay.

And you like people to greet each other at the beginning.

Tanarive is functioning not just as my co host, but as my producer and director. Director. Because I have a brain for that sort of thing, really. And that allows me to kind of stay in the flow so I can. I can be as great value as possible. So I will. You'll be hearing me yielding to my good lady wife on all of her recommendations because she's the other lobe of my brain.

Hey, Melana. Ray Johnson. I know Diane Jarnstone well she used to be one of my coaching clients and she's gone on to do really great things. Not because of me necessarily, but I like to think I helped a little bit.

You're part of her resource circle. Our behaviors results are our responsibility. But any great to have friends and coaches and people to take the journey with. Megan Lancaster saying hi there all you people. Hello, Maggie. How are you, sweetheart? Yanah Pearson. We're going to get started now. There's no reason not to. We are recording. We're getting started. Would everybody please unmute yourself yourself and say hi to the room? Yes. May you understate. VR hugs everybody. Hi there.

Thank you for.

Yeah, I mean you. It's important for us to raise our energy, you know, and this is something I do very deliberately. This is not accidental. I mean I have a similar energy level to this, although I don't always peak it. Right now I'm letting more of that energy out so that we can be together for this hour. That there's a pattern of change in life. Okay, I'm going to mute you. Go ahead. Go ahead and mute everybody.

I'll work on that.

Okay. That's okay. There's one of the patterns for. For personal change, actually it's a pattern for behavioral modification. I forget where I learned it. It's my book on finances, oddly enough. But the pattern goes like this. You identify the pattern you want to change in your life. That's one second thing is you identify the pattern you want to change it to. You raise your energy level, practice the new program, fail successfully and start over again. So let's go through that again. You identify the pattern you want to change. You identify the pattern you want to change it to raise your energy level, practice the new program, fail successfully and start over again. Now what does that mean? And this is really important. This was spontaneous. I did not had that plan for this. I have no notes for this. If you look at why most people get stalled, you will see and all these patterns that I offer you are ways to try to language something. It's almost like trying to describe a sandwich to you so that you can recognize a sandwich when you see it. It's not the same as eating the sandwich. This is what actually nourishes your body. But it can help you. We can describe the mountain of progress and growth.

So.

I'm going to introduce my wife and myself and then we will talk about why it is that that pattern can help us understand why so many people never reach their dreams. So my name is Steven Barnes and I'm the creator of the life writing system, the creator of Fire Dance. And this incredibly gorgeous, brilliant creature right next to me is my good lady wife who is a miracle on so many different levels. Would you please introduce yourself and make an opening? You know, just kind of say hi to the folks.

Hello everyone. A special hello to anyone who might be a first time attendee from my email list. In case any of you are out there, say hey in the chat. I am Tananaribdu. I am married to this spectacular man right here who has taught me a great deal, especially a lot too, sweetheart. The more I let him in, the more he teaches me. We teach each other. We are a married couple, so we're partners in terms of building our lives together, raising our son. We raised our.

My stepdaughter, Nikki, who you got her through college. You're the reason that she finished college.

And although we are, you know, we're writers and we're screenwriters, teachers, I teach at ucla. We also love to share what we have learned as soon as we learn it. So I'll put that in chat.

You put that in chat.

I'll put that in chat. Monoree list. Yes.

Okay, so with that brief introduction, let's go back to the question of the behavioral modification pattern. Identify the pattern you want to change. Now, a lot of people do this. They will say, you know, I don't want to do this anymore. I hate this in my life. I've got to change this. I don't like this. Okay, so a lot of people have the first step, the second step, identify what you want to change the pattern to. That is rarer. That is rarer. More people will describe what they do not want in their lives, then will tell you exactly what they do want. And that is an important distinction. What is wrong? What do you want? The third step is raise your energy level. Now, almost everybody falls down here. Fatigue makes cowards of us all. The reason you can't teach an old dog new tricks is because the old dog is tired. I mean that it really, it really is as simple as that. If you, if you have a. Remember an old fashioned record player. If you guys remember LPs, vinyl, yes, they remember LP. They remember. If you speed up the record, the needle will jump out of the groove if the groove isn't deep enough. Okay, so that's what you want in order to break a habit. You want to jump out of the neurological groove that you're in because you, anything that you do repeatedly, your nervous systems begin to groove to make it easier for you to do that again. So if you're doing the wrong thing repeatedly, it becomes easy to do the wrong thing. So in order to get a new habit pattern, every time you want to change the habit pattern, look at your energy level. If you think to yourself, I want to double my energy. That is one of the smartest goals you could have for this year. It's one of the smartest goals you can have, no matter what you're trying to accomplish. More energy and is always a positive thing as long as it doesn't become too. As long as it doesn't become more chaotic. Okay, so you definitely want your energy to be non chaotic. But everything we're talking about is about getting that energy under control. And it's not necessarily under control like a dog that does everything that you want them to do. It might be more like a kitty cat who wanders back and forth, but is there at meal times and jumps into your lap when you get busy and kind of snuggles in your legs when you're trying to sleep. It's there. And there is some connection with your behavior, but it's not a direct connection. But if you raise your energy level, you become more dynamic, more attractive, more courageous, more everything. So aiming at increasing your energy level is never a bad idea. Okay, so identify the pattern you want to change from. Identify what you want to change it.

To.

Raise your energy level. Fail successfully. Think about what this is saying.

Yeah, let's. Let's rest on that fail successfully piece and make sure people understand exactly what you mean by that.

Absolutely. When you set out to do something new in your life, especially if it's something that is transformative, you're going to fall down. You want to learn how to ride a bicycle, you're going to fall down. You want to learn how to walk, you're going to fall down. You know that we understand this for children, but we forget it for ourselves as adults. Anytime you set out to do something new, you're going to have problems at first. Not only that, but after Tenanarive and I have written millions of words of fiction, published millions of words of fiction. And as for me, I know that Tananarive has to go. How many times do you have to go over a page on average before it feels right to you and you can move on?

It's a lot of times, in some ways I wanna say never. But whether it's because my process, for those of you who haven't been here before, is to basically polish as I go, not Literally every sentence. But let's say write a couple paragraphs, write a page, then go back, find the best aspects of that page, and then polish everything up to that level. Like, what's the lazy language? What's the synonym that I can use that I haven't used six times already? What's the right amount of poeticism in the language? And that, to me is writing. That's the fun part for me is the polishing and the polishing and the polishing. So to answer your question, Steve, between that, while I'm actually sitting at my keyboard and at night listening to my voice Dream program, which is AI readers who will read the text to me from my Google Doc, I will literally go to sleep listening to what I wrote. And something like that jump out at me. I gotta change that tomorrow. That doesn't.

You know, I've got to start doing that, T. Because what you're doing is Emma.

Emma's the best reader. She's British.

Your hypnagogic state, you're using that state halfway between dream and awake. And you're also imprinting on yourself for the sleeping mind. So you're taking advantage of the fact that the smartest part of you is not your conscious mind.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's almost never. And I do. I feel it, but a dozen easily times, you know, that I will go over the same page and then I listen to the whole thing again. It's just a constant process of polishing for me.

And for me it is. I would often finish an entire story before I go back and look at it. But the tolerance for looking at a page that is filled with garbage, looking. The tolerance for looking at a page that's full of garbage is difficult. The voices in your head that say, I'm. This is garbage. It's not good enough. I've lost my talent. I've lost my skill. I can't do that. Those voices are in there. So what you really. What I really have to do is give myself permission to write crap in my first draft. That I actually have permission. It's actually my mission. I'm going to write a page of crap. And the idea is to shut down the voice that. That tries to stop me. Because it's that idea. If I write a mountain of crap, I keep digging because I know there's a pony in there somewhere. That. That there is a diamond in there somewhere. That's right. You shut down the inner editor, Dennis. That's exactly right. By telling the inner editor that it's okay, remember the part of you that creates is like a child. It's small, it's shy, it's very young. And the part of you that is an editor is older. It's been to college, okay? And that part of you looking at a child's story in your first draft is like a child's story. Story in that sense is always going to find flaws. And if that adult part of you is brutal to that child part of you, the child never gets to mature, never gets to create the first work which then can be worked on. You know, it's. It's. I look at that first draft is like dragging a chunk of rock up from the quarry, and everything after that is chipping away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. It's like, you know, let me get the draft and buy. And so. So that's why you have to give yourself. You have to fail successfully. That's what failing successfully means. You predict that if you take these new actions, the universe is going to react to you negatively 90% of the time, maybe 95% of the time. But it's okay once you realize that everything that you know in life, you went through a pattern of failing before you succeeded. It's just that somehow, kind of like childbirth, maybe. I've heard women tell me this. We don't remember what it cost us to get where we are. So we can't use the same lessons we use to get where we are to get where we're going. So this is about real talk. This is about Tanarive and I actually talking about what's going on in our lives and the real things that we're doing to try to move ourselves forward so we can bring as many of you along as possible because it's lonely out there. And the number of people who will tell you you should not try, you cannot try, you cannot succeed until all of society changes or whatever. It can weary you if you feel like you're too alone. So what we want to do is to give you one hour a week or 90 minutes a week in which you're going to be around people who believe you can do it. We're never going to give you an excuse to fail, ever. You can find plenty of people for that. You can have plenty of pity parties. Our position is that if you have the resources and capacity to get on this call, then there are people who have done more than you have done, with fewer resources than you have. And so there is no excuse. We're about no excuses. It's not that there are not Reasons, for God's sake. There is real oppression in the world along axes of. Of sexual orientation and race and gender. That stuff is real. But I want. But if you are willing to stand up anyway, if you're willing to take the blows, if you're willing to believe in yourself, you know, when all men doubt you, then you can be one of the people who helps the other members of your tribe survive. There are people right now who are thinking about ending their lives. And if you can connect with them and they believe you started from where they started and that you understand what. What they're going through, they are going to listen to you. They'll be so much more likely to listen to you. You can save lives if you'll just step out of your own smallness and decide, I'm going to win for my tribe. I'm going to win for my family. I'm going to win for the little boy, the little girl that I used to be. I failed at so many things, and in spite of. You see lots of martial arts certificates behind me. But. But every step I took along that path for the majority of it was just pain and a sense of shame and a sense of, I'm not good enough and there's something wrong with me. So I did not go as far as some of the people who I trained with. But it's okay. My journey was mine, and what I got from it was very genuine in that sense. So identify the pattern you want to change. Identify what you want to change it to raise your energy level. Fail successfully. Okay, let's say identify the pattern you want to change what you want to change it to raise your energy level. Fail success. Practice the new pattern. That's it. You know, it's. It's. You raise your energy level and you practice the new pattern. You practice the new thing that you want to do. You fail successfully, and that will happen a number of times before it catches and you repeat the pattern. You go back to number one after you fail. So most people never identify what they want. They don't raise their energy level. They just let themselves get tired. They don't deliberately practice the new program consciously. They don't define failure as success. Failure is just echolocation. It's just you send out a squeak, you know, the echo comes back to you. So you know what the space you're in looks like. You're. You're getting out of your head and into the world. You don't. People attach guilt to that. They will say, I'm not good enough. And all that stuff. No, no, it's just data. It's just information. It's nothing personal. And the last pro, last step is you repeat this pattern until you're successful. And that is why the sixth step of the life writing pattern goes to, you know, write one sentence a day, write one to four short stories a month, finish and submit, don't rewrite, accept your editorial request, read 10 times as much as you. As you write and Repeat this pattern 100 times, you build into your behavior the room that you need to fail and fail and fail until you figure it out. And you have faith that you can and will figure it out. You give yourself that room. Whatever. The average writer wrote something like 30 stories before they sold. When I was. When I was a kid, those were the approximate numbers that I saw. So I told myself I had until 100 numbers. I had to tell 100 stories. I gave myself three times as much room as average because I really wanted to succeed. And I made it to about number 26 before I started selling. And I've never looked back. So you have to give yourself room. So that's that. T. Well, one thing you can lean in.

I think one thing people sometimes forget is that small course corrections can make a huge difference. So if you are in the woods and you are following a trail and you veer off of that trail just by this much, you are not going to get to your original destination. A very small correction is what will take you to your destination. So the same is true with anything new that we're learning. You know, you might be doing everything in your fiction except X. There's this one piece that's missing, and you learn what that piece is by repetition. And having people who can read your.

Work and tell you the truth. Right there. That's it. Having people who read your work and.

Tell you the truth.

Yes.

So those people cannot be your parents. You often, your spouse may not be the right person. Someone who loves you unconditionally will not necessarily see the truth much.

I have been very. Tell you the truth, I've been very shy at times about showing you some of my work. Certainly in the early days.

Yeah, me too.

Because I have. I'm in awe. I'm slightly in awe of you as a writer of what you can do. I mean, you see the. The flaws in your work, like all artists do that. But what I look at is the things you can do that I can't do. I don't see. You know, it's like, God, how does she do that? How does she pull out. How does she get that reaction? So I had to have the feeling, if she sees something wrong in my writing, she's not going to love me less, is she? So that's my needy, wounded, abandoned child, you know? Will she love me less if I'm not as good a writer as she thinks I am?

Oh, my goodness, no. Absolutely. Well, this is just an example of a voice in your head.

Yes.

Signifying nothing.

You know, it's full of sound and fury.

There's no there there. It's. And we all have those voices. So that's why I think we are so quick to give up after a few failures, because it's as if the voice is being validated all along. Like, told you you weren't a writer. Told you you'd never be able to get published. Told you you'd never be able to find a relationship. You know that there's a part of you that is eager to sort of believe those voices because it means you can rest, you know, it means you can stop striving, basically. But if it's something you really, really want, if it's something that you would feel unfulfilled at the end of your life if you did not at least continue practicing this thing, I mean, we can always control how much we succeed in any endeavor. But if you would feel like you let yourself down because you stop trying, then that's the answer right there. You have to stop to keep trying.

Amen. And as you can tell, part of my success in life is that I have the right partner.

Well.

Let'S just be honest. It is. You know, when one of us is down, the other one is up. That is huge. We had. In order to get there, we had to trust our own intuition and instincts. We had to be the person who could be the mate of what we wanted. You know, the Entire Soulmate Class, www.SoulmateProcess.com is about being the person who could be with the person. What is it that you desire? What is the match for that person? And that defines the direction that you need to go in in order to become who you really wanted to be in life. Because the person, if there's a particular person you're interested in, it's not that you're going to get that person, but you're going to get someone like that person. You're going to get someone with those same attributes or as close to their perfection as you are to yours, assuming that you have the same basic amount of potential, you're heading in the same direction. At the same speed, with the same values. And that's to a huge degree what a relationship is. Oh, we're both going in the same direction. Would you like to travel together? You know, I'll make the journey better. You know, we can sing together. It's going to be hard. Life is hard. But you want to have somebody who works hard and takes a certain amount of joy in it. Tananari has so much joy. You should have seen her at Christmas time, the way she turned this house into a home, into a celebration. And every day, and I'm worried about this, about that, and every day she's living in the joy. And dear God, you know, that is.

I like joy.

Yes, you do. You really do.

Well, you know, the fact is there's enough of the other stuff in life. There's enough grief in life, you know, and sometimes we create grief for ourselves. So a lot of what Steve is teaching me and teaches in these meetings, the whole fire dance philosophy, is about finding joy on the path. Whether it's the joy of a relationship, the joy within your body, the joy within your. Your writing. It's like, you know, that's the thing that we can control. We can't control what pandemics. We can't control who's in the White House or isn't in the White House sometimes. But we can control our joy.

And we. One of the things we use, we talk about the dog and the cat. The dog is the stuff that you can control directly. The cat, cat is the indirect effects, the stochastic effects that you want. The acceptance of a story, the appearance of a lover, the victory in an athletic contest. All you can control is how good you were. You can't control what you're going to be running into. So this is why the morning rituals are so important that what we're asking you to do is to define your goals, what you want to do for 2023, and make sure you have at least three major arenas. What are your goals for your body? What is your goal for your emotions in relationship? What is your goal for your career? Now, if you, let's say you want to change careers and get into something artistic or you have an artistic career in addition to the way you earn your money, then you might have four goals. You know, that might be, you know, body, health and fitness, heart, your emotional relationship with yourself and others, your artistic expression and your bank, whatever it is you're doing to make money. So you might have four different goals. Then what you do is you figure out what is the Minimum, you need to do every day to move those goals forward, such that in a year you would have made serious progress, you know, 1% progress per week. Then what you do is you break that down so that you can ask yourself, what if I had, if I could squeeze down everything I'm doing to get done by one, you know, or through by two or three by three, or out the door by four, or alive by five or whatever it is. But you're trying to, you're trying to get the smallest amount of time, preferably, you know, if you had to get it done by one. What is the, you apply the Pareto principle. What is the 20% of your work that gets 80% of the results thinking that way. And then you ask, what is the 20% of the 20%? What's the 20% of the 20% of the 20%, and you will eventually get down to, what can I do in one minute to move myself forward? Once you found that you've got your five minute miracle, and let's say that it's in all these different things is knowing where I'm going, direction, and then dealing with stress. Because in life they pay for how much stress you can take. And you know, it is not that which does not kill me makes me stronger. That is not the truth. What is the truth is that which does not kill me that is within my system's capacity to positively adjust to it makes me stronger. You know, if you, if you do give your muscles too much stress, they'll just break down. You have to give your muscles stress and then rest and proper nutrition. If you do that right, you get stronger and stronger and stronger. If you don't get enough rest, if you don't get enough exercise, if you don't eat properly, your body breaks down. The same thing is true with your spirit. So what, what we start with is the five minute miracle. Five times a day, once every three hours at the minimum, you stop and do 60 seconds of deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing. Okay, Once you have integrated that pattern into your life, I can help you. Once you can actually, you can just commit to that pattern and I can help you, because then you can say, oh, darn, I'm not doing it. What kind of resources can I use? So you start right there. But then once you've got that, the next step is you take that first minute and you begin to expand that out. You spend more time there. And what we suggest is you use Tai Chi because it is, well, it is the single most powerful and popular transformative body, mind exercise in the world done by something like 10% of the entire world's population. 20% of the entire world's population, it's estimated. Does this one thing. So there's a gigantic amount of science around it, and there's a huge amount of research about what it does. It's powerful stuff. And while you're doing it, you visualize, you chant. You flood yourself with positive emotions in a very specific pattern. Or you can do it more loosey goosey. But the proof is in the pudding. Once you start realizing that your ability to accomplish in life is based on how much of your physical energy you can put behind your emotional desires, your hungers, and then coordinate with a mind that knows where you want to go and knows what you want to accomplish and has role models of the kind of people who can get there in one minute. You can change your body, you can change your breathing. You can visualize the role model. If I've got a problem with the story, I might spend a minute visualizing Octavia Butler. What would Octavia say about this problem? And she'd be sitting out there laughing at me. Oh, Steve, you've got this. You know you did. Will you stop it? It's not that big a problem. You've solved bigger problems than this before. Try this, try this, try this, try this. My. And it doesn't matter whether we think about that as if it is literally true. You know, the Akashic records are making or connecting with the ancestral plane. But we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, of our friends. Those people are still with us as long as we keep them alive in our hearts. So why not deliberately bring the people into our lives that we love and ask them. Ask their ghosts. Ask our images of them. In. In Napoleon Hill's book Think and Grow Rich, he talks about the internal community. He would have Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson and. And Thomas Edison and people like this in his room in a mental boardroom with him sitting around a table, and he would have them talk about life, and he would put out questions to them and imagine their answers, imagine their conversation. That's very similar to the parts party from Ericksonian hypnosis where you drop somebody into a deep hypnotic trance and you have different aspects of their personality interacting with each other. Love, Meet fear. You find out both of you are trying to do what's best for me. Fear. You're just trying to keep me safe. Is there another way that you can keep me safe? It will allow me to also find love. It will also Allow me to take these risks. Independence, meet commitment. Independence is trying to keep me safe and allow me to be myself. But intimacy is where I get a lot of the joy in life. Tananarive, tell these people about Lobo, would you? T. Lobo.

Okay. Well, when Steve and I first got married, this imaginary character he called Lobo kept entering conversation. Lobo was the lone wolf, and he used to have a little stuffed wolf. As a matter of fact, that was a physical representation. Oh, you still have it there, do you?

I still have my.

Yeah. Yes. And I forget what your little catchphrase was. Lobo walks alone because he was pretending to struggle with commitment. I mean, it wasn't probably entirely pretending. He was just. Steve is just more candid than many people are. But in the case.

It was scary. Sweetheart, real love is scary. And I told you when you got back from Atlanta, my life doesn't work without you anymore. A real relationship, you're leaning on each other. You're surrendering to it.

So, yeah, it is scary. It is scary.

It was terrifying.

Me, I didn't need a Lobo. But, you know, that's just.

No, but what. What she did was she just said, I'm Lobo.

Yeah.

In other words, she was the mate that Lobo was looking for.

Hey, listen, I always had, like, we've lived many places, and until recently, I always had sort of my getaway hotel scoped out, just in case. I've always wanted to stay at that motel, that hotel.

So.

Yeah, that devil tree right there. That's the one. No, but never have had to use it. So it's an escape hatch, like an imaginary escape hatch. And never even came close to wanting to. To use it.

And what I can tell you is that, you know, this is no dishonor to the other women who I loved in my life. I was doing the best I could at every step, and I just was dealing with my stuff like we were all dealing with our stuff. And for the first time in my life, I know what being mated is. For the first time in my life, I'm not looking for an escape hatch. I'm not. There's no. If this happens, I'm out the door. If this. If it. No, no, no. Tanada Reeve is it. This is my relationship. This is my life. And she's more than my wife in that sense. And she factors into every decision I make because I want every day with her, every hour with her to be as good as it can, because I'm very aware of the fact that we don't have each other forever. One of these days I'm going to look over and she's not there anymore. She's going to look over and I'm not there. So what I want is for it to be as good as it possibly can every day. And one of the commitments I had is I don't want her to ever regret the decision she made to trust me, not once. If I can do that, I have succeeded as a husband. Anyway, so we talk about that morning ritual, starting with just five minutes. Adam Crafter said, have a great day, y'. All. If you have to take off, it's great to see. I'm glad that you can come by. If you create the morning ritual and then you have your five minute miracle, those two things you can spend from 10 to 20 minutes moving, visualizing, so forth, and then your five minute miracle every day. All you have to do is give yourself either a check mark on a calendar or rate yourself from 0 to 9 or 0 to 5 in each of the categories and make sure that you don't have a zero on any day. That if you can get how many days in a row can you get without breaking the chain? Then if, let's say you can get a whole week done where you're doing your five minute miracle and you're doing your morning ritual, notice at the end of that week how much work you got done. And what I'm going to tell you right now is I already know how much work you got done. You got about twice as much work done. And furthermore, it was less stressful. You had more fun doing it. You enjoyed doing it. You're taking steps towards where you want to be. And all you have to. You don't have to look up five years later and say, oh, my God, how come I haven't accomplished anything? At the end of the week, you can look and you can see whether or not you're heading where you want to go. And if you're not heading where you want to go, it's just information. Stop using guilt, shame, blame. No guilt. Blame or shame. That is how your ego slows you down by getting you guilty about the things you didn't do. It's just like, this is my first draft. It's terrible. I guess I'm not going to go to the second page. Okay. It's the I made a mistake. I'm terrible. I'm not worth trying. Oh, God, guilt. I hate myself now. You finished that court of Haagen Dazs, you know, and the weekend is gone. When you were promising yourself that you were going to get something done. When you look at your failures as information, when you understand that you and everybody else are doing the best you can with the resources you have, and you can forgive yourself that it's just data. It's like, oh, I fell off. I fell off because I spent time so, you know, scanning social networks rather than doing my work. How can I be better at that? And you can. You. You can Google how do I spend less time on social networks? You know, or you could ask me. You could. You could bring this into the space here. But energy is, you know, we can talk about energy sometime, but one of the forms of energy is just being able to sense your own energy more. And that's what qigong and Tai chi is. Qigong is the energy system inside Tai Chi. So if you were in a. If you were in a wheelchair, you could do qigong exercises which would get you in touch with your subtle energy, which would then allow you to live with love and forgiveness, forgiving your body that has done the best it could at every step. And by forgiving your body, if it's an old horse, you can still ride that horse with joy. That horse, that old horse still wants to ride with you. It still wants to know that you love it. And by taking that old horse out of the garage and going for a walk instead of a run like you used to, the horse gets stronger and will give you the power that it can give you. Your body will give you what it can if you will engage with it and forgive it for not being a swimsuit model. Okay, so the tai chi, the qigong exercise, and I like doing this every week. People had a good time with that last time, so let's do this again today. And what I want to do is I will move back here. And the most basic exercise is probably the chee ball, because I will have students sit in a horse stance. But you can sit at your desk. It's okay. Rub the hands together until the hands get hot. Shake the fingers out. Now you get your hands close enough together that the heat radiating from my left hand is felt in my right hand and the heat radiating from my right hand is felt in my left hand. If I let me get relaxed here, I'm not going to fake you out. Okay, now I can feel the warmth. Need a little more. I have to relax. There it is. I can feel the warm air and the tingle. If I can relax more, vascularity increases. The capillary. The capillary action increases. I can feel the warmth, it's like a. Feels like spider webs or little electric lines connecting my. Oh, I can feel that now. I can feel that ball of chi, a ball of warm air. Inhale through my nose. Do the diaphragmatic breathing, breathing low. So I'm doing two things at the same time. I'm relaxing. I can also hold my hands like this. Centering. Let my head be held as if by a string from above so my body can relax. I'm resting my weight on my bones rather than on my muscles, so I can relax more. The more I relax, the more I can feel that warmth.

It.

Let me squeeze that back down, take that warmth, put it into my heart, bring that warmth down to the very core of my being, and then let it rise back up through my heart, through my mind. Now at the top of my head, connecting me to the universe. I stand here. I'm independent, but I'm also part of the universe. This space is mine. No one has the right to come into this space without my permission. It is mine. The span of my arms, my wingspan. Within this space, I need to live with love, power, and integrity. The meaning of life is to be joyful and of service. That feeling that you create in qigong, you then can take into other aspects of your life that sense of being centered, simultaneously powerful. So before we go on, any comments, questions, or requests about anything, because we have some student stuff today that I wanted to. I wanted to do concerning qigong. A couple of times you mentioned walking circles. I don't recall that exercise. Did I miss it? Walking circles is just literally walking in a circle around the room, paying attention to every half inch of your feet against the ground. As your foot. As you roll the foot, heel to toe, you're walking very softly, slowly, gently, paying attention to every breath, every inch of your foot against the ground. You're turning a movement into a meditation. And you take the same energy that you give that you get during the chi ball exercise. And you're looking for that sense of warmth, relaxation, and centeredness in motion. That is an amazing feeling, and it's something that anybody can do. How long would I hold that early Qi ball exercise to start? Yeah, one minute is enough. If you do it for one minute five times a day, that is better than doing it five minutes all at one time. For a lot of different reasons. But one of the reasons, neurologically, it's called neurosynaptic facilitation, that any activity, if you have 20 minutes, if you have an hour to practice piano, you're going to accelerate by doing five 12 minute sessions or six 10 minute sessions more than if you spend one hour for a variety of reasons. So holding a chi ball for 60 seconds five times a day is fantastic for you. You'll find yourself just feeling more relaxed all day long and that in five minutes a day. You also want to study the diaphragmatic breathing. You go on YouTube and you find, you know, you look up diaphragmatic breathing and you'll find a bunch of videos on it. It's just when you inhale, your belly gets bigger. When you exhale, your belly contracts. It's as simple as that. You lay on your back, you put a book on your belly, and you watch it rise when you inhale and fall when you exhale. If you will do that. Yeah, Buddha belly. That's exactly right. It's exactly right. If you will do that five times a day, you can literally rewire your nervous system so that stress produces excellence. It's bizarre. And you have to. You have to actually practice it. Order to experience can seem like nonsense. Okay, so, all right, so push back inside. The warmth is different from the tingling. Tingling for me means the warmth is building, charging, changing, or being pushed back inside or to someone else. You know something, you have to learn your own internal language. Any internal language that you use, it helps you to understand it and work with it is fine by me. It's just, you know, we can go deeper into this if we. One of these days, we might do one class just on qigong, which is just powerful, powerful stuff. But we had, let me see, we had a couple of students who had questions. The first of them was Melinda Crawford. Is Melinda Crawford here?

I'm here.

You're here. Okay. Would you get on screen, please, Tananari, would you help facilitate that? Hello, Melinda. You look great. Look at that. Look at that pretty lady. Okay, so. And once again, I have your permission to read what you wrote to me. Excellent. Excellent, excellent. So this is. This is how we actually move together, people. We're willing to, when we're willing to write, roll over just a little bit, we start learning. Where is it safe to expose your vulnerability? This, my commitment here is that this is a 100% safe space that we believe in each other here. We support each other here, period. Anyone who cannot play by those rules is not welcome here. And I will enforce that, you understand? Because what Melina has done is she has allowed me to share with you her dreams. So here's what she said. My top 10 things I want to Manifest and change to be genuinely happy and fulfilled as a woman, mother, and one day a wife and know God intimately. I want to know what my chop wood carry water daily work is. So let's take these one at a time and put them into a morning ritual. So being genuinely happy, you have control over that. And so you control your emotions by what you focus on. The way you're thinking, the words that you use to represent your reality, and the way you use your body. So if during your morning ritual, that 10, 20 minutes, you're controlling those things, and also five times a day, you're taking your 60 second breathing break and you're shifting your attention, you're literally thinking about something that makes you happy. Start developing. When I first learned this, my coach for this discovered that anytime I thought about my daughter Nikki, I got happy. So I can literally tap that every time the same way that you have memories and every time you think about it, you feel bad. The same thing is true about positive memories. So start developing a library of positive memories because this will have a snowball effect. So five times a day you're thinking. And if you want your connection to God intimately, then the beautiful thing is that you're made of his substance. That if God is everything, you are made of that substance. So getting, getting deep enough into the question, who are you? Who is Melina? Is also bringing you closer to God. It's just like if you connected with the embryo, you were in your mother's room. From your frame of reference, I would assume you believe that that soul had recently arrived from heaven. So that by getting in touch with that deep self, you're getting in touch with the divine. So the path that you want to know God is to know the only one of his works that you have an intimate daily connection with, which is your own soul, your own being. You can know God, in other words, by knowing yourself and anything inside you that is saying, I am corrupt, I'm this, I'm this. That's your pretender voice. But you go is directly for the part of you that is connected to the universe. And any atheists out there just connect to the universe. You're made of the same substance of the stars. It doesn't matter in that sense how you represent this, as long as you understand that the universe is a living thing that you're a part of and that when you know yourself, you're knowing the source of your power. Does that make sense, Melinda?

Very much so.

So five times a day I want you to get in touch with your God, your goddess nature, your God self, your, your. Your Christ nature through things that make you happy and feel fulfilled. And what happens is you're going to be filled as a human being. And that makes you fulfilled as a woman because a woman is just one half of the human equation. And as a mother, because having children is one of the things that human beings do. It's. This is all natural stuff that chop would carry water in that sense is the daily actions you take to feel loving and connected to the world. Does that make sense?

Yes.

All right, excellent. And if you have any questions, you know how to reach me. And I will go as deep into this as necessary. And once again, thank you so much for giving me a chance to work with you like this. This is, this is great. This is what I, this is what I love doing. And for the record, I charge a thousand dollars an hour for this. But I don't like doing that because the people who can afford to pay me a thousand dollars an hour are not necessarily the people I want to help the most. The people I want to help the most are the people who come in the middle of the week like this. Because you guys are like me. You don't necessarily have a thousand dollars to invest in somebody. But by helping you in this context, I help everybody else on the call. And then you can take this into your world and help other people. And now we're changing the world together. And that's. Thank you. Anyway, second thing. To be a successful best selling novelist with a legacy of being a legendary storyteller of my generation. Okay, that's the cat. You can't control that. You can't control other people feel about you, but you can't control your work. That's the dog. So the question is, what can you do today and every day to be the best writer you can be in this period of constant growth? So it's going to be, you know, a sentence a day, one to four short stories a month. Unless you're already a. Published. Are you already published?

My first book, yeah.

Your first book. Great. So you're on the, you're on the novel thing. Stories. Then short stories would be how you would get better. Tonight, reviewer about to say something. I can hear you.

T. I was just saying.

Woo. So if you want to get better, then you write novels and short stories. Short stories are where you get better. Novels are where you get paid.

Okay.

Stories are going to school. You know, you can try different things, you can experiment, you can have fun and make sure to read 10 times as much as you write and keep aiming at being more and more honest, more and more honest in your stories, you can run out. Don't try to be clever. You can run out of clever, but you could never run out of the truth. Okay? Okay. So to finish a great, and I mean great, novel this year, 2023, and get a movie made in my first novel, Two Separate Goals. So the. It will be a great novel. If it's the best novel you've ever done, the most honest novel you've ever done, the one that if it. If it's supposed to be sexy, you're turning yourself on. If it's funny, you're making yourself laugh. If it's horror, you're hiding under the covers while you type. That's one thing. Getting a movie made in my first novel will require that you begin to meet people who have taken the actions that move them into that position. And there are several different ways that they can do that, but there is. That's. That. That's a real cat right there. Being able to get your book to someone who has knowledge of the people on the inside, who will then represent your book in a way that the people on the inside can think, oh, if we put a dollar here, we might be able to get $10 back. Because they're not going to think of a dollar for a dollar. That's ridiculous. Nor are they going to think a dollar for two dollars. What they're going to look for is the home run. So finding the right people to share your vision, who can then give that vision to the money people, who can then get it done, that is the cat. What you can do is network. You can keep your eyes on the prize. You can write books that you think, this would make an excellent movie. You've got a book already there. You can find. You could write a script from it. You could write. You could pull out an incident from it and do a short film, which would be a proof of concept, put it up on YouTube, get in touch with the Writers Guild of America and ask for. For the names of agencies that will look at unproduced scripts and new script writers. You can get in touch with those agencies or producers who made a movie. You can look at the movies that you like. I like to be that movie. Who made that movie. Who are the producers, who are the actors, who's the director? Get in touch with them, find out who their people are. In other words, the part of you that creates is the creative part. The other part of you is the business part. They're not the same parts. Okay, so what you, what you do is focus on doing the very best work that you can. Make sure to feed that child. Part of you and the adult part of you is looking at the social webs, playing games, developing strategies, being really calculating, strategic, and a little cold blooded. How do I move to this position? How do I get. What you want to do is get to a position where you can whisper in the ear of somebody who can get your thing done. Who are those people? Do your work, take care of, walk the dog, and then maybe one day you'll be able to play with the cat. Okay, that makes sense.

Yes. Thank you.

So every day. What's that? In your ritual, I would bring into my ritual, who is the mentor, who you admire, who has had the kind of success that you want? Let's say it's Octavia, although she, she did not have that success during her lifetime. So you might want to look into Toni Morrison. You might want to look into Donnatarey of do.

Okay.

You know, there are many different things that you could look at it make sure you. You want to make sure that one of your allies is someone who is on the other side of the problem you have. That person can, will be able to tell you, don't worry. I know that you're feeling tired. I know that you're feeling discouraged. Why don't you try this? Why don't you just rest right now and you hit it again tomorrow. And you know, this is how you can interpret this. You want someone so you can study that someone and see how they survived, how they did it. I have at least three different novelists or fiction people like I mentioned, Octavia Butler, Larry Nevitt and William Shakespeare. If I needed additional people, I would bring additional people in. I want to make sure that when I'm on this journey, I am not alone. Because this is scary and it is lonely and the voices in my head can be demons. So I want to make sure those demons are rowing the boat for me. I can actually turn my demons into puppies if I find out what the fear is they're addressing and make sure that they've got an alternate way of addressing the fear. So in your morning ritual that 10 to 20 minutes, one of the things you're doing is you're going to say affirmations. You know, I've got this. You know, I have. I be. I do. I have. You know, I am so grateful for my movie this year. I'm so grateful that I finished 12. Finishing 12, 12 stories. I'm so grateful for the new book. That is the best book I've ever written. You, you step into the space. You what Tanari calls throwing your hat over the fence. Would you say a little bit about that?

Yeah, that is just notion that you sort of have to fake it till you make it is the best way to put it. Throwing your hat over the fence and then figuring out how to climb over and get it is really the key to all growth.

Frankly. It's just every kid does. Every kid does it when he puts on daddy's pants and walks around. You're pretending. Look at me. I'm pretending. We learn fastest when we're pretending. So I want you to right now, if you had a best selling novel and a movie that was about to open up, I want you to show me how you would sit in that chair. We are interviewing Melina Crawford, author of the best selling novel the Melina Crawford, the Molina Crawford. And she is going to share some of her secrets for not just success, but beauty and happiness. Be that woman, okay? For five minutes a day, during your five minute miracle, be that woman. Just, you know, walk the way she walks, the face, the voice. And one of the things I can tell you, you be that woman. You're going to attract a man who is looking for that kind of woman. You know, he's gonna have to be strong and confident because he's going to see a lioness, a partner, A partner and his. And the thing is, a lion wants a lioness. You don't want somebody who's going to be scared of you. You want someone who is going to relish you, who is going to feel like you are everything he's been looking for. And every time he thinks about you, he melts a little bit inside. Right, Exactly. There you go.

Exactly.

So be that woman, okay? To manifest a soulmate love and do great work with him. We've already covered that. By being in your morning ritual, walking, talking, moving as if you were that woman, you're also thinking, well, what is it that woman would do today? She's going to write this, she's going to do this, and then she's going to take some time off. Can she get all of her basic work done by one o'? Clock? Spend the rest of the day at the spa? Of course she could. And that's the way you're moving yourself. You believe in yourself now and start stepping into the life that would give you the results. And if you don't get that and just be honest for a second, if you don't get the best selling book because that's the cat. If you don't get the movie. You've had a wonderful ride every day. You've had fun, you've walked with power. You know, you are that person.

You are.

This is something we just talked about in our most recent podcast at Life Writing Podcast, which is this idea that, you know, Octavia Butler wrote all kinds of affirmations. She's quite famous for her affirmations and her goal to be a New York Times bestselling writer. But she did not live to see that goal. So I use that as an illustration that sometimes we're afraid to write down and proclaim these goals because they sound so grandiose. We feel ridiculous. Right? But it was in proclaiming those so called ridiculous goals that Octavia turned herself into Octavia Butler. Regardless of whether she lived to see herself as a New York Times bestselling writer. That turned out to be too small a goal in some ways. The real goal was that she was going to be Octavia Dan Butler. Right?

That's right. She became Saint Octavia. You know, I did not see that coming. Octavia was just my friend and my big sister. You know, we just hung out. You know, I had no idea that the legitimate. She was the most obsessed artist I've ever known who was still sane. She was sane, but she was also obsessed. She walked that edge. But she stayed, she, she did stay with us and she stayed within that and that enabled her to become what she became. I, I wish that she had lived longer and seen more. But you know something? Not everyone who changes the world also gets to live to see the change. That is simply the truth. You, Moses, did not always enter the promised land to make lifelong friendships and have so much fun. Enjoy with my new friends, people I love and share my love with there. Call your friends every week, at least one of your friends, you know, and if you really want to do that, if you've got 10 friends, rotate between them a couple times a week. You call one of those friends and you, you laugh together, you cry together, you share yourself. It takes work to keep a friendship alive.

So like Vietnam with them at the end of the month, I'm going to Vietnam with them.

Fantastic. So you have those things. You, you, you've got group rituals and your task, your assignment is going to be to have as much fun, fun as possible and to help them have as much fun as possible and to have real experiences and memories that you could build a lifetime of friendship on that you can laugh about when your old lady's in the home, get into some mischief, too. Mischief is fun. Make my life an adventure. Be known as the woman who made life an adventure that everyone got to join her on. You know something? When you are living your life to become the person that you. You were supposed to be, that's an adventure. And that person goes all over the world and touches people's hearts all over the world. And that person is extraordinary. And everybody will want to know, how does she walk? Who is that? When you walk into a room, your response? Some people kind of say, here I am. I've heard that a better thing is, there you are. You know that that interest in what's happening in other people's lives, there you are. Will be met by their reaction of who is she? Or there she is. When you do that and you have more of that, you know, who are you? And you're fascinated by that person. And you have more of that interest and aliveness than anyone else in the room. You become the leader in that room. All you have to do is care about other people so much that you're not. You don't. You're just present. You don't have an agenda other than making sure that they're happy, making sure this person happy. How are you? What do you mean? What's going that in your way? Of course, I'm kind of being hyper about it. You become the one that everybody in the room falls in love with because you make them feel good. One of my things was I always wanted people to feel better walking away from me than they felt walking toward me. You know, just like I want to be somebody who helps them remember how beautiful they are and they feel when. If I talk to Steve, he will remind me of how beautiful I am, how powerful I am. Because that's all I let myself see in people. And I see, because I see anger is fear. Even people who dislike me and are angry, I ask myself, what are they afraid of? I try to see their humanity, and it does not weaken me as a person. Primarily, my primary identity in terms of interpersonal interactions is I'm a communicator and a healer. But I'm also a martial artist. I always protect myself. So if you have. You want to have a wonderful open heart, make sure that on another level, you're a lioness capable of protecting that innocent cub part of you that wants to love and play with them. That's the innocent part of you. Make sure that mommy lioness is watching carefully. Mommy does not let anybody play with her cub, unless that person comes correct. And mommy can just keep a sleepy eye. But just watch a lion at the zoo watching their cubs, they have a sleepy eye. Unless somebody gets too close, then they better come correct. So stay safe, because if you don't protect yourself, your heart will begin to armor itself in life. You can either have a shell or a spine. So remember in your morning ritual that one of the people who you represent among your mentors has the power to keep you safe is a lioness of a woman or a man, somebody to protect you. Nothing wrong. I have, I think, two or three female role models in the mix to make keep me anchored to the feminine energy. Octavia is one of those. My mom is there some of the time and a lady named Dawn Callan, who is a human dynamo is a third. Keeps me in touch with the feminine energy is also a protective energy. Nothing is stronger than a woman protecting her child. I would rather fight a black belt than the average woman protecting her child any day. Any day. So you remember, you've got that you are not harmless. You are a female of the species that are the alpha predators on the planet. Understand the implications of that. Own it so you can keep your heart safe. So now you can have a loving heart and you've got the power. And all the people who are stuck up in their heads or have open hearts, but no power will be hypnotized by you. And if you can walk with integrity every day, they will want to walk with integrity too. And they will ask you how you do it. You'll be able to tell them simply by teaching them how to shift themselves from a disempowered state to an empowered state. And you're doing that five times a day in a five minute miracle in every morning with your morning ritual, make enough money to be financially independent so I can leave the federal government, help my mom and live fully, do my life's work. This is the only one that I have a criticism about. Money does not come in denominations of independent. It comes in specific dominations. You find out how much money it will take you and that's what you're doing. It is reasonable for you to, you know, if you say it's reasonable to increase your, your capacity in almost any arena by 1% per week just by studying for an hour a week. Okay, so if you are, if you currently have, you know, $25,000 in the bank, what you want is a net worth of 100,000, which means you have to clear up your finances, pay back your bills, and build a nest egg of $100,000. Then say the numbers. One part of your mind just focuses on the fun you want to have. The other part of your mind crunches numbers. So left brain, right brain, right brain is just kind of, hey, it's fun. We're all here together. Maui. And so the left brain is saying, that's going to cost $5,000. Where is it coming from? So you make sure that you are seeing the beautiful things, but also crunching the numbers. There's one part of you and so the. The child, you know, you could see it this way. The child gets to have the fun. The adult part of you crunches the numbers. Okay? So make sure that there's a part of you that handles money and does money that's also part of your morning ritual. You visualize her every morning or him. What would you say to me? You know, what should I do today? How should I do this? But here's the whole thing. If you will just do the five minute miracle in the morning ritual, if you'll just commit to those two things, all you have to do is look back over it. Did you do it? Didn't you do it? Take a look at what you did or didn't accomplish that week, and I guarantee you, you will see that the days and the weeks when you did what you did that morning ritual, you got more done and had more fun under less stress. I 100% promise you, furthermore, if you will try this for 30 days and you have not gotten that result, I'll give you $100. You do this for 30 days and you actually keep track and you come back and you tell us, I am willing to stand with the best part of you. You tell me you come back on like you do. You come back on every week for a month. If at the end of a month and you've done a month and you have not gotten the results that I'm saying, I'll give you $100 and I'll make that bet in front of everybody right here, right now. Is that fair enough?

Yes, very fair.

All right. You have any comments, questions or requests about anything that I said?

No. It's been wonderful. Thank you so much.

You are absolutely welcome. For those of you who are listening, if you like this, all you have to do is become a part of this group. Anybody who signs up for the fire dance Tai chi before midnight tonight, I want to choose two people every week to do this, to do this with, and yours might be one of them. Www.firedance. tai chi.com. do we have. Before we go to the other, the other person, do we have any comments, questions or requests? Anybody in the program who wants to ask a question about anything about the performance of the Tai chi? About anything that they're doing right there. So just, just right now. Let me, let me, let me. Anybody, hands up.

I have a. I have a question.

About the Tai chi practice.

Yes. Who's that put on the screen?

It's Nicole on a.

On a sick day.

So I'm a little fluffy, but so I know a while ago I'm working my way back through the Tai chi lessons, starting at the beginning because I think I wasn't in the right brain space to engage with them. So I'm going back through them again. And the segment where you did only footwork.

Yes.

Was really helpful.

Okay.

Is there a segment that exists that I just need to find. Were you shown only hands or were you worked only on? This is a move for inhaling. This is a move for exhaling. Are there any?

No, but what we do, we do say that when you, in general, when you're expanding, inhale. When you're contracting, exhale. But you'll find that for yourself because there are some moves where it's not obvious, and I don't want to be dogmatic about it, when I can't be there to put my hands on your diaphragm. Okay. So that's the general principle, will help you follow the footwork. Follow the general principle. The way I say it is trying to learn Tai chi by following the hands is like trying to count the leaves in a forest by counting leaves and dividing by a thousand. Look at the hips, look at the hips. There's only one hip, you know, only one pelvic girdle. If you look at the way the hips are moving, that is the simplest part of the entire equation. So if I'm doing this, Inhale, exhale. My hips are straightforward. Exhale. I step forward. Ah. My hips are canting just a little bit. But now when I push forward, my hips are straight again. Now I'm going to turn my hips to 3 o'. Clock. Now my hips are moving again. You look at the hips, the hands go along with it. And then what you get to do is you can say, steve, will you show us the footwork of this particular movement? Show us the hand work of the. This particular move, and I can do it. I can also post the answers in the Tai chi for. In the Fire Dance Tai Chi forum, any question that you ask me, I'M happy to make a video and post it there so that you know that we can. We can actually have this conversation and I can actually help you because. Just give yourself permission to screw up, laugh at it, have fun with it, and notice the voices in your head that did not want to deny you that permission. Those voices have stopped you in other ways in your life. We had Megan's hand up and then we had Jaime's hand up. Maggie.

Thank you.

Hello. Hello. Yes, I can.

This is not a Tai Chi question. I hope it's appropriate. A question. Starting child story. Is that a question?

Yes, of course it is. The child story is the fairy tale that you tell yourself about how you became the girl you are today. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who. Okay, so what's your question, sweetie?

Well, it's starting to run past two pages and it. I mean, I'm old and I lived a very interesting life, so I feel. I'm not sure I'm addressing.

I feel like.

Should I be addressing this from a. I know the perspective of the child.

But from one with Dick and Jane, you know, she had a lot of adventures. You're not a page of stuff. She had many adventures and met many interesting people. Make it very, very simple and preferably under 100 words.

Under 100 words, that's helpful.

Very simple language that a two or three year old would understand.

Okay.

Because you're communicating to that young part of yourself. Okay.

Yeah, thanks.

You betcha. Okay. Jaime?

Yeah.

Hi. I want a little clarifying that I've got the right perspective on this.

Okay.

In my own style of learning, and I think it's from my theater background, and having to memorize lines for a role in a play.

Yes.

There's a part of my brain that wants to have the numbered list of all the different moves in the form. And what I observe is that some of the motions are specific to the name of the form. But there are some of the numbered movements we have in our fire dance routine that appear to have extra movements added in them or there are transition movements between them with no names at all.

That's right.

And in order to assist myself, I did a Google search for the Wu style of Tai Chi and to try to come up with that list of 108 different moves to help myself in learning them.

Sure.

And I was surprised to discover that there's more than one different version of the 108 move list.

Let me put it this way. Everybody who does the form does it a little differently. Everyone teaches a matter of fact, every time you do the form, it's going to be a little different. So this is the closest book that I have ever seen to listing tai chi. This is the one that my teacher, Hawkins Chun, recommended to us. And it doesn't have it exactly the same way as what he taught us.

So the thing I wanted to clarify here was, in my own practice of the movements so far, I mean, we're up to movement number 30. I think I'm pretty solid up to about 27 or 28.

Take a video of yourself sometime and send it to me or post it on YouTube. Let me look at it. Okay, go ahead.

But one thing I noticed yesterday was I got all the way through it, and then I realized, oh, I left out one movement, and that inner critic jumps in and all of that stuff. But then as I'm looking at, everybody's teaching it different, Everybody's doing it. And in those different versions of the 108, the order isn't always the same.

That's right.

And so it's like all of a sudden, I could stop beating myself up for leaving out that one moment, that one movement. And you can kind of rearrange them and add them to whatever you need.

And is that, look, you try to do them exactly the way that I teach, but you will notice that I don't teach it exactly the same way two times in a row. I can't, you know, not just a matter of errors. It's a matter that the Tai chi is the feeling, not the form. The form is connected to the feeling. You do the form so that you are. I'm relaxed in this position. I'm relaxed in this business. I'm relaxed getting from this position to this position. And that means every day, when you have different tensions in your body, your head is at a different space, your body's at a different space. The way the elastic energy moves around your body is going to be a little different. Different, literally every time. And that's not even counting the mistakes. There is. There is one transition. There's one transition in Tai chi where the first couple times you do it, you do it. I. My foot is here, and I do it this way. And then there's another time when instead of stepping this direction, I have to step back. I do it right. I think it's like right after the third or just before the third cloud hands. And literally I'm doing it, and I'm thinking to myself, is this the first time or the third? Did I do it this way or that? It's like my brain will be doing that instead of just enjoying the process.

Right.

I have to be the teacher as well as the student. So when I'm doing Tai Chi, a lot of the time I'm not practicing it for myself as much as I'm practicing it. This is. Or I'm not practicing it for itself. I'm practicing it to be part of the morning ritual. And in order to get better at Tai Chi, I have to do it without the recitations because it's more important in order to get better at the form, I have to step out of the thing itself. I have to step out of observing myself or being in the part of my mind that remembers language and just feel the energy. So I can't be saying, you know, all the. All the love I need is within me now. You know, I'm so grateful for my kid that that stuff. My form isn't going to get better on, you know, when I'm doing that, my form is going to get better. When I'm not doing that, however, that's where I am. Okay. And what you're trying to do is literally just remember the movements one after the other that can be done at the same time that you're. You're doing. That's you're multitasking. And it's specifically teaching you to stay relaxed under stress.

Right.

Okay.

Well. And so I guess because I know this about myself, in terms of the styles of learning that I have, there is difference in teaching my body muscle memory and teaching my mind the memory of sequence required.

Yes.

Could we get just 108 move list printed somewhere or is that jumping the gun?

It's jumping the gun. However, what I might, I might be willing to do is put a list every week of the moves up until that point.

Okay.

That I might be willing to do. You know, that's. That's, you know, I. Because it's. To a certain degree, one of the things I say is that I will teach you a bunch of moves, but I only expect you to remember one new thing every class.

Right.

It's just to keep your little monkey mind busy while you're. While your deep mind is learning well.

And it's had to be. It's had to become part of my process to watch the videos again and again and again.

That's right.

To write out my own list and then have little notes in the margins for those transition movements that aren't part of the name.

You're convincing me that I shouldn't put a list up there? I mean, I'll probably do a list, but you're. What you're doing is even better. Let me go to the next person. Have I answered your question?

Okay, thank you.

So, Yaniwa. Yania.

Yes, it's Yaniya.

How are you, Yania?

I'm inspired.

Good.

I'm inspired and I'm scared.

Fear is good. What are you afraid of?

So. Well, one. When I'm working with positive language and what I've come to be known as affirmations, which I do believe in.

Yes.

And goal setting too. I feel like I get in a performer's head, a performative head, when I'm trying to articulate those goals. Like, what I loved about what Valena did is her language was so alive with what she wanted. There was no performance in there, if you know what I mean.

Give me an example of a performative goal.

Let's say that procrastination is one of the patterns I want to change.

So what would you say?

Something as similar as, like, I want to be able to focus on those things that are most important to me on a daily level.

Okay. So let's take a look at that. First of all, that. Just not changing the content, but clarifying what you just said. It should be, I focus on only the most important, important goals. You don't say, I want to be able to. That's saying you're not that person. But one day, maybe I'll be, you know. No, it's. You own your power. I am. For those 60 seconds or those 10 minutes or 20 minutes while you're doing the Tai chi and you're. And. And you're saying a thing. Take your power. You're a warrior at those moments. Yeah. And the little child inside you that has all the creativity needs mommy to say, do your homework. Needs mommy to say, I believe you can do it. Okay. So you ask yourself, who is the woman that could own her life, inhabit her life in this way, and for at least those few minutes, become that woman I see. Step into it. You act as if you are that woman with that power, that beauty, that sensuality, that intellect, that honesty, that absolutely ferocious. If you cannot match this energy, get out of my way. Don't even dream you can hold me back. You have no idea what you're looking at when you're looking at me. You own that. And if you have a hard time doing that, do you imagine whoever you think is a magnificent woman, Mahalia Jackson or whatever it is, and you step into her. How does she carry her body? How does she smile. How does she speak? How does she walk? And for those 10 minutes, that's who you are. And you will find it starts. It's like adding yeast bread dough. It starts propagating through the rest of your life. Confidence breeds confidence. Fear breeds fear. Fear is totally natural. Every human being feels alone and afraid. The only question is, what do we do with our loneliness and our fear? You can probably tell, what did I do with my fear? Martial arts, you know, lifetime of martial arts practice so that I could not. So I could not be afraid, but so I could understand my fear. What do I do about my loneliness? I create family. Every week, I get to talk to all these smiling faces. I get to help people. Okay. I give my love to my wife. I tell my son that I adore. Adore him every day I tell him how much I believe in him. Every day that I can, I tell my daughter how beautiful she is to me, how precious is to me. That's what I do with my loneliness. I create connection. So. So what you do with your fear is you face your fear and you use. The real fear is of dying without being who you really are.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Yeah. See the way you said that right there? Absolutely. You could face down a man with a knife with that voice. It's the absolute 100. I'm ready to die, and I'm ready to take you with me. My demons. Guess what? Demons. I'm going there anyway. And I will either bring you along for the ride, or I will kill you and walk across your corpses. It's up to you.

You. You. You just did me, Stephen. You just did me.

See, now you're laughing now. This date right here.

And. And I'm. I'm, like, ready to break through all the politeness. And I think that was like. My goals are, like, when I try to write them down, they're too polite. Almost like.

That's right.

Those are. These. Are these things that I'm think. I'm thinking I'm supposed to be, or the things that I actually am right now.

Let me tell you one of my father figures, Steve Muhammad the Sejo, you know, master martial artist and just master human being. You know that he'll say that the word defeat does not exist in my fighting science. I will find a way or make one. See, Be. Pardon my language. Be that. Own it. You already have your success, and all you're going to do is clear all the detritus out of the way. Own it. You're a lioness, you know, Tananari, and I From time to time. And we are overwhelmed by, you know, God, there's all this. There's all this. We all. You know, there's so many things to do. We'll look at each other and we'll just nod and we'll say, we are.

We are that.

We are that bitch.

Happy birthday.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

So once again, if you'd like me to help you with your goals and stuff like that, join the, you know, fire dance program firedance tai chi.com and I will try to get to. To you to be one of those people. Let me take a quick look.

I want to sign up for. So is that pretty easy? I just went to your website. Yeah.

Www.firedancetaichi.com. very, very easy. Is. Let's see. Is Clarissa Walker here? Is Clarissa Walker here?

Is a Clarissa here? But I don't think it's Clarissa Walker. By the.

Who. Who sent me? Who sent me your goals?

No, I don't think Larissa's here today.

Okay. So I will respond to her offline. So we're winding up our time here, so, you know, make sure that. That. Tell your friends.

I think she's here. I think she's waving.

Waving. They're Clarissa waving.

Yeah. I don't see. Okay, let me look and see.

Yeah, find.

Oh, there she is. There she is.

I miss her up on the screen.

Put her up.

I want to miss Clarissa. Sorry about that. I cannot hear you.

You need to unmute.

Unmute yourself. I cannot hear you. Can you unmute yourself? Ask to unmute.

Tap on the microphone. On your screen.

Click your microphone. Okay. She's having a hard time doing it, so we. Let me just address your things, you know, you remember. Remember what I. The things that I said to Melina as we go through this. So your first goal is to earn $10,000 in deinstitutionalized income to make money as a writer or whatever. So the goal there in your morning ritual, make sure that you have a role model in your morning ritual who's capable of making money doing the things that you want to do. Make sure you've got that so that when you get discouraged, you can talk to them. Also, you have to ask yourself, what are the things that you need to do? You can earn money as, let's say, a writer. You say a writer, a podcast host, a writing coach, and or through new passive income streams. Let's take a look at just one of those things, because the ideal situation is to put all of your attention behind one thing that will then give you, the other things, the writing is a thing that you can do even if nobody else is there. You can, you can, you can develop your skills with that by selling a story, a few stories. Raise your hand. Have you already sold stories? Raise your hand. If you're not okay, then you need to sell some stories so that you can then be a writing coach. So you can literally look at the process of selling stories as something that will leverage you into being a public speaker or writing coach. Because you can speak about the process of selling a story in, you know, the whole thing in the life writing process is you write one to four short stories a month, you send them out. Nobody has gotten it past, gotten past, I think number 26 or 27 without selling. So you can predict that 27 weeks from now, if you were to write 27 short stories and be sending them out 27 weeks from now, you would have published. And at that point you can start making money from this. You can literally define the dog in the situation, which is, what is the, the work that you can do. It's writing one story a week. Make it a really short story. Flash fiction, you know, you can, you know something you can write in one sitting, read flash fiction so you can see what that, what that thing is. 27 weeks from now, you will probably be published. If you did wrote 27 pieces of flash fiction, you're reading 10 times much as you wrote. You're starting to get to know the field. You're understanding your emotions, you're understanding your strategies and patterns. You're creating your morning ritual where every single day you're writing at least one sentence. You never do less than that, no matter what. And you aim at specializing in writing one page stories. You read a bunch of one page stories. Figure it out. Figure it out. Okay? And that same thing, that sense of self confidence, that sense of I can do this, that's what you're going to need. And so you do that by modeling people who could accomplish the thing and the kind of thing you want to do. Tananarive and I would be happy to be part of your internal community because either of us could do this. So I would be honored to be an eternal coach for you on your path. And I know Tananarif feels exactly the same way. We're there with you, okay? So to strengthen my core and maintain a high food quality and fish's diet, okay? Two separate goals. Exercising every day, working with your core is probably the smartest single thing to do in terms of bang for your buck. So you look at, there are many different types of exercise. If you said to yourself that one of your five minute miracle is going to be core exercise, breathing properly during core exercise could become part of your five minute ritual. So, you know, like there's they're plankster using the unsteady plank thing. Playing video games on your, on your iPhone while you're doing your ab exercise is a lot of fun. You could do crunches, leg lifts, roller wheel exercises. 60 seconds of roller wheel exercises five times a day is going to turn you into a monster pretty fast. Okay, so you figure out what is the dog, what is the thing you can do in terms of your diet? You know, one of the things that you can do with your diet is intermittent fasting, where every day or every other day, you don't eat until a particular time. Or you put, you get all of your calories within a particular thing. But until you do that, the easiest form of diet that I know of is simply to be conscious of what you're eating. So you use your cell phone, you take a picture of everything you eat all day long. You don't even have to try to limit yourself, just take a photo of it. Have to be conscious about what you're eating. You will automatically begin to adjust it because it's like you won't be able to kind of say just eat unconsciously. No, you want a bowl of caramel corn. Pour the bowl of caramel corn, take a picture of it. Be sure that you consciously are deciding to eat that food. And that says you can eat anything you want, but you will begin to eat the things that are in alignment with your goals simply by bringing it up to consciousness. The kid inside you wants the caramel corn. The mom inside you knows, well, you can have that camel corn after you've had your steak, after you've worked out, after you've done your homework or whatever it is. Be sure if you are not the adult in your life, you will have to work for someone who is. It's as simple as that. You want to be self, you want to work for yourself. You have to separate between the child and the adult self. So in your morning ritual, you imagine the person who could be a good mother to you to be a good mother to the little girl inside you. You can actually have a conversation between the little girl and the old woman that you're going to be on your deathbed. And you as the adult can simply step out of it and listen to them talk. That's one of the best ways of accessing wisdom I've ever seen increase deep, meaningful human connections. That's opening your heart, sweetheart. Simply loving the people around you and making sure that your friends know that you love them. You call them every week.

You.

You work to maintain that relationship. That means opening your heart. And if you've had problems with relationships in the past, and make sure you first get in touch with that mommy tiger inside you so that that beautiful, loving heart does not attract predators. If they do attract predators, they run into that bad bitch with the teeth. You know what I'm talking about? Okay, Use my voice. Look, what we have to offer the world is anything that we have become. If you say, if I had known 10 years ago what I know now, I. I would pay anything to know right now what you know to know back then, what I know now. You have just discovered something you could do your TED Talk about. How did you become the Clarissa of today? How did you overcome. If you will do that, if you will simply say, all I am doing right here is I'm having the conversation with you that I wish to God someone had to me 20 years ago. I'm talking to the younger person inside me, and I see myself in each and every one of you. And that is exactly where my energy comes from. I'm trying to send a message in a bottle back to the younger Steve, who was so scared that he would never have his career, who is so scared that he would always be weak, who was so scared that he would never find love and passion and joy. And I have this special thing inside me, but the world is going to crush me if I. If I try to bring it out. If I could only tell him that it's all going to be okay, that fear is totally natural and normal and that he is loved and he's a part of the universe, and that there was someone out there, that there were going to be a number of very special women who would love him one day in various ways the best that they could, and he would love them the best they could, and he would eventually find his soulmate. If he could only have known that, it would have made everything so different. So that's what I say to you. Get your five minute miracle. Do the morning ritual every day and keep refining it. Every time you come on here, you ask me questions, and we will get. We'll get it so that. So that the ritual is taking you where you want to go, and all you'll need to do is check your calendar. Did I do it? Did I do it? Did I do It. Okay, great. I'm gonna have a great weekend. Let me go to Cabo, you know, Cabo San Lucas. Whatever it is, be sure that you understand what the minimums you need to do. And then once you've done that, it's party time. I mean, seriously, if you don't. We talked about. Is it true that 20 minutes a day, you can get more done than people get done all day long? How many people all day long actually connect with themselves, Their dreams, their essence? Very few of them. So even though they may do a lot of work all day long, is that work really taking them where they want to go? Are they really joyful? Are they really having a good time? Are they taking care of their bodies? Are they taking care of their emotions? In 20 minutes, you can take care of your emotions, your body. Stay in contact with where you're going, do that. And you have done more in 20 minutes than most people do all day long because you have made contact with your own sacred soul, with the little girl that started this journey. And you have told her, mommy is here. You can just play, Mommy will take care of the work. And you have just become a different human being. Okay. All right. So you can put anything you want to say in chat. Folks, we have run out of time today. Thank you so much for being here. Can you repeat the morning ritual? The morning ritual is moving at the same time that you are chanting affirmations, at the same time that you are envisioning your role, role models. It's all in the fire dance tai chi program. Go to www. Firedance tai chi.com. join the group on Facebook. You know, come to these meetings, share the links with people. We love seeing you here. We love meeting new people. Www.firedance tai chi.com Tenon, do you have anything, any final things you want to say?

Nope.

That's it. Everybody just have a great weekend, have.

A great time and friend the other people and just love yourselves and make every day, every hour, every moment, take care of itself and the years will do just fine. Take care, folks. Bye bye. Oh, Unmute yourselves and say hi. Say goodbye to everybody. Unmute, everybody, unmute. Say bye bye.

Thank you.

Thank you. Bye bye. Take care.