Firedance 12-23

Hello? Hello?

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm muting everybody at the moment so that I don't get an echo, but I will have everybody on in just so that I don't get an echo, but I rebound more than the world so that I don't get an echo, but I revive on more than the world so that I don't get echo. Revited on the world so that I don't get echo. That's so interesting. That's so interesting. Okay, let me hit that mute all button again. Mute all button again. Testing, testing. 1, 2, 3, 4. Testing. 1, 2, 3, four. Testing, testing. 1, 2nd, 3, 4. Testing. One, two, three, four. Testing, testing. Can you hear me now? Raise your hands if you can hear me now. Okay, great. So what I had to do is I had to turn off my sound. Is the sound. Does it sound good? Okay, great. Welcome, everybody, and welcome to the Christmas edition of the Fire Dance, which we are going to kind of shape into how to use this technology to have the best 20, 23 imaginable. So the minimum buy in on this is the five minute miracle is taking five 60 second breathing breaks during the day. And so that's available to almost anybody. If you will start there, I can help you. If you can start there, you can do this. But one of the things that's important to grasp is that this is not just a developmental activity. Oh, I see. I also had it up on Facebook. Facebook, okay. It's not just a developmental, but it is a diagnostic. So if you aim at working for 60 seconds five times a day and you look back over your journal and you realize, oh my God, I didn't do it. Oh my God, I didn't do it. Day after day after day, oh my God, I'm not doing it. Then you know exactly where you need to start. That you know, the first thing you need to start is to find a way to actually engage during those times. You can set an alarm, you can get a buddy, a friend who will talk to you on the phone every day and say, did you do it? Remember what you did. You can do whatever it is that it takes. But being able to keep your word about what it is that you want to do in life is critical to getting it. If the primary problem is that you don't keep your word to yourself, it's best to be able to look at that directly and say, God, I let myself get interrupted. I let myself get distracted. What we're about is helping you with that. So let me just kind of introduce myself. My name is Stephen Barnes. I'm creator of these technologies and I'm a New York Times best selling writer and creator of life writing and fire dance. I'm married to the amazing Tananarive due and I have two amazing children and wonderful, amazing friends and students, you know, every one of whom I am very grateful for. We already have more people here today than I thought we would have leading up to Christmas. You know, you'll notice that we're going in a rhythm. We're getting more and different people every week. And what I really want to do is to know what I can do to serve you, to help you get on the train. Lowest step is five 60 second breathing breaks. If you cannot do that, then that tells you what you need to do. So before we go any further, I would like everybody to unmute themselves and, and say hi to everybody. Just kind of welcome.

Hello everybody.

Hi.

Hey, hey, hey.

Merry Christmas.

We have a Happy Hanukkah somewhere in there, huh? Do we have a Happy Hanukkah somewhere in there?

Absolutely. How about a good Yule?

Happy Hanukkah?

Good Yule, Blessed Solstice.

Jewish brothers and sisters are just those wish to celebrate a wonderful tradition and want to feel closer to the people that they love and want to give thanks for a beautiful year. However you celebrate that and if you don't have a holiday, then just be happy. You know, the meaning of life is to be joyful and of service. Whatever it is that helps you do that, I celebrate with you and I will stand with you for your right to feel that your heart matters as much as the heart of any other human being who has ever walked this planet, period. Okay, so this is just. This is just great. So I want to. I like to start by going back over some of the basic things. And one of the basic things is the qigong exercise. So we can go. We can look at the Constant Bear, which I love, and we can also look at one other one. So let's take a look at Constant Bear. I'm going to keep my Santa hat on. Look at Constant Bear. Constant Bear is thinking of yourself a little bit. I'll take off my sandals a little bit like a slinky where you're moving all your weight to the right and then you turn from the hips to look to the right and then you shift to the left and then you turn your hips to look to the left and then you sink to the right and you turn your hips. So let's just do this for 60 seconds. You can do it in your mind if you don't want to get up, it's just fine. I like to inhale. Here. Exhale. Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale. Exhale. One more time. Inhale. Exhale. You can practice this at any time, any place. In line, at the bank or at the store, while you're waiting for a phone call, anything. The idea is to be able to steal your time back from life. We had a question. Here, let me go into the chat room. I am discovering a problem, failure of my left leg from the hip down. It is better to notice those things when you're focused, focusing on it directly than accidentally when you're standing up or walking down the stairs, walking down the street. That to take conscious evaluation of your body enables you to minimize the chances of accidentally hurting yourself. I'm also recovering from right knee surgery, fairly severe injury last November. So what you do is you make sure that whatever movements you do, your pain never goes above a two, maybe a three at the most. Okay? And if you stay within what you can do, you stay within what you can do without your pain going above a 3 or above a 2. Ideally. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the worst pain you ever felt, a is you're just fine. And of course, you have to make some adjustments for this based upon how your body is feeling and where you are in that relationship. What you're looking for is the relationship between your mind and your body. You're not asking your body to do something in particular. You're working on your mind's ability to connect with your body and ask it to do things, make polite requests of it. And then you have the feedback where your body tells you, yes, I can do this. No, I cannot. And if you feed that connection every day, within a few weeks, you'll notice that you're actually sometimes less time than you'll notice that your body can do more, that your body will begin to expand. There's always more potential than your body expresses because your body is afraid that you're going to hurt it. We actually forget how to operate our bodies as children. As infants, we climb, we crawl, we taste, we touch, we explore. Then, as adults, largely because of the industrialized world that we live in, make our living sitting and staring at a computer screen or sitting at a desk with a typewriter. Do we still have typewriters? I'm showing my age sitting at a desk. And we forget that connection, okay? And we develop. We can develop something referred to as sensory motor amnesia. We literally forget how to operate our bodies and our bodies Start saying, oh, well, I guess you don't need me anymore. And actually deteriorate faster than it had to. So what you want is some gentle connection regularly, every day. Very, very gentle. Staying within what you can do. The guilt and the fear and the frustration that you feel because your body doesn't do what somebody else's body does or what your body used to do 20 years ago and is all very human. But those things stop you from being able to explore the aliveness that you could have. So you have to forgive yourself. You have to love yourself. You have to remember that every moment of your life, you've done absolutely the best you can with the resources you have. We do these things until we're doomed, too active, until repeatedly shut up and sit down. Yeah, as children, absolutely. So one of the things that we do is we connect the adult that you are now moving through the adult world means that you have sufficient discipline and control of your energy that you're able to produce goods and services that you interchange with your communities to make a legal living. That's one of the thresholds of adulthood that adult personality can now protect. The child personality, the child that was told to, you talk too much, you move too much, there's nothing wrong, you're not doing what's right. You're going to need to take a little bit of control. You're going to need to be willing to get in touch with that child self and to say, I'm here now to protect you. So another exercise that we do within this system, and I do it almost every single morning when I wake up, one of the first things I'll do, well, the first thing I will do is, is follow my breathing, get my breathing, make sure that I'm connected to my body. The next thing I will do is listen to my heartbeat. Now listening to your heartbeat, you're listening with your whole body. If I take my pulse and I feel my heartbeat, the next thing I want to do is to relax until I can feel my heartbeat, the capillaries pulsing in my face, maybe in my throat, my body. I get relaxed enough that I can feel it. There are multiple reasons to do this. But if breath is the first thing and heart is the second thing, then the third thing is connecting with the child inside me, connecting with little Stevie who started this journey of life. Little Stevie has worked so hard for so long, given me so much. He's grown so much. He was so afraid, had so much feeling that there'd be no place in the world for him. But I committed I will protect you. And what I want for each and every one of you is if you were not nurtured as children, remember that there is a place inside you that was nurtured. That no matter how bad your childhood was, there was a point in your life when you were treated as precious and you were protected and loved. Children who are infants who are not protected in love die. It is called failure to thrive. And unless we love them, they literally die. So it is possible for you as an adult now to kind of wire around to that younger self. Maybe it's just an infant. Maybe you have to visualize a fetus. I don't know. But making that connection wire around the damage, and you make the commitment that you will die before you let that child be harmed. If you feel any less protectiveness towards yourself than you would feel for a beloved child under your care, if you can imagine how hard you would fight for a child under your care, if you would fight any less hard for yourself, your heart, your dreams, that's the damage that happened to you. That is not natural. That is what was imposed upon you. And what we're asking you to do is to learn how to express the best and fullest part of what you are as a human being. All the different tools. And we give you different tools every week. Why are you supposed to use all these tools?

No.

It's a cornucopia of different perspectives on the same journey up the same mountain, from different cultures, different times, for different people with different issues. There are all these different ways of doing it, but all of them are about knowing who you are, knowing what your path is. Moving down that path with joy and power, with a commitment to joy and service, climbing the same mountain. Along the way, you will meet other people traveling in the same direction at the same speed at the same time. You are. Those people can be your friends. The ones who match you most closely can be your partners and lovers, husbands, wives, boon companions. And when you meet people who are wonderful, but they're not aiming at the same mountain. They're not going at the same time. They're not heading at the same direction. Appreciate them. That's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. But you need not feel like you have to change your journey to be with them. They're on their journey. You're on yours. It is your task you to heal yourself. It is your task to complete your journey in this lifetime. And they say that the. The Sufi definition of enlightenment is the door of perception that opens at the moment of death, that the Seeker simply attempts to open that door before they get there. We are seeking together. I am describing what the journey looks like to me, what the mountain looks like to you, and hopefully we'll find some things that are useful along the way. Before I any further, are there any comments, questions or requests about anything that we're doing here that has to do with any of the subjects that we've covered or the subject of having the best 2023 humanly possible? I am here at your service for this hour, hour and 15 minutes that ordinarily I'd be working on my writing or I'd be with my family, or I'd be watching anime. I mean, who knows? This is your time. So. Yes, Clarissa Walker, please unmute yourself.

Yes, I wondered if you would talk a little bit about the difference between stress and strain.

Oh, absolutely. It's a beautiful, beautiful. I can be very specific about that. From an engineering point of view, stress is pressure per unit area. It's just the stress that's happening to you in life. As long as this paper is flat like this, it's stress. But okay, you know, that's just what happens in life. Strain is deformation per unit length. Strain is when stress gets so bad that you cannot handle it. So it is not true that that which does not kill me makes me stronger. It's that which does not kill me that my body, mind can integrate in order to become stronger. That's what makes me stronger. As long as you can still integrate. So you have to either reduce the amount of stress that you're taking or you have to increase your capacity to cope with that stress. Now the reason that we use Tai Chi and fire dance is because it is in some ways the most scientifically tested anti stress technique in the world because it's used by the largest number of people. So there is a vast amount of research, both practical and experimental laboratory. If you take a look at what we've discovered concerning qigong, but yoga is the same way. And if you breathe and meditate, you understand that your breath is probably the most accessible measurement. Are you breathing smoothly? So when you do the five minute miracle, you are breathing specifically an anti stress breath. It is, how do I remain in the center of the storm? There's all this press and believe me, sweetheart, if you try to move from any one arena of your life to another, I'm not talking, I'm talking about whether or not you try to open a business to increase your finances, get into a new relationship, or take your relationship to the next level, or try to lose weight or increase your fitness, you're going to hit resistance, you're going to hit stress. It's not an if, it's a when and it's a how much, and it's what are you going to do with it? So what's critical to do is if you look at the hero's journey, you know that the hero's journey is the path of mastery. It is how do we move from one level of our lives to the next? And what it states very clearly is that part of that is the road of trials. You just have to set yourself to do a certain amount of work. And every day it's just, you know, chop wood, carry water, and then tomorrow chop would carry water, and the next day, chop wood, carry water. So as long as you have measured the path and you've evaluated it based upon, okay, I want to find other people who have accomplished what I'm trying to accomplish, who are on the same path. What do they do? Okay, now I'm going to do those things. It's going to cause me to change. Oh, my God, I'm going to have to change. That's going to cause stress. Okay, so before I even start the journey, what are my stress coping mechanisms? How am I going to deal with this? What you want is the rituals that will enable you to automatically do the things that you need to do to keep stress from becoming strained. Because as you try to change your Life, what is 100% guaranteed is that you will hit stress that will knock you off your center. So how do I stay in the center of the storm if my house is burning? I need to stay calm enough to know, okay, I need to get my papers, I need to get my family out. I need to grab the pets, whatever it is. In the midst of the worst situation, you have to be calm enough to see what the options are. It is not that stress does not exist. It is not that stress is bad. It is that you have to keep stress from becoming strain and that you will either reduce the amount of stress in your life or get tough. You know, either one works. I suggest both. You know, you keep working to become more efficient and effective and also stronger physically. Also better at noticing when you're breathing wrong. Say, oh, God, I'm under enough stress that my body is giving a fear response. Let me sink my breathing back down. And breathing once every three, every three hours for 60 seconds, breathing properly. And you go to a yoga teacher or tai chi teacher or singing instructor and say, help me learn diaphragmatic Breathing or you get look at videos on YouTube. What is diaphragmatic breathing? Let me get that. When you set your alarm on your smartphone or whatever, for once every three hours, what will happen is that alarm will go off when you're right in the middle of a stress reaction. You know, you will have just had an argument with your kid, you will just have gotten a bill and you're panicked because you don't know how to, how to pay it. Somebody just cut you off on the freeway. And you will notice I'm breathing up in my shoulders, I'm breathing fast. I'm breathing through my mouth, mouth breathing as opposed to through my nose, diaphragmatic, low and slow. Through my nose, diaphragmatic, low and slow. Once you understand that, you will get to the point where you start recognizing when you're going into a stress breathing reaction, even at other times. Then you. And if you, if that happens, then you have an amazing opportunity to actually create a Pavlovian stimulus response loop between stress and a reintegrative reaction. When you are under stress, you will start automatically breathing with power. When you're under stress, you'll start automatically. You know, well, how do what I have to do to shift myself into a resourceful state. I've got to deal with this. You know, if somebody pulls a knife out on you, that is not the time to panic. That's the time to put all of your focus on what is happening right here at this moment. When your child comes to you and is hurt or scared or needs to convey something to you. You might be scared to death, but you have to stay calm or else the child will sense your panic. Well, if mom and dad is panicking, I better panic too. There's no downside to this. We need stress in order to grow. We have to interact with the world in order to understand what the world is. Or we just stay up in our heads. You can't stay up in your head. What I want you to do? Well, first of all, Clarissa, did that answer your question? Great. Does anybody else have a question? Because I can take any one of these. Because I live on the mountain, I can take any one of these questions, talk about it at any length, and that's not always useful. I need to know what is useful to you because you've done me the extreme honor of coming and sharing this time with me. So it's critical for me to know what I can do for you, because otherwise I'll go on to the next subject and it'll be a Good subject. But I want to make sure that you understand. Is there anybody here who has been trying to do the five minute miracle but unable to get themselves to do it, raise your hand, please. We could workshop that a little bit. Okay. Does that mean everybody's been doing it? Raise your hands if you've been doing it. Okay, so there. There are a few of you that are not. I beg you. I beg you to engage with that. Michelle Pincus, did you raise your hand to speak? If you did, please unmute yourself. You missed. Kurt missed raising his hand. But I'm glad. I'm glad if your hand should have been raised, Kurt, you know, old friend. So, Michelle, unmute yourself, please. And what can I do? You have a question, sweetheart?

No. You said raise your hand if you were doing the five minute miracle. I raised and I follow directions.

Thank you. You follow directions very well, my dear. And I appreciate that. So that's the first thing. The fire dance. That's a fireman miracle. Fire dance is taking one of those five minute miracles and then expanding it out into a 10 to 20 minute session where you are doing Tai chi and chanting affirmations at the same time. Or you could use walking, you could use any physical activity where you can talk at the same time. So I'm not trying to say that there's only one thing you can do. No, but you need to move. Misty said, I'm going to be honest. I appreciate honesty. My morning routine is great, but the five minute miracle is one of the habits that has slipped. Well, that's why we're here to remind you. It's as simple as that. Everybody gets off the path. Don't you understand? Everybody. We're human beings. We're engaged in a human world. We will get off the path. The trick is to get back on the horse as fast as possible to notice. So my whole thing is I like to wake up in the morning, meditate, connect with my child self, connect with my heartbeat, connect with my breathing. Great, get up, do the first of five Tibetans. You know, that's twirling first thing in the morning. Then I go right into Tai chi. And after, you know, and do my entire morning ritual, which goes through the magic formula. I give thanks for my blessings, you know, my son and my daughter and my wife and having a healthy body. And I visualize the role models who can accomplish the things I'm trying to accomplish in my life. I see how today's activity fits in with the overall plan of my life. And then I express confidence that I can and should do these things. And then by that time Tai Chi is finished and it takes somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes, depending on how slowly I do it. If I was not doing that, I would walk, or I would do qigong exercise, or I would do something where I am moving. And if I was confined to a bed, I would use breathing. If I was in an iron lung and could not breathe for myself, I would blink. And if I was totally paralyzed but my mind was still active, then and only then, I would simply do the affirmations that were designed to increase my sense of joy and contribution. If I could do nothing outside the envelope of my body, that I would live as joyfully as possible with nothing but that. Because this is the only life I've got. I'm not going to spend it miserable, I can promise you that. So comments, questions and requests or we move on. I love moving on, but I also love answering questions. Yes, sir. CS.

Hi, I just put a message in the chat asking about the. I've been talking to Ross.

Yeah, he's a good man.

Something called the Ancient Child.

Yes, the Ancient Child, I just touched upon it. But the Ancient Child, there's inner child work. The Ancient child, meditation specifically is talking to what I call the inner elder, which is you on your deathbed. That means you're beyond all ego, all fear, all need to prove yourself at all. What is the conversation that part of you would have with the youngest part of you? The conversation between the elder part of you and the youngest part of you is a thing. You can meditate, you can visualize yourself as a child. You find hopefully a happy child. If there was any abuse in your life, then you go before the abuse took place. You get a child that's younger than the abuse. You visualize yourself on your deathbed, preferably having a good peaceful exit from this world. And you imagine the wisdom of that part of you with the context of your entire life. Now step out and let the youngest part of you and the oldest part of you dialogue. Don't get involved. Just listen to what they have to say. That stage, child meditation. Yes. CS what if you don't?

What if you don't have pre trauma memories?

Okay.

Then you imagine it. Imagine yourself floating in the womb. If you need to go to a previous life, if you have to, you. You take control. The imagination, you imagine. Like I said, we don't usually remember things until we're out, until before the age of two. Most people don't remember things before the age of two.

I'm Gonna blow your mind. Yeah, I have very clear pre birth, just pre birth memory.

Okay.

And next thing I remember, I'm three.

Now it might be 100% real or it could be constructed. Anybody who does research into memory knows that we construct a lot of our memories, but it might be real. Now are your pre birth memories positive?

It's a very short sort of scene. There's no emotion or judgment attached.

What's happening in the scene?

I'm traveling down very fast with a pair of companions that I cannot see. Very fast down a corridor with alternating doors and I just fast as light going down this corridor and I take a turn into a door. And the next thing I know I'm three years old standing in the kitchen saying, mommy, I can count to.

That's very interesting. And I would suggest that in your meditations you make contact with that part of you and see if it will talk to you. See what he has to say to you. But in terms of this activity, if you can get that part of you to talk to you, what you want to do is to get it to talk to your deathbed self, the self that is, like I said, beyond all ego, all striving, that is close to the ultimate mysteries of life. And see what those two have to say. You simply sit back and listen to them talk. Don't try to guide that conversation at all. But you, what you can do is record it, is talk it out or put in your journal what's coming up. Whether you believe that it's literally true or it's symbolically true, you will find this to be very, very valuable.

I feel it will be the closed circle.

What does that mean?

The thing returning unto itself.

It could be, it could be. But that's, that's what you think, what you, what we want you to do. And it's, it's really good to do this in a meditative state. And if you don't meditate, start. But if before then the hypnagogic state where you are just sliding into sleep or just waking up are perfect times to do this. And if you visualize your deathbed self and say, you know, what do you have to tell me about life? And you visualize the pre birth self and you say, what do you have to tell me about life? And you make contact with both those. Now step out and let those two parts talk. And you will probably be surprised by what they have to say to each other and what they might want to say to you.

I have no doubt I have huge problems with sleep. It's a whole thing.

Yeah. So that's one of the. If I were you, that would be one of the goals that I'd want for 20, 23. I want solid, good, restful, healing, sleep. And then it's a matter of once you've made that goal, then it's a matter of let me find the resources. There are many, many resources. Some of them. Some of them might be the temperature, the time you go to bed, what you're eating before bed, emotional stuff. It could be anything. But just if you have that as a goal, then every day or certainly every week, do at least one hour of research on better sleep. So you're just looking to get 1% better every week?

I'm not sure what better I can do. I've had a CPAP machine for going on 25 years. I just got a new study. I just got a new machine. I'm still. I'm almost certain it has to do with a number of things. Like I said, I've been a year out of work, recovering from a really bad knee injury, which not only affected the leg that the knee is part of, but the other leg as well. I used to be really active for all that. I'm a large person. I was fairly active. I have sat down for the last 13 months now.

So here's what it is when you say you don't know what else you could do. Of course, if you knew what to do, you'd have already done it. What you have to do is have the assumption you need to have the belief. One of the most useful beliefs you can have is, I'm ignorant right now, but I can learn. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I believe there's an answer. If you believe there's an answer and you believe you can learn it, then the fact that you don't know what it is right now is irrelevant. What matters is when we talk about dogs and cats in terms of goal setting. The dog is what you can do directly with your own effort. The cat is what comes and sits in your lap when you're distracted. The cat is good. Sleep the dog. Every week you're going to do an hour of research into sleep. You can do that. You can grab that time. You say, I don't have all the knowledge I need. There's an answer out there somewhere. There's someone with the answer I'm looking for. And I'm going to keep looking and looking and looking, looking at. I'm going to try something new every Week. And I'm going to keep track of my sleep times. I'm going to keep track of everything. That's what I eat. Affected. That's what I watch on television. Affected. Does the temperature in my room affect it? And keep experimenting until you start getting the results you want. And just if you were to do this for an hour a week, you're going to study by the end, and your commitment is by the end of 2023, you're going to have deep, restful sleep. You don't know how, you have no idea how, but you're going to have it. You're going to look at emotional things, you're going to look at intellectual things, and you're going to look at physical things. And an hour of research a week to get that 1% improvement per week. If you will do that, you're going to become an expert. You'll be able to turn around and help other people who are in the same situation. I don't know at the point. Problem is, could be physical, could be emotional. If you don't remember ever not being abused, then I can tell you right now that that's enough to give anybody sleeplessness. You know what I'm saying?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, part of it is hypervigilance.

That's right. That's right. How can you sleep when bad things happen, when you aren't paying attention?

Exactly.

So, you know, the thing is, become an expert in anything that deviled me, in anything that stopped me in my life. My attitude was, I want to be so good at this. I could teach it anything that was important to me. So I would say that you want to get so good at this that you could write an article that would change people's lives. There are people out there who are considering suicide because they have a problem similar to the one that you have. If you can learn how to deal with this, you can save lives. It's critical. This is the only way the human race works, is because we notice a problem. We research the problem, we find somebody who solved the problem, we try it ourselves. If it works, we tell other people. But you try things and you try things and you try things. When I'm having problems with sleep, I would stack up the things I'm not going to eat within three hours of a bed. I'm going to take a hot bath. I'm going to drink chamomile tea. Let me try at least a stack of at least three things. I'm going to work something with my mind, something with my body, something with my emotions. Stack, stack, stack. Keep track. How was my sleep? On a scale of 1 to 10, how long did it take me to get to sleep? How deeply did I stay in sleep? What gets measured gets managed. Assume that there is an answer. Believe that you're smart enough to find it. Get mad at the people who hurt you. Illegitimi non carborundum. Do not let them win under any circumstances. And I am more than happy to be your ally. I'm delighted to be of service in any way that I can on this. So that would be one of your goals. And let's. Because goals are so important and we're winding up this year, I wanted to talk about the challenge I gave you last week, which was to find a goal in all three of your major arenas. A goal with career, a goal with your body, a goal with your emotions. I would suggest that solid night's sleep is a perfectly good goal because it will affect so many other things in your life. That's. Take that as a physical goal. Now, in order to do that, you know, you might want to be looking at your body. You know, just, okay, well, I need to lose some weight, so what would I need to do that? Let me look into that. Let me look into this. Let me look into this. Have that sense of childlike curiosity. In terms of career, it is reasonable to once again think I could increase my income by 1% per week just by studying at about an hour a week. What is it specifically? I need to. Either there are going to be two things. You're either going to get better at the thing you do, or you're going to get better at marketing the thing that you do. One of those going to be the, you know, the two basic things. Get better at the thing, become more efficient and effective with your time. You know, there are some are little things that have big payoffs. So you're going to focus there in terms of your relationship. If you don't have. If you don't have memories that are positive in terms of your childhood, then there's a very, very good chance that fear anchored into your body is a major aspect of what's. What's hurting you. So becoming an expert on dealing with fear so like, you know, don't be at the effect of this. Use the fear to drive you to learn. So when we talk about, you know, these basic things, these basic rituals can be tweaked to have more powerful effects in one way or another way. I need to get better at dealing with fear. I need to sleep More I need to make more money. I need to love myself more. You could take all those things. You could take all those things and put them into the ritual just by visual. First stating clearly what it is that you want, taking responsibility, in other words, saying, I believe I can do this. Asking yourself, well, who's an expert on this? Who's been successful at this? Starting roughly from where I started, begin to visualize that person. There are experts at these things. No matter how smart we are, there are people who are smarter. And even if they're not smarter, they've spent their time studying that particular thing. So the most useful belief that I know of is there is a way. I may not be able to find it, but there's a way. I may not be smart enough to find it. I may not be connected enough to find it, but there is a way. The problem is I didn't find it. The danger is in thinking there is no way because I did not find it. That's dangerous because then you quit, whereas you didn't know. Maybe just one more book, one more article. So how many books do you have in your house?

Me?

How many books?

Yeah.

I can't even count. I am a book hoarder.

Okay. How many of those books are about sleep?

Couple of them, actually.

Yeah. So does that represent. Is that an honest representation of the percentage of importance that sleep has in your life?

Probably more representation of how much attention I've spent on towards it.

Okay. So what I would. What I hope you will do is to treat yourself the way you would treat your own most beloved child. To say, my child needs some discipline. My child needs love. My child needs support. Let me become an expert when you know we have to. If we don't become knowledgeable about the things our children need to thrive, our children suffer. And the child inside us is no different. So I would task you with that. And what I would say to the rest of you is if you have created models of what it is that you want to create for yourself in your life and your career in the next 12 months. One of the things to look at is, have you quantified this? If you say, I want to make more money, that's not enough because you find a penny on the street that satisfy that. So you. But if you say, I want to increase my NET Worth by 10%, now you got a benchmark. If you say, I want to lose some weight once again, if you lose an ounce, that would satisfy that. So you said, no, no, no. It's like, I want to Get I want to be 180 pounds or 190 pounds or whatever you feel like your, your best weight is. So you've got something quantifiable in terms of relationships. It might be, I spend 20 minutes a day meditating. High performing people will do that often twice a day. But the number of people who are engaged in extremely high performance, who manage to stay sane, who are doing some sort of meditative discipline, way off the charts. You can't function in those arenas and only have the average amount of stress coping mechanism. You are specifically going into more stress. So it behooves you to become an expert at stress coping. Anything that you are not good at, become, just commit to becoming an expert at it. I'm going to be an expert at this. And it doesn't take them. 100 hours of study of most disciplines will make most people think you're an expert. A thousand hours and you'll actually be one. So if this is something that's important to you, get to work. This is your life. You're in process of doing it. Since considering that the average. You know what I used to do when I was teaching writing at ucla, one of the things that people always said was I don't have time to write. I don't have, you know, there's just no time. So the next I heard this from a lot of students, so the next class I started was, wow, I watched this great television show last night. You know, I mentioned a television show and we get talking about it. So what are your other favorite shows? Me, everybody be talking, talking about this, this, this, this, this. Until everybody in the classroom had talked about the television they loved that week. And then I would stop the night. So every single person in this room spends at least five hours a week watching television. The national average is closer to, I forget what it is, four hours a day or something like that. Every single one of you has the time to write, every single one of you. And they hated me. They didn't like me for saying that because I'm going to ally myself with who they really are. Not with their egos, not with the excuses they use for not getting to it. So if you can get really clear, I want this physically, I want this emotionally. Maybe it's 20 minutes a day meditating. Maybe I want to find my soulmate. Maybe I want to spend have an hour a day with my kids. Whatever it is, something quantifiable, something you can photograph. Preferably once you've done that, then you can ask yourself what are the minimum Steps I need to take to be on that path for you. Minimum step with sleep, which I think, considering all the things that sleep connects to, I think that sleep is a fantastic thing for you to aim at. It'll pay off so many different ways. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most of people I know who are having problems with their creativity, with their stress levels, with obesity, they're not sleeping very well. And so focusing there will pay off benefits in multiple ways. So if you could become sufficiently an expert that you could write a course on how to handle it, now, you got it covered. Not only that, but you could probably monetize it and make some bucks. So, you know, because, you know, really, I mean, I mean, seriously, people want to know if you could become an expert on that, you'd have something that you could sell.

I have things I can sell.

Yeah, but this would be another.

I do things. Yeah, you know, we all do. I'm. I'm a fine art black and white photographer in the style and tradition of Ansel Adams.

Okay.

I need a place to print. I have all the equipment. I need darkroom space.

Well, that's another thing. So in terms of your goals for 2023.

Oh, I've got a list that would.

Make a perfectly good goal, but I suggest find three that will pay off as many different ways as possible. You can find three goals that would give you the biggest bang for your buck. Then put all of your attention behind those three goals. Find goals that are generative. Sleep is a great one, because without proper sleep, the stress just kills you. But if you sleep properly and deeply, your body actually gets stronger and your psyche gets stronger and, you know, in many ways. So to. To go back. Thank you very much, cs. I appreciate that. I hope that.

Thank you for taking all this time with me. I appreciate that as well.

Oh, no problem. No problem. You're here, buddy. So there are three things. Once you've got quantifiable goals in all three arenas and make sure you've got them in all three, you have to have one for your body. You have to have one for your. Your hunting and gathering, your intellect, and you have to have one for your emotions. The reason is that wherever you don't look, that's where your crap will crawl to hide. You want to flip over all three flat rocks at the same time and see what comes crawling out. And this is one of the reasons why it's important to love ourselves, because the fear that there is something corrupt within us can stop us from looking deeply into what we are. If you believe that no matter how deeply you looked into yourself, you would find nothing but love and light and beauty. You would have no aversion to looking into yourself, no aversion to meditating. But in order for that, somebody usually has to give you permission to think that you are. I remember very clearly when Nikki, my daughter, was about six years old, I had her look in the mirror and say over and over again, I like myself, I love myself. And she couldn't do it at first, but once she got it, once she was able to look in the mirror and say, I like myself, I love myself, she just giggled and laughed and all that tension went away. And it was beautiful. So if. Yeah, permission is a big missing piece. That's right. So for what it's worth, I give you permission. I give you absolute permission. I want you to love yourselves enough to be willing to fight for yourselves, enough to be willing to heal yourselves enough to be willing to try something a little bit new. Now, once you have those goals, there's something specific I want you to do. Hold on. There are three parts to this process. The eulogy, the child story, the adult story. Let me see if I create this. Okay, so this is what you're going to create and hopefully you'll create it before we meet again next Friday. But these are from the original life writing workshop. And what it is, is the eulogy is looking back over your life. It's what somebody else would say about the nature of your life. And it is as encapsulated as possible. No more than a page or two. A couple pages is fine. So for instance, you know, one might be. We are here to honor the life of Stephen Barnes, father of entrepreneur Jason Dew Barnes and Nicky Barnes, entrepreneurs Jason Dew Barnes and Nicky Barnes, grandfather, husband of best selling novelist and creator of the long running My Soul to Keep television series. To Nanu Reeve, due martial arts grandmaster of the fire dance system, taught to inner city schools across the country. 120 years would seem enough life for any man. But not for Steve, who was excited and eager for more. Right to the end, that kind of thing. That gives an indication of my goals in all three arenas. But also you might ask yourself, if you're asking for these benefits, what are you willing to pay to get them? People can often say, well, I want to be a multimillionaire. What are you willing to give to be a multimillionaire? I want love and I don't have it. What are you willing to give up about yourself? Image about what you're doing right now, what are you willing to be, to do in order to have the things that you want a hint about that should be in your eulogy, you do something like that and make it a little bit fun because thinking about the fact that you don't have forever to play this game is rarely a fun set of thoughts. Okay, so the next thing is your child story. And this is, this is important too. It is in fairy tale language, something it's, it's the way, it's the history of how you became who it is that you are up until this moment. Once upon a time, there was a boy named Steve who had no father to raise him. As a result, he struggled to figure out adulthood and manhood, wanting to have a writing career, martial arts mastery, and a family to love. And then in similar language that a six year old child would understand, because you're writing this to the youngest part of you, you tell the story of how you became the person you are up until this moment. So the eulogy is what someone else would say about your entire life and your death. And you want this to represent your goals, you to see yourself on the path. If you do the right things every day and you're going in the right direction, you take those steps, where do you end up? The child is the fairy tale that you tell yourself about how you became the person you are today, what happened, positively, negatively, and be as honest as possible. Most of our stories are some combination of triumph and tragedy, you know, of horror and humor. So get in the game in that sense. So you have your eulogy, you have a child story, and the third is your adult story. It is a warrior's position on your preparation, your willingness to do whatever it takes to protect that child, because that child is your aliveness and it's your creativity. It's all the creativity you need to build the life that you want somebody to one day look back on and say, wow, what a life. So my, my adult story might sound something like this and it's very short. It shouldn't be more than hundred words. 200 words. I, Stephen Barnes, swear that by all I hold sacred, I will do all in my power to increase my integration and amplitude by 1% per day. That I will be the best husband, father, brother, friend and teacher I am capable of being to honor my mentors in the universe that birthed me. I will never stop the struggle, but will also live every day of my life in joy and service. So 10 honorif said. This reminds me of Octavia Butler's affirmations. You bet. Octavia believed in in this book, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. She lived by it, okay? I saw her handwritten goals herself. You know, when I hung out with Octavia, we talked about this stuff and now it's in her archives. She planned her life out in advance and then figured out what she need to do in order to make it happen. The instructions on how to get out of the box are written on the outside of the box. Don't think that you have to be confined to what you can think of, to what you know how to do, to what was told to you in your childhood. Assume that there is more that you can learn, more than you can do, more than you can be, more than you can have. Always make that assumption. Comments, questions or requests? Because giving you a lot today, because I'm trying to make sure that we have the basics that we need to go into 2023 and kick butt. So comments, questions, requests, you know, who's, you know. Any questions about the Tai Chi form? Any questions about the five Tibetans? Any questions about breathing, about how to set goals, how to control your emotions, Anything. A version of the start of the man of La Mancha. Maddeness of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be. That's the truth. So raise your hands if you have anything that you want to ask. Tom, unmute yourself, please. Can you unmute yourself, Tom? It took a couple tries. There you are. What is the difference between Tai Chi and qigong? Oh, qigong is the energy system inside Tai Chi. So I can take a simple movement like Tai Chi ruler and you know, it's just rolling it forward while I'm focusing my mind, my eyes, my breath and the motion. And that's just a very simple repetitive movement. And I go deeper and deeper into the connection between those things. But Tai Chi is a specific multi joint pattern of qigong. It's very complex. There are ways that qigong, it's easier to get the feeling in qigong because it's very repetitive. But life demands that we learn new skills and that we integrate those skills from unconscious incompetence all the way down to conscious competence. So by trying to learn these patterns and relax enough to also simultaneously be able to say these different things. It's complicated. It is a small version of life that in that tiny little encapsulation you get, you get to practice the totality of what your life is. I need to be able to move forward, I need to stay calm. This new Storm. There are these things that are complicated, the voices in your head that say it's too complicated. That's interesting. How many times has that stopped you from learning other things in life? I can promise you many, many, many. The things that come up, the voices in your head during when you're practicing, these things were also there every time you stopped yourself. It's just that you were so busy you didn't notice them. And once you notice that those voices are running your game, you then can take the next step which to ask whose voices are those? Because what I promise you is those voices are not you. You are the one listening to the voices. So you have to take a step back from the voices in your head. You have to take a step back from the circumstances of your life and start looking at yourself as a generative force.

Force.

What is it I do to create these things? What is it that I must do? Who do I need to be to every day do the things that keep me on the path that will take me to my destination? And by taking something as small as the five minute miracle that anybody can do. If you can do that, if you can't do that, then you know that the problem has nothing to do with the outside world. Problem has to do with how you programmed yourself. There's probably nothing wrong with your computer, but you're running crappy programs. So it's like, let me hit the reset button on my programs. The reset button can be done simply by throwing yourself into oxygen debt. When you start getting tired and your body, you know, the CO2 level in your blood starts rising, any consideration about your taxes or who wanted to go out with you or anything else goes out the window. It's all about survival. Next breath. Now you've touched the animal programming and from there you can say, well, anything else is what I learned along the way. The animal programming, that's the machine language of the, of the human nervous system. You get back to that and then you start taking a look at those other beliefs. Why can't I do these things? What stops me from doing these things? What do I believe about doing these things? And this is where having a journal or going into therapy or meditating or having good strong talks like these can be hugely valuable to start separating the who you are from the what you do or what has happened to you. Does that make sense, Tom? Is that useful? But it's deep and it's. And there's a lot of understanding. Knowing the words is one thing.

Feeling the words is the thing to get Developed.

So learning how to love ourselves, learning how we control our emotions. So if you say, well, how do I control emotions? Emotions are controlled by three things. How we use our bodies, what we focus on, and the language we use so we can actually learn to control our emotions by controlling those three things. So then you have to ask yourself the question, why don't we let ourselves be happy if that is true? Well, one of the reasons is that pain is a useful thing. Fear is a useful thing. It reminds us that there's something wrong, that there's something we need to work on. But if you stay in that state, you miss your life. So having a balance between noticing that there's something that needs to be fixed and being able to enjoy your life right here, right now, where we are, that balance is one of the things we have to calibrate. It's not easy. If it was easy, everybody'd do it. So we're just here to talk about one path to this. There will be other paths. I want each and every one of you to become an expert on how to do this your own way. Then you can turn around and teach me. You can say, this is what the territory looked like to me. This is what I overcame. This is what I'm doing. And I'll say, wow, that's great. Tell me more. But what we can do right now is I can share you what I honestly see in the journey up the mountain. And that can be powerful. As long as we can be honest enough together, I can make an absolute commitment to being as honest with you as I can possibly be. And that is the commitment that I have made. You guys are being honest with me, and you're showing up. Clarissa's hand is up. Hello, Clarissa.

Yeah, I feel greedy. My hand is always up. So I just wanted to ask you about something you said last week.

Yeah.

Because it was. It was so great. You were talking about, like, I'm gonna call it this, your acclaim. You wrote Twilight Zone. I mean, there was. There was a huge space you carved out for your say brand. And then you talked about this window of a smaller. A smaller window. And now you're going back into it.

Yes.

And I was. When you were talking about the voices, I know, for me, one of the questions is, what about when the voices are telling you that the Twilight Zone is your. Your standard now? You know, how do you go into this new space and carve out territory when. When the Twilight Zone is a stand? I'm just bringing up Twilight Zone.

No. So. So let's say Let me, let me see if I can interpret this. Say, I think the best thing I ever wrote for television was an episode of the Outer Limits. You know, it won an Emmy for Amanda Plummer, Best Actress. It was nominated, won a Cable Ace Award. You know, it was probably my best work. So if what you're saying is how do you, what do you do with the voices in your head that say that that's the best you'll ever do and you'll never be that good again, Is that kind of what you mean?

Well, I wasn't going that far. I was just, I was saying like when that voice creates this standard or moves or creates a finish line for you or, you know, sets this level when you're re entering into a brand new space. So it's not so much your, about you, your brand, your accomplishment and the awards that you were just talking about. You're going back in as a writer in a whole new era, whole new space, and carving out territory. So my question's around carving out territory. When, when those voices are there, the standards are there, because those are not voices. Those are real accomplishments in your life.

Yeah, but, but they're accomplishments. But what do the voices say about those accomplishments? Do those, those voices say you did it before so you can do it again, or do they say you did it before but you'll never do that again? You know, the voices can twist it. So let me try to say what I think about those things. My first Twilight Zone episode, I knocked it out of the park. And Phil DeGuerre and Jim Crocker, the people who are at Twilight Zone, told me that they said it was the best first draft script they'd ever seen. Can you make it longer, Steve? I froze. I couldn't do it. I could not respond to it. I blew it completely. And that also happened to me on the Outer Limits, where the first thing I did for them knocked it out of the park. It was great. So. But then I couldn't duplicate that level of success. However, I did better at following it up than I had with Twilight Zone. So what was clear to me is I have the potential. I got a home run, and after that I got base hits. Well, if you got a home run, you know, you have the ability to do it. The ability is there, but why can't I access the ability? So what I put a lot of time into is what is the process that will reliably create the best work I can do? And I have a lot of thoughts about that process. Now. It so happens that My writing partner, the beautiful and talented Tananarib Du, is sitting right there. T. Would you answer Clarissa's question from your point of view? How do you deal with the voices?

Well, I also just want to clarify that Clarissa didn't mean, now that the bar has been set so high, that anything less won't do, which is another version, like anything that. That isn't as grand as that feels like a failure. And walking backward, which is another version of that voice saying, you'll never do anything that great again. I think, because you have to have the courage to just keep, like Steve says, chopping wood, doing assignment after assignment. They're not all going to be the Twilight Zone, you know, but then again, you might have an opportunity for something that's not the Twilight Zone, but where it's not part of like such a. How do I describe it? Sort of a rigid system where you actually have more creative influence over the outcome. You know, it's not based on decades of brand building and people's expectations of what it's supposed to be like and, you know, very careful executive attention. You know, it could be a 10 minute short. You shoot on your iPhone, right? And that could give you more, in fact, creative fulfillment. Not as much money, but more creative fulfillment than writing any episode of anybody else's television show.

How it comes out and how people react to it is the cat. You can't predict that. You can't control that consistently, but what you can do is walk the dog. You can say every day, I will do these things. I will read this much, I will write this much. I will improve my circle of companions and I will pass my work out to them to get feedback from them. This is the path of steadily improving. I cannot predict the quality of any particular creative output, but what I can do is, is get truer and more honest and more disciplined every week and I can find greater joy and I can have more fun with it, because that's what I really wanted anyway. The money was mostly just to enable me to spend the time to do the writing because I didn't have to split my time between writing and managing McDonald's or something. So if the prize is staying on the path, then your emphasis should be on what is it that if I do this, I will get better and better and better and then other people will look at what I'm doing. And over time, I will eventually surpass these previous. My previous high spots will start being my medium standard if I continue to improve. Now, what I need to know, Clarissa, is, are we still missing your question?

No, you know what missed was my asking. You gave me great insight, both of you did. But I should have personalized it. I was just drawn. I was. You made me think about it last week and I was trying to recreate what you said. So more specifically, you know, as Tananarive and I have talked about, you know, we come from newspaper traditions and that's a day, that's a daily deadline of writing. But then I remember how hard it was for me to write when I got it, when I was working on, and then got a PhD in composition studies because now the arena has changed, the expectations are different, and then even the finish line keeps moving on me in my head. In my head. So you just reminded me it does. And you just reminded me of that when you started talking about re entering and I was think I personalized what you said and tried to recreate it in my question.

Oh, I see what you're talking about.

So what you need to know is that it's always different every time. It's just that sometimes you notice that and sometimes you don't. Every single action, every moment. You cannot step in the same piece of water twice. So what you have to have is faith that you can do it, faith that you can learn it. I don't know how to do this, but I'll learn. And by the time, you know, I will often set myself tasks that I cannot. You know, a writing project, I can't write this, but. But I have faith that by the time I finish it, I will, I'll be able to. I will gain the skills such that over the year or the year and a half or the six months or whatever it is, I'll know how to write it by the time I get there.

And the bottom line is, if I can jump in there for a second, honey, is that we're capable of so much more than what we do. That's the bottom line. And I find that for me, one of the joys of aging, when I have a little less ego attached to, like a failure in my 20s might mean, oh, I'll never do this. I'll never do that. Well, I've had a lot of successes and I've done a lot of new things. So when I take on something new now and I flail and I feel like I'm failing it, it doesn't, it doesn't hit the same way. And I, and I understand that it just takes practice and it just takes, you know, study, as Steve is talking about. And maybe I'LL never be great at it, but I can. I can figure this out. And that's part of my whole attraction to Hollywood, is just really just trying to figure it out. It's like, okay, it's a game. It's diff. It's a difficult place to get a footing. It's who you know, it's. How do you position yourself? I'm older than the typical. I'm. I. You know, I'm more ethnic than the. So what. What. How do I find my ways in? Who are my allies? What's the relationship between my creative inner child and the adult who has to go to these meetings? You know, all of it is. And I can see why some people wouldn't like it. It doesn't feel a lot of it like writing at all. In fact, most of it isn't writing. I really, if I think about it, But I am intrigued. It's like a Rubik's cube I'm trying to figure out from time to time. It pays off and I have a great partner. So it's part of what keeps me curious about the world and feeling young and fresh as. As I've been doing the same thing, you know, decade after decade. It's nice to change it up.

I love it when something new comes up. You know, how about podcast? Oh, I've never done that before. Do a Scooby take. Okay. How about work in a writer's room? Never done that before. Oh, that sounds like fun. So it's like, I'm going to find something new. And the fact is that because no two things are ever the same, no two moments are ever the same. There's always something new. So Tananarive has an aspect of her personality that we call obsesso. When obsesso wants to find a new house, obsesso gets on the job and it's like, up early, up late, incredibly focused, and finds that damn house. You know what I'm talking about? If obsesso wants to find something to help our son with schooling, obsesso is when obsesso is on the job, I can chill because I know what she is when that part of her engages. So part of the conversations we've had is what does it take to trigger obsesso? What does it take? And I can tell you a few things. One is something that's a benefit to her family, something that involves learning because education is very important to natari, something that is of benefit to her community, the communities that she believes that writers are a community she believes in. You know, people of color are a community that she believes in. So it's like if we can line up several of the things that, that trigger obsesso, I know that all the emotion is going to be there, all the intellect is going to be there, all physical stuff is going to be there. It's going to be just like she's doing a morning ritual. You know, it's just like that. Bringing all of that together at the same place at the same time. For me, it's. I want to do something new. I want to move my career forward. I want to create something that I've never seen before. I want to make a lot of money. Why? Because money, you know, I've given away thousands of dollars this Christmas. If I can't do that, if I don't make the money, I can't give it away. I can't support my family. I go into stress if there's a money shortage. These things. Learning how to turn on your excellence, your genius, your obsesso. Learning how to do that, my warrior self, the martial arts. What I learned from that was not about how to kick somebody else's, but butt, but how to kick my own butt, how to stop feeling sorry for myself. No. Poor little Steve. No. This is my life. My family depends upon me. I have no safety net other than my family. You know, whatever you think about Avatar 2, that one line, you know, wherever we go, this family is our fortress. They had me when they said that. I get that completely. One of the things that Tanari talked about there is your companions. Who are you traveling with along the path. They will make or break you. I'm. I'm begging you to let me coach you to show up here. Show up here on Fridays to get into the fire dance program. We have a 25% discount until Christmas. All you have to do is, is go to www.firedancetaichi.com, enter the code word 2023, go to firedance tai chi.com, enter the code Word 2023. And until Sunday night, until Christmas night, you get 25% discount. So you can pass that out to your friends, whatever. It's a good idea to find a partner, somebody to do these things with you. Somebody remind you to do your five minute miracle. Somebody who will ask you what you're doing with your daily rituals, somebody who will push you and someone who will let you push them. Tanari, there was something that you wanted to say. CS says that you're flat broke. I haven't worked in 14 months. And so do you have Are you on Facebook? Cs, Are you a Facebook friend?

Yes, I am. And I think I sent you a friend request a couple weeks ago that I don't know if your list is all full.

So here's what you can do. My. My direct email is stepheniamondhauer.

Hang on. Let me get. Let me. Let me get a notepad open.

Yeah.

All right.

Stepheniamondhour.com okay.

Okay.

And what I promise you is you send me an email. Stephenimondhour.com we will work out whatever it is you need to work out to get into the program. And Merry Christmas. I don't care about. You know, I love money. Money makes it possible for me to keep this going. But this isn't about money. This is about service. So if there is a need that you have, my friend, and you have expressed yourself to me directly and honestly, we're going to take care of you. We'll find out whatever it is that you need. You understand me?

That's a big. That's a big promise.

Man. It's just electrons. It's just electrons. Once. Once we've got it online, I can give it to anybody that I want to. I just can't do that for everybody.

Yeah.

No.

Okay.

I can sure as hell do it for you.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

We will work it out. So you send me an email. We'll talk there in the time that we have left. Is there anyone else I can serve? Is there anyone else who wants to ask anything? Do you understand what the assignment is for next question. Next week?

I was going to mention a little bit about the soulmate process.

Yes, go ahead, sweetheart.

It's not directly related to what we've been talking about.

No, it is, because the soulmate process is a specific application of fire dance into a ritual that heals your heart, creates a real and prepares you for a relationship with others. So go ahead. It's.

It's exactly. That's what I was going to say. People often tell Steve and I how lucky we are to affect, and we were, no doubt. But it's also a lot more than luck, because he had done work before he met me and I had done work before I met him that even enabled us to recognize each other on site. The old me would not have fallen for Steve because he was too ready. The old me was attracted to people who were not emotionally mature and who were not that into me. So the soulmate process is really us telling our story. The steps we took to prepare to meet each other as soulmates, and the steps we continue to take within our relationship. One beautiful one this morning. No, not what you're thinking. Yoga together. Yoga. Yoga together. And something we call the blessing dance, which we talk about in the course. But so it's really about not just finding a soulmate, but if you're already in a relationship that you want to make feel fresher and stronger, keeping and nurturing a soulmate and becoming the soulmate. So check out www.soulmateprocess.com. there are testimonials up there from students. You don't have to listen to me, but just see what they say. And that was all I had to say.

And we have a discount.

Oh, yeah, There's a discount until the end of Christmas Day. It's 30% off, which is a pretty deep discount.

And basically use the coupon code. Kindred.

Kindred. Yes.

K, I N, D, R, E D. All caps.

And I'm gonna write it right here.

Comments, questions, requests. Before we close, before Christmas, I want all of you to have the most fantastic Christmas imaginable. I'm so glad that CS was on here because I wanted to give away a Christmas present, and you helped me be Santa. I get to earn my hat. I get to earn my hat. So anybody who has not spoken, who would like to add anything or ask anything, Jan or Gwen or anybody. Hello, Gwen. Take yourself off silence, Sweetheart.

Yes.

I don't have anything to ask. This has been such a wonderful experience, and I will be coming back. You know, you have lifted my soul, my spirit, and given me some tools that I had no idea about. You know, I understood breath, breathing, and things that I've heard and understood and. And have learned, and you have just made it such a practical, doable construction of wholeness. Wow.

Thank you. Lovely. I could not ask for anything more than that. Thank you, Gwen. You are so welcome here. All of you are so welcome here. I hope you can tell what our commitment is and how much we love you guys, how important you are to us, how grateful and how honored we are to have each and every one of you. If you have any questions, comments, or requests, contact me through email or things you want me to cover. Otherwise, please dream about what you want 2023 to be and allow us to help you join the program. If you're dead broke, just take what we're doing here for free or send me a message. We'll work out what needs to be worked out because this is about moving together as a tribe. I would like to close today with the Sanskrit words that mean that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Namaste. Take care. Be well, love yourselves and take care of each other. Oh, take yourself off. Off mute and wish each other, you know, goodbye and Merry Christmas. Happy New Year's. Happy Hanukkah.

Very merry, everybody.

Happy, happy days.

Happy Kwanzaa.

Very happy.

Bye bye.

Steve, right before. Right before you said Namaste ran through my mind.

Absolutely, absolutely. There you go. There you go.