Firedance 12 3

And, yeah, so great. You know, having Tananarib over there as a guest host is so great. So what I want to do is I'm going to unmute everybody if I possibly can, and I'm going to mute all and then unmute all. Do I have an unmute everyone button? No, I just. I'm going to unmute people just to have a chance to say hello. Can you guys unmute yourselves? If you can't, Steve, everybody can unmute themselves. Okay, great. So unmute yourselves everybody. Just kind of say hi to everybody.

Hi.

That is wonderful. As long as we don't break into song, which will sound terrible. Speak for yourself. I have a voice. Beautiful voices there looking people. Look at people that I haven't seen for a while. Leo and Ross and Megan. Hey, Maggie. Love you, sweetheart. And Peter and Kurt, Jasmine and Michael and Sharon and Paula and Scott. Look at each other's faces. And as things go on, I want you to start networking with each other and talking with each other and make maybe finding partnerships to reinforce your daily rituals. Because what this is, we're playing with what this is evolving into. And what I want to do is to take a look at that morning ritual thing and make sure that you understand that you can do the morning ritual without the Tai Chi. You can do it using some other movement of your choice, but you're going to be invited to do that. Okay? So you're invited to use Tai Chi, but you don't need it. So everything that I'm talking about, you can do just with what we're going to give you right here on this talk. And if you let me coach you with the other things, I can do some very specific things with you and for you. But this is your time. It's absolutely your time. So let's see, Tanadu, keep your eyes on the people who are coming in, who need to be. Who need to be let in so that I can focus here. And let's see. Firedance Monthly, my meetings. Oh, boy. Okay. Yes, this is what I need. I need to go over here and I need to open drive and I need to open my. There we go. All right. The run of show the actual order of things that I want to do. So I like to start this with qigong exercise. And let's see, we've talked about the Tai Chi ruler, we've talked about the Qi ball, or what would be a lot of fun today, we could go back over the Tai Chi ruler, or I could give you something new. So in the chats, real Quick, tell me, would you rather go over something that we've already done or would you like to learn something new in terms of an energy exercise? So somebody wants the constant bear. Great. The bear is a great exercise. And I agree. I'm going to do bear. I'm going to do bear. Bear is good. Bear is more than good. Bear is important. I've been experimenting with it. Okay, more bear and then something new. I can do that too. Like I said, this is your time and I will do my very best to respond to what it is that you need. Okay, so bear, then something new. All right, so the constant bear exercise. Okay, first of all, all qigong exercises are. Are ways to explore aspects of what's in the Tai Chi form or in countless other energy exercises. It works in a. Actually, you could turn anything into a profound exercise, a deep exercise, simply by applying the notion of I'm going to put my mind, my eyes, my breath and my motion. I'm going to connect all of these things at a single moment of time. Mind, eyes, breath and movement all at the same time. Body, heart, mind. Especially if you emotionalize that, you'll see Tai Chi people doing the movement with a slight smile on their face. So what they're specifically doing is they're spending this time to give themselves positive emotions. Okay, so tiny smile on your face while you're doing it. And then you're going to think about what you're doing, you're going to look at what you're doing, you're going to move smoothly with your breath synchronized to what you're doing. Okay? So mind, eyes, breath, movement. Mind, eyes, breath, movement. You can go over this again and again and again. My move into the my beautiful office space, which was found for me and designed for me by my beautiful wife, Tananari. I am so happy in this office because I get to interact with you guys live. This is great. So the constant bear size, our feet are approximately shoulders distance apart. Now it's always going to be weight is 51% on one side, 49% on the other. It's never exactly in the middle. The reason is never exactly in the middle is combatively. If my weight was perfectly distributed, I would have to shift before I could move. But if my weight is weighted slightly more than one way or the other, I could move without shifting, so I'm faster. Also, it's that idea of a slinky where you're going from one palm to the other palm with a slinky. And the middle point where it is at 51% is mostly theoretical. It's a moment in time. It doesn't exist quite. So always think about that. Now, what I'm doing here right now, a line between my heels through my hips and across my shoulders should be as parallel as possible. They should be as aligned as possible. Because what I want to do, if My weight is 51% over here on my right, actually let me take my sandals off, because this is best done barefoot. So you can really feel your feet against the ground. Because the movement of tai chi, and really any movement should come up from the ground. Your toes are gripping the ground, and it's not effort up here. You're actually gripping the ground and then turning yourself, starting with your feet, you feel your feet against the ground. So if I ask myself, how do I have to grip my feet against the ground in order to turn so that I face, you know, my eyes here so that I'm facing this way? I have to sink here. Okay? I have to sink with my left foot, and I have to push with my right just a little bit. I'm steering it. I'm steering it with my right. So if I start to push from the feet, it goes up through my calf to my thigh to my hip. Now I'm turning my hip, and I'm sinking all the way over here. But I'm not pushing here. I'm guiding here. I'm sinking on the left. So once again, I'm going to turn to the right, sink to the left, turn to the left, sink to the right. Turn, turn, keep pushing away. And right there. I made a mistake. I was actually turning from up here, right, rather than thinking about the feet being grounded. So you constantly want to move between the different things that you have to do to make the movement right, which is why we do this slowly, so you have time to actually move between the different factors. So I'm thinking I'm gripping the ground with my toes. Remember in Die Hard that our favorite Christmas movie talk about making fists with your feet? That's what you're talking about. So I grip the ground, and then I turn this way. I turn to the right, sink to the left. I grip the ground with my toes. The rest of my body is relaxed, and I turn to the left, sink to the right, turn to the right, sink to the left. Now you just want to think about what you're doing when you do that. And so before I move on and give you a new exercise, if you have any questions, do your feet turn pointed with your body? You know something I don't but you could. If I turned my feet, if I planted my feet, then if I was striking. And you think about this, even if you're thinking just thinking about it. In terms of health, it's a good idea to remember the intention of the movement. So the intention of the movement is to create health and unity, but it's also combative. So if somebody is pushing me, if they push my shoulder and my feet move, that's okay. If my feet move like that, like that, at the instant at the time that it's moving, I'm kind of floating. At the moment that it moves and I sink, I'm set. So if I was being pushed here, I have to maintain flexibility in my upper body at the same time that I have stability in my lower body. Because if this person pushes me anytime that they are aggressive towards me, they're creating an opening. This is true in an argument as well as a physical confrontation. In order for you to push me, you have to create an opening for me. So if somebody is pushing me right here and I deflect it here, at the moment, I deflect. If my feet are solid, I can also strike. Now, if my feet are floating, then I can still strike, let's say an eye strike, because it doesn't take as much force. But what you want is to experiment with that. The truth is that the movement back and forth is what you're looking for. Now, how does the breath sync with the movement? You're going to have to discover that for yourself. What I will say is that every exhalation is a contraction, every inhalation is an expansion. So the body mind dynamic is not so sensitive that it is not possible to look at a turn as being either a contraction or an expansion. It depends. So you can experiment. You can say, how does this feel? If I am turning here and contracting, so I exhale, what happens if I'm turning this way and I'm expanding for an inhale? There are different uses for these things. And it is only through experimenting that you'll find what feels the best. You know, I can tell you that if you're applying force to something, you want your body to contract. General. Because you want your body to be a solid mass. If you're lifting something off the ground, you want to. You want to lift, Bending your legs and contracting your abdomen to make your body a unit. You don't want your gut to be bulging out. Now, the intra abdominal pressure could give you a hernia. But if you can contract it up to turn this whole Thing into a solid mass. Looking ahead now, I could pick this up. Head held as if by a string from above. What you're looking for is ways that your intentional movement. The ways that your intentional movement when you're practicing starts becoming unconscious competence when you're moving in life, so you just start moving more efficiently and effectively and safely at all times. When you practice walking in terms of putting one leg in front of the other, that means that between the constant bear in conscious walking, you can literally be working on your body mind connection at all times. I don't care if you're working, you're standing in the bank, you're walking down the street, you're washing dishes. One part of you can be thinking about it. Okay, so if I keep sinking on alternate sides, I end in a deep knee bend. Where is the rise? Good question. Where is the rise? Okay, so I sink here, I turn here. As I'm turning, I come up a little bit and then I sink. That's where it is. As I'm turning, I come up a little bit and then I sink. And it's gentle. It's very gentle. And the idea is that the Tai Chi form, the entire form, takes 10 to 20 minutes to do on average. The longer, the slower you do it, in some ways, the more powerful the effects. But when you're just learning the moves, if you only have three moves, then how do you keep doing it for 10 to 20 minutes? Well, you could do the constant bear for the rest of the time. You could do conscious walking for the rest of the time. So, Dennis. So it says, I'm reminded how the body behaves when skiing. Where you look determines where you go. Absolutely. Full body, mind, dancing, movement, breath, situational awareness and thinking. Absolutely. For every activity that you are doing, there is a perfect meld of attention and energy. There's a whole discipline that I created. I call idea, instinctive designation of energy and attention. And what you're looking to do is to take your moments when you are focusing consciously and move things to unconscious competence. If you work on your breathing enough when you're awake, what will happen is that your breathing will actually change when you're asleep. There's like. If I'm working with someone in Tai Chi, I might find that they're very tight through the abdomen. And when they breathe, they're up here in their shoulders. Even worse, their whole body is tight and they're really hardly breathing at all, which throws them into negative carbon dioxide balance, which triggers the hind brain to give a fear response. So I know they're in anxiety all the time. They're doing this. What you have to do is, for a little bit of time, feel safe behind closed doors. Your space. No one but people who love you around. You can do the constant bear, or you can walk, you can smile. You can feel open and safe. No one is going to hurt you in this space. And when you feel safe now, you're playing with that little child inside you. Let's play with this energy. Let's. Let's do this a little bit. Let's do this a little bit. And it's a lot of fun to do that, but it's serious play. Because what you're doing is you're taking your life back from the world. There is a story I wanted to tell you today. That there was a monk who was walking through the woods and meditating. And suddenly a tiger springs at him. The monk runs, and the tiger's gaining on it. And the monk comes to a cliff, and he climbs down the cliff. And there's a ledge below him. And curled on the ledge is a cobra. So he, Carl, climbs back up the cliff. And then at the top is the tiger looking down. And he's holding on to a vine. And he notices that he goes down. There's the cobra. If he looks up, there's a tiger. And the roots of the vine begin to pull out of the cliff. And he looks over to the side, and there's a wild strawberry growing out of the rock. And he plucks the strawberry and he eats it. And he says, delicious. The stress in life is always there. It's always there. There are always tigers and cobras. But the people who are afraid of death need to consider that you can only be afraid of death when you're not fully living. Because if you're fully living, you're in this moment. You're not thinking about what might happen in the future. And you're certainly not dealing with the grief or guilt about the past. In this moment, there is a wild strawberry. In the next moment, there is the tiger. Or the cobra could be true. But we have to live in this moment. Moment. So learning how to stay in the moment, but simultaneously be dynamic to stay in the moment is not static. What can I do today to move my life forward? If I use the morning ritual to organize my mind and body and emotions, then I can ask, well, what is the atomic minimum of things I need to do today in my writing that might be doing a single sentence or it might be writing a single page in my relationships? It might be making sure I have my meeting with my wife, my meeting with my son, and we hug each other and tell each other that we love each other every day. If I do that and check in, how are you doing? What do you need from me? This is what's going on with me. What's going on with you? How about you? This is what's going on with me. What's going on with you? I love you. How can I support you? What is the minimum that's necessary to keep your career forward, to keep your relationship healthy? And then your body, the minimum for your body might be nothing more than doing Tai Chi and constant bear and walking. That's terrific. If you want to take it a little bit further, you might think about the five Tibetans. I'll write the five Tibetans in chat here. But I'll tell you something, if you will, if you will go to YouTube and look up the five Tibetans, you will find a very simple exercise that takes no more than about 10 to 15 minutes a day. That you start by doing no more than three repetitions of each of five exercises. And you add one or two repetitions per week until you get up 21 repetitions and you stop there. If you can do 21 repetitions of each of these five movements, which, like I said, you start with just doing one repetition and then you scale upwards carefully. By the time you can do 21 repetitions of each of them, you're actually in pretty good shape. It's actually not bad at all. Anybody who. Your spine is going to be pretty healthy. Your legs, your knees, your overall musculature is going to be pretty good. It's possible to find very simple things that have a tremendous impact, tremendous impact. And so what you're looking for is yesterday there were things I regret. Tomorrow there are things I fear. But today I will live joyfully. Today I will act with power and meaning and purpose. Just today, forget about yesterday, forget about tomorrow. Today I'm going to live with power and meaning and purpose. And ultimately in this moment, I will behave with power, meaning and purpose. There's a book called, one of my favorite self help books, one of the first ones my mom ever gave me, Think and Grow Rich, which has a chapter which actually gets left out of some of the translations of it called the Mystery of Sex Transmutation. And he basically is saying that all of the successful people he studied had unusually high sex drives and very few of them achieved success until they got into their 40s. That where they no longer thought that their sex drive was just about chasing, you know, partners, but was about taking that same passion and focus and putting it into the moment about the things they're trying to accomplish in their lives. They transfer it from the arena, from the arena of. They transfer it from the arena of physical sexuality to the arena of. This is what I'm passionate about and this is what I'm bringing into the world that we all have experience of. What happens when we put all of our focus, all of our attention, all of our passion, all of our intellectual into the moment. We've all had that. Like I said, if you have any question about that, we're all adults here. The last couple minutes before you reach an orgasm, the rest of the world is going away. Anybody had that experience? I certainly have. As one person said, the intensity of an orgasm is. Well, actually, it's not one person who said this. This is an. Was implicit in a number of different disciplines. I said the intensity of an orgasm is in direct proportion to the amount of your ego that you let go of at that moment. In other words, if you can remember your name, it wasn't good sex. It is that sense of total connection, of total throwdown. This is who I am at this moment. I'm giving it everything I have. Think about what happens if you put that into a story story. Think about what happens if you put that into anything that you're doing. There isn't anything more of you than all you've got. I'm just all my body, all my emotions, all my mind, all my creativity, everything right here, right now. Let's do it. That feeling right there is as close to genius as you're going to get. And anytime you look at somebody who seems to be brilliant at something, I would suggest you think of it as skill rather than talent. That skill was the result of focus, passionate focus over time. And the luckiest ones are the ones who, when they were 18 months old, saw something on television. It's like, wow, dancer. And they get up and they kind of try to stand and. And they're flopping around at first, but they keep going, they keep learning. While other people go off and do other things. They're focused on what, you know, what Fred Astaire, Michael Jackson is doing on television. And. And they become brilliant dancers because they spent that focused time. And then when they become brilliant dancers, what happens? Those who did not spend that time, look at them and say, see how talented they are?

See?

And that's. That's one of the biggest disappointments that I have. Felt I always thought that as I got more successful, I'd be able to help people more. And that is true. That is certainly true. What is also true is that the more successful I became, the more likely somebody was to. To forget the work that got me here and think, well, there must have just been something special about Steve. If I say there's something special about me, that's my ego and they're not going to like me. If I say that it's focused work over time, then I'm saying, well, you're just ignoring, you know, how many obstacles people have. In other words, you can't win. So if you can't win, if you make up, if you go by the rules of. People are trying to protect their egos against. Are you trying to make me feel guilty because I'm not focused? Are you trying to make me feel. No, I'm not trying to make you feel guilty. I'm trying to set you free. If there is a goal that you have. This path says you. Find people, men and women, who have accomplished your goal, starting approximately where you started. And you look at the price they paid in terms of their actions, their behaviors, their emotions, their strategies. You examine several of them and you ask, what are they all doing in common? And then start to do that. If you want to go to another level. I hate to say this, but look at people who failed in those same arenas. Examine them, find out what they believe, and then pay special attention to the beliefs that they have that vary from the beliefs of the people who made it. The people who are making it might be afraid of death in more of an abstract way, but they're using that fear to power them to move forward. In other words, I don't want to die without having accomplished this. So I get up every morning. What do I have to do? Okay, I know the step that I need to take. Let me spend my day doing it. Let me kiss my wife. Exercise plan in my journal. Now I'm going to get to work. I'm going to do everything. It's now 9 o' clock in the morning or 8 o' clock in the morning. I'm going to work straight through until one the idea done by one. I'm going to take all the basic things I need to do and I'm going to do them all so that I can quit by one o'.

Clock.

So for me, the business part of my life, the things I have to do to stay in business, it's done by one or through, by two or three by three. Or out the door by four or alive by five, whatever it is. But I set some time. And for that period of time, that's what I'm doing. I got to get it done. If I can get the best basics done, it's Miller time. I can kick back for the rest of the day, watch Netflix. I could Binge Netflix all day long, but usually what I'll do is I'll be sitting with my computer or my iPad working on a project that makes me happy, something that makes a little kid inside me smile. It's like, so I get the work. That's the adult part of me now. It's playtime. But the playtime is also work. And to be totally honest with you, the I love these zooms. And I would do these zooms for free. Everybody, anyone who's running to me at a convention knows there's nothing I love better than talking about this stuff. But I'm also turning this into a business. So that. And that is because I have noticed that there are aspects of Hollywood that only work if you don't need the job. That, as I said many times, there are aspects of life, aspects of success, that are like a dog. They come when you call. They are directly responsible, responsive to the work you put in and the attention you put on them. And then there are other things that are more like cats. Cats wait until you're busy and then come and curl up in your lap. So the success you want. And that is true in terms of selling a story. The dog is doing the work. The cat is getting accepted or making a career. In terms of love, the dog part of it is being honest about what it is that you desire and making sure that you are the equal of what you desire. You can do that work. You can't predict when the right person is going to come along and notice you. That you cannot predict. That's a cat. The dog is the work that you do every day. And in terms of your body, we can't totally control health. There are genetics and environmental things that can affect that. But what we can affect is our daily behaviors in terms of how we move and the food that we put into our mouths. We can control that more than probably anything else in our lives. If you can see the problem that people have in controlling their input and output and the problems that we as individuals can have. I have a hard time fasting. I know I'm supposed to fast. You know, I'd like to fast every other day, but don't bring that cheesecake around me. Don't tell me you're making pasta for dinner. It's like, well, I guess I'm pretty healthy. I can go ahead and have that. I can hear the justifications in my head. So it's like, how do you, how do you allow yourself to have fun and, and stay balanced, but at the same time, be respectful to the part of you that you know something, you've been working hard for a long time. You deserve a little pasta. You deserve a piece of cheesecake. You know, that's just the truth. The Dalai Lama said that the meaning of life is to be joyful. End of service. And as long as you are focusing on the things that will take you where you want to go and you're doing it in a way that you are joyful, then this day, regardless of how it fits into some larger long term overall plan, this day is successful. I mean, you get that. It's not, let me get the things and then I'll be happy. No, it's be happy, find a way to be happy first. Because otherwise you could be like somebody who puts all their money into lottery tickets and then finally you get the payoff and you get hit by a car on the way to cashing in. I mean, nobody guarantees you tomorrow. You have to find ways to be happy today. And luckily that magic formula, map or model M times daily consistent action A times gratitude, positive emotions G times clear intention times conviction or courage. You have to believe that what you're doing will make you, will give you more pleasure than pain. If you believe that an action will give you more pain and pleasure, you cannot do it. And you certainly cannot sustain doing it. You have to find a way that doing this thing you can see and believe and touch and taste. If I exert this discipline, this little bit of irritation every day, I'm going to be happier at the end of this. If I move through my fear to write, if I move through my fear to trust myself enough to be able to read people's intentions, to know who a good partner might be, if I exert the discipline necessary to control the diet, the calories coming in, and the exercise that relates to calories going out, if I can control those things, I will be happier, I will be healthier, I will be able to control. And being happy as an individual relates to wanting to contribute. Because as soon as you feel safe and happy, you automatically begin to expand to wanting a partner, wanting to be a benefit to your community, wanting to connect to the world. So they're all, all this stuff is connected now. I have. Let's see, let's see. More questions here. I really, really like that. If nothing else, repetition teaches you muscle memory. Absolutely. It was useful to practice the new weak 10 Tai Chi moves just from the move before. But once the sequence was solid, it was important to start at movement one, all the way through the sequence so far. Why? That is exactly what you need to do to learn the form. But remember that the form is not Tai Chi any more than this blender is the slushie inside it. The vitamin slushy is what I want. The blender bottle blends the ingredients, crushes the ice, makes the slushy. So the form of Tai Chi is a series of power positions, a series of challenges. Can you maintain the relaxed focus of the Constant Bear? Can you put a Sharpie on the back of your hand? Not for long you can't. Let's say on the front of your hand. Can you relax your hand enough that you can feel the weight of the Sharpie and give just enough tension that your hand does not sink when you put it on? Okay, but also, can I be relaxed enough with the forward pressure that if somebody took this off, my hand would rise a little bit If I put it on, it would sink just a little bit, then I stabilize it. That level of relaxation, focus and sensitivity is what you're looking for in the form. And because I cannot touch hands with you here, although we might meet at another time, I'm going to give you lots of different ways to find that feeling of relaxation. Maybe you soak in a tub and you say, how much do I have to relax my arms until they float in the water or in a hot tub or in a pool. That relaxation, finding the way that it floats in the water. Now visualize the air being like water and you are floating in the air. How much do you have to relax to get that? If you can do that, that is the same feeling that the teacher will transmit to you doing push hands. We're trying to be sensitive, relaxed but responsive. Responsive. What do you feel here? What do you feel here? It's all about the feeling. That feeling that you get just before you fall asleep, when you go into the hypnagogic zone. It's that feeling physiologically. Let's take a look at more questions over here. Mind muscle memory. Exactly. Okay, so let me go to one comment that came from a student. I love it. I love it when you guys leave comments on Facebook, when you send here, when you email me. I would vastly rather answer your questions than simply lecture you, this is best as a conversation. Okay, so. Oh, gosh. Tara Pearson said, left a comment on Tai Chi. Said, great lesson. I finally got to the point where I exercised daily joyfully. But Tai Chi is another layer level of discipline because it requires so much more active engagement than Pilates or running. Like my Ashtanga practice. There is a ritual to be learned here that requires deep consciousness. I feel like I'm learning a really long prayer and a dance. I was really moved by today's message of belonging in the universe. I'm coming to understand how Tai Chi is a dance, a prayer, a formal celebration of and communion with life. I love this. Anyone who can resonate with the words right there is on the path. We're talking about that sense of being grateful for life, of being grateful to have a body who can do this, of being able to have a slight sense of humor about forgetting something or doing something wrong. It's like, so what? We're all doing things wrong. You may look at the teacher and think that their practice of piano or writing or Tai Chi is perfect. But I can promise you that they know it's not perfect, that the better you get, the easier it is for you to see the flaws in your performance. So you're up there feeling like a fraud because everybody's applauding and think, oh, God, that's so beautiful. You're thinking, oh, God, I went too far over here. There was a better word for that. I didn't do this. Unless you stay in the moment, in which case you're just enjoying the feeling. And if you look at the video later on, you might say, ah, I can improve there. I can improve there. Okay, I can get better there. But in the moment of doing it, you're in that joyful flow. And taking that feeling into every arena of your life is what we're talking about using a morning ritual. Who you're doing something physical at the same time that you are focusing your mind on your role models, focusing your heart on gratitude. All you have to feel grateful for in life and thinking about what it is you want to encounter. Feeling grateful for where you are. The people in your life or in your imagination who could easily deal with these challenges. The belief that you have everything it takes to do it. See, if you don't believe that you have what it takes to do it, you might be afraid of your current position. See, what you want is the honesty of saying, I'm not good enough, and the confidence of saying, but I will be. I can learn this. I can learn this shit. There is nothing out there that's beyond me. I can find this, I can learn it, I can break. If I can break it down, I can learn it. I break it down to small enough pieces that I can eat one piece every day. If it feels like I'm choking on it, then I need to break it down further and I need to keep track so that I know I'm taking steps. What? I forget who it was. Earl Nightingale, one of the first commenters on Think and Grow Rich and things like this, said that success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. The progressive realization of a worthy goal. That means as long as you can feel yourself taking just one step every day, you're going to feel like a success and you get to feel happy. So if I define success in my writing as. Did I write one sentence? Yeah, I did. Okay, I'm a success. Now from that position, the pretender voice in my head that tries to tell me that I'm no good or I'm losing this and the other really doesn't have anything to say because I'm doing it in the voices, the negative voices in your head that are saying. If you're saying, you know, so let's say this is a. We talked about the walking exercise. So let's. Let's do that just a little bit more while I'm saying affirmations aloud. So if I'm walking, what I'm doing is I'm paying attention. I'm going to put my hands in my pockets deliberately so that doesn't distract. I'm paying attention to the movement of my feet against the ground and the way that relates to my breathing. So if I'm going every day, every way, I'm getting better and better every day, every way. And I'm feeling every half inch of my foot against the ground as it rolls down. Okay, I roll. I pronated a little bit there. I have to go right down the center. Every day, every way, by balancing on one foot, I'm feeling my weight as it tries to shift back and forth. I'm not masking my lack of balance by moving quickly. Every day, every way, I'm getting better and better. Now if I say that, the negative voices in my head will say, no, you're not. That's a bunch of crap. Who knows that voice, by the way? Who knows that negative voice in your head? So here's the whole thing. If you can learn, if you can improve by 1% per day, just 1% per day, you're going to end up increasing by about 300% per year. I forget what the exact numbers are. If you can increase by 1% per week, you're still going to double. You're going to. Every two years, you'll almost triple yourself. All you have to do is say, I'm going to learn how to be conscious, how to keep my mind, how to keep my eyes, my breathing and my movement all in the same place at the same time. I'm going to learn one thing this week. If you're really ambitious like me, you'd say what? You'd look for 1% per day. You'd be looking at just 1% improvement per day. Just one tiny thing. Learn one tiny thing. Then if you're doing it and that voice comes up and you're saying, every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better, which can lead to every day and everywhere, I'm getting stronger and stronger. I'm getting more and more loving. I'm getting more and more creative, whatever it is. While you're moving, the voice says, no, you're not. This is crap. You can observe. It's interesting that that voice would say that, because I'm actually getting better. I'm actually doing the thing. How can you tell me that I'm not doing it when I'm doing it? And you will begin to notice that, that you are not the voices in your head. It is critical for you to notice that, because what your demons want, your ego identity, which mistakes itself for you and does not want to die and will actually kill your body to protect itself, does not want you to change. But you must change. The fortress that you built to protect yourself against your fear and your doubt becomes a prison. Once you get large enough that you know, once you have expanded, you no longer fit there. And that protective shell must be destroyed. Just like a baby bird has to peck their way out of that shell or it will die. If you stay in the shed, one point it's armor, at another point it's your prison. And you're going to have to figure it out. And if you are consciously, every day disassembling that cocoon, if you're consciously, every day asking yourself, who am I? What is true? Who am I? What is true? Then what ends up happening is you are slowly disassembling it and awakening, which is all that enlightenment means to be awake in a particular arena, particular time. That process is not as destructive. If it is destructive, it's people who are in ego denial until some emergency in life hits them and smashes them Flat. And then it's like, oh, God. And I remember being curled on the floor, crying my eyes out. This was just 10 years ago. Crying my eyes out. Because the map of my life that I had created in childhood, that I had followed my entire life, was destroyed. Was destroyed. I protected my family. There was a family emergency that was a righteous emergency. It was absolutely appropriate. My wife was doing exactly what she was supposed to do to honor her mother, who was dying of cancer. And I was not a strong enough man to be able to step up and support her and do it without feeling put upon. That was me. It wasn't her. She was being the warrior woman that I married. I mean, she. I marry her again 10 times in a minute. Life showed me where I had made mistakes. I had lived in my ego rather than living in my excellence rather than my commitment. The only thing that saved me was that my commitment to my family was larger than my commitment to my ego. So I could do the right thing. But, God, it hurts so much. And I could not see my way out of it. All I could see was, let me. Let me love my family every day. Let me do the work that is, you know, here. You know, be with my son every morning, tell my wife that I love her every day, do all I can to support her while I work through this crap myself. And I remember the moment that I made a choice about who am I going to be? And what's true is that the instructions on how to get out of a box are written on the outside of the box. It is a strange and cruel trick. So what I did was, luckily, one of the people in the world who I trust more than anything, more than anyone else was Steve Muhammad, my beloved karate instructor. And he had retired to right outside Atlanta. Now, if you start getting the joke here, how likely was that? That I just happened to have my ego shattered? Being in a place where I'm saying to myself, oh, boo, Hoover, I don't have any friends. I don't have any connections. Poor little me. But the man that I trust most in the world is living right here. Anyway. No accidents in this universe at any rate. I went to him and I said, what do I do? And I'm editing this slightly because some of it was even more personal than I'm willing to share. But the basis of it was that he said that in this hand were all of my resentments and my fear, and that was all legitimate, and I could have that. But in this hand were the qualities of mind and spirit that when I walked into his karate school 30 years before and said, I want to be a man like you. I want to be a warrior. That that quality of mind was what he was asking me to respect, asking me to cleave to. I could have this. It was real. I could commit to this. But I could not have both. I had to make a choice. Was I my fear and my ego, or was it my commitment? And I knew at that moment that there was only one choice. I'm my commitments. I am a father. I am a husband. I am someone who is walking my path between life and death with the greatest amount of intention I can. And even though I could not figure out how I was going to do it, I knew what I had to try to do my way through it was this morning ritual that I'm teaching you. It was taking things from shamanic things and Ericksonian hypnosis and the sweet medicine Sundance Path and neuro linguistic programming and Tony Robbins, for God's sake. And blending them with Tai Chi, although you can blend them with other disciplines. I get that. I'm going to keep saying that because I want to make sure that you understand how serious I am. That practice saved me. It is the only thing I do every day, six days a week. I give myself one day a week off for very specific reasons. This is what I'm talking to you about. And what I want each and every one of you to do is to create some version of that yourself. I do it for myself as an individual. Tananarive and I have the blessing dance that we do as a couple. We do our meetings with our son Jason, as a family ritual. And it's a total of about an hour a day for all of that interconnection. And then the rest of the day, we go our separate ways. We do things in the back. In the evening, we kind of connect and say, how was your day? Let me read you another. Another letter. Okay. This one, let's see, is from Lionel. Okay, Lionel, let's see. Five Minute Miracle has been a lifesaver for me, but the added dimension of movement just seemed to fill in some gaps I didn't know were there. Yesterday, after some really crazy moments, I actually did some affirmations. I chanted, I got this. I know who I am and what I'm capable of. Which almost turned it into a mini morning ritual. It was immensely effective. Here's another one. Good afternoon, Steven. I hope all is well. A few days ago, I was intrigued when you mentioned integrating the five Tibetans into the Five Minute Miracle. I wanted to try it, but I wasn't sure how I could do so because I work out in public and I'm patrolling large areas in a big vehicle. It's just not practical to find a place where I can get on the ground and do the five Tibetans effectively. I was trying to figure out an alternative. My martial arts background is Chinese kung fu and I remember the Tsing I Chuan has five element qigong and Hung Gar has five animal forms. It's easier for me to find a quiet corner behind a building or someplace where I could remain standing and practice. So for the last couple of days, I've integrated those techniques. A five minute miracle and wow. It's been a particularly hectic week, but I felt like the eye of the storm. I surprised myself by how cool I remained under pressure. The physical movement seemed to have a lasting residual effect so that even after the minute of mindfulness to center myself, I was able to carry it with me throughout the day. I still have about an hour before I clock out of work. I wanted to share this with you. I feel amazing. Thanks a lot. See, that's it right there. To take. Yes. From light. From Leo Rojas. Thank you, Leo. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And every one of you that shares things with me. Yes, it's just. Applaud. Yay, Leo. You see, you're getting it. When you bring everything that you have together, your body, your mind, that wonderful heart of yours and. And you say, I want. And you tell yourself the truth. I want a better life. I want to be happy. I want to be loved. I want to get published. I want to lose weight. Whatever it is that you want to do and you put everything you have behind it, that's the most you can possibly bring to it. Can't do any better than that. If you can take satisfaction simply from bringing everything together, life will, to a certain degree, determine the results that you get. Life is a cat. In that sense, you can walk the dog, you can take care of the things that are under your control and then the rest of it, and if you set it up so that I am happy being who it is that I am, then you're way ahead of the game. If you'd like to join us on this journey until midnight tonight, I'm going to offer you a 20% discount on the fire dance course if you use the following password. The following. The seat. And the secret word is. And the secret word is. So you would go to www.firedancetaichi.com, enter the code Friday and get 20% discount. So somebody else put the URL in there. Tononari. Would you put the URL there? And now I would love it if you. If you guys would ask me questions. This is your time. It can deal with career or writing or relationships or physical integration. So push me. I want to know. I want to know what I can do to help you. Because I want so much to build this community. I'm going to keep doing this every week. I'm going to answer every question that people answer that people ask me. And let's. What I'm suggesting is let's grow together. I'm looking for brothers and sisters who are beside me on the path, who when I fall down, can remind me. Steve, you forget you better do this. Steve, have you been doing this? Steve, have you considered this? That's how we grow together. I teach you what. What I know. Oh, it says coupon, which is 17%. I put in. What did Michael say? I fixed the offer to Tai chi. Michael, if you have. If you have a 20. I tried to put in 20%. If you've got a bonus, better coupon code. As long as it's designed to go off at midnight tonight. Put that in the. In the chat right here so people can get it. I tried. I'm still, you know, figuring the technology out. I'm keeping an eye on things. Okay, good. I will get that fixed while you finish up this. Okay, so hand raises and then let me. Let me talk to you directly. Okay, so, Jasmine, unmute yourself and. Hello, Jasmine. Look at that pretty smile.

I know I'm at a school, so. But there's no kids around me. I'm a high school librarian. My question is how do. Well, not how do people. Or have people revise their morning ritual? Because I've been learning various energy work, like Reiki, sound healing. I do guided meditation, and so I add all of those. I practice all of those things as part of my morning routine.

But before I answer that question, what movement are you using?

So usually I just do whatever. I'm in your. In the Tai chi class as well. But it's challenging for me because in the morning, I'm kind of on automatic still. So I like to do my Tai chi practice in the afternoon.

That's fine.

So I just. I like to get up and dance. I get up and dance.

Perfect. I love it. I love it. A spontaneous, joyful expression of life. Love it. You rock. Okay, so the answer is the morning ritual is a living thing. Living things change. So absolutely you not only can change it, you should. As you evolve, as you move down the path, you're going to see new things. You will also begin to associate with a different kind of person who resonates with you. And those people sometimes have been further down the path and they can, you know, they can offer you their perspectives and you will say, oh, well, this that Steve gave is interesting, but this is a little bit more in my heart. As long as you're engaging with your role models and they could be energetic or personal, make sure you're on the path to your goal. Make sure you are just filling yourself with gratitude for this beautiful life. You realize how critical, how important, how precious it is that I can just turn on, zoom in my office and talk to you guys. The miracle that we can do this. From all over the country, around the.

World.

We live in a time of miracles. If we're just willing to grab, there's so much to be happy for. And if you can just believe that life has been wonderful to you, then it's easier to believe that life might get better tomorrow. If you don't see the blessings you already have, why should you believe anything is going to get better? So you have to associate with the blessings you already have, however you phrase it. I tend to phrase things having grown up in the Episcopal Church, but you could be a Buddhist, you could be an atheist, I don't care. What matters is that you engage with the wonder of life on whatever basis you can. And if you're doing reiki, if you're doing energy work, you are touching the ineffable, you are having an experience of the unity of the universe. And I would want you to bring those things, feelings and concepts into your practice. Your practice is your practice. It is your practice. I tell people who are studying yoga, I don't care what the teacher says to you. You never violate the threat of your breath to get deeper into a pose. If you do that, you will injure yourself. I don't care what some 17 year old cheerleader, you know, sitting in front of you is turning her body into a pretzel. She's thinking about her boyfriend while she's putting her leg behind her head. That 90 year old woman who's bending forward just six inches with total focus. That woman is doing yoga. The cheerleader is just doing gymnastics. I'm totally unimpressed. All I want from you guys is to do the best you can do. If you will do the best you can do with joy, then you will automatically begin to expand and be Willing to serve those children who you teach or who you support and the people who support them. You know that, that, that's just the truth. And Jasmine, wonderful question. I love questions like that. Who's next? Oh, first of all, let's give Jasmine a hand. Yay, Jasmine. Being the best is not the same as being the best. You can. Yes, until you change your definition of being the best to I am absolutely the best Steve. I can be at this moment. Which means you have to forgive yourself for not being perfect. Or you have to change the word perfect from an adjective to a verb. From perfect to perfect, from perfection as a position to perfection as a process. I am engaged in perfection, in the perfection of my spirit. I am a high level expert in a couple of different disciplines. So I look at where those disciplines overlap and where they overlap. That's the secret of simply excelling. The secret of simply being more of yourself, being more appropriate. I'm very interested in how can we perfect ourselves. I love to hear how fasting works. Is there a pattern to follow? There are many different patterns that you can follow. What I like when I'm doing it properly is literally just taking every other day. That's the simplest thing. I can drink water, I can drink tea, but it's literally just fasting every other day. Your body does not go into the, I forget what you call it, catabolic state. Your body doesn't go into a catabolic state for about 40 hours. So taking 24 hours between times that you eat, or even as much as 36, there's no problem. You want to check with your doctor first because the doctor might say, well, okay, let's not do that, but how about we have, you don't eat until dinner time and you have a three hour window in the evening when you eat. Or you know, there are many different things you can do. But what matters is that you keep your system empty long enough for your body to begin the repair process to stay. You release growth hormones. You do all sorts of fascinating things. But if you research intermittent fasting, which is deliberately taking long periods where you're not eating during the day or during the week, you will see that there are several different patterns. They all work. You could simply eat one meal a day in the evening. You could eat every other day. You could eat during a particular window. You could change the kinds of food that you allow yourself to have. There are many, many different ways. Check with your doctor and go for it. Because that discipline, the voice in your head that says you're going to starve if you don't eat is lying to you, usually. Once again, this is why I keep saying over and over again, you need to have a wellness circle of people who will support you and advise you. You need to have that. But in general, a healthy person should be able to go 36 hours without eating. We're certainly descended from hunters and gatherers who, if they died after eight hours of not eating, none of us would be alive because the food supplies were just not consistent. Up until you get. Not pastoralists, but literally agriculture. You need the birth of agriculture where you can predict how much food you're going to have in the harvest and through winter, so forth. And storing grains. That's relatively recent human history. It's what, 12,000 years or something? It's not very long at all. So we can do it. But make sure if you set a period of time that is broad enough that you're dealing with hunger, you can actually feel hunger beginning to nibble at you. It's like you are touching the source code. You're touching the machine language, the bare wiring of what you are as an animal. So one of the problems we have in society is that society, life is so comfortable to us that we mistake what used to be. Kurt Steinler is going, take care, Kurt. See you later. That you mistake momentary inconveniences for core problems that you know, when people talk about, that's a first world problem. My Internet isn't working, damn it. It's a first world problem. You know what I'm talking about. I have to pay taxes. That made you. That meant you made money. You know, you have to. In order to get in touch with your motivation, you need, well, one way to get in touch with your motivation. There are other ways. Focusing on, on what you're committed to in terms of helping other people is a way to boost your motivation too. But one part of it is simply get in touch with the animal part of you. And you can do that by slowing your breathing down until your carbon dioxide level raises to the point that your brain is going ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Or you can do it by denying yourself food even when you're hungry, within a very specific window that is consciously planned and worked out with your doctor, he keeps saying over and over again, you start noticing that your mind will tell you to do things and will lie to you. You're gonna starve if you don't eat. No, you won't. You're not getting any better. Yes, I am. Which leads you to asking the question, well, Whose voice is that anyway? It doesn't pass the three gates which are, is it true? Is it kind, Is it useful? If it's not true, but you're saying it in your head. And you can get in touch with that by reducing the amount that you eat or slowing down your breathing or whatever. You get to be aware in ways that most people are not, that the voices in your head lie to you, which will lead you to the conclusion, if you think about it, that the voices in your head are not you. You are the one listening to the voices. You're not the voices, you're the one listening to the voices. And I ask you to consider the implications of that. That is a fairly high level statement that is given to meditators so that when they're meditating and they hear the voices and they have the feelings and stuff like that, they're flying by and they ask themselves who is observing? And then they ask themselves who asked that question? And then they ask themselves, who asked that question. And you keep following that and you start seeing consciousness as a process, ego as a process. If you look at the times in your life when you have been the smartest, the deepest, the wisest, the most loving and giving, the I part of you was not there. It's what Stephen King refers to as the boys in the basement. It's not your conscious mind. It's not the I part of you in which when you ask the question, who said that? And you notice that you're asking that question, the instant that you notice where you are, in between the time that you asked it and the time that you asked yourself what part of me asked that question, There was a moment when the undefined, lurking reality of who you are was present. It's a little bit like when you're in total flow. You don't notice it. There's just something happening. And then you notice to yourself, I was in flow. And as soon as the I comes back, you pop out a little bit, that that's okay. Noticing that you're there allows you to say, well, what helped me get there? What did I do? How did I set it up? Let me go back there. It's the part of you that wants to be enlightened can't get there, but enlightenment is possible. The part of you that wants to create great art cannot do it, but great art is created. Finding out how to resolve those conundrums is the path. Megan, you have your hand up, sweetheart.

No, I know I do. Hi. I don't have a perfectly. I Don't have a question. I might, but I don't right now. I just want to say something in response to your discussion here of fasting. I would say to anyone, yes, of course, you should go to your doctor and talk to them first. And then if you find that after so six months or so of working hard on alternate day fasting, your partner comes to you and says, you have to stop. You, your anger and your mood is bad all the time. You need to do something about that.

I would say so, too.

Yeah. It happened without my realizing it was happening. And I had to have someone come to me who loved me and was getting difficult living with me to say, this isn't working for you.

Well, or it's not working for him.

You know, I know what I like. Okay. I know that it is not working for me if my reaction to it is to take out my low blood sugar on him on a regular.

So there are a couple different things you can do. First of all, you can simply modify it to a different pattern or try something else altogether. Legitimate answers. Another is to realize that the physiological positive effects of intermittent fasting seem to be constant, even if you take in as many as 5 or 600 calories that day, that it doesn't really change things that much. Which means that if you choose the right kind of, let's say, high protein to take in, you might be able to balance your blood sugar while maintaining the positive effects of the fasting. But once again, you should absolutely negotiate this with your partner and absolutely negotiate this with your doctor. So thank you very much, Maggie. Any more comments, questions or requests? Okay, so let's see. Maybe it's. Maybe it's the last question sometime. I think at least one of those voices was put there long ago by my father. He's been gone a long time now, and that part of me is still concerned about what he would say. I still have my mother's ashes. In an urn in my office. I still talk to her. I've got her picture up on my. My shelf. Our parents are incredibly important role models to us. And I ask my mother and I asked my father's spirit, how am I doing? I'm on the same road you're on. I'm doing the best I can with my life. I hope you're proud of me. There is nothing wrong with their voice in your head. Unless, of course, that voice is negative and is hurting, hurting you. At which point you might need to go inside and ask yourself, do a representation of your parent and ask them what Their intentions were with that behavior, with those statements, it's possible to find peace with them. It's possible to understand that they were doing the best they could with the resources that they had, just as you have done the best you could with your resources. And that their intention was to help you. Even if they blew it completely. They wanted to have a loving relationship with you. And if they could not figure out how to do that, that's because they were so damaged. Probably carrying it from their mother and father, who was carrying it from theirs, who was carrying it from theirs. Which gives you the chance to end that chain of pain in your generation so that you do not pass that along to the people around you. Let's see. Was there one more? Definitely a high note day. Looking for the replay. Sounds great. True, he used year took years to bury the guild his mother gave him. Listen everybody. I want to remind you, if Michael has not put in the new the new code, then use Friday. Use Friday to get that discount. I will try to get better as we go with understanding how all these things fit together. Please forgive me. I'm doing the best I can. Please send me emails, personal messages. Let me know what questions I can answer. How can I serve you? It's incredibly important to me to do that. So we're going to end this today. So everybody unmute themselves and say goodbye.

Bye bye. Bye bye, Karen.

Love you. Namaste. You are so bad. I'll follow up with you by email or dm. That's when I'm at my best, sweetheart. When I'm being bad.

Bye bye bye everybody.

See you next week.