Firedance

That when you have, when you have overcome the stuff you're working at, you're.

Going to have some really interesting knowledge to share.

You know, I really, you know that, that I can already, I can tell that on the other side of this.

Is going to be some understanding and.

I'm going to want you to teach me when you have overcome the stuff you're working at. Ah, there it is. Really interesting.

Yes.

Good.

And now I get to. Okay, I need to expand this. Interesting that the zoom thing there is the record button.

Record to the cloud. All right, well, welcome to Fire Dance. And this is October 7th, Fire Dance. You can see the Halloween in the background there. And this is Steven Barnes. I'm inviting you to join us for the next, well, close to 90 minutes where we will be exploring what happens if we focus on all three aspects of our life with the intent to maximize our success in our physical health, our emotional health and our careers while.

Staying within a structure of ethics and values. I believe that this is possible also.

Like this candid conversation with people who are. Who are Christians. Explaining, look, this is one of the big.

Somebody is talking there. So I would like to introduce my co host, the beautiful and talented Tananarive due. Hey, sweetie. Hi.

I don't know about. Why is this mic not working? Can everyone hear me?

No, I can hear you.

Okay, well, hello, everybody. Great to be here. You see my cat Django sleeping in the. In the back next to my laptop. Like a perfect portrait of a writer cat. Office cat, rather. And welcome to everyone who's on my newsletter or even if you're not on my newsletter, but if you are and you haven't seen it yet, I sent some historical photos of my aunt getting arrested in 1961 and a newspaper clipping about my civil rights activist mother and aunt to explain the backstory for my. My Jordan Peele story out there screaming. And I know Steve is excited to talk to you about the continuation of our 90 day love feast, which was a great experience. I don't want to jump ahead. I don't know if you're planning to mention that yet.

No, all I wanted to do was to let you do a core dump of everything that's in your head.

Well, that's in my head. So also on my newsletter, tananarib list.com if you're not already subscribed. Ride we drove to Lake Arrowhead. And of course I watch all these survival shows and every survival show seems to start with our leads reenactments of a day you almost died With a day trip where the weather changes and everything goes terribly wrong. So I of course have plenty of water in the car, food in the car. And I checked the forecast, it only said clouds. But I forgot that when you're going up to a higher altitude, clouds manifest as fog. So the road became very foggy as the temperature dipped by 20 degrees. And it was a little bit of an adventure I thought.

Right, it was.

But when we got there, what did we do?

We went to the lakefront. We were so cute, we held hands and we basically reaffirmed that we want to continue our 90 day segments of our, what we call the love feast, which is something Steve brought into our relationship that has been extraordinary and freeing and has brought so much more harmony to us while we not just live together and continue to co raise our 19 year old son, but work together. So that's the real testament right there. And I'm sure, Stevie, I want to talk more about it, but I'm just going to say hello everybody, I love you baby. And.

So listen, what I'd like everybody to do is unmute yourselves and everybody say hi, let's get our energy up. Because energy is, is where you need to start your day. That you need to deliberately do things every day to control your energy because the mood that you're in, fatigue makes cowards of us all. That when your energy is low, it's very easy to fall into fear. So just say hi and just get the energy up and hi everybody.

Some new people.

Great.

There's some new people. So you know, one of the things we always love to do is any, any new people who are here who would like to introduce yourselves. The point here is that we're aimed at increasing our lives by 1% per week. Okay? That's the kind of minimum, just 1%. That means, you know, every day you're looking for some way to get better at taking care of your health or some way to be happier and more loving and less fearful. Some way to increase your capacity to make money. So it's just if you aim at 1% per week, you will increase really rapidly. Now but the theory that we're operating.

On is that you can increase 1%.

Approximately for every hour that you spend focused on personal development. So if you spend one hour a week, you could, you know, like you just came here and you make that commitment, you can increase 1% that week. But if you were to study at 1%, 1 hour per day, you, you can increase by 1% per day.

What.

You want in there is up to you. But remember, that's working on yourself. Your fear, your focus, your memory, your clarity, whatever that is. It's not specifically working on your job or specifically exercising unless you kind of connect those things with who you are. If you're answering those questions, who am I? And what is true?

Then almost anything becomes an opportunity to grow.

And that question of is it possible.

To grow by 1% a day?

Considering how subjective a measurement like that is, I would say that you probably can.

But most people would feel whiplashed by that much growth.

But 1% per week will get you.

Anywhere that you want to go.

So anybody who is here, I guess the first thing. People who have never spoken up before. There's anyone who has never spoken it before, that you're first time here, please feel free to raise your hand and let's. Let's meet you. Anybody got their hand up who looks.

Like they have not been here before?

Cora. Hello, Cora. Can you unmute yourself and say hi?

Cora might be shy. Okay.

Tammy.

Hello, everyone. I'm actually at work and I'm watching you all trying to get encouragement. So thank you for having this.

Okay. If you felt more encouraged, how would your life be different?

I think I would be much more productive.

You could be more productive. You'd like to increase production.

Definitely.

Excellent. Okay, so if you would say, I want to learn something today that will make me 1% more productive this week or in the next week coming up, that'd be perfect. So now you. You've set your reticular activating mechanism, your. Your unconscious mind to look for things that will help you be more productive. And I will. I def. I love that idea. It's a beautiful idea. And let's make that happen. Okay.

Exactly.

Thank you. You betcha. How about Scott? Oh, Scott. Hey, Steve.

I'm not new.

You've.

We've met before.

Okay, that's great. So it's been a while. I haven't been in on one of.

These for a while.

Okay, well, it's good to have you back. Good to have you back. Now, we had some people who did say specifically that they wanted. They had some things that they wanted to ask, and I believe Tom Barkley was one. So I like to start by letting people ask, you know, either talk about what they've done in the last week, they increase themselves by 1% or a.

Challenge that they're dealing with, or observations.

Questions, requests, utilizing this kind. This kind of approach laid on me.

This isn't so much about me. Before the session started, we, Jaime and You were talking about the editing process.

Yes.

On a particular piece that you're working on right now. And you mentioned having realized that something you were using as an ending would actually work better, pulled all the way to the front and serving to frame the whole narrative, the whole beginning and the rest, and the.

The.

The remains of the remaining part of the. Of the book.

Yes.

It struck me that in what Jaime was describing and your response, most of us who are beginning writers don't feel really free to make dramatic changes to the text that we're working on. What you have, what you described in making that decision struck me as similar to how it is said when you come in as a white belt in whatever study you're in. Yeah. Proceed through the ranks, but you won't really be a student until you're a black belt.

Yes.

Then do you have the freedom to really learn?

Yeah.

What you're talking about is the freedom of discipline. That. That there are strictures within any discipline that I can think of things that you need to learn that unless you have an instinctive, you know, kundalini, awakening, enlightenment about the thing, you're in a process of learning.

Okay.

And it's arguable that even those spontaneous, you know, boom, wham, are nothing more than large amounts of learning that hit you so fast that they overwhelm your mind.

And you get, you know, that enlightenment experience. Saul on the road to Damascus sort of thing.

The paths of learning, let's say in.

Relationships, you date, you learn, things work.

Well, things work badly, you fall on your face. You know, you try to kiss the girl, you get slapped, you ask her, she says no. You know, it's. You're learning, okay? And hopefully your. Your errors are kept small enough that you can learn without anything disastrous happening in your career. Let's say as a writer, we talk about the six step life writing process, where you, you know, write at least a sentence a day, you write one.

To four short stories a month, you.

Finish your stories and submit at least one a month. You don't rewrite, except to editorial request.

You.

You read 10 times as much as you write, and you Repeat this process 100 times. That's designed so that you have a chance to move up through the ranks. Which is the metaphor you're talking about is martial arts, where you start as a white belt, you know nothing. You learn certain things, the basics of that, of the discipline, until you work your way up and you get to the black belt. And a black belt is basically the point where you have your basics and unconscious Competence. At that point, a master instructor can really teach you.

Okay?

Because what you really are doing in terms of, huh, in terms of the real body, mind benefits of the martial arts as well as the self defense martial aspects. A real fight is two cats in a sack. There's. There's nothing pretty about it, okay? So what the teacher has to do is to give you conscious structures that enable you to move into the place where the teacher or the senior students can fight with you in a limited way to the point where you begin to break down.

You get scared, your breathing changes, your.

Form deteriorates, and a good teacher can then stop and say, okay, reintegrate, stop, breathe, remember who you are. Or at the end of the class, sit, meditate.

Because you're unleashing that animal part of.

You, but you're doing it in a way that is relatively safe. So the techniques are increasing your efficiency and effectiveness. But the real secret of self defense is to be an animal is, is to project to anybody who might want to mess with you.

I'm prepared to die right now to protect my nest.

Which is why all these arts suggest don't fight except for something you're willing to die for.

Okay?

There are sporting aspects where two young warriors will get into the arena together and practice letting that animal out through.

The strictures of their discipline.

And they shake hands before and after. Because what they're doing really is teaching each other. We're going to create a context in which we can learn. Now, relating this to storytelling. Everybody tells stories every day. Everybody. You know, we talk about what happened at work, we talk about this, we talk about that. And as long as we're not thinking about ourselves and trying to be clever, usually our storytelling is excellent. You listen to a kid talk about what happened on the way to school, that's perfect story. They won something, something got in the way, they did something, they tried something, and it worked or it didn't work. That's all story is on one level. So we look at these different strictures.

The hero's journey and stuff like that.

And all of them have to be practiced until you forget them.

Okay?

So. And when you forget them, then they're naturally and automatically present in the work as you work. If your attention is on the emotions of the work, take my attention off the technical into the emotional. But that means that I have to practice the technical until it reaches unconscious competence. So at the point where I am having published 4 million words of fiction.

Or whatever the heck it is.

I think about the journey that the characters are on, or the emotions that I.

Want to convey to the audience or some thematic element that I want to express.

But the first drafts are always garbage. Now, Tananarive deals with the fear of that in a different way than I do. The concern, the process of that. She will polish every page before she.

Goes on to the next page.

What I will tend to do is write all the way to the end so that I've got it. I look at it sort of like.

Creating a Polaroid picture.

I've got a very vague, shadowy notion of what the entire arc of the story is. Then I just keep going over it and over it and over it. And every time I do something new, every day I work on it, I can trust myself to come up with about two ideas. I'll come up with about two ideas a day, and I can never predict.

Ahead of time what they're going to be.

But. So when I hit the dark night.

Of the soul in my work, which.

I always do, the only way I could avoid hitting the dark night of the soul is to write something I've already written before that I already know I can do. And the risk of that is becoming a hack. A person who does the writing that they already know they can do is doing hack work. I have to stay on the edge. Every single time I write. I'm not sure I can do it. If I'm sure I can do it.

I get more ambitious.

Because what I want is that sense of always growing, because I believe that that's what it is that the readers really want. They want that sense of spontaneous discovery. And so when I write, when I'm going back through it, I literally don't always know what it is I've written. I don't know what I said next. When I see it, I can astonish myself. There are times when I look at that and I think, boy, that's bad. It's just rotten. And the first drafts, there's much more rotten than anything else. But the idea is that you. It's the same as, you know, working out. It's the same as being in a relationship, the same as anything else. You gotta get in there, get in the game and mess up and then evaluate what you did. Love yourself enough to forgive yourself, laugh at it, and look for, where are there some gems? It's like I will dig through a pile of horse manure because I know there's a pony in there somewhere. I know that if I do the work and then I go back through it, I will find something that works, you know, 20,000 words. I will find 10 words that actually.

Feel like the truth.

And then all I have to do.

Is I say, why does that feel like the truth?

Because it's speaking to thematics. It feels right in the world. Before I go on with that, you know, because if Tanakariv is here, we have a world class writer who takes a. A slightly different point of view on this. And Tananari, if you're there because she goes in and out, if you'd like to make a statement about your position.

On this, you would be totally welcome.

She there? She's not there. Maybe she'll come back in later. All right, so does that address what you were saying, Tom?

Yes, it. Part of it is a question of courage.

Yes.

Part of it is a question of. Like your story about when you met Larry.

Yes.

You said, hi, I'm a writer. And he said, oh, yeah, tell me a story.

Yeah, yeah.

Always being prepared. If. If you are truly in that art, and you were, then that's something you can do. If somebody walked up to me and said, tell me a story. Yeah, I probably could. If somebody walked up to me and said, sing me a song. Yeah, I probably could.

Yeah.

See, what you want is to. To choose the things you want to give the world from the place inside.

You that really knows that thing.

In other words, if you're selling courses on self improvement, all you have to do is aim that at a younger version of yourself because you have learned. So that younger version of yourself would.

Love to know what you know today. Okay.

I mean, me, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, are you kidding? I'd pay anything for what I know now. So as long as I'm aiming at that younger person, it is totally legitimate.

For me to teach.

What's wrong is when people feel like they have to be synthetic. Let me learn something so I can teach it rather than what do I already know. Tononarif, we were talking about process and finding things that work. You know what my process is. How would you differentiate yours?

Or to what degree do they overlap?

Talk to us a little bit about your process.

Wow.

Okay. That's a big one. Process. I'll just use an example of coming up with an idea for a short story, maybe.

Sure.

Perfect.

I mean, the broadest strokes are that Steve will tend to write through to the end in whatever rough form it appears, just to power through it and get that first draft. And from there he can adorn it and decorate it and polish it. And I think the biggest difference in our processes Is that I polish as I write. So I might write, like, for a short story. Honestly, I don't always outline. I am a religious outliner. Otherwise, especially when we collaborate, we have to. But I've also been affected in my other work where I have to outline. So a short story. I might just write four beats because I've had experiences where I go back to a short story I started that's like a page long, and then I had no idea what I was planning to write, which is very frustrating.

So.

So I'll do, like, beats like, this happens, this happens, this happens. And I usually know the ending. Usually I do know the ending. And then based on those beats, I.

Start.

Usually with some backstory, maybe a mini crisis at the beginning of the short story to catch the reader's eye that reveals a little bit about the character. And I polish and polish and polish as I go. So the next day, I might go back and just polish what I wrote the day before.

Okay, here's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to look at the underlying methodology, the underlying strategy there. Compare that to your boxing. How does. What your. How does your writing combine boxing. That's right. To what we're doing with you on the body action system.

I got a pretty good elbow, I'll give you that. I do not have any clue how. I'm not used to looking at myself on the outside in or even thinking I have any kind of a process except trying to keep up with the commands and not mess up. So what do you see? Because I don't. I don't know how to answer that.

Okay, so you go over every page until it's perfect. My guess is you kind of try to do that with every sentence.

Yes.

In learning a physical technique, you could either work on, you know, find some particular thing you want to work on in a session and get that one thing right, or you could just.

That is true.

Just put a ton of energy out there and let your coach watch from the outside and point out some things.

For you to change.

No, you're absolutely right, honey. I'm sorry. Because now you jarred my memory. I will walk into every new session with sort of a memory of the last thing I was trying to correct. You know, like, you. There have been some great corrections, like lean my weight into the punch more rather than being. But like. Like stepping forward into the punch.

Yeah. Punch is you're stepping on his face with your fist.

Yes. Stepping forward and. And being able to use more of my body mass. For the power behind the punch or the elbow correction. So that's what I'm focused on. And. And next time I come in, it's going to be getting my weight under the uppercut, because that's something I've learned from my Supernatural app. I. Does anyone have VR? Supernatural Great Workout, has a boxing app application. And one of those coaches, coach Doc, said that, you know, instead of doing this flimsy, like, you got to bring more of your. Your body into that.

Right?

You, you, you. You're lifting your hips so that everything is underneath it. So the parallel for that is putting your emotion behind your technique. Whether you're talking about fighting or writing that, that you have tons of technique, and you're constantly inputting horror writing, you know, classical writing, you know, good movie imagery.

You're.

You're not just enjoying it, but you're also learning from it. So there are the techniques of things.

Like grammar and spelling and structure and, you know, reverse pyramids and stuff like.

That, but they're all in the service of what do I want the reader to feel. And since you're your first reader, it's really, what do you feel?

Right.

Okay.

So do you have a writer self and kind of a. A younger tananarive storyteller, Story listener? Is there a storyteller and a story listener inside you, and you're kind of communicating between the two?

I mean, that's very well put. I think every project starts as the storyteller. Sometimes it just feels like typing, as I like to say, which is no fun at all. There's nothing worse than the fate of a story where it just feels like typing. Right, right. Because you're just going on faith that one day you're gonna be like, we were watching a horror movie the other night that was on Shutter. It was so cute. Like kid horror. Kind of like Goonies, Poltergeist.

Oh, yeah, the gate.

The gate. And there was a scene in the living room where all these kids were just sitting around the fireplace listening to one of the older teenagers tell scary stories. And I felt like I was one of those kids. I've had that experience at a Horror Writers association convention where they had the short film Night. There aren't enough seats for everyone. We're all just sitting on the floor like we're 10 years old, staying up late. That part of me is very much alive.

Yes.

And that's who I want to be doing the writing, not the one who's thinking and planning. So what I have found with Faith, that if I find My character. That's the key for me. If I find my character, if I find that voice, if I find that one aspect of their past that really moves and drives me. Like in the wishing pool collection, there's a story called Rumpus Room, where I had a hard time accessing this character because she was. She had done an unlikable thing, and I needed to like her enough to write the story. And, you know, but the more I tried to find ways to make her relatable just to me, the more it just. One day you wake up and two hours have gone by, and you were writing and you didn't even notice. Now that's when you become the story listener, when the character is telling you what they're going to do and what they're like. I have my little bullet items. But she came up with this idea. She decided to do that.

See, that's the gold standard.

Yeah.

Gold standard is what Bruce Lee says. I don't hit. It hits.

Right.

The. The.

The boy, what Stephen King refers to.

Is the boys in the basement.

If you do your work, if the adult part of you does the work, some other part of you eventually starts.

Waking up and wants to play.

And so it's a matter of every day, what is the work I need to do to stay on the track. And I trust that if I keep doing this, the playful part of me.

Will wake up and want to get into it.

So the same thing is going to be true in your writing, in our.

Parenting, and in our relationship.

You know, if.

If we do the blessing dance, every day, we're moving certain. Certain aspects of focus and commitment to unconscious competence that every day, our task is to fall in love with each.

Other just a little bit more, to see the beauty in each other just.

A little bit more, to commit to each other just a little bit more. And there is a point at which it stops being work or it stops being conscious. That's just the way you are. You're falling in. You're leaning into each other.

Yes.

And that's just your.

Yeah.

See, that's why. That's the natural space that you are. The point is. And that's going to be true. True with anything you have to do, you do the work until you find yourself naturally leaning in toward it. And sometimes you just have to work. It's just chop wood, carry water, and you accept that. Thank you very much, sweetheart.

Absolutely. Thank you.

All right, so, Jaime Rodriguez.

Hi, Steven. Hi, Tananarive. Hello, everybody.

Hello.

Gosh, this whole discussion has been great already. I Wanted to report from last week that the inertia and resistance that I had been feeling and the suggestion to journal my fears was very productive and helpful. I'm happy to report that everything that was on the to do list has been done. And life threw up a whole bunch of other things as well. And all that stuff got done. But the journaling was particularly useful. I discovered a couple of things. I wasn't actually afraid of any of the stuff that was on the initial to do list. It was if those things were done, there were the next items on the list, and some of those I was afraid of.

Ah.

Listen.

Okay, I want to stop there for a second. Yeah, this is good. This is good. So if you would not. Would you mind sharing something that was scary for you?

Well, yeah, I wanted to go on with that because one of the things that I was afraid of is that winter is coming. And that last winter I put on £70.

Right.

And I need to lose that £70. I'm actually down to where I need to lose 50 now. So I've had a decent summer, but there's that fear that winter's coming and I'm going to put it back on. Yes, I've got all the things in place through fire dance, tai chi, my daily ritual exercises and things. I'm not going to put it back on, but I was afraid of it and that fear was interfering.

See, if you look directly at the fear, it has less power over you. Let me. Let me put something up on the screen. I found something that was powerful, and if I can put it up on.

The screen, I think it's going to be useful.

God, I love it. I never know where these conversations are going to go. Once I ask people whether or not they will share.

Well, and even talking about the writing and the difference between your process and Tananari's process, I think my process is in some ways much more similar to Tananarive's, where I want to get the first sentence perfect and then move on. And I realized that that same thing was happening to me with Fire Dance Tai Chi.

Okay, so what do you see on the screen right now?

Okay, I see the chaos and clarity when I think when you space Bill.

Yes.

Okay, great.

Excellent.

So this is a. This is an illustration that I saw today that connected to one of the most important breakthroughs of my life. I have mentioned to you guys that because of being bullied and not my.

Father not being present in the home.

I developed a pathological fear of being small and weak. That when I Went into the martial arts. I was able to ego my way through up to being national champion in taekwondo, second place winner. But it was all ego around the fear. I hadn't dealt with it. Then one day at a, at a better school, I got my butt kicked.

By a 13 year old.

I mean just, I was in my 20s and this kid just kicked my butt. I mean it was just, it was humiliating and it made me feel like nothing had ever changed, that I had not grown up. And it created a Pavlovian stimulus response loop. It, it created a phobic response to sparring. I was good at it, but every time I thought about going to a school on a sparring day, it was.

Just terrifying to me, right?

And for decades I went through this loop of going to the school until I got good. When I got good, I started attracting the attention of the higher belts. That terrified me. When I'm in action, it didn't bother me. It was waiting to spar. It's like you're sitting at the side of the school waiting for the teacher to say, okay, Steve, get up there. That I just wanted to vomit. And it was just awful. Everybody else seemed to be able to just enjoy themselves having fun, you know, just, you know, like, like they're getting ready to play basketball. You put me in coach. But for me it was like I.

Was dying every day.

And I went through this cycle for years. And one day, I mean, I would ask martial arts instructors, you know, do you. Is there any way out of this? I went to teachers, I went to therapists, I went to shamans, I went to all the. And nobody could help me. Then one day I went to. I was at a. My brother in law, the brother, my first wife Patrick, young, good guy, was studying shore shito Ru karate with a gentleman named Terry Lato. Now Terry was a human wolf. He's one of these guys who just. You no sensible person want to mess with Terry.

You could feel it radiating out of.

Him, something about this guy, you know. But the interesting thing about Terry is if you put him in a parking lot, outside a fair or something like that, there could be a thousand people in the parking lot. And he's the one who the drunk.

Would come up to and start a fight.

It's so strange. It's almost like he's reading. If you want free ass kicking is right here, you know, people would line up to get him. So I asked Terry the same question.

I'd asked so many other people, you.

Know, and I said, I have this problem.

I'M dealing with fear connected with sparring.

I expected him to laugh me off.

Or have contempt for me, but instead.

Of that, he looked at me and he said, oh, your problem isn't fear. And I said, it isn't.

What is it?

He said, your problem is lack of clarity. And I said, what? You say, yeah, lack of clarity. I said, is there an answer for that? You say, yeah, absolutely. Sure. You just visualize a glass tube filled with water, and there's glitter suspended in the water. You simply watch the tube until the glitter settles to the bottom. I said, and then what? I said, then you see what you see? I said, is that. That's it? You say, yeah, that's it. So that's all. That's all. So I said, okay. So I went home. And that very day, I got started. I spent like a half hour to an hour every day visualizing a glass tube filled with water. There's glitter suspended in the water. And it was. The water was swirling. It was chaotic. It was chaos. Here. It took about six weeks for the glitter to settle to the bottom over here. Clarity. And when it did, I was shocked. I saw clearly for the first time in my life that the problem was not that I was afraid. The problem was that I thought the fear meant something. Yeah, I thought the fear meant that I couldn't or I shouldn't or I mustn't or that I was a coward or that I was weak. It didn't mean any of those things. It just meant that my body, mind was preparing me for action. And here's the problem. If I had 10 units of energy, it would have taken five units of that energy to just deal with the fear as fear itself. But I felt guilt about being afraid. That's another three units. And then I felt shame about the guilt. That's another three units. And now I'm overloaded. And then there was. There was concern about the guilt, about the shame, about the fear. And there. There was confusion about. About the shame, about the guilt, about. It was an infinitely regressive hall of mirrors that my ego constructed to keep me where I was.

Because.

And it was trying to protect me. Not only was my ego afraid that if I changed, I would die, but it was also afraid that if I changed, I would suddenly begin to provide to. To. I'd have a target on my back. I knew that when I was competent physically, I attracted the attention of Alphas at the school. I never wanted to be an Alpha. I just wanted to know how to deal with them. You know, I'm not. I'm not that guy. I'm not an Alpha. I'm not a Beta. I'm just Steve. I just wanted to be able to live my life without being afraid that bullies were going to come after me. That realization, that clarity that I had stopped myself all those decades because, you know, well, this is one of the things is this is one of the reasons why I would die and burn.

In hell before I would walk away from my son.

Because if my father had ever just told me, you know, Steve, other people are afraid too. Everybody's afraid. It's just what you do with it. If somebody had just said that to me, it would have given me an indication. This is why it's so important for us to share our experiences of life. Because it can be tiny little instructions that make a gigantic difference.

If.

If I tell you that I am terrified every time I sit down and write a book, that helps you to contextualize your own fear. Oh, fear is okay. Doesn't mean I can't do it. Just means I'm scared. You know, the fear. And once. Once fear. Another thing that's interesting about fear is that fear is there to get your attention. Once the problem has your attention, you don't need the fear anymore. You don't anger anymore. They can be useful, but saying you need them is different from saying, I found them useful.

Well, And I found three interesting observations, realizations through the course of the week. One, I got stuck somewhere between move number 45 and move number 50 of the Tai Chi form. And that the way to get unstuck was to simply go back to the beginning and start again. Yeah. And that. That's what I'm. That's what I've started doing. And it's got me back in forward movement. That was the first realization, second realization in that magic formula, not just having a one in each of the five categories. It's that I can have a one in any category, but if I've got more than one in any category, it multiplies.

Yes.

And it can get to that point of overwhelm where I'm growing and changing faster than I can cope with. And it's okay to slow it down a little bit, just keep moving forward. So that was the second one, but here's the other one. And this was. This ties into the earlier discussion today. It dawned on me that journaling the fear and then recognizing the secondary fear under it is probably one of those kind of archetypical human experiences that I can put into the characters of Some of my stories don't you understand? It's like, holy crap. And then hearing all of this business so far today about process of just getting the shitty first draft done versus perfecting every sentence. It's not about there being one right way. It's about recognizing what I'm doing and being comfortable with it and okay with it and just keep moving forward. And it's been such a great week. Thank you.

You're welcome. It sounds to me like you made about 5%.

Yeah, it was pretty awesome.

Feels like a 5% week to me.

Well, and even better than that, my stepson, who's been behaving badly for over a year, got out of jail two days ago and my husband rescued him and enabled him again. And I did not have to get in either of their faces or interact in any other way than from love, care and honesty. And I was able to tell them both no.

Yes.

Without any ugly on my part.

When you said no, do you mean.

Because of the work we're doing here?

Look, you mean that you said no as a way of establishing your boundary?

Yes.

Good. Excellent. Because. And this is where I, as soon as I. I want to morph this towards talking about self love. We talked about the love fest. But part of what self love is is living to protect that little child inside you. That the love fest works if you are in relationship with someone who also will protect that little child inside you.

And it worked. It worked where I didn't have to have any ugliness with my stepson or with my husband.

Great.

And everything's fine. Which is mind blowing considering how challenging the situation is.

So be sure to journal all of this out. You set a goal that by the end of winter, you want to have lost at least one pound.

Right.

Last time you gained 70. Right. So if you lose at least one pound, that is a U turn. You see what I'm saying? You don't have to set a massive goal for yourself. It's just set yourself a little goal and make a game of it. So you're going. Your goal is to lose at least one pound over winter and have fun in the process.

Yeah.

Because it's the little kid inside you that's going to be the energy and the optimism and the enthusiasm. So you have to give him the sense that we're about to play a game. We're going to play a game and this could be a good game for this winter. You know what we're going to do is we're going to lose at least £1 and have fun in the process. So in your journaling, the life writing process is to write a story about someone who's in a life situation dealing with something similar to what you're dealing with, so that your storytelling mind, in resolving their issue is. Is also resolving your own.

Yeah, it's cheating.

It's cheating. I love cheating. I love having a nice, nasty, unfair advantage over my old self, my shadow self.

I don't disown my shadow self.

I integrate. That's. I'm not going to be afraid of my fear. You see what I'm saying?

I do.

Excellent. Jaime, this is Bank. Great work. Great work. Thank you for sharing. Is there anybody else today before we go in to talk about that child self a little bit more?

I'm going to unpin. Okay.

All right, let's just. We'll just look at everybody here. This is so many people here today. It's. It's just great. Misty Soul. Haven't seen Misty in a long time. Misty, how you doing? Just. Just very briefly, just. Just kind of say hi to us. Misty there. She may have stepped away. All right, so the 90 day love feast was a very specific process designed within relationships to. To create a shift. And the idea was that for 90.

Days, I would put Tananarive above myself in terms of her health, her happiness.

Her joy, that I would remember that every day. In order to do that, I had to not only forgive things that I was irritated about, but realize that my irritation was fear. Why was I afraid? I was afraid that some old patterns might reassert themselves in the future and I would be hurt. Well, why was I afraid of that? Because I was expecting her to take care of me. The fact is, it is her responsibility.

To take care of herself, to fulfill herself, to express herself.

She is the very picture of an excellent human being.

I love her more than I can say.

But we're all. We're all limited. We all have fears. We all react to the degree that I am afraid of anything she might do. That's the degree to which I am.

Not taking care of myself. I'm not taking care of my business. I could not trust myself to take.

Care of myself, so I was giving into my needy, wounded, abandoned child. I was being a baby. I was not taking care of my.

Business as an adult. And the one thing that is true.

About intimate relationships is if you're having sex, you better be an adult. That is an adult activity. And an adult is someone who handles their.

Who takes responsibility for their actions, their emotions, their results. I was not being an adult, I.

Forced, in order to be able to put all of my emphasis on her. That meant that my emphasis about myself.

Had to be an unconscious competence.

Remember, we're talking about all these different principles of writing or martial arts or anything else. You, you have to get them to unconscious competence, muscle memory. In essence, at that point, it's, look, ma, no hands. You're not thinking about riding a bicycle anymore. You can juggle at the same time and enjoy yourself because all the basic skills are taken care of. I had not taken care of the basic skills of taking care of me such that I was being dysfunctional and.

Expecting her to fill in the gap. I could not give my.

I was not safe to give myself.

Away to my beloved because I wasn't handling my business.

Anybody. If you, if you understand what I'm saying, if you, if you recognize this, if you have seen this kind of behavior in yourself where you've expected someone else to carry the mud for you, raise your hand.

It's right. It's right.

We've all been there. We've all been there. And so the 90 day love feast was not about being better to Nananarive, although it was. It was really about asking what stands between me and being as joyful as.

I can be, as healthy as I.

Can be, as successful as I can be. And I simply used the relationship as a way to look at this. The 90 days were so powerful that we went up to Arrowhead. We decided to renew them.

And I wanted to express that with you guys.

But I asked myself another question. What if you're not in a relationship? What then? Well, if you're in a relationship and it's a bad relationship, you go for 90 days. And at the end of that 90 days, either that relationship is transformed or you find out you got to get out of that relationship because it's dead.

And there's nothing there for you. So you can start making your exit strategy.

But if you're not in a relationship at all, remember we talked about how Tananarive has the writer self and the listener self. We can make that connection.

And I'm going to share this picture on the screen too. Share screen. There we go.

The child self and the elder self. That one way of looking at yourself is as if there's the child self who began the process of living, starting life. And then there's the adult self in the middle. That's you right now.

And then there's the elder self, you, at the end of your life, you know, there's no more ego. You're not trying to prove anything.

You're taking your last 10,000 breaths. Okay, you're on your deathbed. What would that self, that elder self, tell you about what you're doing? In many ways, life is about nothing.

More than taking the enthusiasm and the.

Energy and the optimism of infancy, of.

Youth.

And combining them with the wisdom of time. Such that in many ways your job as an adult is simply to move between being an infant and an elder with integrity to both, integrity to both your dreams and the deathbed values. Your real understanding of what is important that will be at the end of life. Such that visualizing your child self and your elder self, when you can visualize both of those, you can do a fantastic exercise of simply sitting back in, listening to your elder self talk to.

Your younger self to a degree.

When we are writing, we are writing.

For the entertainment of our younger selves. When I teach, I am teaching to my own younger self. What did that younger man need?

So if I talk to you today about fear and not letting fear disguise.

Itself as guilt and anger and shame.

And stuff like this, just look at the thing itself.

Fear.

I'm afraid. If you can say I'm afraid, all the rest of that crap disappears. You don't have to carry all of that. You can just carry this. But that's only five units and you got 10 units of energy. You can carry your fear. What you can't carry is all of.

Your opinions about your fear. Fear.

You can't be observing yourself dealing with the fear. The truth is that if you're afraid, you ask yourself, what is it I need to do to resolve this fear? And then you put the emotion behind the action. You don't feel fear while you're in action. You feel fear while you are waiting for something to happen. If you are sitting back and saying, I'm just so afraid, that's one thing. But if you're taking one step, I will do one page of research. I will talk to one friend, I will come to fire dance on Saturday, and I will tell the truth about how I feel. Any action you are taking will diminish.

The amount of fear you're feeling.

Fear and guilt. Guilt is about the past. Fear is about the future.

In the present, there is action in being.

So what you want to do is.

Spend as much of your time in that moment.

If you divide yourself into the adult.

Self or elder and the child self.

The 90 Day Love Feast is then.

About caring for your child every day.

Asking yourself every day, how can I.

Improve my relationship with my own heart by just 1%. Let me do something to make myself happy.

Because if you love yourself enough, you will not only do things to make that part of you happy, but you.

Will also exert discipline. If you've got kids and you've had.

The experience of your kids saying they don't want to do their homework, and you know that they must in order to complete their schooling, in order to be able to go out in the.

World and have happy lives, you know.

That you're willing to sacrifice being their.

Buddy in order to be their mom or their dad.

I think most of us, we'd rather just be buddies with our kids.

Wouldn't it be great when we're just playing together?

But that doesn't always work. Sometimes somebody has to be the adult. And the same thing is true within yourself. There are the childlike aspects of who.

We are and what we're doing.

Just the child self. Okay, let's put it this way. The adult part of you, their responsibility is to create a safe garden. To cut thorns off the roses, to build the walls high, sweep out the broken glass and keep the mountain lions out.

The child's job is to play, is.

To dance, is to enjoy life. All of your creativity and your energy comes from that child self. And if the adult does her job, if the adult does his his job, that the child is safe to play. So what I ask you, see, I was able to do this for tonight are Eve because she and I have a connection on the child level. We're kids all the time because we're also adults all the time. You know, we create, we do the adult business so that our kids have a safe place to play. Simple as that. I want this for you. That the 90 day love feast was about what I would do for Tananarive, not what I would get back from her. That would be a transactional relationship. The worst relationship, level one relationship is I'm here for what I can get. The level. The level two relationship is I'll do.

You if you do me.

The level three relationship is I give.

To you unstintingly without asking anything in return.

And if my instincts are correct and.

I'm in relationship with another giver, so I give to her and she gives to me.

But it's not contractual, it's not obligated, it's not a one for one. I want you to do this with yourself, Tananarive. You unmuted yourself. So I have this feeling you want to say something.

I just wanted to Be present in the relationship, darling. No. Everything you said, I kind of downloaded my contribution at the beginning. But whether it's just a solo go at it or you're in a relationship, even one that feels extraordinary because I always feel like the luckiest of my friends and my relationship with Steve. But everything can be improved. And why not get the most out of life?

That's right. I would like you. For the next 90 days, we're going to be talking about loving ourselves enough to be joyful and also disciplined, to create the safety that allows you to feel joy. The most important thing is to be safe. And so if you find that there's not a lot of joy in your life, there's a lot of fear, you're.

Probably stuck in survival.

If you love a child, you will.

Get up early for that child. You'll be sick, but drag yourself out of bed to make breakfast for that child. We all know that. I want you to do that for you.

I want you to be willing to.

Do whatever it takes to be happy, whatever it takes to be joyful, whatever.

It takes to feel safe, whatever it takes to feel successful. The adult part of you is going to take care of the adult responsibilities so the child can dance. Now, having said that, I would like.

To open up two questions.

Duran Jones. I'm not sure I've seen you before, bruh.

Hey, how you doing?

Yeah, I'm doing great.

Thank you for doing this.

This is my first time here.

Well, you are so welcome. So tell us Make America dope again. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about what we can do. What would your life look like if every week your emphasis was, I'm going to be 1% healthier and happier?

This week I'm going to create a.

1% safer space for that creative kid inside me. What would happen if you did that?

Man, that feels like such a loaded question right now. Where I'm at. I think it would look like finishing the feature that I've put off as a writer to be a producer for other people. It would look like giving myself the space and the love that I've given to other people's projects, to my own project.

Wonderful, wonderful. Now, what you might want to do is to reduce the size of the project. Instead of a full film, maybe it's a short film, which would give you the joy of completion. And the short film, of course, is your foundation for a bigger film. But whatever amount of faith that you have in yourself, squeeze your goal down until it's small enough to fit into that faith.

Okay.

Or it's no more than 1 to 5% bigger than the amount of faith you've got. You got to grow a little bit, but you have faith that, you know, every time I write something, I know I cannot write it, but my faith is that by the time I finish, I get to the finish line, I'll be there. I'll be able to grow enough to do it. So I deliberately scare myself to keep.

My attention, partially because I'm a little bit masochistic and it's fun.

You know, a small amount of pain is like. Is like small spice, you know, on the chili dog. So what I want you to do is to give yourself permission to be. To. For the little boy inside you who started life, started your creative journey that just wants to tap dance in the living room and have, you know, mom and dad and the relations and the neighbors all say, you're wonderful, you're funny, and clap and throw money at you.

You.

It's. See, that's. That little kid has all of your joy. And so the. The adult part of you has to take care of business. The adult part of. Is going to take care of contracts and discipline and time management. But all of that is just to create a safe place for the kid. So that means that every day you get to play. Every day for the rest of your life, you get to play. Because that's the. If you're not. If you don't get to play, then your adult isn't on the. You, in essence, you've pimped your child out. You put your kid out on the corner to make money for you instead of the adult taking care of adult business so that the child can play. So in the adult world, that's the money world. Anytime you're dealing with money, that's probably the adult world. The kid world, that's the artist, that's the singer, that's the writer. Okay, that, that's that thing is this. Let's put on a show. The adult is. Okay, that's the contract. Let's do this. We're going to talk to the lawyers. We're going to take. But remember what it's all for, it's all for creating a safe space for your kid. So if you will commit to getting in better touch with your child by 1% per week, that's easy. If you'll spend at least one hour per week researching how do I do this? How do I take care of myself, how I do, how do I get healthier and happier and heal my emotions? How do I do that one hour per week. Will do that one hour a day. And you'll find your progress so fast.

That you'll get dizzy.

If you will make that commitment, come back next week and tell us what.

You did to improve yourself by 1%.

And we will support you. We will. We will be a safe space within which you can dream and you can be as silly as you want and you can work as hard as you want. Because I believe in working like a rented mule, but also goofing around and having an awful lot of fun. I have so much fun in my life. I work very hard. I'm very disciplined. But every day I'm watching cartoons. Every day I'm camping out in front of the television while I'm working, working on my man watching Monk, you know, or Lupin the third. I said about this because I know that that kid part of me is hungry. That kid part of me wants to play. That kid part of me cries because his father was not there. And so I turned myself into my own father. You are now the father of that little boy inside you. And you have the chance to be the perfect father for that little boy. All you have to do is not want anybody to come and rescue. Realize if it's to be, it's up to me. It's up to you. Can you be the father that little boy needs? Can you. Can you step up and do that? Because if you can, you can have.

Your whole life, Duran.

You could have your whole life. All you have to do is the man who can father the little boy inside you. Does that make any sense to you?

That makes a lot of sense.

All right. I'm so glad to see you.

Thank you so much for that.

Absolutely. Come back anytime you want to, you know, just take a quick break to say that, you know. This broadcast is brought to you by Fire dance tai chi. Www. Firedance tai chi.com I love, you know, in the life writing lifewriting premium.com. i love the things that we sell to people because we put our whole hearts into them.

We.

But you can come here for free. I will give you anything that's in any of those courses for free if.

I can right here.

Because I make my money writing it, you know, I make a lot of money doing the things that I that. That I do there. So what you need to know is.

That if you choose to come here, you.

You will be respected and cared for. And if you go away for a long time and you come back, it'll.

Be fun to see you so you know, you. You do.

You.

But consider every week for the next 90 days, improve the relationship between the adult part of you and the child.

Part of you by just 1%.

Just 1%. How that means you wake up every morning. How can I be better to myself? How can I be healthier? How can I exercise better? How can I spend more time writing? How can I spend more time reading? How can I watch. When was the last time I watched a favorite movie? Something that inspires me? You know, for me, that might be, you know, Kaltiki, the immortal monster, or something like that movie that I loved watching when I was a little kid? You know, it's like, I'm going to watch that movie again. Was the last time I watched Godzilla. I mean, you know, feed the kid.

Part of you and then also feed the adult part of you.

These are metaphors. The idea that there is a child part of you that's not literal, it's.

Figurative, but incredibly powerful.

And one of the most powerful meditations you can do is to sit quietly.

Listen to your heartbeat, follow your breathing, visualize the little boy that you were.

When you can fully visualize the child.

That you were.

Ask him to tell.

You what he wants from you, and then just listen. Don't try to lecture him. Let him tell you. And the level above that is to visualize the old man. You are going to be on your deathbed. Beyond all ego, he has accomplished everything.

That you want to accomplish. He's had all the love, all success.

And now he's got just a few days to communicate everything that's important to the most precious person in his life, his own grandchild, and just step back and listen to the old man inside you. Talk to the child that you were. And if you do that, you will hear truth and wisdom like you won't believe. Okay?

Commit to me.

You can approve by at least 1% the next week. Try real hard to get back next week so that you can report back to us how the week has been.

The one practice that I would ask from you is the thing that we ask from everybody, which is every hour.

On the hour, stop and breathe for 60 seconds.

You do that at least five times.

A day, you know, with at least an hour in between.

There are a whole raft of psychological.

And physiological reasons why this works.

60 seconds of deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing. Go to YouTube, look up diaphragmatic breathing. Or talk to a yoga teacher or a tai chi teacher, martial arts.

My wife's a yoga teacher.

I'm familiar.

Get her to Teach you belly breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, and then set your smartwatch, set your smartphone for one hour or every hour on the hour, just breathe for 60 seconds.

If you do that, miracles can happen.

Okay. And thank you so much for coming. It's wonderful to see you. And welcome to Fire Dance.

Thank you. Thank you all for holding space. I appreciate it.

You betcha. All right. Is there anybody else? Because you can either volunteer or be voluntold. I ain't shy. Yes, Linda Dickens.

There. Unmute. I am really proud. What you see behind you is the quilt. I finished about 11:20 this after this morning.

Yay.

Unmute everybody. Applaud. Congratulations, Linda. I bet that feels really great.

It really does. And I will be. It still needs to be trimmed and have the binding put on it. And then it's going in the quilt show later this month. And then I'm going to donate it to charity central.

Fantastic. That sounds wonderful. You know, just is that is your self expression and it's also your giving to the community.

And this was a thing I did, literally my name. I called this my joy quilt because I did it just for the joy of it. I'd been working on a quilting project that was driving me bloody nuts. In fact, I have put it aside. I rage quits. Like I'm not dealing with that until I'm in a better place. Then I just went through my stash and pulled out stuff I really liked and put it together and just played with it. That's not an official. You know, there's no name to what I did. I just played and I had a wonderful time with it.

See, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. And you know, art is the act.

The space of creation.

Quilts and stories and dance moves and vases are objet art. They're objects of art. They are the byproducts of having been.

In the creative space.

So what you got is you got the joy of actually living in your creative space. This is just the evidence that you were there. It's just a. You picked up while you're passing through the territory called art. So you can give that away. Nobody can take the memories from you or neurologically the knowledge that you took complex skills and had internalized them to the point where you could get into flow state and forget about anything except.

Being in the moment.

That's the point that Tananarive goes into with her writing.

That's where I go into with writing and martial arts.

That. That is the place. So bless you. Fantastic. Wonderful.

I know you Guys would like to hear about it, see it?

Oh, heck yeah. Heck, yeah. Thank you for sharing, Linda. Congratulations. Okay. Megan.

Hello.

Hello. Hi.

Yeah, so. So I had a really great week, I think. And I had a sudden influx of women's spiritual things happening. I was invited with a thousand other people, I'm sure, to an online ritual with someone that I have been following for five years or so. I really am interested in what she does in her work. And then there was a five day Hags Crohn's and Elder Wise Women Summit, which was an online summit that I attended over the weekend. And I really got some real clarity and I feel that I have now I've kind of created a morning ritual that could possibly work for me. One of the things that the women. The woman did who that I went to that ritual was she's based in Tibetan Buddhism. That's her practice is grounded in Tibetan Buddhism. And when she does her essentially five minute miracles, she hums. And so I'm adding humming to my five minute miracle.

Wonderful.

And would you.

Would you.

Would you hum for us? I just wanted to see the pitch.

Oh.

Yeah.

So on my out breath, I do my humming.

Nice, sweetheart. There is nothing that is more important than finding a practice that takes you home. You know, some combination of movement, sound, breath, attention. Qigong exercise, which is the energy system inside Tai chi, is a matter of bringing mind, eyes, breath and movement together. Sound is a way to do that. The pitch of the sound, there's so many different pitches and rhythms and so forth. Creating a sacred ceremony for yourself to protect your own heart. I can't think of anything that's more important in life.

So thank you for taking care of my Maggie. That sounds wonderful, sweetheart.

So thank you.

You're very welcome. You're very, very welcome.

Is there anybody else would like to share or ask any question you want?

You can ask any question you want and I will answer yes.

Dijonia Almost is Deje Nejne. Yes. So this is my second week here, and last week I told you all that I wanted to write a screenplay, a short screenplay.

Okay.

I did it. You did? Yeah. Oh, it's only 10 pages.

No, no, no. 10 pages is fine. It's 10 pages long. That's fantastic.

And what I learned from that is honestly just to be patient with myself because, I mean, at the end of the day, I'm going to get it done. So why, why put that constant pressure on myself when I can just be patient?

Well, can you do me a favor? Can you turn on your camera at the moment, no. Okay, well, don't worry about it then. So what I wanted to ask you is. And even another possible door you could go through is to ask yourself. So the point was to not let these things stop you from, you know. Would you rephrase again? What you were doing, what you learned from this? Say it again.

Yeah. To be patient with myself.

Yes. Good. So who taught you to be impatient?

Self.

I would say maybe myself.

Now, it wasn't parents or teachers or bosses or spouses or anything like that. You didn't get any of that from the outside.

I'll have to dig a little deep and think about it.

Yeah.

Because you didn't create yourself. You didn't create your ego. Your ego was created in interaction with your environment. And when you find yourself, the voices.

In your head that tell you to.

Be impatient, to tell you you're running out of time or tell you you.

Can'T do it or you shouldn't, or.

You couldn't, or you mustn't. Remember what I said about the fear thing. All that stuff was what I had learned from other people about fear. They told me I was a coward.

Or that it meant that you couldn't or whatever.

So there is the thing itself, which is spending, if she's existing.

And then we must do certain things.

Chop wood, carry water in order to provide for survival. And then after survival is handled, we.

Generally wish to create joy.

And art can be a part of that. But the struggle between what we're told we need to do to survive, which is fear based, and what we need.

To do to create, which is joy.

And pleasure based, has to be resolved. They're not necessarily the same lessons. They're not necessarily the same voices. The, you know, get your lazy butt up, you know, and fight, which will save your life on the battlefield, is not always the best way to talk to the artist. Part of you it might be. And then the way you can determine is take a look back at what.

You'Ve been creating and how much fun.

You'Ve had creating it. The meaning of life is to be joyful and of service.

I would say.

So if the meaning of life is.

To be joyful and of service, and.

You find that the urge to create has actually been inhibited by some of the beliefs you have about the act of creation or the value of creation, it is useful to interrogate those beliefs to ask yourself, where did I learn that? Where did I get that? Who taught me that? Whose voice is that? To separate yourself from the voices in.

Your head is One of the steps to being awake, and the whole point of this is to be an awake, aware, adult human being, balanced and healthy, strong enough to provide a safe world for children.

Even if you choose not to have any kids, at the very least, you're.

Not making the world more dangerous for, for them.

But to serve the child within you. You have to ask yourself, what are.

The words that I would give that child? Would I be impatient with that child or would I be encouraging? Would I tell that child, Do I.

Tell that child that I love her.

Enough times every day? How many times a day does a child need to be hugged, need to be told that they're loved in order to be the healthiest, strongest child possible? When you are working on your script.

If you do it from the position.

Of this is a joy. Oh my God, I get to spend time working on this script.

I am so lucky. Let me get in there.

This is hard, but this is good. That's very different from the way most people are, which is to criticize themselves for everything. They do second guess themselves.

They look at their first draft and.

They want it to be, you know, like a Scorsese movie.

You know, it's like, oh my God. You realize you don't have any idea how many drafts a finished script goes through. Get past your first. You don't know what Shakespeare's first drafts look like. Whatever it is that you do, remember.

That the creativity is coming from the child part of you. And speak to that child kindly, with discipline, but love and congratulations. Proud of you.

Thank you.

Thank you for sharing. What is this? What I say make sense?

Yeah, yeah, it does. It does.

Good.

Is there anything else we can do for you? No, I'm just going to practice that fantastic 1%. All you have to do is get 1% between now and next week. All right, all right. Tom Barkley.

Sorry, I got the most away from unmute. Just very briefly to support what you were saying. Give a. Give a firm example. Most of us know who Patrick Stewart is. His autobiography came out this week.

Oh, cool.

And in the first two pages, he talks about growing up in a poor lower class neighborhood somewhere in Yorkshire. And he says, we lived on Cam Street. Why it was known called Cam Street, I don't know. I couldn't find out. And I was reluctant to ask because if I asked anyone, I'd get a cuff on the ear and told. Why are you asking these stupid things? You don't need to know that. Nobody needs to know that. Why the hell are you wasting your time asking stupid Questions and on and on. I didn't get that extreme sort of reaction at home, but I'm sure many of us got one version of it or another.

Yeah, you're talking about people who are so concerned with survival that they don't even let themselves feel. What they're feeling is, you know, why have, why have curiosity about anything that isn't. Does it either get you laid or.

Put food on the table and a roof over your head?

If you've got insecurity on those things, then the question of happiness, let alone.

Random knowledge, is absurd.

Focus on life where you focus on what's going on. Right here, right now, your mom and I are raising you and we're going to be old. We need you to get strong enough to be able to help us one day get your head in the game. Kids, that is very useful for survival, but it's not very useful for joy. Joy is letting that little kid inside you explore and learn stuff and just ramble. It's not just being concerned with how.

You stand within the tribe, whether or not you find a mate or whether or not you're going to draw your next breath, have food on the table and a roof over your head. That's survival stuff.

The kid inside you. I remember my mom sold World Book.

Encyclopedia so we could have a new encyclopedia every year. And we were in the Lookie club and the motto was we never guess.

We look it up. And that was just how I grew up. It's like, you know, let me absorb as much random information as possible. And my mom, God bless her, we were poor, but she never let us feel poor. She made sure we had library cards.

She made sure we had experiences. She made sure that we had. We knew people that were upper middle.

Class, you know, that, that we saw.

The potentials of life.

If no one did that for you.

Then you must do it for yourself and then turn around and do that for other people. That it's not too late to make.

Contact with that child inside us that.

Just wants to learn and grow and dance and be happy. Be sure that every day that child, part of you learns and dances and.

Finds a way to be happy. That that's actually part of your task in life. If you could, if you'll take this.

90 day love feast with me.

And every day you're asking yourself, what can I do to put a smile.

On my own face?

What can I do that would be fun? What movie makes me laugh until I'm sick?

I haven't watched in a long time.

Where have I gone. What ice cream have I not eaten? What art have I not done? What can I do today to make myself happier?

I want Tom to be happy.

And if Tom wants to be happy, too, then asking that question long enough and you'll start coming up with answers. Or say, what is it that I need to do? I need to do this, this, this, and have fun in the process.

Be sure that you add that.

So life is not just a grind, it's a blessing. Exercise is a way of saying thank.

You for having a body healthy enough to exercise. You know, it's. It's. It's embracing your life.

That in order for you to. I would like for all of you.

To have a goal of being one.

Of connecting with that child self, of.

Loving that child self 1% more every week for the next 90 days.

Does that make sense to you, Tom?

Very much so. You've gotten me thinking about it, and I've been digging down through the. You know, through the layers of debris.

Yeah.

Looking for causation.

You ever see Fantastic Voyage, the miniaturized submarine?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So try this. In our lives, all the pain and.

The disappointment and the fear and the failures.

And this, that and the other are like all of the. The clotted garbage, the detritus.

Okay?

What you have to do is shrink.

Your ego down like a submarine.

Like that submarine and Fantastic Voyage. Until you are in the water, in.

Between the clots of garbage in a.

Cesspool, there is still clean water.

Get down there low enough that you can just move in the water. You move between the obstacles. You can observe them.

That stuff is there. Nobody is denying that.

The pain is there, the experiences are there.

But you have the responsibility to protect that.

Protect your heart, to protect the child within you.

You keep. That's what parents do.

They protect their children from understanding how serious life is long enough for those children to develop a sense, a healthy sense of self that can then resist the pain when it comes. If you need to go in there.

And deliberately, every day, tell Tom, I love.

My God. Look at all you've survived.

Look at all you've given me. Look how far we've come together.

Daddy is here. Your job for the rest of your life is to play. Daddy will take care of the work if you do that.

And you can have that conversation appropriately.

In a way that that kid, part of you believes.

One of the things that you might find is that kid running and jumping.

Up into your arms and saying, I love you so much, Daddy. Thank you. All he wants is to know that he's lovable and loved and safe.

Do that and you'll get back all.

That aliveness that you felt like you're lacking.

So it's like, how do you have to step up? How do I have to step up.

To be a better husband?

How do I have to step up.

To be a better artist, martial artist? I need clarity on what is true.

I need to understand that my thoughts.

And the voices in my head are not me. They're things that are happening in the space of the me. Just commit to being 1% happier, having 1% better connection with your child every week, and let us support you in that just 1%.

If you'll just ask yourself, what can.

I do today to be a little bit more in touch with my own loving heart? Find one tiny little thing, the tiniest sliver of something, and that's enough to get you started. Will you do that for me, Tom?

I will. You brought Dawn Callan into one of these sessions once. And I will never forget what dawn said to me when I was talking about my fears. And she said, you're trying to avoid them. Well, don't do that. That's where the good stuff is.

That's right.

It's where the good stuff is. And by the way, just you reminded me of Dawn.

We've got that warrior within course.

My decision is that at the end, I'm almost at the end of putting.

All 108 movements of Tai chi up in the fire dance course. And my decision is that I'm going to take the other personal development courses, starting with dawn, and add them so that you can stay in that one path and get everything that we've got. Because what Dawn.

Dawn was a miracle worker.

And it was one of the greatest honors of my life that she was willing to trust me with how she did it, how she took people and turned their lives around in two days. One of the things that she does is she divides us.

You know, if you talk about belly.

Brain, heart center, head center, the belly brain is the warrior center. That's survival. The heart center is the shadow, which includes our fear. And you have to own your fear.

In order to really have the energy.

That your body mind has, which is designed both for survival and thriving. So it's the warrior, the shadow, and then the headspace is the magician. When you integrate your survival and then move up to joy, you start developing the capacity to create the world that you want in your life. You start moving into wholly extraordinary space. Most people are stuck in survival. If you make the Commitment to your child to create a safe and happy place for that child. You're starting to do magic. And that's what I want for you. Okay?

Yes.

All righty. All right. So we're almost out of time here today. I've got a friend coming over. I'm going to book my passage to Manila. Going to Manila for the Filipino martial arts workshop. I'm in training for it.

I've got. You know, my. My training has been working.

I.

It's a lifetime ambition to go to.

Asia and study Asian martial arts. And it's like, wow, that little kid inside me is so happy. So the adult part of me is willing to work like a maniac to make this happen. And Tananari is totally on board. God bless her. She understands what this means to me.

She.

She's got my back. That it. The joy of knowing that there's someone.

In life who has your back cannot be overestimated.

And I would say to you that I want you to have that feeling for yourself.

To know that you have your back 100%.

Period. I will die before I will betray.

The child inside me.

And I want. That's all the kid inside you wants to know. You don't even have to win. You have to be willing to fight. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes within your power or die honorably in the process. If you will make that commitment for your child self, that child will give.

You all the creativity you need to.

Answer all the problems that you have as an adult. You say, this is what I need to accomplish. How am I going to do it? I don't know. The kid will say, I know.

This is the path that I'm laying out for you. This is the path that was laid out for me. I'm not important at all. But the path is. I don't take myself seriously, but I take the path dead seriously. Like to say again that, you know, the. The morning ritual is really encoded within the Fire Dance. Www.firedancetaichi.com It's a monthly program. You can quit whenever you want to. But.

And you can be here without being.

A part of the program. But we would love to have you in that program. Like, we can get. We can get a little closer to you and help you a little bit more.

Unmute yourselves. Everybody say goodbye. Goodbye now.

Take care, everybody.

Peace and blessings, all.

Love.

Namaste. Namaste. Thank you so much for being here. Please take care of yourselves. I love you. We love you. Love each other. I love seeing what you're doing in the chat room. Sharing and supporting. That's what this is about. No negativity. This is a safe zone for you.

To come and play.