FIREDANCE July 1, 2023

RECORDING in progress welcome to Fire Dance, the next level. My name is Stephen Barnes. I'm the creation of the fire. I'm the creator of the Fire Dance technologies and the life writing technologies and things of that nature. I'm a husband and father, a professional novelist and television writer and martial arts. Martial artist. And I am so honored and so happy to be here and so happy to see all of your faces. There are few things in the world that I enjoy more than learning and teaching what I've learned. It is just an absolute blessing. Before we go in, I think Sonya is here and Tom Barkley is here. Sonia, if that's the same Sony that sent me the story, I sent you an email asking about whether I could share what you sent with the group. I did not hear back from you. So I'm not planning to do your story today. But if you do, give me permission to share it with the group. We'll do your story tomorrow, next Saturday. So can you hear me? Yes, I can.

Okay. I just saw the, your question, your.

Request about sharing it with the group and I'm okay with the group getting it. Great. So we'll do you next week. And Tom Barkley, we're going to do you today. So this is, this is wonderful. I love the fact that we're starting to integrate the Life Writing group into this. And since, you know, the Hero's Journey is the story pattern that I use because I noticed that it can be applied both to human life as well as to story structure. And to my knowledge, it is the only story structure that does that. It's the only one that I know of. It's certainly the one that I have integrated the level of unconscious competence so that we can talk about any story from the process of not just what's happening in the story, but the process of creating the story and the process of living your life as an artist. And then we can put all of that, the specific story stuff aside and we can look just the question of how do we live our lives so that we are continuously moving to the next level. I had the joy of working with a young writer earlier today. I mean, she's 10 years old. She's brilliant, brilliant little girl. I mean, it's like, wow, is she smart and she has so much presence. And I said, you're writing a story about a 10 year old girl who wants to be a professional writer. And I say to you that at the end of that story, that girl got everything that she wanted to. She gets the writing, she gets awards, she gets Money, she gets health, she gets happiness. And so all you're going to do is to imagine in advance what are the challenges that she's going to face. And by looking at the hero's journey, you can actually figure out what challenges you're going to face before you ever get there. You already know that it's going to take tons of work, that you're going to deal with fear, you know, the rejection of the challenge. You already know that you're going to have to make a decision and make a declaration to the world, the acceptance of the challenge. You know that there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And that's going to be the road of trials. You're going to have to just, you know, chop would carry water, get up every day. Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it. You're going to need allies, networking, mentors. You're going to need new abilities, the emotional abilities, intellectual abilities, to create a safe space for you, to create your writing, to be able to support yourself while you're learning. You're going to fall on your face and some of those falls are going to feel devastating. You're going to feel like you've got your guts kicked out. That is just the way it is. You and you need to grasp that before you set off on the journey. In any journey that is transformative in nature, your ego dies. Any journey. So if you know that ahead of time, you make your peace with it. Like a warrior going off to war, you make your peace. The fact you're going to die, you're never coming home. But what's important and what is more important than you are will survive. In this particular case, because we're not literally talking about physical death. We're talking about your ego death. Who you think you are, especially your limitations. Even the positive ego that you build around your fears, that has to die too. Because it's like I tell my son.

Who you really are.

Now, you've got a lot of ego around yourself which you use to protect yourself from your insecurities. But your father is here to tell you that who you really are is 10 times as magnificent as anything you ever dreamed of. Who you really are is not just adequate to the task, it is more than the task. You have no idea how wonderful you really are when you drop all the nonsense. And if you follow that, then she will get, you know, she'll get to the point where she can turn around and take another little 10 year old girl. She will look back from Having won her awards and published her books and built her home. And a little 10 year old girl will come to her one day and she'll say, ma', am, could you please teach me? I'd like to be a writer. And there should be a part inside you that will say, there you are, I've been looking for you. And you will give that little girl all the wisdom you have gained. The idea that we can turn around and help younger versions of ourselves should be one of the things that inspires you to get up and every day, day after day and say, what can I learn today? What can I be today? What can I do today? Because one day somebody will come to me and ask for the help that nobody gave me. I had to fight my way through this. I'm going to give that help to the next generation. And that's how the human race moves on. And it's the only reason it does. Because we learn, we grow, we accept, we observe and we teach. So before we go any further, it's just so wonderful seeing everybody here unmute yourselves and everybody say hi to everybody. This is the moment that I love.

Hello.

Hi everyone.

That's just so great. I love you guys. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm seeing people I haven't seen for a while and it's just, you know, whatever is happening in your lives, you are welcome to bring it here. You know, our whole thing is that if you are willing to take five breathing breaths during the day, that's all we ask for. I don't ask you to join our program. You know, I love for you to be, you know, this is the program. I don't ask for you to pay me to join the program, although we love it. If you would go more deeply into Fire dance, firedance, Tai chi dot com, that's where we are. But this is not about the money. This is about the learning and the growing and the changing. So come here. Even if you can't afford a dime, this is, this is fantastic. We'll help you make more money so that you can afford a dime, you know, love to help you, you know, get to the point where you can, you can join to pay that part of the program, but we don't hold anything back from people. So the basic program is to take five 60 second breathing breaks during the day. And the more advanced program is actually creating an hour long or 10 to 20 minute period where you are breathing and moving and visualizing your future and flooding yourself with positive emotions, setting yourself up to have a fantastic day. Before I go any further, I would like to introduce. We're doing something a little bit special, but my co host, my good lady wife, the love of my life, my darling baby girl, Tanana Reeve, due.

Hey, I wasn't. I'm still kind of getting ready, but good to see everybody.

Yeah. And you know, I wanted to mention, you know, we talk about the 1% and we'll open this to people sharing how they have improved in the last, in the last week. We ask you to look for something to improve every week. You know you've tried to improve by 1%, get 1% better physically. You know, that might be exercising or improving your exercise form or diet or improving your diet or getting better rest. It could be something in career, you're doing something new in terms of marketing yourself or becoming more efficient and effective with time management. Or it could be something emotional. You're loving yourself a little bit more, you're forgiving yourself more, you're giving more love to others, whatever it is, but just 1% change per week. And the notion is if you just come here, if all you do is come here and share, honestly, especially those chat things should be going, you should be talking about what you're doing and commenting and asking each other questions. My estimate is that if you will work on yourself, sharpen your axe, as it were, for one hour, you can get 1% better. That means that if you want to improve by more than 1% a week, you can improve 1% a week just by coming here. Because we're working on the axe, we're helping you sharpen your axe. If you need faster than that, work on yourself for an hour every day. Not the career, but your psychology, your energy, your physical body, your emotional health, the quality of the person that you are, you are the instrument that is doing in your life. So if you needed to make a 1% improvement every day, crack those books, get into those tapes, find a mentor, work on yourself for an hour every day. And I can tell you that my commitment is to improve myself by 1% a day. I don't know whether or not, I mean, how do you objectively measure something like that? Unless you know, that's difficult. But I hallucinate that on a subjective level that's happening. And the truth is that if I were to look at that in terms of career stuff, there are times when I'm stuff is happening faster than that. I mean, it's like it can get amazing at times, it can be disorienting at times. So you have to make sure to keep your center. So one of the things I wanted to talk about is a process that I am beginning today. And this is very, very important. And it's basically called the 90 Day Love Diet or what we're calling the Summer of Love. This comes out of Chloe Madonnas strategic intervention technology. It's a, it's a way of approaching human life that I appreciate. And basically the idea is that after modeling people who, couples who have been happily married for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, still passionate about each other, still connected to each other, they have extracted some behaviors and attitudes and actions that seem conducive to this. And one of the things that they talked about is the 90 day love diet, basically. And the task is to, for 90 days, for three months, you put your spouse, your significant other as the most important thing in your life. You put them above yourself and you do everything in your power every day to give them more love, more passion, more support in the way they understand. In other words, you need to ask them how do you, what helps you feel loved? It's not your love language, it's not what you would want. It's what they need to feel supported. And I'm going to be honest. You know, I grew up without the role model of a healthy family. You know, my mother and father were divorced by the time I was about 7. My mom never got remarried. So I had no idea what a healthy marriage was. And I made it up as I went along. And I'll be honest with you, I blew my first marriage. I did not understand. I thought that there were no rules, just, you know, we could just kind of make this up. I mean, hey, you know, we're, we're, we're adults. We're aware and it's not good enough. And I learned from that and grew up some, but I still didn't have any specific role model for that. And then I met this amazing woman named Tananarive Due and luckily I'd done enough work on myself that she took pity on me and said, no, I'll give you a chance. I'll give you a chance. And I think 80% of the time we're at that top level relationship where we are sharing and giving and loving and supporting each other. But there is that 20% where we bump against each other. Would you make some comments here about how you see what we are and how this has been?

Hello everybody. So it's always a little weird talking about your love life. Two people, but here we are. So yeah, Steve, And I will have been married for 25 years on August 1st. And it's a big milestone. And in almost every way I can think of, we're doing better than ever. So this is not a matter of saving our relationship or last stop before divorce court or any of that. It's really, I guess, sort of selfishly, we want it all. We want, you know, we don't want it to be great 80% of the time. We want it to be great as close to 100% of the time as. As we can get it. And there are some fairly common communication patterns and pitfalls that we fall into. You know, that I want to interrogate a little more deeply, and Steve does, too. And we're already sort of seeing the fruits of our labor in terms of communication.

Very.

Even just something very simple this morning.

Yeah, why don't you tell them about that? Because I messed up, and I love messing up.

But there's a show, I don't know if you've seen the show on Amazon or heard about it, called I'm a Virgo. And the star of the show is a very talented young black actor named Jerrell Jerome, who is also in our Ava DuVernay's when they See Us. He was the kid in Mr. Mercedes, I think. Right, Honey was the show. He was.

Oh, pussy. Right. So it's a great show.

Very talented young man. And there was an article in Variety saying that after When They See Us, which got all kinds of Emmy nominations and all kinds of attention, he said he didn't work for three years. And I told Steve, oh, man, Jerome Durrell said he didn't work for three years. I was just sort of feeling bad for him. He found it terrifying, you know, but all of a sudden, it all dried up. And what was your response, Steve?

My response was that artists need to see themselves as owning an art store. They produce the product, but they also have to take care of the physical plant. They have to market, they have to sell. They have to constantly be upgrading their skills. Tanada even said, people, stop calling.

And the first thing you said was, well, that always happens with actors now.

The first thing I said was, he needs to call them. He needs to call them. Okay. And Tar, I could feel that my approach had kind of shut her down a little bit. And I thought about it later on, and I realized, oh, my God. I fell right into a pattern that they talk about in strategic intervention, which is the male pattern of trying to fix things. She talked about feelings, feelings.

She just feel bad for this kid. He's a talented actor.

Let me fix this. And I thought about that. I said, oh, my God, if first of all, this kid isn't our kid.

We don't know this man.

I don't know him. I'm not in the position of fixing him or helping him or coaching him. My wife was trying to share a feeling with me. I blew it because what I should have done first was commiserate, was share the space. Remember we talked about the influence pattern where you start with rapport and once you've built rapport, then you can interrupt the pattern. What I had done was gone straight to the question of, well, let's interrupt their negative pattern of doing this, this, and this like this. But since the kid wasn't even there, the real problem was not this kid. The real problem is the question of how can we as artists be in the world because we're both artists. She was feeling his pain.

Yeah.

And I completely. I was oblivious to that. So within about 90 seconds, I realized what I'd done and I went to her and I apologized because.

And also I said very gently, okay, honey, I was just commiserating, you know, I was just trying to commiserate.

So.

And I was using the language from the lessons we've been listening to. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it. You. You were. Nothing you said was wr. Wrong or inaccurate or anything. It was just. But I. But you recognize later it's like, oh, this is what I did. And I think it's that kind of stuff. It's just like the little fine tuning. I'm not talking about us biting each other's heads off or ignoring each other or the heat and passion leeching out of our marriage. Although, you know, the longer it goes on, the harder everyone has to work at that. That doesn't just take care of itself, but we have been. And anyway, I'm just excited. I see the fruits. Day one officially is today of our day one. So.

So we will keep you posted. We will be sharing these things. Now, for those of you who are not, you know, in a relationship right now, just do this for yourself. You know, Give yourself that love, that support, you know, and even if you're not interested in a relationship, give yourself that love and support. Nurture the different parts within you. But if you are in a relationship, the idea of for 90 days giving to Nananari as much support as I can, putting her interests above my own, this is. This frightens me. I'm not used to that. Just being honest with that I'm used to putting my kids first. And I realized that that's if I didn't have a model for what a healthy relationship is. Let me take 90 days to experiment with this model. Let's see what happens. Worst case scenario is that I learn things about myself. You know, if I'm worried about rejection, what am I scared of? I'm scared of rejection. Am I scared that she might take advantage of me? Am I scared that she won't return that love no matter what happens then that thing. I don't have to be afraid of any of those things. If I'm handling my own heart, if I'm protecting my own heart, if I know my heart is safe, then I can give myself away because I'm safe. So in other words, it was fear. It is fear that stopped me from being able to love with everything I have. That in order to do this every day, I. I have to find the place inside myself that is free to love and to love without asking what comes back in return to just give myself away completely. And the worst case scenario for somebody who's in a relationship and wants to do this is they find out their partner cannot return that love. And so in 90 days, you find out that relationship ain't going to work because you gave everything and that person didn't return. Okay, you now have an idea about what you need to do next, don't you? In 90 days. But most people, it's very, very hard not to like somebody who loves you without asking anything in return. It's really tough not to do that. We're not set up that way psychologically. So in other words, if there's any hope in your relationship, you can heal it. Like, this is what I'm thinking is reality and worst case scenario. But then what's the best case scenario? The best case scenario is not just giving this wonderful woman of mine, you know, my girl, my sweetheart, the love that she needs to heal herself and to do the best she can in life. But I'm also learning how to love without any withholding. That means a more direct, honest and passionate connection to my own love, my own heart than I have ever known. Because fear is what stopped me from doing that in my first marriage. Ignorance is what stopped me from doing that my first marriage. Now I gain clarity and I learn how to manage my fear better, regardless of what else happens. And that sense of love has already in one day, what has happened? I had the best lucid dream last night I have ever had. I have had in years. And Tananari was there with me in the dream. I've been. I've been working with that for months. And I had a breakthrough right there. I realized today that I need to take certain aspects of my own fitness more seriously. The exercising I will do, but the diet I'm capable of, you know, I'm a carb fiend. Just be honest. I love my carbs. I love ice cream. You know, I love sweets. And I want to take better care of myself, not just for myself, but for her, because I promised her that I was going to take the best care of myself that I could. That love, that clarity. In the same way that the three gates, when you apply them to any aspect of your life, three gates being, asking yourself, is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? Once you start asking yourself those three questions, they begin to change everything in your life. They begin to change. The only reason not to be honest and kind in looking at everything and asking, is this useful? Is fear. You know, in the situation where a mugger is coming at you, that might not be the time to be kind. You know, you might not want to be honest about the fact that you've got a hundred dollar bill in your sock. You know, you give me your wallet, that's got five bucks in it. You don't tell them the rest of it. Under fear we lie. Given fear, we can be cruel. Instead of kind. Given fear, we might stop asking, well, is what I'm doing right now useful? No, but it's fun. And you can actually waste years of your life doing things that are just dumping stress rather than asking, is this helping me build the life that I want? Is this filling me with joy? Is this filling me with purpose? Am I increasing my ability to serve the world? To heal myself? I'm asking myself the question. If I'd had a perfect, supportive family and been born into a world that supported me perfectly and saw my beauty and my power and. And supported that, who might I have been? And I refused to let the world beat me. This is the world I was born into. So I figured that there is a way to be the best I could have been, or even better. That I can look at the stress coming at me and I can look at what was not given to me. And I can use that to motivate myself to be better and better and better. And if part of that, I mean, there is. I think we've all had the experience of feeling sick or feeling tired, but then a friend or a child or a spouse needed our help and we got out of bed and we did what needed to be done. Who's had that experience? Yeah, we're capable of doing things for other people that we cannot do for ourselves. I think that by putting Tonata Reeve above myself, I will find motivation I have not known to be the best I can be. In other words, there is no downside here. There is nothing but love. And at the very least, it's letting this incredible woman in my life know that I treasure her. And I am so grateful that she is in my life. And it is such a blessing that we saw each other. And within 72 hours of meeting, we were basically engaged. Within 72 hours of meeting, we were holding hands in the airport in Atlanta, talking about how we could build an empire together. And we were committed to each other. And she's the only woman I have loved since that time. Amazing. Anyway. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, Jesus, you know, why eat celery when there's steak on the table? You know what I'm talking about? So before I go on, comments, questions, requests, stories about how I've Talked about my 1%, I think you can tell this is more than 1. But 1% is all I'm asking for. If you will aim at improving yourself just 1% a week, if you will breathe five times a day for 60 seconds to break that stress, come and talk to us, interact with us, I am telling you that you will increase by more than 1% per week. Prove me wrong. Paul Jackson, PhD.

Good seeing you. Steve, I want to call you out. Thanks for calling me out last week. And so I actually met up with Deborah. I'm a computer bearer and we had a conversation online and it's going to turn into like a podcast. And what we talked about is her experience in the Metaverse and she worked for Microsoft back in the day when they first had Ms. Dos. And actually she worked for. She said her son worked for Unity, which is an engine that creates a lot of the applications that you run on your phone and stuff. And so we're going to do continue having these conversations. So I want to thank you for calling me out because if you didn't call me out, if I didn't expose myself, I would never met her.

Well, fantastic. Wonderful. You guys, you know, network in the chat. The people here are people of similar mind. We're all looking to improve ourselves. We all care about honesty and love and self growth. We're all wounded and we're willing to talk about those wounds. All human beings, you know, we all bark our shins as we run through life. That just happens. Everybody falls down and we brush ourselves off and we keep going. The people you will find here are people who have a similar commitment. You guys create this Saturday workshop. I can't do this alone. You bring your honesty. You bring your heart. You bring your experiences and help each other support each other. That's what I want, is to build a community of people who are committed in this way. So you come here and expose yourself. You roll over and expose your little tummies, and we will scritch those tummies. We will not hurt you. This is a place where people are safe to tell the truth about who they are and to be the loving beings that they can be. And no one is going to mock you here. Okay? Deborah.

Hey. Hey, family. You know, I was sitting here. I was sitting there listening. I was like, now, how am I going to work this out to apply to me? So maybe this one. This love business will not work for me because quite frankly, I am at this point in my love, I. At this particular time in my life, I am really uninterested in having a romantic relationship with someone else.

Right?

And so I'm like, okay, well, I am working on loving myself more. So that's one thing, you know? But then I thought about the fact that I have two children, 12 grandchildren, and a great grandchild. This is my legacy, my lineage. And maybe what I can do is I can apply this to. To loving them more. Yes, to apply all of this to loving them more. To be willing to listen before I immediately try to jump in and solve. You know, it's like. It's just like what you said about Tananarive, you know, what is it they're really trying to say to me? You know, before I jump in there and say, well, I think you ought.

To this, and I think you ought to that.

Why don't I listen to what they're really trying to say to me or ask. So thank you. Thank you.

Did you have to be both mom and dad?

Yeah.

Yeah. No, no, no.

I'm gonna take that back. I had to parent my children alone.

Yes.

It's impossible for me to dad. That's my feeling. It's impossible for me to dad. But I did fulfill that. That kind of role, and I had. My father. My father did a great deal of that for them.

That's fantastic. You know, it's trying to understand that dance of the masculine and feminine energies that we all have. All of us have both energies within us. And in a lot of relationships, it's divided up between, you know, the husband and the wife. Or, you know, in gay relationships, I would imagine that sometimes it's divided, and sometimes both people have a balance of both. But to understand those energies and the dance between them, the dance, the differences between them, the similarities allow communication. The differences create the passion. So people who are a little bit dysfunctional look for people who are very different because that way they feel a lot of passion, but there isn't enough communication for them to actually have a relationship. But you can. You can literally go from relationship to a relationship, and it's like, absolutely turns you on. But there's no. There's no there there. Okay. So if Tanamoreem and I feel like 80% of the time we're there, but those 20%, when we're out of sync are so painful because we love each other so much, and it's just like, damn. Especially when I realize that what causes my problem, if I've had problems with something that she does, that's because I'm not handling my stuff. I'm not handling myself. That I'm expecting her to carry part of my weight for me, which does not allow me to give to her without asking for anything in return or which does not create the space for her to give to me without asking anything in return. What this is forcing me to do is to grow up and heal myself in ways I didn't even see I needed to do it. I didn't even know that I had. I had. Everyone does the best they can with the resources they have. Every single one of us. So forgiving myself for my past issues, but also deciding to step up. And I will be that man that she needs me to be. I will absolutely be that man. I will not accept anything less than from myself. I will not. Because that's what I promised her. That's who I promised her I was. That's the faith that she had in me. And I will use that. I will use anything, fear or love to motivate myself to be the best I can be. And I cannot think of a greater potential reward, greater intimacy. So what we want is. I want 80% of the remaining 20%. Get me to 95%. We'll keep that night. Well, 5% of conflict, that's okay, you know, that's the spark. There's nothing wrong with a little, but it needs to immediately lead to this. You know what I'm talking about? There's nothing wrong with having a little friction, so to speak. I see this path. I see these next 90 days as being transformative. One of my teachers made the comment that every seven years your ego needs to die. I'm really good at creating an ego shell. I suspect I might need to do it every seven months. I don't know. But what I'm asking the universe to do, in essence, is to kill me, to kill my ego. Let me kill the parts of myself that are not genuine. Your ego is never you. It's a useful model of you. I remember Nichelle Nichols. I was at a convention where she was a guest of honor, and we were both guests of honor and we spent some good time together. And one of the things that she talked about was that you need to create a simplified version of who you are. That the public doesn't really want to know who she is. It wants to interact with the image of Michelle Nichelle Nichols. So she would create a simplified, honest, but not, but less complicated version of herself to share with people. I think we all do that in some ways. God knows I do that.

I call it.

I create a Stevie Simulacrum. You know, the person I am at conventions is not terribly different from who I am at home. It's a simplified version of who I am at home so that people walk away feeling like they know who I am, you know, And I think that we all do that to a degree. And we present slightly different images with each individual and each context. But with our intimate partner, the person who shares my life, I need to really share who I am most deeply. That's the only way to feel known. That's the only way to feel that there's somebody in the world who sees me for who I am. And to do that, I have to create a space in which I feel safe, to open myself more completely than I ever have with any human being on this planet every day for at least 90 days. And I think at the end of this 90 days, well, I suspect we're going to keep sharing every week what this process is. And I think that it's going to be amazing. So anyway, who else has comments, questions, and requests before we Orion and then. Mary, Unmute yourself, sweetheart.

And to find the mouse. Two things you recommend? No. You told us that you do your breathing at five different hours of the day, three hours apart. And I tried that, and it works beautifully for me. So I was able to start doing the breathing regularly, and it's given me more energy. The other thing is that I don't know where it came from. I just know it was Fire Dance that said that it Would help me to lose the weight that I have to lose in order to get new knees. By asking myself, when I'm eating, is this mouthful furthering my goal? And I've lost two pounds in the last week.

Two pounds a week is perfect. You know, between one and two pound a week is all you should try to try to lose. Because if you lose faster than that, that's a false game. You need to literally change the person you are so that your eating is providing you with the energy you need to be who it is that you want to be. And if it's providing you with that energy, then you can ask yourself of the foods and the eating patterns that provide me with the energy and aliveness. What is the tastiest? What gives me the greatest pleasure? If you like chocolate, don't eat cheap chocolate. Eat the best chocolate out there. A smaller amount of the best chocolate is better than $5 worth of cheap Hershey bars. Eat the good stuff. Remember that. Your point is a life. Your goal is a life of joy. Well, that's great, Orion. That's wonderful. And breathing. So what you do is go to YouTube at least once a week and look up a new video on diaphragmatic breathing. Try to pick up some new hints about how to do it right. Or you meet somebody who takes yoga and you say, I want to work on my diaphragmatic breathing. What is your opinion? So that you're owning this process, I can only get you started. I can point out where the path is, but the moments when I point out where the path is are moments when I'm not on the path myself in some ways. But on the other hand, service is part of my path. So it's, you know, it's more complicated than that. In fact, I take that back. This is part of my dharma. I love doing this, but all I can do is point it out. You have to take every step. I can be beside you, but at this distance, I can't even put my arm around your waist. Or you put your arm around my shoulder and help you. I wish I could, but I cannot. But what I can do is tell you that what you just said is perfect. That's it. That's the moment. Okay. Good for you, Orion.

Thank you so much.

You're very welcome. Mary, did you. You had your hand up?

Yes.

I was listening to a tape, and they were talking about the nature or the natures that we're born with. And because I was looking at what do I really want to do, career wise. And they were Talking about working with your natures. They mentioned caretakers, people that like to work with people in hospice, problem solving, nature, things like that. Do you know of a book that lists all the possible natures that could be in me so I can, like, identify them so I can figure out.

You know, if you. You could look up the Enneagram of Personality. The Enneagram of Personality talks about nine or ten different personality types. And it ain't bad. You know, it's not a bad structure. That's most of what most people understand. Matter of fact, let me see if I can find something right now. Now that I've learned how to get better, a little bit better at sharing my screen, I might actually be able to find something for you. Hold on. Personality. Boom, boom, boom. And let me find some images. Oh, okay. You got on a call right now. Okay, Somebody needs to mute. Somebody needs to mute.

I'll mute people.

Okay. And I'm going to share my screen. Okay. If you can see this, this is one aspect of the Enneagram of Personality. Now, the Enneagram is basically a paper computer. It's a way of looking at the relationships between different structural aspects of a thing. In this particular case, the Enneagram of personality is probably 1%, maybe 5% of what the Enneagram is. Mostly it's a diagram of process. And whereas these are more. This is more static. But you can see that it says here that the nine types are the Investigator, the Loyalist, the enthusiast, the Challenger, the Peacemaker, the reformer, the helper, the achiever, and the individualist. Now, you can look at the lines in between them, and there are books that go into that. But if you look up Enneagram of Personality, you'll find some interesting books. And because we've used Enneagram to discuss process and look at the relationships between different aspects of process, looking at it in a more specific static sense might be a very useful thing. So it's useful to look at tools that you already have and say, how can I apply this tool to looking at something new? But the real question, or one of the questions is, and this is. This ties in with what we were going to talk about today. Depending on how many questions we get about other things. The thing that you should be doing in your life probably has to do with the thing that you go into flow state most easily. What is it that when you're doing it, time just disappears? That is the thing that you should spend the time learning how to do professionally. From my point of view, because one definition of success is to spend as much of your time doing the things that you love as possible. So if you love helping people, find something that puts you in there and find a way to get paid for it. You love creating art, spend as much time as possible doing art. Find a way to get paid for it so that you're not dividing your time between making art and working in McDonald's. If you do that, there is nothing wrong with honest work and then having a hobby or having a passion, you know, that you do on the weekends or in the evening, there's nothing wrong with that. But I think that if you can, if you can combine those things so that the thing you love is also the thing that sustains you, then that's a little bit like a farmer who loves sowing and working the field and feels even the work is something sacred. You know, that. That they're feeding their family, feeding their community. Hard, hard work. Life is going to be hard, hard work. So if you can find a way to go into flow state so that you're just there, there's no opposition.

There's.

You're not fighting yourself. You're just doing the thing and you're paying your bills and you're taking care of your family, but you're spending your time doing something that is precious to you. So if you have some idea of what it is that when you're doing it, time disappears, I would suggest that might be where you want to go. Does that make sense now? Because this is just an opportunity. I love it when something naturally comes up. But I'm going to share my screen again because this was something I wanted to talk to you about anyway. I love it when a plan comes together. Okay? So flow state can be identified in different ways. One thing, time, seems to vanish. So when you're writing, you just fall into the page. You're dancing, you know, she's dancing to the danger zone where the dancer becomes the dance. It just. The difference between you and the thing you're doing begins to dissolve. We all experience that. Driving on the freeway, suddenly you realize, I've driven 20 miles and I don't even know what I was doing. But you were driving perfectly. Because all that was in unconscious competence in sexuality. The last few moments before you reach an orgasm, the subject, object, relationship, the barrier between you and the beloved begins to disappear. It's just like, wow, I'm just. We're just there. There's this, this. This thing happening. This energy flow state happens. You can see this picture. If I've got a. Let's see. There we go. Oh, okay. It's not really. It's not really showing me my cursor, but this center zone here where it says fun, joy, flow, energized, and growth. That's the flow state. The flow state happens when you have enough challenge that you are not bored, but not so much challenge that you're in anxiety. So one secret to life is to continue to learn so that you can handle greater and greater amounts of challenge without going into anxiety. So you have to keep doing tougher things, but not so challenging that you feel afraid and pop out of flow. So you start with something very basic, like a sentence a day or breathe five times a day or something like that, until that gets easy, and then you immediately find a little bit more challenge. When it gets easy, it gets boring, and you drop out of flow and you start saying, let me do something else. A few weeks ago, we talked about a juggler in the Cirque du Soleil who was talking about the fact that amateurs will try to get 100% perfect at something, and they get bored before they get 100% perfect. They're just doing the same thing over and over again. For the first 80%, they were learning really rapidly. And then it gets slower and they get bored and they quit and they go do something else entirely. People do the same thing with relationships. They stay in a relationship until it starts getting boring. Deborah is nodding her head.

And let.

Me go find somebody more exciting than this. Instead of going deeper into that relationship or deeper into that discipline. In this particular book, it's called the Art of Practice, he suggests that you choose a more complex version of the same discipline that you don't try to get to 100%. You get to 80% of perfection at that thing. That's the part where you learn really quickly. Then you choose a more advanced version of the same thing, and you work in that until you get to 80% of that, and then you choose a more advanced version of that. Now, the advanced version, like a more advanced version of the same song, or the managed version of the same kata, or the more advanced version of the same recipe, the same basic recipe. By the time you got to 80% of the more advanced, when you move to the third one, go back to the first one, you'll find you're almost perfect because you were not doing something totally different. You were doing a more advanced version of the same thing. So you were automatically playing. You're playing Tetris, you know, where the new skills are falling down. And when you make a solid row, it disappears. It goes to unconscious competence. So you need to constantly be learning new things. Yes. But you also need to respect that you can't get into anxiety or feel like, oh, God, I'll never be able to do this, and you don't want to. Boring. Oh, God, this is so tiring. You have to keep challenging yourself enough to stay engaged and have fun with it. And one of the things that is fun is learning. You stay in the flow state. What is the thing? What is the approach that allows you to be there? And it's like, you know, the friend that you have where you can talk to them and the entire day goes by is probably the. Probably some challenging conversations. You're talking about life. You're talking about things that really matter. They're offering you perspectives you hadn't thought about before. You actually. It's a chewy conversation. You know, it's keeping you engaged. You can feel your brain buzzing a little bit, but it's not so challenging that you feel stupid. Okay. You feel like, oh, I don't get this. So if that makes sense, then let's go back to that question. Comments, Questions? Requests? One percents. Yeah. One thing with large amounts of weight loss, take care of your spirit. Absolutely. If you're trying to lose as much weight as would have made another human being, that ain't a physical thing. That's emotional. And as you start losing that weight, you will have emotions that start coming up. And if you're not ready, if you're not processing, this is a great time to have a therapist, to be meditating, to be journaling, to have a trusted friend, a coach, someone you can talk to. Life is real in that sense. The Hawaiian huna have the comment that the body is like a black bag where you store your unprocessed emotions. If that is true, what does that say about what we need to do to be healthy? In that particular sense, if all of us are doing the best we can with the resources we have, we can forgive ourselves and say, you know, I've been doing the best I can. Let me get some new resources. No guilt, no blame, no shame. Just a commitment to staying in the flow zone, accepting some challenge, forgiving yourself. No guilt, no fear, or just enough fear that. That it's fun. Just enough fear that it's fun. And you will find some people get. If you keep doing that, if you get to the 80% point and then you switch to a more advanced version and you get to 80% point, you're staying in the rapid growth zone. You're staying in the rapid growth zone. Instead of getting 80%, you know, you get to that first 80% in the first three months, and then it takes you two years to get another 5%. Okay? Instead of that, switch to something else. Stay in the rapid growth. You'll start finding yourself among the best in the.

In the world.

That is the path of mastery. At least that's the theory. And I think that that matches what I've seen in the martial arts. You start out in the white belt until you understand that, and then you're ready to try sparring with a green belt, you know, and then when you're, you know, you're winning 80% of the time, you spar with a brown belt. When you're winning 80% of the time, you spar with the black belt, you keep. You keep challenging yourself. Just enough so that every class is exciting and there's a little mystery. I don't know if I'm gonna get a black eye today, but I better pay attention. I better be careful. And you find yourself in a situation where if you spar with a black belt class your first time, you just would have gotten the crap knocked out of you. But by staying in the rapid growth zone, you keep learning and learning and learning. And what people have understood about these kinds of disciplines forever is that once you learn that in any discipline, you learn it everywhere. You learn to master anything, and you learn to master anything else. You learn the process of mastery. That's what we're talking about here. What is the process of mastery? The definition of mastery? Being when you have the. Mastery is a verb, not a noun. It's a vector, not a position. And when you have the basics of your discipline and unconscious competence and have committed to your discipline for a lifetime, you are on the path of mastery as much as anyone else who's ever walked that path, even if they are horizons distant from you. Somebody like Danny and Asanto is so far ahead of me. I will never be there, nor do I deserve to be there, because he has put more of himself into that. I celebrate that. It's like, look at what is possible when people totally invest themselves. That is wonderful. I've been to being. I'm split between being a writer and being a family man and being a martial artist and trying to deal with my particular sets of challenges. But when I see Danny, you know, by some wonderful miracle, he would recognize me if I was walking on the other side of the street. He'd say, hi, Steve. He recognizes that we're on the same path. He does not put me down because I am not a fingernail fragment of what he is. He's at least two orders of magnitude better than I am. I don't even see where he is on the path, but he has been kind enough to slow himself down and describe the territory to me. I then get to decide do I want to invest that much of myself? Do I want to. I can invest more of myself. I'll never invest that much, but I can invest more in myself. But I'm having a perfectly wonderful time here, and I'm hoping that he's having a wonderful time to where he is, and I'm hoping that each and every one of you has a wonderful time. I am further on the path than any of you in certain ways, and you are further along the path than I am in certain ways. And we can teach each other. So any more comments, questions and requests? As you can tell, once again, I can spin off on any of these things as far as possible. The next thing I want to do if we don't have any more, and I'd like to get at least one more, especially from someone who hasn't spoken to the group before or today. And then we will take a look into Tom Barkley's story, but who has another comment, question or request something that you. A problem that you'd like to. To workshop or an observation or anything like that. Please, somebody raise your hand, please, or I'm going to be nasty and say, I'm not going further until somebody raises their hand. You got to ask me one more thing. Come on, come on. Somebody's shy. Yes, Jaime.

Okay, so we were talking a little bit at the beginning. I own a small perennial nursery, and springtime is our busy season. And it's eaten up my Saturdays for two months now, all of May and all of June. And I've kind of really missed being here.

We missed you.

But I'll tell you what, being able to listen to these recordings has gotten me through the past two months of not only the most challenging time of year for me, but in two ways. I have achieved the goal of doubling my income in 2023. And I'm there, which is fascinating how this works.

So tell me what made the difference? What is it you did that made that got you that result? I think all of us would love to double our income.

I think the main thing was getting rid of my own negative thinking, telling myself that it was impossible. And the interesting thing is I was already at a pretty low Income. So doubling it wasn't a huge stretch.

Don't you dare put yourself down.

Let me finish. At the same time, now that I've done that, by using these techniques and things, and the positive affirmations, the body, the movement, the. The ritual, the breathing, all of it, I know that the next six months of 2023, it's entirely realistic. I could double it again.

That's right.

I've gotten rid of my limiting thoughts.

Fantastic. Jaime. There are times when I will say, you know, you model success. You model people who are better than you. You model people. You find people who started with less than you, have less than you had, and got further than you've gotten. It is fascinating to watch how many people don't believe that's possible. The people who, you know, who take the position, oh, no, I'm doing the best anybody could possibly have done, you know, starting where I did. The ego that it takes to think that out of the billions of people who have lived on this planet, you are the best and you're not doing too great. But obviously, I was just so oppressed. Nobody's saying that people don't have problems. Of course, every single piece of this philosophy came because I was a little kid who was told I could not have any of the things that I wanted, who had no father in the home, was terrified, was getting terrible grades in school, the girls used to beat me up. I mean, it's like, what do I do to be a man? What do I do to be an adult? And so I looked for the people. For instance, one piece of this, there were. I did not know about Octavia Butler or Chip Delaney. Their name, their bases weren't on any books. So as far as I knew, there were no black science fiction writers in the entire world, right? But there were black people who'd succeeded in the arts, and there were successful science fiction writers. So what I did was I looked at the success principles of poor black people who had succeeded in the arts, and I looked at the principles of writers in general who had succeeded at writing science fiction. And I said, where are they saying the same things, Certain things both groups were saying about believing in yourself and working hard and making connections and finding mentors. They were saying the same things. And so I just. I looked at where those circles overlapped, and I did that. And that was the key. And there's nothing that is sadder. People who think they have to make it up themselves, that if it doesn't come from their own minds, it's somehow cheating or something. I don't understand. But they're cheating themselves of the ability to live a life of joy. They think that it's enough to get out of pain. Well, there's a real problem with living to get out of pain. If you need a new discipline to get out of pain, then as soon as the pain diminishes, you'll stop that discipline and you'll go right back in the loop. How many people have been on diets that work just like that? You know, the doctor says you got to lose weight, so you do some drastic diet until you've lost the weight and then you fall off of it instead of that. That's what happens when you motivate yourself with fear and pain. As soon as the fear and the pain have diminished, you stop the discipline. If, on the other hand, you accept a discipline out of love and joy, it's not, I want to. I want to stop being this, But I want to be this. I want to. I want to hike the Andes. You know, I want to compete and swing dancing. I want to do this. I want to do this. And you have this vision of something joyful that motivates your actions, then the more you do, the better you feel. Then you actually gain momentum.

So a couple. A couple other. A couple other comments I want to share with the group about this, though, is that in this effort and commitment to 1% of progress, whether it's per day or per week, per week was what I was going for. I found that I had to also get rid of my preconceived notions of what that 1% was going to be. I might be looking for 1% improvement over here, but it was happening in a different place or a different direction because I was doing the other stuff. That was an interesting observation that was not comfortable to arrive at.

Yeah, it's a wash pot doesn't boil.

I had an interaction. Yeah. The second thing was that I had an interaction with my partner last Sunday that was very unpleasant and uncomfortable, where I was not being treated well. And I lost all grip on, is it true? Is it kind, Is it useful? And I got stomped a little bit, and I reacted harshly. And then immediately felt the hangover of the adrenaline rush of that emotional surge. But it took me two days to calm down, get centered, balanced again, to realize where I made a mistake, apologize, and reconnect. He owned his part in that. And all of a sudden, everything was well again. And in the aftermath of looking back at that moment of conflict, I realized that I didn't make a mistake. By reacting that way, that was exactly the response he needed to wake up, to realize what he was doing, and that we're both still on this same journey together, even though we had a moment of. And it's like, oh, I did not know that being in that kind of long term, committed partnership relationship meant that it would bring all of my issues into my face and I could do my work, but I can't do his work for him. And that even if he never changes, if he continues to do that, I can still love him.

You know, he said, that's. That's beautiful, Jaime. It's absolutely beautiful. In fact, that's a perfect share because we talk about the dog and the cat. You know, the dog comes when it's called, you know, but the cat will wait until you're busy doing something else and then curls up on your lap. So we have to focus our conscious attention on the things that we can control. But if it's in balance, and one of the ways you know that it's in balance, you know, there's the right path, is when synchronicity starts happening. Things that were unanticipated start happening. It's like, oh, I didn't realize this good thing was going to happen or that good thing was going to happen. That's one of the ways you know you're on the right path. So, Jaime, really proud of you, buddy. And keep sharing what you're doing. Money is a perfectly good way to measure your increase in efficiency and the way the community sees you and your. Your willingness to protect yourself. You know, the adult part of you has to protect your money, but it's the kid part of you that's creating the. That has the creativity to make the money in the first place, you know, so.

Well, the next step for me is in sometime in the next six months, giving you one of my stories to workshop here.

So fantastic.

That's my next sort of roadmark for progress.

I would love it. You know, this is. That's fun for me. That's. That's really fun for me. You know, I. I can't help.

I'm so excited to hear. To do this with Tom's story.

You bet. So we'll do that in just a second.

Thanks.

And I just. Because I'm feeling mischievous. Hi, Kathy. You know, how you doing?

Hi.

Just you, you, you. You amuse me in a positive way. Just wondering, how have you been?

I've been better, but I've been worse. I'd like to say that I did use your mantra with my son about. I've done the best I can in all circumstances with the resources I had at the time, because he had a friend who was pressuring him and trying to manipulate him, and he was feeling bad. He was feeling bad because he couldn't help, even though he probably shouldn't be helping because of the circumstances that were involved. And I used that to kind of remind him, you've always done the best you can with the resources you had, and right now, with the resources you have, you can do no more.

That's right. And his friend is also doing the best he can.

Correct.

But he also. I don't want to go off rail because you talk all the time about it. There's a lot of issues there, and there is manipulation and usage there. So while people do the best they can, they don't always have to do harm while doing the best they can. And this individual is doing harm while doing the best that he can. So that. And it's coming to my son, who's very sensitive and wants to help and can't.

Of course he does. Of course he does.

So I've been using a lot of stuff here. We all re echo everyone's feeling that we are as excited and happy to be here as you are, and we really appreciate this space so much. You have no idea. There's a lot of people shaking their heads right now and clapping. Steve, this ain't made up, man. There's a whole lot of truth tellers in this room. Can I get an amen?

Can we have an amen?

They would say so. If they did not believe, they would say so. Thank you again for the space.

Okay, so let's go to Tom. Tom, would you unmute yourself? I just put in the chat, the link to Tom's story. So if you did not have a chance to read it before, you can read it afterwards. But basically, what I wanted to do, and this is the way I do story analysis, the life writing stuff we talk about. There are two different things that take place within story that are the most central. One is structure, the story, and the other is character. This mirrors the idea that philosophy is basically two things. What is true, what is the structure of the world, and who am I? What is the structure of the human beings who view that world and live in that world? So by just looking at those two things, we are looking at the spine of what a story is. And you can then flesh out that spine with artful language and imagery and skills of various kinds. But I. I stay away from the Question of whether it's a good or bad story. Because if you understand these concepts, your stories will constantly get better. And it also stops the ego stuff. So let's just look at this. So I'm going to go down the. I'm going to do two things. I'm going to ask Tom what his answer to a series of questions are, and then I will. Yeah, let's see. Did I do that here? Okay. I will remember what it was I thought. I didn't. The notes that I wanted are not sitting right there, but I. I will remember what it was that I thought. So, Tom, who is the protagonist of your story?

Kind of a trick, isn't it? And not something I intended to do according.

Let's just say in terms of. Tell me what you think your answer is, and then I will tell you what I think my answer is.

It's from Vance's point of view, but the person who actually goes through the hero's journey is the nameless man.

Now, he gives his name at the.

End, he gives his name at the end, and I've gone.

And you could also. Tanarive, would you put me and Tom side by side? I don't know how to.

Quince. Quince. Sorry.

Yeah, I'll do that. Give me a second.

Okay, so. But let's start with the notion. Let's work backwards from the end of the story. Because at the end of the story, Vance has created a family. And it reminded me of the outlawed Josie Wales. That Josie Wales was shown as a totally damaged human being who was a total loner, who, over the course of the movie, gathers a family around himself regardless of whether he wants to or not. And at the end of the movie, he finally has a future. He has people who love him and care about him and would protect him and watch his back, but also love him in a sense of purpose that the context of that movie is to take a man who has a life, strip everything away from him, so that becomes nothing but vengeance, and then opens his heart again so he can forgive himself for what he became. You know, we all died a little bit in that damn war. That line goes at the end of Outlaw Jesse Wells. So Vance starts the story alone, driving alone, and he is looking for Jennifer. Jennifer, yeah, he's looking for Jennifer. Now, in the process of driving through the desert looking for Jennifer, he meets this nameless man, Quince, who is with a broken down coach. Not a bus, but a coach. I love that stuff. By the way, one of the things that's really important in Storytelling is specific information. The idea that the writer is giving you an entree to a world you've never been in, that allows you to trust the writer. And it's like you're absorbing information. That writer is God in the universe of their story because they know things you don't know. So if we were to wonder why he's alone and why he's driving in this way, if we were to take the position that he needs something and he needs to take responsibility for others, then we could follow that story in some interesting ways. So his. His journey then is to accept the responsibility to be the guardian and to be the father and to be. And to be with humanity again. He starts alone and he ends with a family, you know, temporarily at least. So we don't know why he has rejected the challenge. And that's kind of. You know, it's not even necessarily that he has.

When you say he has rejected the challenge, are you talking about Vance or about.

Yes. We don't know why he's in the position of. Not of needing this arc. And once again, because it's a short story, I am hallucinating a lot of this. A short story is a tiny little. It's a few degrees of arc rather than a complete novel where we might have gone more deeply and understand everything about his life. And I could be completely wrong about this. This is just one way of looking at it so that I could read this. And I thought to myself, oh, this is a story. There's no question. This is a story. I had no doubts about it at all from the very beginning. And you grabbed my attention fast enough that I said, oh, okay, he needs something. What does he need? He needs to find his dog. But in that sense, in the larger sense, he needs to make a connection. So those are the first two things to that degree. Faced with a challenge, rejecting the challenge, accepting the challenge. Is there anything you want to say about those first three steps? And what I said about it?

I wanted to keep it uncertain. I wanted to make the fact that Jennifer is a collie shepherd surprise at the end. I wanted to let everybody assume that he was looking for a woman, a human.

So by doing that, you kind of suggested that the dog was a substitute.

For a human relationship, which was true.

Yeah. So the idea that what he needs is to open his heart to an actual relationship and an actual building an actual family, and that he was sublimating his. His. That into an animal was a structural clue. In other words, the. The. The. The trick that you played implies some Things about the world that we're looking at. Okay.

Later in the story, I think just after. Yeah, just after Quince has and. And Vance have found where Jennifer is. Quince says, I thought you were looking for a woman. I thought this. I thought she was a woman and that you had a woman. And Vance says, not yet.

Got it.

I will.

Got it.

He's. He's in between relationships with humans, so.

He is forced out of his pocket of safety because he loves Jennifer, and Jennifer ran away. So he accepts the challenge. The road of trials is just the stuff that he does. You know, he meets. He meets Quince. He does this. He deals with, you know, getting a gun stuck in his ear. He uses skills to get the. The coach going once again. That. That's good writing. That's. That's. It's good thinking about the process of writing. And this same story written ten stories from now would be totally publishable. Maybe not ten, I don't know. But what you're seeing here, what you, what you. What you conceptualized here, is what a story is. It just is. So the. The allies and powers. He's basically a compassion man. He's a smart, observant man. He has a set of skills. He has a big heart, you know, just so. So he's got those skills. But his allies in bringing these things out would be Jennifer and Quince. They educe from him the qualities that he needs in order to create the family that he wants, that he is sublimated into the dog. Okay, so the question of what is the moment at which he confronts evil and is defeated? That's always. I'm never dogmatic about that, but there are two moments. There are a couple of different moments that stand out. One is when you get a gun stuck in your head. And the other one is when the coach is stolen. So you could look at those things. I could kind of say that they're moments of real tension and real risk and real, oh, my God, what's going to happen now? So, you know, you could say that, okay, so that maybe the gun stuck in his head is. Is confront evil and is defeated. And maybe the coach being stolen is the dark knight of the soul. You know, what is he going to do? He can't leave this guy there. But he doesn't want somebody in his life just any more than Jennifer, you know, found the fox and her and her children, you know, and what is he going to do about that? Suddenly, just like Josie Wales, he's forced to take care of people. He really doesn't want to, but the universe basically forced him to respond. So the faith. What is the leap of faith that you think that Vance made, Tom?

Now, that I didn't think about.

Probably.

That he could do his part to setting the universe right by fixing the bus. Oops. Coach. And getting this man on his way?

Yeah, I mean, I would think that. Didn't he have to have faith that this man was not going to kill him if he let it be?

That's.

That was the. I mean, that was uncertain until he realized, you know, surprise twist number number one, that he was not really at risk versus And. And then surprise twist number two. Jennifer, is it?

Well, he does not know that he's not at risk, but he has reason to have faith that he's not at risk. You know, the gun is not real, but that doesn't stop the guy from hitting him over the head. But he believes that this. That this is the right action, that if he extends trust to this man, that he can heal this man sufficiently, that whatever crimes this is all about, this man will not hurt him. He is starting to trust his instincts and his intuitions more.

There is that moment when Quince asks, if you knew the gun was fake, why are you helping me?

Yes.

And rapport is created at that point, even though it has begun to establish itself in the course of working on the coach and getting the fuel system cleaned out. But at that point when Quince asks why, that's the moment when Vance really puts his hands on Quince's shoulders, figuratively at least, and says, I know you. I've been in your position. You're worth helping.

There you go. So he's really talking to himself.

I haven't thought of it that way.

But I see who you really are. You are worthy of love.

And we are. We have been similar.

That's right. But the interesting thing is that he went after Jennifer. Dogs are our heart. You let a dog into your heart and it becomes an extension of your heart. You understand me, Jennifer, by running off and protecting the Fox family. The Fox family is in the back seat. His heart taught him the value of family, led him to the realizations that he needed in order to heal himself and simultaneously heal someone else. You're only implying those things. But a careful reader looking for a way that this story represents the world it represents. Something true about who we are can find a way in and find meaning. The rest of it is simply the skill with which you say it. So you wrote a successful story here tomorrow. You know, the question of. Of writing more and reading more so that your skills at presenting these notions get higher. That's why you continue to write. But you're on the right path, clearly. Clearly. No question about it. Well done.

It's. This one is based in bits and pieces of it are real life.

Of course. Those are the best stories.

I'm just gonna jump in for a second too. Hold on one second. Oh, maybe I'll even add myself to the spotlight. Hey, look at me.

So look at that.

I really enjoy this story, Tom. And I'm a line editor, so I'm not going to go through all of my line edits verbally while we're all on this call, because everybody can see my line edits are already in the manuscript script. But I do think it's that kind of polishing and giving thought to the questions that Steve has given you that will make this. It's a professional level story, you know, I mean, there's nothing on a sentence by sentence level that doesn't feel like a professional writer. It's just a matter of arranging all of those sentences and experiences in such a way that it. That it directly replicates the experience you want the reader to have. So, yeah, you know, Steve and I have argued a bunch of times about concealing information from a close point of view. So of course I'm like, why haven't we learned more about the girlfriend? And I figured you were concealing something. And now that I know what you were concealing, I get it, and there's a way to make that work. But just, yeah, look at my line edits and just keep at it. I think what really makes this story pop for me, weirdly enough, is the level of authority and expectation expertise that you have about fixing these coaches. I couldn't have written that. So I'm already sort of like at your feet. Like, okay, teach me, teach me. And the rest of it is you.

Could have pacing.

Clearing up, like sort of some of the questions the reader will have because you're concealing. How do you not make your reader put off by what you're concealing? Maybe substituting more information about the. The girlfriend he's looking for with some of his emotional reactions to the situation at hand? Or maybe we can get the sense that he's diminishing his own stress by engaging with this man, you know, or whatever it is. But just look at the line edits. But yeah, this is a. This is a good story and you're a good writer, so keep it up.

Yeah, so this is great. I mean, life writing that blend of how does the hero's journey apply to writing and apply to life? So I'm always going to look at those things, and this is part of this. I'm happy about this because I want this space to be for writers and people who love writers, people who love writing, and we all love storytelling. So by looking at stories where we can reach everybody. But it gives me a shorthand with which we can look at a vast amount of information and intercultural wisdom about what is the structure of life, what is the structure of consciousness, how do we heal ourselves, what damages us. So I want to bring story analysis into this space because it's something that I have expertise on. And if you guys. If you have stories, aim it. You know, try to keep them about five pages so that we can take a look and we can do one. I'd love to do one. A conversation like this every week because I think it's really, really useful. Tom, has this been useful? Any comments, questions or requests? Tom?

Yeah, there is definitely a question. Yes, it has definitely been useful. Oh, boy. My goal here, as I told you previously, the idea of how. Of what I wanted to achieve with this story grew out of your story with Larry, your recent story. And if friends and neighbors, if you have not yet read Sacred Cow, it is a tiny little masterpiece. It is a Dutch master's painting that is 10 inches by 12 inches and is a perfect example of how to craft and execute. How did the two of you. Having been reading Larry for a long time, my suspicion is that he came up with the plot line and the twist and that you created the Persona of Gill that we read in this story. Because there are things that Gil says that are in your voice rather than in Larry's. What I was after was coming up with story twist. And it's been a weakness of my writing. I think. I think I tend to write linearly. This happens, this happens, this happens, this happens. There's the. And the end result is this. That was what I was after. Finding a way to create a surprise ending.

I want to be careful about this for reasons that of. Reasons of just good. Not good taste, but just privacy. My relationship with Illyria is intimate enough that some aspects of it are not things that I discuss publicly. However, what I will say is that the dance that created this story started with Larry and ended with both of us. And there was a major twist in that story that was mine, but that twist was created. Asking myself the question, how would Larry do this with Larry? I'm constantly trying to model the way he thinks. Because Larry is a grandmaster of writing. I. I flatter myself that I'm a master. I think that is reasonable, given the amount of time and effort and the things that I've put in there. Larry is above me and always will be. And I love working with him because I'm constantly asking myself, how can I make him smile? How can I live up to the enormous gift that he gave me of a chance to enter into this world of the intellect and the heart in this specific way? So you're not wrong about what you think happened with that story, but I can't be too specific about it. I hope you can. I hope you can understand that.

I didn't mean to be intrusive. Sorry.

No, no, no, you're not. You were not being intrusive at all. Tom, I asked you. You have. If there's anything that I would ask from you, it's that you not feel like you have to apologize for yourself. I like you, Tom. I think you're a smart man with a good heart. And I am really happy that you shared this story with us. You did us a favor by doing that. So stand proud. You know, just. That's all I'm asking you. Be proud of yourself. You. You deserve praise in this space. We love you. We accept you. You need apologize for nothing. If you do, it's okay. We'll just remind you to stand tall. That's all. Fair enough.

Not having. Not having real good socialization from an early age, I have been known to step over unintentionally step into other people's space.

See? But I invite people to ask intimate questions. And the reason I do that is because I'm perfectly comfortable saying no.

Yes, that would work.

So I can tell. You can ask me anything you want, but I might say no. All right, put everybody back on the. Back on the screen.

Thank you.

Thank you, Tom.

Thank you, Tananarive. Much obligation.

My pleasure. Thanks for sharing that story.

Yeah, absolutely. So you can see, this is the life writing process where, especially when Tananarive and I do this together, I talk about my perspective, she talks about her perspective, and we get a stereoscopic view of what this is. The same thing is going to be true with the stories that you are writing about your. Your own lives. You are all on a journey to being healthy and happy and productive, to escape pain and to live a life of joy and service. And what we're doing is just examining how you do that in the same way that I could in a story. I can Talk about those things with greater specificity because stories flatten reality out in some ways. So they're simple enough that we can understand the world. Our lives are infinitely complex, but by looking at them through certain patterns, we can derive things. We've only got another couple minutes. Any comments, questions or requests before we close up for today? Because this has been great, Suzanne.

I.

Wanted to share something interesting with everyone. I shared it in a response to something you post on your wall. But my life coach and I talk about a lot of things and she's a very different person than you are.

She.

She has a wife and she lives in Minneapolis and she's not a West.

Coast girl at all.

I've got a wife too.

Okay, so you share something in common.

People look like women.

We talked about something last summer that I have in an email and I periodically reread, which is instead of saying you made good or bad decisions, saying you made fear driven or love driven driven decisions. Oh, and you've talked about fear and love being the two things that drive everybody. And so the comment I had to someone is that that's in my head now. Like, I don't need a third opinion to tell me that using love Driven and fear driven is the way to. A way to change my view of the world. Because two of my mentors said, with totally different worldviews, 100% agreed that that's a great way of looking at the world. So I don't need a third opinion like you. I could go get it.

It's useful. You might find a more useful, more useful perspective and we would love for you to share it. But I know it works. That's all. Does it work? Is it. Is it true enough for it to work? And then we will experiment together to see the depth of that truth. But I'm delighted that anything that I say is useful to you people who are spending an hour and a half with me on Saturday, trusting me, giving me this time, and I have no words. I'd like to remind everyone, everybody again, that this broadcast is brought to us by Fire Dance. You know the fire dance Tai chi, which is a specific approach to creating that morning ritual that empowers your life and drives everything else. Everything is connected to the notion of the little rituals that we do every day. You show me your rituals and I will show you your life. It's as simple as that. So if you go to firedance tai chi.com www.firedancetaichi.com you will see what we've got there. And we would love for you to get into that program, but you are welcome here regardless. Just come. Bring your honesty, bring your energy, bring your hearts, bring your minds, and that's a beautiful thing. And I want to thank my beautiful wife, Tananari. Do you have any closing statements, sweetheart? Not really.

Just go on and have a great weekend, everybody.

Yeah, fantastic, everybody. You take care. Unmute yourselves and say goodbye to everybody. Bye, everybody. See you next week. I will not be here.

Happy weekend.

Oh, if you're not going to be here, then be safe and come back to us as soon as possible. Take care, everybody. Love you guys.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you. Bye.