FIREDANCE LIVE! 4-1-23

And welcome to today's Life. Writing Live or Fire Dance? Live. I'm Steve Barnes. My wife is in New York taking care of business and being famous and seeing old college friends and stuff like that. So she won't be with us today. So I will have to. I'm going to ask the feminine energy in the room to please step up so that you can represent because we do need to balance between the male and the female. Right. Anyone who thinks that that balance is important in life, raise your hand. Raise your hand. Okay, good. So I expect the sisters to represent today because I will just. Hey, Mary, how you doing? Mystery conventions, Daniel. So people are talking about places to meet people in science fiction conventions. Definitely one of them. So the first thing that I want you to do is unmute. Everybody say hi to each other. Just. We made it through another week. We're alive.

Hello, everybody.

There you go. Okay, great, great, great, great, great. So let's kind of get started with some things really quick. What I wanted to do today was to move through the first few movements of the Tai Chi form and just kind of, let's see if there's any, anything that comes to mind that I haven't said before. We have some people waiting in the, in the, in the room. Admit all, all. Let's see, let's see. Okay, who volunteers to help me watch people coming in. I will make you a co host today and you watch the, the list of people coming in so I can focus on teaching Kathy Fall. I was hoping you'd say that. Okay, good. You can help fill in. You can be my work wife today. How's that? So make co host. There you go. And thank you very much. I think Tananari would improve, would approve. Okay, yeah, just keep track of the people. It'll say, you know, they're entering the thing. Can you. Okay, great. That's exactly what it is I want you to do. So what we're going to do right now is do a little bit of warm up physically and then we'll talk about like the first five movements of the Tai Chi form so that we can get into. And you may have some additional questions about them. The fact is that if you understand the first movement right, you've got everything that, plus the joint mobility drills, you know, just, it's. There is simplicity and then there's complexity. And what you do is you practice the, you practice the complication until it becomes complexity, until it becomes simplicity. Right now there are times, you know, my son is learning the form and he will say, well, what comes after this move? I don't know. I literally got to get up and do it in order to feel what comes next because there are compressions and releases and if I compress myself then I can feel what direction my body wants to release in next in a way that I don't remember the names of the things. It's not stored in that part of my head. So that's. That's kind of odd.

So.

Okay, so let me sit down here for a second and say something in preface to this. I may have formally completed the designing the physical workout that I need to be able to go to Manila next year. I look at what it is that I've got and the technology is sound. The theory behind it is sound. What it will give me are the physical and mental characteristics that I think would enable me to go and really enjoy myself. I don't want to fly halfway around the world to have a horrible time, that's for sure. Or get my butt kicked, that's for sure. You know, I've been. I've been hit in the face in as many times I want to be hit in the face in one lifetime. I could be.

I'd be very, very happy.

Never get hit the face again. So there are certain qualities of mind and body that I would like to have to be able to do this. So, and it's. There be one way of approaching it if I was doing the Tai Chi twice a day, once in the morning and once a night. But quite frankly, by the time I go to bed, I am tired of patterning myself. I have been focusing and patterning and staying within the lines of all day long until I'm finished with work which could be, you know, do the most important work by 1 o' clock or 2 o' clock or 3 o', clock, you know, done by 1 or through by 2 or 3 by 3 or out the door by 4 or alive by 5 or whatever it is. But the idea to figure out what's the 20% of what you're doing that gets 80% of the results. And you do that stuff first and you try to get it all done by one o' clock and then the rest of the day is free. So what I do is everything that's really important for my body, my mind, be my work and my emotions, which largely will be connecting with Tananarive, connecting with Jason, sometimes connecting with my baby girl, but certainly connecting with my inner child, which we're going to be talking about today, meditating. If I can get that all Done by one. Then I have my work day finished, and the rest of the day is play. Now, that day can be structured or useful. Play, in other words, for me, play might be sitting downstairs watching anime while I've got a. I've got a chunk of text on my laptop that I have to kind of massage, go through it and make changes and tweak it and stuff like this, you know, so, but it's play. I don't. I don't count that as work. And I can do that all day long. But by late evening, I want to start preparing my brain to shut down completely and rest. And to be honest, I have a little, you know, that. That can be a little bit of a challenge. As you can tell, I'm kind of, go, go, go, do it, do it, do it. And if you don't sleep, that breaks down. So I don't like to do tai chi just for bed because that's when I'm kind of. I want to just kind of free associate and just kind of drift. So what I can do is I can take the morning joint mobility. Do it, because it doesn't take more than a couple minutes. And I just do my joint mobility morning and night. In the morning to wake up, and at night to prepare myself to go to sleep. A Pareto principle. What Pareto principle is 20. Oh, it is 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities. You spend 80% of your time with 20% of your friends. 80% of the money you make comes from 20% of your customers. Okay. Is when you can look at the body of things that you do in a given day, look at them and find what is the 20% that gets you 80% of the results, then. Okay. Sorry, Steve. You talk faster than I can type. I am sorry. Yeah, yeah, I can. Which is why we record this. But I will. I will slow down right now just. Just to show you that I can. So the Pareto principle was named after an Italian economist, I believe, that, who noticed that 80% of a company. 80% of a company's time was spent with 20% of their clients. 20. 80% of the profit came from 20% of the customers. And the same thing can be applied to your activities during the day. 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions. So to the degree that you can define what 20% of customers, actions, friends, whatever, you get 80% of. And also 80% of your complaints will come from 20% of your customers. So if you can identify the 20% of your customers that give you 80% of your complaints. Well, you know, that's. That gives you an idea who you might want to spend less time with or you might want to take a look and get a sense of, you know, Kathy, you've got people coming in that if we. If you look at that, that's just one of the ways that I sort. What I want you to do is have a lot of positive ways to sort things. Okay? So anyway, it's the joint mobility, morning and night. So my schedule then on a workout day becomes 2, 3 minutes of joint mobility followed by tai chi, which is my morning ritual. So I'll do tai chi while doing the morning ritual, speaking aloud, centering myself. If my day ends there, if I get a frantic phone call and suddenly I have to do something, then I've taken care of my basics, taking care of my health, my sanity for the day. Remember, we talked last week about the most important thing being your emotions. Get your emotions right first, get them right in emotions, because if your emotions are right, you'll do all the stuff you need to do in the other arena. Then I will take a break. I'll do some things, or I will work my abdominal muscles and I will do some specific martial arts activity, very short stuff, kata movements that relate to all to five or six different movement systems that I like to. You know, it's like my attitude is sort of like, I spent the time and the energy and the blood to learn this. I don't want to lose it. Does that make sense? I mean, it's like, you know, I spent years practicing, so. Practicing Indonesian pit jocks a lot. I haven't taken a pitch a lot class in a very long time. But I don't want to lose what I got from the Pindecker, Paul De Torres or Steven Plink. That was sweat and blood and dealing with that phobic response that I've spoken of, that I have. I'm not losing that for nothing. It cost me. I'm taking that to the grave with me. So guru Cliff Stewart created what he called a speed drew, which has elements of all 18 of the basic movement systems in one thing that I can do. So I do that, and I do some other things. Then I take another break. I can answer emails, or I can do this, or I can do this. But what comes next after that is the intense physical work, which are various things. And then that follows by with a little bit of yoga. Now on yoga days, and then during the day, that five minute miracle thing, I will do five Tibetans spaced out through the day. On a yoga day, I would do qigong spaced out during the day. On a martial arts workout day, and those are alternate, I would do five Tibetans and a little bit of martial arts. And this is, this is what I'm tweaking now, getting ready for the possibility of Manila. How, during the five minute miracle, how much do I have to do to be equivalent to an hour's solid workout time? Because of synaptic facilitation, focusing on the coordination, if you break that down into several repetitions during the day, you actually accomplish more than if you do it all at one time. So that, I don't know, maybe 20 minutes scattered through the day can be equivalent to an hour if you put it all in at one time. And in terms of coordination, in terms of coordination. Now, there's some forms of fitness that demand constant work. You don't even, you know, it's like you hit second wind after 12 to 15 minutes, third wind around a half hour, and then there's a fourth win and a fifth win. And for some activities you want to go. In fact, if you're training for a particular sport, your exercise routine should be as long as the period of the sport so that you are literally training your mind and body to do the thing that you're going to be doing in competition or display. But in terms of martial arts, well, that's, you know, there's a lot of ways to cheat there because you don't really want to fight to go more than 60 seconds, do you? You really want it to be over, you know, in five seconds, you know, you just want it to boom, over. So there's some cheating room in there. As long as you are working, you know, the basic fitness and your, your, your, your basic movement, so forth. There is, there are ways. So on yoga days it would be joint mobility, tai chi yoga, and then qigong during the day. And then at the end of the day, I can just do joint mobility again and I've prepared my body for rest. So let's kind of go through the joint mobility. So I generally start with my fingertips. So I feel as if I have threads attached to the ends of my fingers that kind of pulling out from my palms and I wiggle them like make an ice cream cone with your fingers. Come on, do this with me. Don't just watch, do it. Okay. And then I can wiggle the individual fingers. Like I could do this for anywhere between 2 and 20 minutes if I was having problems, if I was feeling stiff, if I had. If I was arthritis or bursitis was starting to be an issue, I would do a lot more of this. And the trick is that I would do just a little bit less than the maximum I can do without it going over three in terms of discomfort. And it would be the regularity they would get it accomplished. Ooh, this finger is not feeling coordinated if I do them both at the same time. So I'm deliberately increasing the complexity to force my neurology, force me to focus more carefully on the coordination of the movement. Okay, good. Then the wrists. So we're going from fingers to wrists. Now, there's several variations on this, but most. The simplest one is just making circles. Okay. And then reverse it. Now make sure that you're breathing smoothly the whole time. Elbows, inhale, exhale, Inhale, exhale, Inhale, exhale. Great. Once again, I'm going through this briefly. You could spend a full minute on each one of these segments easily. Shoulders all the way up, all the way forward, all the way down, all the way back. Up, forward, down, back. Okay, and then we're going to reverse it. Do the forward until you can feel the muscles pulling in your back. Okay. Neck side, forward, side, and across. Don't lean. Back, side, forward, side, across. And reverse it. And once again, you can do this slower and longer. Always stay within what you can do without it going over three in terms of discomfort, even if it's just little tiny circles, doing that daily will start to increase your amplitude, increase your potential for movement. Okay, hands on hips. All the way. Side, back, side, forward, Side, back, side, forward. Reverse it. Side, back, side, forward, side, back. Oh, something clicked. That's good. Okay, now keep my hips pretty still, and I'm going to try to articulate the spine so the back, side, forward, side, back, side, forward, side, back. Reverse it. Any belly dance teacher could really teach you a lot about this. Okay, now the whole trunk. Exhale. Make sure that you're not holding your breath. Okay, once again. Ideally, you do this five times in each direction. Okay. Then the knees. You push the knees forward until they're over the toes, but no further. You roll to the outside edges of your feet. Push back inside edges of your feet, over the toes, outside edges of your feet. Reverse it. Inhale, exhale. Notice you inhale as you expand. Exhale as you contract. Okay. Then shake it out. Great. So I guess what. Let's just go to see whether we have any comments, questions, or requests about anything that we've covered so far. And in terms of what you guys have experienced in the last week, we had a couple of very specific comments. I would love for those to come back around. So raise your hands if you have anything you'd like to say. Tom, unmute yourself.

There we go. You mentioned the moves of C lot in combination. How different? I would imagine it's totally different than what you just did with joint mobility.

Yeah, it's. It's specific.

When I think of C lot, I think of you sitting way down.

Well, you're thinking about. There are many different forms of silat. Saying silat is a lot like saying kung fu or martial arts in general. There are probably a thousand different styles throughout the Indonesian archipelago. In many ways, they're very similar to. It's almost like silat is the hand art of Kali or Skriema, the empty hand. They work together really well. And maybe that perspective was created by the fact that Danny and Osanto, who I learned a lot of these things from, puts it that way. You know, that he looks. He looks at the. At the art of the Mahapajit, I think empire, the, you know, the Philippines and Indonesia. So there's a. There's a lot going on there. So just. Just as a. For fun. So just making this up as I go along. Collie, let's say that a basic movement is the six count. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And a lot of what you do is based on that. So you've got hand movements, exercises that are designed to kind of maximize the neurological efficiency where those angles are all coming very natural. So there's a flow there. Salat is a lot about cutting that flow. So let's see the first juru, if I remember properly.

Okay.

Like that. So what you have that circle there. So with this. This idea here is rat tat, tat, tat, tat tat. You're hitting high and then low. This is. You are deflecting here. And if the hand goes here, then I might turn my head and grab that and pull him down. You can see that somebody. A punch is coming here, and I deflect it and pull. Then his weight coming forward is now over here, Right? He's now over here. At that point, he's going to take a step to probably try to preserve his weight. And I'm going to make a sharp angular turn instead of staying within this. And I'm going to change here. Now maybe his right foot, he might have punched. I deflected and pulled. So he takes a longer, longer step. Now he's out of his balance. Okay. If that makes sense. And I step his Foot is here. You can imagine an X. He steps out here to try to preserve his balance. I step in this direction. In other words, I'm facing here. I step here, I step here and I have my hand here. Now he's coming in this direction. I've cut his line going in this direction. And now if I step hock, if I step back here, very similar to the 10 Khan in Aikido. I've got his arm here and his head here. All I have to do is turn my waist because he is off balance. So Kali in that sense would be like creating the flow. Salad is like cutting the flow. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does. Thank you.

Cool. Mo burns. Hey, how are you? Good, man. Good. He's good.

I have a question. You know, it's rare when you can find a person who studied a different martial arts form. And you're, you're doing, you know, you're looking at the Asian forms, but I, I want to, like, ask you about the Asiatic African.

So you're talking about. Well, first of all, you're going to have a lot of, you're going to have a lot of grappling, but you're also going to look into arts like angulu, which is one of the sources of capoeira. I would kind of suggest if you can find a capoeira instructor who will show you the things that they don't show tourists. That's what you're looking for. That's what you're looking for.

So have you ever looked at the, from ancient Kemet, the Tatib scrolls from the old kingdom, which was stick fighting?

I've seen some of the stick fighting stuff. Yes, I have. Okay. Because all human bodies have the same limbs and the same basic perceptual equipment. What you have, what, what you want to look for in terms of finding the difference, it's not going to be the difference between Africa and Indonesian archipelago and, and, and the Philippines, although there are differences. What you want to look at is a difference between northern European movement systems in the African system. Because a lot of the stuff in Africa dispersed because there were nice trade routes between the Philippines, Indonesia and the east coast of Africa. So there was going to be a lot of extreme exchange there. Both friendly exchange and because they were kicking each other's butt.

And everybody can pick up a stick too.

Everybody knocks. That's right. Stick fighting is great because learning how to use a stick means you also know how to use a knife. No, it means you know how to use empty hands means you know how to use a rolled up newspaper, you know, you know, keys between your fingers, all sorts of stuff like that papyri scroll, papyrus scroll. That's. Yeah, so that's, that's what I would say about, about that. Unfortunately, there isn't as much documentation of it and it's not as, it's not as formalized in terms of what's available in the United States. But what I have seen of it, you know, martial arts is a heritage of every people on the planet. You know, it's basically just. Well, let's say martial science is not everybody connected their movement systems with their, their feelings, their emotions, you know, their life way. Although if you are a hunter, gatherer, warrior society, that lifeway is integrated into the basic everything that you, you do every day. You're protecting the flock, you're protecting your home, you're making your body strong, you're working out with your kids to help them become strong. You know, so it's, it's all part of the same thing. You don't have to have an intellectual understanding of it. This is just life in the Philippines, you learn from your uncles.

So I guess it's in like in my studies of international politics, political anthropology, we talk about the specialist in violence, which is the specialist who protects the village.

Yeah, we all should have that warrior self within us. The same way we should all have healer, we should all have lover, we should all have priest, you know, we should all have artist. And then some people within the village would specialize in one or the other thing. And by being together, the person who specializes in being the warrior gets certain privileges and has certain responsibilities. And every other position has those things. And when those are all inter nested and interwoven, it makes a healthy community. When you separate those things out, you can have a very dysfunctional community.

But what society?

Yes, that's right. That's exactly. One of the things I would look at is how did basketball look before black people came into it? Then look at 20 years after they came into it, you will see a tremendous amount of rhythmic and positional variation that did not exist before. Expect to find the same things in the movement systems. On the other hand, if you go to Spain, you look at Spanish circle fencing and they're doing a lot of the same things that you see in the Philippines. Who got it from who is another question. But if you look at the mark of Zorro, you know, when, when Anthony Hopkins has Antenna Banderas working on the Spanish circle, that's. Boy, that's pure Kali. A screamer you know, so like, who's zooming who? I don't know. Everybody's gonna. Gonna argue about that.

Well, that goes back to the moors and that influences.

Exactly. Right. So anything all around the Mediterranean. Expect a lot of intermixing of genetics and memetics. Just, you know, we love to have social and physiological intercourse with each other. Exogamy is a very real thing. You have to pass laws to keep us from jumping each other's bones because we just really like the other. The exotic thing is sexy. So the same thing is true about movement systems and meditations and dances and all sorts of other stuff. We like learning the new thing. That's how the human race moves forward.

Okay, gotcha. Thank you, sir.

You betcha. Who else? Because I have a painful story to tell you today, and if you don't distract me, I'm going to have to tell it. So come on, distract me a little. Distract me just a little. I don't want to cry in front of you. And I know I'm going to.

If that's the lead into the Ancient.

Child, then that's where we need to go.

Oh, God, do I have to? One more question before I do it.

Do you want to go into that thing we talked about just before we started?

Absolutely.

Okay, so I'm. I'm a chairperson of one non profit and I'm on the board for two others. And I'm trying to sneak some of our techniques like the five minute miracle and magic and these ideas into our board meetings and our board training. Because quite frankly, working with some of these people is like herding cats. And the only urgency that they have is for whatever their own personal agenda is, not for the group or the group need.

That's right.

I'm trying to create that collective mind. I can't remember what you used, how you phrased it when you were talking about the writer's room and having a.

I don't know if the writer's room is. Because we're not cats in the writer's room, we're dogs.

But you're talking about having everybody's mind working on the same problem.

Yes. Let me answer you. You can't herd cats, but open a can of cat food and every cat in the house is there. So what you have to do is. One of my teachers told me I just worked out to his widow today. That's an interesting coincidence. One of my teachers told me, don't trust people. Instead, rely upon them to do what they perceive as being in their own best interest. It's up to you to figure out what that is. Don't ask them to do something that is contrary to human nature. You have to understand what do they want and then find some way the thing you want them to do matches their self interest. If you cannot do that, you cannot sell to a customer, you cannot sell an idea to your staff. It has to fit them. And if you do that, wonderful things can happen. But you have. It's up to you to keep, you know, make an index card for every person in there. And then you ask what are their basic fears and loves in terms of physical survival, in terms of heart connection, community, in terms of career advancement and self expression. Figure out if you can figure out what they want. That I remember there's a Brian Tracy, I think it was, has a course on selling and he talked about a real estate guy.

You said a lot very rapidly. Excuse me, you said a lot and you said it real fast.

I will slow down and thank you for reminding me because you.

I heard I wrote basic fears. Get a card, make a list of their basic fears and then you install.

Okay, I'm sorry and I apologize. Their basic fears are going to relate to survival of self, genetic investment in relationship, their children, wife, children, husband or their tribe. If it relate, if you can relate it to their personal survival, genetic survival or tribal survival, you will get their attention every time. It's like if you don't have anything else to sell a product with, sell it with sex works every time. You're not going to get everybody, but you're going to get a lot of people. The only thing that gets attracts more people than sex is survival. Tell them that they'll live longer or better or won't die. How is this going to enhance something that they care about? That's for you to determine. Does that make sense? I mean it's not up to them.

It makes perfect sense and it gives me a clear direction on what I need to do this week to prepare for my next board meeting.

Beautiful. So give yourself from 1 to 5 or from 0 to 5 on the task that you need to become an expert motivator. Expert motivator. God, there's so much more that could be said about that. But that's good. Basic. You do that every day. Giving yourself from zero to five on paying attention, listening, anticipating, intuiting, understand. And then you know, when you come back next week, let us know how you did and you'll, you'll have more questions for us. So we're here for you.

Thank you.

All right, Kathy, Hey, Steve.

Thank you. I need to be ambidextrous, by the way, to let people in and take notes at the same time.

I'll try to keep my eye on that too. But you're doing a great job.

I wanted to. You asked about bringing something back to share, like some of these techniques and sort of. And I wanted to bring something back that actually I've been doing for the last few weeks. I've been doing professional development for the person who works for me, which is just one on one and just teaching them different things. And I realized there was something you said, and you've been saying it actually about making the learning physical, about people having a physical practice. And while I'm doing this in zoom and I'm not doing anything physical with them, I took it as operationalizing what they need to do, like somehow making them try to do the thing. And I do this when I teach. I wasn't doing it with them one on one. And that is creating a scenario, putting them in the scenario and getting them to try and physically, if you can think about it, physically work through the scenario. If this is going on, this is happening. This is what was said, this is the context. What do you do?

One thing you can do, Kathy. Have them write it down. Yes. Force them to write it down. The act of writing physicalizes the thought process.

Yes.

But it has been working really well because they don't get to think about it ahead of time. So they see it for the first time like. Like you walk into a room and there it is. Now you have to react.

You were. You're a guy. I'm going to conceptualize this very, very poorly. You're a second level thinker, Kathy. You're synthesizing a lot of things and creating new ideas. That makes you a leader. So you just got a little extra of my interest because that's the way I want you guys to be. I want you guys to be like Kathy. She is teaching, she's learning, she's synthesizing. And when we do that, we're taking many ideas from lots of different places, creating something, testing it, teaching it. Kathy's a scientist and I appreciate that a lot. Good going, hun.

Appreciate that. Thank you, Steve.

You betcha. Okay, anybody else or am I gonna have to cry? Okay, last one. Mo go.

Yeah. I sent you a direct message and I understand what you talked about. The expert motivator. And I want to say the expert demotivator in a situation. I stepped out of the situation, leaving the foreign government position that I was in. But I guess extracting yourself and realizing that it's toxic and demotivating when you're trying to be positive, that's something I've encountered.

Well, what you can do is if you understand or you have a theory about how to motivate people, reverse it and see whether or not that would be demotivating. Okay. And because there should be, you know, a mirror image thing there, you do this. But if you do this, you know, you can. You can take them. You do this and you lift them up. Do this and you'll take them down. When you've got that isomorphism, you've probably got something workable. It's probably going to have the effect that you want. You can see it both ways. All right, so I've stalled enough. I've talked a lot about something that I call the ancient Child. And what I wanted to do was what the ancient child is, is you visualize your child self or represent your child self. You visualize or represent your ancient self, your elder, the person you're going to be on your deathbed. And you get your child self and your ancient self to converse with each other. You step out of it and just listen to them. And that is the basics of that technique. And I wanted to talk about where it came from because there's a lot going on there. And I don't want to teach too deeply about it other than to say, try it. Then as you try it, you come back and report to me. And I can tweak. But what this came from was transactional analysis. Transactional analysis is just, you know, one of the countless psychotherapeutic forms. And it suggests that you look at a human being as if that human being is divided into three aspects. One aspect is the child, one aspect is the parent, and the third aspect is the adult. So if we were to put these up on the board. Child, parent, adult. Now our child self has our aliveness. It wants, needs, and gives love. It's, you know, your child's only job is to play in the sunshine, is to, you know, ideally, if you've been nurtured in a perfect way, raised in a perfect society, raised by a loving family and in tribal situation where you, during the, during your youth, you never had any fear that went beyond childish fears. You knew you were cared for, you knew you were loved. You're seeing life all around you. That, that perfect little child, the parent is the emotional protector. It provides, you know, food and shelter and protection for the child, watches over the child. That's Your heart space. So the child, if you were to say that the child is the body, the child is playing with the dirt every day, you know, the adult self understands that the child must be protected, but also has dealt with the fear of death. That says the child is here to replace us, that we give to the child so that child can take our place in the chain of life. And then the adult part of us is a little cold blooded, a little calculating, and it has the knowledge of how to do these things, but it's not engaged in the emotions of it. It's just get the job done, what needs to be done. Just kind of a machine in a little bit of what. And it, to the degree that this model is useful, it shows us one more model of how a human being who was never hurt might function in the world. As an adult, you still have connection with your child self. You have that sense of love and protectiveness for the child within you and for all other children. And you also have a picture of the world that is not centered around you. It's just this is the way life is. And I'm preparing my child self to go down that path. If you wanted to, you could say that the elder self is even a super adult that is already very close to death and therefore not limited by ego concerns and other things. So that connection is there's an entire body. And I'm, I'm not an expert in transactional analysis. What I will say is that I respect the model and it points in some interesting directions. So before I go forward, do you have any comments, questions or requests? So we are make sure that we're all on the same page about this. Okay, so there is an entire body of work that has to do with the child part of this, the inner child part, healing your child, listening to your child, playing with your child. If you were neglected. Oh, Mary Elle raised her hand. Mary, Mary.

Okay, so suppose you grew up. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, I can.

Okay, suppose you grew up in a loving, protective. I'm an only child, so everybody. I was the center of everybody's world. And then as I got older, that's when the hurt and the attacks came from people.

Yes. This technique is specific for you, specific for you, what you would do. Here's the child, here's life and here are you.

So.

Here's the child, here's the adult who you are today. That makes sense. And in here someplace was the damage. Yes, the damage could be any number of different things. It could be a bad relationship and there is nothing that messes us up more than painful relationships with people who have primary control over one aspect of our lives. In other words, a boss, a teacher who stands between you and your degree, a boss who stands between you and your paycheck, your significant other. There is nothing that is more powerful than the emotional waves that are happening when you reach an orgasm. The context of sexuality. Same as what's happening around food, what's happening around shelter, what's. What's happening around money. These things connect with our basic identities. And an abusive spouse or boss or an abusive parent or step parent who damages your sense of self before you've had a chance to fully develop an adult sense of who you are in the world that is real and it can stay with you for a lifetime. So if this is the adult you are today and that down here is the child you were, some therapy will deal with looking. Where did the damage take place over here, There was abuse over there. You were the star of the show when you were a child and you went out in the world and you began to perform and people spit on you. And suddenly you realized how horribly vicious competition was going to be in the world, that every house on your block had a little genius in it. And when those geniuses go to school and start competing, you know, maybe you even were the best at your little junior high school, at your elementary school. You go to junior high school and all of a sudden there's nothing in that drama class or dance class except the best of that group. And if you manage to be the best there, just wait until you get to high school. If you think. If you manage to be the best there, think about what you get to college. And if you think that's bad, wait until you go out into the world and start competing for money. You're going to get the living crap kicked out of you. At some point along that path, everybody who you see dancing and smiling up on stage or anything else got the living crap kicked out of them. The only question is, how did they keep going? How did they keep going long enough to become excellent? If everybody gets a living crap kicked out of them and everybody does, is there anybody here who never got the living crap kicked out of them? Raise your hands. If you never got the living crap kicked out of you, I don't see any hands, do you? So the question is, how do we do this? And we do this Therapy and meditation, the many, many different ways of doing, doing it. The last thing in the world, I would say, is that the techniques that I'M giving. You are the only ones. What I'm saying is you need the result of having a healthy alignment between your child self, your adult self, your parents self. However you get that, even if you don't represent it this way, do it. Okay, so I'm going to give you a technique. I'm always apologizing for this because whereas I have clarity on this stuff, it doesn't mean I'm saying this is the only path that's. So please forgive me if I. If it's very important to me because there's so many bad teachers out there, there's so many frauds out there and your hearts are so precious to me. So with that. Did I say that in a meditation, for instance? Well, no. Now it's time for me to tell the story. And in telling the story, we will then be able to extract the teachings. You'll know why in just a second. Okay. Some of you are aware that Tananarive and I have been working in the writers room for something called Crystal Lake, the Friday the 13th series. Well, 35 years ago, there was another Friday the 13th series about a haunted curio shop. And if you bought some of the curios, you would start committing murders. And my agent asked me if I would be interested in pitching for this show. Now, my daughter Nikki was maybe 3 years old at the time, 2 years old at the time, something like that. And yeah, I needed the money. It's good money, good money. So I came up with an idea and I thought to myself, if this idea could work, it could not only be successful, but it might actually say something. Okay, I could get behind it. I could feel. I could feel this was an actually good idea, not just something I was doing for the money. So I went onto the lot at Paramount and parked the car and walked in the little bungalow. And it's always the same way. There are several guys there and they ask you if you'd like some water. And then they chat with you a little bit and they say, so, what have you got for us? And I told them a story called Purple Heart. Now, this story began in the Vietnam war where there's a unit that is very tightly knit together and they've had every kind of stress imaginable. And they're being led by an incompetent lieutenant right out of officer training school, thinks he knows everything, really doesn't know anything. And their sergeant, who is greatly beloved by the men, this is the sort of lieutenant who would have his men go into a live minefield to Retrieve a hand grenade under heavy machine gun fire. Just an idiot. And he gets their sergeant blown up. And in revenge they frag the lieutenant. They kill him. And in order to get away with it, they make it look as if the dead sergeant did it. There's only one problem. The sergeant wasn't quite dead. He's medevaced out. He's lost both of his legs and arm and eye. And the military believes that he killed the lieutenant, murdered the lieutenant. But they also know that there's no way they can prosecute this guy. They put him on the witness stand and the, you know, the attacking attorney would get ripped to shreds by the defense attorney because this guy look would look so pitiful. So instead of that, they completely destroy him administratively. He doesn't get his benefits, it's dishonorable discharge. You know, they just completely screw him. And the thing is that he's in such a daze, he has no idea what happened. He doesn't have any memory of what happened back then. Years pass, and on his birthday some years later, there's a reunion of his unit. And he goes to the reunion and the men, you know, they're so happy to see him and everybody's getting a little bit drunk and somebody lets it slip what happened in the war. And he is shattered. He just how, how could you do that to me? I. I loved you guys. I would have died for you. Why didn't you just let me die? If you needed to do that, why did you just let me die? And it breaks up acrimoniously and he goes home. He heads home to his little walk up cold water flophouse wheeling along in his wheelchair. And as he goes past the front desk, the lady at the front desk sees him. And she's always seen this nice young man who's crippled and she knows that he didn't get any medals after the war. And she tells him that she knows it's his birthday and that she was walking down a side street and she passed this little curio shop and there was a purple Heart medallion in the curio shop from World War II or the Korean War. And she bought it for him and she gives it to him. This is the medal that you should have gotten. He sheds a tear from his one good eye and thanks her and pins it on his chest and goes up to his room and levers himself into his bed and goes to sleep. And that night, while he's sleeping, the purple heart metal begins to beat. And it glows purple and little veins extrude themselves from the sides and dig their way into his chest. And he gives up and then goes back down into sleep. And the empty eye socket glows and an eye grows back, and the empty sleeve of his left arm glows, and his arm grows back, only stronger than before. And the empty sleeves of his pants glow and his legs grow back, and he levers himself up out of the bed and goes after the men who framed him, killing them off one at a time, commando style. I mean. I mean, choking people with barbed wire and stabbing them with punji sticks dipped in human excrement and karate chops and claymore minds. So I pitched them the story, and they said the following thing to me. We can't do that story, they said, because if we did that story, people would think this show was about something. And our only excuse for putting on a mass murder every week is that this is pure entertainment. And I sat there looking at them, knowing that I needed that money. And I just began. They said, what else have you got? I didn't have anything else, but I began to try pitching ideas, anything I could say to try desperately to get that money so I could go home and tell my wife that we weren't in trouble. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you want to look at it. When my heart isn't in it, I can't do good work. So they shook my hand, told me I could come back anytime, and I walked out of that room. And when I walked out, it was as if I walked out of an opium den. And suddenly I was breathing clean air again. And I felt like I was stepping out of a trance. I was waking up, and I clearly heard the voice of the little boy inside me, that creative little boy who had sustained me since childhood. And he said, daddy, why did you have me talking to those terrible men? Don't you love me? And I realized that I had done a terrible thing. That I had taken the most precious, innocent, vulnerable part of myself and put him out on the corner to turn tricks. I had abused my own heart. Instead of getting up and walking out of there, I tried to whore myself. And luckily, there were no buyers. For the first time in my life, I lost my connection to my own creative self. I couldn't write anymore, not anything worth anything. I could not hear the voice of my creativity because I had betrayed myself. So I asked myself, what am I going to do? And I done some studying in the Sweet Medicine Sundance path and some other shamanic paths, and I realized that there was some power in personifying the image of what I had lost. So I thought to myself, where did I used to be happy as a child? We used to go to Playa del Rey. The beach, Playa del Rey. My mom and my sister. I used to love it when I was a little boy. So I would sit and I would visualize being at Playa del Rey. And I was hoping that the image of my child self would be there, and he was not. I did that every day for a couple weeks. And he never showed up. So I started bringing toys and food. I used to love Kentucky Fried Chicken, back when that stuff tasted good. And I would bring toys and picnic stuff. Still, he never showed up. So I would leave it on the beach, and then I would end my meditation. I'd come back the next day to see what had happened. And after a few days, I noticed that there were a child's footprints in my visualization, Playing with the toys and then eating some of the food. And I kept going back, day after day, meditating. Day after weeks went by, months went by, close to a year went by. And one day I went there, and he wasn't there. But I looked to my right and up north along the beach, I could see a tiny shadow, a tiny silhouette of a child standing there. And I kept going back every day. And that silhouette slowly got closer. Slowly, one day at a time, got closer. I kept bringing toys, and I kept bringing food. And I would sit there quietly. And finally I saw myself as a little boy standing maybe no more than 50ft away, tears running down his little round face, looking at me with such fear and anger. And I stood up and I just. Just spread my arms and stood there. He just stood where? Stood there. And I came back day after day, doing the exact same thing. And slowly, day after day, he got just a little closer. And I took a step and he ran away. And the next step. Next day, I came back and I did it again. And he came a little closer. I took a step, and he didn't run away. And the day after that, I took a step and he took a step toward me. And the next day, I took two steps and he took two steps. And sometime after that, I took a step and he took a step. And then I took one and he took one, and I took one and he took one. And then he ran into my arms and jumped up into my arms. I hugged him and he said, daddy, where have you been? I've missed you so much. And I told him, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for what I did. To you. And I swear on my life, I will never leave you alone again. And I never have that little boy. He has given me everything. All the creativity, all the love, all the energy. And in some ways, the core of my marriage to Tananarive is just my little boy and her little girl playing and our parents standing at the gate of the playground where we're playing safely. To that degree, the proper job of the child is to play. The proper job of the parent is to keep the sweep out the broken glass, clip the roses off, the thorns off the roses, keep the mountain lions out and be sure the child has a safe place. And to stand at the gate of that playground to say to anyone who wants to, to get in there and play with that child, you shall not pass unless you pass my approval. Tananarive had a mother like that. First thing her mother ever said to me leaned across the table and said, well, I'm not impressed by you at all. And I said, it's not your job to be impressed by me. It's your job to protect your daughter. That's how I've always thought about that. Every day, almost every day when I meditate, I make contact with that little boy and I hug him, I hold his hands and I say, what do you need from me? What can I do for you? And as long as I do the very best I can every day and never forget that my life, my creativity, my energy, my aliveness is based upon that little boy who started this journey of life and looked out at the world and said, earth below, heaven above, no one in the world like me. That's how children begin. And as adults, our adult job is to help them transition from that to a world where they have to demonstrate their worth rather than just being loved for being beautiful children. And that takes discipline. It takes adults who are willing to be adults and not necessarily their buddies. And it's the hardest and best thing in the world. And whatever happened to you between now and the child you were that once upon a time, was loved. And believe me, all children are loved at some point or they die. It's called failure to thrive. Unless children are loved, hugged, protected, they wither up and die. All you have to do in your visualizations is find the child who is younger than the damage, and you hold that child and you swear that you will die before you let anyone hurt them. And you will die with honor. And that child does not ask you to win. That child asks you to fight. Did you do the best you could? Then it's okay, dad. Let me wash your wounds. Did you fight? I didn't fight for him at Friday the 13th. I tried to pimp him out. You understand the depth of the betrayal. It was appropriate for it to take a year of daily work for me to earn his trust back. And I will never stop earning it. The principles that I want you to extract from that are just a few. But before I go on, any comments, questions, or requests. It's never easy to go back through that story, but it's important and it's the truth. Thoughts, questions, and requests.

You are such a great storyteller. And this is Sonya. I know you guys don't hear my voice often, but just thank you for that. Thank you for having that courage and that strength to share that with us. I really appreciated it. And just your gift, you know, I'm glad that you are aligned with your child again, because the gift that you bring to everybody in. In the world, whether they know it or not, is necessary. So thank you for that.

My honor. And that's my gift to all of your children. Because my little boy wants to play with your little boys and girls. We want to get together on Saturday and have fun together and share together. And we could do that if our adult selves, our warrior selves are watching to be sure that the predators stay the hell away, because they're coming. And only the adult warrior part of you can protect that child. And all I can tell you is whatever it costs you to make that connection, it's worth 10 times as much, no matter what. And the predators of the world, the bigots of the world, would love for you to think that you're helpless, would love to think that you cannot. And I'm here to tell you that is you are strong enough to protect yourself. You're not helpless anymore.

All. All I can say is I am a snotty mess. I was not. I mean, you had me when the heart was. Started beating, but then I just started crying and I'm like, okay, I. I'm a grown woman. Why am I crying? And it. It touched something in me. And my trauma came from. Well, my real trauma came when I got married to the man I loved. And then years and years and years went past and I found out he was gay, but he never told me. And so I lived a lie.

And.

And he would do things to keep me off balance so I wouldn't know what was going on. And. And I was. I was so naive. And when I finally realized, because we went to different cities and there were Always gay men around, but I could spot them. But I didn't. I didn't get it. And then my lightning fast mind said one day, wait a minute. What's the common denominator here? Different. Different cities, different faces. He's the only common denominator. And I went, oh, my God, he's gay. And I told my mom, and she said, oh, yeah, baby, we. We knew that when we met him. I'm like, why didn't you tell me? And she said, because you loved him and you wouldn't have listened and we didn't want to hurt you, and we became friends. But I used to be a size 4, petite, and he used to tell me if I ever gained weight, he would leave me. And once I realized the lie I was living, I said, if it didn't eat me. And I. And. And I couldn't outrun it, I ate it. And I gained weight.

Yes, of course you did.

And he left. And then I loved. I still loved him. I loved him till the day he died. But the weight was a protection because I knew I couldn't go back. Because he wouldn't want me. Even though I loved him.

Your way through this is through your heart. You have a beautiful, loving heart. Beautiful. And the little girl inside you is as precious as the stars. And she deserved both a protective father and a playmate. And someone with whom you could make love and celebrate life and plan a future together. Every little girl has the right to that. Every little boy has the right to that. And what I invite you to do is to be the mother for that little girl. Apologize to her, say it will never happen again. And you do whatever work is necessary to celebrate your heart and your sexuality. That part of you is precious. And remember what I said about nothing hurts more than the things that happened to us during those core survival connections. You took real damage. That's not a joke. It's not an accident. It's not a hallucination. There is work to be done, and you are safe to do it. Here. You start. You can start with heartbeat meditation. Listening to your heartbeat. And when you can make connection to your heartbeat where you can relax enough that you feel it through your body, bring your little girl into your heart and just let her be there. And just tell her that you love her and protect her. And one day you're going to find her the right playmate. And he's going to be a good playmate and he's going to relish her. You guys are going to have so much fun. But first, she's simply going to be loved and heal. You do that, you understand that you have the right to a healthy heart and you have the right to an abundant and healthy sexuality. And you're simply going to get the tools that you need. Some of those tools we'll have for you. Others of those tools you will find elsewhere. And some of them you'll create for yourself. And when you've done that, you will share what you've done and you will heal a thousand hearts. And then you will have changed the pain into power. Can you commit to that for me? Because that's a life of joy and service. And when you touch and when you tap into that and you tap into that child energy and that divine energy, the conversation between the little girl you were and the old woman you're going to be on your deathbed is going to be a fascinating conversation. You can also meditate and just sit back and listen to them talk and watch what they do to stay out of it. You let your deep wisdom do its thing. Your ex husband was doing the best he could with the resources he had. If he'd had better resources, he would have done better. He didn't want to be a bad person. He didn't want to hurt other people. That was just thrashing, you know, just. It's tough. Life is tough. Life beats the living hell out of all of us. It was beating the hell out of him in a very specific way. Way. And unfortunately you got in between him and him. And I'm so sorry. And speaking from the masculine aspect of the energetic, I want to let you know that you are precious and beautiful. And when you bring forth that part of yourself, you are exactly what a good man is looking for. Exactly. And there's someone out there who wants you and just doesn't know how to find you yet. You do your work, he'll be doing his work and we'll help you guys find each other.

Yeah, because I was his arm charm. Because I, I justified his masculinity. Because he had me on his arm.

Right. And that wasn't your job.

Right.

It wasn't your job. He was asking you to do his work. That was wrong. That was wrong of him. Okay, you don't have to hate him. Doesn't make him an evil person. But that was wrong. Simple.

And he didn't have the courage to be who he really was. So he, he had me as. Oh, well, he can't be gay because look at his bad, badass wife, you know, so.

So look at this, sweetheart. What can you do in your morning ritual to step into your power, your place of power, protection, so that your child can be free to have all the energy that you need to have a wonderful life. So what woman can you think of who is the epitome of strength and power and protectiveness and sensuality that joins with your golden woman to see the aspect of yourself that is every woman in the world, that is this the essence of femininity that can forgive because she is powerful enough that that does not touch her true nature. What happened then is no threat to who you are now. Who you are now is between you and your spirit and your child. If you can visualize a woman of that power, bring her into your morning rituals. Every morning when you move, I am so grateful for the beautiful woman who is now my role model. And you see her and you feel her, and maybe you get quiet and you ask her if she has words for you. Or maybe you just let her take steps in front of you and you walk behind her modeling. How does she stand? How does she hold her face? How does she breathe? How does she laugh? Or maybe if you're doing Tai chi, you visualize her doing the Tai chi first. You watch the video of me doing it. You see her doing it beside me. Step into her. Do it her way. Step out of yourself. Step out of your needy, wounded, abandoned child. Step out of the person you were and into your destiny. And make a commitment that this will never, ever happen again. Never. You're worth more than that. And so is that little girl. And the woman you're going to be on your deathbed is watching you. Yes, she is. And thank you for sharing it. Thank you. Let's everybody give. Just unmute yourselves. That took real courage. Let's. Yeah, everybody unmute yourselves. We're getting to the end of our time here. This has been a great. We will have some. We'll. We'll take a couple more thoughts. But I did want to say that. That, that looking at these tools, expanding them out and then coming closer than expanding it out and coming closer, closer. Short view, long view. This is what this is about. Rotating between our bodies, our hearts and our minds. Okay? That's what we're doing here. And I strongly invite each and every one of you, join us during the Fire Dance. Www.firedancetaichi.com We're going to give you all the tools that you need. I will do the very best I can to be a hundred percent honest with you every single time we interact. That is my commitment to you. Any More comments, questions and requests before we close today. I hear somebody, anybody.

Yeah.

Yes, Tom.

I've heard you tell that story before. I didn't realize what the production was that you were dealing with. And yeah, they. That's another case of they weren't good enough for you. The money was, but they weren't.

You know, I. They didn't. They weren't what I needed. I don't need. Although that voice was genuinely in my head. Why did you have me talking to those terrible men? The truth is that from an adult perspective, they were just playing a different game than mine. Yeah, they have the right to that. I wish them well. I hope that they are having wonderful lives. They weren't terrible people. They're just people trying to get through life like the rest of us. And they chosen a path that is not mine. Simple as that.

I had kind of comparable experiences in the world of entertainment. Radio versus public radio.

Yeah.

Not the same thing at all. You don't want me. You want me for the one kind of thing, but not for the other. And force fitting can be really ugly when you. When you're in the wrong place at the wrong time these days. I. Because you told the story again and I'm sorry for the cost of it. Oh, no, I just.

Well, okay, but that's cleaning out my pipes. That's, that's. That's getting in touch. If I can't laugh and cry easily, there's something wrong with me. That, that's being in touch with the actual stuff of your life as a writer, the only. Or an actor. The fuel of my work is my emotion when we cover that stuff up because we're afraid we lose the very power we need to move ourselves forward in life. Live. It's good.

There. You got it. Because what I got out of it today was my. But my child's been wondering why I don't come out to play anymore. And lately the adult and the adult, the parent, have been afraid of losing more than hopeful of winning. They've gotten used to being rejected.

Yeah, you're. You're. You're more about avoiding pain than gaining pleasure. So you're still in the zero. Nothing wrong with that. That. That is core human stuff. One of the things I realized is that if I was to go through the different levels of what we're trying to do here with Fire Dance, it starts with what is life? What is existence? The meaning of existence. And I use a tautology there because clearly otherwise we get into descriptions of things. Things. And conversation is as useful in this arena as describing a sandwich is to nourishing your body. So let's get it over with as fast as possible. The meaning of existence is to exist. The meaning of life is to live. Look at the definition of life. There's breathing and there's eating and there's this and there's that. Just the meaning in a dictionary sense is just that meaning. But once you've got that, then you have the question, how shall we exist? How shall we live? On the animal level, it's move away from pain toward pleasure. On the human level, it's to live a life of joy and service. So the first thing you have to do is get out of pain. So you're stuck there. There's work to do, you know, as long as you're not ashamed of the fear, then you simply look at its data. I, my child self is still damaged, I'm still obstructed. I've got work to do. To the degree that you can look at that without any judgments, then it's just, well, let me get the resources to do that. You know, it's going to take some time. I spent a year doing one exercise to get that particular piece of damage done. So whatever it is that you do, once you decide to do it, give yourself at least a year. I'm going to do this every day. I'm going to do my morning ritual every day. And because the morning ritual is so much more powerful than any tool I had at the time, it won't take a year. But your commitment to stick with it for a year means you're not going to, you know, oh, okay, I did it today and nothing happened. I guess it's not working. You know, I did it for a week and then I did it for a month. And it didn't work? No, you've made a commitment a year. And the little kid inside you will hear that commitment and say, yes, daddy, you do love me. And eventually, if you keep showing up, that kid will take a step towards you. However it is, you represent it. So you might. It might be a playground, it might be a garden, it might be a baseball diamond. It could be, you know, for me it was a beach. Where did you used to enjoy being as a child? What was your bliss place? Create. Create a beautiful place right there for your child. And every day, go there, make it a safe place for that child. Let that child see your commitment. Because all that child wants to do is love his daddy. That's all he wants to do. He wants to know his dad. Is there? That's all he wants. He doesn't care if you got a raise. He doesn't care who you've got on your arm. Except he would like a mommy. What he cares about is, did you play ball with me? Did you read me stories at night? Do you love me? Will you get me a puppy? The child's love is very simple. It's much simpler than the adult world. Nurture the child. Love yourself, Tom. You're a lovely man. You genuinely try, you genuinely care. If we're open hearted people like us, the world can be a challenging place. So this place is a place to deal with challenges. And you will never be shamed for anything that you bring here. Honestly. And I will fucking destroy anybody who tried to hurt you on this space. No, no, no. This is my space. And in my space, children are safe. In my space, women are safe and men are safe. There's no other meaning to having spent 50 years of my life more than that practicing martial arts, except to make it safe. Does that make sense, Tom?

Safe for softness. Yes.

There you go. Any other comments, questions? Thank you, Tom. Thank you for sharing that. The only way this is going to move forward is if you use these tools. Do things come back here. Let us know how it worked. Measure yourself from zero to five in each category. Just make sure you don't get a zero on any day. So work with your body, work with your emotions, work with your mind. Do your morning ritual. Give yourself a 0 to 5. How did it go? And just make sure you never get a zero. Everything else is just taken care of by time. Remember Fire dance, Tai Chi. Www.firedancetaichi.com so I'd like you all to unmute yourselves and say hi, say goodbye and wish each other a great weekend. Next weekend, by the way. I don't know, but I think this is going to be at 1:30 instead of 12 because I'm going to be at the Norwest Con Science Fiction convention. I've got from 12 to 1, but I will leave the panel immediately and go to my hotel room and I will have checked my Internet connection. I will jump right on. Yay, Northwest Con. That's right.

Yay, Northwest Con. Yeah, they nerdy.

Stay geeky.

Oh yeah.

Yes. Amen to that. One of these years. My little boy loves conventions, loves having fun.

Get you back at Dragon Con in Atlanta, man.

Well, I was, I was guest of honor Dragon Con back. And those are nice people. And so it's quite possible, I guess got no objection to that.

And you are Both welcome to come back to Detroit anytime for any reason, but especially when we're having a convention.

Thank you very much. We've got a couple conventions this year. I'm going to be in Indianapolis talking at the Ray Bradbury Museum or something of that nature. I'll let you know more about that, too. That's going to be in June, I think it's. That's another story that I'm going to cry when I tell, because Ray was very important to me, and I have a very specific set of stories about my interactions with him. Tears are good. They really are. They let you know you're alive and they let you know that you love. So I would like to thank all of you. Mo, did you have your hand up? Yeah. Yeah.

I wanted to say, just listening to you today, we're talking about protecting the child and everything, and I know you're a very busy person, and I know about anybody else on here, but I think this season's arc with Picard, especially with his son, is very relevant. And I really enjoyed the last one.

I'll probably binge it when it's over. I had a conversation with LeVar Burton about it on our podcast, you know, the lifewritingpodcast.com and he was very enthusiastic about what they were doing. So I look forward to. Forward to that.

Seeing his daughter was awesome. So.

So listen, guys. You take care. I would like to close this with the Sanskrit expression that means that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Do your morning rituals. See you next week.

Thank you.

Next week.