FIREDANCE Mastery Zoomcast 12-16

Okay, there we go. So I'll start over here. Hi, Steve Barnes, welcoming you to the Fire Dance Mastery Zoomcast. In order to say that, we do have to start with the question of what mastery is. And I, for the sake of this conversation, the definition of mastery we're accepting is that mastery is a verb, not a noun. It is a path, not a position. And once you have the basics of your craft and unconscious competence and have committed to that path for a lifetime, you are on the path of mastery as much as anyone else who's ever been on it. In actuality, it's a circular path, goes all the way around the world. So in a very real sense, there's nobody ahead of you on the path and there's nobody behind you. But in a more limited sense, we look at people who are better than we are at things, and we think, ah, this is the master. I can't have that. But if you catch up with them and you ask them about their skills and you ask them about their expertise, what you will find is that they've generally just been walking that path longer than you have. The path of mastery is one of constantly learning, constantly doing, and quite often constantly teaching. So this is my expression of this, and you are being invited to get onto that path, and all you have to do to do that. Well, there are a couple different things to take into account here. One of them is that you are already masters. You've already found skills, you've already learned, skills that you mastered in life. Once upon a time, you did not know how to walk or talk or ride a bicycle or any of those things. And now you do. You don't take that seriously because you think mastery has to be something rarefied. It has to be something extraordinary. It has to be something that other people don't have, or it doesn't count. By doing that, you disempower yourself. You say, well, I don't have any extraordinary ability at this or this or this. You miss the fact that once upon a time, you could not do those things and that you wanted to do those things very badly. And that when you learned how to do those things, you were very proud. But then you forgot the pride, you forgot the work, and you began to believe that that level of satisfaction was out of your reach. What I want you to take a look at, and the path of mastery that I'm offering for you, is to look at something you've mastered in all three arenas of your life. Something that you mastered physically, something that you mastered in terms of your Intellect, your career, your education, something that you mastered in terms of your heart, your personal relationships. In order to go more deeply into that, you might want to take a look at principles of mastery as offered by someone who is. Who you can. It's. You can see, oh, this person is a master in their field. What do they say about the process? So let's take a look at one version of this. I'm going to share my screen with you, and then I'm going to go to this. Okay, so the person. Can you all see my screen? Raise your hands if you can see my screen. Okay, great. So this picture is of a man named Musashi Miyamoto, born in 1584 in Harima Province, and he died on June 13, 1645 in Higo Province in Japan. He is widely considered to be the greatest samurai in Japanese history. Tananari, would you take a look? Would you keep. Keep track of people that are coming in and approve them. Let them come inside.

I definitely am doing that.

Thank you very much, sweetheart. So Musashi was considered to be the greatest swordsman in Japanese history by most people. And what I want you to take a look at is his principles of mastery. What did he consider? So let's take a look at this. He said these are his nine core principles that he wrote about in a book called Gorin no Sho, a book of five rings. 1. Do not think dishonestly. 2. The way is in training. 3. Become acquainted with every art. 4. Know the ways of all professions. 5. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters. 6. Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything. 7. Perceive those things which cannot be seen. 8. Pay attention even to little things. Pay attention even to trifles. 9. Do nothing, which is of no use. Now, this is a guy who's talking about this being the path of swordplay. But if you can see how these same principles apply to other arenas of life, then what you're doing is you're taking wisdom from one arena, martial arts, and you're transferring it to another arena. Writing, for instance, relationships, fitness. There are many different ways that you could apply this, but by cross referencing models from different fields, you can start saying, oh, in learning how to walk, this is what I did. This is how I use these principles. Or not in learning how to read and learning in graduating from college, this is how I use these principles. Or not. Now, in relationships and finally having a happy, healthy relationship, this is how I use these principles. Or not? Because what you're looking for is what principles do you believe worked in all three arenas? When you can find principles that worked in your physical, your emotional and your mental arenas, you have found the way that you think about the world. That brings you to mastery. And then all you. Then the next step is now define what you want to achieve. So what I'm asking you to do is to set some goals for the next year. We're coming up on the end of the year, and I want you to have the best 2023 you can possibly have. What that demands if you want to do it consciously. One of the things that I've done this before is I define the things that you can do consciously as being dogs and the things that happen spontaneously, out of your control as being like cats. Okay, so the trick to life is that dogs will come when you call, but cats wait until you're busy and then come and curl up in your lap and distract you. So a lot of the things, the results you want from the external world, you can't directly ask for them. What you can do is you can do things in your life that increase your stochastic chance of getting those things. You can increase the odds in the same way that a salesman knows, you know, well, traveling salesman used to know that you can't predict which door you knock on where they're going to buy a vacuum cleaner. What you know is that you sell vacuum cleaners to 5% of houses, which means that if you want to sell a vacuum cleaner today, you have to knock on 20 doors. You don't know which way it's going to happen. And on one day, you might actually sell a vacuum cleaner to the first door you knock on. Another day, it might be the 30th, but over time, it's going to even out. Once you understand that about things like selling stories, winning tournaments, finding love, that you can't predict exactly how it's going to happen, but you can predict the behaviors that raise your odds of doing it. So if you have goals in, you know, if I were to ask you, who do you want to be at the end of 2023? What is it you want to accomplish by the end of 2023? And to have goals in all three arenas. So for me, for instance, I have some very specific goals. I have some career goals. I want to be writing television. I want to write at least three television scripts. I would love to get a movie in progress. So three television scripts in a movie. I would like. Physically, I'd like to lose about eight pounds. I want to get kind of lean and mean, because in 2024, I want to go to the Philippines for a week to train in a martial arts. Martial arts event. Just one of these, you know, trip of a lifetime sort of things. It's like I really want to go. I want to be able to enjoy myself. I want to be able to have fun, which means that my body and my mind need to be in a particular alignment. So, you know, they're there. That that kind of goal is inspiring to me. And in terms of my relationship, I want to deepen my relationship with my good lady wife. But that's not an objective thing. Objectively, I want Jason, my son, to be self supporting. I want him to be making enough money that he can support himself. He will have a home with me as long as he lives. As long as he is respectful. As long as he is respectful. I love having my son around. I love being able to put a roof over his head and food on his table. It just makes me happy so he don't have to get out. But he does need to be a part of the family business and he is already doing that. We're already starting to integrate him into that and it's working beautifully. I mean, I just, I'm so proud of him, so happy with him, but I do want to get him across that line. Does that make sense? Because my goal is to create 1 million Awake, Aware adult human beings. I can do that with a thousand students like you guys. And so what I want very much is for you guys to talk to each other and chat to find out who seems to have some interesting, some interests that are similar to yours. Because if you take a look at other models, like the Hero's Journey, you can also apply that. What was my hero's journey? Learning how to walk or talk or ride a bicycle or earn a black belt or find love or whatever that is. One of the points of the hero's journey is you need allies, if you could. The safest thing to do is to assume that anything you want to do, you can't do it right now, but you have the ability to learn how to do it. You need to have total confidence that whatever it is that you need to learn, you can learn it then. My attitude is, if anybody else in the world ever accomplished my goals, starting from where I am, I can do it too. Is that 100% true? No, it's not 100% true, but to a degree, our brains are kind of binary. It's not totally true, but the simple thing is I would rather have too much faith in myself than not enough. It's really as simple as that. If I had to choose one or the other, I'd rather have too much faith than not enough. Does that get people into trouble? You bet it does. But I think more people are hurt by not believing in themselves. More people are hurt by lack of courage, lack of commitment, lack of faith than are hurt by having too much faith. You have to be careful of both. But the fact is, you only know how far you can go by going too far. You can't. You just don't know who you are until you bump up against the world and you try something and then you get feedback about what the world is and how it works. Otherwise, your plans and your ideas and your models for how the world work just bounce around inside your head. You need to test them. So if I were to ask you what you want to accomplish in the next year, you would have answers. And I asked people this. Well, first of all, before we go on, does this make sense? Am I making sense so far? Raise your hands if what I'm saying makes sense. Great. Fantastic. Because, you know, I love this so much. I hope. I hope you can tell how much I enjoy being with you guys, how much I enjoy talking about these things. Part of it is just because it's fun. It's a game. It's the game I like playing more than anything else. How happy can I make my wife? Can I make her smile? Can I find a new way every day to let her know how much I love her and make her feel more treasured every day? If I can, I win. Can I help my son? Can I help my son see how magnificent he is? Can I help him to see how. How he seems to me from my eyes? If I can do that, and I can make him love himself more, have more faith in himself, be more willing to give everything he has to the game I win. Can I raise my level as a martial artist? And right there, at this point in my life, that means can I communicate to a student how to move their bodies with power and effectiveness? Can I convey that? And part of what I'm doing with these talks is experimenting with that. Can I get to this next level in my career? Right now, I am fighting to integrate two different things, intermittent fasting and lucid dreaming. If I can integrate intermittent fasting and lucid dreaming, I will be at the next level of a particular type of energetic integration within myself. It is hard because intermittent fasting is a dog. And it's a dog that is uncooperative and snaps at me and Wants to go its own way. Because I am a carb fiend. I love desserts. Today has been. Has been cheat day for a long time. So not going for the donuts. It's going to be a challenge. It really is. I'm going to. I want to do my cheat day tomorrow for some various reasons, having some people over tomorrow. So that's a better day for cheat day. I have. I have some control there, but I have no direct control over lucid dreaming. That is my unconscious mind letting me wake up inside the dream. And the idea is to wake up inside the dream to practice things like flying, which I have done, and walking through walls, which I have done, although that's harder. But to meditate inside the lucid dream, that's when you are really cooking with gas. And the idea, if you could meditate inside a lucid dream, can you dream lucidly inside a lucid dream? Now you're creating a connection between the conscious and the unconscious mind that is wholly extraordinary. That's the next level for me. I don't know. One of my teachers used to talk about how he was trying to get enough energy to be able to move to that next level in his own development. And I didn't totally understand what he meant by. But I'm understanding it now. It's just tough. Yeah. Inception, Ross, Is that Inception? Absolutely. It is. One of the reasons that that that movie was powerful is because they were touching on a truth. You know, there was something going on there other than just fantasy. And you can often tell when people base their fantasies on something that is real, it feels more solid, feels more like, oh, I kind of recognize this. And that works really well. Let me take a look and see if there have been any questions so far, because what I love more than anything else. Okay, so the three questions that Stephen Search about creating goals. Is it true? Is it useful? Is it kind? Now those are. That's the three gates. There's the three gates of behavior and speech, that before you speak, ask yourself, is it true? Is it kind? Is it useful? I prefer that order. The traditional Sufi or Buddhist version of that might be, is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? But for various reasons, I choose to go from the bottom to the top, from body to emotions to mind, because that's the safest progression of the human energies. You awaken your survival drive, then you awaken. You open your heart, then you open your intellect. But also because there are lots of things I do that are not necessary, but they're useful. And then Ice cream is not necessary, but it's useful if you want to have fun. You know, it's not necessary to throw a party, it's not necessary to get a hug from my cat. But it's fun, it feels good, you know, so that's what I like. Now, to use that to govern your speech with people or your behavior is, I think, a way of being conscious about your life. And I think that that is. It's beautiful. The question of our goals, I actually don't remember specifically thinking to myself, my goals should be true and kind and useful. But I cannot see how you can go wrong applying them. The three Gates are beautiful. They are powerful, they're extraordinary. If you ask yourself, what would the world be like if we all did all that we could to speak the truth, if we did all that we could to be kind to ourselves and others, and if we actually tried to be efficient and effective in action, we tended to do things because it increased our ability to affect the world. For instance, the effect the external world or the internal world. If the Dalai Lama said, the meaning of life is to be joyful, that's the internal world, and of service, that's the external world. So to a degree, any principle that enables you to do those things is going to be a positive thing. That's really good. Really, really good question. The Tsunade said, good luck with the hug from Ginger. Absolutely. But Django will hug me from. From time to time, Django will stand up on his hind legs and put his paws on me and rub. So for that I can get good kitty hugs from Django doesn't like to be startled. We got a couple rescue kitties and they still remember when they had to fight for their food and when people might have been mean to them. So they're not as friendly as they might be. But I'm just happy that we can provide a safe home for them. It's not their fault. It's not their fault. They all living things wish that they could just stay in a space of joy. So when people cannot stay in a place of joy, when they are confrontational, do negative things, that's not what they wanted from their lives. What they wanted was to be happy. And the evil that they do is their twisted way of trying to approach it. While you need to protect yourself from such people, which is why I say open your survival drive first, we can pity them and empathize with them, that there is a degree to which everything that you or anyone else has ever done has been an attempt to get Closer to the divine or that sense of peace that they felt in the womb. That if you can understand how everything you have ever done was an attempt to feel good, to move away from pain towards pleasure. If you can see that, then you can forgive yourself. But you can't forgive yourself deeply without also forgiving others. If you really see that within yourself, you start seeing it in other people, including people who seem to be irredeemable, people who've done terrible things. If you go deeply enough into what they do, they were just trying to be happy. They were twisted in the way they went about it. And sometimes these people are dangerous. I am not suggesting that you make yourself vulnerable to these people. Absolute love and total love does not mean giving them access to hurting you. It does not. I can love someone, I can forgive someone without letting them back into my circle and turning my back on them. I mean, truly your primary responsibility is to protect yourself. Only when you feel safe can you open your heart and begin to really expand your sense of self to include others. So, yeah, I really, really do love it when people ask questions because it enabled me to go forward. So let me tell you a story because we're going to. I'm going to ask you to think very carefully about what you want to accomplish this year, who you want to be by the end. End of the year. You got 12 months to get there. Most people think about the next year. On New Year's Day. They set some New Year's resolutions which last for a few weeks. The most successful people do this. Most successful people do this once a month, every month. They take a look at what they want to accomplish in the next 12 months. The really successful people, the most successful people will do this every week or, God bless them, every day. They wake up in the morning, they look at their journals, they say, what is it that I need to do today? How does this relate to my daily goals? How does it relate to my weekly goals, my monthly goals, my yearly goals? Is everything lined up? Great. Then they can just spend the day flowing and take care of what's there today and find joy and service in the day. So what I want you to do is to have goals, physical goal, a career or mental goal. You know, finishing school would do it. And a relationship goal. You can start with loving yourself. That relationship goal within yourself, other people is probably the hardest thing to quantify unless you're not in a relationship and you're saying, I want to find a relationship that's easily quantifiable and that's a Good goal. It's a solid goal. But in terms of body, one of the things I noticed is that people will not be. Will often tend to be unspecific. They will say, I want more money. No, no, no. Your mind doesn't work like that. The mind works in terms of dollars and cents. So if you. If you were to say something like, I want to earn an additional $10,000 a year, your mind understands that. If you say, I want to increase my net worth by 20%, your mind understands that more money, it does not qualify because you could walk out your front door and find a penny on the sidewalk. You've just made more money. Hey, I got my goal. So you want a goal that's going to transform you, because no matter what you do, by the end of the next 12 months, you're going to be a different person than you are now. So take control. So you become the person that you want to be. So the question there is, once you've created your goals in all three arenas, what is the path to reaching those goals? And we talked about Musashi Miyamoto and his principles of sword play and applying them to other arenas of life so that you find some set of principles. And it doesn't have to be that. It could be Brendan Burchard's High Performance 6. It could be my own magic formula, Model action, gratitude, intention and conviction. Or courage, whatever the principles are. You find something that makes sense to you and then you ask yourself, what is the person? That's right. Ross Merker's plus one. Good. Interact with him. We've got people on this call who, who can help you. They either are on the path and can be companions. In some cases, they're going to be further along the path than you in certain ways. Check them out. See whether or not you feel like they could work for you or open books, you know, go to YouTube. There's a fantastic amount of information out there. You do need to learn to sort through it so that you are following information that works for you that is actually tested in the lives of the people who are teaching. So if I can see how, let's say Musashi's principles worked, learning how to walk and how to get my first story published and falling in love, then if I have, I can have some confidence there, say, okay, this seems like a pretty good foundation. What do I want by the end of 2023? Allow me to describe that in an objective sense. You want objective goals in the same way that if you get in your car and you want to go on vacation, it is useful to have a destination in mind. There are times when you just want to get in your car and drive in a circle. The trouble is that you'll run out of gas. And unless you are one of those very rare people who is just integrated sufficiently internally and externally that they can sort of Zen their way through life. And there are people like that. They are remarkable. They never seem to have any goals, but they're always happy and they're always, always accomplishing things. They make making a good impact on the world. They're moving their own lives forward. They're just whistling their way through life. Man, oh man, oh man. That's the highest level. Most of us are human beings and cannot do that. But I think that getting goal setting and things like this to the level of unconscious competence is your road to being able to sort of Zen your way through life in that sense. But what I'm saying is that if you can find a pattern and you can see how that pattern worked in all three arenas of your life, now apply that same pattern to the person you want to be at the end of the year, does it make sense that you know, in terms of this pattern. Let's take a look at it. Do not think dishonestly, okay? That means to be honest about where you are. The usefulness of a map is not just in the map being accurate. It's in knowing where you are on the map. If you don't know where you are on the map, the map is useless. So you have to know where you are. It's only after that. So if you're being dishonest with yourself about where you are in your life, your intelligence has no leverage. Intelligence is problem solving, but garbage in, garbage out. If you don't have accuracy with your thought, you can't get anywhere even if you're brilliant. Two, the way is in training. So let's say. Let's say that. Let's focus on a very specific goal. Let's say I want to do more television. I want to write more television. I walked away from my television career in order to take care of my family 20 years, 25 years ago. And more than that. Jesus, almost 30 years ago. Then I finally got back to it. And then just as I was getting things going that got interrupted again because of family emergency. Now I'm back at it. Okay, so I've got ageism and racism and the fact that my credits expired. You know, it's like the stuff I did on Twilight Zone and Otto. That stuff doesn't count anymore. It's like, what did you do last year? So I have to be honest. Do not think dishonestly. I have to be honest about the fact that I have challenges, but I also have to be honest about the fact that if I'm good enough, if I'm energetic enough, if I keep trying, I'm going to maximize my chances of getting there. I'm going to need to. To bond with people. I'm going to need to have better sets of allies and so forth and so on. Okay, so that's as close to honest as I can come. The responsibility is mine in some core ways. What can I do every day that will maximize my chances? The way is in training is the second one. That means I have to learn, I have to do. And it's useful to teach, become acquainted with every art. Oh, that's fairly easy. So I should be studying movies, I should be listening to music. I should be looking at art. I should be familiarizing myself not just with the art, but the lives of the artists. What is it the artists went through? What are the processes that they went through that the best of the best of the best went through in order to produce their best work, in order to market their best work, in order to let the world know who they are? I've got people who basically will beg, people, buy my art, buy my books. It doesn't work that way. If you want money, you need to understand how money is made. So one of the arts. So the next thing, know the ways of all professions. If you want to make money, look into marketing and sales. That's how money is made, not by being good at your art. And everybody knows McDonald's hamburgers are not the best hamburgers around there, but their marketing is superb. So if you know you want to spend part of your time on getting better, better at your. At your work, but you need to get better at marketing yourself and asking for the sale. If you don't, if you don't know how to do those things, you're always going to need to give part of your money to a manager, an agent who will sell it for you. And those people are often going to think of you as children. They're out there doing the adult stuff, dealing with money in the adult world while you just want to play. So we all love to play, but the kid inside me who loves writing has to be disciplined by the adult inside me who can be serious about the work, who can work without taking it seriously, without taking it, not taking it personally. You take it very seriously, but you don't take it personally. It's like they said in Jerry Maguire in eight show friendship, it's show business. If you can't wrap your mind around that, you cannot work in this town. Okay. There is a ghastly amount of money running around in Hollywood. I mean, it's just. It's staggering. The problem is getting access to it. The problem is getting yourself into position where you can demand your chunk of it. That is so hard. And this is why people will will hoard their connections in Hollywood. If you meet somebody who you're really good working with and if somebody who's on the inside in Hollywood will introduce you to somebody who can help you make money, they have just given you a gift that is bigger than a paycheck. They have just gifted you with a token into the real game. And it is a beautiful thing to meet people who are that generous of spirit. We tananarive and I know some people like that. And we just. We just love them. They love us. They have introduced us to the people who've helped their careers and other people who are trying. And then I get to use my skills. What about distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters? Do you know when you are engaged in a behavior that is actually moving you forward? Do you know the conversations that are worth getting into? The actions? You know, I mean, do you. Do I know when I'm actually working on my writing and when I'm just being on social media? If I say I need to write a thousand words a day, that ain't a thousand words of social media posts. That's not what I'm talking about. You have to differentiate. I have to know. I have to tell myself the truth about it. And the way I learned the truth is by looking at the way successful people in my field use their time and energy. Am I doing that? And here's something that is so critical. Once you know what it is you want to accomplish and you start studying the people who accomplished it, they always think and act differently from the unsuccessful people. Always. The unsuccessful people are doing very different things. They believe in very different things. They act in different ways. And it's not that there are some people who are lucky. That's fine. 5% of people on one end are extraordinarily lucky. 5% of the people on the other end are extraordinary, extraordinarily unlucky. Most successful people are just in the middle in terms of luck. Most people have an average amount of luck, including extremely successful people. But the people who are really successful. One of the things they do is they're constantly working, they're constantly growing, they're constantly networking, they're constantly improving their skills, and they have a tolerance for failure. They're willing to fail over and over and over again and keep getting back up and trying. So what about develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything? That's principle six.

Yeah.

There are things, there are dogs and there are cats. There are things that you can work at directly, and there are things that you can only work at indirectly. Relationships are like that. You can't directly make somebody fall in love with you. But our soulmate process is based on the notion of, of focusing on what you can do by yourself in an empty room that prepares you to find and have the relationship that you want. It is critical to focus on what you can do. The dog, the cat is love wandering into your life. You can increase your odds of encountering cats, but you can't tell the cat when to show up. It's as simple as that. So the dog of it is, is, you know, things like taking responsibility for your life, taking responsibility for your relationships in the past, being able to say honestly, yeah, I did that. I created that, I caused that. Because if you don't take responsibility, you cannot take responsibility in the future. If you don't have responsibility for the results you've gotten, how are you going to change the results that you get in the future? You can't. All you could do is wait, is hope that the world changes. And if I had done that, I could have honestly said, you know, because of, of racism or classism or, or whatever, I, the average person of my group is not succeeding as much as the people who did not have those disadvantages. That means I cannot accomplish my dreams. If I had said that, trust me, I would never have written a book. I wouldn't have three black belts. I would not be here with you now talking. It is not that those disadvantages did not exist. Of course they exist. And every single one of you has disadvantages. But everybody here also has advantages. If you can read and write, you have access to the Internet, and you have the time to be on this call, and you can afford a computer. You've got advantages, you've got serious. And if you can't see that, then you have no gratitude with which to develop the faith that future actions will make things better. So you have to acknowledge what you've got in order to get something different. Where are you on the map? Some of the stuff you have to feel pay Attention, even to trifles is number eight. Look at the small things. You know, there are no advanced martial arts techniques. There is simply advanced applications of simple ones. And, Clarissa, I will answer your call in just a second. I've got one more to go to. And the ninth one is do nothing, which is of no use. In other words, don't waste your time and energy. Do not make sure that you are investing your time and energy in creating the life you want. Now, let me stop just talking to you, because what I want you to do is to between now and next Friday, I want all of you to have goals in all three major areas and bring them to us so that we can work with them. And I want them to be as specific as possible. Slightly daring. Maybe they should scare you just a little bit. They can be easily 50% bigger than where you are right now. That's easy. That just requires. That requires less than 1% growth per week. And you can do that just by studying the subject for about an hour a week. If you know what's badass is people want to improve by 1% per day. Those are people who are, like, studying their discipline for an hour a day. Those people. That's my tribe right there. You're my peeps. If you're willing to push yourself that hard. Fantastic. Clarissa, you had your hand up. I hope you're going to have a great question for me. Go for it.

Well, I have a question, and I've tried to write it, like four times. And I said I just need to say it because it's too long. It was getting too convoluted. But I know, I think about, like, this line in Shawshank Redemption. Recently institutionalized men, when they're released and they can't get. So I feel that you and Tananarive, between newspaper journalism and teaching and being professors in the. In colleges, have been your mastery, in part, has been transitioning from being a part your talents within the institution. And then now they belong to you. They belong to you, and you're not institutionalized. And I wanted to know if you could talk about having that kind of transition and that kind of mastery coming from someone who was developed as a professional and all of your talents being developed within an institution. And now you might have those relationships, but they are not guiding and governing relationships with those institutions.

Fantastic.

I would love to jump in on that one, if you don't mind. Yeah, please do, T. Because I remember, okay, I worked for the Miami Herald for about 10 years out of college, right. And so all I knew was newspaper journalism. And I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I was doing that on the side and I wanted to write for magazines. But I was so mystified by it. I didn't even know how to approach a magazine editor or didn't learn how to approach a magazine editor. So I really boxed myself in. I have a friend named Olympia Dewhart who is the first friend I knew who quit journalism. She became a public school teacher. She rose through the ranks as a public school teacher. Then she started teaching at a law school. She's now a dean at a law school. And that was really a great example. Example for me that you can sort of let go of the safety strap, you know what I mean? And that you can start something completely different, completely new, learn it and master it. Because she wasn't just. She was a good teacher, she was a good enough law school instructor that she became a dean. I mean, she's excellent wherever she goes. And that's a goal that I really tried to embed within myself. You know, those first years after I quit the Miami Herald were up and down. I married another artist. So we did not have. We did not have what you call traditional income. Year by year. You couldn't.

It's scary. It's really scary.

That's how much we were going to earn in a year. So that's why my perfect balance for me personally is sort of a part time gig. I teach part time at ucla. I used to teach part time in an MFA program. But then having just enough of a safety rail so that I can explore, well, what would happen if I did write novels full time? Then I was like, I don't really like writing novels full time. That's a lot of pressure on my little inner child who produces my fiction or so what would it be like to try to do marketing? And that's something that's like a daily process. Learning, learning, learning. And I'm just glad that I had examples. And that would, I guess is a short answer for me is to try to find people who can be role models to you. You probably have friends who have de. Institutionalized themselves and you can even talk to them. What did you do those first six months? I mean, it is scary. And freelancing is. Yeah, freelancing is scary. So the demystification process is crucial and giving yourself permission to try it.

See, I'm. What I've been watching you, Clarissa. You're an honest woman. You're letting your fear on your face. You let your fear and your insecurity into your voice. My suspicion is that you have mastery in some arena. There's an arena in which you feel very confident. You walk in the room, you own it. You are that woman. So if you can acknowledge that you have fear, then the next step is to acknowledge that the fear itself is distorting your view of yourself. That the primary thing that all animals do is they want to move away from pain toward pleasure. That means that if you're comfortable where you are comfortable, even if there's a slight sense of this isn't quite right, is less frightening than the possibility of freedom, the possibility of going out into the world. Like Tananarive said, we have no security. Our ability. Let's see what is. Can I show this? That kanji, that. That tattoo is the Japanese kanji for the word ronin, which is an unemployed samurai. It's a samurai who works for himself. I am performing without a safety net. You know, it's not entirely true, because this amazing woman that I'm with, Tananarive, has magic. But let's just say that we have no safety net other than each other, other than our skill, other than our honesty, other than our willingness to look at our fear and use it to drive us forward rather than to stop us from becoming. The fortress that you build around yourself can become a prison once you grow to the point that you no longer fit within it. So by asking the kind of question you asked with honesty, you emptied your cup, said, teach me. Okay? That's my superpower. Other than the other, my other superpower is that I don't know how to quit. I literally just don't know how to quit. I don't know how to turn it off if it's. If it's something that is important. I will not give up on anything if it's a worthy goal. You can kill me, but you cannot stop me. It took me 23 years. I checked my certificate to earn my first black belt. Takes most people about four. Okay. I was dealing with so much fear. I was in the box of my self concept, which was buttressed by lies about what fear is. I would not. I could not tell myself the truth about it because I didn't know the truth. Nobody had ever told me. I thought that my fear meant that I couldn't or I shouldn't or I mustn't. Okay? No, it just meant I was afraid.

That's all.

It just. Okay, I'm afraid. Everybody feels fear. The way I put it is everybody feels alone and afraid. The only question is, what do you do with that loneliness and fear. That's the only question. Another question is, what lie do you tell other people about it? You meet people. I'm not afraid of anything. They're just lying to themselves. At the very least, we all feel that fear. You have found, I'm going to guess, a safe place in life where you get a monthly paycheck, but it's not a chafing. It's not enough. Great. So by asking the kinds of questions that you just asked us, you're asking two people who were in a box and got out of it. Now, Tananarive actually had a career that she could have gone through. I did not. I never had a safety net. Once I decided that writing is what I was going to do, I dropped out of college. I never had a job that meant anything, you know, really. There was no career path for me. It was. I burned my bridges behind me. That was not smart. But I did not have a father in my home to convince me that, no, you stay in school, get your degree. If I'd stayed in school and gotten my degree, I would not have felt insecure for the 10, 20 years after that. When I'm in a room full of people who've earned degrees, I'm thinking, God, who am I now? I've taught college without having graduated college. I've taught college, so it's okay. I understand that I educated from myself the same things. But there would have been no downside to finishing college and getting a degree and having a career path. I could have trusted myself to been a writer anyway. I could have stayed within that cocoon, sent messages out to the world by writing, seen which stories worked, which ones did not. And then as I started making more money doing that, started to peel away from the academic world. But I would have kept that card in my back pocket because that card would have given me a sense of confidence. Oh, I can always fall back on that as long as I also had confidence in my ability to fly free. And my problem was I was afraid because I met too many people who are in academia who could not fly free. They had mastered this little box and they were afraid to go outside of it. But if you know yourself deeply, then you know you can survive. You'll be okay. We are all descended from a million generations of survivors. All of us, every one of us. Whenever people think, I haven't won anything, I said, come on, you beat out 5 billion other sperm for the job. I mean, don't even go there with me. You're a Winner. You're a survivor. You can do this. And anytime somebody says, you know, I'm asking for too much and I'm expecting too much from my life and I. I shouldn't aim that high, I ask themselves one simple question. How long are you going to be dead? And armed with the answer to that question, go out and have fun and be of service. Simple as that. Just keep modeling people who made it. Model people who transitioned from academia into the field that you're interested in. Talk to enough of them and you'll start seeing the common patterns. Apply whatever success philosophy that you believe in to that arena, you know, and say, oh, okay, I use this in my own life. I can see how they used it in theirs. How did they use Musashi's principles or the High Performance 6? Or my own magic? Now, the one thing I will say is that to take this out of the theoretical into the practical, that's what Fire Dance is all about. It's about taking some physical activity. It doesn't. Doesn't have to be Tai Chi. I love teaching people Tai Chi. I'd love for you to join the Fire dance program@firedance tai chi.com so I can coach you more personally. But if you like to walk or dance or do yoga or the Five Tibetans or any number of other things that you can do that you can use Fire Dance with the fire Dance concept with where you are moving. At the same time that you're chanting affirmations aloud. At the same time, you are visualizing the mentors who can help you get there. At the same time that you are flooding yourself with positive emotions. Because once again, if you don't have positive emotions about where you are, you will have no faith about getting where you want to go. So you have to look at the blessings you already have. You have to believe it. Every day. Every single damn day. I get up in the morning and I do Tai Chi and I do my ritual. And if I don't do that for just a couple of days, I start slowing down. I'm not as focused. I don't have as much motivation. I start. I can start sliding towards being. Well, I don't want to say depressive. I don't understand. Because I would never let myself go long enough to. To go all the way there. But I can feel the edges of it. I can feel that I'm not as positive. You know, what you're seeing, this energy. This is because I do the work every day to connect my adult and child selves through my heart. Okay, I got my survival drive. There's a rabid wolf inside me. You mess with me or my family, that wolf comes out. But I like to act to the world from my heart. I love to just be able to love people. And if you just. If you let me, all I want to be is, you know, is a little fuzzy ball. I mean, it's like, really, I just love being a goofball. I really do. But in order to do that, then I have to engage my brain to create the structures that protect that child. That child inside me just wants to give himself away to the world. I have betrayed my child in the past. And one of these days, I will talk about the specific instance when I did that. And it took me a year of work to make that connection again. Took me a year of daily work to make that connection again. So what I'm telling you right now is build a structure now in your lives where, you know, if I do this every morning, I'm going to get where I'm going in five years. Because what you don't want to do is not check in. And then five years you realize, oh, five years is gone. Or even worse. And I never got it. If every day you say, if I do this every day according to everything I know, I will get there. If I write a. If I write one page a day, by the end of a year, I'll have a book. Okay? Might not be a good book, might not be a book you can sell, but you will have a book. If you say it that way, then all you have to do every day is ask yourself, did you write your page every week? Did I write seven pages every month? Did I write 30 pages? If you did that, then you know you're on track. You do not wake up five years from now, ten years from now, it's all gone. What you want to do is wake up tomorrow and say, God, I blew it yesterday. What went wrong? I let myself get upset. I let myself get tired. I didn't get enough sleep. Okay, These were the negative voices that came into my head. Let me take a look. I need to step study how to. How to handle time management better. I need to study how to handle my emotions better. And it tells you what you need to study, what you need to do to do the things, which implies you know, what you want is to be able to do the things without a lot of stress. So who is the person who can do the things that will get you to your destiny? And then all you have to do is every day Be that person. You know, I am that guy. You know? There are a ton of things in the world that I cannot do. I cannot make pancakes. I cannot handle a garden. If I try to plant something, it dies, okay? But at the things that I chose to be most important to me, I care about them like I care about my own life. I care about my writing, and I care about my teaching. This is sacred to me. You guys are. Are sacred to me. My sense of obligation to you is as close as my soul. I wake up in the morning thinking somebody's going to be on this call today who is in desperate emotional trouble. Somebody might harm themselves if I cannot be honest and direct and show them a path. I'm going to save somebody's life today. That's where I'm coming from. When it comes to teaching and it comes to the martial arts, it is. I was afraid, and the martial arts taught me how to deal with my fear in a healthy way. And it gave me focus and energy and friendship. And I love the arts, and now I practice them for as much as anything else to be able to teach to other people. Tai Chi, for instance, is a martial art I can teach to people in general, even if they have no interest in martial arts, even if they have no physical gifts, but they can follow along. And because of the poses, they are power poses. And we will give people a chance to ask questions about this stuff in just a minute, because that's another thing I enjoy doing. My new office that, once again, my wife got for me, is big enough that I can actually do demonstration. And then in terms of my family, my family is my heart. My family is everything. Anybody who knows me knows that I put my children above everything. I put my wife above everything. Everything. You look at this magnificent woman I am married to. What kind of fool would I be to risk that? I'm not going to find that again in life. I mean, if. If I blew this, it's over. It's over. I will never have a woman of this quality again. You know, if something happened to me, I think that Tananari, if she wanted to, would find another good man. If something happened to her, I think I'd find another good woman, but I would have. She represents the essence of the feminine energy in this world. And I serve other women by serving my wife and to giving everything I have to her and allowing her to educe from me a better man and then presenting her, that better man, as a gift of thanks. There is nothing out there for me if I betray my Commitments to the people who trust me, who would I be? Not the person who can do the things, who can get the destiny. And that's the thing. All I have to do is find within myself the master I already am. And to let that master tell me what I need to do one day at a time, that requires forgiving myself for all of my imperfections and all the things that. That I failed at and all the ways that I haven't kept my promises to myself. I can forgive myself for those things because I know I've done the best I could. And each and every one of you has done absolutely the best you could with the resources you have. And if you need to do different in your life, let us help you. If you find somebody else, that's great. But if you don't have somebody else that you trust, let us help you. Let me guide you with Fire Dance and the Soulmate process and other things. Tananariv, I think is. Would you want to talk about the soulmate process just a little bit when it's time to do that? Because the next thing I want to do is I want to find out who is a student within Fire Dance who specifically has a question about the movement or the activities in there that I can address right now. So does anybody have a question about a movement? The movements are interesting, but what's more important is the flow. The flow is, in other words, If I say rising hands, that's rising hands, I can see that movement. If I then do a push forward and I go from there to Seven Star, Seven stars kind of exists. It's kind of a real thing. And I can stand here, and most of my balance is on the left. There's a little balance touch point here on the right. My face is relaxed. My head is held as if by a string from above. My fingers are touching the pulse point on my wrist. That's all important stuff. And I can break it down. I could do that in a very mechanical way. And that could be useful. Could go, I'm looking at those points, Right. But it would also be true that this is also those same movements. It's the same thing with different levels of fluidity. The point is, is your mind, your eyes, your breath, and your movement all going in the same direction. It's that idea of, are you integrating all that you are? If you do that, then the Tai Chi checkpoints are interesting, but they're not as essential. Okay, so Sonia says the laptop battery is depleted. It's going to boot me off soon. Well, do you have any questions or comments for us before you leave, sweetie? Bill says it's more function than form in some very key ways. Absolutely. What do we want from the tai chi? There are martial arts aspects of it, There are health aspects of it, There are meditative aspects of it, There are mental focus aspects of it. You decide what you need from it and then get what you need. It's going to be a prescription for you in your life. Because the meaning of life is to be joyful and of service. So how can you use tai chi to help you be joyful enough? Service me, you know, I chant my affirmations and focus on my mentors and flood myself with gratitude while I'm doing tai chi. And I can teach you guys to do that. You go to Firedance Tai Chi.com, sign up for the program, and it's, you know, the monthly program, so you can cancel anytime. And that allows you, when you come here, I can answer specific questions and I can help you even if we're not in the same room. Are there any other comments, questions or requests about anything I covered? Because otherwise, I'm going to let Tananarive talk to you for just a second. But I want to make sure that we're communicating clearly. This is the time every week I want to do this. Anything that you want to know, anything that I can help you with, and I mean anything. There are no questions that are wrong. I may not choose to answer a question, but it was not wrong for you to ask it. And I can't even think of the last question somebody asked me in this context that I was not willing to answer. So this is time for you. So while you guys think about that, Tananari, would you speak to us for a second? Sure.

So it's all about mastery. Our company is called Mastery Plus. So some of you might be in our life writing program, which is about mastery and writing and fire dance. Tai chi is a kind of a physical mastery. Our soulmate process is really learning how to master, as the title implies, a process of really preparation to meet a soulmate or to nurture the relationship you're already in. And, you know, we've taught different versions of this in years past, but we're now at the point where we've been married for almost 25 years. And we're also much better online instructors. So between those two things, we created a really great workshop this past summer that was live with students who came, and we broke that up into five different chunks for a digital download course, which is basically sort of telling secrets on ourselves, what we were doing wrong in relationships before we met. Some of our mistakes, some of our heartaches, toxic patterns. I just did an Instagram post about this. Thank you, Kathy. I just did an Instagram post about this today. The three biggest mistakes people make on the path to love. And those are the kinds of things that we're talking about in the soulmate process.

It also works for people who are not in relationships because the starting point, the trick is you have to love yourself. Exactly. Have to fall in love with yourself.

And easier said than done.

So it is easier said than done.

Yeah.

You want to feel like you're wonderful. You want to feel like somebody like you would love to be like with someone like you. You know, if you feel that now you can go out into the world with a certain sense of pride and, you know, authority. It's like, this is who I am. If you're not willing to match my energy, step off. I mean, seriously.

And having the confidence to, to feel that and to say that to yourself, to even just see yourself in the mirror for who you are, it's not easy. So it's a five part digital download. You take it at your own pace. Just like our life writing and fire dance tai chi courses or Steve's fire dance tai chi course. Looking at the videos again and again if you need to homework that you monitor yourself. And there's a social media group where you can talk to other people who are also. Is there a social media group for this one?

Well, yeah, there is a social media group, but we're just starting the process. Many people in there right now, but you guys can be the first. And you can also ask questions about any aspect of it on these free zooms every week. Do we have a discount? Don't we?

Yes, we do. It's holiday time. And especially for the soulmate course. It's our new. It's really brand new. It's 30% off. So check out the link that's in chat. I did.

What's the password? What's the password?

It's Kendrick. Kindred is the coupon code. So the holiday sale coupon code is type it in. Which is not a coincidence that Octavia Butler's Kindred series is now out on Hulu. But also it's about you finding your kindred spirit and first falling in love with yourself and then taking that love shining out into the world to. To attract your soulmate.

Absolutely. So I. I cannot ask you more sincerely to find a teacher you can trust because the Answers for how to get out of the box are written on the outside of the box. And the fastest way to move forward is find somebody who's in a different box who will give you perspective on yours. You know, it's not that I don't have boxes. I have not kicked out all my walls. And when you kick them out, they just reform themselves because egos are like that. It's that I can genuinely. That we can genuinely help you along these specific paths, and then that helps to create a tribe of people who can call us on our nonsense, you know, who can say, steve, you're not being true to yourself. You know, Tananarive, you know, you could have done this better in this story. Or, you know, steve, I don't like the way you spoke to your son. You know, are you considered this? I love being corrected. I used to. I would drive a thousand miles to spend 10 minutes with someone who can correct me, you know, please. It's just. It's so important. Your life is so important. So last call. Last call. Any comments, questions or requests about anything here? Because what I want you to do for next week, bring me your goals. I want you to have the best 20, 23 that you can possibly have. And if you will tell me what that is represented by in terms of your physical changes, in terms of your career and in terms of your relationships, then we can coach you to get there. So that's the first step. Please do that. So comments, questions, or requests before we close up today? None. Okay, then everybody unmute yourselves and say goodbye. And, you know, if you're not, you might not be here next week. Somebody might not be. So wish, you know, merry Christmas and happy New Year's, but hopefully I will see you next week. So Merry Christmas, everybody. Yes. Very merry Christmas, everyone. Happy holidays.

Thank you, Stephen T. See you next week. Thank you.

Happy school.

Be here.

I have a question in the chat. I had a question in the chat for next.

What's the question, sweetheart?

It's just. Have you ever applied the hero's journey to another movie? Other than.

Oh, I apply it to. I applied to tons of different movies. Name a movie, and if I've seen it, I'll do it.

Okay.

Right now. What is it?

Oh, I mean, you picked the movie. I just wonder.

No, no, no, no, no, no. I want you to know that I'm not faking. You pick a movie, and if I've seen it, I'll do it.

Any Stephen King movie.

Any Stephen King movie. Okay. Cujo. Okay, so the. I forget the name of the. Of the protagonist in. In. In Cujo. But the woman in Cujo, her primary. Her primary task. Confronted with a challenge. She is a mother. Primary task of a parent is to protect the family, which then protects the child. She betrayed her marriage. She rejected the challenge, she betrayed her marriage. Within puts her family at threat, right? So then she's forced to accept the challenge, which she realizes she did wrong. Her husband kind of catches her. He, of course, being hurt, cannot accept her apology. And she, she goes off with her son. She's heartbroken, and they get trapped by a big dog in the car. Now she is forced to accept the challenge of protecting her family. Circumstances in the metaphorical form of this big dog. It's. The beautiful thing about fantasy is that we can externalize and personify internal concepts and abstract concepts in a concrete way. A big rabid Saint Bernard is going to kill her. So the road of trials, once she's accepted the challenge, because she's not just lay down and die, she decides she's going to fight. Is to try this, try that, try different things to try to beat the dog. Now along the road is, you know, she gains allies and wins powers. Her basic ally is her son. We can see her father, her husband, kind of trying to figure out what's going on. And I think the mailman shows up. Could have been allies, but were overwhelmed by the evil. But her primary powers are her sense of commitment, which she has not dug all the way down to find yet. Her love for her child, her sense of guilt, which is confusing. And she has the initial confrontation with evil in which she is defeated. Now that defeat moves into the dark night of the soul. So you could take a look at that. The. The moment at which she is defeated is, you know, arguably when the car won't start. But each of the. You know what the biggest moment is. It's usually in the last third of the movie. All rational means of solving the situation seem to have disappeared. But the dark night of the soul is when her son begins to. To die. Her son, because of heat exhaustion, actually begins to die. At that moment, all of her ego is stripped away. And what is left is the core human animal drive to survive and protect her young. All the bullshit is gone at that instant. At that instant, it becomes her and that damn dog. And when she. When that reality, because when she gets out of the car that time, she is different than she was every other time. It was you or me. And I have a thinking brain. As one of my teachers said, you're A primate use a tool.

Okay?

All my karate stuff, forget all that stuff. You come in, I'm. Hit you with a chair. I'm going to say, look, look, it's Elvis, you know, I barely hit you with a chair. So then if she followed all those other steps, then she takes the leap of faith. Her faith is that there is some way to save her child. She, you know, the next step is you confront evil again. In this time, you're victorious, and she wins. She kills that damn dog. The last step is the student becomes the teacher. We have the feeling that her sacrifice for her son will heal her family, that her husband will see that this is the woman, that a woman who's going to fight like that for his son, fight like that for her marriage, in essence, is the woman he wants. They can make their way through this. They may need to go into therapy like this. But that is exact. Isn't that exactly what you want? Isn't every man really at the core of it? Every woman at the core of it wants someone who will fight to the death for their family. That is powerful stuff. And by doing it, the teaching in that is her existence in the story itself, which then gives us inspiration about what we can be if we lose all of our illusions, forgive ourselves, forget our guilt, forget our pain, forget the small us, and step up and say, it's you or me, bitch. This is who I am. Who are you? I'm a human being. You're a dog. That's just off the top of my head.

Bravo. I hadn't seen Star wars since the 70s, and so I was like, I'm just. I'm struggling, struggling through it, but absolutely.

And what I would ask all of you, you could. You guys can challenge me with a movie every week, and if I've seen it, I'll be happy to show you. You can find this pattern in everything. Okay? And you can find it in your lives. You can find it in your lives. Just. Just once you get it, use it anyway. Take care, everybody. Remember, you know, firedance tai chi.com, soulmate process dot com. Join us. We love you. Take care. Bye, bye.

Bye, bye, bye.