Focus and Flow!

Foreign. Here with Fire dance. I am the New York Times best selling author, martial artist and martial arts instructor and most importantly, ecstatic husband and father. I just adore being a dad. I adore being married to this wonderful woman in my life and I wanted to share with you every day or as often as I possibly can. I want to share with you the various technologies and ideas and perspectives that created this life that I'm enjoying so much. And I want the same for you. I really, I really honestly do. So I had a letter from a student today who's connected with the the fire dance. Tai Chi is a combination of a morning ritual and the Tai Chi Chuan Wu style form, which is the two most powerful technologies of personal development that I know and that I want to go more deeply into it. So you can create your own ritual. You can do it with conscious walking, any kind of exercise. You can focus yourself at the same time. You know, yoga and sun salutation, stuff like this. Or of course I invite you to check out www.firedancetaiti.com now here's the letter that I got and I think you'll understand why it was so fascinating to me. Quote and all the distinguishing characteristics the identify characteristics have been removed. Steve I really appreciated the Week three suggestion of focusing on footwork that really helped the movements flow together. I just watched the Week 4 videos. The subtitles help a lot. I'm noticing the joint mobility and qigong addition to the morning ritual having a wonderful effect all day long. It's also interesting the way resistance manifests. I've shared in the past some of my parenting challenges with a now blank year old stepson. He was living with me till the end of blank when he broke the agreement and I had to evict him. He made a series of poor choices that led to multiple lapses of bad behavior and substance abuse that put him back in the jail system. My mate has been hooked back into the enabler role. The fire dance Tai Chi practice is helping me navigate this minefield and keep clarity and flow to my choices. Maintaining my own healthy boundary and how to say no without being a dick about it is a huge benefit to the practice. Much of my own resistance to doing what I must to be on my A game is connected to the desire to be helpful to others, but not in a way that depletes me. Interruption and demand from a narcissist son in my enabler spouse are my challenging distractions. The Week four lesson helps with that. Thanks God I love this. I love hearing that this Work is valuable. I mean I. It means the world to me. So I wanted to break down the reasons why this note was so wonderful. There's just so much to unpack here and I'll take as long as necessary to do that. So first Quote I really appreciated the Week three suggestion of focusing on footwork. That really helped the movements flow together. Okay. Focusing on the footwork, the foot placement, the lower body is a route to learning more rapidly. The hand movements flow from the feet but are much more complicated. Get the lower body first. You've cracked the code. Okay. Quote Just watch the Week 4 video. Subtitles help a lot. Great. I get requests for this and responded as rapidly as possible and everybody going through the course let me know what it is that I can do to help you, what I can do to increase this value to you. And I will do everything possible to respond to give you what you need to succeed. At this Quote I'm noticing the joint mobility and the qigong addition to the morning ritual having wonderful effect all day long. Yes, that's a quote. You're warming up your body consciously. You're bringing your mind, your movement, your breathing, your eyesight all together in the same place at the same time. That's turning you into a human laser. That conscious connection with a commitment to joy and service produces the motivation and energy to rock it all day long. Quote it's also interesting to note the way resistance manifests. I've shared in the past some of my parenting challenges with a now blank year old stepson. He was living with me until the end of blank when he broke the agreement and I had to evict him. He made a series of poor choices that led to multiple relapses of bad behavior and substance abuse that put him back in the jail system. My mate has been hooked back into the enabler role. The fire dance Tai chi practice is helping me navigate this minefield and keep clarity and flow to my choices. Now just look at what he touched on in in the first three sections of the chakras or the belly brain, the the Muladhara Slasana Manapura, the survival, sex and Power. So in terms of survival, he's having to eject the stepson. That implies the stepson had become dangerous or threat to the house sex conflict with his mate. Power in the sense that your ability to find your own center and maintain it under pressure is a critical thing in life and people will try to steal that agency from you. They're not being bad. I mean if you leave a pork chop on the table, the dog will grab it. It's not big bad. It's just the natural tendency of human beings. You have to maintain your barriers. You have to keep your eyes on your ultimate goal, which is joy and service and the short term actions that support it, which require both focus and flow. It's an unusual quality of mind, but Tai Chi offers valuable, powerful navigation tools. You focus on your ultimate and medium range goals, then just flow through the day. Quote Maintaining my own healthy boundary and how to say no without being a dick about it is a huge benefit to the practice. Unquote. Buddy, you can either have a shell or a spine. A spine in the sense of a sense of self. Your answer to the question, who am I? When stress, whether human or environmental, hits you, you can either stand strong and resist, or you can bob and weave like a seaweed frond in a current. But you remain rooted. Be flexible in life. In life, as I said, you can either have a shell or a spine. Having a shell will protect you, but it also numbs you to the elements. You're not getting to experience life fully. I suggest you build a shell and then inside the shell, you work on your spine. When your spine gets strong enough, you can let your shell dissolve. Tai chi is about finding your spine in that sense, being able to fold and bend, weave, breathing smoothly under stress, to find flow in spite of the voices in your head or voices from outside. It's a powerful survival trait. It's actually evolutionary and that's what fire dance is, self directed human evolution. Quote Much of my own resistance to doing what I must to be on my A game is connected to the desire to be helpful to others, but not in a way that depletes me. So look at those ultimate goals, joy and service, and the intermediate goals that support them. Chiefly, those will be grouped around making money, taking care of your health and bonding with your family. The clearer your focus on these things, joy and service, the more your intelligence, which is just problem solving, engages with the question, how can I be of joy and service to the world? How can I express joy but also help those around me? How can I support my family and community without losing myself? I mean, don't you get it? His stepson and his mate have problems with self identity, love, meaning they're confusing love with weakness rather than associating it with strength. You not only serve yourself when you are strong, if that strength is accompanied by real deep love, then you are offering them a role model of extraordinary possibility. A doorway out of personal, social, or even intergenerational trauma. Be strong warriors. Your family needs you and so does the little child inside you and so does the larger world. We need as many strong loving people as we can possibly have. Strong loving people do not cause problems in the world. Quote, interruption and demand from a narcissist son in my enabler spouse are my challenging distractions this week four lesson helps with that. Thanks. John Lennon said Life is what happens while you're making other plans. Deep work, meditation, therapy, journaling, self hypnosis, yoga, or of course the wonderful art of Tai Chi are all useless if you leave the insights in the office, school or on the page. What they're really about is creating a body mind that is strong, flexible, resilient for life, not just in the dojo. Can you breathe smoothly when you're shaking with fatigue or fear? Can you breathe smoothly when the negative voices stalk you at night as you're trying to sleep? Can you keep your balance when moving in odd and unique ways, folding and unfolding your body like an origami solving the daily Rubik's Cube of finding flow within your creaky, achy body? Connecting this to keeping your emotional balance simply by using the five Minute Miracle connected to Qigong. Remember, Qigong is a power posture. You do proper breathing, mental focus and smooth movement all at the same time. The five minute miracle is doing this for 60 seconds at least five times during the day. Once every three hours. Change your life. You're changing. You're training your body mind to react differently. You're finding the water that flows around the rocks of resistance. In life, the rocks are always there. But if you keep your eyes on the twin goals of joy and service and use the ancient and modern tools of Fire Dance or other profound disciplines, then every day you're learning how to expend exactly the right amount of energy for a given task. No more, no less. Moving toward your goals one step at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time. This is the road to mastery and you're walking in my friends. I'm so proud of you and happy for you. Take care. This is Steve Barnes. You know, go over to my website www.stephen-barnes.com. you can check a look at Fire Dance the www.firedancetaichi.com and let me know in your comments. Hit like in the in the comments below. You let me know what I can do for you. Ask me any questions that you want. I'll answer them right here within 24 hours in all likelihood. Take care of yourselves, my friends and remember to be the hero in the adventure of your lifetime.