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Without necessarily even being in shape. They don't work out during the week, but they get out on the weekend and try to play touch, you know, pick up basketball and wreck themselves. Okay, so if you start with the psychological, the fear. So what you're going through, you know, it, it. If you feel yourself aging. So you have to look at it. I look at it like solving a Rubik's cube every day. I have to solve the puzzle, okay, what, how do I get my aliveness? You know, it costs me a little bit more every year to be Steve Barnes. You know, it used to come free. When I was a kid, it was free. And now I look at it like, okay, I have to be prepared to invest 1 minute per day per year of my age. I don't usually do that. Doesn't take that much, but I'm prepared to spend that much time. So then it's a matter of, okay, well, what are the things I need to work on? And the most important thing to work on, I would say, is joint mobility. Okay, so I'm gonna put into the. I've done this before. If I do this properly, I should be able to get a link here. Hold on a second. There we.

Go.

Cardio flexibility. Okay, and here's a link. And that does it. That's great. Okay, I'm going to put into the chat room a link. Very important link. A damn fine place to start. It is the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning. The first, the last thing I do when I go to bed at night. And it doesn't take more than a couple minutes. And if you will, watch this man's words. His name is Scott Sonnen, dear friend of mine and arguably the smartest human being I've ever met, who put that intelligence into the body, mind. And being a jock, I mean, in one sense, he is just a jock. He's a meathead. He likes to get out on the mat and pound bodies with other big, you know, alpha males. But another, he is a loving, sensitive, brilliant guy who has really thought this stuff through and has some actual answers. The joint mobility drills are so essential for health that if you will just begin to understand what they are. And we cover them in the fire dance class. We cover them in the course@www.firedancetaichi.com. but as anyone who comes to these lessons knows, I'm trying to give everything I can for free. There are things I cannot give without having people being in the program. But the core of what we're doing is if you will breathe for 60 seconds at least five times a day. You choose, you know, separated by at least an hour. If you will do that, you have the buy in to this process that this is not concepts for your mind, this is discussions of your process that you're actually engaged on the path. And it doesn't matter where you are on the path or how long you've been on the path or how fast you're going on the path. I just, I can only communicate to the people who are having the experience. Otherwise I'll run into all your concepts. I'm not interested in your philosophy, I'm not interested in your concepts. I'm interested in your experience. If you will give me just that much five minutes a day, you know, so it's like, you know, somebody did this recently said a perfectly good thing. Let's say that you decide to do it every hour. Okay. You set, you get yourself a one hour timer. You set it for an hour, forget about it. When the timer goes off, you breathe for 60 seconds and reset the timer. Simple. If you will do that, you're on this path and I can help you so much. And that would be if you did it every hour, that's only, you know, for half the day. That's only 12 minutes a day. Day. You, you can find 12 minutes out of your life. Okay. And the minimum is five minutes every three hours. That's fine. That's fine. I can work with that. I promise. If you will give yourself five minutes, I can save your life. I can help you with this. I can help you with so many different things. And this community is nothing but people who are willing to support you and are asking you to support them in return. A place where we can honestly express our feelings and our emotions and honestly ask what is it that we need to move forward. Kathy, I see you there. Will you do me a favor? Would you be my work wife again? Absolutely.

Steve.

Great. Tananarive would not mind at all. She is off being famous today. She's going out to the UCLA book fair thing. She has a new book out and she has been. Yeah. So basically you've been made co host. If you just go in and let people in, you know. So I will try to do that but I get into a flow state when I'm doing this. I always have an agenda. I never know whether or not I'm going to follow my agenda. Because the most important thing for me by far is to listen to what it is you need from me. The questions you have as you are following this process and then spontaneously react to you. From where I am on this path, all there is is the path. There are no ranks in that sense. There's just, are you doing it or not? If you're doing. If you're not doing it and you want to do it, how can we help you? And if you're doing it and you're having some experiences, what would that be? So, David, for you, you're on the path. If you will breathe five times a day, 60 seconds spaced out, and then do joint mobility. Okay. And the joint mobility drills can take five to 20 minutes. You always do less than you think you can do in terms extent of the rotations. And we'll actually probably go. That's a perfectly good thing for us to go into again today. There's no limit to how valuable that drill is. Kathy, you have your question. You have your hand up.

Yeah. You made Jacqueline co host.

I did.

Yes, you did.

Oh, okay. Well, expertly done, too. I will have two co hosts then. There we go.

Okay, now I can help.

Yes. Great. Fantastic. So it is in one minute. We're live and we're going. You know, I kind of start talking early just to give people more opportunity to interact. I am so happy to see everybody. It makes my heart so happy. This has been an amazing week. And I think that, you know, we call fire dance, you know, live. I keep trying to figure out how to label things. I am starting to call this fire dance. The next level. The next level. I want all y' all to be thinking about what the next level of your lives is. And that means wherever you are physically, what would be the next level? So, like, if you have a weight issue, the next level would be resolution of that. If you aren't in the financial. If you're in a financial hole, you're. The next level would be getting to, you know, zero debt. If you are out, if you not in a relationship, the zero point might be beginning the journey with someone who you could love where, you know, there's this possibility. I've met this person, you know, and we are exploring this next level. Next level. And the reason I say this, I said this two weeks ago, I was in Seattle at the NO Westcon Science Fiction Convention. I've been going there for 40 years. And there was a friend there who asked me, you know, how are you doing, Steve? And my response was, next level. And then I started asking, and she said, oh, well, what does that mean? And I realized that in terms of my physicality, I went all the Way through my martial arts system. I have no more promotions there, nor do I want any more. All I want there is to know how I can serve. I call my master, my martial arts master. Everyone can ask, what can I contribute? And that's all I care about. How can I be of support? The martial arts gave me what they said that they would give me. They actually were the product as advertised. And they were a fire in which if I continually put myself in those flames, I would burn away enough of my impurities to. And it also called attention to my weaknesses so I could find the resources that I needed to solve this. It took me 23 years to earn my first black belt because I was dealing with so much fear. 23 years. And the resources that I found in that process are the kinds of things that I'm giving you now. So you won't take 23 years to go through your barriers. You know, I had extreme bullying. You know, it's like, okay, so it's. I tort. I went through that torment because I figured that if I did not do that, I would never know who I really was. I would be letting my bullies define my life. I would be letting my oppressors define my life. I would be letting bigots define my life. And my attitude is, no, no, it ain't that kind of party. I'm who I am. I get one life, and I am going to live it to the absolute maximum of my capacity. I'm going to love myself. And I do. If you can't tell. I'm really delighted. Being Steve Barnes. Being Steve Barnes really amuses me. I mean, I crack myself up. I really do. And that what I want for everybody is for you to recognize that once upon a time, you were a little boy, little girl, starting this journey with all the hope in the world and just loving caterpillars and sunrises and comic books. And somewhere along the way, most of us lost that. Remember, every doctor knows that if a baby doesn't move and touch and crawl and taste, there's something wrong with the baby. But somehow so many of us lost that sense of wanting to move every day. We lost that. You know, we used to be able to get hugs and make friends so quickly, go to the playground, and within 10 minutes, you meet somebody and you're playing like you've been best friends forever. Remember that? Remember when we used to be able to open our hearts and then later on we found out that people could hurt us and mommy and daddy weren't there to protect us anymore and so we began to close down because we were afraid of being that open. And what I'm saying to you is that the things that we're going to talk about, things we talk about here are being. Have to do at least partially with being safe enough that in a positive enough relationship with our own fear that we can be open hearted. I can't. That this space is a safe space that I will stand. You know, there is no one who's going to come in here and hurt you, that you can be who it is that you are here and you can admit that you have hopes and dreams and needs and fears. So I'm Steve Barnes. I'm creator of the Life Writing system. And Life writing was a way of applying Joseph Campbell's model of the hero's journey to life itself. And I made modifications in it. The first modification I made was what would I have to do to take his structure and turn it into something that applied to movies in general and stories in general. And so I would. I took his stuff that had to do with dragons and descents into the earth and ascents to the top of mountains and talking to the gods. In other words. There were a certain number of core mythologies, mythological stories that he looked at and what he came up with was really interesting. But I would assume he would expect people to take it further. I looked at it in terms of storytelling and when it comes to telling stories, I would look at patterns like you have a hero in a. In a situation with a problem in his efforts to solve the problem, or series of revelatory increasing failures leading to a precipitating event, making necessary a reward, a solution followed by a reward. You know, that is a model, another model of storytelling. And so I would look at what he did and I would make it in some ways fluffier that my version of the hero's journey is you have a character with a problem and initially they reject the problem. Then they are allowed to or forced to accept it. They set out on the road of trials during which they meet allies and gain powers. They have their initial confrontation with evil in which they are defeated. They enter into the dark night of the soul. Now, the dark night of the soul is a moment in which it feels that all of your capacities are insufficient to meet the task at hand. We've all been there. The way through the dark night of the soul is called the leap of faith. Now, the leap of faith is always faith in one of three things. Faith in yourself, faith in your companions, or faith in a higher power. Doesn't matter which one it is. It's a good idea to have at least one of them, the belief in yourself, you know, my belief is anything anybody else can do, starting from where I started, I can do too. It's just a belief that I have. Okay. In general, I mean, most, most of the time, it's anything anybody else can do, I can do that. That's harder to justify. I understand that you need a belief about yourself that you actually believe. If you take the addition those other steps, you have your confrontation with evil again. And this time you are victorious most of the time. And the last step is the student becomes a teacher or the movement to the next level in life. So this pattern is fantastic. Some people will take it too literally. They'll say, well, stories don't have each of those steps in order all the time. No, you minimalize stuff. You play things out of order. You do things twice, you hit them with different rhythms. That's the art of it is knowing that each of these different steps has a different impact on the person listening that you know you're going to be confronted with a challenge. Actually, before I go any further, because I'm just going right now, listen, unmute yourselves. Everybody say hi to each other. Just. Just say hi. Hi, everybody.

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to Saturday.

Oh, happy Earth Day. Happy Earth Day.

See, this is great. You realize that everybody here is someone who took at least one hour out of their day to ask questions about who am I? And what is true, that you are among tribe. You are among people who actually want to think about their lives, who want to feel better, want to feel good. And, you know, if. If every animal wants to move away from pain towards pleasure, and every animal does, and every human being, if you understand human behavior as a matter of they were trying to get. They were trying to stop hurting. That's why they did this awful thing. One way or the other, they did an awful thing. And if you can understand how they were trying not to hurt, you will understand them better. And you also have the chance of being able to affect their behavior. But you'll also understand yourself better. Because if that's the animal and the basic human thing, then once you wake up, once you get to a zero point where you're out of pain, the next question needs to be, what next? Because if you just push until you're out of pain to the zero point, the instant you take your attention off it, you're going to backslide. It's a little bit like saying, well, I'm going to Go on a diet until I lose £50. And the instant I lose those £50, I'm going off the diet. The weight comes right back on. Not only that, but you've lost some muscle mass, so it's actually going to be harder for you to lose the weight the next time. And you get stuck in that loop. And then you say, well, my body doesn't work. Yeah, your body works. Society has changed. We severed the connection between how much work you do and how much food you get. That connection doesn't exist anymore. We're not evolutionarily programmed to deal with a world like that where fat and sugar and protein is easy to get. Where, you know, if the Average person makes $7 an hour and a Big Mac is $4 an hour, this is a bad equation. It just is. So we have to be more conscious. If we're going to take advantage of the technological society, we have to be more conscious about how we are within it. We have to forgive ourselves knowing we're doing the best we can with the resources we have and so is everybody else. If you can forgive yourself and forgive others, and that does not mean letting them hurt you, it does not mean letting them back into your life. It means letting go of the negative feelings about them. They're doing the best they can. They messed up, they're a mess. They're going to hurt everybody around them. You know, they are lying, they're manipulating. But since everybody, all everybody ever wants is to feel loved and safe and joyful, those negative behaviors, they're not taking people to feeling loved and safe and joyful. They're taking them to the fool's gold. Feeling powerful or dominant or having sex as opposed to love or money, as opposed to a healthy relationship with your society that is mutually beneficial and remunerative. That it's, it's tragic. People settle for the fool's gold in life. And what we're talking about is what are the real diamonds? The real diamonds come from setting out on a path where you start with a commitment to spend five minutes a day. That is the buy in for this process. If you will do that. I swear with everything in my heart, I believe I can help you. With everything in my heart, I believe that just five minutes a day. So before I go on, because if you talk about the hero's journey, the next step is you have to ask what is a hero? And we have some answers for that or a perspective on. That's the other thing I want to say. There's a lot of cautionary things Here, because I'm perfectly aware of the fact that there are a lot of frauds out there. A lot of people ask you to trust them. I'm going to try to be as transparent as possible. There are people come on the Zoom here who've known me for decades. Some people popped up here, have known me since I was a kid. I'm as flawed and messed up as anybody. I'm just genuinely on a particular path. I have genuinely been helped by teachers, and I'm genuinely sharing what they gave me. So before I go forward, because there is a very specific topic to today's symposium that has to do with one of the most magical things I have ever learned or experienced or seen. I would like to find out what comments, questions, or requests do we have from the group here, because some of you guys are following this path and you're in the, you know, the fire dance program@www.firedancetaichi.com. you have questions, and this is my opportunity to answer questions that you have. So I will do this here. I will also do this at the end. Jaime Rodriguez.

Yes. Hey, everybody. Nice to see you all.

Great to see everybody, isn't it?

That's so good. And I missed last week because I had to lead a new a zoom meeting for a club that I lead, and they changed the time and they conflicted.

Well, I can tell you, Jaime, what I want. I love teaching people, but what I love is teaching teachers. Yeah, that's how you change the world, people.

And I'm out there trying to use this stuff with them.

Excellent. Excellent. Now, what can I do for you?

The question is, for next week's fire dance lesson, if we could get another list of the various moves and numbers, just a printout of it at the top of the game. We're getting far enough along past the kick sequence that I'm having trouble remembering what comes next.

Okay, so there is a point right about. At the kick sequence, I start labeling every. Every move on the video. If you reach that. Have you got that?

Oh, I got that. It's just having it all from 1 to 60 in a single list that I can print because my style of learning, I need that.

Absolutely, absolutely. And what Jaime just said is very important. Everybody has their own style of learning. So what I'm going to ask you to do, Jaime, I'm going to try to remember that. But if you'll send me a note on Facebook.

Sure.

When I'm off here, I will absolutely do that. And great suggestion. You guys are my beta testers. I Can be as sincere as I want about this program, but until it actually runs through real human beings, I don't know. All I can do is do the best I can do. You will tell me whether or not I'm doing a good job. It's not up to me. It's up to you guys to help me be a good teacher. Okay. Okay. Who else has a question for me?

I'm kind of, I'm kind of at the beginning of this. I'm stumbling over the first instruction. Write a sentence every day. I write all day long. I don't know.

Okay, so if you're. Are you. A sentence every day is for writers. People want to be professional writers who want to get in the game of selling stories. So there is a six step process. In other words, you start with finance. In other words, the, the bringing together your mind, your emotions, your body every day. Once you do that, then you branch off anything. I want to be a better parent, I want to find love, I want to be a writer. So we've got, you know, major things like, you know, your body or your emotions in your mind. If you wanted to be a writer, then the process that once you have your morning ritual together within that first hour of the day, you might write a sentence. Because the idea is you write at least one sentence per day on your story. The next step is you write one to four short stories every month. The next step is you polish those stories and sell them and submit them for publication. The next step is you do not re. Once you have sent that story out, don't keep rewriting it. You move on to the next story. You don't rewrite an old story unless you get a specific suggestion from an editor saying, hey, we take a look at this. If you change this, then you go back and you redo it. Otherwise you move on to the next story. The next step after that, step five would be that you read 10 times as much as you write. So if you're, if your goal is to write one short story per month, that's the minimum to be in this process. You would read 10 stories. And the last step is that you repeat this process a hundred times. Now people say, I want to write books. And our suggestion, understanding that you're all grown ass adults, you're going to do what it is that you want to do. But our suggestion is don't write 100,000 word novel until you've written 100,000. Until you've published 100,000 words with the short stories that it is. Short stories. That will teach you what you need to know about yourself, about writing, about the field, about dealing with fear that you will then leverage into the larger project. So if you are interested in being a writer, you know, then find the way to adapt that notion of a sentence a day to your path. And you may be further along than that. You're doing, you know, a page a day. Fine. A thousand words a day, fine. The point is that you stay on the path. You define what is the path. And a couple weeks ago, I kind of said, well, if you set it up so that if you did your day perfectly and you had a thousand perfect days, you'd reach almost any goal that you wanted. So to define what a perfect day would be, you know, adjusting those numbers and so forth, some goals you want to achieve in a week, some goals you want to achieve in five years, some goals you want to achieve in one year. So you figure it out. What is it that I would need to do every day that is totally within my capacity to do this? If I'm totally on point, if I'm totally focused, you know, I'm not pushing myself too hard. I can look at this and say, yeah, I could do two hours of work on this every day. I could. Then you sit back and you're about to find out who you really are. And this is why it's critical to start by loving yourself and having a sense of humor about yourself, because you're going to fall on your face over and over and over again. I promise you. Everybody falls on their face. Champions fail more often than amateurs could possibly imagine. Could possibly imagine. They simply have developed something inside themselves to say, get back up and try again. So one of the things that I'm hoping that you'll do is you'll use this time to get back up and try again. So. Well, I'm going to be going to Fire Dance on Saturday, and I'm going to be going off into a side room and chatting with my partner. Partner. Find a buddy here in, in the group and say, listen, I want to do a page a day. Will you hold me responsible for that? And we'll meet up and exchange email addresses or phone numbers or whatever. And you. Every week you connect. I mean, the hero's journey includes that thing about allies and powers. Find an ally to help you increase your power. You get it? So anyway, I'm wandering again, who else has a. Has a comment, question, or request? Because otherwise I get to go into what I want to talk about, and I don't see any heads Up. I don't see any heads up.

Okay.

Oh, Mo. Hello, Mo.

Hey, how are you?

I'm fine.

And everybody here in the group, I feel kind of guilty. And then I had to stop myself because like you had said, I had to take care of myself. I had move my boys. They're 18. One being very rebellious. I shared that to their own apartment which is literally around the corner from me. And so they're learning some true life lessons. And I did not write because I was, you know, making sure they were squared away and set up. But it's, it's been very interesting. It's been me journaling also about what they're going through and especially as Yesterday was the two year anniversary of their mother's passing. They're both 18, you know, one is autistic but high functioning and the other one is, is rebellious. Your twin boys. So. But listening to you today, right off the bat, when you said, you know, take care of yourself and your writing and talking to others, it really hit me. So that's what I wanted, to take.

Care of yourself first. Like I said, the buy in for this is your breathing. No matter how busy your day gets, I don't care. You could be trying to put out a fire in a burning house. Take five minutes to breathe one minute at a time. If you don't do that, you will not be able to help to be as good at putting out that fire. You maybe you do that minute of breathing while you're driving. You know, you could be in the middle of a conversation. You say, I'm going to concentrate on my, on my breathing right now. Okay? While I'm listening to this, you go into a quiet space. You're breathing, you're listening. Never deny yourself that. And when you do understand that what's getting in your way is not how busy the day is, what's getting in the day in the way is some sense of what you feel you deserve. Do you deserve to be healthy? Do you deserve to love yourself? Do you love yourself? If you love yourself and take care of yourself, then you can serve your family. Every morning I ask myself, well, why am I doing these things? Because I love my wife, because I love my son, my daughter, because I love the fire dance community. I did Tai chi today thinking about you guys. I did a half hour of Ashtanga yoga today thinking about you guys. I meditated today thinking about what it is I want to give to you. And by building a healthy community that you wish to serve, you will be encouraged to do healthy things. So my service for you is serving myself. You get that I'm being purely selfish. Purely selfish because I have created a community in which I have to be a particular kind of person to sit here and guide you and help you and point out what this road is. Okay, so it is. It's a trick thing. I'm using you to increase my own discipline. You get that? So you can use your sons to produce your discipline. That. That the example that you give them of how to live life as a good, moral, strong man. This is who you are. If that is in alignment with your hopes and dreams, then you're actually using your service to your sons to help you be the man you wanted to be anyway. You get that, Mo. That when we have to serve others, we should do it from a sense of joy, pride, that this is the people that we are. But also know that we're actually becoming who it is that we want to be. This is who I want to be in the world. I want to be the kind of man who can be a good father to my son, a good husband to my wife, a good teacher to my community. This is the guy I want to be. So you are helping me be who it is that I am, as I'm helping you be what it is that you want to be, that you need to be, that you deserve to be. And it starts with loving yourself and caring for yourself and taking responsibility for yourself. Does that make sense, Mo?

It makes perfect sense because even dealing with the stressors, once, you know, they're moved in, and believe me, they went in better than I would have had at 18 with a stackable washer and dryer, purple mattresses, refrigerator full of food. They got their Internet set up. They're literally, you know, I can see the apartment from my back porch, so they're right around the corner. And once I was able, it took two days, but all of a sudden I felt the stress just leave when I didn't have to get up, you know, I'm always up at 6:30 or really 6am it's my girlfriend, my fiance says the crack of you know what.

Instead of the butt crack of dawn.

But being able to have that time to myself without saying, okay, get up. They have breakfast. Get up. Did they take their meds for the day?

Yeah.

And being able to call them and say, get up. And they had some difficulties a couple of days, but then they didn't want to hear Dad's voice.

Well, you know, let me. Let me talk about that, because there are going to be Three major things that people are going to want to reference here. If you've got your morning ritual, in other words, you're breathing, you're doing your breathing. And then during one of those breaths, once you've integrated those five breaths, you take one of them, one of the early ones, and you expand it outwards. You start to turn into your morning ritual, where you are, you're doing Tai Chi, you know, you're walking or doing Tai Chi, and you're breathing and sinking your breathing down. And you just for that minute perhaps, maybe it's two minutes now, moving it up to five minutes. As soon as you can, you're doing these movements and you're visualizing the people that you love, what you feel grateful for in life. You move your body and you hold your face, you deliberately smile and hold your posture like someone who is confident and loving. And however you see the universe, you visualize God giving you bounty, or the universe giving you bounty, or just your ancestors inform you, whatever it is that is meaningful to you, bask in that energy during that time. And you move like a panther, or as close to it as you can come, you know, to say, you know, maybe you're moving like an old panther, but a panther nonetheless, and you're, you're radiating in this. And every day see the, the from ADHD to A's program, which is called Magic 14, the number four, which is the course that my, that my son created and that we created, talk about how we worked with him to get him from ADHD to graduating high school, getting A's, and now starting his own business. The, the core of it is once again the morning ritual. But now it's not just for myself, which is what I do every morning. It's between me and my wife when we do the blessing dance, which we've done for you guys, and then it's the family meeting that we do five days a week. At 2 o' clock in the afternoon, he stays up all night playing video games. Fine. When he's finished sleeping, we do our meeting. There's no escaping. There's no escaping me at all. I don't care. I'll do it at 5 o' clock in the morning. I'll do it at 2 o' clock in the afternoon. Whatever it is, the part of him that doesn't want to believe in himself will make it harder to do this. Because if you actually give it everything you've got and things don't work out, it can damage your self image. So a lot of people who are Blase are people who are just afraid to invest. They're afraid to fall fully in love. They're afraid to give everything to a job. They're afraid to really submit that story for publication. Because what if I fail? You have to answer that question first. If you fail, you take the lesson and you get back up. That's what you do. You fail. You get the lesson. You and you get back up. You need more resources, better resources. Fine, get the resources. You need a new partner. You need a new book, a new course, a new idea. Fine, you get that. You keep experimenting. What you want to do is fail as often as possible with the cost of no failure more than you can afford to fail, more than you can afford to lose small failures. That's why I say don't write books. It might take two years. Write short stories you can write in a day. You know, short enough story, you send that out and it gets rejected, who cares? You're on to the next story by then, okay? It's just the process. And once you understand it's just the process, it's just chop wood, carry water. It's more work. I got to get up today and do the work. I got to get up tomorrow and do the work. Got to get up the day after that and do the work. You start saying, well, how can I do this with joy? And I personally do that by being sure that every single day of my life, I am serving my family. I can have joy with any level of work or sacrifice. If I feel like I'm being a dad, I'm being Tanavari's husband, I'm being Joyce's brother, I'm being Nicky's father. Once you understand that there's no place to get to, there's just the path, then you surrender to that process and you find ways to to walk that path with joy. And I believe that the meaning of life for an awakened human being is a life of joy and service. So you are serving your sons. Do it with joy and with power. You are showing them how to live not by what you say, but by who you are. They need you to do this like roses need rain. You understand me, Mo?

Yes, I do. Thank you so much.

I will give anyone here everything I've got. Every moment I'm on here. If I know you are on the path to living a life of joy and service. You're carrying your own end of the log. You're breathing, okay? That's the buy in to be here. You're breathing. You buy my program@www.firedancetaichi.com I love it if you were doing that, but it's not necessary. And my business partners hate it when I say that. But it is the truth. What I need from you is the five minutes and the commitment to yourself. What I want for you is being a fire dance student. Any more comments, questions, or requests before I get into the meat of what I'm going to talk about?

About.

Ella. Mira. Ella. Maria.

Ella, Maria.

Hi. Have we met? Sweetheart, is this your first time here?

This is my second time here.

Okay.

It's good to be seen. Thank you. It's good to be here. So I am in the writing for your life, and my question is, I really struggle with morning ritual. Do you think there is enough overlap in your curriculum that I could just continue with my writing for my life and. Or do you recommend also during doing the fire dance while writing for my life?

Look, and this is why I recommend it. You might be taking me on a little bit of a side thing here that is necessary.

Excuse me, I don't mean to.

No, no, no, no, no.

This.

This. What you just did, this is what this actually is. Is. I have an intent. But life is what happens while you're making other plans. Okay, so I have a plan. But you asked me a perfect question. So this week, over the last two weeks, we did six weeks in the writer's room. Fantastic experience. Working on Crystal Lake, making good money to go to school. Imagine the best school in the world, and you're being paid to go there. Holy crap. Life. And working with friends. Driving back and forth two hours every day with the person you love most in the world. Satisfying lifetime dreams. Amazing experience. It took everything we had, you know, in terms of energy to do that. As soon as we got finished with that, I got offered a Star wars novel.

Right?

Okay. And I had the meeting. I've had two meetings, and it's gonna happen. Okay. So I actually have to. There's the Star wars novel. There is another television series that we're in that we're working with some people with. And because the. The Writers Guild strike is about to happen, they have. They have ordered a script. Now, because they can't meet with us after the Writers Guild starts. They can't even talk to us after the Writers Guild starts. But if they. If. If they commence, if they pay us and they commence, you know that if we decide to write during the strike, that's nobody's business. So, yeah, so we've got that to do. And then there's another thing. That gig that came just from throwing my bread upon the waters. There was a guy in another country, I don't want to be too specific, who felt like my teachings had been really useful to him. And he is doing something massive in the computer field that involves storytelling and has offered us ridiculous amounts of money to do very little work. So it's like, okay, so we've got all these different things. Things to do. How do I balance all of this? Well, one thing that I did is I'm using. I'm using index cards. Okay? One card of one color equals one day of work on that project. As you can see, there are white cards here that represent the Star wars novel because that's Approximately, call it 400 pages. So I need 80 cards. The blue cards, another project. The red cards are another project. The green and the yellow. What I'm gonna get are index card divide. Our dividers for each month. I figure I can do 20 days of work per month, working five days a week, okay? So I can make. I can do 25 pages of work per week or about 100 pages per month. Because the projects are due at different times, I'm going to have to put different colored cards. So it's like this week I'm going to do one red, one green, one red, one green, one. Or there's going to be white, white, green, green, white, white, green, green. But to keep from panicking and to be sure that I'm getting everything done on schedule, I then can take a look at what are the cards, how's my progress going on this project? How's my project going on that project? And I can look at the weeks and the months and the next six months, eight months, year of my life, my writing life. If new projects come in, somebody offers me a ridiculous amount of money to do something else, can I do it on the time?

Can.

Can I push these other projects back? I need some way to look at this stuff. Does that make sense? Because it's too much for me to hold in my head, you know, I cannot hold in my head. So you see behind me, there's a whiteboard back there, and I got a big notepad, and I got index cards, and I've got these, you know, magnetic cards. These are all ways to externalize all the different pieces that have to go in all these different orders. That's just in one arena of my life because, you know, there are other things, you know, projects. So if I keep all that stuff up in my head, the amount of stress that it takes will burn Me out. The fear that I will not be able to do this will keep me from being able to access the deepest part of my writing ability, which is that little kid inside me doesn't want to juggle all these things. He doesn't care about money, he just wants to have fun. So I have to tell him every day, this is what I want you to work on today. I'm going to take one card, just work on this, you know, and in the idea of the morning, whatever, if you do this, you can go out and play homework, then you can go out and play. This is your homework. And sometimes this homework is fun. Usually it is. I'm kind of getting to the point where I really don't work on anything that isn't fun. But some days it's just work and just do it because it has to be done. To do that, I need all of myself. I need my mind, I need my heart, I need my physical energy. It takes physical energy. Fatigue makes cowards of us all. When you've got energy, you feel confidence in your ability to do it. Yeah, I could do this. You know that the cocky part of me can come back out. I got plenty of energy. I could do this, no problem. I just have to do five pages. It's not even five pages of text, it's five pages of script. And I can do five pages of script in 40 minutes, you know? Yeah, because I'm bad. You know that, that bravado that covers up the fear. I can be realistic about this now because I've been through this process so many times. So the core of all of this is to keep your eyes on what the long term goal is. A particular life, a particular good life, and ask yourself what person you need to be to live that life and what that person would do Every day that person gets up in the morning, they do there's certain things, they do this, they take care of their family, they work out, they eat, they do all their work early so that they're done by one or through by two or three by three, or out the door by four or alive by five or whatever I like done by one or through by two. Because by two o' clock I have to do my meeting with my son. So if I can get all my core basic work, that five pages, that one index card done by two o', clock, then I can do my meeting. I've done my exercise already, I've done everything before then. But sometimes life gets in the way. So if I can get just one hour a day My Diamond Hour. I can do a little bit of work on my writing. I can take care of joint mobility. And by doing the Five Tibetans, I've got my basic physical integrity, basic, basic meditation, maybe my blessing dance with my wife, meeting with my son. Maybe I have to take off for the airport after that. But I've got my basics done. If I don't have that, then do I have 10 minutes? If I've got 10 minutes, I can do my fire dance, I can do the tai chi, which is working my joints, it's working movement and balance, it's working breathing, it's working focus. It's complicated enough that I really have to bring myself there, but I'm looking for the easy movement between the points of focus. So I'm flowing between the rocks of the places where my brain is saying, oh, you're clumsy. Oh, this. Oh, this isn't working. It's a fantastic metaphor. So what I would say is, if you don't have that 10 minutes, make sure you've got that five minutes. Just breathing five times a day. If you have more than that, then yes, I would. You know, I would definitely suggest the fire dance program saved me when I created it for myself when I was in Atlanta back and I crashed and burned because my entire life seemed to have come apart. And by creating a morning ritual of movement, focus, affirmation, emotional flooding for 10 minutes a day, I'm bringing my mind, my body and my heart all together at one time. I'm asking myself, who am I? And I have declared that who I am is a person who can accomplish these things every day, to become, to lead this kind of life for the sake of my soul, the sake of the child that I used to be, for my son, my daughter, my wife, who I openly give thanks for every day. This is why I do this. I'm entering the period of my life. Tanarim and I are entering the period of our life that we have been working for for over. For 25 years, since we first met each other. We realized what the potential was, trying to figure out how to get there, how to do it. We made them. 72 hours after we met, we were basically engaged. You know, we were sitting in the airport in Atlanta holding hands like a couple of kids, leaning our head against each other, talking about how we could build an empire together. The mistake we made was thinking someone was going to hand us the empire. We're so wonderful, we're so fabulous. Of course people are going to want now we had to learn how to watch each other's backs. We had to learn how to work together, play together, fight fair when it was time to fight. If you're all it takes to get everything you want is everything you've got. Everything. All your physical strength, all your love, all your fear, all your hope, all your capacity for compassion for yourself and others, all your ability to bond a team to you. Everything. Being realistic in ways that you've lied to yourself in the past, throwing off all the old definitions that were given to you by people who may have loved you but just did not know, and in some cases, did not love you, but tried to impress their view of who you are on you. You're going to need everything. You're going to need to break some habits. And the process of behavioral modification is to identify the behavior that you want to change, identify what you want to change that behavior to raise your energy level, practice the new behavior, fail successfully and start over. What people forget is that failure is an inevitable and positive part of the process. They forget to raise their energy. So the fire dance program has built into it the minimum amount of everything you need. I strongly suggest you do more exercise, more meditation, more journaling, more of all those things. But it's minimum. And it connects all three in an ancient technology that is arguably the most powerful and popular body mind science on the planet. It's arguable, yoga is a challenge to it, but at least a billion people practice Tai chi every day. So I got a lot, and they've done it for centuries. So I have a lot of faith that it will provide what my students need for our lives. It is my honest assessment of the best thing I have found so far. And because I can support you with it if you were to say, and I don't understand this move, I don't understand that we can do it. You say, how does my breathing relate to this? How can I use this for this purpose? This for this purpose? I can coach you through all those things because I understand the form. There are other things you can do and I pray that you will do them. Other teachers out there, find them other philosophies and positions, for God's sake. Experiment with them. See what enables you to get more work done per week with more joy if you learn something like that. Bring it back. Teach it to us here. We're dying to hear what you're doing out there. But yes, I strongly suggest that you do the fire dance program. You use that basic foundation to then build a career on and a life with. Ultimately, it does not matter what kind of movement you do. But you got to do something. It can't just be thought. You have to move. Life belongs to those who are willing to take action. So in this world, prepare yourself to take action. Okay? That answer your question, sweetheart? It does.

And I just want you to know I'm asking the question because I am in the process of detoxing my mind. I have been an educator in the Academy for 20, 25 years, and. I am gracefully exiting, but I'm exiting, recognizing that I have to re. Educate myself from the space of knowing what it is that I want and trusting that. That I can have what I want. But I'm. I'm moving from being, you know, the full professor to being the student that I now want to be.

So let me. Let me rephrase one thing. And this is a perspective. I'm not going to be dogmatic about this, but one of the great spiritual teachers of the world, Mick Jagger, said, you can't always get what you want, right? Get what you need. So the core things that you desire in life need to be raised. The point where you feel like you need this. I need my body to be a live animal. I need to be the best husband I can be, the best father I can be. This is not what I want. It's what I need, and I'm committed to it. Okay? I need to publish. I need to be the best writer I could be. I need to be a good mother marketer and salesperson so that I can convince the people around me and I can convince my students to do more than they believe they can do. And I've got a business over here that is important. And this that I'm doing right here, this is marketing and sales. Of course it is. Of course it is. I'm trying to. The primary thing I'm trying to sell you on is yourself. Anyone who's on here knows you. Who knows me, knows that if they were to write me and say stuff. Steve, I really love the course, but I'm having real problems financially. We work it out every time. This is not about money. I'm making a ridiculous amount of money in Hollywood right now. Okay? So I love money. Yeah, it is. It's great. It's what I waited for my whole life. And everybody who knows me once again knows that at Christmas time, I'm giving it away. Every Christmas, I give away thousands of dollars and other people come and say, listen, can I help? And all someone has to do is send me a personal message. Message say they got a problem And I'll send them money. I love being this guy. This is why I've waited my whole life to be this guy. So raise it to the level of need.

Okay?

Okay. And assume that you don't yet know how magnificent you are, how beautiful you are, how sexy and brilliant, energetic and brave you are. Live in the possibility that just maybe you are magnificent. Magnificent. Hear me, Carrie, hear me, Kathy, hear me, Dennis, you hear me. All you people. Maybe you're not just okay. Mark Lauren and Orion the Merchant. What if you are magnificent? What if you're wonderful? What if you're beautiful? What if you believed the wrong things all this time that the world told you? Live in the possibility that you are amazing. As you can tell, that's certainly my idea. My attitude about me, and I can promise you it's my attitude about my wife. I am in awe of that woman. I'm literally in awe of my wife. It's like, what am I married to here? Especially when she gets dolled up and she puts on her public Persona as opposed to being the tomboy she is around the house now all of a sudden she's like, va voom. It's like, damn, what kind of man do I have to be to be worthy of that? She's a lioness. The answer is simple. She needs a lion. It's as simple as that. It's so simple. This stuff, we break this. I can break this apart into infinite levels of models. I really can. I think you can probably tell that about me right now. But at the core of it, it's just simple. You just chop wood, carry water, love yourself, love the people around you. Be kind, be honest, be useful and just live your life. Okay. And you come here and ask anything you want. Send me emails, it's worth. Let me know how I can serve you, how I can be your ally on the, the path. As you have been an ally to so many others. If you have lived a life of service, you are absolutely my tribe. And I want nothing more but for you to have a magnificent rest of your life.

Thank you.

You betcha. Tom. You had your hand up, Tom Barkley.

I did. I was going to take it offline because I wanted to hear what you had to say about magic.

Oh, okay. Let's get to magic. Now we've talked about. I had some, some models I wanted to, wanted to look at right here. If you can see that there's a, a guy. If you can see this, this is a guy sitting cross legged. Okay. Now we've talked about or Maybe I'll do better. I'll use a screen share. Okay. Not that. Okay. Huh? Okay, let me get rid of that. And I don't have that. Let me clear this away. I am sorry. Clear that away. And I'm going to go to. Sometimes switching around between. Between screens. I lose. Ah, okay, there's that, there's this. And I should have it right here. Oh, wait a minute. Recent. There it is. Okay, good. So this is what I want right there. Now I can share the screen. Okay, so what we have here is a model of the human. Of what it is to be a human being. If you ask the question what it is to be the hero in the journey, the first question is, you know, hero is a human being who is facing a challenge and at. Usually at risk. At some level of risk, they overcome the challenge. And it could be a challenge that is internal, like speaking with courage or finding love. You know, it could be, you know, finding love between two people or loving themselves, or it could be, you know, dealing with terrorists in Nakatomi Plaza. It doesn't matter. We have these challenges. And so if that's what a hero is, then the question becomes, what is a person? What is a human being? And there are lots of different models of what it is to be human, including body, mind, spirit. In the Greek triad, the most complete model that I know of is the yogic chakras. And if you were to go online and look up chakra C H A K R A S, you would see a lot more about this. But basically the chakras are visualized as seven energy centers. No, if you cut somebody open with a scalpel, you're not going to find chakras inside them. They are a reification. They are a way of imagining things. Any more than if you look at a globe, you're going to see different colored states and lines for different countries. But if you go up onto the space shuttle, there are no colors for different states. There are no lines separating countries. There's just this planet. So this is a concept, not a literal thing. So. So be sure not to. Not to get trapped. Needing to be too literal. But what they say are that there are seven energy centers. Muladhara, Svadasana, Manipura, Anhata, Vishari, Anja and Sahasarara. So this down here is physical survival. This is sexuality and yeah, sexuality, this is physical power. It's also, this is actually usually down at the. Just below the navel. So every model is going to look a little bit different. And it's also Referred to as the hara or the Dandian. It's a center of physical mass in the martial arts. There's a heart center, emotion, the throat center, which is communication, both learning and teaching. The intellect, which is associated with the throat center. Very clearly it deals with the models of the world that we make, the way we refine our intellect. And then the spiritual center, which is sometimes visualized as a halo outside of the body. Now, for the sake of simplification, we often talk about grouping these together and into the belly brain down here at the base, the heart center and the head center. So if you can take. If you can see that we're going from a more complex model here to the simpler model of the three centers, we can now have a very interesting conversation when we talk about the three centers. The belly brain, the heart center, the head center. I have associated those things with instinct and emotion and intuition to the three gates of is it true? Using your body to determine what is true in the world? Is it kind? The heart, Is it useful? The head? Those things I've talked about a lot. But there is a way to look at these that is a little different. And I'm going to tell you about the day I found out what that difference was and when I promised you some real magic. Here it is. Thirty years ago, I was studying Native American spiritual arts and martial arts with a guy named Harley Swift Deer Reagan, who was my teacher. And he taught me many, many fascinating things. Some little pieces of them I've given you over the years. I went to him for martial arts instruction. What he taught me was how to connect my physical being to my emotional spiritual being in some very wonderful ways. And once again, I've given you little pieces of that. He was one of my most important teachers. One day, my brother in law, Patrick Young, who was the brother of my first wife, my daughter's mom, Tony Patrick was studying shore shito r karate with a guy named Terry Lato up in. Where? Halfway to San Francisco. Between. Halfway between Los Angeles, San Francisco. There's a place there. And he would go there and.

He.

Would study this karate. And he was getting ready to go for his brown belt or something like that. Now, Swift Deer had been Terry's teacher. So Pat was concerned with being able to do a jump spinning back kick something. He was in the jump spinning back kick or jump spinning hook kick, something like that. And he had some other concerns too. But he asked me if I could set up a meeting with Swiftir for him to go over these techniques and get some advice I said, sure. So Pat drove down here, and we went out to Swift's house. And, you know, Swift had a dojo out in his garage, and he would sit on kind of a throne, smoking clove cigarettes. He was just an old rascal, but also a lethal martial artist and just really fun. I really enjoyed Swift a lot and would critique different things that Pat was doing. And after we'd been there for like a half hour or maybe an hour, I don't remember exactly the time, Pat said, you know, there is this one technique that I have to do. Jump, spinning, back kick. How do I train for this? You know, because I can't jump up high enough in the air to. To get the air in order to do the technique. You know, do I do squats? Do I, you know, run track and jump hurdles? What would you suggest that I do to gain that explosiveness? And Swift said the following thing, said, no, none of that. You imagine that, you know, he said, there are three energy centers in your body. Belly, brain, heart center, head center. The belly brain controls movement up and down. The heart center controls movement forward and back. The head center controls movement side to side. All you have to do is ask yourself, what combination of up, down, forward, back, and side to side do you need to do that technique? What centers do you have to breathe into? Visualize in what order order to accomplish this. Think about that. Pat did, and then Swift stepped out of his Persona and looked at Pat and said, now do it, Pat. And he set himself and jumped up in the air, damn near levitated, did the technique perfectly, landed in perfect balance. A look of utter astonishment on his face. Swift sat back, took a puff of his clove cigarette, said, I wrote this story in my column in Black Belt magazine. Called it a Christmas miracle because it happened over Christmas vacation. All you have to do, we talk about connecting various conceptual things to the hero's journey. You know, storytelling, movies, life, so forth. When you're doing Tai Chi, those of us who have ADHD will notice our minds wandering all over the place. We're thinking about all kind of stuff. So. So what you do is you give yourself different things to think about within the structure of what you're practicing. You think about your breathing, you think about your balance. You think about the way the air feels against your skin. You think about the flexibility. You think about your knees. Or you could think about. You could specifically focus on in this movement. I'm doing some combination of down, up for bot, belly brain, forward, back, heart center, side to side, head center. Ask yourself which Combination of those things, you need to make any movement that you're doing within Tai Chi. And you are starting to integrate at the level of unconscious competence. Something that most people never even suspect about. The way the energetic body mind is wired up, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I am telling you that there are real secrets in the world. There are genuine, no bullshit secrets in the world. And I've just given you one of them. This is real and it's amazing. And once you get it, and once you understand the metaphor of up, down, forward, back, left, right, you' start finding ways to use this in everyday life. If you know that during that one minute of breathing, you're breathing into maybe your belly brain, okay, but at the same time you could be listening to your heartbeat. At the same time you can be visualizing something in your head. What do you need to do? What combination of grounding, forward motion and maneuvering do you need to reach your goal? By creating a physiological metaphor for what you're doing, your morning practice becomes a way to ground yourself in your life that most people don't even suspect exists. And once you learn it, you can teach it to everybody you know. None of this knowledge is is trademarked. This is the heritage of all mankind. But the secrets of how to operate the body mind at this level of efficiency and effectiveness, if they haven't been hidden, they've been hidden in plain sight. They've been divided between the different cultures of the world. And now, arguably, for the first time in human history, all of these secrets are coming back together. I'm simply sharing with you what I have learned and how I've learned it and how I am applying it to having the, you know, stepping into the most challenging and rewarding period of my life where everything I have been working for my whole life is right there. If I have the heart and the will and the energy and the self respect and self love and the honesty to push myself, to accept myself, forgive myself, nurture myself, demand of myself that I be the man. Well, quite frankly, something I said to Tananarive yesterday. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for giving me an idea of the kind of man I would need to be to be worthy of a woman like you. Thank you for not letting me off the hook. I. Sex was easy for me. I'd gotten to the point where I could get almost anything I wanted in that sense and who cares? It's not that hard. What I needed was a love that was so deep that I had no Interest in anything or anyone else that I finally, for the first time in my life, had found a home for my heart, someone to care for and who could care for me and who saw me and I didn't feel like a freak. You have any idea how much like a mutant I have felt my entire life for trying to create what I have? Lauren Davidson's hand is up. Lauren, I'm just agreeing with you on the. On the mutant thing. Yeah. Tananarive by trusting me, made me want to be a better man. I wanted to be the man that she believed and needed me to be because she fellow mutants represent. Who feels like a mutant? Mutants in the house. That's right. That's right. Mutants represent. I look at my son and I want to be the father that can lead him my daughter. And I want to be the kind of man that she wants to find in her life. I look at my ex wife. We loved each other so much, but we made so many mistakes. And we made enough mistakes that it was no longer possible for. For us to be together. And I would like for her to feel that I have learned. I would like for her to feel that I am honoring the time and the years that we spent together. And I love her dearly. Tanari knows how much I love my first wife. And I told her when we met, I said, I will treat my first wife as if she is my sister who is raising my daughter for me. And if you can't understand that, you're looking for a different guy. This is who I am. And thank God I was what she was looking for. It's one of the great blessings of my life. I'm working on a novel with Larry Niven, my wonderful mentor who brought me into the science fiction field. And every time he looks at something I write and says that he loves it. It's like it makes my heart happy, that little kid that I am. It's like Larry likes my writing. He still likes my writing. When I talk to my karate master and remember the first time I saw him, this beautiful black man moving faster than Bruce Lee, with a level of speed, power and precision and love for his students because it was a mass attack situation where he was moving at full speed, full power. It was unrehearsed against four people simultaneously. I had never seen anything like that before. I said, I want that. I was raised without a father. I did not know how to access my own male energy. But what I saw there, both the power and the beauty and the love that his students trusted him like that. And he was so gentle with them. I said, I want that. And when I went to him and I said, I would like to learn karate. And he said, well, we would like to teach you karate. And I said, I have to tell you, I don't know how to fight. And he said, that's all right, we do. And now after all these years, I talk to him every week. And he considers me to be his son. He considers that I have followed the path in a worthy way. I don't move the way he did, but I found my own way of moving, my own way of getting there. And one of his core principles is the word defeat does not exist in my fighting science. I will find a way or make one. That was me. I could not fight my way up the ranks through these amazing athletes that he attracted. At one time, 7 out of 10 of the top competitors in the California, Nevada, Arizona, Tri state area were all this one man students. He was like that. I couldn't compete with them, but I didn't have to. All I had to do was find my way to be myself. That's all I was ever looking for. And everything else I wanted came along with just accepting myself, being myself, being a goofball like I am, but also understanding that once you have decided that life is short and then no matter what, you're going to die, and that you decide to live your life on your terms and die your death on your terms, you take back from the world everything they tried to take from you. Suddenly you are free. And the tyrants of the world and the bullies of the world, the last thing in the world they want you to do is love yourself and have that warrior attitude of I'm ready to die and I'm ready to take you with me. That attitude is why I would rather fight a black belt with a knife than a mother defending her child. Just absolutely. Can I have it? Amen on a Saturday morning. So this has been a great thing and I want to make sure that I'm answering any questions you guys have. This is your time. I take this time every week because it lights me up to see other people walking the path. If you can just spend five minutes a day breathing, deep, slow, diaphragmatic breaths, you're on this path. And then I can help you to understand. I can teach you things, I can tell you things about my journey. And hopefully if I say one thing in an hour that makes a difference, that lands then, we've spent good time together. Who's heard one thing in the last Hour that seemed valuable to you? Fantastic. So, comments, questions, requests. And some of you have been very quiet. You know, I'm willing to answer it if I said I want to answer anything. Anything that you want to ask me.

Question.

Yeah.

Chat.

Gpd. If I've got the names right. GPT is an artificial intelligence thing. It's out. And it seemed to be a threat to writers and editors because machines are now writing books and short stories and articles in that nature. I'm venturing that direction because I analyze books. My purpose of doing that because my novel, my trilogy, I've been writing for like 10 years now. It requires a lot of history, world history.

Okay, so I got to ask you a serious question. Yeah, serious question. Are you published?

No.

Okay, so what you just did is exactly why we suggest that people write short stories that you extract from this trilogy. You're working on something. Just an incident, a moment in which a character changed. You write a short story around that. That. Writing trilogies before you have published can be a way of. Can be a form of writer's block. I've seen it many, many times. Be very careful about that. I would never ever suggest somebody do that. You're a grown ass man. You're going to do what you want. But I have to tell you right now that you are investing so much of yourself in that. Huh?

I haven't published my share, so. Synopsis with a variety of people over the years.

No, what you need to do is publish. Because the, the compliment that you're looking for is a check that clears the bank given to you by a stranger. That is the evidence that you have, you've channeled and you can do this, that path that I talked about, the story every, every month. You know, writing a sentence a day. Story, month. So for not a single person who has followed that pattern has gotten past story story 25 without publishing. Not one. Most of them do it faster than that.

I'm sorry, repeat that.

Okay. You write a sentence a day. You write one to four short stories a month. You could be working on the book at the same time. I don't care. You polish the stories and submit them. You do not rewrite those stories once submitted for except for editorial request. You read 10 times as much as you write and you repeat this pattern a hundred times. Which means you want to be published in a year. All you'd have to do is write two short stories a week and you'll be publishing under a year. You want to be published in two years. In other words, how long is it going to take you to get to that. 25 stories. If you write a story every other week, you publish in a year here, you write a story a week, you're published in five months. It's up to you. It's up to you. But what you. I strongly. You have to figure. You have to give yourself time and room to fail. If you figure you've got. You've got 20 failures in you before you publish anything, you don't want that to be 20 novels, that's your whole life. Make it 20 short stories, that's six months. And suddenly you're on the path. You've made all the mistakes, you know?

You okay? I am. I have a mobile order for Stephanie J. All right, Stephanie. I don't know what I was getting ready to say. Oh, you're fine. I am. Is that all for your. Yeah, that's it. You're going to fall behind the bins in front of you. Okay. Thank you.

Okay, we're having some problems.

Stephanie. Stephanie Jackson is unmuted.

Okay. Stephanie Jackson, please mute yourself. Okay, so we have. Tom said something. So we're going to do Clarissa first and then we will do Tom.

So, Clarissa, I just wanted to. That now you've said so many things that now I want to say other things. So I just wanted to thank you. I had a comment. I didn't really have a question. Do. Really quick comment. When I came here, I was in life writing initially, and I was doing what you said to do in life. Writing, writing. Writing every day. And. And I just realized that it wasn't about writing, you know, and I. And I've shared with this group before. I have a PhD in writing. I run a writing center at a college.

Wow.

But I wasn't. I wasn't writing. I wasn't writing. And a friend, you know, a friend of, you know, and I heard you say, writers write, you know, and I was like, you know, authors have written.

Writers write.

Yeah, you know, exactly. And you can delude yourself. I've run writing workshops. I run a writing center. I got a writing degree, but I'm not writing, you know, so, you know, I said, you know, you can really fall into this fraudulent, you know, this fraudulent identity believing that you're something that you're not doing. And so I came in wanting you and Tananari to really help me, to talk me, talk me into. Talk, talk, speak over me. The. The life that I wanted, you know, as opposed to the one that I was settling for. And that's really the truth. And so And I'd known Tananarive due from writing at the Miami Herald the previous life. Right. So I did life writing and I started writing and I, you know, and I didn't really know where this was going to go, but I decided to trust the process because I was in enough pain from where I was being so unsatisfied with that vision, feeling very limited and like I was hiding, doing what was comfortable and staying along a carved path.

Because, look, sweetheart, I gotta say one thing. Nobody with your level of energy and accomplishment could be stopped from having actual writing career.

Well, but I wasn't writing.

I know. That's fear.

It was fear.

It was your imposter syndrome.

It was so much imposter syndrome.

That's right. You were afraid that you didn't have the ability to do it. So you cheated yourself, yourself of the opportunity to find out that that little voice was wrong. Like I said, you've got to pursue.

I needed you and I needed you to talk to that, to that voice. So I just wanted to say that life writing was where I started to do the writing. And the content from the life writing homework became a keynote address that I did on April 1st. And that address is being published in a journal. I'm presenting that content in Germany at a conference on 3 June.

I wish Tanarive was here. She would be so proud of you. She would be.

It really did start from the life writing exercises because that's what started me writing again.

There you go.

Because I wasn't writing anymore. I had stopped writing.

If you're specifically interested in writing, then I would say you start with Fire dance with what we're doing here, and then you add Life Writing premium to that, because that's the technical stuff. But the question of how to get yourself to do the things that you need to do every day and deal with your fears, that's just life stuff. So let's deal with our life stuff here and then whatever specific applications you want that becomes easy. Writing this stuff is easy. It's just you do it every day and you face a little bit of resistance every day, and you just get 1% better every week. That's. I told my son, just show me get 1% better every week, and you'll get anything that you want. He's given me like 5% improvement per week. You know, he's. My boy is just kicking butt. I just, I. I love him. I love him. I love him. And I love you guys because you're here with me doing this thing. Crazy People, you mutants. Thank you, Clarissa. Tom.

I'm asking you to back up when I. When I do this. How do we apply the three that three chakras? Christmas miracle lesson. Up and down, forward and back, side to side. How do I use that to get myself over these humps that I have let stop me?

Okay, so what you do is in the morning ritual, you know what your end goal is. You know what you have to do to get there, and you begin to define what the obstacles are. Okay, I'm not doing this. I'm not getting out of bed. I'm not doing this. Then you find a role model who could accomplish your goals. So, you know, just. I'm willing to be a default role model. But it's even better if you find specific role models. You know, your favorite writer, if you wanted to be a writer, you know, some great yogi or fitness person, you know, if you wanted to change your body, the person who can have the kind of relationship with themselves and with their loved one that you want, if you want that, who would be able to solve that problem? And you actually visualize that person during your morning ritual. Then when you're doing your Tai chi in the morning, you really, really slow it down. And sometimes when you're doing it, you're chanting, visualize. Other times, when your mind starts to wander, pull it back to one of those three centers. I've got to drop here. I got to move forward here. I've got to move side to side here. And because the movement through life is a metaphor for that, you are moving a complex series of notions. The operating system. If I gave you a book for the operating system to your car, you might have to absorb that before you could go out and drive. You're constantly working. What is it that's stopping me from doing these things? It might be fear. Fine, then how is fear stopping me? I believe that fear means I can't do it.

Ah.

You go through the three gates, which are connected to the three centers. The physical aspect of it is, is it true? What is the physical truth? If you are moving during your morning ritual and you're saying, every day in every way, I'm getting better and better, the voices in your head are going to say, no, they're not. No, you're not. But if you are doing the movement, and every day getting a little better at integrating your body, your mind, and your emotions, then you are literally doing the thing that the voice in your head tells you you're not doing. It's like that voice is saying, you know you're eating pancakes and the voice is saying, there are no pancakes. But you see them, you smell them, you taste them, and you start understanding at a good gut level that the voices in your head not only are not you, but they lie to you. When you ask yourself, why don't you do the things that are you? Why don't you do the things that are moving you across your life? It's always going to have something to do with programming that you learned after your computer left the family, left the factory. Your core programming is survival, Moving away from pain toward pleasure. That's. That's hardwired into all animals. What is the programming that is stopping you from doing the things to be the person who can have the result? If you can identify those programs, for instance, in your most consistent failure in life in this context, would be in what arena? What is it you're not doing that you know you need to do?

I'm not taking care of any of my arts, not music, not writing, and not my physical self enough. Physical self's getting a little better, but the other two.

So are you doing your five minute. Are you doing your five minutes a day of breathing?

Yes.

Okay, good. So let's say because we want. There is power and focus. Writing is one of the things you want. So let's make a commitment there that you are going to write at least one short story a month. Doing that will teach you everything you need to do all your other arts, because it's going to be similar reasons why you're not doing it. But I can just help you more with that one. And we can start with that one sentence a day. So if you're doing your breathing five times a day, then during your first or second one, you're going to write one sentence. You're going to be kind of breathing. Soften your face, soften your breathing, and you're going to write one sentence. If you make that commitment, there is no rational reason not to be able to write one sentence. All the reasons will be emotional, and then you get to journal them. If you say that you're going to write one sentence a day, every day until the next time we meet, write down the reasons you didn't do it. Bring them here. Let us see them. What's going on? What stopped Tom from doing this little thing? Because it was a small enough thing that Tom knows logically he could have done it. That means that there are emotional reasons, not logistical reasons, emotional reasons. Once you have identified those emotional reasons, we can use different resources to Deal with it. The first thing is to gain clarity what's actually going on. Because we know that Tom can do it. We know that Tom deserves to do it. We know that Tom wants to do it, that it would bring him joy. So what's stopping him? This is a diagnostic process at your level. Once we have diagnosed it, we can cure it. Once we have cured it, then it becomes a developmental process. So this is the first thing we have to do, is clearly define where it is you want to go. Clearly define what is stopping you from taking the daily actions. Get clarity. If you had to make a guess right now, what is it that's stopping you from doing something that takes no more than a minute.

Trying to get to work every day? The day job, Right?

So you are lying to yourself that you have to get to the day job instead of writing a sentence. Why? What is the payoff? If you know that it actually causes frustration, then the part of you that keeps confusing you in that way thinks it is serving you. It thinks it is doing something positive for you. You may need to stop and think about that. What rules, what laws, what beliefs would you have to have about yourself that deny you to spend? That deny you the right to spend one minute out of 24 hours doing something that is close to your heart? Love yourself, Tom. Love yourself enough to be clear on the fact that little boy inside you deserves to have one minute a day. Doesn't he deserve one minute a day that belongs to him? He's worked so hard for so long. If you can look at the little boy inside you and say, no, you don't deserve even one minute. You're a different kind of human being than ever I have met. But if there is a voice in your head that says, no, that boy deserves nothing, then I'm telling you right now, that voice is not you. That's somebody else's voice. You're letting someone who is no longer here control the person you are today. And you have to take the step of separating yourself from the voices and begin to observe them so that you can get the resources and the allies you need to live the life you deserve to live. You understand me? If we make that deal and you come back next week and you tell me what's coming up for you, we can take another step along the road. So that's the first thing. What is it that you believe? Because if you believe that you don't have a minute to go to work because you have to go to work, that doesn't pass the three gates, it's not honest, it's not kind, it's not useful. Be kind to yourself, Tom. From everything I have seen, you're a good man. You deserve to treat yourself. If you would do anything less than you would do for your own child. Someone has hurt you. And what we have to do is make sure that you know, you have the permission to bare your fucking teeth and fight. You understand me?

Partly part of it. I know I'm still missing, but I'll work on it.

Yeah, it's, you know, so you might, you might have to start with self love so that while you're breathing, you're feeling your heartbeat and you're visualizing your child. That'll work, but it's. What's critical is to. If you say you're going to do it, figure out what's stopping you. Once you figure out what's stopping you, then we can go to the next level and do some work. But the first thing to do is to clearly diagnose the symptoms. Okay. So you come to us next week with some information. Okay. Will you do that? Will you make me that promise?

Yes.

You promised me to do that. I promise to be here. You understand me?

That I do understand.

Excellent. Who else got a. Got a few more seconds? My wife isn't here, so, you know, I just want to make sure that I have all the time that you guys need and deserve some. Somebody else had their hands up. Is there anybody else that I could help?

I got a follow up.

Yeah, follow up question.

Yeah, I was trying to bring in IT technology. That's my background and I was trying to use those things to prevent plagiarism, to do fact checking and that sort of thing. I want to know whether it's any. He had experience on talk on issuing those. And who would you recommend? Be the initial publishers I might approach.

Now. What was the first part? What is it that you're doing about plagiarism?

I've used the systems. There are online systems, artificial intelligence chat.

Oh, okay. I've never done anything like that. You know, I don't. I've never done anything like that. Why would you worry about that? You know, whether or not you're plagiarizing anybody.

I don't think it's possible.

Possible to what?

I can be writing something someone else written and I wouldn't know that.

No, no. In other words, if you, if you write it, then first of all, it's your. If you're writing short stories, short pieces or excerpting short pieces from your books and saying, well, what would turn this into a story of doing that? Some of your stuff, of course, you're using the same words that the people have used. You're going to be exploring some of the same themes, but you're going to be doing it your way. So it's always going to be unique. The second question, what publishers should you approach?

Fact checking was the next question.

Fact checking, that's just research. And, you know, there are tons of different ways to do that. I mean, you can start with Wikipedia and move out there to the research books or websites or whatever. And of course, there are people who are experts in different fields who, you know, would look at it, or you create a circle of other writers. You know, if you join the Life Writing group on Facebook, there are other writers you can find there. There's probably writers who are here and say, listen, would you. I'll read some of yours if you read some of mine. But don't ask him to read a trilogy. That's why I say that doing that is postponing your execution. And I get the feeling there's a part of you that's thinking, oh, God, it's going to feel so hard. If you follow my advice, then the question of where do you submit your stories? Is answered by where did you read them? Where are you reading stories? Are you reading them online? You're reading them in collections, you're reading them in magazines. That's the same place you submit them. And the process of submitting stories will teach you everything you need to know about submitting novels. The fact is that the same editors who read your stories know the editors who are buying books. And if they know that you're a good writer, they know agents, they know editors, they know publishers. And they'll say, these people get together and have lunch. So by selling short stories, you're getting to know the very people you need as allies to sell books. And the you don't need an agent to sell a story. You need an agent. You probably need an agent to sell a book. So the walking your way up, we are dividing the work that needs to be done for you to sell your work into small enough pieces, both technically and emotionally and in terms of the physical effort that you know. Otherwise, it's like running a marathon. When you've never run around the block, you can't do that. You'll kill your body. You have to get. You have to work your way up to it. And that is not just technical things about the structure of writing, but it's also emotional things about dealing with rejection, dealing with focus over time. These are critical things. Do the smaller piece build up to that? Otherwise, I've known people who have worked on, worked on a trilogy for decades and then decided it wasn't worth it and put it away and started another trilogy. In other words, they were really simply blocked their whole lives and they never passed the three gates to say I'm blocked. Wow. If they'd ever said I'm blocked, then they could have gone to a teacher like me and said, how do I get over my block? Oh, okay. You do this, this, this, and this. Let's see what happens when you do that. Could diagnose it, come up with a pattern, come up with a set of resources, get you through it. So those are the things that I would say to that. Always do. If you haven't published short stories, don't try to do a novel yet. It's like going into the black belt class. You're gonna get your ass handed to you unless you just happen to be a genius. You know, don't. Don't risk your future on whether or not you're a genius. Figure that you can do it. If you're just smart and hard working, then if you happen to be a genius, great, great. You don't have to be a genius. Dude, I know writers. I'm surrounded by writers. Trust me, they ain't that smart. You could do this. You could do this. Who else? Any other questions? No? Okay, let's see if I've got. The most important thing here that I wanted to remind you of is the belly. Brain is the center of instinct. It is your door to truth. It is action. You either take in the actions or you're not. So in all these things, you are designing small actions. If you take them, you're on the path. You don't take them, you have a diagnostic, oh, I have a problem. I'm not taking these things. And you can start to fix it. Your heart center is emotion. It's, you know, love. And fear it is. Most people are motivated by moving away from fear. What I want you to do is to be motive is to do that, but then move to being able to being pulled by love. It's like every day I could be motivated by fears, like, God, can I make enough money to do this? Can I do this? Can I do that? Of course those things are there. But I've got all that stuff and unconscious competence. What I wake up in the morning thinking instead is what can I do today that will bring me joy? That changes everything. And Then in my head, I want the most accurate map of what is reality, what is it that's going on? The heart is kind of like, you know, who am I? The head is what is true. All these models that I'm giving you want you to actually test them, actually explore them. If you will come to me with an empty cup. Get into the fire dance program. You'll know within six weeks whether or not I'm telling you the truth. If you're doing the breathing, you'll know within two weeks whether or not there's something here. So if you're wondering whether or not there's something here, you want to be part of this program, simply get an egg, get a timer, set it for an hour, the end of every time it goes off. Breathe for 60 seconds. Keep track of how much work you got done that week and how you felt about it. Trust me, you will know for yourself very quickly whether or not this path is for you. If it is, get into fire dance so I can coach you more deeply, help you more. Come to this community. Give to them. Let them give to you. And I'd like to close this meeting, as I always do, with the Sanskrit expression that means that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Namaste.

Namaste.

Unmute yourselves and say goodbye.

Namaste.

Namaste.

See you all and happy Earth Day. Have a wonderful week.

Have a wonderful, wonderful week. Take care. Love all you guys.

Be well.

Love you, too, Steve.

Take care.

You bet.

You dazzle them, Linda.

All right, thank you.

Bye.

Bye.