lifewritinglive1 10 21

Greetings. This is Steve Barnes here. Let's see. It's been a while since I've done this, so I have to make sure that everything is live. Okay, great. Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. It's been a long time, and I wanted to talk about why. It's been a long time, but mostly I just kind of wanted to say, you know, we made it, we survived to 2021, and I think we have good things ahead. My point always is to try to be philosophical as opposed to political. There's been plenty of politics over the last year, and frankly, I'm prepared to move beyond that. What I want to talk about here and what I've always tried to talk about is the just really just kind of discussing the things that are going on in my head, the ways that I think about how to survive, how to thrive, how to make a life for yourself, how to create a life of meaning. And I kind of wanted to talk about that. And to get started doing these broadcasts again, I had a tremendous amount of fun doing it. I just got so busy with a number of different projects that it became very difficult for me to do the sort of formalized broadcasts or increasingly formalized broadcasts that I had been doing. So what I'm hoping to do now is to kind of go back and let's keep this a little bit more informal. If that works for you, then I'll be able to answer any questions that you have on writing, martial arts, personal development, the things that I care about a lot. All I can really discuss is my perspective on these things, things that I've studied, things that I honestly believe to be true. And if you find any of these things to be of to you, I would be delighted to. For you to leave comments so that I can see that you're there and I can have some idea what is working for you. You know, what. What is it that I can contribute to you? Whatever it is, I will do my very best. And that I promise you. I'm going to try to do these at about noon on Sundays. You know, if I can do that regularly, then you'll be able to start, you know, expecting me to be there and we can start having a dialogue. I can start having a sense of what is it that I can offer you. I think that that's the most important question is how can I serve you? If there's something that I have to offer and I can offer it to you, then I'd be glad to do so. So let's talk about where I am this week because I guess that's the best way to. To get into this once again. If you have any comments, questions or requests, please feel free to. To add them to. To make comments and I'll read them and as if any questions come up, I will be able to address them, hopefully. You know, it's been a while since I've done this, so I'm not entirely certain how Facebook is working these days and what the rules are and so forth, so on. So all I can do is the best I can. That's really all any of us can do, but once again, to kind of start over again. My name is Steven Barnes. I'm a novelist, husband and father, martial artist, and it's my honor to speak truth. Ah, okay. We have a comment here from George Loki Williams. Getting to know you these past few months has been inspiration. Looking forward to these, George. I'm really looking forward to doing these as well. And I just want them to be a conversation. I will always talk about the different courses and so forth that I have, but really what I'm trying to do is to give that away as much as possible. Any wisdom that I have to offer was gained mostly from teachers who gave to me. I would sometimes pay for their time and compensate them for their time, but the knowledge, the wisdom itself is free. I mean, information that has to do with how we can make our lives better belongs to no one and everyone. I just want to give that away. So any questions that you ask, it makes it possible. I will answer anything, any of these courses that I'm doing. The Warrior's Journey and Life Writing and things like the Afrofuturism and Sunken Place, anything that I've ever done dealing with fear, dealing with relationships, anything that I have done. If you ask me the question, I will answer to the absolute best of my ability. I'm not going to do the, you know, buy my course. I'm not going to do that because I love you guys. You're my neighbors, you're my friends, you're my family. I spend a lot of time on Facebook and it's because I need to engage with people. During this time of COVID it can be very difficult to. To feel connected to the world. So I. I've been able to survive and thrive. To be honest with you, my family is doing better than it's ever done. We're doing great right now, and I want to be as much of a resource as I can possibly be to those of you who can't say that, you know, would like to be able to say that. So please, you know, hold my feet to the fire. What is it that I can offer you? So this week I've got probably three or four different writing projects that I'm working on. There are a couple of television series things. There's a movie. We have several movie scripts that are out being circulated that people are looking at and we will find out more about them over the next week. Edward Frank says, good day, Steve. Good day, Edward. Carl Blackstone says I'm mostly an Aubrey Knight fanboy and I appreciate your insight on everything else, especially race and pop culture. By the way, Carl, I am speaking with the the same editor who is working with me on two graphic novels about the possibility of an Aubrey Knight graphic novel. I have a story in mind for these characters that I love so much that I would like to be able to do. But right now I'm doing more Hollywood stuff than book things for a number of different reasons. And so I'm there are a couple, I have a couple of books that I think I'd like to do, and I'm working on one with Larry Niven, but that's out of love. Books are not my career at this point. The impact that I want to make on Hollywood, on the world, on my family's security and finances. Hollywood seems to be the better fit at this moment in my life. But I don't want to forget how I got here. I don't want to forget my fans, my friends, my family who have loved me and cared for me and helped me put my daughter through college, you know, the things buying my books, you know, so I can't forget that. But it's important to keep things in perspective. I'm glad there's some questions here now, some comments. So thank you so much for the thoughts you share, the wisdom you pass in here on Facebook land. I was introduced to your page quite a while ago by a friend. I always look forward to your thoughts on the world, our country, even movies. Thank you. Well, thank you, Maya Moore Harper, thank you very much. What you need to know is that I love people, I love life, I love my country. And I believe in us. I believe that we are going to, you know, evolve to a higher level, a better level. We're going through a lot of trauma right now. Birth is a messy, painful sometimes not sometimes a bloody process. But that's how life happens. We're going through existential shifts as a set in my mind, a set of delusions about what our country wants was are broken down and then we get to ask new questions. Well, if we're not that, then what are we? And I have to be one of the people. Hopefully. Well, hopefully I will have the honor of being one of the people who help to have these discussions. But what you need to know is that there has never been a moment in my life that I have lost faith in the human race or faith in my country. It has never happened. And I've. I've doubted myself more. It's not necessarily questioning my basic capacities, but it is wondering whether or not I have the ability to bring my dreams to life. I have had many moments in my life when I have wondered about that. When I took a look and said, the culture isn't ready for me. What do I do? Or the culture is now ready for someone like me, but is there enough of me left to be able to accomplish the things that I wanted to accomplish? These are real questions that I asked myself. And the conclusions that I've come to are that, yes, the opportunities are there. Yes, the culture has changed. Yes, this is the right time. And if I can drop my bs, if I can move forward without carrying my ego damage with me, if I can really be true to the essence of who it is that I am and the teachers that I've had and the dreams that I started this journey with as a child, that I have what it takes to create the things that I want to be a good father to my son and my daughter, Jason and Nikki, be a good husband to this wonderful woman in my life. Janana Reeve, dhu. To be able to write stories that have meaning and impact, to be able to speak honestly what I see without saying this is true. But to be able to say this is what I honestly believe to be true, if I can do that, then I can be one of the people who helps to make a difference, and that would be profoundly joyful. Okay, so Michelle says, we love you, too. Love you, Michelle. You're a wonderful heart, a wonderful spirit. You are so caring. You care so much, much about the world. And I just. You know, every time I see your name pop up in my feed, I smile. There's Michelle and Liza. Yeah. Hillary. Kelly. This is my first time tuning in, and I'm impressed. Wish I could share this with my writing students from last semester. They have such difficulty articulating themselves, writing and even reading. Following folks like you would probably help them greatly. Well, Hillary, I'm going to try very hard to do this every Sunday at noon Pacific. That's what's what I'm going To aim at. Then I will download these and I will put them on my YouTube channel. So if you have specific questions that you would like me to answer, I would be delighted. Writing is one of the most important things in my life. And let's see. Let me take a look. They have difficulty articulating themselves, writing and even reading. So let's talk about motivation, shall we? The motivation to write, Because I could talk about the path to being a writer, which is not that dissimilar to the path of being an awakened human being who is following their bliss in any profession. That there is this thing that I loved, which is storytelling, which is communication. And there is a way that I had to communicate, which was writing. So the question was, what is it going to take for me to be able to be a writer? That is, who is good enough to be able to send my stories out and get enough money back that I can spend my time writing, as opposed to flipping burgers? That was the whole thing. The idea that if I can spend enough time writing, if I could read, if I could research, if I can learn, I can get good enough to make enough money from this that I can spend all my time doing it and have a good living. So what I did was I started looking for the means of doing this. And how do I focus my energy? How do I focus my mind? How do I focus my heart? How do I speak my truth? To the degree that I believe that truth is important for a writer? I think that in the arts, the only things that we have to talk about are two questions. Who am I? And what is true? What is it to be a human being? And what is the world that I see and experience and create? What is outside me? What is inside me? One way or the other? All stories are dealing with that. I would say that all writing has to be philosophical in the sense that philosophy is a search for truth. The writer has to try to find an emotional impulse within themselves and then communicate that with language and structure in such a way that the recipient on the other side will feel the same emotions you were feeling when you wrote it. So if I am honestly feeling those emotions and I can communicate that directly, then the other person feels those emotions. And what you try to do, or one of the things you do, excuse me, is ask yourself, when they put the story down, when they put the book down, when they walk out of the theater, when they turn off the television set, what do you want them to feel? What is the determinative emotion? What is the climactic emotion? Is it sadness? Is it awe? Is it, yeah, what a great story. Is it laughter? Is it a release of tension? Is it a buildup of tension? Is it to consider an illusion? Is it to consider some new truth? What are the emotions that we have that you want to trigger and what are the means of taking them to the place where they will experience those emotions? So all of that is going to be impossibly complex unless you start with just the question, what do you want to see? What do you want to feel? What do you respond to? And you write the story for yourself. And then you trust that if you write honestly enough that the success at writing is going to be dependent upon your marketing finding a group of people, a tribe of people who are similar enough to you that they will groove to your dreams. They will understand your vision. They will feel that you are speaking what they could not say or have not said. That is the purpose of writing, to express yourself. Art is self expression. The way to succeed in writing is to be able to create an emotional change in your reader and then to find a tribe of readers who want the particular type of emotional change that you are creating. And you write, you then share with them. So there are all these different things and they're all dependent upon how clear your perceptions are, how much honesty you're willing to share, how personal you're willing to get, and do you have the courage to speak your truth. So all of those things, any of those things, I am more than willing to share. And hopefully we'll be talking about these things on Sundays at about no. So, okay, so George Williams says I write tabletop role playing games. I've had a hard time during quarantine. I've also just been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, add. I'm having massive issues with trying to focus and write to the point of dragging deadlines, which I never do. Can you recommend any tools or thoughts on trying to get productive again? Also overjoyed to hear you're working on more with Larry Niven. I am overjoyed to know I'm working with Larry Niven. Do you have any idea how much I love that man? How much I owe him? He gave me my writing life. When we met, I was just this poor kid from South Central Los Angeles with a dream of being a writer. He was this millionaire, award winning genius writer and somehow we made a connection and he let me work with him. There is no price I could pay for the value of what that man gave me. I so this is one of the reasons why I love giving it away. And also the reason why I will do anything for Larry. I will do anything for him. I do not need Larry Niven right now. I'm off on my career. I'm doing these things. But what I do know is that I love Larry Niven. I love that man. I adore that man. The chance to work with him is one of the good things in my life. So now let's talk about anxiety, depression, add. Let's talk about that specifically, shall we? Because according to the Dalai Lama, the meaning of life is to seek joy. So I want you to be happy. And so that's the first thing to give yourself permission to consider, the fact that maybe the meaning of life is to be happy. I mean, on a biological level, we know that all animals will move away from pain toward pleasure, that. That from, you know, from just core animal behavior all the way up to the Dalai Lama. And in between there, the meaning of life is to seek joy. If that is true, then that means you have the absolute right to be happy, and it's just a matter of seeking out the means of doing so. So if you know that you have the right to be happy, what means might you adapt to be able to actually find that joy in your life? Well, five times a day during the week, I post these notes. Breathe. That's the primary thing, the warrior's journey. And this is a very brief advertising here that everything I'm talking about here relates to the teaching that I do. And the most sophisticated version of that teaching can be found@real warriorsjourney.com but I will also talk to you about that. The most important thing is to break the pattern of negative behavior. Your emotions are caused by three things what you focus on, the language that you use, and the way you move your body. If you use these things properly, if you use them improperly, you can get depressed in a moment. I could focus on my Mother's Day death that the doctor told me to go home, and she died while I was gone. The language that I use, I could say terrible things inside my head. I could say terrible things to myself. And the way I use my body, I could slump and frown and I could change my vocal tonality until it's just filled with pain for all the regret. And, yeah, I could do that in an instant. I can be depressed anytime I want to. And the truth is that you can also select the memories, words, and body language that is positive. But you have to practice it consciously for it to be available to you unconsciously, because it's the Unconscious moments that really affect you. So the first thing is what I call a five minute miracle, where five times a day, once every three hours, you stop and you just breathe for 60 seconds. And I would suggest deep diaphragmatic belly breathing, where when you inhale, your belly expands and you exhale, it contracts, right? So that's diaphragmatic breathing. You go to YouTube, look up diaphragmatic breathing. There's tons of stuff all free. If you will do that for 60 seconds, you will shift because your, your mood is reflected in your body. If you fake it till you make it, if you act as if, breathe as if hold your posture as if focus on positive things just for those 60 seconds, you can break the negative spiral for those 60 seconds. Now, once you have learned how to do that, and you might have somebody watch you, how is my posture? How's my facial expression? What am I thinking about? Breathe. You do that and you will break that anxiety and depression thing. Because if you are breathing as if you feel good, your brain is tricked into thinking you feel good. Now, once you've created those breaks, you then have a little bit of space in which you can do something. And what I always suggest that people do is every morning, every single morning of your life, adapt a ritual of action that every morning you do certain things. So if you can get yourself to spend just five minutes a day taking five 60 second breathing breaks, then you can do a morning ritual. And I call it the magic ritual that I talk about this a lot. Magic is an acronym. It's MAP or model M. A is actions, the actions you're going to take that day. G is gratitude. The emotionally flooding yourself with positive emotions. Deliberately, consciously just taking a hold of your emotions and thinking about the things that you have to feel blessed about. You say, well, I don't have anything like that really. You have access to the Internet. Would you feel depressed if you lost that access? Then why don't you feel grateful to have it? Would you feel bad if you lost your eyes? Would you feel bad if your children died? Would you feel bad? You think about the things that you have that you would feel bad about if you lost them and now celebrate having them now. I mean, what a concept. Why not be happy just to be happy? Why not instead of not, you know, I don't realize what I had until it was gone. Think about it now. Think about it now. Be happy now. Okay, so for five, once you've got the five minute miracle nailed down, and that is, that is the beginning, you need to Begin that today. You set your watch for a three hour time down countdown. And every three hours you then stop whatever you're doing and you breathe for 60 seconds. Inhale, just breathe. Deep diaphragmatic belly breathing. Just do that. Break the cycle of stress. Then once you've anchored that in for maybe a week, once you can trust yourself to do that, then you take one of those and you start expanding it out into a session that is designed specifically to anchor into your body positive emotions to remember the things that you're blessed for. So M is map or model of the thing that you want to accomplish. A is the actions that you need to take that day. G is the gratitude, the positive emotions. Gratitude is the antidote for fear, anxiety, stress, anger. I is intention. Clear goals, clear goals. You need to know what is it? It should be photographable, preferably what is it you're trying to accomplish. You don't say, and I like the God, what is that? Smart goals, specific, meaningful, as if now realistic and time bound. But we can go over all those things on other days just to kind of give the broad thing. The most important thing is to understand the magic. Map or model. Action, gratitude, intentions and conviction or courage. That's magic. Give yourself a score between 0 and 9 for each of those arenas. The clarity of your map or the model of the person who can accomplish the things that you're trying to accomplish. The actions you need to take today in order to move your life in that direction. All you have to feel grateful for in your life, your long term goal, your intentions and the belief that you can and should do this thing. You need all those things. Okay, if you have a zero in any one of those categories, you are going to swim in a circle until you drown, drive in a circle until you run out of gas. You need to have at least a one in each of those categories. You need to have some idea of the path you have to go in order to get where you're going. The person who has accomplished what it is you're trying to do so that you can model their behaviors, their actions, their emotions. You have to know what you have to do today to make it happen. Because if you, if you look at your goals once a year, you can get really lost. But if you're looking at your goals every day and you're saying to yourself, what do I need to do today? Like for instance, in writing, it's a sentence a day. You rewrite one sentence every day, you'll accomplish everything that you're trying to even write. A book a year with a sentence a day, because of the psychology of the process. So if I know that all I have to do is write one sentence every day, then the question is going to be, at the end of the day, did I write my sentence or didn't I? If I didn't write my sentence, I then get to focus on that. Why didn't I? What stopped me? What emotion stopped me? Because if the goal is small enough, if it's just one step, then there is no logical reason not to do it. And what you got is the emotions that stop you. And once you start looking at the emotions that stop you, you've got control. Because your emotions are created by what your behaviors. You can create your emotions with focus, language, and the way you use your body. So you've got it under your control. The only question is, will you or will you not keep your word to yourself? That can often lead you to a sense of how do you feel about yourself? Do you love yourself enough to give yourself a chance, you know, to be happy? And if you don't, why not? It's my belief that we all have within us the love that we need to power our emotions, the emotions then that we need to power our actions, the capacity to do things, small things, small actions, day after day until we reach the goals that bring us joy, that the ultimate goal is to be happy. To be happy. Can I add to that? To be happy with integrity, with contribution, absolutely. But if you don't look just that first thing, to be happy. There are tons of people who have financial success, relationships, they're in great physical condition and they are miserable. Why? Because they didn't even know that they had the right to be happy. So you start with happy, then you start looking at, well, how do I do this? As an awakening, alert adult human being with responsibilities to my family, my community, my spiritual reality, my country, whatever it is that is important to you, start with I have the right to be happy. Then you find the ways to be happy with integrity. Then you find the means to get there. The thing about the anxiety, depression, add, if you will, start, if you will set your clock, set your smartphone to three hours, and if this is a serious problem for you, then just do it at the top of every hour. Just breathe for 60 seconds at the top of every hour. If you will, begin that practice, if you will do that for one week, you come back here next Sunday and ask me the next question. I can give you the next piece, but that by itself will make a fantastic difference. Good Question. Oh, we have missed you and your guidance. I am. I'm profoundly grateful that people feel that I have things to offer them. I am so grateful to my teachers. So grateful. And if I am part of their lineage, if I can affect others the way they have affected me, then God has been kind to me. I ask for nothing more than that in life. Let's see. Any other questions? Role playing as an interactive involvement. Quarantine is cutting you off, right? Find a friend you can bounce things off. Good, good, good thought. Michelle. Hi, all. Talitha. Hi, Talitha. Good advice. I finished a book based on this. Logic was back in 2016 when I first heard you write One Sense a Day process. It works. It most certainly does. It really works. Thank you, Steve. Your suggestions and guidance is vital to modifying my responses to PTSD triggers. I'm not living and loving without fear for the first time in decades. You rock, Grant. I love this. That's exactly what I'm looking for. You have the power within you to have joy. You can use that joy to drive your actions. You can use those actions to create your dreams. You can use your dreams to inspire other people to pursue their dreams. And people who are engaged in healthfully bringing their dreams into existence are good neighbors, good citizens. We can live with them. We don't have to all have the same values, the same goals, the same politics, for God's sake. But if I care about your children's health and welfare and your joy and you care about mine, we can be good neighbors. And I think that frankly, that's enough. It's enough. Let's see. Anything else? No, nothing else there. So let's just. Let's just talk about. Okay. So we talked about a little bit about writing. Okay. Another thing that I've done that I will be referring to and coming back to over the next weeks this year because I hope to do one of these every week is preparation to go to Manila for a week long Filipino martial arts conference in 2022. It's in March 2022. I was supposed to go in March of 2020, but. Well, coronavirus had its way. I could see from the maps from the CDC about China. I could see that this was a problem. It was impinging Philippines were right underneath China. I knew that if I was to fly to the Philippines, I would be flying via China Air which flew through Seattle and flew through Los Angeles. And I could just take a look at that loop and I said, you know, we're in trouble. This is coming to the United States. I do not Want to be trapped in the Philippines if there is a quarantine. That does not strike me as being a happy way to spend, you know, weeks or months of my life. So I canceled my trip. In looking at March of 2022, I recognize that I've got a big birthday coming up there. I've got a big zero birthday coming up that year. And frankly that's a little scary, it's a little sobering. So it's like, well, what can I do to have the energy, aliveness, the physical potential, the tissue elasticity, other things that I need in order to have a fantastic time? I've always wanted to go to Asia and train in martial arts. This might be the only chance that I get. What can I do to make the most of this? So over the last three years, I guess I've been putting a lot of thought into my workout schedule because before then I'd been like, how hard can I work out? And the truth is that you reach a point where the real question is how thoroughly can I recover from my workouts? So recovery had to start becoming the most important thing thing, and the most important thing for recovery that I know of is yoga. So yoga started becoming a more and more important part of my schedule and recovering from it. And then I used my sleep cycles in order to determine whether or not I was fully recovering. When I don't recover fully, I don't sleep well. So I could use that to measure it. And it's very, very good to have objective measurements. And so it's like what should I be eating, what time should I be eating, what kind of workout, what kind of recovery, etc, etc, etc. So the broadest strokes is that kettlebells. And I'm currently experimenting with something called an isochain. It's an isometric device. It has a dynamometer built into it and also a heavy duty spring which tricks your brain into thinking that you're actually moving something because it wiggles just a little bit which overcomes something that they call cortical response. We'll talk about that another time. And using the five Tibetans, using Bikram style yoga, using Ashtanga style yoga, specifically the short forms of Ashtanga yoga. So I have a copy here. Yeah. In this book right here by David Swenson, there are several short forms. There's one that's only 15 minutes long, one that's 30 minutes long, one that's 45 minutes long. And what I found is that I can, I can work out and do the 15 minute version and I'll be able to sleep all right that night. That it's removing enough tension from my body to be able to do that. So this is. This is a good thing. Now, let's. Let me. Let me talk about that just a little bit. The. The. I'm tricking myself, see, because remember earlier I said that, that I think that the opportunities are there now, but I'm not entirely sure that there's enough of me left to take advantage of those opportunities. I'm not kidding. I'm not vamping about that. That's a genuine fear that I have. The voices in my head. Everybody's got those voices in your head. So I'm looking at the fact that I want to be certain that mentally, emotionally, creatively, I'm at as close to my peak as I can be. How do I do that? The theory that I'm operating under is that the health of your brain is related to the health of your body. That if I can increase my physical efficiency, that my mental efficiency will hang in there. That all the people I know have suffered cognitive decline. Their bodies had fallen apart first. Now, I'm sure that's not true in every case, and that's always relative, but that's what I've seen. I never saw anybody who was fit and strong by my terms and was suffering cognitive decline. So such people must exist. But I figured, you know something, maybe I can use my body to, you know, it's a transport mechanism for oxygen and sugars to the brain, and it's carrying away waste products and so forth and so on. So maybe if I. I can jump up my physical, I can also jump up my mental. So that when Hollywood comes calling and they're already called, so they're like knocking at the door saying, where's, you know, where's this product? You know, where is this script? Where is this treatment? Where's this outline? I have got every single day, I've got a ton of work that has to be done, and I have to really hit that. I have to be able to. To do it. I have to be able to do it on a schedule, on a timeline. So if every day I have to do a certain amount of work and every day I have to do a certain amount of working out, that these things connect to each other, if that makes sense to you. The third major area of my life is relationships. Now, that's going to start with my relationship with myself, the feeling of loving myself and liking myself. And the truth is that most of the people who suffer from depression if you ask them if they love themselves, they will have a hard time answering in the affirmative. In other words, I don't know what's true in terms of the need for medications. And I'm no doctor. And I think that if you suffer from depression, especially clinical, that is no joke. And you should have a doctor, a medical profession in your wellness circle. But I have noticed that a lot of the people who are depressed have good emotional reasons for being depressed. In other words, they were abused as children. They were programmed to think that they were not worth anything. They've run into real problems in life. It's not a hallucination, it's not just a chemical storm. There really are issues. So while it's important to work with a physician who can prescribe medications if that's necessary, I also suggest that you ask yourself the question, do you love yourself? Do you take care of yourself? Do you believe you're worth taking care of? Of to look at that and ask yourself that question to start with, Love, I think, can make all the difference in the world. If you love yourself, you're willing to do what it takes in order to bring your dreams into existence. So asking yourself, do I love myself? Is one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is take control of this. During your five minute miracle sessions, why not stop and say, visualize that little child inside you, the little boy, the little girl that started this journey called life, and say, I love you. A teacher, a coach that I may be hiring very soon, suggested that I do a different thing than that, that I connect with that child within me and say, not just I love you, but thank you. That little kid inside you has given you all your creativity, all your aliveness. He or she has tried so hard for so long. And if you can just imagine yourself holding her in your arms and looking in her eyes and saying, I love you more than anything in the world. Thank you so much for every moment of aliveness. Thank you for all that you've done, for all that you've been. And I swear I'm going to do everything in my power to take care of you always, from today until the day I die. Taking care of yourself starts with believing that you're worth taking care of. Being able to maintain discipline depends upon having reasons to do something. And if you don't love yourself, if you don't feel that drive to grow, to be, to do, if you don't have faith in yourself and the only thing that motivates you is pain, is trying not to fall down trying to pay those lousy bills. I'm sorry, that's not enough. That's enough to get you started. Being motivated by pain is enough to get you started, but it's not enough to keep you going. See, this is one of the problems that people have with dieting. You know, the doctor says you have to lose weight. You know, you're afraid of losing a partner or something like that. So the pain motivates you to lose weight, but at the same time, you haven't dealt with any of the emotions underneath there. So you'll lose just enough weight to get them off your back, and then the old habits will come right back. But if you can find a way to love the discipline, to love the dream so that everything you're doing is increasing the joy in your life, then the more you do, the more pleasure you get and the stronger the motivation gets. Whereas if you're motivated by pain, the more you do, the less pain there is, so the less motivation there is. Now you understand why that's a trap. I hope you can see why that's a trap. Motivate yourself by pain on the one side, love on the other, pain on one side, pleasure on the other, fear on one side, love on the other. When you have both now, it's easy to get yourself out of bed because you have both the discomfort, oh, God, I've got to get my kid ready for school. And you have the love. I get to contribute. Today I get to grow. Today I get to change. Today I get to write that story. I get to do this, I get to do that. I. You look for the ways to motivate yourself with both the pain and the pleasure, both the fear and the love. When you do that, all you have to do is pump up those emotions and you start moving rapidly towards your goal. We're going to be talking about things like that this year. I'll be answering any questions you have. I'm going to try very, very hard to be with you here on Sundays at noon Pacific. I think I'm going to kind of let it go today. Thank you so much for being here. It is an honor and a privilege to be here with you. And I'd like to close today's session with the Sanskrit expression that I often use that means that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. You Namaste. If you have enjoyed this, please share it. If you'd like to find out more about this, please go to www.realwarriorsjourney com take.