Morning Ritual, Daily Life

Hi there. Steve Barnes here with Session of Life Writing Live. We've been so busy over the last 10 weeks getting the podcast right that I wanted to make sure that that was going right. And we've just wrapped our 10th episode, so I can free up some energy to be able to speak with you today and hopefully, you know, just more. More frequently. But I have kept my promise to myself to be able to communicate, to be able to speak of where I am in life and just kind of what's going on. Adrian sky says, hi, handsome. I say, hello, beautiful. How are you, sweetheart? And so I thought that what I'd do is take a look and see what's going on in my life and then how my daily schedule is addressing these things in life. They tell you how that you're rewarded in proportion to how much stress you can take without breaking. And so you deliberately want to put yourself in stressful circumstances, but you also want to be able to calculate whether or not you're getting too stressed out, whether or not the stress is getting to the point that it's becoming strained, because that's the issue. It's not. The stress actually triggers an adaptation response in your system, in your body and your mind. It's like working out at the gym, but if you don't get enough nutrition, you don't get enough rest, your body doesn't have a chance to rebuild. So that's always the thing. You want the stress, but you want to make sure it stays within your ability to cope with it. So your ability to cope with it is the most important thing in some ways. On the other hand, it's how much stress can you take, how much. How hard can you push yourself? You know, how much chaos can you withstand and still keep your balance? So life is chaos. You know, family life is definitely chaos. So just kind of make your peace with that and go on. So I thought I'd talk about, you know, what my schedule has been thus far today and what I'm expecting and how I put these things together. So I woke up. I like to stay in bed until my body feels rested, you know, so it's like I'll wait until my body starts to spontaneously move. I'll actually lay on one side or the other and kind of just kind of breathe and listen to my heartbeat until my fingers and toes start wiggling pretty much all on their own. That kind of tells me that my body is ready to start waking up. So then I'll sit up and I'll meditate. And the meditation is usually Some combination of visualization of my ancient child breathing and listening to my heartbeat. Okay. Really, really beautiful. Adrienne says she needs to lose weight. Okay. So the. I love addressing questions when they come up. The important thing is that you're out of balance, that there is an imbalance between the food that you're taking in and the amount of movement you're taking. You're. You're putting out. The easiest part of that to deal with is the food coming in. So what you want to do is to first be very aware of what's going wrong. Somehow you've gotten out of that balance. Life, modern life does that. It's not your fault. Modern life has cut the connection between how much we move and how much we eat. So you need to start thinking about that. And so start thinking about how much are you moving. And then I would say in terms of your diet, you're probably eating more than you think you are. So I would suggest the smartphone diet. Carry your phone with you and simply take a picture of everything you eat. Bring it from unconscious to consciousness. Start becoming aware and you'll start seeing what it is that you need to do, you know, and just get. Cut yourself some slack. There's no moral dimension to this. It's not a matter of being bad or lazy or anything. It's what has happened in the modern world. So if that was a concern of mine, then. And the other thing that I do, you know, in terms of maintenance of weight and there are times when I'm not as skinny as I'd like to be, but there is a point where not particularly interested in pushing myself. I feel, I feel fine and I feel like I look fine, so. But I still want to fast more. I'm exercise, my exercise program is just fine. But I'm a carb fiend. I love carbs and, you know, I love, you know, having carbs in the evening. It's kind of comfort food. I love that. So the easiest way I can think of to have that discipline that I want is simply intermittent fasting every other day. Don't eat or keep the window before I eat as long as possible. So I do that kind of every day. I Rarely eat before 5 or 6 o', clock, even on eating days. On fasting days, what I'd like to do is not eat all day long. That's what I like to do. But how often do I manage to do that? Not as often as I want to. Today is a fasting day. We'll see. I promise. I'll be honest about when I take my first bite, if I do. I mean, the best thing would be if I don't eat all day long. I mean, that would be great. And then tomorrow I can pretty much eat whatever I want. Back to the beginning. Distracted. Oh, God, yeah. Comfort eating is a thing. I've been in need of comfort for a good two years. Again, that's real. The fact is that we're under stress. You have to try to keep the stress from becoming strained. Food is a very reliable source of comfort, anti stress. You know, that piece of coconut cream pie never fails to satisfy. You know, so, so, you know, don't beat yourself up for wanting to feel good. The, the meaning of life is to seek joy. And I like the, an addendum that it's to be happy in service. Okay, I like that too. But be kind to yourself. You know, be very kind to yourself. If you can forgive yourself, then you can say, well, what is the better path for me? And if you like comfort eating, then you might ask yourself, well, what, what am I going to eat for comfort? How much am I going to exercise? How much am I willing to exercise? And it might be that I'm not willing to spend, you know, an hour a day exercising. Well, the luck, the lucky thing is you don't have to. About an hour a week will get you there, even if you exercise smart enough. We could talk about that sometime. But a combination of, let's say the five Tibetans for overall health, kettlebells for fitness, and there are kettlebell routines that last no more than 10 minutes that will fry you. They will just blast your metabolism in the stratosphere and then fasting every other day. If you were to do the five Tibetans and walk and fast, you'd find your way normalizing really fast. So that's the thing to get a balance between calories in, calories out, that, you know, you can change everything else, but if you don't get a hold of that, you're. You're going to stay big. You're going to stay, you know, carrying, carry more weight than is optimal for your body if you were a hunter gatherer. So that's the idea to change what it is that society did to us when we industrialized and we made it possible that a person can sit in front of a computer and earn all the calories they need. Staying in one place, that's lethal for your waistline. So back to my morning. Okay, so I, I meditate and that's usually 15 to 20 minutes. And I find a place of, of peace inside myself. And I made some good progress there where I can visualize things and I can see light inside my body when it's feeling light and I'm feeling centered. So it gives me a nice visual metaphor for the state that I want to be in. And then I get out of bed, I look at my emails and do a little bit of, you know, social media surfing. Now if stress was a problem in my life, I would cut that out. If productivity was a problem in my life, I would cut that out. The most productive people I know of don't check any social media or their email first thing in the morning. The first thing they do is get their business taken care of. They have identified the most important things they need to do. I simply know that I can take that time and still, and still accomplish the things I'm trying to accomplish. Okay, Adrian Sky, I would say looking for, where can you find the information on Tibetan on the five Tibetans. I'm going to type it in there. Look up Five Tibetans on YouTube, Type in five Tibetan rights on YouTube and you will see a bunch of people. They are five different exercises, very simple exercises really. You start by doing no more than three of each of them. So in the beginning it will only take you like two minutes and you add no more than one repetition per week until you get up to 21 repetitions and you stay there. And the truth is, if you can do 21 repetitions of those five exercises, you're in pretty good shape. It's not bad. It doesn't take you, takes you about 10 minutes. So it's a very, very effective and efficient system. And were you to combine that with intermittent fasting, actually be pretty fit and have pretty healthy, strong, flexible body and good energy with a minimal investment of time. In fact, you'll actually get. The intermittent fasting would actually give you time back. And it's the, it's the zero net time system that, that once you realize that, that if you take a day off from eating or you only eat one meal in the evening, at least you know, every other day, then the other time that you would have spent preparing and eating food, then you get to reinvest that time in your day. You could spend it writing or exercising or watching movies or whatever you want. So after I've done a certain amount of that social media stuff, I make out my journal. Oh, actually that's not true. The first thing I do is I do Tai Chi. And while I'm doing Tai chi, I do my chanting, my incantations and my incantations flow along the, the magic formula. So I'm talking about the things I'm grateful for and I'm talking about my mentors and I'm talking about doing the things every day that I need to do to, to reach my goal. So it's all kind of connected in there. So the point is to know what the map or model of your activity is, what direction are you heading in, that you're taking daily action, that you're feeling gratitude every day, that you have a clear intention, clear goals, but what you're going to do and that you have the courage and conviction that you can and should accomplish your aims. If you have all five of those things, you are in the game. If you have a zero in any one of those five categories, you know, clear map or model, not taking, you know, you don't have a map or model, you're not taking action, you have a negative attitude, you don't have a clear goal or you don't have confidence that you can or should do it, you'll sabotage yourself. You're basically, you're basically dead in the water. But if you make sure you have at least a one in each of those categories, you're okay. So that's. Then I get into my day, you know, I post on Facebook, I like to do that every day. Reminders for people to breathe. Look through my email, see if there's anything I need to deal with. And in my make out my journal right here, I use a journal that Brendan Burchard did, the guy that did the high performance habits. And it asked me questions every day that are very useful to make sure that I'm staying on track. And his primary thing is, he asked himself every night, did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? I like that, you know, I like the three gates, you know, is it true? Is it kind, is it useful? I look for basic patterns that are really useful in multiple ways because I've got three separate goals, you know, it is to maintain and progress mastery of writing, martial arts and relationships. You know, and that means being totally engaged every day, looking at my failures and flaws every day, finding role models of people who are doing it better than me. Every day I, you know, just, I will drive hours, I, you know, to, to spend some time with someone who does it better than I do so I can study what it is that they're doing. I guess, you know, God, this has actually gone on longer than I, than I wanted to. But hopefully it'll be useful. Misty says she'd like to see a kettlebell workout that I'd recommend. There's one called Kettle. Let me see if I can find, find the. Okay. You go to tacticalathlete.com. I think that's it. And you look for a video called Kettlebell. For Women. Okay. It happens to be. It uses the randomizer feature in your DVD in your DVD player. And I don't know if they've discontinued it, but it's. I think it's really cheap and they might be selling off their copies. But this might be the best exercise DVD I've ever seen in my life because no two exercise sessions are the same and their exercise sessions as short. They're like 5 minutes, 10 minutes and 15 minutes that you can literally get. Exercise sessions as short as five minutes that will, will help you. Let's see, have the link to the Tibetan exercises. No, I'm not going to do that. You go to YouTube, type in 5 Tibetan rights and you will find many different versions of them. Start looking at them. They're also books on, on Amazon. The exercises came out of a book by a guy named Peter Kelder called the Eye of Revelation, the Ancient Secret to the Fountain of Youth. They are fascinating exercises and we might talk about them at some point in the future. Anyway, I want to get into my day. Just wanted to say hi, you know, just. And if you, if you like this communication, please go check out our podcast, LifeWritingPodcast.com you will find it. We're doing such great things about living a high energy, creative life and staying sane, which I think is we should all want. Take care of everybody. I love you guys and it's just great to talk to you. Bye Bye.