Sun Salutation program and...Does anyone really know anything?

Hi, Hello. Stephen Barnes here. Another Life Writing Live. I don't know how long a time I need. Oh, it says I'm now live. So. Hello there. This is Steve Barnes with Life Writing Live and Today is the things to talk about Today. Because I think to a certain degree, just like my morning essays are attempts to kind of empty my mind out, get stuff from the back of my head onto the page so I can think about what's going on. Because I'm traversing some extraordinarily complex territory where there are no maps. There are maps for individual pieces of it, but not for the overall thing. I'm a little bit reminded of somebody who said that there aren't any manuals on how to deal with sudden massive success because it's a rare enough thing that it wouldn't be profitable to create such manuals. My, my lawyer, by the way, actually did kind of sort of create a manual, a book like that. So it's not entirely true, but it's a reasonable thing to look at. So about a month and A half ago, six weeks ago, I came across the concept of doing 108 sun salutations for 30 days, which has a. An energy output overall about the same as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. So I thought, well, this could be a nice challenge to both rewire some things about my, my physical body, challenge myself psychologically and emotionally. So I set out to do it, and it has been a challenge. You know, they. There's this thing that says nobody knows anything. You know, people say that about, about writing, for instance. Nobody knows anything. It's not the literal truth. We know a lot of things about writing, but the process of. You can't predict whether or not a particular thing you do is going to be successful in that sense. No, you can't predict it because you can't totally predict what another person is going to think about what you do. All you can do is to do the things that you know to do and do them long enough that statistics begins to work in your favor as opposed to work against you. Then you notice the results that you're getting. You keep modeling, you know, what other people who have traversed this territory say. And you, you make adjustments. You know, you, you, you act like kind of a bat flying blind. So the, the sun salutations are a little bit like that in the sense that I knew what it's like to do eight salutations. I knew what it's like to do maybe 10 salutations. I think that the most salutations I'D ever done at one time was 10. I'm pretty sure that I did 5a salutations and 5b salutations at some Ashtanga yoga workshop. A. In general, the most I'd ever done was eight five A salutations three B salutations. The notion of doing 108 of them, the, the estimated caloric output for single sun salutation done slowly is 13 calories. So doing 1300 calories, you know, in, in burning 1300 calories in one session, that's a lot. I mean, just, you know, I think 3,500 calories is a pound of fat. So if you're doing 100, if you're burning 108 sun salutations, if you're doing 108 sun salutations a day, you're burning about a pound to two pounds of fat a week. About two pounds of fat a week. And that's not even counting the metabolic afterburn. So it's a lot. But there was also the question of repetitive stress injury. I mean, the fact is that all human movement is imperfect, and imperfect movement causes wear and tear on the joints. So whereas it is most damaging to the body not to use it, it is also, you know, wearing to your body to do something. So you're kind of caught in between those, in between those, those extremes. What I noticed is that as I increased the number of salutations I was doing, the amount of soreness in my body was starting to increase. Now, that might have been the way I was doing them. It might have been just what my body is at this point in my life. But what I saw that seemed to be extremely true is that I could not do 108 salutations or even go toward them without beginning to neglect some other things that I was doing. In other words, there are other exercises, other, other activities that I do that are all part of my fitness. If I was to take a look at, you know, what is the minimum necessary to work, if I were to add a static hold, like clinging, holding, hanging from a bar, and spinal twists, then a salutations B salutations a hold and spinal twist would, could conceivably cover just about everything I can think of in terms of basic, basic human performance. On a physical level, that's good, basic stuff. But I also have skill things that I do and things that have to do with becoming more sensitive to energy, like qigong work. So if I can't do all of that every day, then I'm forced to listen to the voices in my Head that are saying, well, if you don't do everything, you're not doing anything. And if you don't, if you. If you break it up so that you're distributing it across the week, then you're not doing the program or you are. You're surrendering to time. You know, oh, you. You know, you would have been able to do this when you were 20. It's no good. You'll never catch up. Those voices, that stuff is always there in my head. So listening to those voices, as long as I remember that I'm not those voices, allows me to ask, well, who's saying that? And what do those voices want? Well, some of those voices are trying not to injure me. No question about that. But others of them are literally. I think that they're. I think human beings have a death drive. I think we have a drive that destroys us as well as one that builds us, one that cautions us to stay back, as well as one that encourages us to take risks. And I think that if I made the assumption that this program could actually benefit me, then it is reasonable to think that there'd be a part of me that would not want me to change that. If we are genetically and socially programmed to age at a particular rate, and if, for instance, I'm just saying this, if this program was something that was a fountain of youth, there definitely be parts of you that would not be happy about it. There'd definitely be parts of you that would try to discourage you from going down that road and inquiring into, what are they talking about? Are they legitimately stopping me? Is this paralysis by analysis? Is it legitimate for me to break these things up into patterns? What is true about this? Am I being kind to myself? Is this useful? Using the three gates in order to analyze this? All of that stuff is in there. And to the degree that I use the sun salutations as a way to anchor the body, mind stuff in, then looking at the things that either enable you to do it, the analyze the process of you doing it, or tries to discourage you from doing it, these are all valid things to look at, and they're all part of what makes this whole process so fascinating to me. Just the process of life in the sense of remembering that you have to continue to integrate at those core levels. So looking at all of this, then I asked myself the question, why am I doing this? And so there are a lot of different answers to that, and some of them are simply to explore myself, to have fun, you know, that I'm If I have found a path that is useful to people in the sense that anybody can do the simplest versions of it. You could, you know, because the simplest version would be simply following along, visualizing and breathing. But there are infinite modifications that allow it to be good for a body of almost any size or any capacity. But at the higher levels, if you were to try to knock off 108 sun salutations in a half hour, that would be devastating. I mean, that would just kick your butt. No question about that. So it's possible to look at this as a fitness activity as well as a diagnostic as well as curative. Fascinating. Like I said, nobody knows anything except that the scientific method says you observe a phenomenon, you postulate a hypothesis, you know, to, to explain the phenomenon. You formulate an experiment to test your hypothesis. You perform the experiment, you take a look at your results. If the results were positive, you publish your results so that other people can try them. If they're negative, then back up and try another hypothesis. If you successfully go through this process, you have a theory, a working theory, something that has been tested, that other people have looked at, and so forth and so on. That's what we're always trying to do. That's what I'm always trying to do. I think that that is the greatest contribution of Western civilization to the world, quite frankly, the scientific method, it is usable in any arena. I mean, so this is, we're testing this in terms of right of martial arts and fitness, testing it in terms of writing. When we teach writing principles, we don't know, you know, we don't know exactly what will lead to your success. But we can reverse engineer the things that lead to failure, the things that all writers do. For instance, all writers write. Authors are writers who have written. But if you're a writer, you are writing. And we like to say every day, the day that you write, you're a writer, the day that you don't write, you're not. Which is one of the reasons why a lot of writers start feeling like they're losing themselves if they get creatively blocked because they're not being who it is that they see themselves as being. They understand the difference. You know, and the thing about the violin master, it was a piano master who said that if I don't practice for one day, I can hear the difference. If I don't practice for two days, the critics can hear the difference. If I don't practice for three days, the audience can hear the difference. That you know, that you're always either moving forward or going back. So what are the things that it's most important for me to move forward on? Well, writing is certainly one of them. And so I have to write every day, literally every day, and I have to communicate and teach every day. That that's part of that mastery program of you. Do you teach, you learn, you know, you're always learning, you're always doing, you're always teaching. That's what the masters that I have observed at close range, that's. That's them, especially if they let me into their presence, they were teaching me at that moment. So it's possible to come up with a set of principles that works for writing. And I'm experimenting with the principles that lead to success in the physical arena by examining this new possibility that sun salutations can be used both to anchor in an emotional state and to produce high levels of fitness. We will see. This is what we. We programmed into the Soulmate process. By the way, we looked at the successful principles that Tananariv And I, after 20 years of marriage, asked ourselves, how did we know this was going to work? Because we proceeded. We took a huge leap of faith with each other, but it worked out great. So it's like, how do we do that? And how we started studying how we did it and how other people who've successfully created relationships did it. And that led to a set of principles that I then experimented with in my coaching. And they worked. And so now we're creating an online class that you're invited to. And until Friday, it's 66% off. If you go to soulmatedeal.com soulmatedeal.com you'll have an opportunity to get it at a 66% discount. We start the class on the 3rd 30th of July. So I hope that you will join us and I hope that you've enjoyed the speculations and take a look at the thing, the three things that are most important in your life. And make sure that you either accept or have a specific reason to reject the notion of physical health and fitness, your relationship with yourself and others, and your mind as expressed in hunting and gathering your career. Okay. That you ask yourself, what are the results that you want? Study people who've gotten those results and extract from them sets of theories about what you can do to optimize your chance of success. There are always things you can do to increase your chance of success. And there's nothing you can do to guarantee success, but you can generate, you can't, you can't. Guarantee failure simply by not doing. You know, it's exactly the same way as you can't guarantee someone 100% health and fitness with any diet, but you can guarantee they're going to die if they don't eat. So that's what I wanted to say for today. Once again, I hope that you'll join us. You have until Friday to get the course at 66% discount. Soulmatedeal.com Take care, people.