The 108 Sun Salutation/30 Day Challenge: "Everest for Everyman"

Hello there. Stephen Barnes, or what's left of him after all these years. Coming to you on Life Writing Live. I am really, really happy right now because I. I think I might have come to some decisions that are really useful. And the fact that they've come just that decision has been made. Just as there's some fascinating career things opening up, there's some possibilities, you know, I don't know whether or not I'll succeed at them, but I'm going to give them my best shot. I'm also dealing with having had a couple nights of sleep interruption due to coughing, which sometimes happens seasonally. Some sort of an allergy thing that hits me. And I'll cough at night only when I'm in a sleeping position, oddly enough. And I need to take. There's a really strong cough medicine that, that works for me over the shelf stuff. But for some reason, it didn't work the first two nights. So I ended up losing some sleep. And two nights in a row. What happened is my symptoms were identical with COVID I mean, you know, as far as I knew, I was, you know, fatigued and achy and couldn't think straight and, you know, oh, my God, everything was just awful. I mean, but I. I figured that it was just. It was just the sleep loss. I took a COVID test negative. So, yeah, I got good sleep last night. I made damn sure of that. And today I woke up my brain buzzing. I had a really good sleep, slept for about nine hours. You know, just kind of stayed in bed until my body felt like it wanted to give up, to get up, wanted to give up. Oh, boy. Little Freudian slips here on the loose. But. Hi, Carla. I had some thoughts about another subject and I wrote a long essay about it. And so I think that the best thing I could do, I published that essay, but I also wanted to document it with a life writing live. Hold on for a second. Let me. Let me change my lighting here to get better lighting. Make me prettier, if that's even possible. Okay, there we go. There we go. There he is. There he is. That's a nice guy. So I thought that I would read the essay that I wrote. I might stop and make some comments from time to time, but I think that it's. It's representative. It allows me to go back over my thoughts and hopefully do something useful. I will keep looking at the comments from time to time. So if you have any comments, questions, or requests as I go. Let me see. Let me minimize this part of the screen that might Help me to be able to serve you better so I can see if there's anything that comes up from anybody as I'm going, but okay, here we go. I was in grief some years back. I'd wanted to climb Kilimanjaro as a rite of passage and Nikki was not up for it. I was not going to fly her all the way around the world to have her first major disappointment in life. So we did a photo tour instead of that. Had a wonderful, wonderful time. But I wasn't able to do this particular thing that I'd wanted to do. Some years later I thought about, well, maybe I could do it now. And I tested myself on Dog mountain, which is 3,000 foot incline. And if you can climb a thousand feet an hour, you are fit enough to climb Kilimanjaro, basically. So dog Mountain is 3,000ft. I climbed it, but it killed me. Coming back down, I felt horrible. Now I realized I could train myself to get used to that and to be fitting up to doing it. But I no longer believed I could do that and have fun on a multiple day, multiple day journey. I just, I just couldn't believe it would be entertaining. So there was, there was a bit of grief attached to that, that sense of, of opportunities past, you know, am I getting too old? Stuff like that, you know, all the voices in your head. Later on, Julius Francisco invited me to a, a week long martial arts event in the Philippines. And I thought to myself, well, it was going to be two years ago in, in 2020, March of 2020, I believe was. And I thought, hey, there would be a real way to celebrate my birthday, you know, that, that I could train for this and get myself ready for this. And if I could do it successfully, that would be a life transformative experience. You know, it kind of thing to test yourself. And then Covid hit and I saw what was happening in China and I realized it would be foolish of me to go to the Philippines and be halfway around the world if a major pandemic hit. The number of things that could go wrong in a situation like that were off the chain. So with grief, I canceled my dream. And there was definitely some of that. If they don't do this again for two years, four years or whatever, because they didn't. They only did it, I think, every four years. Julius, if you see this, is it four years or every two years, you know I'm going to be too old to do it. That did go through my mind and those thoughts will kill you. But something happened recently. I invited People to try to do two sun salutations a day, one in the morning, one at night for 30 days just to see what would happen. And I noticed my own response to doing it, that it did seem to create a higher level of body mind connection in me and experienced with this. But in the people who were doing it, I noticed several of them having some similar very positive responses to the point where I felt like, well, maybe this could be a good thing. Maybe it could be a standard challenge that I give people who for instance, want me to coach them commit to a sun salutation every morning, one every night for 30 days. You do that and maybe I'll coach you. I mean, I don't do a lot of personal coaching anymore because I have to charge too much money for it. I mean, frankly I just can't, I literally can't afford to. And the people who can afford to pay me, well, they can still reach me, but you know, I ain't cheap. But I want to make sure that whatever I work with them on is, is worth it to them. It's very important to me to, to earn my keep. So this might be something that I can give them. So it's like, it's worthwhile experimenting. But in the process of studying the sun salutation, I came across a very specific thing that dedicated yogis were doing. It was doing 108 sun salutations for every day for 30 days. And I looked at that and I thought, that's remarkable. I wonder what the consequences of doing that would be. So in thinking about it and reading about it and talking about it, I had the sense that this might be the kind of challenge that would be roughly equivalent to that week long martial arts workshop or climbing Kilimanjaro. And I wrote an essay today about it. And so now I'm going to read that essay to you and hopefully you'll enjoy this. So I want to try the 10830 day challenge, but the question is building myself up to it. That means a few things. One, locking in the breathing, such that if I follow the thread of the breath continuously, I'm in the groove sufficiently efficiently to prevent injury. Two, building up any actual fitness requirements so that I have the physical endurance to do it. I would estimate the same fitness requirements as running a 10k. 3, how do I do this and also maintain the other components of fitness and skill during the 30 day period, I might well diminish everything else except a little compensatory yoga and some basic martial arts. How do I ramp up as I investigate this possibility. 4. Let me use the how, what, why pattern to look at this. The what is 108 repetitions of the sun salutation daily for 30 days done continuously. That takes about 40 to 60 minutes by most accounts. 5. The why is to see what the experience is and also to test myself. It is not primarily a physical practice. Yoga is primarily mental, but uses the body as a biofeedback device to test your concentration. Really surrender is as important as conquest. It is very Yin Yang in that sense is a test of my mind, heart and body. This is not a thing I'd want to do long term, but after I've done it once, I'll know how to do it and also understand it better. If the Sun Salutation is the most important part of the most important sequence, the primary sequence of Ashtanga Yoga of the most important created by the most important yogi Krishnamachara in recorded history. And I believe that that's arguable. Then I would be aiming to see what the universe looks like from the perspective of the world's most advanced Hatha yogi. He lived over a hundred years healthfully by all accounts. So that's in the ballpark I'm looking to play in. It's. It's a hypothesis that supports argumentation and therefore deserves experimentation. Another possibility arises. I may not want to do 108 reps for 30 days again. But what if I did my birthday and Sun Salutations every year on my birthday as a ritual? That sounds badass. I have to say it's something to look forward to and maybe train toward every year. There's a joke. I say it's a joke. That isn't a joke. It is. I'll never die on any day I do a Sun salutation in the morning. I will not die in my sleep any night that I did a Sun salutation before sleep. There is enough truth in that to be worth considering. So if I can pump that energy through my system 108 times, that's a serious pipe cleaner. 108 is also the number of moves in the Wu style Tai Chi form that I do every day. 108 crops up in a lot of different arenas and a lot of different traditions. I can have opinions all day long about what that means. But only the experiment will actually produce the data. 8. So how do I approach this safely? I look at my daily exercise routine. I do three days hard, three days easy yoga, alternating. I don't want to upset that. It's pretty balanced and intelligently. Designed. But there is another system I can adopt. The five minute miracle system. Five 60 second breathing breaks, one every three hours. Combine this with the notion of taking a five to ten minute break every hour to optimize performance that runs in parallel with the full daily workouts. Usually no more than 5 to 10 minutes total a day. I can hijack that stream. So today for instance, I'm gonna do two reps per set, a total of 10 sun salutations for the day. Then if I did that successfully, did all five that day, I'll add one set, one rep per set per day. That should be give me time to see how it's feeling and make sure I have the biomechanics, you know, the breathing basically tight so everything feels good. I should be able to tell by how I sleep at night and how I feel first thing in the morning. When I get up to 22 repetitions per day, per set, per day, I'm ready to try them all in one session. With breaks every 10 or so sets. I should be good. I'll probably cancel all my other physical stuff. Except a little martial arts and a little compensatory yoga. I should be good. But by the time I get to that level, I'll be a somewhat different person. One who has different perspectives on the entire process. Those are my thoughts. I'm excited. I've been looking for a challenge like this for about two years, ever since I had to cancel my trip to the Philippines. Damn you, Covid. As another bonus, the. Let's see, I'm take a look and see if there are any comments. See if they're. If you're enjoying this, click. Like, you know, just so I know that you're, you're hearing what it is that I'm saying and it's working for you. So I've been looking for a challenge for two years, ever since I had to cancel the trip to the Philippines. Damn, Covid. Okay, I said that. As another bonus, the sun salutations might be a perfect ladder back to a full fitness routine when I've had to fall off due to illness or injury. By the time I can do say 10 sun salutations, I'm ready to do a full badass exercise session again. But I don't think I've ever been sick enough that I couldn't do just one. I mean, the sickest I've ever been with measles, sleeping most of the day and you know, oh my God, I can't. I could have gotten my ass up and done one that's taking control of the body mind connection and offering the body a perfect template. Perfect template is a movement that you do saying, okay, body, this is what I want you to do. Teach me how to do it within your current limits to the best of my ability, with a pain level below a 3 and level of form above an 8 plus such that if I can do this thing, I'm in good shape. I admire who I am at that moment. That's a hell of an instruction when you're looking at an exercise as deep as a sun salutation. I mean really, it works everything except pulling muscles. That's the biggest flaw in yoga as generally practiced across the board. There is a discipline almost lost called rope yoga, which does involve some pulling, not suspensions. But yo, if you're actually pulling yourself hand over hand up and doing gymnastics while pulling yourself, maintaining the breathing flow, I don't know any place that teaches it anymore, but there are some traces of it. And some exercises that Indian wrestlers do, they do that in club swinging, which addresses some of the same issues of pulling. So I'm going to look into that. However, that's another subject. This is important because one of the things that happens as you age is that every time you injure yourself, that voice saying, this is it, it's the end, you'll never get it back. Gets a little louder. You need to have an answering voice that says, really? Let's see. And if you have a beginning entry level, one rep, just one that can slowly bring you back into the game, well, even something like having a stroke isn't quite as scary. Screw most rehab programs. They wish they were as scientifically designed as an excellent yoga program that rests on 6,000 years of practical experimentation and body mind development. Western science is just beginning to even believe in the things that the depths of Chinese, Indian and African movement systems have known since forever. The reclamation of the animal human and the development of the divine spirit. Huh? Well, that was my morning thoughts on this subject. I'll keep you posted. Today it's five sets of two. I have to do my sets at 9 o', clock, 12 o', clock, 3 o', clock, 6 o', clock, and 9 o'. Clock. Bracket them with some qigong exercise and a tiny bit of martial arts. Something flowy, say Aikido Tenkan turning movement combined with a Kali 6 count. That ought to be pretty good. It's pretty universal, dynamic sphere stuff. So I'll just need to do some pulling movement during that major exercise window about three times a week. Say I'll aim at holding a front lever for 60 seconds. Aiming at is the key word here. If I can hang suspended for for 60 seconds with my knees up, that's a fine start. The rest will come in time. So looking at that sounds pretty badass actually. And that little flash of male pride. Yeah, I can do that. Is an emotional bump I can give myself to motivate me. Also, another motivation. I was once in a situation where I could have drowned because I couldn't pull myself on a high platform in the Caribbean. To my embarrassment, it was Blair Underwood who pulled me up. Damn it. I can use that discomfort in that natural male competitive sense to motivate me at all. This should be as well. Rather, this should be fascinating really. I'm going to learn a lot about myself. After all, there are only two major questions in life. Who am I? And what is true? All other questions, all storytelling, all of science and philosophy and psychology are just branches off those questions. Here's the if you had perfect knowledge of yourself and reality, you would never set a goal you couldn't reach. To the degree that that's true, then the consistency with which you can reach your goals is the best indicator of the accuracy of your inner and outer map. A corollary, anything you do in any arena to strengthen that map will have an effect on your ability to map in other arenas and therefore to reach other goals. So here's a challenge. This the 10830 challenge. I don't know if I can do it, but I'm willing to commit and fail publicly if that's what happens. That's a little bit more pressure, embarrassment. Right? Let's see, let's see. Would you be willing to lay it out in writing so we can follow along? It is laid out in writing on my page in a couple different places. I can try it again. No. Blair was not supposed to star in Street Lethal. Blair was going to star in my soul to keep. Blair is not the martial artist that Street Lethal would require. Michael Jai White is though. Anyway, back to this Will I forget to take the five breaks? Will my ego outpace my essence and push me harder than I can actually healthfully adapt? I don't know. Will I be able to move beyond my excuses, self delusion, fears, perceived limitations and self images and just friggin do it? I don't know. But I think the person who could do it, who could do 108 sun salutations a day for 30 days is a better, purer Steve, a more honest version of who I am. Someone with the clarity, energy, intensity and self knowledge to address the new challenges that come with the opportunities I'm being presented with in Hollywood. Ah, more motivation. So you need as much motivation as possible. You've got the what, you got the why. If you've got the what and the why, the how takes care of itself. I think I'm gonna enjoy this. It's almost precisely what the little devil in me calls good evil fun. The very best kind of fun. The kind that kicks the out of your chrysalis walls and sets your butterfly free. One last thought. There's a metaphor I heard once. I think it was a Sufi metaphor. Enlightenment is to the unenlightened state as butterflies are to caterpillars. If the following statement were true, caterpillars do not become butterflies. Caterpillars die so that butterflies can be born. Maybe that's what we love about zombie movies. They are a de evolution. We die to become something less. What if this entire genre is via negativa, teaching by negative example? What if the reason we respond to it is that it's a mirror of something we sense to be true? To grow, we need to do the same thing in reverse. Be bitten by a passion so deep and hot it drives us beyond mortal fear to deconstruct what we think to be true about ourselves and the world. To discover a deeper, truer self. Damn it. It's just a thought. I thought I was ending this essay, but just had another memory. Many years ago, I went to a party at David Gerald's house. Darn you, David. During which he showed us a video about the EST training. Remember that Earhart seminar training, the two weekend thing where there's a lot of confrontation and they don't let you go to the bathroom? Yeah, yeah, you've heard of it. Take another look at the comments, cases, anything that I can, I can help anybody with. Okay. All right, Well, I saw the video and I thought, huh, this looks like a bunch of head stuff. People sitting around talking. But then they showed a clip of something called the six day training, which was a residential six day training that involved a tough run up a friggin steep hill. And everyone, including people with serious body weight issues, were doing the run at a pace that was appropriate to them. There was a zip line, there were other things. It looked great. I mean, I thought, damn, they're actually engaging all the basic body mind aspects for six days. Controlling when and where you sleep, what you eat, what you do. That looks like good evil fun. To do it, you had to get through the basic S2 weekend training I did, I found it very interesting. They'd actually found a way to reliably choreograph an epiphany that's major. I mean that's not easy. Extremely difficult to do. You really did leave the workshop with a different and I think useful level of clarity. Trying to communicate what you saw and felt to others is a little like trying to describe a salad enough to nourish a healthy person. You couldn't do it. Words didn't hold it. So the clarity begins to diminish partially because you need a truck, you need Tribe more than you need truth. Well, let me repeat that. I think it might be important. You need Tribe more than you need truth. Most of the time that's how most people feel. A lot of people try to keep that clarity going by going deeper into the organization. And I hope they found what they sought. I could not. What I wanted was the six day. And about 10 months later, after a full medical exam, I drove up to Marin county to the facility and did it. I won't go too far into it except to say that every day was like an entire weekend of the basic training such that after two days I was experiencing the same clarity I had after finishing the whole thing. And it was mind blowing to realize there were four days to go. I will say that at the end of the sixth day I experienced a non ordinary reality that led to an extraordinary amount of serendipity. It was weird. I mean shit just seemed to work out without real effort. Like a greased key slipping into a greased lock. And if you catch the sexual metaphor there, you'll understand a little of how it felt. Maybe I'll talk about that in my encounter with an aikido master another time. It was pretty interesting. Anyway, that clarity never completely went away. The six day was the single most impressive retreat experience I've ever had or heard of that was basically available to almost anyone. It no longer exists. But I expect that there are other equivalent even more powerful experiences if you research hard. Check comments again. But I said all this to get to a single exercise they had us do. It started at say 8 o' clock in the evening and it was the leader sitting on his friggin stool saying stand up. There may be somewhere between 40 and 60 of us in that room, I guess seated in rows and we stood sit down. We sat stand up. He said. And we did sit down. This continued minute after minute and we started grumbling after half hour, 40 minutes. But we did it. It got more uncomfortable. But we continued. Physiologically, I understand that the exertion was within the envelope of how quickly our bodies can reconvert physical fatigue toxins. We are persistence predators who can out walk any animal on the planet. And this, really at the core of it, wasn't much more exhausting than walking. Stand up. Sit down. For hours this went on. I kid you not. I don't rightly know the exact length of time. I'm not remembering clearly, but I have a sense that there were no watches and allowed and no clocks in the room. But I'm estimating maybe three hours total. I don't know. I really don't know. We. We wanted to rebel, but we'd signed agreements to do whatever we were requested to do. And no matter how irritated and frustrated and tired I got, I wanted to keep my word. I also wanted to support the others around me. I wouldn't be the one to break the chain, right? Stand up. Sit down. We settled into a pattern of grim, fatalistic. Grinding it out. God damn it. This bastard wouldn't break me. Wouldn't make me quit. And wasn't that cute girl in the next row glancing back at me? I twisted my lips into a smile and tried to lend her my strength. Come on, honey. We'll beat this bastard together. We'll show these sons of bitches. Stand up. Sit down. And then maybe two and a half hours in, something happened. You could feel it. Something in the room changed. Someone laughed, maybe just a chuckle. I felt something go inside me. I surrendered and realized that I'd had my brakes on. I'd held a tension, a resistance in my body. Call it something related to a Golgi tendon organ tension, the thing that stops you from doing a full split. Flexibility is mostly de inhibition. It's switching off of this response to produce the full natural range of flexibility. In other words, flexibility is mostly in the mind. What if the level of persistence, predator endurance was the same? What if the limits are mostly emotional resentment, fear, limiting self image. A great philosopher once said, in every job that's to be done, there is an element of fun. Find the fun and poof, the job's a game. That's M. Poppins, said that very great philosopher. In that room, we surrendered and you could feel it. That sense of surrender swept the room. And now we were all laughing. Stand up. Sit down. It was nothing. We were riding an emotional wave. It wasn't some horrible thing. It was just shop would carry water. It was just life. It was flowing with the mind, directed us to do powered by positive emotions now. And the body just went along for the ride. It was extraordinary. After we were all laughing, the exercise ended fairly quickly. We were sent to bed. I think that exercise happened on the third night. My dreams that night were Technicolor virtual reality. I woke up a little sore, but feeling great. Ran my best, ate like a horse at breakfast. We were all laughing together and if the leaders had looked the other way, they would have been an orgy for the ages. I kid you not. Was that stand up, sit down really much different than doing a sun salutation, isn't it? Just taking that all the way to the floor instead of to a sitting position? Is it really that different? Other than using more joints, distributing the stress more evenly over your body, moving through more planes of motion. What if it isn't? What if it is a very similar level of intentions, intention, focus, discipline and release to laughter and joy. What if the 10830 isn't a brutal hazing but a celebration of life, A way of saying thank you to the body mind for all it is done, for all it has given me, for being my vehicle through life. What if? I don't know. But time for speculation is over and so is this essay. Finally, time to get to work. Five minute miracle. Two reps each break for a total of 10. Tomorrow, three reps, for a total of 15. Monday, four reps. I can keep at this level until I adjust, if I need to, if I start feeling too sore. But this is what I'm going to attempt. Am I really going to go for this? I don't know, but I swear I'm going to try. And the Yoda voice in my head says, try not. Do or do not. There is no try. Shut up, you little green leprechaun. But then, damn it, I see Grogu smiling at me and I smile back and I laugh. Oh, screw it. He's so cute. I'm in trouble. Namaste. Damn it. This is Steve signing off. If you like these thoughts, you know, I would suggest you listen to the lifewritingpodcast.com if you want to know even more, I would suggest that you try Real warriors journey dot com. It's the best stuff I've got. You take care and hope you're gonna have a wonderful day.