The Five Minute Miracle

Hi, this is Stephen Barnes and I'm the wife and the fire dance Tai chi program, many other programs. I've been a martial artist, a New York Times best selling author, but most importantly, an ecstatic husband and father. And I just wanted to talk to you about one of the tools that you can use in order to help you onto the path of mastery. Mastery is basically just following a valid path of action, learning every day and continuing at it until you've got gray hair. I mean, really, a lot of ways that's all there is. Having achieved that status in both writing and martial arts, I can tell you that there's nothing special about it except being able to keep your enthusiasm, keep going and resist the stress, the internal obstacles, the internal opposition. This is really, really critical in life. They pay you for how much stress you can take without cracking. I mean, the same thing is true in sports, it's true in artistic careers. Can you handle it? There's the skill that you have, and then there's the question of whether you can handle the stress. So what I wanted to do was to have a conversation with you. And in order to do that, we're going to use some slides because I want to show you a way of dealing with stress that takes no more than five minutes a day. So before I do that, let's talk about two different things. The difference between stress and strain. Stress and strain. I'm going to need a piece of paper here. Let me grab a piece of paper from my office. Okay, so this piece of paper, this, this definition and this little talk is related to sports physiology, especially Russian sports physiology. What the Russians say is that all human movements are related to three things. Your alignment, your breathing, and the quality of your movement. That everything that you're doing in the world contains or relates to those three things. If you can start with that as a thought, we can go on to the next thing. Now, the gentleman who created the concept of stress and promoted it, his name was Hans Selye and he spoke about six languages. And before he died, he said that if English had been his first language, he would have been known as the father of strain rather than the father of stress. And here is the difference. Stress. If you look at this piece of paper, stress is pressure per unit area pressing against this piece of paper. But it doesn't really move. Notice that? But strain, on the other hand, is deformation per unit length. This is what happens when you get more stress than you can handle healthfully. And this is what you have to prevent. Now, if we go back to what the Russians said about all physical movements being a matter of alignment, motion and breathing, then what they teach their combat athletes is that part of the purpose of striking, throwing, grappling, is to disintegrate this structure, to start taking the structure apart. That the more stress that the person can take without breaking, that's going to be a strong person, you know, and they specifically train to be strong. But if you can exceed their capacity to absorb that stress you take, you are going to impact their breathing, you're going to change their posture, and you're going to change the quality of their movement. If you ask yourself what is the posture of the depressed person? You know, behind that curtain over there is a person who's feeling very depressed. How is, what is their posture like? You probably would guess that their posture is slumped, okay? And the quality of their movement is going to be tentative and possibly frightened. Okay? And the breathing is going to be low and shallow. Now, this is where we're going to focus our attention. Because the canary in the coal mine, the first part of this triumvirate that begins to break down when you go into stress is your breathing. So if you breathe as if you are relaxed, if you breathe as if you are comfortable, then your body mind will believe this. It will, you know, no matter how much stress is going on, it will believe you can handle it, and you will stay relatively calm. And you sit in the center of the cyclone. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on all around you, but where you are is relaxed. If you can do that, you enter a different realm. Okay? So the question is, how do you do that? And luckily, it does not take much time. Not if you do it right. So now we're going to share the screen with you portion of the screen and we're going to go over here. So this is the five minute miracle. Okay, so the five minute miracle is what we call this exercise? Yes. Okay. Centering this right here. Okay, great. So remember what you said about stress and strain. Click to add subtitle Ha. I hate that. All right, so what this said about stress and strain, that as long as the it's not what does not kill me makes me stronger, it is what does not kill me that is not beyond the capacity of my body mind to adjust to. It makes me stronger. If it exceeds the capacity, my capacity to adjust to it, I break down. My immune system will start going out. My body won't heal as quickly. I'll start getting sniffles and sick and fall into anxiety and depression. Oh, it's awful. So the trick in life is to take to be able to continually deepen your capacity to absorb stress without it becoming strained and to avoid any stresses that take you into strain. As long as you stay in that golden zone where you have enough stress, that there's enough stuff happening, that your tension is focused, but not so much that you're feeling like you can't make any forward movement. So it needs to get your attention but not trigger fear and anxiety. So how do you do that? Well, let's study the way we breathe when we're breathing, when we're feeling very, very relaxed. And the best study of that is probably the way babies breathe, and that is diaphragmatic breathing. So this illustration here says you inhale through your nose. You could inhale through your mouth. So let's just say you inhale through your nose. And as you inhale, your belly expands, okay? Not your chest, not your shoulders up here, but your belly expands, okay? Then when you exhale, your belly contracts. So inhale through the nose. Belly expands. When you exhale, the belly comes in and you exhale through your mouth. Now, you're going to need to actually put your hands on your belly in order to feel this because most people are breathing up in their chest. And the longer you've been breathing in your chest, the more work it's going to take. But luckily, like I said, we've really, really got an excellent way of, for you to address this. Now, one way of learning the proper way to breathe is to lay on your back. So diaphragmatic breathing, step by step exercise. And you can do, you know, a search on Google for diaphragmatic breathing, and you'll find videos on YouTube and elsewhere and also lots of slides for it. But you can use these. So you lie down comfortably, you place one hand on your chest, one hand on your belly. Now begin to breathe. Now you inhale through your nostrils. And when you inhale through your nostrils, feel your belly expand, the belly goes up. You understand? Your belly goes up when you inhale. Now, you could put a book on your tummy. And when you inhale, it should. Your belly should expand as if you're blowing up a balloon. Then it contracts. Expand, contract. Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. Inhale, belly expands. Exhale, belly contracts. This is the core. And once you've learned it, and also it should be as slow as possible, as relaxed as possible. Your face should be relaxed, your breathing is relaxed. This is your time with yourself. And if you can do this, learn this, you have learned something that will change your life and give you more life to live. So now this is the way that you use this. Remember I said five minutes a day. It only takes five minutes a day to learn this. But the trick is, and not just learn this, but use it so that stress never turns into strain again for you. And that's what you're going to do, is every one to three hours, you're going to perform 60 seconds of diaphragmatic breathing. If you do it every three hours, which is what you do in ordinary circumstances, that means maybe 9 o' clock in the morning, 12 noon, 3 o', clock, 6 o', clock, 9 o', clock, you just take 60 seconds and you breathe. Deep, slow, diaphragmatic breaths. Deep, slow, diaphragmatic breaths. If you will do that, you will begin to change yourself. You'll begin to notice how you breathe, how you hold your body, the expression on your face, the muscle tension in your body when you're feeling deeply relaxed. You can even practice this just before you go to sleep. Feel what it feels like to be deeply relaxed. Then what is going to happen is that during the day, I would suggest taking setting an alarm on your wristwatch or your smartphone for every hour. If you're under a lot of stress, do this every hour. But under ordinary circumstances, every three hours. That'd be five times a day, five minutes. What will happen is that the alarm will go off and you'll start your breathing and you'll notice a lot of tension in your body. And as the days go past, you'll start noticing that tension even when your alarm doesn't go off. And you'll start automatically beginning your reintegrative breathing. The beautiful thing about this is that you are going to create a Pavlovian stimulus response loop between the stress in your life and the reintegrative response. The actual, ah, let me stop. I have to relax my shoulders, relax my face, drop my breathing. Let me spend 60 seconds breathing in this particular way. If you will do that, stress will actually start reintegrating you. You'll start making that change. Somebody's screaming at you, or you have something to do when you don't want to do it, or someone cuts you off on the freeway, and instead of raging, you breathe smoothly. You think, oh, that person must have been in a hurry. I wonder where they're going. Maybe their pregnant wife is in the backseat and they need to get to the hospital. Who knows what you have to do is to control the aspects of stress that lead to strain. And it's going to be things like galvanic skin response and pupil dilation and heartbeat rate and breathing rate, all these things, many of which are autonomic, but the doorway to affecting them is the breathing. You breathe smoothly, you breathe slowly, everything works out. So I beg you to try this. This is very real. This is a gift to you. It's called the five minute miracle. It combines ancient and modern technologies in a very, very usable way. It's very, very simple. Anybody can do it, and everyone should do it. If you'd like to know more about this approach that leads to mastery in multiple arenas, I would suggest that you go to firedance tai chi.com www.firedance tai chi.com or go to my website, www.stephen-barnes.com. you take care, and thank you so much for watching this. Bye.