The Hero's Journey

Hi, Steve Barnes here. And I think you can tell if you've been with me that I'm finally starting to get my office together. There's this life here. God, I've got some books back there and I've got some of my certificates up on the wall. And hope starting to. The house is starting to feel like a home, and this is really great. So I just kind of wanted to talk to you at the beginning of the week. And just as I'm working on myself and I'm working on aspects of my life and organization, I wanted to invite you to do the same thing. I wanted to invite you to take a journey with me, just as my students are, that a year from now, you're going to have mastery in your life in some arena that you are concerned with. It could be work, it could be your body, could be relationships. But I invite you to do that and to. In order to go there, you know, just remember that our definition of mastery is that you have unconscious competence at. At the basic skills that drive the activity that you care about. In martial arts, you're a brown belt, and you've committed to the path for a lifetime. In writing, you're doing, you. You've published a few stories that you understand the basic structure, you understand discipline, you understand those things, and you have committed to that path for a lifetime. In relationships, you understand that you are your partner. Viewed through a mirror, you are complementary. You balance each other. That person is the best you can do right now. I mean, just, you know, just enjoy, rejoice, feel a real sense of connection to that aspect of your life, and you know basically how to communicate. And you have committed to learning new things every day for a lifetime. As soon as you have the basics and you have committed for a lifetime, you're on the path of mastery. Okay? Mastery in that sense is a verb, not a noun, a vector, not a position. And once you are on that path and you've committed to staying on that path, you are as much on the path of mastery as anyone else who's ever been on it. Some people will be further ahead of you, of course, others will be behind you. But you have to concern yourself with where you are, with learning from those ahead and helping those behind you do that. You're on that path. So looked at that way, addressed that way, you can commit to mastering any arena of your life that you want. But I strongly suggest that you have one goal in terms of your career, one goal in terms of your body, one goal in terms of your relationship with Yourself and your loved one, your family, your community, the world. To have that kind of connection and commitment means that at every moment, you know what your motivations are. And when you know what your motivations are, it's easy for you to get yourself up in the morning, because you know what you're gonna do. You know what it is that you're gonna do today that is going to help drive you. So I want to talk this week about the hero's journey, which is the overall pattern that we use in life writing to describe the process of moving from one arena of your life to another. Now, we'll go into today. As I'm going to tell you, it's kind of an easy day for me. I'm not going to work out today. Didn't do much meditation today. I deliberately take Sundays off because taking one day off gives me a sense of, oh, I'm doing yoga, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. To a certain degree, the behaviors can mask the state. So if I go through a day where I am not doing these things, when I wake up tomorrow morning, Monday morning, I'm going to feel more natural. I'm going to feel more like, oh, this is how I feel. If I don't do those things right, it actually helps to increase my motivation, do them. Whereas if I do them all the time, I can get kind of a general malaise and a general sense of, well, this is just who I am. Well, it's not who I am. It is, well, God, how do I put this? It is who I am. If I look at who I am as a person who does certain things, that the person that I am does certain things every day, which puts me on a particular path, which allows me to accomplish certain things which take me in a particular direction. So the question is always, you know, am I on the path? Am I doing the things? Have I clarified the goal? Am I being the person? So on Sundays, I get to see who I am. If I'm not doing those things, if I'm not doing my morning ritual. And who I am is pretty much the same guy in many ways, except that when I wake up tomorrow morning, I will feel stiffer. I will feel stiffness in my. Probably my elbows, my shoulders, my low back, my knees, my hips, I will feel it not. It's not extreme. And then it gives me greater appreciation for God, greater appreciation for the person that I am, for the things that I do, for the lessons that I've learned, for the teachers who have shared with me, and that Appreciation, that sense of gratitude is itself a boost, you know, to start the week with a sense of gratitude. Oh my God, this is how I would feel if I didn't do these things. This is how it feels. So what are the things that I need to do this week? We're going to keep this relatively short because what I want very much is for you to feel that when you talk to me, when we share this time together, I'm giving you a little piece of the puzzle of how to build your morning ritual. Now, you're going to use tai chi or you're going to use some other movement system of your choice. It doesn't matter. What does matter to me is that you get the life that you want. You get to be happy. If the meaning of life is to be joyful and of service, if we take that as the meaning of life to be joyful and of service, that everything we do in life is connected there you say, well, does this make me happy? Does it serve the people around me? Is it part of a discipline that will take me in a direction that I need to go? Am I dealing with deep emotional things? Am I increasing the net amount of joy in the world? Am I helping people? Am I being a good example? Am I living in accordance with my dreams? Whatever it is, but remember, it all goes back to those things. Are you joyful and of service? Now, the concept of mastery in terms of those three arenas. Your body, your mind, your emotions, or your belly, brain, your heart center, your head center, you know, body, physicality, heart center, your relationship, starting with your relationship with yourself and your head, your map of reality, especially your hunting and gathering, your career, your money, in other words, very, very good measuring world in which money works the way it does, you better master that aspect of your life or you're going to have massive stress. At the very least, if success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal, the idea of providing more service to your community and having enough self love and self respect to demand to be paid what you're worth strikes me as being a very moral thing. And so when we work to increase those things, when I work to be a better writer, I just sold a couple stories recently and you know, each of those stories. Yeah, this is a good thing to talk about. You know, I never know what I'm going to talk about here. I just kind of go, you know, each of those stories. So let's say even just the most recent story. I had a gentleman had asked me if I would provide a story for an anthology and So I said, I don't even know if I've got an idea. But he said some very nice things to me. Oh, you know, you're one of the masters of the field. We'd love to have something. And, you know, I've got an ego, and it's like, okay, well, let me. You flattered me enough. Let me see if I can do something. I had no ideas. But if you go to our life writing podcast, lifewritingpodcast.com you'll see that our guest this week was the wonderful, magical Cassandra Peterson, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. And she was amazing. I mean, I just. Amazing. And I thought about what she had to say about her life as a horror show hostess. And I got an inspiration about a character, a character who. See, now, Cassandra Peterson has found a way to be happy, and she's had an amazing career. But I thought to myself, what if somebody was on that path and was not as happy for one reason or another? Can I connect this with something deep inside me, something I've experienced over the course of my life? The emotion was the thing I wanted to tap into first. That feeling that this is true and it has emotional resonance. See, ordinarily, when I've thought about stories, I think about the structure first. Oh, this is really a neat story. Wouldn't it be great to have this thing happen? Rather than, this is a fascinating character in a particular situation, or even, this is a fascinating thing that human beings deal with. This is something that I feel deeply about emotionally. Can I create a story that would convey this? And furthermore, I do it quickly. So if I start with a generative emotion, I go from that emotion to, well, who would this person be and what would their life situation be? And a story is about a moment when someone's life changes. So what would that moment be? And then what is the structure that I want to use? And the structure is always going to be related to the hero's journey, because the hero's journey is storytelling that it relates to what is it that we do in life in order to move from one place in our lives to another? And so, just very briefly, I'll probably be doing some things about this this week. You have a hero, a character who's confronted with a challenge. They often are very uncomfortable. They will try to reject the challenge. Then they accept it, and they start on the road of trials, which is just the stuff they do to try to solve it. They meet allies and gain powers. They have their initial confrontation with evil in which they are defeated. They enter into the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul is that moment when it feels like nothing you do is going to be enough. The dark night of the soul will trigger the leap of faith. Okay, now, the leap of faith is always one of three things. Faith in yourself, faith in your companions, or faith in a higher power. It's always going to be one of those things. It is going to be direct or implied. If you take that leap and you've done the other steps, then the next thing that happens is you confront evil again. In this time, you're victorious. If you take that step and you are victorious, the next step after that is that you move to the higher level. You return to the village with the elixir. The student becomes the teacher. This is the significance that you have finished one aspect, one cycle of your life, and moved on to the next. So what I would ask you to do is take three movies and think about how they relate to the hero's journey. Take three movies and literally break those things down. And they won't all be at the same time. They won't always be in exactly that order. They won't always be to the same intensity. Sometimes you can have an entire short story that just deals with someone not accepting the challenge. Or, you know, a very placid story could be just about the road of trials. People on a road trip doing things and getting to know each other. You know, the challenge could be external, be internal. The villain that they face, the evil they face, could be something outside themselves or inside themselves, it doesn't matter. But there are things that you want to do. I don't care whether it's learning how to ride a bicycle or learning how to be a loving human being. Learning how to tell the truth to yourself doesn't matter. We all have journeys, we all have challenges. And if you understand that, then the structure of a story relates to what you think the ethical structure of the universe is. How is the universe set up? Does the universe respond to our behaviors? The character is a reflection of what you believe human beings are. Who am I? What is? What is a human being? So even just a little story that I wanted to write quickly demanded that I ask questions to myself about what I think. My intent was what I think the universe is, what I think structure is what I think character is. Characters are what I think human beings are. Characters are more two dimensional human beings. That's all you know. Within a story, what a character does has to make sense based upon the information that you give people in the story. In real life, of course, human beings do things that often seem nonsensical based on the information you have, that they seem nonsensical because you don't have enough information. What human beings do always relates to basic human drives. But if you don't understand it, remember that it's not that the other person doesn't make sense. It's that you don't understand well enough yet. Now, people. That doesn't mean people don't do stupid things. They do. It doesn't mean that they don't do crazy things. They do. But the craziness and the lack of wisdom is actually part of what you have to factor in to understand. Oh, they were moving away from pain toward pleasure. And they misinterpreted this, and so they did this. Whatever it is that you do, make sure that you understand that when you don't understand people, it's not their problem, it's yours. So what I had to do then, what I chose to do, was to do a piece of flash fiction. I've got this story that I want to do. I understand the thematics. I have the core emotional burst. And that emotional burst thing. Got that from Tananarive. Okay. And I want to. I want to write it all in one sitting. So the idea then was write the first draft in one sitting. And the way to do that was to write it as a script. I often do that because a script just has quick scene descriptions, place settings, and it has dialogue and plot. And really, most of what it is is dialogue and plot. And if you do that, then, you know, in an hour of writing, I can easily do five pages. In an hour, I can do more than that. So it took me about two hours to write eight pages of script. And then I could look at that story. I could look at the script and kind of say, does it work? Does it. If the events flowed in this direction, does. Does it make sense? Do I believe in this character? Is the thematic intertwined? Is it saying something that I believe about human beings, about the way the world works? If those things are true. You know, one of the things that is true is that I have a lot of ideas because I have permission to come up with bad ideas. I have permission to come up with stupid ideas. And then, you know, you come up with a bunch of ideas, and then later on you take a look at, say, well, this one is good, this one is bad. This one is good, this one is bad. So if I race through a script that way, and I use a piece of software called Writer Duet. It's available free online. I can look at that script and start picking out the good ideas and bad ideas, but I can also put it aside for a day. Put it aside for a day. So that happened on. Call it Tuesday. I wrote that because we did the interview with Cassandra on Monday. And then I wrote the first draft in script on Tuesday. And then on Wednesday, I transferred the. The script. I, you know, did a copy and paste in a select all copy paste into the notes program on my Mac, which then stripped away all the formatting. And then I took it from there over to Google, Google Drive, to Google Doc, and I just plopped it into Google Doc. Then what I did was while I'm watching television, watching a movie, you know, just going into what's called second attention, where you. You focusing on one thing and while you're doing another thing. And this is good for brainless work, you know, you know, listening to a podcast while you're doing the laundry or something. So I would go through the script and I would strip out the. I would turn it into text. Turn it into text in the roughest way imaginable. I mean, it's not good. I don't worry about spelling, grammar, anything. But because I've stripped out the formatting, I also have to worry about the structure. Okay, you know that I'm not worried about paragraphs. I'm not worried about spacing, stuff like that. And I just went over it and turned it into very, very, very rough script. By Thursday, I could polish, not turn into rough script. It turned into text by Thursday. I then went over that. And we're just talking about investment of about an hour, hour and a half, two hours. I go over that and begin to polish it, get a sense. Does this work? Is this story working? And here's the thing that's kind of fun. If you write something as fast as you possibly can and you have your basics at the level of unconscious competence, in other words, you are on that road to mastery. You will find that what you come up with automatically and spontaneously is actually not bad. I mean, you kind of look at it and realize, oh, who came up with that? I mean, what Stephen King calls the boys in the basement, not your conscious mind, but your unconscious mind is working for you. And because of the reading that you do and the movies that you've seen and the conversations you've had, you understand structure and you understand thematics. You understand characterization and plot in a live sense. There's a part of you that really gets this stuff. There's another part of you that is the editor self always questions everything that you do. And with every story that I write, there comes a point where I wonder, is this story working? You know, have I lost it? Is this the time that it's not going to happen? That insecurity is just a result of the fact that you've read much more than you've written. So the part of you that can edit is stronger and smarter in some ways than the part of you that creates the original text. So it's like the part of you creates original text is like a little kid. And the part of you that edits is like your parent or teacher saying, that's not good. I don't like that. The grammar is bad. That's the wrong word, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. While the little kid inside, he's just trying to say, hey, I'm dancing, I'm cute. You know, this isn't this fun. So by Friday, I'd gone over it again, and I was ready for Tanada Reef to take a look at it. And she did, and she had some suggestions. She thought it was a good story. She thinks I'm absolutely heading in the right direction. I'm trying to increase the quality of my writing, and short stories are the best way to do that. You know, short stories, where you go to school, novels is where you get paid, or in my case, scripts, because I'm taking that shot in Hollywood. But I'm still working on short stories. Not because they make a lot of money, but because I get to play, I get to practice my skills, okay? And it's valuable. It's also I get to create something that is totally mine. I'm not concerned, I'm not terribly concerned with a whole bunch of people I've never met. Think about what I've done and how much they're going to change it before it gets on the screen. It's. It's pure. It's touching that part of myself that started this journey. So I hope you can see that I had a lot of motivations for doing this. You know, there's a little bit of money. You know, there'll be sushi money, as I call it. There'll be, you know, somebody appealed to my ego. There is paying attention to that little kid inside me that enjoys dancing and showing off. There is the part of me that wanted to express something that I felt when Cassandra Peterson was talking about her journey. There's a part of me that wanted to do other things. I tied some black history into the Situation, which is important to me because it doesn't. I did not read many stories that related to that when I was growing up. So therefore I did not have the, the wisdom, the knowledge, build a context for the world that I was seeing around me. So if I do that for my own younger self, then I'm doing that for some of the readers. If I'm primarily concerned with entertainment, then I know that people are going to enjoy it. It relates to my values, my inside, my motivations match the outside, the results that I get. I am being the person I need to be to do the things, to stay on the path, to get to the destiny. So that structure of the hero's journey, which I apply to both the writing and other aspects of my life, it's both the structure of the story and the organization of the way to write the story. And it's also the way I live my life. I look at what are the challenges that I need to take? What are the fears that I have around it? What commitments do I need to make, promises do I need to make to myself and to others? What, what journey do I need to get on? What's the road of trials ahead? What are the things that I need to do? What is the chop wood, carry water today? What is, what are the allies and powers that I need? Who are the people I need to talk to? What are the capacities I need to develop? What. When I do this, I'm going to hit the wall. There's going to be pain and fear and failure. Get over it. It's going to happen. It always happens when you're moving between one level and another. What resources am I going to need to get through that fear, get through that pain, get through that doubt? Get those resources now, in fact, every day I want you to build the resources that you will need to get you through the inevitable fear and failure and problems that you are going to face when you go out after your goal. That is what the whole Diamond Hour concept is. That's what we're doing when we're building the morning ritual where you're going to walk or dance or do Tai chi with me at www.firedance tai chi.com. but you're going to do something and you're going to take control of that first hour of your day, starting by taking control of just five minutes a day. So you know the five minutes a day, very simple. Every three hours, 9 o', clock, 12 o', clock, 3, 6, 9, stop and do deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing for 60 seconds. If you will do that, you are converting fear into energy. And you can take that energy and use it to lift yourself up so you can see the patterns of your life more clearly. You can understand the things that you're going to do to move in the direction you want. You make sure the things you want to do are things that make you happy. They're fun. Because remember, the meaning of life is to be joyful. End of service. So that every day you're taking another joyful step, but you're moving toward a destiny that's going to bring you even more joy still and enable you to be of service to your community. That's really all I want to say. Today I'm going to hang out with my family and go to the movies. Today is my day off, but I'm looking forward to a week of good hard work. I hope that you are too, in a context where you can feel grateful just for the strength to be able to do the work that enables you to express being the person who can do the things to stay on the path that will take you to your destiny. You take care. Of.