The Inaugural FIREDANCE Mastermind group meeting!

And I am, like, so happy to be here. And the biggest reason I'm happy to be here is that I have loved teaching these things in connection with Tai chi and fire dance and. And life writing and so forth for years. And I would get up early in the morning, oh, Leo's in the house, and we got Tananarive do My dear sweet wife, and Dennis Dickens and all sorts of people showing up. It's just wonderful. See, the whole thing is that. That I can teach life writing, you know, which is a conceptual structure. It's a really valid conceptual structure, but, oh, there's more people coming in. Isn't it great? Just like, I want to have this as a community, I want to do this once a month, you know, and any questions you have about Tai chi or anything else are all going to be answered because I want you to have a morning ritual, but you don't need Tai chi to do. I love Tai chi for it. I love it, love it, love it, love it, love it. But you can use the five Tibetans, which you can get totally free. You can. You can get the five Tibetans totally free online. Look them up. Works beautifully. But what I want is something where I can coach you, where you can ask me questions and I can answer. And now for the first time, I've actually got an office where I have enough space where if you ask me a question about a movement, I can actually demonstrate it. This. Huh. I'm hearing. I'm hearing. I heard a voice, I guess, you know, let's. I'm going to unmute people. As long as everybody is polite, which everybody is. Is being polite, I'm gonna. I'm gonna mute all first, and then I'm going to see about unmuting. What do I have to do, Ask all to unmute? So as long as everybody's polite, we don't have to unmute. You can go ahead and unmute yourselves, and we can have a conversation if it gets a little too rowdy. And, you know, being rowdy is okay. A little rowdiness is good for the spirit. We'll just mute everybody, and we'll choose people one at a time. We'll take people one at a time.

So I guess the limerick collection is off the table.

Well, it depends on the limericks. There once was a man from Nantucket. No, I'm not going to go any further than that. You know what they're like. So, you know, this is.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for coming. You know, I've been trying to figure out how do I, you know, if I teach tai chi classes or if I teach workshops or anything like that? I'm limited by my location, limited by my location. And I can't work with people every week, which is what I've wanted to do for so long. And it's like, how do I do this? Well, I literally did not have the technology and the understanding and the place all at the same time. And this is the first time I have. So God willing and the river don't rise. What I want to do is to every month, first Saturday of the month, I want to come to you and join with you. And Jan Holmes is here. I see. Jan, thank you. Jan is so wonderful to see you. I love you, honey. I really do. It's. It's a blessing to see you. There are people here who have been a blessing in my life. Not, not just friends, but a blessing. Because this path that we're talking about can feel so lonely because we're ask to be true to your heart, true to your soul. That means you can't always be true to what other people want you to be. You can't do that. Life can be like a Procrustean bed. And that's from a Greek myth, the king Procrustes. Every visitor that came through the house, he either put him on a bed, either stretched them out until they were his height, or he, if they were too tall, he lopped off their feet. Life will try to make you what other people feel comfortable with. And that's not your soul. Your soul is you, and it's only you. And it's never been anything but you. But in that way, it is the same as everybody else. So there is a way in which we can have tribe, but it isn't in trying to shape your ego to match what other people want. All I'm going to do here is to share with you. We'll go back and forth and we'll answer any questions that you have. Anything I can do, anything I can do for you, please let me know. I'm going to share. Before we go on, let's just kind of have people say hi. I'm going to go down this list and let people say hi. And you know, because of the technology, I actually get to run this very similar to the way I run Tai chi classes where I give an introductory talk about who I am. And then I kind of go around the circle and ask people who they are, what brings them here, what I can offer to them so that we understand each other. Just a Little bit better. So let's see. Well, Tananarive. Do I know who she is? So there's a Gurney man. Von Paradise. Who's that?

That's Tom. That's. That's the name of my Macintosh.

That's cool. How you doing, Tom? Oh, your sound went out, buddy. You know, your sound is out. Hit Ctrl A. No, sounds still out. Experiment with that. You can take a look down at the left bottom corner, and there should be a mute thing, a little microphone. And when you're live. Okay, try it again. Ah, your sound's still out. I got to move to the next one. See if you can get that fixed. Dennis Dickens. Dennis Dickens up in Spokane. Used to be an IT person. Do have some background in architecture and city planning. My college career overlapped with Weird Al Yankovic's career. Have you seen Weird? Yeah, yeah, I've seen that. I was thinking, you know, it's absolutely 100% accurate if you invert a whole bunch of things. Yes, yes. He is interestingly quiet about a few details, but he's genius. Brilliant. I'm so happy for him. He seems to be having a good life. Lauren Davidson.

Hello, this is Lauren. I'm down in Panama, where I retired somewhat over a year ago. I'm in your. I'm in your life writing program. And some decades back, I know we've been in the same room at either a lost FUS meeting or a lost con or some such, but it's been forever, and not remembering me is. Is fine. And dancing.

You seem familiar. I tend to remember context and energy more than names, so take no offense.

You know, and it's great if. If Jerry was in the room holding court, he drew in all the energy.

Anyway, there you go. Studio. Who is. Yeah, hello. Henry Lyles down in Atlanta, Georgia. I took the get out course offered online as well as the Warriors Journey. And I got email. Anything that relates to anything that you've gotten from us or anything that relates to the way the body, the mind, which is career and education and the map of reality or spirit and emotion. Because I look at spirit as emotion, as emergent, as spirit, as emergent from emotion. When we have love and we're coming from love, then we don't fear. And without that, the circle of our ego naturally expands. We begin to include people, and we begin to include reality to us. And so it's all the same. So anything that has to do with that and the way the path looks to me, that's all I can offer is the way the path looks to me and what I'm experiencing. And hopefully there'll be something that is of use to you. But please, if everybody would think about a question that you want to ask, which might include, you know, demonstrating a Tai Chi move or something from the five Tibetans or answering anything like this, please ask them. This is your time. I made this time just for you. I want nothing from you except to be with my brothers and sisters on the path. God, I want that so much. It's. It's. I am so happy. I just. Thank you so much for making Vicki Solomon. That's great. That is wonderful. Yeah. And so what can we do for you today, sweetheart?

I don't know.

I just thought it'd be fun to hang out with you. Fantastic. I think it's fun to hang out with you, too. Yeah, I read all your newsletters and. And I often get some pearls of wisdom from them. Well, let's open a few oysters, shall we? Yes, Jeff. Nice. Just kind of here to see what comes up, basically. Okay, that's perfectly good. And just know that I am totally open if there's anything you want to say or ask. There's no question that is inappropriate. I might choose not to answer one, but there's no such thing as a stupid question. And I. The more we can interact, the more we feel like we're all on this journey together on parallel paths. Nobody ahead of anybody else. Nobody knows where somebody else started, you know, but we're all traveling on this together, the better this is going to be. I feel totally comfortable being challenged on any of the things that I'm saying. In fact, if I'm not willing to be challenged, I do not deserve to be a teacher. So let's. Let's do this. And Jan Holmes, sweetheart, I hope you have some idea how happy my heart is seeing you.

I'm happy to see you. Too much to catch up on at another time. But what shows up on the screen is Jan Holmes. But I married a year ago. I'm now Jan Morris at the age of 81. I feel like I've really jumped off the edge into a whole new adventure.

Oh, fantastic. You and I will zoom and catch up. There is much to say, and you're one of the few people I could talk to who. Who understands some of the language that I have to use to discuss these things. So I really want to talk to you.

I just want to say that I've been following you, and I'm enrolled as Janice Morris in Fire Dance. And one of the main reasons is that I need the discipline. It's not my strength, and I'm getting a lot out of it. And so. And I'm not a community person. I'm very much a lo. But I decided that it was important to come on and see what the potential is here. So I'm really glad to be here.

Oh, blessings. The whole thing about. And we will. We will get back to that. We'll discuss Fire Dance. What I want to make sure of is that, you know, my intention here, although we talk about the products that we have, that's not what this is about at all. My intention is to voice these things and to make sure that every one of them is. Is available to anybody. Even if you got zero resources financially, this is not what it's about. As Swiftir used to say, the teachings are free. My time costs, but the teachings are free. My teachers gave me these things primarily just as a gift of love. So the only way I can be true to my teachers is to give them away from love. So, you know, I can take an hour or two hours on a Saturday. I can plan that and just have a party. So this is a free. This is. This is. This is a party. So. So don't feel shy about asking anything. But one of the things that's important about Fire Dance, Jim, is that if you just get the first couple of movements and let's say you're having a problem, you get to movement three or four, and it's like, oh, God, I can't remember. It doesn't matter. That voice in your head saying, I can't remember is not your friend. Your body knows. So if you just stay with the first couple of movements like this, like, for the first time, I'm going to be able to get up and actually demonstrate. You see my obnoxiously exuberant T shirt. Science fiction writer Ed Bryant. I woke him up early one morning and he was not happy. And I was so perky in the morning, and he said, you are obnoxiously exuberant. So I actually had the T shirt made. So let's say you're studying Tai chi. You're studying. Oops, get this out of the way. Say you're studying Tai Chi and all you know is this. If that's all you know, that's fine because you just do that until you feel a flow in it. And if you only have two moves, let's say all you've got is this. If all you had is those two moves, then you do this and you come back here. And you do it again. And you come back here and you do it again slowly, working on the breathing, working on posture, working on the uni of it. The mind focusing, allowing the whole idea in a chair. Qigong exercise is to focus your mind, your eyes, your movement, and your breath at the same time. And so any one movement out of the Tai Chi form could be done over and over again as a. As a qigong exercise. And observe the voice in your head. Observe the voice in your head that is telling you that that's not enough. That voice. That voice is what has stopped you from realizing that you already are on the path of mastery. You are already on the path of mastery. There's nothing out there. You've been on it since the first time you learned how to walk or talk or ride a bicycle or anything else. It's just moving from unconscious incompetence, where you don't even know something exists, to conscious incompetence like, I don't even know bicycles exist. Conscious incompetence is, I know bicycles exist, but I know I don't know how to ride one. Conscious competence moving across that line is, I can ride a bicycle as long as I pay full attention. And unconscious competence is, look, ma, no hands. And you have gone through that process thousands of times in your life. You already know how to master anything, master one thing, master 10,000 things. You have to go through that process. You have to remind yourself of what those steps are every time. Because your ego knows that if you learn something new that is profound, you will change, your ego will die. So what your ego tries to do is to get you to forget the process that got you there with other things. So that every time you face something new, it's like, oh, God, I don't know how to do it. That voice in your head is, you know, turn it into the. Into an ally in the sense that when I hear that voice, oh, that means I'm at the threshold of growth. How interesting that voice is there again. You might even give the voice a name. Like, my voice is Mortimer. When Mortimer shows up again, I know that I'm up against it. So this is an opportunity for us to grow together. Every one of us who shares, like Jan just did, openly and honestly lets us know we ain't alone. This is the process. This is all there is. Okay, let's see. Who is next? Michael Dobkins. Hi. Hello, Michael. What brings you here and what can we do for you? I'm in Corona, California. I'm just here because we're Going towards the end of the year and, you know, New Year's resolutions and nothing specific. So you're breaking a good idea in the middle of Saturday to kind of soak up a little positive vibe. You know something, that's great. I'm positive because my life is a blessing. And you understand me. I'm not saying it's good. I'm not saying I got my goals and stuff. My life is a blessing. I wake up every morning next to the most beautiful woman in the world. I get to work on my writing, which was a thing that the little boy inside me wanted to do when I was a kid. I get to. Even when it's frustrating and it gets frustrating, often I'm actually doing the thing I wanted to do when I was 10. I actually get to do that. In terms of martial arts. Jesus Christ. I mean, I don't really talk about it very much because if I talk about it, the fact is, if you just get a little bit better at something every week and you don't stop, you get into territory where people stop believing. And then once again, it's another thing that Swift Deer was talking about that you get to a point in your life where people don't believe what you've done. And I'm at that point, so I don't talk about it too much. But for you guys, I'm going to show you something. This is the last martial arts certificate I ever won. It's in accordance with the bylaws of the Black Karate Federation is with great honor that I, Steve Q. Muhammad, hereby confer upon Stephen Barnes the distinguished rank of professor, 10th degree black belt. I made it all the way through the system. All the way through the system. It took me 23 years. I just did the math recently and I realized. I thought it took 17 years. It actually took me 23 years to earn my first black belt because I was dealing with so much fear, so much confusion from having been bullied, not having my father there and doubting myself, and even worse, having the illusion that I was the only one who was afraid. I thought there was something wrong with me for being afraid. So if fear is an issue in your life, you know, raise your hand later on and we'll address that. This time is for you. It's just for you. And in giving it to you, I'm giving it to myself. Because we're all part of the same energy. We're all part of this, and we'll deal with that, too. By the way, the warrior arts are important because if you have the urge to open your heart. You first have to be sure that you are protected because there are predators in the world and everyone has a touch of predacious nature. And it is very difficult to resist taking a pork chop off the table if somebody leaves the pork chop there and turns their back. So I prefer to deal with people who are going to protect themselves because then I don't have to worry, control myself. I'm not a shark, but I have to know how to deal with sharks. I'm kind of a dolphin, actually. Dolphins can deal with sharks, but we have to do it together as a pod. So what I'm inviting you to be is a dolphin with me. You know, we're gonna be safe, we're gonna be on this journey, we're gonna have fun and we're gonna kick ass if that's what it takes. Okay, sounds good. Sound great. Because my goal is to facilitate the awakening of 1 million awake, aware adult human beings. And within our social circle, everybody, the average person knows about 600 people. Tananarive and I have, let's say about 150,000 people inside our social media bubble. That means that if each of those people will commit to awakening 10 people to being awake, as awake as they can, and that doesn't mean awake 100% of the time. And we'll talk about that. It means learning to recognize the difference between when you're awake and when you're asleep. That's all you have to do. It's like you get angry, you know, it's the hell beings. And hungry ghosts is something a term that came up just yesterday, a couple days ago with a teacher of mine from Buddhism that hell beings you know are stuck in anger and fear. Hungry ghosts are people who feel that getting things from the outside world is going to satisfy them. And you will never stop being hunger hungry. There is no end to your hunger if you think that the things you need are outside yourself. Once you begin to recognize, oh, I'm letting my fear drive me, or oh, I'm thinking that getting something from the outside is going to make me happy. As soon as you recognize that, you wake up a little bit. So what? All we want is it's not that you're not going to get angry. It's not that you're not going to be fearful. It's not that you're not going to be greedy. It's that you begin to recognize when you go in those states more often. We live here and we visit the land where we're beyond Those things. But once you start waking up at a certain level of reliability and rapidity, you start living there. And you only visit here, you only visit the land of the hungry ghosts. So that's when you have done that, you're on the other shore. So it's not perfection. You don't think the Dalai Lama, you know, gets up sometimes feeling cranky. You're. You're not aware. As long as we have bodies and we have egos, and as long as we have egos, it's going to say we want more, want more, want more. We have to wake up to the truth about what this path is. And that in many ways all there is is the path. There's no destination, there's no place to get to other than where you already are. And you begin to see the territory where you are differently. That's the only difference. After a certain amount of time, a certain number of years, a certain amount of workshops, looking at a certain number of models, you start seeing where they are all overlap and you get. Your head fills up with junk. My head is so full of junk. So tired of all the models, all the stuff I study, the neuro linguistic programming and the transcultural shamanism, the sweet medicine Sundance path and this martial art and that martial art and Ericksonian hypnosis and all these things, all of them being wonderful. All of them are models. Recipes are not meals. The menu is not the meal. What we want is the love, the satisfaction, the feeling that I'm living every day of my life with a certain amount of real satisfaction, real joy. The Dalai Lama said that the meaning of life is to live a joyful existence in service. To be joyful in service. So be joyful. Come from the place of joy. Ask yourself what you need in order to come from the place of joy. And then once you find that, realize that's what everybody wants and see what you can do about being of service. Service to others, willing to walk on the path and teach others. So it is a good thing to wake up. It is a better thing to wake up other people. It is an even better thing to wake up other people who are committed to waking up other people. That's how you multiply yourself. You teach teachers, you teach teachers. And you start by teaching yourself. You share where you are and you be as honest as possible. As honest as possible. The truth of who you are and who you have been in the journey is enough. It's enough. What if the world has lied to you and said that you weren't enough? And the Truth is that you were always enough. But you have to wake up to the illusions. That's the question. I want you to live it. Ross Merker, lord of plus one. Good. How are you doing, buddy? Unmute yourself. There you go.

Yep.

Better by the moment. Excellent. Excellent. And I'm going to want to. I want to see you here every month and I want you to keep going with fire dance so that I can coach you even from a distance. Ross is one of my favorite people. He is a real warrior. He has been dealing with no bullshit, real stuff. He's been dealing with the real stuff for years now. And he's at the point right now where he can teach. And just all you have to do is be honest and share your journey, buddy. And you know you've got it. Clarissa Walker. Hello, Clarissa. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I'm here because I'm a Tananari Steve Barnes fangirl. But then I got this link. Thank you. And I was like, oh, it's a zoom link. So I clicked on it and I came in here and you were sharing all of these things that were about to make me cry because it's like you're speaking my life. I definitely, I can definitely identify with what you were saying about fear in the location. Just recognizing that fear is. Can create a prison.

Yes.

The pieces of my vision that I have for my, When I, when I, when I felt like I got to a point where I was brave enough to have a vision or to put a vision together with the identities that I hope for, I feel like fear immediately started to build a prison and keep me out of the actions that would take me to the vision.

Absolutely. That's exactly what it does. Because if you do real work, if you engage with the real work, and I'm asking everybody here to have a physical discipline, even if it's just walking consciously and emotional discipline doesn't mean you have to be in a relationship, but yes, you are. You have to be in a relationship with yourself, with your own heart, with your own soul. Okay. And then career wise, that's just hunting and gathering. How do you solve problems to hunt and gather? Better build shelter, get food. I mean, the basic animal stuff. If you're working on all three at the same time, you are in the space of reality. You are in the space where things are really happening. And at that point, point, your ego knows that to the degree that your ego is based on illusion, your ego is based of the pieces, the definitions of yourself that you created over the course of your life. Every person who you ever interacted with wanted you to be a particular way. They wanted you to fit the model in their head that's good for them. If that person had power over you as a teacher, a parent, a cop, something like that, you might have to build an identity. Yeah, well, yes, officer. Yes, mom. Yes, dad. Okay. Yes, teacher. I know every one of those. They're not quite you. You know that Those are masks that you put on. But what happens if this is a bottle and say it was clear? Better still.

This.

My. My morning smoothie. This. If every one of the ego identities, the mask that you wear was a different postage stamp that I put on here. Over time, you wouldn't be able to see the smoothie anymore. It would be nothing but the stamps. And over time, you would begin to think that the stamps were the smoothie. Okay, so what we're talking about is stripping that away. That will terrify your ego. Your ego is the stamps. Your essence is the smoothie. So by stripping away the stamps, you get to see that beauty and, you know, taste it. Salud.

That's true of you.

Yeah, absolutely, Skull. Well, sure, Skull. It's got ice in it. So. So up and down your kilties as my grandfather. So that's great. And we can deal specifically with. With fear if you want to. Like I said, it took me 17 years. No, 23 years to earn my first black belt. I did the math. I found my first black belt certificate was like, oh, my God. That took me longer than I thought. That's a lot of mess. And I remember I was dealing with so much fear. But we'll talk about that. Let me get to everybody and we'll talk about that and we'll come back to anything that needs to be addressed. And as long as you guys have questions, I'm going to try to stay on here. And if. If one of you had showed up, we would have done an hour of one on one, you know, because, like, it's. But. But the more of you there are, the bigger the party gets. Eventually we have the technology to have 10,000 people on here. And so we'd. If we had. If we had a lot more people, we'd have breakout rooms and I'd have people who, you know, people like Russ and people like Jan, if she would. Who can. Can talk in the breakout rooms. Because you know me, you know what I'm up to, you know me, flaws and all. I've got huge, dripping, gaping flaws. I'm just getting better at steering around the Potholes, that's all. Alex Rojas. Hey, Alex, how you doing, buddy? Alex.

Oh, hi.

Hi. So tell us a little bit about yourself and what brings you here.

Well, to be honest, I'm here just simply because I just been following you for a while, you know, and I've taken, you know, a lot of things that you said to heart, you know, like, and they become, like, part of my life, like the morning ritual, the five minute miracle, you know, just. And they've really made a significant, you know, impact on, you know, just how I live, you know, my life daily, on a daily basis. And it's just so, you know, anytime I see you, you know, have a meeting or something, you know, I'm there, you know. But I want to learn more stuff from you.

Absolutely. And it's good to learn things. More important is to use it. And the morning ritual and the five minute miracle, which we'll talk about today. Once again, we're going to give this stuff away to you. This is, you know, this is not a stealth sales meeting. The sales stuff is right up on the surface. Go to www.stephen-barnes.com and you'll learn about all the that stuff. But right here is for people who are already engaged and are applying it. So let me take a, you know, let me get in. Let me share my screen. Well, I got one more person to go, and then I'll share my screen. We'll get started. Because the most important thing is just me saying, hi, thank you so much for being here. I just, it just makes my heart so happy to be able to look at each and every one of you and say that you matter to me. I'm so glad you survived the pandemic. I'm so glad that you're, you're one of the people who's aware that the world has a lot of illusions. And it's so easy to get trapped. It's so easy to get trapped. And the best thing I could do is have brothers and sisters who understand my intent and say, Steve, you're off the path. Steve, you're not living your word. Steve, think about who you are. My commitment is to being the best husband, best father, the best teacher, the best writer that I can be. And anything less than that is disgracing my teachers and the people who rely on me and trust me. Diane Osborne, how you doing? Hello. How you doing?

Hello.

And Vicki.

Hi. Vicki's from the background. I can, I've been trying to connect with Vicki in the East Bay for a while, and I'm down here in LA and I get your ping 40 minutes before the thing and I'm hustling to get back to where I have my five.

He just poked his head in there. That right there is my son. My gigantic, brilliant.

That's a young adult. That's a human being. That's no longer a munchkin. Dude, I am so impressed.

Every morning when I wake up, one of my first thoughts is, what can I do today for Jason? What can I do today to inspire him, to be with him, to be the man who can be a father to that kid? It is an honor and a privilege to be able to do that. And to each and every one of you, what can I do to be sure that I am being a true teacher or just a true guide along the path or a true friend? So. So we've said other people might come in, but let's kind of get started with some ideas that I want to cover today, that I want to deal with today. And I need to do this. I need to share my screen. I need to make this a little bigger.

Greetings to everyone and thank you for joining in this message. I am so glad that Steve is making it available and everybody can join in. I've got people flocking in, trying to come back from the beach and various things to join in to this last minute.

Zoom.

Okay, we're gonna do a portion. I'm going to put this up here.

Hi, everybody. Before it goes up, my son wasn't.

Did you have fun at the World Fantasy Convention?

We were not there this year. It'll be next year.

Okay. No, you were at the World. Were you at worldcon?

Work on.

Yes.

Okay.

You were worldcon. I'm going. I know. I. I'm sorry. I'm distracted. A thousand ways to Sunday. I saw you guys on the virtual and thought you were awesome. Thank you for being there.

Thank you very much.

Okay, so can everybody see that? What are you seeing on your screen?

Fire Dance www Step.

The buy in is. Can you give me five minutes a day? Can you give yourself five minutes a day? If you can, I swear to God, I can get you on this path. Just five minutes a day. And all you have to do is learn how to do diaphragmatic breathing. If you will learn how to do diaphragmatic breathing. That's reverse of what most people do. When you inhale, your belly goes out. When you exhale, your belly comes in. And if you will do that, you can practice this by laying on your back. Put a book on your Tummy. And when you inhale, the book goes up like expanding a balloon. When you exhale, the book goes down. That single thing is where we begin. Once you've. So let's, let's take a look at that. Like I said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop, stop the share. I'll get back to it. But once again, because I have this beautiful office which my wife found. My wife found this house, let me tell you. You know, it's. She, she, she did a miracle in terms of getting us from a house that we did not like as much to one where I can share with you this way. And, and it's, you know, I'm having you all over for a party right now. So the inhalation part of the cycle, this goes out. Inhale, exhale, goes in. Inhale, exhale. Just try that for a couple minutes. That's anti stress breathing. Just put your hand on your tummy right now, please, everybody do that. I can see you. Don't try to cheat. Put your hand on your tummy. Inhale, expand, exhale, contract. You might notice that when you inhale, it's your chest that expanding or your shoulders that are coming up. That's stress breathing. Under stress breathing, your chest is tight, your belly doesn't move, your shoulders don't go up or your shoulders go up. If the beginning of real breathing is your chest stays the same, your shoulders stay the same, and your belly goes in and out as your diaphragm expands. That's the way it begins. The truth is that you also have three part breathing where your diaphragm, then you feel it up here, and then you feel it up here. That's okay too. But let's start by being sure that you're breathing properly. That. Inhale, exhale, Inhale. Exhale. Inhale, exhale. Okay, now here's the trick. Once you learn how to do this, you set your timer, your smartphone, or your watch for every three hours. And when it goes off, you just spend 60 seconds breathing diaphragmatically. That's it. Every three hours. You do that for 60 seconds. This is what classically trained singers learn to do at the beginning of their studies. It's probably why I'm still alive. Absolutely, absolutely. This is. You can find this discipline. Every baby in a crib knows it. You can, you can, you can learn this in martial arts, in qigong, in. In singing, in yoga. Find a teacher, someone to put their hands on you and feel that movement so that you really get it in your body, okay? That breathing pattern is central to Tai Chi, for instance. That's what we're doing. So Tai Chi in many ways is just a proper breathing, proper joint mobility, drill that is patterned. There are ways in which that's all it is. There are other things that have to do with energetics and so forth, but in many ways, that's all it is. So what you have is something that challenges your ego because it is complex. 108 movements, all this. I'm supposed to do this and breathe this and do this because you have forgotten the path of mastery. You let yourself get spun by the complexity. Whereas what you really want is to embrace the complexity, embrace the confusion, and kind of say, how can I find relaxation in the midst of this? I'm traveling down a river on the. You know, there are rapids, there are rocks. I just have to keep my. Have to keep my. My canoe in the water. That's all I have to do. Flow around the rocks. Yes, the rocks are there. The fear is there. The anger is there. The disappointment is there. The desire is there. There's a hungry ghost that wants more.

And more and more.

You know, there's a hell being that is, you know, connected to anger. That's interesting. I'm not going to touch it. I'm going to observe it as I keep my canoe in the water. Just do that. Just keep your canoe in the water. Go through the rocks, and the smaller your ego is, the smaller the canoe is and the easier it is to keep it in the water. It isn't that you have not had these wounds. It is not that you've not had these issues. Of course you have. You cannot, you literally cannot make it through life without getting wounded without that stuff coming in there. What you have to do is to understand that no matter how, you know, you can fill a beaker with sand and there's still room for water. If you do the fantastic voyage thing and get down into a little micro submarine, you're traveling in the water in between the grains of sand, and that allows you to live your life even when there is confusion. And once you start that process, you're not letting fear stop you anymore, and you get to move to the next level. So let's share the screen again. I've just got some. Some fun stuff for you. Okay, so you're. You're breathing, and you go on www. You go to YouTube and look up Diaphragmatic Breathing, and you'll find lots of videos on it. And you look at several of them, and you practice this a little Bit every day. You can practice it as you're going to sleep, but remember, the trick is to do it during the day five times. And there is a tremendous amount of technology and there is a lot of, you know, from. From both Western and Eastern science about why it works. 5 minutes done 1 minute at a time, scattered through the day is probably more valuable than 20 minutes done all at one time. Because you are actually interrupting the process of going into a stress spiral that when your alarm goes off, you might find, oh, I'm in the middle of an argument. Oh, I'm doing my bills. And you start breathing properly and you'll notice, oh, my shoulders are tight, my chest was tight, my face was tight, you know, let me relax, you know, and when. If you relax, then you realize, okay, this is just life. I'd rather be a human being paying the bills than a rabbit in the woods worried about hawks and foxes. This is the path. So I'm going to share the screen a little bit differently so that I can get this to you. Let me see if I can do this. Okay. I should be able to do this, right? Okay. If this is working. Okay, so if you can't quite see it, you can look. This is another thing you can look up on Google Images. David Hawkins is the map of consciousness. And all the things I give you, I want them to be things you can look up for yourself so that you have many teachers and you can look and see what they're all saying and where they all overlap. That's a really good way to see how does this match my experience if I'm in a meditative state? You go deep into a meditative state, and you'll understand where the anger and the fear and things are. But you also can feel the love, which is why heartbeat meditation, listening to your heartbeat, feeling your heartbeat, is such a powerful tool. But this map of David Hawkins was pointed out to me by one of my teachers, a wonderful guy named Tim Piering, just a couple days ago. And starting at the bottom, if you can read that, you'll see shame with a associated emotional state of humiliation and a view of life that is miserable. You're down here at the bottom. This is like 20, you know, on a scale of a thousand, okay, going up to guilt apathy. Now these are at the absolute bottom. You're just. You're just paralyzed. And this often comes from letting your ego go into the negative state. That hungry ghost part of you that wants more and more. In this case, it wants more and more enlightenment. And it says, well, There's a gap between me and where I should be and that makes me a bad person. Without realizing that bad people don't even try. Bad people aren't even trying. That if you feel like there's something wrong with you because you're not evolved, that means you actually have your path on the right shore. Next after that is the is desire, fear and grief. That's the orange section. Desire, fear and grief. Now I like to say that fear is the base emotion and these other things are versions of fear. Now it's not that that is true. Words are never true. Models are not truth. They're a way to try to understand truth. The level above that, you're starting to wake up. Anger, pride and courage. So you get angry as a way of mobilizing your fear. So when you see angry people, remind yourself that anger is a mask over fear. Anger is a way you mobilize fear. They are going into anger so that they don't get paralyzed and stay down here in apathy and shame. Anger at least gets you going. The level above anger is pride. It may not be wonderful, it may not be evolved, but it's more evolved than this stuff down at the bottom, the apathy, guilt and shame. Courage gives you the ability to say, I am afraid and I will do it anyway. I have sinned, but I have within me the capacity to grow and to heal, to have the courage and the confidence, the commitment to believe that we can change, we can evolve, we can grow. This is critical. This is critical. And doing that takes you out of the red and the orange and the yellow and moves you up to the neutral position where you are looking at life as it is without any particular judgment. You're just kind of in the middle of it in terms of moving through life the next step according to this scale. Once again, these are just words to help you to understand the markers along the path. Willingness. Are you willing to go forward? Are you willing to take action? Are you willing to accept discipline? Are you willing to teach others? Acceptance means that you look at your wounds, you look at your failures, you look at the world as it is. You accept it all, you forgive. That's the associated emotional state. And the view of life then is harmonious. You are starting to move into non dualistic state thinking. You're starting to. You're not there yet. Reason is the next level. You're starting to engage your rational mind to help you to look at the path of moving towards evolution, moving towards awakening. And you're, you're asking questions like Is it true? So that you can, you know, the epistemological part of your brain can say, is this true? How do I know that it's true? Why do I believe that it's true? The associated emotional state is understanding. And your view of life is that everything is meaningful, everything has a meaning. I may not understand it, I may not approve of it, it may not be in alignment with what I wish were true, but it's all happening for a reason. In the natural world, everything happens for a reason. If you don't see the reason, that's not the world's fault. That's it. You have not been able to look deeply enough, or you have a desire about the way you wish the world was. And you're letting your desire about the way you wish the world was stop you from seeing the world as it is beautifully. The next step beyond reason is love. Once you can understand meaning, in some ways it's understand that I, you know, to know that you don't know, you know, I forget who the philosopher was. It says that the only thing about me is that I know that I don't know. That's what makes me wise. I think with Socrates, and that's that I'm the wisest man, because I know I don't know. So understanding and understanding that the world has meaning, whether or not we grasp that meaning gives the world significance and we have a reverent view for the world, everything is as it is. Everyone is doing the best they can. And when you can forgive yourself for doing the best you can with the resources you have, you then can say that everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have, and you can forgive. Now I'll tell you the honest truth. Down here you see fear. So if you are too open and too loving and too forgiving, you can attract predators. So it's critical to wake up your survival drive first. So that's what I had to do. I had to spend, you know, 50 years in the martial arts to be convinced that, okay, I can defend myself under any ordinary circumstance. Let me forget about the bullies. Let me forget about the fact I didn't have a dad. Let me forget that I was worried that I was too feminine and too small and to this and to that, and let myself be what I am. Who is Steve? What is true about Steve? To accept who I was and where I was allows me to live with joy. Now I am happy to be in the world every day. Problems and all that. I have problems because I have embraced the World, world that the problems. You know that Frederick Nietzsche said, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. Not quite true, Freddie. It's that which does not kill me that is within my body. Minds capacity to adjust healthfully to it makes me stronger. If you take too much stress, more stress than your body mind can handle in your emotions can handle. Your mind can handle your body. Now you break down. If you don't get enough stress, you break down. You're a couch potato, you'll break down. But if you get, if you get just enough stress then you can stay in the zone flow state which is the door to genius. Because all you, the only thing about genius that I will admit that is it's focus over time, you focus on something long enough to get there. I mean the way I put it is that you folk, you find a valid path with a good teacher and you stay on that path long enough to get gray hair. You know, That's, you know, that's basically what it is. And understanding that allows you to let go of your preconceptions and now you can be at peace. And that associated emotional state of bliss and the view of life is that things are perfect as they are. There can be few things harder than holding this state in under stress. Somebody is yelling at you. There's a political argument, there's an election. Oh my God, those people, you know what? Those people are terrible. And you realize that this fight over the polarities of the warrior versus the lover, the male versus the feminine, the black versus white, whatever this versus this, that has been going on since the beginning of time, to be able to understand that your, your joy in the world is not dependent on what's happening outside you. Viktor Frankl said, find his quote, find his quote. Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, a last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. When you decide that you are going to control your internal world, you have taken a step to the other shore. And enlightenment then is a word for the state that exists beyond dualism. And it is difficult to put your finger on because words depend upon shared references. And only people who have gone beyond the non dualistic state understand what that state is. So it's nothing special. In some ways it's the removing of the illusions. In many ways it's not being able to levitate. It's not never losing your cool. It is actually being with your existence, accepting it, loving it. And that means eventually that you are with the existence of others, accepting them as souls, loving them, even if you don't accept their behavior, you don't have to accept their behavior, but loving them, you know, hate the sin, love the sinner. It's kind of along there. So let's kind of stop for a minute and let's see if there's some questions, anything that's, you know, I love talking. I can talk all day long, but I'd rather be in conversation. So raise. I think that you have a hand raising capacity so I know who to call on. Or you can just raise your hands on screen.

I have a question.

Why yes, sweetheart?

I think it's a little bit of a cheat that I'm married to the teacher because it, it is very helpful, obviously, when I'm not feeling too shy to come up and ask for personal instruction. But I love your little pieces of guidance. And one of the most helpful things I try to remember when I was getting tripped up in my Tai Chi form and trying to like stressing over what's the next pose, was what you said about, is it called the bear, just going sort of back and forth.

The concert bear.

Right.

Okay, go ahead. You finished?

Well, all I wanted to say was I did find it tremendously helpful, even if I couldn't remember where I was supposed to land, to at least start the movement in the other direction to help my body remember what to do.

Yes. So I would love it if you.

Would talk to that about that.

Absolutely. First of all, when you get into the Tai chi enough, you'll realize there's a contraction. You're moving in one direction into the, you've gone as far as you can in that direction. Then the form tells you to go in another direction. Eventually what you look for is I'm compressing here. In what direction do I then release to get to the next step? And that leads you to the place of feeling. Like there's something within you that's like water that is swirling around. It swirls in this direction, it hits a wall and then it moves in this direction. Oh, isn't that interesting? And it all starts becoming natural. And the fast is once you get to that point, whether it's catch the bird's tail or you know, embrace tiger, return to my. That doesn't matter as much as am I in the flow. So you, you get out of your head. Now, just recently, this was just within the past two weeks, there was a gentleman named Robert W. Smith, who was the first westerner who went deeply into the Chinese martial arts. And he wrote a bunch of terrific books. About it. And in one of those books he taught, actually in several of them, he talks about the greatest Tai Chi master that he ever encountered, which is a man named Chin Man Ching. Chin Man Ching. And Chin Manchin was supposed to be, you know, from Robert W. Smith's position, the best of the best of the best. So looking him up on YouTube would be very profitable. But in and in researching chin manching, I came across something where he said that 80% of the benefits of Tai Chi can be found in a single exercise he calls the constant Bear. It's one of the Qigong exercises. And because it's so simple and because you can practice it anywhere, standing in line at the bank, you know, while you're cooking anything, like, it's really interesting. And you could actually load this into your five minute miracle time, that instead of just breathing, passively sitting, what if you did 60 seconds of constant bear? Now you're cooking. Now you're starting to understand what the potential is here. Because you do that and you tap into something the Russians call neurosynaptic facilitation, which means that if you have an hour to practice piano, you're going to learn piano much faster if you divide it into five 12 minute segments than if you try to do it all in one chunk. Much, much faster. Okay, so let's take a look at the constant Bear exercise. Pretty cool stuff. Okay, so you're just kind of standing there, right? And your feet are approximately shoulder's distance apart. And let's say you turn, you always, you turn from the hips. I turn. I'm going to sink my weight to the right, sink my weight to the right just a little bit because it's always 51, 49, 51, 49, one or the other. So you never want to be completely double weighted. Because if you're double weighted, you have to shift before you can move. And you just lost a beat of time. And combatively. Tai chi is about being able to be in the moment. So the moment happens, you move through it. If you poke a hole in a bucket, water doesn't wait a second before it starts coming out. It just comes out. So you be like, watcha, my friend. So you sink a little bit over here. So my weight is weighted to 51%. And now I turn my hips, and I turn my hips so that I'm facing in one direction. But I notice now, see, notice I lost it. I didn't have my. I need to keep my shoulders over my hips. My back is facing this direction. You see that? So All I do, once my hips are turned as far as they can go, I now sink with my left foot. I don't push off the right foot. I sink with my left foot. So I'm going to sink here, and as I sink, I'm going to float in this direction. Once I get as far as I can go, and you experiment with this as to how far can I go and still be comfortable. Now I turn my hips again so I'm facing in this direction and my back is to this direction. And now I sink on my right foot and I float over this way until I move, until I get as far as I can. And now I turn again so I'm facing this way, my back that way. And I repeat this, I sink on my left. Remember, do not push off the other foot. Sink on this foot. It's about letting gravity do it. I sink, sink to the left, turn. I sink to the right. Relaxed as possible. Employ all the Tai Chi ideas. Head held as if by string from above, spine erect, eyes soft, turn, sink.

Turn.

Sink.

Like that. Just that gentle movement done over and over and over again is according to the man who might be the greatest Tai Chi master that we know of. By the judgment of one of the greatest scholars on the subject, that single thing gives you 80% of the value. So there is no excuse. Anybody can do that, because you're staying within what you can do. If you have a sore hip, you have this, you're staying within what you can do. Your pain should never go above a 2, maybe a 3 if you're a little bit of a masochist. But on a scale of 1 to 10, your pain doesn't go above a 2. So you move to the point where I'm beginning to experience just a little bit of discomfort. I don't care if you're only turning an inch, and then you sink, and then you turn the other way and then you sink. Now, think about combining that with the breathing. What we know about the breathing, and you have a very simple exercise which conducted with full consciousness, will have profound results. Because every stress in your life will impact your breathing, your posture, or the quality of your movement. If it does not impact your breathing, posture, or the quality of your movement, it isn't going to have any negative effects on you. This is why lie detectors work. Because the stress of fearing of being discovered will affect your breathing. The shallowness of your breathing, your skin conductivity, your pupil dilation, your heartbeat, right, your heartbeat rate. If it doesn't have a physiological impact, the lie detector Cannot pick it up. If you can stay relaxed under stress. If you don't grasp that that is the greatest gift that martial arts have. Somebody's trying to hit you in the face, and you stay relaxed enough to see what's happening and to move smoothly one way or the other. Or on yoga, there is this very stressful position. How do I move into this position and keep my breathing smooth? If the breathing stays smooth, you'll never hurt yourself. Before you hurt yourself in a yoga pose, your breathing will start going. That's because your ego made you want to try to imitate that cheerleader standing in front, sitting in front of you in line, who's thinking about her boyfriend while she turns herself into a pretzel. I don't care if you can only move 1 inch toward your leg. If your focus is completely there and you're relaxed.

Hey, honey, can I throw in an anecdote there?

Please do.

When back in the day. I'm gonna date us here. When Billy Blank still had his Taebo studio in Los Angeles, which I think is going back maybe 20 years now.

The only time I was standing in front of us.

What are you doing?

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Did you see him just take my story?

I'm sorry.

Well, the point is, the only time I ever hurt myself during Taebo was actually in the studio, in part because there was no stretching beforehand, but in part because it's exactly what you were saying. I was trying to keep up with freaking Jamie Lee Curtis, who was right in front of me and who was very limber and very energetic, and, yes, I pulled a muscle that took months and to heal. All right, that's my start.

Yeah, And I apologize, sweetheart. I. I do that.

No, that's okay. You guys.

Don't let me get away with that, sweetheart. Don't let me do that.

You got excited.

Yeah, I do.

All I can think about is now I want to watch Halloween.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Anyway, so. So that's. That's cool. So we've covered a bunch of stuff here, and let me solicit some more. Somebody else have to put their hand up and ask me something so that I can tailor what I'm trying. I don't want to do an information dump on you. What I want to do is to engage with you. So who has a question for me? Diana.

Yeah, let me. Let me unmute. I think I'm muted.

Yeah, no, you. I can hear you.

Okay. Is there any advantage or disadvantage towards doing the diaphragmatic breathing more often than just periodically. As Vicki probably knows, being a singer and I know from my practice, I do the diaphragmatic as often as I can. It simply grounds me and keeps me centered. So is there a disadvantage to it?

No, you do it. You do it more often because you are unusually intelligent.

Well, I do it because otherwise I'll be bouncing off the ceiling. You know.

That's right. That's right. You've got. Your energy can be chaotic. So what you. Is bring your energy down. Other people might be too lethargic. What they'd want to do is bring their energy up. So you're staying in. In the right zone. The fact is that if you practice this enough, you'll be doing diaphragmatic breathing in your sleep. What you want to do is to move it to the level of unconscious competence. So the more often you do it, the better off you are. Now, are there even deeper levels beyond that? And absolutely are. Ross is talking about four square breathing. Fantastic. If you go to a teacher, a qigong teacher, and they give you a specific exercise, you know, reverse, that seems to be reverse of that. As long as it's a good teacher, follow what they're saying. There are many, many higher levels, but this is just a doorway that everybody can get through. That's all. If you can find a teacher, you know, actually, the most important thing is to be conscious of breathing. That makes you feel good when you stop making. It makes you feel better after you stop. So, you know, you feel more relaxed, you feel more centered, you feel more present, you feel more. I am. Your every breath is answering the most important questions. There are. Which are who am I? And what is true? Who am I? I am who you know. I am a being who is alive. What is the meaning of life? It's simpler. It's. It's so simple that most of us can't grasp it. The meaning of existence is to exist. The meaning of life is to live. Now, you can then ask, well, what is the best life? The Dalai Lama said, it's to be joyful and of service. Oh, okay. So primarily it's to stay alive. So that's where our survival drives come in. If I'm not feeling threatened, then I get to ask the next question. I'm not running from a predator. I'm not having to hunt for my food. What is the best way to live? It is to be joyful, to find a way to be happy. And then once I've done that and My fear begins to diminish, my circle expands, and I begin to include other people. And then the best way to live is to serve. Helping them be joyful so that they will in turn feel safe. Remember, helping them feel safe first, you know, so get in touch with that survival drive. No question about that. But after that, open your heart. My spiritual teacher, Sri Chinmoy said that there are two ways to awaken the kundalini. And kundalini is just a way of discussing what happens when you have the different aspects of yourself in alignment. They're not fighting each other anymore. You can awaken your Kundalini from the heart space out or from the core base chakra up, but you never awaken it from the head down. Doing that creates an image of the world that you have not tested. Okay? And there is nothing that is more frightened than a person who has an image of the world. A political or an economic theory that they have never been able to test. And they're saying, well, why doesn't the world follow me? I know I'm smart. Everybody's smart enough to talk themselves into believing the. They say we're all smart enough to do that. You know, be around a con suite at a science fiction convention, and you, you will hear all these brilliant people spouting all these wonderful ideas that have no grounding in the world. If you start with reality, then it's, you know, you're dealing with. With realities like gravity. You know, what is, what is true. Well, gravity is true. Who am I? I need air. You know, or you can open your heart with love, because at the core of it, you can take the most twisted, evil, violent person in the world, and if you satisfy their genuine needs enough that they're no longer in fear. Anger is fear. What you will eventually learn is all they ever wanted was love. And they're going about it in a perverted, twisted, damaging way. And whereas it is true that we should have compassion for them, it is also true that there are people who are so warped that you cannot help them, that you might regretfully have to do something about that in that moment. If someone is coming at me with a knife, this is not the time for me to be thinking compassionately. This is a time for me to primarily defend myself. But after I've defended myself, if I have neutralized the threat and I'm no longer in fear, can I then be compassionate? Can I then give them a chance to learn? Can I create a lesson from this so that this hungry ghost, this hell beast, can be calmed and Nurtured. Because at the core of it, all he really wants is a hug, you know, and you come at me with a knife and the hug is probably going to be rather abrupt, if you understand what I mean. So.

And speaking. Speaking to your. You talked about politics and economics as that being the big reality check.

As a big reality, I'm down here.

In LA with a friend helping them with a reality check of. I'm doing this because my partner is so kind. It's like your partner's behavior is endangering your well being. That's not kind.

That's right.

Kindness and love. Kindness enough does not put you in the path of danger or destruction. So whatever they call it, if the action does not match the word.

That's right. That's exactly what, you know, disconnect. Sometimes we don't love ourself enough to take care of ourselves. So a very useful question is, if you had a child who you loved with your whole heart, would you want them in that relationship? Would you want them to be treated that way?

Yeah.

If one of the things that one of my wonderful teachers, Dawn Callan, just. I miss her so much. But she taught these workshops. Awakening the warrior within. Jan, I think you, you went through that workshop. We got you in that workshop. And her thing, her thing was that if you were defending a child, if you imagine, imagine defending a helpless child, someone attacks you. How hard would you fight to defend that helpless child? If you would fight any less hard to defend yourself. You have work to do. Someone has damaged your connection to your own soul. Someone has told you that you are less precious than the stars. Anyone who ever told you that is lying to you understand that clearly. Anyone who, who tells you that you are worth less than the helpless child that you would fight to the death to defend has lied to you. And you need to wake up from that lie. You start with a 100% commitment to walk this path in life with beauty and power. And anyone who tries to take any either of those is not your ally. They are not your friend. They have lied to you, even if it's you, even if they got into your head. And those voices are saying, I don't deserve to be fighting for, to be fought for. I don't deserve to be protected. I don't deserve love. Ask yourself, where did I learn that crap? Where did that voice come from? You are precious. You are ineffably precious. When I said how happy I am to see every one of you, that is what I mean. To be surrounded by human souls. Each of you beautiful on the path of your life, warts and all. There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the human soul. And when I interact with you like this, it is the greatest honor of my life that you trust me to do it. I would do anything to stay in a place where I can honestly communicate to you, where maybe one thing I say here wakes you up just a little bit so that the rest of this day is beautiful. Because if you can live one beautiful day, you have a standard by which you can measure your weeks. If you can live one beautiful hour, you have a standard for the rest of the day. If you can live one beautiful minute, you know what your hour should be. And that means that every breath, every heartbeat has the capacity to transform your life. If you just understand every single one of them could be the key that a match, a single match, can light an entire forest on fire. All you have to do is bring yourself to it honestly and understand you deserve joy. It's like in. In my writing, one of the reasons I love Tananarive is I start my writing with a pattern, A there she is. There's my baby. I start my writing usually from an idea. She starts hers from a feeling. She starts her writing from feeling. And I'm going to be honest with you, I'm good at a lot of different things. So this is not blowing smoke up her skirt. She is better than I am. She's better at this because she is congruent. The line between her feelings, her action, the body, her feelings, her heart and her mind. The structure is strong, and I think her parents helped to create that for her. Her mother was a tiger boy. I like to tell people the story about the first time I met her mom. She had a restaurant in Miami. First time. And Tananari slides into the booth. Her dad slides in across the table. I slide in, her mom slides in right across from me. Nothing is said at the table. She looks at me and she says the first word she's ever said to me. She says, well, I'm not impressed by you at all. And I look back at her and I said, it's not your job to be impressed by me. It's your job to protect your daughter. And in that instant, we knew each other to honor. We've had a tiger for a mother, a warrior for a father. We all deserved to be protected and loved like that. And if you were not, then this is your call to be the mother, the loving mother that you should have had, the protective father you should have had to Both be loved beyond any question, but also discipline. Get on the path. Get back up. Keep going. And mom saying, I believe in you. I love you. Let me give you a hug. Let me kiss your owie. Now get back out there and try. Get back up. Love yourself, but also discipline yourself. The same thing you would do for that beloved child. That's what the whole. The whole ancient child thing is about, is connecting with that God. There's so much I want to make sure in the time that we have left. Because I don't want to keep you. Because I don't want you to be afraid to come back for fear that I'm going to try to keep you here all day. Even though I wish we could just hang out all week and we could talk about these things. We could do things. So somebody else raised their hand. What can I offer you? What do you need? Yes, Clarissa. Oh, unmute yourself, sweetheart.

I always do that. I'm sorry, I just wanted to ask you. You've touched on it a little bit, but it was something that you wrote in your email. Career aspects are in flux with so many projects going on. I can. I literally can't hold them all in my mind. All I can do is hold a central clarity and commitment as I move from one to another. So I wondered if there was just like maybe two or three, maybe or not. No, no number. But could you address, like, the tie between all that you've taught us today? Because I. And as Alex said, I'm the same way. Like, there are so many things that I pick up from your. Whether it's your emails or your Facebook page or your videos that I use all the time. But when this is in. You expressly talked about career and I writing. Absolutely. Yeah. Pick up from that. But for career management and the sorting through that.

Okay, so first start with. Like I said, there are two questions. Who am I? And what is true? Everything you do in life, you should be asking, who am I and what is true in relationship to this. So if I look at a project, let me pull a couple projects so we can be specific about this. Right now, I am floundering. I was floundering a little bit to try to figure out what is the next script I want to write. Because it's a little bit fallows. The Hollywood starts shutting down towards the end of the year. And so we're not getting as many meetings right now. But I still like to work. I need to work. Somebody said, will you write a short story for me? Okay, so I'll go with that. So the short story, you know, it says they wanted a horror short story that related to animal. Was that what it was? Animal Spirits? I think that that's what it was. And so who am I? I'm someone who is going to try to do this and do this right. So I've got a dozen different projects today. At this moment I'm working on this. Yesterday I was working on something else. Let me go over here. What is the task to write a story that's appropriate for this anthology? Do I believe I can do this in the time that I have? Yeah, as a matter of fact, I set myself. You know, one of the things that's really good that is true about me is I respond very well to deadlines and I respond well to challenges. If I haven't done this before, it's going to be more fun. Ah, fun. So that little boop. I want to start with a feeling. I want to. I want to have fun with this. This. We had just interviewed Cassandra Peterson Elvira for our podcast and she talked about some of her experience. I said, ah, she gave us some of her. Let me take some of this energy. Can I do a story that takes some of her energy talking about what it was like to be a horror show host? Because I had fun. And if I had fun with that, then the reader and I have fun writing it, then the reader will have fun reading it. And that means that the editor will give me money. So there is no compliment as great as a check that clears the bank. Let me tell you, in the external world, that's what you're looking for. So then the question becomes one of the. I've got the what? To write the story, I've got the why. To have fun, make money, to give fun, have fun, make money and to learn something. Because I set myself the challenge of writing the story in one day, basically writing the story in one sitting to. You know, it's called flash fiction. You Were you writing it without stopping? More or less. I mean, I'm not going to say that I probably went to the bathroom. I was probably writing. I was probably writing the first draft as I watched a movie or something like that. I do that a lot. Which called what Swift year called second attention, where you distract yourself here and you work over here. Because creativity is not a dog. It does not come when you call it. Creativity is a cat. It comes when you're busy doing something else. So I have to get busy doing something productive. If what I want are the creative bursts that come in the side So I know how to do it. So what's the path I've got? The path of writing of a story is the same as the path of creating the story. The structure and the creativity are the same things. But the hero's journey, which is the same as a structure that I use overall, that's a very deliberate conscious trick that allows me to get that deeper and deeper and deeper into my unconscious competence every time I do it. So now I've taken this project. Every time I work on a project, I'm deepening my understanding of the world because I'm deepening my understanding of the hero's journey and how I walk it. Okay, so now I've got every reason in the world to do this. I'll make money for my family. I'll have fun for my heart. And I'm learning, and I'm deepening my understanding of the hero's journey, which is useful everywhere. So let me get the physical discipline I used. There's is technology. My heart's in the right place. I'm willing to do the effort. What is the structure that I need to do this in? The structure this time was not. Final draft Writer Duet. The Writer Duet online screenwriting program enables me to write screenplays max speed. And I like my. I like my first drafts. I like to write my first draft in screenplay form because it's faster that all I have is dialogue and basic plot structure, and I don't have to worry about the poetics or the descriptions. So a story that might take me a week to write, I can write a script for it in one day, in a couple hours. Then if it works in that form, all I have to do is turn that into a story. I change the tenses. I begin to fluff it up. That takes another day, often while I'm watching a movie. Then I focus, you know, so on day one, I just. I write the script, and that's a matter. Can I envision the process? Can I envision it? Okay, sit. Roll my eyes up so that my brain goes into alpha state and I just type out what I see, more or less. Okay. Then I expanded out into story language. Then I polish the story language. Language. Then I let Tananarive reader. I might let her read it in script form to kind of give me a sense of, does this work? Am I crazy? And what am I missing here? So for every job, there is a process that is central to it. Even if that's just show up, pay attention, respond, you know, with integrity, you know, with something with A path that you have walked before. You're. You should have more specificity in that. That. Because I've written many, many times before. Okay. If it's something completely new, then I go through the process that I go through to learn a new thing. What do I have to do? Show up, pay attention, find somebody who can always already do it, do what they do. You know, I'm. I. One of the things I love doing is finding a mentor. I'm really, really good at finding mentors. Emptying my cup, saying, teach me. Getting my ego out of the way. Teach me. I still do that with Larry Niven, who is 84 years old, semi retired. He looks at me and says, you don't need to follow me anymore, Steve. As I will. I will say to him, you know, whatever it is you tell me about this story working on, I will do. And he's just like, steve, why do you do that? I do that because I like it. Because I like to follow. I. That mastery. Every time I've met a master there, every day, they're doing the thing. They're following a mentor, if possible, and they're teaching. So there's someone behind them. I am where I am. There's someone ahead of me. As long as I have Larry Niven and Steve Muhammad. I would not take a billion dollars for this picture. I actually got both of them together in the same place at time at Dragon Con, and I managed to get a picture of the two men who fathered me, Larry Niven and Steve Muhammad. And I would do anything that I possibly could for those men because they gave to me what I needed to complete myself in life. They showed me the path of pin and sword, how to be a warrior in the world.

I just want to thank you for saying that, Steve, because it's so. And I specifically have heard myself say, or reach a place where you feel like you should stop looking for mentors. You're too old for that. You should be mentoring. You shouldn't be. And I'm so glad that you validated my. Because I am always hunting for mentors.

Yes. As long as you can find them. And what happens sometimes is you. You fraction. Okay, I can't find one mentor, but I can find somebody who is better at this aspect or better at that, or simply better at being a good, decent human being according to what their values are. And I will stay on that path. Maybe eventually you. You find them in books. You find them from the past. You find them in your heart. So the other thing I want to round all of this bringing it back to the concept of the morning ritual. My morning ritual. It is the practice I do most. There was an event 10 years ago, family emergency. It broke me psychologically. It broke me. I had to move away from Los Angeles. It felt like I was losing my career, my life. I was off the map of my life. I'd had. Anybody who's known me for a long time knows I have a certain cockiness, a certain self confidence. Yeah, Steve can do it. I wasn't there anymore. I didn't know how I was going to make it. I was literally. This is not an exaggeration. I was literally curled on the floor, crying my eyes out. I no longer saw how my life was going to work. I was broken. But as we know, you have to go through the dark night of the soul and the way through the dark night of the soul is the leap of faith. And the leap of faith is always faith in one of three things. Faith in yourself, faith in your companions, or faith in a higher power. I'd lost all faith in myself, but I believed in my wife, and I believe in my family. And I believe in the universe, God, however you want to put that, the rhythm, the ethical structure of the universe. So I found a mentor who could help me. I was very fortunate that Steve Muhammad had moved. He'd retired to Atlanta, where I was. So it's like, no, no, no accidents in this universe. And I took things that he and some other people had said and I created the morning ritual. And what it was for me was. And I got a piece of this from Tim Piering, who I mentioned much earlier, and other people. The morning rituals is you are moving. You are doing affirmations. You are visualizing mentors. You're moving your body as if you had the power to do this for just 5 to 20 minutes or 30 minutes a day, you are going to act as if you are that you are. You have that part. It's one of the things that Tananariv and I will say to each other. Sometimes when things get tough, we look at each other and we say, we are that. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil because I'm the meanest son of a in the valley. We can do this. We can do this. And I will move my tai chi to. Even though I was broken, curled on the floor, get my dead ass up, and I will begin to move. And while I am moving, I am chanting and I will start with an affirmation that everybody knows. Every day, every way, I'm getting better and better. Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better. I'll go through it like this. And then I will move to another one, one that. That is. That is not. Is customized for me. So listen to this and understand the meaning of the words. God's wealth is circulating in my life. His wealth flows through me in avalanches of abundance. All my needs, desires, dreams, and goals are met instantly by infinite intelligence because I am one with God, and God is everything. I mean, saying that over and over and over again, keeping my body, my breathing, everything, moving in that direction with everything I've got, you understand? And then I will go from there into what I'm grateful for. I'm so grateful for a strong, healthy body. I'm so. And this is. I'm moving the whole time, right? I'm so grateful for a strong, healthy body. I'm so grateful for a strong, healthy mind. I'm so grateful for a strong, healthy body and mind. I'm so grateful for the people who love me and trust me. I'm so grateful for my son Jason, my daughter Nikki, my beautiful, brilliant wife Tananarive, my sister Joyce, who deserves all good things in life. And I will go through that, and then I will give thanks for the mentors. And I would choose my mentors because they are people to be people who I know could solve the problem that I'm in. So I'll be grateful for Steve Muhammad and Larry Niven. Okay? Any physical problem, that's Steve. Any mental problem, any. Any career problem related to writing would be Larry Niven. If Larry had this problem, how would he solve it? Okay, and then there are other people, too. BKSI Ingar. The greatest yogi that I've had a chance to study with. I've been in the room with him. Chin Manching has become one recently because I. When I'm doing. As soon as I think about Chin Manchin, my movement begins to soften. Say, oh, that's right. Yeah. Be like water. Yeah. Dawn Callan and Octavia Butler. Any story problems I could think of and the sincerity and the honesty, and these are people who I had the chance to be in the room with, to touch, to hug, to tell that I love them. So there's a heart space connection there. And I will go through that. And it's. I go through the steps of what I call the magic formula within the things that I'm chanting and visualizing. I have m A map or model of what I needed to do to get on the path. Right. A Action. What is the daily action I must take? And who are the people who have taken those daily actions? Masters each in their craft. These are people who took the daily actions, who paid the price to stay on the path, to become the people who could do the thing to get to the destiny. G Gratitude. That's the emotional Flooding myself with joy, just allowing myself to feel happiness. Because if you don't feel that there are things in your past that were wonderful enough to be blessings, how are you going to believe that the future could hold anything positive? Once upon a time, you could not walk or talk or ride a bicycle or drive a car or make love. And you learned to do these things. And when you did, you were joyful. But suddenly you turned them into. That's just 24 hours. Anybody can do that. No, go back to the child part of you that was delighted to have these things. So M A G I is intention. That's a clear goal. You know what you want? What you want is to. What I want is to evolve, to be the person who could help awaken 1 million adult aware human beings in the last C. Is the courage, the conviction that you can and should do this. M A G I C. Every day I do Tai chi while I'm saying that. And when the demons in my head say, come up and they say, no, you can't. You can't do that. That's ridiculous. Well, one of my commitments is to get better at Tai chi, and I'm doing that right now. So you're a liar, aren't you? You're lying to me that I'm not getting better, aren't you? And once you start understanding that the voices in your head are not you, that you are not the voices in your head, you. You get to ask yourself a very serious question. Well, who am I? And the answer to that question is you're not the voices in your head. You're the one listening to the voices. Once you understand that you're on the other shore, you might fall back across this shore, but you'll notice your feet got wet. So that's what I do every day, and that's what I want you guys to do. You can do it while you're walking. You can do it while you're doing the Five Tibetans. You can do it. You know, if you want to go to www.firedance.tai chi.com and get into that program, I would love for you to. If you Want writing and see how this connects to that. We've got the Life Writing program we're about to have, the Soulmate program is about to go up. But you've already got everything you need to get everywhere you want to get. You've already got all of it. I am delighted to be able to help you, to show you my perspective. But do not make any doubt about this. You've got what it takes. You always did. Last comments, questions or requests before we close this up today. And I get to spend some time with my other family because each and every one of you who's on this path of me, God bless you. Thank you for being here. And I'm going to try to do this first Saturday of every month. If you're on the list, you'll find out when it's going to be. But this is always going to be free. Tell your friends, share the links. Let's create a community. Be joyful and powerful and of service. Go out and make you know. You never know who's hanging on by your fingernails. You never know what small kindness that you give to others could multiply to help change the world at a time that the world needs help. So any last comments, questions or requests for you, go raise your hands and unmute your microphones and let's say goodbye to each other if there.

Thank you for creating this space and sharing your energy and your insight. As always, it is well received, much needed and appreciated. So thank you.

Love you, honey. You're very welcome. And for the rest of you, if there isn't, thank you.

All I can say thank you are.

Welcome from the bottom.

Steve, are you guys still going to the Miami Book Fair on the this month?

That's right. We're going to be in Miami Book Fair.

I hope to see you there.

Okay. Jan, Jan, would you come back on for a second, sweetheart? I wanted to reiterate how happy it makes my heart to see you.

It's really good to see you too, Steve.

I have missed you and I. Let's set up a time to zoom where we can just talk in a more relaxed way there. You are a person of immense value.

Thank you.

Thank you. Take good care.

Absolutely. And for the rest of you, you know, say goodbye to each other. And I like goodbye. Now, I like to close my sessions with the Sanskrit expression that says that the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Namaste. Take care.

Namaste.

Be well.

Pleasure to meet you kindred spirits.

Bye bye.

Bye.

Till next time.