The Seven-Day Sun Salutation Challenge: A Taste of the Warrior Way in action

Greetings, greetings, and welcome to an episode of Life Writing Live. This is Stephen Barnes. I'm talking to you on our Facebook live right now. That's how we're recording this. It will eventually go over to YouTube, some other things, but what I wanted to do was to do talks. You know, we've got the light, we've got the Life Writing podcast, which is really specific to writing, but I wanted to be able to talk about both pen and sword. And so talking specifically about the warrior arts and how they have interfaced with the rest of my life, what they mean, what they have contributed requires. Well, if I'm talking to people who have never experienced them, there are certain aspects of all of this that are experiential and not theoretical. And until you have learned that for yourself, until you've experienced that for yourself, it's very, very difficult to understand. So about two weeks ago, I had. I started experimenting with something. And that something is the notion for myself of doing one salutation every morning, one salutation at night. Now, the reason I was doing this initially was because I wanted to know what the minimum amount of yoga that I might need to be able to sleep well at night. Because if I do a lot of exercise, one of the things that it does is it stores tension in my body, and so I can lose sleep. If I lose sleep, I'm at the point in my life where the question isn't how hard can I push myself, but rather, how deeply can I recover, how fully can I recover from having pushed myself. So being able to sleep deeply at night, eight hours of good, solid, deep sleep, I need that as a minimum. I mean, that's just the truth. If I don't get that, I start falling apart. I start getting flu symptoms if I don't get enough sleep. So. My daily vitamin slush. So the question is always, what is the minimum amount that you need to get the maximum effect? I'm not interested in doing more than I have to do. Now, this connects with the notion of what mastery is. Mastery is being able to do in a moment what you would do if you had a week to think about it. In other words, to be appropriate at a given moment of time spontaneously. Another way that I put this is in the idea, instinctive designation of energy and attention. To match the curve of attention and energy and effort to the task at hand. You don't do less than is necessary to accomplish something, but you don't do more either. If you do less, you fail. If you do more, you've wasted some Energy. So that question of what is the minimum necessary to get the optimum effect is very important. And that means that thing of matching the curve of energy and attention. So it occurred to me, just like with writing, I said that the atomic minimum, the minimum effort that will keep it moving forward, is one sentence every day. Okay? So I've had the same thought with the physical arena and the emotional arena. What is the minimum you can do there? Now, in the emotional arena, the minimum seemed to me to be five 60 second breathing breaks once every three hours. Okay? If you do that deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing once every three hours, you start touching the place inside yourself that controls your breathing, your emotions, because your emotions are created by a combination of where you focus your attention, the language you use internally, and the way you use your body. So, you know, was it the five, you know, that's only five minutes. Five minutes, you know, 60 seconds once every three hours. But when I did the. Started doing the sun salutation at night, and then I said to myself, well, let me try one at night, one in the morning. Because I didn't like the stiffness building of my body when I wake up in the morning. You know, from doing club bells or kettlebells or other things you, you want to. You know, one of the measures that I use when my body has recovered from something is that sense of, I wake up in the morning, my body feels cool and light, say, feels cool and light, I've recovered. If I still feel, if I feel sore, if my body feels hot, if I feel, you know, like I'm solid and a solid mass as opposed to a more plastic mass, you know, with spinal articulation, then I know that my body is still holding tension, it has not rested sufficiently, and I want to crawl back under the covers and go back to sleep. So the. When I decided to do that in the morning so I could move more easily when I first get out of bed, in other words, take a look. How do I feel when I'm first walking to the bathroom in the morning? Because, you know, relieve your bladder first thing in the morning, I can feel stiffness, I can feel supination as opposed to pronation, you know? You know, is. Is my spine listing to one way or the other? I. Six degrees of movement, you know, forward, back, side, side, twist right, twist left. How does my body feel going through all these? You, you won't throw your back out reaching for a can of peas on a shelf. If you have kind of checked in with your body first thing in the morning, That's a use of yoga or Tai Chi, but it takes a year to learn Tai Chi and it can take, you know, 15 minutes minimum for kind of a basic yoga program in some ways. But I realized that the Sun Salutation was sufficiently complex and sufficiently deep that just doing it in the morning and at night was a real, real contribution. If I. If I felt stiff first thing in the morning and I did just one salutation, then my body started feeling much more open, much more, you know, much more alive, you know, much. My every footfall was more balanced, my spine felt more flexible, my shoulders were, you know, were not hunched as much. It's like, oh, okay, this feels good. If I did just one before I go to sleep, then that's what happened then was I've slept. I haven't had problems sleeping a single night since I started doing one. So I started to ask myself another question. Well, could I take someone who had no physical discipline, and how long would they have to do one in the morning, one at night in order to learn some of the things that I'm trying to teach them about the fact that their body, their mind, their life is what it is, not just because of the way the external world treats you. And there's no question there can be conditions you have internally or externally that limit your options. Okay? And, you know, social pressures and prejudices and bad family situations and, you know, poverty and any number of different things can really wreck your plans if you're not careful that, that you need to have that sense that no matter what, you're going to do the best you can. You know, that yes, there are aspects of your life that the external world is responsible for, but that you're going to control the piece of it that you can. The write a sentence a day idea seemed to me to be so positive because of the fact that everyone has enough time and energy to write a single sentence a day. You know, you just do. If you say that you don't, you're not being honest with yourself. It's as honest, it's as clear as that. And I think that the same thing is true about the Sun Salutations. I really had to ask myself that question. Is it true? If you go to YouTube and you look up Sun Salutation, you will find hundreds of videos. If you have a problem with your joints or something this nature, look up Sun Salutations for the Elderly or Sun Salutations for Wheelchair, Sun Salutations for the Bedridden, and you will find modifications of these things, of this series of Movements is about six movements linked together in a sequence that go all the way to just breathe along, play a video and breathe along, understand the sequence of breathing and breathe along with it, and focus your mind on it. Qigong exercise, which we'll probably be addressing in future, future videos, asks us to bring our minds, our eyes, our breath and our movement all together at the same time. That's how you develop the. The sensitivity to energy that allows you to stay sort of within the envelope of your energy so that you are constantly thriving. You know, when you're a baby, you're just glowing with energy and it's all over the place. You know, kids run, play all day long. As you get older, you have less natural energy, so you have to learn a greater degree of sensitivity to where it is so you can stay within it. And the question was, can you do it in 30 days? Well, I believe so, yes. Because one of the things that's going to happen is that whatever has stopped you from keeping an exercise program or meditation program in the past will come up and bite you on the butt now. And it won't be the external world, right? Because it's only two minutes a day. That's, that's, you know, that's just 12 minutes a week. 12 minutes a week. That's less. That's an hour a month. An hour a month. If you're doing it six days a week. If you don't have an hour a month to take care of your health and sanity and energy, you have allowed the outside world to lie to you, and you are now lying to yourself. You do have that time. If you had the time to listen to this, you had the time. The time it took you to listen to this is all the time you needed to take care of yourself on a basic level for a week. You understand that. You understand that you need to be aware of when you are telling yourself the truth about your limitations and when you are lying to yourself to protect your ego. If you're blaming the outside world for not having an hour a month, please don't do that. If you had access to this video, you had the time. You need to ask yourself why you don't invest that time in. In yourself. If you said, well, I can't do a sun salutation, it's too hard. What did I already say? Look for Sun Salutations for the elderly. Sun Salutations rehab, Sun Salutations wheelchair. Find the version you can do. And if you can't do any of them, then you watch a video following along with the breathing. And your commitment is to stay right on the edge, to never let your discomfort go above a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. Never. Because hurting yourself is another way to stop yourself from moving forward. What will get you there is a consistency. And if you learn to match your breathing to the flow of the movement. Now, this is an exhalation, this is an inhalation. And you time them. You work on that every single day. It's never boring because it's, you know, they're always going to be the strictures and the compressions and the releases, you know, the different aspects of balance. There are so many things to focus on. You could spend an hour a day studying a sun sally those two minutes for the rest of your life, and you never get to the end of it. It is a genuinely deep practice. So if you focus your emotions there at the same time, your mind there at the same time, could that be a minimal morning ritual? I think the answer to that is yes. If you know who you need to be in order to accomplish the things that you need to accomplish in the next three years, then you also know who you need to be in the next year and who you'd need to be in the next three months, the next month, the next week, the next day at this moment. And your task is to be the person who can do the things that will get you to your destiny. That your destiny is a matter of did you do the things that you could do day after day? And if you have a disadvantage, prejudice your gender, prejudice, racial prejudice, whatever it is, find people who suffered the same problem and succeeded anyway. There is no condition in the world that someone has not managed to survive and thrive. Unless you're going to say, well, what about death itself? What if you're on your deathbed? Well, are there not people who've managed to do something meaningful on their deathbeds? The ultimate goal in your life is not publishing a book or getting a black belt or being married or whatever. The ultimate goal of your life is to be happy, to be joyful, to escape pain and move towards pleasure. Can we all do that? What I'm suggesting is that as long as you can control your breathing and put your attention in a place, you can get better at that thing. All there is, in one sense, is the process of improvement. We are happy to the degree that we feel that we are moving in a healthy direction. The Dalai Lama said the meaning of life is to seek joy. He also says to seek joy and contribution. Let's take that as A goal that anything else that you wanted, whether it's relationships, books, fitness, skills were means to that end. You thought, if I had this thing, I would be happier, or if I had this thing, I would be in less pain, or I would. Or people I love would be happier, or people I love would be in less pain. That's kind of how we're wired up in that sense. So if you can find anything that will improve you by 1% a week. 1% a week. You know, times, 50 times. Well, I, that comes out to several, you know, you're three or four times as much growth. If you're at position 10 and you improve by 1% a week, you get up to about 30 or something like that. But if you improve by 1% per day, you improve by 37 times, 38 times. So if you start with units of 10, you end up at 370. Okay. So if you decided to bring yourself to consciousness, to keeping your positive emotions, your positive intent, your clear vision of who you need to be, and you do that every morning, and you do that at the same time that you're doing a sense salutation, then every evening you do the same thing. Only now you ask yourself, did I do the things that I was committed to doing in the course of a day? If you want a bigger chunk of it, you keep a journal. Every morning you write down what you need to do that day in order to reach your short and long term goals. You do your sun salutation. You imagine the person that you are on the other side of these things, Person who can accomplish these things. You step into that destiny. Every night, you check and say, did I do it? Didn't I do it? No guilt, blame or shame. Just data. And you take a look at your journal again. Did I do the things I needed to do today? Yes. Great. Go to sleep. No. Either finish it up or roll those things to the next day. You keep doing that and you will become better and better and better at automatically doing the things you need in order to succeed. If you want to spend more time, you can take one of those sessions out and extend, extended into a bigger morning ritual. You know, 10 to 20 minutes of focusing and doing incantations, which are affirmations with emotion. While you're moving, remember, you're bringing your. Your thought patterns, your words, your focus, your breathing, your movement all together in the same place at the same time for just a short period of time every day. Becoming a human laser, that takes you two minutes a day. Okay? At the, at the lowest levels that can help you take care of your body, your mind, your career. That is, I think, the biggest bang for your buck that I know of. And here's an even better, bigger thing. We were talking about 30 days. Give me seven days. Try it for seven days. If you can do it seven days without breaking one link in the chain. You did it every morning, every night. Then you know that you have. You know what it takes to do the things over time that will take you where you're committed to going. If you do it for seven days, then you do it for 30. If you can't do it for those seven days, start over again at 1 until you can do it seven days in a row. That is 12 minutes if you're doing it, you know, six days a week, 14 minutes if you're doing it seven days a week, which I'd recommend. But you could take one day off. If you can do it for those six or seven days in a row, you will know what it takes to do it. And what it took to do that is exactly what it takes to improve by 1% per day, which would improve you by 3,700% per year. Nobody needs to grow any faster than that. You will be dealing with your own fear, sloth, illusions, justifications. You'll deal with your bad priorities, your negative emotional states. Because the body, according to the Hawaiian huna, is like a black bag. You store your unprocessed emotions there. If you're. If you can't make contact with your body, you're not dealing with where you stuffed your emotions. That stuff can stay inside you and poison you. That's what makes you not send your stories out once you finish them. That's. You don't ask that person for a date. You're afraid to lose weight because you're afraid of showing yourself to the world or whatever it is that stops you from being everything that you're committed to being. Some of this is the outside world, no question about it. But if you have to escape a prison, you can't blame the prison for being there. You have to look at the systems of the prison and kind of say, okay, the guards pass at this time. You know, there's this, there's that. This is how I'm going to operate to get the hell out of here. No question about it. If there's a mugger following you down the street at the moment that the mugger attacks you, it is your responsibility to defend yourself or your responsibility to find allies, Your responsibility to pick up a weapon, something to stay in the light where people can see you so that they're afraid of attacking. You have responsibility. If you blame it on the world at that point, you blame it on the mug at that point, you lose your wallet and maybe your life. So we're not talking about the fact that there are not unfair conditions. That's true. But a warrior has to be prepared to deal with the world as it is and not hallucinate and wish. I wish it was better. I wish people would be nicer to me. I wish they'd be nicer to me too. I get that completely. But if you're going to be safe, if you're going to bring your dreams to fruition, if you're going to protect your family, you have to take responsibility 100% for everything that it is humanly possible for you to take responsibility for. After that, the rest isn't, you know, that's the rest of it is luck. I've never known anyone who took 100% responsibility. Exactly. You know, they either take too much responsibility or not enough. And usually not enough. Usually they don't believe that they have the power to make their dreams happen. Usually they blame the outside world for things that they should have known were their job. If you can't do that one sentence a day, it's not the world's fault. You're not a writer. If you can't spend two minutes a day doing sun salutations or modified sun salutations or visualizing yourself doing sun salutations. Whatever shape your body is in has nothing to do with high fructose corn syrup or the fact that you eat because other people force you to, or because you don't have the time to get to the gym, or you don't have the money to get to the gym, or your joints hurt or whatever it is. Because remember, you could have just visualized if you don't have that time, if you can't do the best you can for an hour a month, that's not the outside world. And if you are ready to find out whether or not what is stopping you is the outside world or your own fears, your own false identity that you have identified with the weakest part of yourself instead of the strongest. If you're not ready to look at that, you're not ready for this. But if you are ready to look at this, then I hope that you will absolutely try. Seven days. And when you have made it to seven days, just seven days in a row, you will understand something about your body and mind that you did not understand. Before you started the process, and you'll understand a lot more about what the Warrior's Journey course is at www.realwarriorsjourney.com. you take care. I hope this has been useful to you and I'll see you on the other side. Bye bye.