The Warrior's Journey 8/5: Completing the Jourrney

This computer. If there's any part of you that is interested in creativity, is interested in having a life that is satisfying to you, a life of joy and contribution, happiness and growth and all those things that make life worthwhile, then you are my people. You are my tribe. And it brings me unutterable pleasure to. You know, I still remember the little kid I was so clearly looking out at the world and wondering whether or not there was going to be a place for me, if I would ever stop being afraid, if I would ever be able to share my stories with people, if I'd ever be able to find love. And now I've been able to do all those things. Literally. I was able to fulfill all of my childhood dreams. I published over three, probably close to 4 million words a fiction at this point and worked in television and film. I have multiple black belts at a rank. I don't even talk about my rank anymore because it's a little bit like being a bishop in a local church. It's very, very high. It's a wonderful church. It's a small organization. There are only a couple thousand people in the organization, but it's tremendously valid. It really does represent a lifetime of work on my part. I honor that completely. But I don't talk about it too much because I don't want people to get the wrong idea. And in terms of my relationships, well, anyone who has met or seen or read the amazing and gorgeous Tananarive Due knows that I am totally blessed and in the arena of relationships. So we're going to talk about, basically, you know, how that works because I spent my entire life searching for people who could teach me how to have these things. And what I promised them was that I'd be not just a good person, but I would be a leader, that I would help other people find the same thing. So. So that's what we talk about here. It's not, you know, we could talk about when we talk about writing, we could talk about plot and characterization, or we could talk about career things and so forth. But I, you know, I'd rather talk about how do I deal with my fear, how do I deal with my indecision, how do I make choices, how do I organize my time, how do I keep my. My enthusiasm up? I mean, literally, the literal truth is that my career got derailed for over 20 years, that it took me 20 years to get that Twilight Zone episode that showed last year just a couple of weeks ago. And I really have to ask myself sometimes, how in the world do you keep your enthusiasm for 20 years through 20 years of failure. How do you do that? There are ways in which I can't even tell you exactly how I did it, but there are other ways in which I do know. So you know. And then how do you survive heartbreak and come back and loss and come back? You know, if you can do that, then it is my belief that you can have the things that make your life happy. You can, you can, you can share your heart with the world. You can continue to grow. Every day, every day I wake up and I think to myself, who can I help today? There's going to be somebody I can help today. I will go to bed at night thinking, you know, I read, I read somebody on Facebook who was having real emotional trouble. One of the things I love about social media is that you can actually see what's going on in people's lives. So I kind of suggest to you that you, you work on your theories of humanity. How is it that people are what it is that they are? And then you watch what people say and you say, how does this fit with what it is? I think people are how people operate. I think if you can do that, then you can turn social media into a laboratory. I mean, I use it as, I use it as a laboratory. Every day I will look and I'll take a look and I'll say, well, who's having a problem out there? And then can I look at the things that they're saying and get some sense of what their internal world is? Because if I can understand their internal world, then I can understand their beliefs, their self image. And then when life hits them, I can see, well, how are they reacting to the stresses in their lives? And it's a way of every day I will go through, let me take a look at the three gates. Let me take a look at the three circles. How are they dealing with problems in the realm of the body? How are they dealing with problems in the realm of the heart? How are they dealing with problems in the realm of their career or their education? What's happening? If I take a look at the three gates, is it true? Is it useful? Is it kind? Are they speaking the truth as they see it? If this is the truth, they're saying, what does the world have to be like for them? If they are trying to achieve things in their life, what is their method of figuring out what will take them closer to their goal? Who, what will take them further away? If I know that kindness is important, are they being kind to themselves? Are they being kind to other people? Quite often you will see people who absolutely rip themselves to pieces with fear and doubt and pain. And you ask yourself, why do they treat themselves that way? And once you start developing a theory of that, then you can ask questions. You find out, and you'll find out stories of loss. People could not remember ever having been loved in their lives. It's horrifying to find it. It's horrifying to see it. But if you can share your light, if you can show people that it is possible to be a good and decent human being, to feel joy life, to celebrate life, to every day take one more step towards the things that really matter to you in life and that you don't have to hurt other people in order to do that. You can give hope. The world has never needed leaders more than it needs them right now. I mean, I would say that we are really suffering for a lack of leadership at the top. So that means that each of us has to care. Each of us has to help ourselves and help our neighbors. Each of us has to be a role model for children. We have to be the leaders. And if we are the leaders, then we can demand that those that we put up there as official leaders rise to a higher standard. We can demand that they be. They tell the truth. We can demand that they do what is useful. We can demand that they do what is kind. And so I just. I'm here. Being a warrior is about being ready to die and to, well, frankly, to kill in order to protect the things that are precious to you in your life. And that is the difference between a warrior and a martyr, by the way. A martyr is willing to die. Warrior is willing to kill. And the village, as grim as that necessity may be, the children of the village are not safe unless someone is willing to stand between them and danger. In this particular instance, I suggest that you be a warrior of the heart first. And that means being willing to kill your own ego image, being willing to kill anything that stands between you and the best you can be the best you've got to kill who you were yesterday to make room for who you're going to be tomorrow. So we're going to talk about that. Because it is my belief that every courageous person who takes a step in a righteous way, who is committed to being honest, to being kind, and to be useful to the world, you are my brothers and sisters. You are my tribe. I live for you guys. You are what inspires me. It is my. It is my absolute honor to serve you. So today, let's see, what have we got today? Well, one of the things I wanted to do is, is I wanted to welcome into this a lady who is the first, the very first, who has completely finished our Warriors Journey Program. Now, the Warriors Journey Program. Let me talk about that a little bit. I'm going to mute you guys now. And then I'm going to unmute. I'm going to unmute one of you. I'm going to unmute this person right here. Oh, not, not this person. This person right here. I'm going to unmute that person right there. There. Beep. Yes, there we go. Okay, so let me give you a little background. Many years ago, I was searching for a way to integrate my physical, mental and emotional selves. The martial arts were the tool that I used for that. But martial arts in the United States is not, not a holistic tool. It is generally. Well, you go to this school and you learn how to fight. You go to this school and you get into good shape. You go to this school over here and they teach you internal meditative things. But I needed all three. I needed all three badly. I went to a workshop in the Tehachapi Mountains. It was a week long workshop called the Warrior Retreat, at which I met some extraordinary people. And there were people who were using Native American and spiritual practices and connecting them, combining them with the martial arts. And while I was there, I met this one little woman, she's about 4 foot 11, and she was teaching the women's self defense class. And this woman was operating at a level of human efficiency, energy, intuitive awareness I'd never seen before. I mean, you know, we. The graduating exercise for the entire thing was padded attackers. You know, all the women would line up around the mat and these padded attackers would challenge them verbally and then choose one and drag them onto the mat and attack them. And the women would have to fight back. It was a very realistic, very, very vigorous exercise. Ordinarily she had three men who did this work, but two of them hadn't been able to arrive. So she asked if some of the guys who were in the men's part of the camp like I was and my brother in law Pat was if we would participate, if we would put on the armor and put our bodies out there so the women could attack us and learn this thing. And it's just like, okay, so I get to be a warrior for the sisterhood. You know, it's like, okay, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take some shots, I'm gonna Get hurt out there. But in the process of that, my sisters are gonna come out the other side of this being stronger. And so I love that idea. So I went out there, and I had fun. It was. It was very challenging. The rules were very, very specific. And it was all designed to make sure that the women were safe and that they were totally challenged and pushed beyond their limits, but were. They were safe. And dawn was just a little fireball because she was just present, 100%. I'm not sure I'd ever seen anybody that aware and present to make sure everybody was safe. Everything was going on, encouraging these women so they would never quit, no matter what we did to them. And a point came after. I was starting to feel a little bit cocky where I was wondering to myself, well, you know, I wonder how good dawn herself really is. And now she's standing, like, 10ft away from me with her back turned. Just a little tiny thing. So I'm all armored up. I thought, I think I'll attack Dawn. At the moment I thought it, she was looking the other way. The moment I thought it, she stopped, turn, looked back at me over her shoulder with this reptilian grin on her face. And it felt as if someone had hit me in the chest with a sledgehammer. She hadn't moved. She didn't touch me physically. Something happened. It was the force of her energy, her personality, her ki. Her chi, however you want to put it. It was like all the air had been sucked out of my lungs, and I did. All I could think of was I'd never felt anything like that before. I don't know what I was dealing with. I don't know what this was, But I knew I had to find out more. How in the hell did this. How does a human being do something like that? Well, I ended up promoting her workshops. I was the first man to promote her workshops. I put every woman I knew through her workshops. I lost over $20,000 doing this because I would not prevent a woman from going through the workshop. If she couldn't afford it. I'd let her pay me a dollar a month. I don't care. It was like this. I wanted an army out there on the street capable of defending themselves and their sisters. Years went past. I went through the workshop myself at one point, and let's just say that it was transformative. I was already a fairly advanced martial artist, but it wasn't about martial arts. It was about having 100% connection to your belief that you have the right to be here. You have the right to survive. You have that animal right to, you know, like, that makes a wolverine so dangerous. You know, it's not the size of the dog, and the fight is the size of the fight and the dog when you. It. Well, to put not too. Not too fine a line on it. There was one moment in one workshop where I was helping her, where there was a woman in the workshop who could not hit the pads, you know, because we drill, kicks and punches, you know, thousands of times. Just a few. Few basic techniques that had to be wired in tight so that they would. They'd be accessible, that information would be accessible under. Under. Under stress. And there was one woman who could not perform. She was just. She was just afraid. She couldn't hit the pads. You know, I'm holding a padded bag. And she just couldn't do it. So she'd broken down with everybody else. And the other assistants came over to me and said, you know, we can't. We can't help her. We can't do anything with her. Steve, do you think you can. You think you can help her? And so I said, you know, I'll try. So she's standing in front of the pad and this. Tears streaming down her face. And I said, okay. Will you hit me? It's okay. And I'm strong. I can take it. It's a patch. I can't do it. I can't do it. And I automatically am thinking to myself, what's her worldview? This woman has been disempowered to the point where she is afraid to strike out to protect herself. And she has an unrealistic image of whether or not she can hurt me. She's afraid of angering me. It's not that she's afraid of hurting me. She has been taught to be helpless. She feels that if she fights back, I will hurt her. So it's like, what. What is the home life? What was her childhood like? And it's. You know, you look at that, and all I could think of was cold, stark anger at whoever had hurt her, whoever had disempowered her, who had told her that she did not have the right to defend herself. So I said, I'm going to. It's one of the things that I have. I have this belief that I will do whatever it takes to help the people who are under my protection. I will not stop at anything. There are no limits to what I will do. So I thought, okay. I asked her question. I said, she can't protect herself, but I bet she could protect Somebody else. We've got that wiring inside us. So. So I said, do you have any children? No, I don't have any children. I said, do you have a little sister? And she said, yes, I have a little sister. I said, do you love her? And she said, yes, yes, I love her. I said, you do anything for her? I said, yeah. I said, do anything. In the back of my head, Evil Steve, the back of my head, Evil Steve said, bingo, I've got you. So I said, alright, your sister is hiding behind you right now, and if I get past you, I'm going to. And then I said something totally obscene and horrible that I will not repeat for a video. And her eyes shifted. Something happened with her body language. Everything changed. And she came at me and she knocked my butt through the wall. And she was on me and it took three men to pull her off me. And it was just like she just beat the hell out of me and pull her off. I was laughing. I said, that right there, that's it. That's the place you went into in your head. That's what I want to do. That's the place when you have found the place inside you, either for yourself or for the people that you love, or for your community, your country, your God, your values, whatever it is, it is big or different from you. Where you will finally say, I will take a stand here. This is who I am. In fact, your attention isn't even on yourself. There is no I. You're not worried about how you look. You're not worried about what somebody else might do. You are 100% Ball of Fury. That place, that switch that exists inside our minds, it is there. That is our genetic heritage, the thing that kept us alive in the jungles before we climbed down out of the trees and became Pithecanthropus erectus, you know, a couple million years ago, that switch is still there. And dawn, in that context of her workshop, had found a way to tap into that deep instinct as well as the divine inspiration that says that I am a child of God. I am as worthy of life and joy and happiness as anyone who has ever walked this planet. I am no less than a spirit and no more than an ant. I am here. I am here. When you access that place, nothing can stop you. Life can kill you, but it can't stop you. So that is my attitude. That is what I want to give to people. And the question that I had was, is it absolutely necessary to go through this workshop to get that. I didn't think it was But I didn't have the answer to it. Well, fast forward years and dawn had retired. She's no longer actively teaching her workshop and I'd lost touch with her. And then I reconnected with her via Facebook. Thank God for social media. And we started talking. And in the intervening years I had advanced my own martial teachings so that I am now I'm not considered a master. And I, my, my relationship is wonderful and my career is going great. Gun. So I'm in a completely different place in my life now. And we were able to talk as peers. I mean, she's still ahead of me on the path of life. She just is. She's, she's a miracle in terms of what it is that she created within herself. And she's tapped into the feminine and at such a deep level that it's not, she's not about being tough. Dawn was never tough. But dawn is deadly. There's a difference. She ain't some big tough muscle bound, you know, like this. No, she'll just kill you. It's different. So we had these conversations and the conclusion we came to was that if we combined everything we had learned together, you know, and separately we had a century of martial arts experience between the two of us and my experience with yoga and hypnosis and neuro linguistic program, other things. And her deep, deep, deep dive into the spiritual aspects of yoga, I, as well as her martial arts mastery, I believe that if we gave it everything we had, we could create a home study version of her workshop. You know, could it be possible? Could we do it if we had 100% integrity, if we wanted 100% to give this. Because I thought you'd give a human being this. And they can write, they can act, they can, they can work, they can love, they, they can just be a human being who can access that creativity, that belief in themselves, that capacity to turn fear into energy. And they can do anything because you're combining the animal and the spiritual. And the human being is suspended between those two things, between our animal survival instincts and our spiritual commitment to live a life that is right in the eyes of the divine or in alignment with the forces of the universe, or however you need to say that so that you understand what I'm saying. Don't get stuck on the words here. So we created a 10 week course and I have invited a couple dozen people, you know, we sold a few copies of it, we invited a bunch of people into it and we created a group on Facebook where I could watch what people were going through. As they started going through the course. And the very first person to make it all the way through the course is Misty Soul, who is. Who is on the call with us right now. And, Misty, how are you, darling?

I'm good.

I'm good.

I'm in the studio doing some painting, having a good evening. I'm on the east coast right now.

What I would like for you to do is tell us your experience and don't hold anything back, because if there's something from your experience of the course that people can take away right now and use tonight and tomorrow, you know, without paying me a dime, that is what I would love. So there ain't no secrets here. You are free to say anything about the content of the course and your reaction to it. Positive, negative, whatever. But please share with us. And once again, congratulations, sweetheart, for being the very first to make it through that. You know, that's really an accomplishment. People are breaking down left, right. You know, and it was totally expected. Of course they were. I'm asking them to actually deal with their stuff. Okay. It wasn't a simple thing. So, you know, share with us. Ask me anything that you want. This is the time. This is the place. Lay it out. Talk to us. First.

I want to say that. I just want to say how great of a course it is. Online courses in general are notoriously hard to finish. I've had online courses that I haven't finished. I've taken online course creation courses where they tell you, like, one of the biggest things that you got to watch out for is in the middle of the course, a lot of people will just drop out.

Yeah.

And so I thought this was the repetitiveness of it and the. Well, I'll just say to the people watching, you're going through a lot of the same processes, but because you're doing it every day, as you live your life each day, the exercises mean something different to you.

Can't step in the same piece of water twice.

Yeah. And you have. One of the most beneficial things about the course is that it's a tool bag. So I have things that I can continue to use, like, throughout my life. And I can see where the processes that I completed in the course are roads that I need to continue to travel. For instance. One of the things you have to do in the course is prioritize your days. And I found that incredibly powerful because it forces you to get clear about what am I doing now that's taking me where I want to be in 10 years. And the system allows you to Balance that with what I need to do tomorrow, what I need to do for my family versus what I need to do for my dreams with versus what I need to do to pay my bills versus what I need to do to make sure that I'm personally balanced and cared for and connected in a loving way to my world, to my community. And it's this wonderful holistic package that really allows you to actively explore wellness and balance.

It's wonderful. And once again, you know, I have so much respect that your willingness to go through it and then report back your experience is going to help me to create version 2.0. It was like, what can I do? How can I make this better? Better, faster, stronger, deeper. What can I do? We had comments from people still stuck in week three, learning how to trust myself after the bad decisions that became bad habits. Well, yeah, Ross, in that sense, the course is a, what you call it, it's like taking your temperature. It is a diagnostic tool. It isn't like you go through it and if you don't go through it, there's something wrong with you. No, no, no. You're going to get stopped where you need to work. So all you have to do is work on that piece of it. And by the time you're finished with that, that might take you a month, it might take you six months, might take you a year. How long did it take me to snarl up my emotions in my life so that it took me 17 years to earn my first black belt? What had happened in my life that it took me 20 years to get back on the horse so I could get another Twilight Zone episode and open that next part of my life? What did I have to go through to stop blaming myself for the destruction of my first marriage and destroying my daughter's family so that I could heal and be worthy of the love of a good woman if I do the work? And then I blame myself for falling down rather than saying, I pushed myself to the limit and I broke down the same thing. It's like working out in the gym until you hit muscle failure. If you say, you know, I loaded up the bar and I did 11 and I wasn't able to get 12, so I'm a terrible person. As opposed to, huh, I put a little bit too much on the bar. Let me eat, let me rest. I'll try it again in a couple of days. So the person who says, oh, I put a little too much in the bar, so I'm strong enough to lift £200 10 times, but not 11 times. That's interesting, because the truth is that in life you could be the strongest person in the world. You could get stronger every day until you're the strongest person in the world until. And still fail at every weightlifting meet simply by putting more on the bar than you can lift that particular day. That one of the things our ego does to stop us is to excoriate us for not being perfect. Doesn't matter how much you do, doesn't matter how far you've come, doesn't matter how much you've accomplished. If people beat the hell out of themselves for not being perfect. So you broke down at a particular point. Congratulations. You've discovered a breakdown. That is a good thing. It's a valuable thing. And most people do not have the courage to push themselves until they break down so they can find out what is working and what is not working in their lives. So you've hung in there, Ross. All the guilt, the blame and the shame is in there.

But.

But you've never totally backed away from it. You keep coming back. You keep coming back. I would want you on my team, buddy, because you won't quit. You know, you may get the breakdown, but you're still there. So this is great. And Scott has completely fell out. Needed to start over again at day one. You can start over again at day one, or you could start where you broke down. It's going to be there for you when you need it. All the information is there, all that is there. The community is there for you. If you share with us how you broke down and then you can say, you know, you can tell us, how did you break down? What did you do to break down? I had to think this way. I had to say this to myself. I had to visualize this thing over here. So, for instance, you know, so I got busy in my life and I forgot to do my journaling for two weeks. All of a sudden I remember, oh, my God, I have been doing my journaling. You look at the journal, if you're clear, you just pick it up and keep going. But if you have stuff inside you that you've been carrying from childhood or from disappointments that is literally trying to stop you from growing, then at that point, what it will do is it will excoriate you for the breakdown. So you're not just dealing with whatever it is that could not move forward. You're now also dealing with the guilt about not having moved forward and your shame about the guilt, and you're confused about the shame about the guilt. So dealing with the thing itself, the practice itself requires, let's say, 3 cubic inches of energy of your energy once you start. And your ego doesn't want you to do that. Your ego knows you only got 10 cubic inches of energy, right? So what it does is it loads you up on guilt and pain and shame and all this other stuff. And each of which is adding another cubic inch of energy on top of until you've got a load that's like 12 cubic inches of energy. And now you break down completely. And now your ego's got you. It has stopped you from changing. So all you have to do is get the joke, understand what it is that's going on, get some perspective on what's going on. And when you are ready to move, when you can laugh at what happened before, forgive yourself completely for what happened before. Now you're prepared to just move forward. Cascade avalanche of crap. That's right, Ross. Let me tell you, buddy. I remember I had my heart absolutely broken by a woman just. She did something, I thought we had something. And she did something so self destructive that I could not believe it. For weeks I was trying to help her and she would not let me help her. She was mired in this error that she made and she would not let me help her. She was cutting off communication. All I wanted to do was help her, was rescue her was, you know. And I went through all this stuff for weeks. I would go to bed at night thinking, how do I help her? In the morning I'd wake up thinking, what can I do? And I could do. So I couldn't back away. I couldn't help her. And it was ripping me to pieces. I actually damaged myself. Being caught between wanting to help, needing to help, and not being able to help. Defining myself as the kind of person who would help, but not being able. There's nothing I could do. It drove me almost crazy on a temporary basis. When I crawled out of that emotional gutter and began the repair work, it felt as if I was standing in a cesspool up to my nose in crap. And I had a teaspoon to try to clean it out. And all that kept me going was faith. And all that kept me going was loving that little boy inside me who started this journey of life and absolute commitment. I would not let him down. I got myself into this. I would get myself out of it. And so every day I dug, Every day I dug and I got every tool I could. It got to the point where I didn't have a teaspoon anymore. I Had a shovel. And then it got to the point where I had a bucket, but the crap was still up to my chin. And this point. And I just kept digging and kept shoveling. Every day for almost an hour. I would go into my meditative space and I would dig. And my brain gave me what I call complex equivalence, the image of the cesspool. The crap in the cesspool was what my brain gave me as a symbol of all the emotional garbage. And so I actually could visualize it, smell it too. I could visualize it. And so it's like this, like, more crap, more crap, more crap. It's like I would dig out four shovels and two more would come back in. But I kept digging. I kept digging, I kept digging with nothing but faith. It felt like it took forever. It took weeks and months until I finally got to the bottom of it. And then what I had was a floor with a big crack in it. And I had to keep digging and shoveling because every day I'd go back into my mental basement and more crap, it oozed up through the floor. What was that stuff? There was guilt, shame, regret, fear, fear for not. It wasn't like anger or hurt. It was my judgment. I was the one who fallen in love with her. I was the one who started this relationship. I hadn't seen this. I was the one who beat my head against the wall trying to help her when she didn't want the help. She was committed to her error. There was no way in for me. And I hadn't been smart enough to back away and say, oh, you know, this is not going to work out. So I was ashamed of myself and I was afraid of myself. I was afraid of my own bad judgment. If you don't trust your judgment, then you're going to be afraid of any relationship you could possibly get into. How are you going to spot somebody who is appropriate or inappropriate if you don't trust your judgment? Judgment? So I had to keep at it every day, every day, every day. And finally I got to the point where stuff stopped oozing up through the floor. And I was able to submit over that crack in my mind and build a playroom. And now that little boy inside me gets. I can visualize him playing in that playroom. And from time to time, some roaches or something will come scratch, stirring up from whatever is underneath there, and I'll have to kill them. I'll have to tidy up a little bit. And I do my daily meditations and my daily actions partially visualize the space inside me. Is it neat and clean and safe? Are my emotions good? Is there a safe place inside me for the little boy who started this journey, who I dearly love? Little Stevie is just one of my favorite people, the whole world. He is just the cutest little guy, you know, and he. He started life, and all he wanted was to run and jump and love and be loved and share stories with the world. He got the holy living crap kicked out of him. And both the boys and the girls told him in no uncertain terms that he was a wimp and he would never be part of their tribe. And so the part of me that went through all those decades of martial arts training, it wasn't because I wanted to be Billy Jack or Bruce Lee or anything like that. I just wanted to feel safe in the world. And then once I found that safety and I found a way to be in the world, and let me be loving and open, because I will kill you if you mess with me or my family. I wanted to be able to share that with people, with you guys, and that's what I'm doing. So we had those questions there. Let's go back to Misty Soul and talk more about. What did you find the most difficult thing in the course?

The same thing that the other participant was talking about. The ego. Like, when. Because I didn't complete it in 10 weeks, it took me longer than that.

Yeah. I became aware anybody's gonna finish it in 10 weeks. And I need to make it very clear to people that you. If you can do it in that time frame, you didn't need it. You know what?

I went back to that statement a lot in my mind. He said, it's not, you don't need it or you're not doing it. You know, if it's easy, you're not doing the work, or you don't need it. Either way.

Yeah, yeah. Life is. Life is hard, you know? And so what you do is learn to enjoy the effort. You learn to take pride in being one of the few who could really do the work. It's like, writing is hard. Every day. I have published over 4 million words of fiction. It's still hard. It will always be hard. It's supposed to be hard. It's just that I'm tough. I can do it, you know, it's like. And I take pride in being one of those people who can do it. That gives me the energy to every single day, get out there and do it. So go ahead, Misty.

So, yes. So that the idea of keep going Part of what you built into the program was what allies, resources do I need to complete this journey? Whatever personal journey we were on that we had identified in the program, but it also worked for the program itself. So I would look at, what do I need? Like, what? Where can I pull faith from? Well, you know, I have faith in you as the creator of the program, and I have faith in the process itself. And so even when I'm not sure that it's working, motorcycles, like, when my ego is telling me this is not, you know, you're not really doing anything or you're not doing it right, it's not working. One of the biggest things that I feel like my mind would me tell me was go back to the front of the line, just start over. So I would get into this, and I noticed a pattern of that with myself where you don't trust that you're going the right way. It's like you get in the car and you're going the right way, and you turn around, you're like, oh, maybe, you know, you make all these wrong turns when you should have just trusted that you were on the right, you know, path. And so just having to exist in the space of maybe I'm not doing it right, maybe it's not working, but still doing the work, that. That's what helped. You know, leaning back on that, what faith do I have? Because maybe I don't have faith in myself today because I skipped a week or I skipped a few days, or I've had this setback. So, yeah, just faith in the process and that. Like, I just carry that through my whole life, you know, because there are days when it, when it seems harder than others, but, you know, you still put in the work. And then tomorrow you're like, oh, well, I feel great because I did that yesterday, but if I listened to myself yesterday, I wouldn't have done it.

Great. One of the reasons I love these conversations is that I never know what I'm going to say. I never know what's going to be triggered. What I just heard, right there is an opportunity for me to talk about the process of problem solving that basically, if you can clearly define the problem that you have, you don't need to know what the solution is. You don't need the solution. You. You need to clearly define the problem in some term that is solvable ultimately. So in other words, like, last just a few days ago, I realized that I was hit the wall in terms of a project that I did not know what I was going to do next. I did not know how to solve this problem. I did not know how to do this. And it was very, very important, very, very important to me. I have a commitment to dealing with this situation and I could not think of an answer. And I racked my brain and racked my brain and I did not have an answer. And I remember sitting kind of numbly, it was like last Thursday. And Tanari was asking was I okay. I said, no, I'm not okay. But it's not about you, it's not about us. So just let me sit, let me sit with this. And then over the weekend I thought to myself, alright, I don't know what I'm going to do here, but I have faith that there is an answer. There is somebody who would have an answer to this. I have faith that I can learn. So here's what I'm going to do. I am going to believe that there is a better, stronger, smarter version of me that would know how to solve this problem. So all I have to focus on is growing. I make the commitment right now that I will die before I stop growing. I make a commitment. I will grow until I see the answer, until I am a person who is big enough, smart enough, creative enough. If I was writing a story about somebody with this problem, I would come up with something that knocked that character sideways so they would see reality from a different position and realize the answer was right in front of them the whole time. There is an answer here, I just don't know it yet. And I will have total faith that there is an answer. And every single day I will sit with this and I will journal about it, I will meditate about it, I will pray about it. I will ask for the strength to grow into being the person who can solve it to. Because there are people who need me to solve this and I will not let them down. That's how I was talking to myself. And it got me out of. It got me out of my exhaustion. Tom Barclay said exhaustion attacks our faith. Absolutely true. So you have to care about something that is bigger than you. So that parents will get up in the middle of the night when they're totally exhausted, running a fever of 103. And if their kid needs something, if their child is sick, you can be exhausted and beaten and terrified, but you'll go into a burning house to save the people you care about. You have to find something in your life, some aspect of your own heart, some aspect of your dream, someone outside yourself, something your community, something that you care about more Than you care about the fact that there's a voice in your head that says you can't do it. Something that you are prepared to die before you will quit. When you find that you have made contact with the same thing that that woman in that workshop made contact with. When I told her the obscene thing that I would do to her little sister if I got past her, suddenly it wasn't about her exhaustion, it wasn't about her faith. Her attention stopped being on herself. We run out of faith, we go into depression, we get exhausted. We, when our attention is on us, when we put our attention on the good we can bring to the world, the value we can bring to the world. We have all the energy we need. You can work yourself to death when you're doing it for your kids. That's the place you want to test. And of course, you also need to have the balance so that you don't work yourself to death. Because that place, that all or nothing place, that total survival place, is the third rail of your psyche. That total survival animal place, that spiritual commitment place, the human part of you is suspended between the spiritual and the animal in that sense. So every day when I woke up in the morning, it's how am I going to solve this? Every night before I went to bed at night, it's how am I going to solve this? Every day when I journal, I'm writing the journal, everything I knew about the problem in. And ultimately had things not broken up on their own, I would have started using the same techniques that I use when I'm trying to solve a problem in a story. I would use post it notes, you know, keep my post it notes right next to my desk. I would cover the wall with post it notes about aspects of it. I would use index cards. I've got a whiteboard, I've got a cork board, I've got big, huge pads of paper and. And I would sketch out the problem of each of them. Looking at the problem this way, that way, this way probably. Now, who are the smartest people I know? I would imagine the smartest people I know conferring with me in my mind, talking to me. Well, you could try this, Steve. You could try this, Steve. You could try this, Steve. Sunday night I went to bed saying, I don't have an answer to this, but I believe that I will find one. And I could hear that voice had a different quality this time. It was deeper, it was more resonant, it was more confident. And Monday morning I woke up and I had the answer. And it was like, yes. I do not believe that I have ever had a problem in my life that has resisted 24 hours of focused thought. There are times when I have locked myself in a room and said, I will not eat, I will not leave this room without the answer. And I would sit there with a pad of paper for hours and sketch out everything I knew about the problem over and over and over again, trusting that there was something inside me that could come up with an answer with this. That's that warrior part. That part that will not stop and that will kill the part of you that doubts you. You make contact with that and then you choose challenges that will force you out of yourself, force you to become a bigger, stronger, better person. You know, issues that I cannot solve, solve this unless I grow. For someone who could zip through this course in 10 weeks, they'd have to go out and find a life threatening problem to trigger that part of themselves. But for those of us who get stopped by the work, by the confusion happening in life and the doubts, you have just found a challenge that will absolutely raise your level just by doing something that is relatively safe in your home. That is a gift from God. To find the things, to find the limits of who we are that have been created by the pain that we've taken through life. And all of us are carrying wounds from the lives that we have left. To find the part of you that is capable of committing a hundred percent, that you will get up again and again and again and again. To know that that part is inside you and that you can rely on it is one of the greatest gifts that you could possibly give yourself. You know, the hero inside you, the whole life writing thing is how do you be the hero in the adventure of your lifetime? You will have to slay the dragons. And one of the things you will learn, I mean, there are four steps to master. The first step is you find yourself fighting the dragon and you find a way to change yourself so that you are strong. The second step is that when you see the dragon, you automatically begin to shift so that you, you know, you put your armor on automatically when you see the dragon. The next step is that you see that the dragons are not dragons. You see that they are creatures of your own psyche and that if you can befriend them, they become like guard dogs at the gate of your soul. And the last step is that you develop the capacity to slay, to find and slay and recruit and transform dragons in every arena of your life. By mastering one arena, you have Learned, you've opened the gate to mastering all. My dear and much missed mentor Jerry Pornell said, if you master anything, you've learned how to master anything else. Musashi Miyamoto in the Book of Five Rings, said, Master one thing, master 10,000 things. So this is about learning how to master yourself. It will be difficult because it should be difficult. If you want to be strong, if you want to find the deepest, truest part of you, then you find the thing that's hard. Then you gather around you the allies. What's the step to the Hero's Journey? The secret of the journey has been right in front of us the whole time. Every generation of elders tries to teach it to the next generation of students. And you will be confronted with a challenge. There will be fear that stops you from accepting the challenge. At some point, you will find the motivation to keep going anyway. You will set out on the road of trials, where it's just every day, day after day after day, you will do certain things. You will find new allies and gain new abilities. Because if you had the ability to do this when you started, you'd already be there. So you know when you start out to go after a new goal, take it for granted you're going to break down. Take it for granted. Assume that. And if you didn't break down, if you zip through it, go out and find something harder. It's like you go to the gym. You don't lift weights that are easy. You'll never grow. You want to be out of breath. You want to be. That's the only way to signal your unconscious mind that it's time to grow. It's the only way you can do it. If you. If you do those things, the next step is you will have your initial confrontation with evil in which you are defeated. Did you hear that? It's right there in the Hero's Journey. You're going to lose. You're going to fail. You're going to fall on your face. It is designed into the system. Every movie you have ever seen, every story, story you've read, every television episode you've seen has failure built into it. So I ask you the question, why, when we fail, don't we remember that that was part of the process. We were promised that before we started. If you fail, you will hit the dark night of the soul. That is the moment in which it feels that nothing you do is enough. So you know, guys, are any of you out there? Have you ever entered the dark night of the soul? Have you ever hit the Point where it felt like, yeah, raise your hands. That's me. That's me. I hit it every day. Every day, every week, I hit it harder. In every month, there's an even bigger cycle, and every year is a bigger one. And every seven years, I have noticed, I hit a cycle of failure that is so hard that I curl up on the floor and cry. I mean, it's just like. It feels like all is lost. Every about every seven years, I totally destroy myself. And that creates the room to be reborn. That is the truth of it. The way through the dark night of the soul is faith. And it can be faith in something inside yourself. It could be faith in a higher power, or it could be faith in your companions. Misty, tell us what the faith was that helped you through. You intimated it.

Yeah, I have a list that I usually. God, family, self, mentors, process.

Yeah. So if you take those other steps, if you have learned, if you've had the mentors, the role models, if you have proceeded with faith, then in the Western world and most of the rest of the world, we say that the next step is that you confront evil, and this time you're victorious. In other words, you become the better person. You become the stronger person. And the last step is the student becomes the teacher. This is why I do this. I'm working to create leaders. What I want is for each and every one of you to be a leader. Whether you're a. Whether you are an employer or an employee, a salesperson or marketer, a writer, an artist, you are a leader. I want you to be so powerful, so joyful, so full of life, that people want to know, how did you do that? And then you share with them. You help them like others have helped you, like others have helped me. It's an unbroken chain of human life, of human love, of human experience, expansion that goes from one generation to the next to the next to the next. And we are now, you know, we're now it. That's all. We're now it. We're the ones who have to help the children, the ones who come next. And it is my belief that if you listen to me, if you have been a part of what it is that I've been doing, you live for more than just yourself. You live to be able to help other people, to serve other people. You're willing to see their souls. I'm trying to turn people into the people I wanted to meet who would not look at my color, who would not look at my poverty, would not look at, Would not Judge me for my fear. Who would look at me and say, there's something within Steve. You know, people like Larry Niven who saw me. I was this kid from South Central Los Angeles who had a dream of being a writer. He saw me and he helped me. Steve Muhammad, who taught warriors, just fantastic. I mean, world class, you know, world welterweight champion type karate guys. I wasn't a speck on the ass of those guys in terms of what I was when I walked into that school. But he never shames me when I got blown back out because I was too scared and he wouldn't see me for months and I would come back, it was always, hi, Steve, how are you doing? Come on, join up. You know, put on your. Let's get to work. When I've fallen on my face, you know, my first wife, who I still dearly love. We made so many mistakes, but we found ways to love each other and forgive each other. My daughter, who knew that her dad did the best he could, even if he messed up. But I. I did everything I could to be there for my son. I have so many times I've lost my temper. I've not been the father that he deserves. But he knows that his dad is doing the best he can. You know, my mom, who on her deathbed was unable to convey to me that she loved me and was spitting vile things because the cancer was eating her brain. And I could stand there and hear every bit of it and hold her hand and just say, I love you. Believing that somewhere inside her there was a place that could hear that. And for all the flaws, all the ways that I couldn't be the son that she deserved, that I needed to be. I couldn't be the husband my wife deserved, the father my children deserve, the students my teachers deserved. But I got back up every time and kept trying. And they loved me and they never judged me. They never judged me. So I asked you, don't judge yourselves. Just love yourself and get back up. Get back up. When you do that, you'll be able to turn to the next person who has fallen down, who has lost faith. And you'll be able to say, listen to me. I've fallen down so many times that I found a way to get back up. Let me help you get back up. I will teach you what I have learned. And that is the way the human race has moved forward. I just want the same for you. Just want the same for you. Misty, any last things that you have to say to us today? And once again, I can't I'm so proud of her. I'm so happy. But I'm proud of everyone who has tried. I'm proud for any step that you have taken, anything that you have done, especially if you've joined us and admitted that there is more for you to do and further for you to go. So what would you say to the people who feel like they got stopped, they got kicked out of the process? What would you say to them? Mr.

Get back up. Trust the process. Be gentle with yourself, be loving, and, yeah, just give yourself this gift.

Great. That is wonderful. The gift that she speaks of is the Warriors Journey course. You can learn more about it at www.realwarriorsjourney.com. we are here every week about two to three times a month. We're talking about writing specifically, but as you'll notice, what we're really talking about is who is the writer, who is the artist, who is the instrument that does these things. Let us work on this instrument together and help each other and raise each other up. I think each and every one of you so much for being here today. I love this so much. I love that you let me touch you. You let me interact with you. You let me share that. It's a safe space for me to talk about my own failings, my own, my own frailty. And that is a gift. I want to be a safe space where we can tell the truth to each other about what we're going through. The rest of the world can be what it is, but I want to create a safe space for you where you can be what you need to be in order to grow and heal and shine and be as magnificent as I know God intended you to be. Thank you so much for sharing this time with me. And I'd like to close it with the Sanskrit expression that says the divinity within me salutes and acknowledges the divinity within each and every one of you. Namaste. Have a wonderful, wonderful week and I'll see you soon. Bye. Bye. Love you all. Oh, wait a minute. I'm going to unmute you so you can say goodbye to each other. Let's hear your voices.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you. Take care, be safe. Take care. Be safe to meet you all and see you in a week. Bye bye. Yep.

Goodbye now. Bye bye.