Steven Barnes's Blog, page 88

Healing Ourselves

I love Facebook. Such interesting conversations, if you scan carefully. For instance, I published the following comment:

"There are two basic ways to evolve your life. Either change the way you use your body: posture, breathing, motion, composition. Or resolve the conflict in your heart. Success in either is mirrored in the other. In this arena, the conscious mind is mostly useful to help accomplish one of these two. And unless these evolve, you have not changed."

A reader posted the following:

"I'm counseling a college student about dealing with her emotionally abusive, Taliban-level controlling parents. After long encouragement from me, she has started to regularly just sit with herself, breathing and observing thoughts (as a precursor to true meditation practice). She said last night that she just realized that every move/conversation she has made in her life (24 years) has been focused on dealing with how they will act to block her if she dares step even the littlest bit out of their control. Her seed of core strength is forming, from the small act of sitting. I hope she can escape safely, but at least she now sees that she can empower *herself* to work towards the Light."

I love this. Good, solid generative work. And replied as followed:

Dear XXX--sounds like she found a good mentor in you. May I suggest some manner of "inner child" work--she needs to re-parent herself with deep, unquestioning, non-conditional love. If she can be the "mother" to her own "child" she can sort of "wire around" the damage from her parents, and recover her power.
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The capacity to heal ourselves, to align our dreams, values, emotions and actions, and to access our deepest intuition lies within you, within each of us. I am so grateful to my teachers over the decades, who led me to that light. The "Ancient Child" meditation is my humble effort to take the cream of this teaching and present it in a linear, incremental fashion. Please join us Saturday on the Diamond Hour, where I will address origins, methods, and applications.

Diamond Hour February show. - Saturday, February 9, 2013, 1:00 PM Pacific Standard time (4:00 PM Eastern)
http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/77111
Connect via phone or VoIP (Skype, etc.)
(724) 444-7444


Be the Hero in the adventure of your lifetime!
Steve

All paths lead home

Diamond Hour February show. -
Saturday, February 9, 2013,
1:00 PM Pacific Standard time (4:00 PM Eastern)
http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/77111
Connect via phone or VoIP (Skype, etc.)
(724) 444-7444

We'll be dealing with practical and esoteric applications of the "Ancient Child" meditation form
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"You have the right to your actions, but not to their fruits. Act without any thought of results. It is the only path to serenity."--the Bhagavad Gita

That is a hugely elevated perspective. For most, it is better to begin in a perspective grounded in worldly balance, which (for most of us) requires goals. Once our values, beliefs and emotions are integrated, goals can be disposed of--we naturally do our duties in life, and the very doing of them brings health and joy. But most times must be "grown through", not evaded or skipped over. If you don't have these worldly aspects mastered, you do yourself little favor to try to jump to a purely spiritual realm. I've seen as much damage done in such a way as I have watching people addicted to drugs or sex. It is a dream of evolution, rather than the path itself.

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My work-flow between my Ipad and desk-top is still not ideal. Since there's no Scrivener for Ipad, I have to take relatively clumsy steps to email text, or send it from one program to another. This isn't ideal because it takes me out of flow, and flow is where all the artistic elegance originates. But...it's still enormously productive. Just need to use a bit more "adult" Steve than I really want to use.
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Now, then...what do these two things have to do with each other? If it isn't clear, it is that I see my worldly tasks as gifts to my spiritual self. If you don't have such an intent, you can take advantage of this "mental streamline" technique, simply identify whatever YOUR highest value is in life. Family? Growth? Pleasure? Service?

Once you've identified it, look at your top four goals (body, career, relationship, and finances) and create 3-10 reasons that your actions will contribute and support your deepest loves. Describe this in such a way that your daily goal actions are empowered. Every word you write, every rep of exercise, every day you help your kids with their homework, every day on the job...EVERYTHING you do takes you closer to your core self. This is magic, on an individual level.

Submitted for your approval...
Steve
www.diamondhour.com

A letter today

Just got this today. Notes like this NEVER get old (name redacted to protect privacy, but yes, his name is Barnes!)
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XXXX X. Barnes

Mr. Barnes,

As I am sitting here in my new digs in Beverly Hills, I took a moment to reflect back on the journey that has gotten me here.

When I was just a kid (about 11), I was dealing with a very rough childhood and life was not that great. I was a social outcast, abused, and had a very profound speech impediment (stutter).

So one day I was walking past a library in Washington DC and decided to go in to get away from the drug dealers that typical harassed me on my way home from school. I began looking thru the paperbacks on the shelves. I wasn't very interested in reading and my family didn't really encourage it. But I came across your book Street Lethal and saw that it was about a black man. And then I got a little happy because it was written by someone who had my same last name.

I sat down and began reading. I lost track of time as I BECAME Aubry Knight. I sat there so long reading that the librarian had to kick me out at closing time. She was nice enough to let me take the book home even though I didn't have a library card.

That day I became the definition of a voracious reader. I got a library card and would take home 15 - 20 books a week. All different topics, different genres, hundreds of authors. I read constantly to escape the hell that was my life. My grades went from failing to straight A's, due to my expanding vocabulary and the fire that was lit in my mind.

I also began training in the martial arts and improving myself physically. I became more confident which began to help me control my stuttering.

Anyway... Fast forward to the present and I now live in LA and have begun a journey in the entertainment industry for the last 3 years. I am in post production on my second feature film which I wrote and directed.

I wanted to take a moment to thank you, my brother. Your work changed the life of another potential statistic. My love of the written word has changed me and the ability to read and to write has opened up new worlds which a little scrawny kid from DC could never had imagined if it had not been for your books.

To this day I the Aubry Knight series is still my favorite.

Thank you for doing what you do. You changed my life!

One Love,

XXXXX X. Barnes

Writer/Producer/Director/Fan
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Steve back now.  Whew.   I had to wipe away a tear.   Listen, people, NEVER underestimate the power of your dreams.  Never give up on them.  And understand that every action you take ripples out into the universe endlessly.   

submitted for your approval,
Steve

Building a Perfect Life

There is a child within us, just as there is an ancient who understands the meaning of life and death. The child holds your passion and creativity, but it also seeks approval. Choose those people whose approval gives you pain and pleasure VERY carefully. Those choices will determine the quality of your life.

Three things to pay attention to, with infinite depth once you understand the implications: your "child self" in the past, your "inner elder" in your future, and the YOU who exists now. Everything you want can be found in the interactions of these three. Everything you could ever want to learn about success and consciousness can be found here. A beautiful visualization.

Here's a brief exercise to demonstrate how this works. Say you have a job opportunity coming up, and want to be your best. Ask yourself a few questions.

CHILD
1) Is there an element of fun connected with this job? Something you would have enjoyed as a child?
2) Is there an aspect of this work that makes the world a safer, better place for children?

ELDER
1) Is this job providing goods and services that make the world a better place, according to your values?
2) Can you find a way to make a personal contribution, or find self-expression, through this work?

ADULT
1) Will this job enable you to care for your obligations in a moral and ethical fashion?
2) Will this job or career enable you to afford time and energy to do something that you DO love?
3) Will this job or career help you "play for position" by giving you skills, contacts, or experience you can parlay into a more suitable position in the future?

See how this works? Any of these reasons will motivate you to shine at your interview. But when you can align your childhood enthusiasms, adult responsibilities and mature understanding of the critical importance of dancing without fear, and living for the larger context...Something special happens.

And when you can set it up so that body, mind, and relationships all support each other, and all relate to what your child, adult, and elder "aspects" need and understand, you have taken your brakes off. Can act spontaneously and still perform at your highest levels. That is a miracle each of us can actually experience in life, one I wish for each and every one of you.


Namaste,
Steve
www.diamondhour.com

OMG. A clean, funny joke.

Lost in a bad part of town, a turtle was set upon by a gang of snails and mugged. The police took the report, and quizzed the poor creature, trying to get better descriptions.
"What happened?" they asked.
The turtle shook his head in confusion.
"I don't know, officer," he said. "It all happened so fast."

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

After spending time in a mental institution, former teacher Pat Solitano ("Bradly Cooper) moves back in with his parents (Robert Di Niro and Jackie Weaver) and tries to reconcile with his ex-wife. Things get more challenging when Pat meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) , a mysterious girl with problems of her own.

The coming attractions told me nothing useful about this movie, almost as if the studio was worried about it finding an audience. I knew Chris Tucker had decided to do something other than collect "Rush Hour" residuals, and that Di Niro actually seemed to be acting, but other than that...not much.

When I finally sat down and watched it, I was reminded of Lawrence Olivier's "Love Among The Ruins" in the sense that it is a story about two damaged human beings doing the porcupine mating dance--backing together very very carefully. Cooper was destroyed by his wife's cheating, is a twitchy, dysfunctional mess who believes he can hold himself together and hopefully reunite with his wife if he can seek out life's "silver linings." A dose of reality comes his way in the person of Jennifer Lawrence, a young woman just as damaged...but with her wounds in different parts of her personality.

She promises to help him reconnect with his wife (there is a restraining order) if he helps her compete in a dance contest. In and around this slender plot thread is Di Niro's obsession with football betting, and Chris Tucker's refusal to allow the mental institution to define him. The acting is wonderful across the board, and ultimately, by being specific enough about a particular difficult and fragile relationship, Silver Linings Playbook becomes about all of us, in our wounds and hopes and self delusion. And...astonishing capacity to stand up and reach out, again and again, despite the endless blows we suffer. To have faith that dawn will come, even in the midst of the darkest night. I was asked if I could recommend a "chick flick" for a reader, and if that term denotes a film held together more by dialog and emotions than plot twists and explosions, SLP over-qualifies. And it is enjoyable top to bottom. And yes, Di Niro is better than I've seen him in years. A "B+".
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WARNING: SPOILERS
Hero's Journey analysis:
1) Hero Confronted with challenge: Released from a mental institution, Pat Solitano attempts to re-integrate his life.
2) Rejection of challenge: but he cannot do this without resolving his relationship with the wife who betrayed him. But little does he know that
3) Accepts Challenge: Tiffany, a young woman as damaged as he, is determined to drag him kicking and screaming back into life, by fair means or foul.
4) Road of Trials: he tries to get his job back. To heal his relationship with his family. To contact his wife. To lose weight and balance himself with exercise.
5) Allies and Powers: his family, nutballs though they are. His friend Danny (Chris Tucker), Tiffany, even his image of his wife. He has intelligence, passion, hope, resilience, a sense of humor...and finally, not a bad set of dancing skills.
6) Confront Evil-Defeat. That would be telling.
7) Dark Night of the Soul. His failure will mean devastation for his family. He has to take a certain very uncomfortable set of actions, for all the marbles.
8) Leap of Faith. In his own capacities, but more than that, in Tiffany.
9) Confront Evil--victory. He definitely has his moment, in which his choices determine the future path of his life.
10) The Student Becomes the Teacher--he is able to finally reach back honestly to someone who has emptied herself out trying to help him, touch him. Love him.

I saw myself a dozen times in this film. And if that isn't a measure of quality, I don't know what is.

Submitted for your approval...
Steve
www.diamondhour.com
 

The Five Questions

Who, Why, How, When, Where?

Everyone who ever took a journalism class (or saw a movie about journalism) has heard these: the basic information necessary to write a story. Since the "Lifewriting" method asks us to write our own Future History in advance, it is valuable to ask: do you know these five questions about each goal in your life?

1) WHAT: Have at least one goal in each of your four major life areas: body, mind, relationships and finances. Specificity has power. The goal should be photographable, tangible. In other words, if you say "improve my relationship" that is mushy. Say "have a second honeymoon in Maui" and suddenly you have specificity. But in brainstorming, prepare to be flexible: "you can have anything you want if you let go of how it's supposed to look." No, you can't flap your wings and fly off the edge of a building...unless you have a hang-glider.

2) WHY: You need reasons. Whenever people fail to reach a goal, or are lost in a position of poor fitness or sloppy finances, invariably their reasons for achievement are weak. They may have one or two thin motivations, but nothing to keep them going through the Dark Night of the Soul. And there WILL be a dark night of the soul, absolutely. It is idiocy not to anticipate the @#$$ hitting the fan, when you've seen it countless times in your own personal history. If you have 2 or three reasons, you'll fail. If you have 20 or 30 reasons, so powerful that when you read them you feel your juices rising, NOW you have leverage.

3) WHERE: Where do you have to go to get the resources you will need to bridge the gap between where you are and where you need to be?

4) WHO: Who are the allies and role models you need to achieve your goal? The safest bet is that IF YOU HAVEN'T DONE IT, YOU CAN'T DO IT WITH YOUR CURRENT RESOURCES. You will need to grow, and change. Change believes and re-organize values to reflect your current life and vision of the future. You will need help. The "Mastermind" technique is the ONLY known way to compensate for lack of talent or even intelligence. It demands that you bond yourself to people with the skills you don't have. How? Here's a hint: smart people need friends too. Offer genuine loyalty, honesty, open-hearted support in exchange for advice and support. Offer value in exchange for value. And keep asking until you find someone to say "yes."

5) WHEN: A goal without a deadline is just a pipe dream. You need to know when this seismic shift in your existence will take place. A date. And by studying role models who have accomplished similar goals you will gain the perspective needed to Time-bind your intentions. "There are no unreasonable goals, only unreasonable time frames." People who want to lose five pounds a week are probably going to fail, or get sick. One pound a week is perfectly doable.

Who, what, where, why, when. Write the story of YOUR life. Be the Hero in the Adventure of your lifetime!

Submitted for your approval...
Steve
www.diamondhour.com

1000 Words A Day

My 2013 plan is to catch up on my book backlog--I have about six of 'em stacked up in my head, and it's crowded in there. To deal with this, I've looked more carefully at what I call "The Machine"--the work-flow leading to finished, published product. Basically:
1) Write
2) Read 10X as much as you write
3) Finish and polish.

I asked myself: how much do I need to write to dig my way out of this hole in, say three years? Without overwhelm or burnout? If there are three different basic components of producing work (as opposed to marketing it, for instance) then research and planning, free reading, rough draft production and re-writing do seem to be the most essential steps. And the pinch point would seem to be the production of new text. Set this number too low (or let the work be intermittent) and there is insufficient production to reach goals, as well as lack of developing the specific "muscles" of production.

If I have to create 1000 words a day, that means reading 10k a day of various fiction and non-fiction works to "feed" my unconscious. It also means that I need to re-write at least every other day. Re-writing occurs at a MUCH faster pace than creation of original rough text, so every other day works fine. That first draft stuff needs to be worked every day optimally, sort of like stretching to keep muscles loose. Or dredging sludge out of a feeder stream.

So the morning schedule is: Up at 5: 45, meditate. Out of bed by 6am, drink my tea and do something kinda no-brainer, like look over emails and check Facebook. See if there's a morning essay (like this one) that begs to be written. Jason's morning ritual starts by 7 am. Afterwards, I have maybe thirty minutes to work out or relax, and then by 8 I have to start on my 1000 words.

This can be production of book text, creation of script (about 5 pages) or conversion of script to book text. Any of these fit the bill. Then a break (if I'm tired, this is a good time for a nap) work out, or begin morning reading. This is Aristotle and Shakespeare (that complete BBC Bard is just phenomenal).

Then...the rest of the day is polishing the text from previous days, and, most importantly, preparing for tomorrow's 1000 words. What do I need to know? What is happening next? What do my characters want? How will their world respond? What themes do I seek to explore? I research, think, plot and plan and even go to bed with such questions in my mind, allowing my "dream time" to work on the problem.

And in the morning? A thousand words feels insufficient. I have enough works and images in my mind to create maybe two thousand words, which makes 1k child's play. I don't create more than that, because testing has suggest that, over time, it can lead to burn-out. And I won't have as much time for re-writing, polishing, and researching. It feels like stress, but not strain.

And stress without strain is what triggers positive growth. I'm enjoying this program, and six months from now, if I've finished two more books, I'll let you know.


Submitted for your approval...
Steve

Musashi's Writing Advice

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There is a relatively simple reason why I have focused upon The Hero's Journey and the yogic Chakras to both represent my reality and as a writing tool.

1) There are two things to write about: what is the world, and who are the human beings who inhabit it? These two tools describe the path of internal and external knowledge.

2) These, unlike almost any other writing tools I know of, describe both the writing and the writer. Therefore, any work I do on my writing teaches me about myself. Anything I do to improve myself also improves my writing.

3) Once you've accepted that the model is not the thing itself, you are free to enjoy a miracle. If you combine these two models, you have wrapped your mind around at least six thousand years of world wisdom about the path of life, and the nature of our experienced reality. It is like glimpsing the arc of a dynamic sphere of life, a construct larger than any conscious mind can grasp...but capable of intuitive navigation.

This is how you know you've reached this place: given any character, a story automatically suggests itself. Given any story situation, a character automatically suggests herself. You "see" and "feel" the connection between them.

4) To access intuition, the component skills of an activity must be absorbed at the level of unconscious competence. This means that you must reduce the basics to a finite set of components, and practice them until they are on "autopilot."

I know of no more effective way to create this internal intuitive wisdom than having your writing approach overlap with your life approach. As Musashi said, "let your combat stance be your everyday stance. And your everyday stance be your combat stance."

Write with passion!
Steve

"You can't know that!"

I was teaching Tai Chi at Arisia science fiction convention, and a lady mentioned that she had struggled with anorexia. I suggested to her that she might want to perform a meditation to make contact with the child part of herself, someone younger than any damage or discomfort life had given her, that that part of her probably had some interesting things to communicate. After the class, a gentleman approached me and said that I shouldn't have said that. That he has been in therapy for years, and that it is impossible to know enough about someone in a moment to make a call like that.

My reply is that there are certain knowings that exist in time, and others that take place in a moment. That certain types of information are available instantly to us, if our eyes are open. The most important determinant is that we are honest with ourselves about how we came to where we are in life, the decisions we have made, and the prices we have paid.

At the core of what we are as human beings, there isn't tremendous difference. I love the analogy that suggests we're much like mushrooms--apparently individuals on the surface, but look deeper and we see these apparent "individuals" are part of a larger mycelial mass beneath. Go deeply enough into your individual reality, and you emerge at the universal. I've never gotten into trouble assuming others are like me. The only difficulties I've encountered over my life have occurred when I assumed others are different.

The second thing he didn't understand is that I'm not a therapist. I'm a coach. the difference is that I have no idea at all of the specifics that this lady has been through. But I know what a healthy human being is, and what the journey is. It is like meeting someone trying to climb Mt Everest. I don't know the path that they have covered to get to base camp. But I can point in the direction of the peak.

That's all I did. I know that a healthy human being, self actualizing, has a healthy balance between the different aspects of their personality. One way to represent this is to speak of "child" and "elder" aspects. There is no downside in what I suggested:

1) Visualize the child self. Find a representation that is young enough to have avoided whatever damage has occurred in life, even if it is an embryo. A single cell. An image of light, prior to your current "incarnation." Whatever works.

2) Become quiet enough to allow that part to communicate with you.

This isn't therapy. I always suggest that my students work with their personal wellness team. Many times, I have worked with their therapists, if they give me permission to contact them. What I'm doing is similar to a geometry student who can be given three points, and from that extrapolate the rest of a circle. It is a matter of keeping my eyes on what the full arc and expression of our humanity is, and believing it is within our capacity to reach it.

He walked away unconvinced. But the lady in question approached me after class...and thanked me. And that, for me, is the only standard that matters.


Namaste,
Steve