Belly, Heart, Head
I hope that you are all looking at the three major aspects of your life: body, relationships, and career/education. Belly Brain, Heart Center, Head Center.
Make that connection, and find the connection between your breathing and your capacity to handle stress with grace, and you can implement any success system that pleases you. Connect this breathing to motion with Chi Gung, conscious walking, yoga, or (my favorite) Tai Chi, and you have opened the door to a new way of addressing life.
And it all begins with the first hour of the day. And your own personal FIREDANCE, the joining of motion to emotion and intent (again, Belly, Heart, and Head! Starting to see the patterns?)
The first hour of the day, the "Diamond Hour" can and does set the tone for the rest of the day. A few questions for you:
Do you start the day by centering your emotions? Meditating? Breathing, heartbeat meditation, or visualizing the "Ancient Child" are perfect.
Wake your body up? A single Sun Salutation ("A" or "B" series…I like "B") to align your spine, check your breathing, see to the integrity of your joints and back, warm up the muscles, tendons and ligaments?
CONSCIOUS MOVEMENT WITH EMOTIONAL FLOOD. AND AFFIRMATION. (BODY, HEART, AND HEAD!)
We'd love to have you in the FIREDANCE TAI CHI class, but until you can join, try this:
If you have NO room, just stand, feet approximately shoulder distance apart. Rub your hands together briskly until they feel hot, then shake out your fingers. Hold your palms an inch apart and FEEL THE WARMTH between your palms. The more relaxed you are, the armer your palms get, and also the more SENSITIVE they will be to the warmth of the other hand. Get this feeling right, and you can expand the "Chi Ball" of warm air, so that the palms get further and further apart. Relax. Hold your head as if suspended by a string from above.
Touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Relax your face. Focus on abdominal breathing. Expand on inhale, contract on exhale.
Find the place of focused relaxation, feeling as if the air is as thick as water, holding you up.
This feeling, a floating sense of detached focus, will take you to a place where every breath is like a little wave. It starts with the survival instinct, and rolls out, rolls through your body thousands of times a day, without any conscious effort. Try to hold this position for 12-15 minutes, but if that is too difficult you can do it seated, perhaps even the first thing you do sitting up in bed.
Keep a slight contraction of your anal sphincter. Feel that sense of connection, from that lower contraction to the crown of your head, like a line of light running through your body, connecting from the center of the Earth to the center of the Sun.
BASK in that light and warmth.
Now. What are your long-term goals? Remember, you should have three of them. If you can't think of anything try these:
Double your energy
Unwavering self-love and love for humanity
Double your net worth (the money left over after all debts are paid)
Those three should keep you busy! Now, say you want do do this within 12 months. Or 18. Or 36. While in this relaxed focus state, see the end point. What would you look and feel like with twice the energy? How would you feel if you lived in a state of perpetual gratitude and love? What would your bank book look like if you doubled your net worth? What good could you do for your family, and the world? How much satisfaction would you feel, living a life of joy and contribution?
Now…come back to the moment. What do you need to do TODAY to make this happen? And what can you do in your "Diamond Hour" to facilitate it?
Could you spend 20 minutes practicing Tai Chi? (Or another system of your choosing, including "conscious walking"
Could you flood yourself with joy while you are doing that, remembering things that you have to feel grateful for, the people you love who love you? Can you do that for twenty minutes?
Can you clarify your plans, model mentors, take a single step toward your goal? Make a phone call to a potential ally, connect with your motivation, clarify three things you can accomplish today that will removes some of the "low hanging fruit" from your goal? Can you spend twenty minutes doing that?
There! That's just one "diamond hour", sixty minutes of work.
BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
"Firedance" offers you the chance to do ALL of this at the same time! You are NOT spending an hour. You are spending just 20 minutes to bring body, heart, and mind ALL TOGETHER AT THE SAME TIME. This is massive, important, a breakthrough.
And if the movement is done with the kind of conscious, calm focus that you used to create the "Chi Ball" you are tapping into something different and deeper.
Do this, and the rest of your day gets EASY. You just chop wood, carry water. You have decreased your internal resistance, at the same time that you’ve clarified your destination, raised your energy, and committed to 1% improvement of efficiency and effectiveness. From the position of the Three Gates you have determined "truth" by grounding your work in the body, been kind to yourself with the emotional "flood" of gratitude (imagine spending 10-60 minutes a day on this alone!) and clarified your goals, as well as identified the role models who could accomplish them with joy.
DO THIS, spend a few hours creating this ritual and just minutes practiciing it, and you can and will change your life. On any day when you need extra focus, extra energy, all you have to do is increase the INTENSITY of your physical action, or the intensity and volume of your out-loud affirmations, and you are "turning it up to 11."
This single practice will change your life. Just give it six weeks to sink in, and you'll never go back!
Namaste
Steve
