The Hero’s Journey
--Reducing Pain
Fibromyalgia
COPD symptoms (depression, anxiety, etc)
High blood pressure
Chronic heart failue
Quality of life associated with aging
Preventing falls
Knee osteoarthritis
Symptoms of cancer including fatigue, sleep quality, anxiety, stress, depressive symptoms, and overall quality of life.
Cognition and memory
Mental health in substance abuse disorders
COVID-19 symptoms such as: improved physical activity, perceptions of difficult breathing, quality of life, and some measures of inflammation in the body
If you are concerned with ANY of these issues, check out the report above on the effects of Tai Chi and Chi Gong on your health. Amazing, and science is catching up with a thousand years of anecdotal and traditional teaching.
They are very, very real. And I want them to be a part of your life.
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Life is a journey, and your mind, body, and heart are all twined together into the vehicle that carries you every day. But YOU have to decide to take the steps. No one can do it for you. The science of self-improvement has many tools and perspectives, and a powerful one is to ask what it takes to BE THE PERSON WHO CAN DO THE THINGS THAT WILL LEAD YOU TO YOUR DESTINY. And "Lifewriting", the science we've refined for thirty years with thousands of students, says to look at the "Hero's Journey" a thematic "spine" of almost any series of events the human nervous system recognizes as "story"
What I'm going to invite you to do is see yourself as the hero in your own story, capable of healing, helping, protecting, living your dream with PASSION and excitement. In order to meet the challenge of living life with greater joy and service, you must increase your health and energy, and integrating a Morning Ritual of thought, emotion, and motion will do exactly this.
I've been tired, broken, and broke. At the edge. Had no idea how to move forward, but I HAD to to take care of my family. And it wasn't until I combined my mental/emotional work with my physical Tai Chi practice that I blew up all my blocks and really embraced the possibilities that had been in front of me the whole time.
I want nothing less than this for YOU and your family.
You are going to combine two of the most powerful transformative technologies on the planet into something magical: Firedance. And while you can do this with any physical exercise where you can speak while performing, Tai Chi has, as you can see, some extraordinary benefits that make it perfect for anyone, from the bed-ridden to the Olympic athlete.
But first you have to take control of the STORY you tell yourself about who you are, where you've been, and where you are going.
And to do that, we have to understand "story" better. To do THAT, let's look at a perspective on the full 360-degree arc of story (most stories are fragments or reinterpretations of this, just as piano compositions START with the master of the 88 keys, but plays them out of order, with varying intensities, repetitions, and rhythms).
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By using story as an analogy, story as a framework, we can talk about extraordinary amount of complex material boiled down to relatively simple steps. Okay. . Joseph Campbell in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, talked about the common thread in storytelling as the Hero's Journey. The HJ is one of the two utterly conceptual foundations of this system, and we'll talk about the other the "Chakras," very soon.
Now, his version of the Hero's Journey worked for his work as a cultural anthropologist and what he was doing. What I wanted to do was to take it a slightly different direction. I wanted to look at not just what is common in the great adventure stories, the great adventurous mythologies, but in every story and in the sense that storytelling is connected to life, what I wanted to know was what is the process of mastery that is discussed in story that is also applicable to our lives?
And this was created for writers, because then you could take the lessons in your life and apply them to your writing and your lessons from your writing and apply it to your life. The truth is it's good for all of us. I started applying it to Tai Chi and giving it to my martial arts students and then to my coaching clients, and it worked stunningly well.
And if you will make a list of three movies that you like, and figure out how these steps apply, you will e'll begin to integrate this at the deep level that we're talking about. So what are the steps of the Hero's Journey? Step one is the hero, or heroine, of course, is confronted with a challenge.
Now, I always use the original Star Wars movie, which is now called "A New Hope", episode four. New Hope, as an example here, begins with:
Step One: Confronted with a Challenge. "Come with me, Luke, and learn the ways of the Force."
Step Two is the rejection of the challenge. "Oh, I promised Uncle Owen and Aunt Baru, I'd work on the moisture evaporators."Now the challenge is generally rejected because it's bigger than we are.
To meet this challenge, we have to become a different person. We have to induce from ourselves to pull out from ourselves the seeds of that different person, then water that with emotion and action so we become someone new. And the trouble is that when you become that new person, you're killing the old person and the old person, your ego shell, does not want to die.
It mistakes itself for you and will give you massive Fear and turn you away from the new thing that you want to do. If you want to know why it's so hard to do anything that is changing your identity, like losing weight, you know, or making a lot more money so forth, literally, unless your identity already encompasses that, it's gonna be tough.
And if your, your identity already encompasses that, you'd already be that. So expect tension, that's a beautiful thing about the heroes journey that allows you to predict in advance. What problems you're gonna have accomplishing something. So confronted with a challenge. Come with me, Luke. Learn the ways of the force.
The Third step is that life allows you or forces you to accept the challenge. In this case, it was uncle Owen and Aunt Baru, you know? Rather coincidentally and plot-conveniently got wiped out by the storm troopers.
So now Luke is free of his obligations and he's motivated to take the next step. So, you know, "teach me to be a Jedi like my father."
The Fourth step is the road of trials. It's just the stuff that you do. And most stories are mostly road of trials. It's like most lives are just "chop wood, carry water."
You're just gonna do the stuff that you do to get where you're going. In the Star Wars movie, New Hope, it was, you know, you go to Mos Eisley Cantina, that wretched hive of Scum and Villainy, and you go to this bar and you get a Millennium Falcon and you go to Alderaan, that has been blown up, you know?
And then you go on the Death Star and you go to the trash compactor and you go to this level and that level, and you do this, and you do that. It's just the stuff that you do. . Okay. So it's confronted with the challenge. Reject the challenge. Accept the challenge, road of trials…and
The Fifth Step: meet allies and gain powers.
Okay. Now the road of trials and meeting allies happens at about the same time. And who is Luke Skywalker? Luke Skywalk as a hero. Okay, and who are the allies? Okay. His allies are Obi-Wan Kenobi and C3 PO. And R2 D2, and Princess Leia, and you know, and Chewbacca, of course, Chewy.
Now the powers. What powers does Luke have at the beginning? He has courage, he has commitment, but along the way he's also going to learn how to use a light saber, how to fly an X wing, how to be a leader, Cetera, Cetera, et cetera. So the idea being that there's a moment of ultimate conflict in the movie that if you took Farmboy Luke and dropped him into the trench battle at the end, you know, the death star, he'd be dead within seconds. He wouldn't know what he was doing. He wouldn't know how to do it. He wouldn't know how to lead anybody. He would not operate the X-Wing. He wouldn't know how to use the force, et cetera, et cetera.
So the movie then is about teaching Luke the things he needs to meet the challenge is going to transform him into a Jedi at the end of the movie.
The Sixth sixth step, you confront evil and LOSE. Now, this is very important, the implication because in the movie it would be , Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed. I mean, this is, this is art, not science.
I'm not being dogmatic about it, but this is the way I would make sense of it. Obiwan Kenobi was the person who was supposed to take Luke all the way to being a Jedi when he dies. In untimely death, premature death, it throws Luke for a loop. And, and there would've been a big dramatic moment, except this is an action movie.
So they spin it into an action beat. you know, "that's great kid, you know, don't get cocky", blah, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Instead of angst, and oh my God, my, my, my dad, I never knew my dad. And then my uncle died, and now this good man who was gonna teach you, see, you could see how he could go into tears very, very easily.
But action. Into an action beat. This is natural. In other words, you can expect that when you're on your way to learn something new that is going to transform you, you're going to hit a point of failure the next step.
The Seventh step is the dark night of the soul. Now, the dark night of the soul In Star Wars might be that moment where they're fighting in the trenches and the rebels are losing, they're getting blown apart. Not only that, but Gran Moff Tarken is saying, "Fire up the laser". You know, and , Peter Cushing, right? He was great, great actor. "fire up the laser" and Carrie Fisher with the cinnamon buns on the side of her head is looking very pensive and John Williams music is going, Boom, boom, boom.
It's just great. But the dark night of the soul is that moment when it feels that all is lost, that everything you have and everything you could do is insufficient to meet the task at hand. Think back over your life, over the things that you've accomplished and ask yourself, how many times did you feel that everything was falling apart?
Were there micro cycles where you went through that a little bit every day? Was there a mega cycle where you'd go through it from time to time, or was there one moment in the entire process where it felt like you wanted to quit? Nothing was working. If you look at this, you'll see that, yeah, that rhythm is there.
Each of these steps, the rhythm is there. Sometimes they're not emphasized, Sometimes they're foreshadowed, sometimes they're minimal. . Sometimes they're suggested, but that sense of compression and release that's there. Okay, so what are the steps so far that's confronted with a challenge? Reject the challenge.
Accept the challenge set out on the road of trials, allies and powers confront evil and lose. The way through the dark night of the soul is…
Step Eight, the "leap of faith." The leap of faith is always faith in one of three things.
1) Faith in yourself,
2) Faith in your companions,
3) Faith in a higher power.
Now I ask you Star Wars fans: Which was it? Was it Luke had to have faith in himself? Did he have to have faith in his companions or did he have to have faith in a higher power?
And if you can answer this question, you know why George Lucas is a billionaire. Because he did something I'd never seen done before. Think about it.
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it was all three! Faith in yourself. He had to have faith in his own skills, not just as a pilot, but the Force is a power within him that both flows through him and binds the universe together.
So it's faith in himself. Faith in this companions, Han Solo comes diving in out of the sun. And faith in a higher power, the force, like I said, binds the universe together. So it is a universal force that he has to have faith in his feelings in order to control or sense. By putting all three of those things together in a single action, George Lucas created a moment of sublime satisfaction.
It was just so wonderful. It felt so great, and audiences all over the world responded to it. That was a great moment. If you take all those steps, then…
Step nine as you confront evil again, and this time you're victorious. That's when the death star blows.
The last step, Step Ten, the student becomes the teacher, or the movement to the higher level or the return to the village with the elixir.
In other words, you have finished one part of your life, you're onto the next adventure. In that movie, it's the, the ceremony where Han and Luke get medals from Princess Leia and unfortunately no medal for poor Chewy. Just got, got no respect, no respect at all. But those are the 10 steps .
I discovered Firedance when I was shattered and without hope. It required a LEAP OF FAITH in the men and women who had taught me the component pieces, and FAITH in my own instincts that the combination of mind, emotion, and complex physical motion would free me from my self-pity and fear, focus me in a way I'd never known, but masters from Musashi Miyamoto to Tony Robbins said was not just possible, but my heritage.
I was afraid of change, but life gave me no choice. I trusted my teachers, took the leap…and changed EVERYTHING in my life within months.
It was the door to Awakening, realizing that there were of COURSE things I couldn't change in life, but that life Mastery is about taking control of what I CAN do. And that when you focus on that, when you have a Map of action, take that action daily, flood yourself with deep gratitude, generate a diamond-hard vision of your future in alignment with joy and service, and have absolute confidence that you CAN and SHOULD evolve into the person who exemplifies your values, your true self…
Miracles happen. M.A.G.I.C. happens. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" Arthur C. Clark, writer of my favorite movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" said (and applying the Hero's Journey to this movie is quite instructional!). I offer you the most advanced technology that a lifetime of study, and forty years of teaching, have discovered and evolved.
I implore you to try it, to declare a new life in a new day. That from this moment on YOU will be the Hero (or Shero!) in your life, take your challenges and commit to doing 100% you best to deal with them and NOT allow stress to become strain, to adapt to them as if you were lifting weights in the gym. Life is your gym. Firedance is the nutrients and rest you need to grow rather than break down.
If these words speak to you, this is the doorway you've sought, and your future awaits.
Namaste
Steve
