The Home of Steven Barnes
Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Sunday, November 11, 2007

Seven Secrets

Poor Jason has been sleeping in hotel rooms, eating nothing but hotel food for almost two weeks now. His behavior starts out fine in the morning, but by evening, he’s pretty much chaotic. Poor baby. Can’t wait to get him home. But it really makes me wince about my own stress level. I’ve been dealing with this for almost a month now, one way or another, and it’s dreadful. I haven’t eaten right, slept right, or had a decent yoga class. My work routine is in the crapper, and I have a book due by the end of the year. Yuck. I guess these are the times we find out who we really are…
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I wrote out that six-part plan to align yourself with the universe at a shamanic level pretty much off the top of my head, but I can’t help but feel that I put something together that was…unusual. And more valid than I had thought. I need to put more thought into that.
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I mentioned to another writer here my plan to do a book next year called “Seven Secrets”, just exploring the most interesting techniques I’ve learned or evolved over forty years of digging into this stuff. The idea is to take those ideas that seem…oddly rarified. The stuff which, if I didn’t know it, I’d pay a huge amount to have it. Off the top of my head, the most important pieces would cover body, mind and spirit, and would include:
1) The Hero’s Journey (applied to life).
2) Spiritual Autolysis
3) The Soulmate Process
4) I.D.E.A. (reality calibration through balanced living)
5) Intermittent Fasting
6) Heartbeat Meditation (and Three-Chakra goal setting)
7) The Five Minute Miracle (“Greasing the Groove”, or synaptic facilitation)
8) Fifteen Minute Exercise (Five Tibetans, FlowFit, Cards, etc.)
9) Fear Removal

Gee. That’s nine. I’ll prune. But this seems to cover the core of it. And if I can interrelate them smoothly, it feels like a damned fine tool-box for total mental, physical and spiritual development. Thoughts?
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Just finished reading the new Andrew Vachss novel, "Mask Market." Wow. If this man's work is "Hard Boiled" then everyone else is runny eggs. Vachss is out in the beyond somewhere, and he's earned the right, through a lifetime of very real and committed warriorhood, protecting the most vulnerable members of our society, to paint pictures of a moral hell so deep that the light of day rarely shines. His character Burke is a career criminal with a special interest in destroying those who prey on children sexually. Not for the faint of heart, Vachss is doing incredibly important work, for those who are willing to listen to a man with a powerful and educated opinion about the palest chambers of the human heart.
So ugly that it is beautiful, with pose so stripped-down and brutally efficient it feels like verbal silat.

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