Diamond Hour today! J. Tamar Stone, founder of Voice Dialogue technique
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Newspapers are good for more than training puppies...

I was asked to do an article on writing for a science fiction writer's textbook. I love assignments like this, the chance to offer suggestions to newbies, as wonderful writers like Ray Bradbury, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison and Gordy Dickson did to me, early in my own career.

I offered the concept of the "Machine" a way of organizing your writing life so that you are inputting ten words for every word you write, and writing a story a week or every other week. To accomplish this, you need a fluid flow of creativity, and fear will force many people into writer's block. As a defense against this, I suggested the "Newspaper" exercise, just for fun.

NEWSPAPER CLIPPING EXERCISE

Open the newspaper and give yourself one minute to find an article upon which to base a story idea. You don't have to write the story, but DO block it out briefly. This kind of exercise gives you invaluable skills. It is important that you have confidence in your ability to think yourself out of any corner you might back yourself into, that you can generate a hundred ideas an hour for days at a time. And the only way you can do that is to practice generating creativity on demand.

You'll find hundreds of more practical, immediately applicable but generative ideas in the LIFEWRITING YEAR LONG course, available NOW!

On being relaxed and erect...

In generating and channeling sexual energy--or all life energy, the key is to identify the most critical aspects of our personality. My greatest meditation Guru, Sri Chinmoy, taught that we can awaken our "internal energies" (again, don't attach too much to the language) from survival "up" or from the loving heart center "out" but we CANNOT do it by building a mental model of the world and then trying to twist our experience to fit it.

Survival drives are critical, and trying to operate in opposition to them is pretty futile. But unless we are experiencing love our lives are filled with fear and hopelessness.

Every day when I write these notes, I look at all the letters I receive, the email, the phone calls and posts, and try to find ways to address as many of these things as I can in the two hours a day I give myself for these communications (hey! I have another life, y'know.)

Here's what I know. When you betray yourself, cut yourself off from your own heart, you will give yourself away to others in the fruitless quest to fill the hole in your chest. You will give and give and allow others to take. You will attract predators and wounded desperate people instead of healthy, self-directed human beings, and be disappointed every time. And ultimately you will become embittered, believing both that love is an impossible dream and that the world is filled with horrible twisted people.

The bitterest people are the ones who began with hope, but not the self-respect required to say "no" to those who will not treat you with love and healthy regard.

So your quest for power, for control of your life, for a healthy and dynamic expression of all your energies MUST be based on aligning your survival drives and your love of self and life. When you "anchor" those two point, and then be certain that your sexual needs are being satisfied in a healthy, ethical way that aligns with survival (safe sex, or sex within a bonded relationship) and your emotions (respect, affection, responsibility, honesty, non-coersive, not desperate or needy, etc.). At this point, you have created the base for the generation of phenomenal energy that can propagate through the rest of your life and empower you in ways you may not have ever experienced or imagined.

So...you've experienced the "flutter" of slowing your breathing. You've also begun to notice the internal shifts that precede orgasm. Now combine the breathing with an exploration of your relationship with love and fear, by using "Heartbeat Meditation."

Heartbeat meditation is, simply, to sit quietly and "listen" to your own heartbeat. Keep your finger on your pulse if necessary, but as you balance your body (sit relaxed but erect, with your head held as if by a string from above) and let the tension go, you will begin to feel the "tremble" of your body with each heartbeat.

Now...and this is no joke: note the phrase "relaxed but erect." Consider that Viagra works at least partially by allowing relaxation of smooth muscles, enhancing capillary response. Consider that stress is a major trigger for impotence. Read between the lines, please: the ability to focus without fear is a route to enhanced performance across the board...and across the bed.

So take 15-20 minutes and practice Heartbeat Meditation. Your mind will jump and squirm in a thousand directions--this is totally natural. Then, you might find yourself going to sleep, nodding off. All of this is nothing more than the ego trying to protect itself. Love yourself enough to be ruthless!

Steve

The Thing Itself

How do you begin to combine sexual energy with the energy necessary to power the rest of your life? The first thing you have to do is separate "energy" (and we're not quite using this term in the strict physics sense. Unfortunately, we just don't have the English language to describe these things precisely. We'll do the best we can!)

The search for "the thing itself" separate from its filligree or manifestations, or separate from our sensory or conceptual input about it, has been a central question in world philosophy. Not to get into these things from a Kantian or Buddhist view but rather an experimental and experiential view, what we want to do is extract from the "second chakra" experience of sexuality the experience of an energy that also pops up on the other six levels.

One way to do this is to connect everything with breathing. Almost every profound practice affects or is affected by breathing, in one way or another. It is a lovely unifying activity. Sexual energy is secondary. Survival is primary. Misinterpretation of Freudian theory makes it seem that he felt sexual intercourse was the most important thing in life. First, Freud seemed to use "sex" in the sense of union and passion, a connection with growth, becoming, evolving, and creation. Physical intercourse was just an aspect of this.

Second, if you think Freud actually meant that sexual intercourse was the most powerful motivating force, then you are simply saying that Freud was wrong. Survival trumps everything. Nobody stops running from a forest fire to get laid. Sorry.

The lovely thing about investigating survival and sexuality as aspects of the same thing is that it makes sense on a biological sense (sex is genetic survival, pair-bond partnership, and physical health) and removal of fear from the equation allows deep relaxation which enhances orgasm and makes erections easier to obtain and sustain, as well as allow relaxation of ego walls, leading to more intense experiences. There is simply no down-side.

The personal experiment you can conduct is to use breathing.

1) Go to a quiet place, where you will not be disturbed for 10-20 minutes. Have a clock with a second hand.

2) Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. It is allowable to inhale and exhale through your nose.

3) Breathe deep in the belly rather than high in the chest.

4) Note the number of breaths per minute. Begin to slow your breathing.

5) For most people, when your breaths get down to about 3-4 per minute, you will begin to feel a "tickle" in your head as cardio respiratory distress kicks in--your body's need for oxygen. This is easy to interpret as fear.

6) Stay right here, balanced at the place where your body is uncomfortable, but not in panic mode. Observe your reactions. You are safe, but your mind is reacting on the edge of terror. See if you can separate yourself from the emotional response. What is your mind saying to you? Are there mini-klaxons screaming? Do you tremble? What images or thoughts come up?

7) Now...speed up your breathing until this diminishes. What is your mind saying now? Slow it down again. Go back and forth, tip-toeing back and forth across this line.

If you stop labeling this emotional response as "fear" you will find a feeling that is not just primary to fear, but as we'll discover next time, is also part of the sexual response.

Guess what? You've just opened the door to a fascinating internal world. See you next time!

Steve

On to Sexual Magic!

I am so happy to be finished laying out the basic principles for Sex Transmutation, the conversion of sexual energy into success energy. Laying down those basic allows me to start backing up and discussing

1) the freeing of sexual energy

2) the use of sexual energy to increase overall energy

3) The use of energy to advance life plans

And the applications of all these things in my own life, and the lives of my students. I'm being aided in this effort by my friend Mukee Okan, teacher of advanced yogic and sexual "magic" principles, and an all around terrific lady.

First, let's take a look at the question of united sexual energy with our other life forces. Steve loves the model of the yogic chakras, which postulates a series of "energy vortices" up the spine, usually seven. From the tailbone-up they represent survival, sexuality, power, emotion, communication, intellect, and spirit. In other words, every challenge of your life is just another version of the same basic challenge: to explore and master our inner and outer worlds.

As infants, we first learn to explore our world through touch, taste, and sight. We learn what is "us" and what is "not us"--we develop an ego shell to help us define ourselves. This is a very good thing. The trick is that this shell is not really "us." From time to time, we experience massive life shocks that disabuse us of the notion that "ordinary" reality or identity is absolute and real. Of all the common experiences that do this, survival threat is probably the most powerful and basic. But right next door to that is a powerful sexual experience. In other words, sexuality is a door to clarity of perception exceeded only by being in a car wreck or crouching in a fox hole. Properly addressed, then...sex can be a key to understanding who and what you realy are as a being.

More to the point, the quest to discover your true identity involves unraveling the "ego cocoon" and there by freeing ourselves from ordinary fears and timidity, dissolving the stress that can limit our sexual expression and leading to a positive spiral that can benefit everything. Energy is energy--it just manifests in different forms or "frequencies" if you will.

Raise your energy, change your life. We'll be back to this next time, but swiftly:

1) Clarify your goals. What will you DO with the energy when you have it? The clearer your goal, the easier it is to plot your path.

2) Have goals in all four basic areas: body, mind, spirit, and finances.

3) Rewrite your goals DAILY.

4) Be certain that one of your goals is to double your energy.

5) Passion is passion. Pursue your external goals with the same intensity you would pursue a sexual partner. Make love as if you are creating an energetic "child" composed of the very best of you and your partner.

6) If you are currently without a partner, make this one of your intents. Raise your energy with self-pleasuring, and visualize/mentalize your perfect life as your energy raises, and as you reach orgasm. Feel your body and mind "sizzle" with energy. And take this "sizzle" out into your life, every day.

7) From time to time, raise that energy without reaching orgasm...that enhanced hunger will add more "umph" to your efforts. "If I work hard today...I'm gonna get what I want." Or to put it the way one vulture said to the other: "Patience my ass! I'm gonna kill something!"

And no...we don't want you to kill anything. Except perhaps your false self image.

ww.sexandprosperity.com

First Draft Finished this morning!

I finished the first draft of the script today! Wish I could tell you more about the subject, title, research, and so forth, but that has to wait a while. Unfortunately, people really do steal movie ideas. Books, not so much.

Anyway, I wanted to detail the sequence of action.

1) Coming up with the original idea. Writing it down.

2) Creating a stack of 3x5 cards, each card detailing one scene. Carry the cards with you, working with them at odd moments. This went on for about four months.

3) The creation of a pitch. This should ideally be about three pages. Read this pitch to friends, and see if they respond to the core events.

4) Expand this pitch into a short treatment, about 10 pages. Flesh out motivations and characters. See if the idea still works. Get feedback and comments.

5) Use Final Draft and begin to create a 1st draft script (I love Final Draft because it has an "Index Card" view that allows me to see the entire story onscreen at one time). Avoid dialogue, but discuss the meaning of scenes, subtext, events and so forth.

6) Add dialogue.

NOW...if this is a script, polish. But if you're using this process to create a novel, just copy the entire script into a text editor, expand the descriptions out, and create depth in the "inner world" of the characters.

It's worked for my last ten novels, and I may well be using it for the rest of my life. Its...painless, and efficient as heck.

Self-Love and creativity

Self Love

"I hate myself." Remember I said a colleague said this to me? And that it suddenly helped to explain an entire raft of negative results he had gotten in his life?

Thirty years ago, when I was a baby writer, an older, more established writer handed me a business card. It read: "(NAME). Freelance hack and literary mechanic."

Not surprisingly, this man was dead within eighteen months, due to alcohol poisoning. What kind of self-image was that? A hack is someone who creates material he himself would not read, or view, or recommend to anyone he respected. Someone who is not working at the edge of his ability. What does that have to do with self-love? Or success?

Well...

1) Success demands taking chances. Your optimal expression of skill and "talent" will always come when you are immersed in the experience of creation, and usually when you are walking the tightrope.

2) Working at the edge means you are constantly risking failure. You have to have a re-integration strategy in place, to help you when failure triggers depression and anger. And if you have genuinely invested yourself? Trust me, your negative voices will come boiling up.

3) Think about this emotional response in child terms. When your child fails, they hurt. They not only want to know you have confidence that they can "do" it, but reassurance that you love them for their own sake, separate from their ability to "do." To be able to take risks, they HAVE to know that there is a bedrock, something that they are not risking. And that is your love.

I don't love my son Jason, because he is a "human do-ing." I love him because he is my boy, and a divine gift, and a "human be-ing." We have to give ourselves that same gift of confidence and support.

No matter what happens. No matter if you fail or succeed. No matter what anyone else thinks...you must love yourself. If you don't, you'll spent your life either bitter, or seeking that approval from others. And nothing anyone outside you ever does can fill your heart. People who expect you to "make them happy" are playing a nasty little con game. Don't be one of them.