Bob explaining the concept of death force and life force.

Video Transcript

I wanna talk about something that's bothered me for a really long time now. And what that is, is the life force and the death force. Now, I remember, when I first started stretching and changing my body and upgrading my physiological health, I was very excited about the biomechanical changes in my body. Untwisting my legs, giving me suspension at my joint structures. Taking chronic pain and discomfort out of my body. Physiologically upgrading, all of those were really great. And then one day, I was at the grocery store and I was like, oh, they don't have any organic kale anymore. And I called a friend of mine on the phone who I taught how to stretch and I said, "Hey, how are you?" And he goes, "Oh, I can't find any organic kale." And like, "Me neither!" I was like, oh my god, I've been eating organic food all the time. I wasn't told to do that. I just found that when I ate a regular orange, that if I had an organic orange, I could eat one of those and I'd have to eat two or three of regular oranges. So the stretching was really changing me in certain ways. And I kept realizing that every time I took trauma out of my body, I got a high physical development and a high psychological and emotional and spiritual change and I thought that was incredible. And then it took me a lot of years to realize that these high... Personality traits are really just the composting, the taking the compost to the negative and with the right equipment with yourself, that you transmit those into very high ideals. Because I watch people that would hold on to very positive ideas and I just thought that became very evil. So I knew that you're not supposed to hold on to a high ideal. You're supposed to solve your problems and they turn into these high ideals. I then started noticing that when I went to the movies, that I got really sick of the topic of good against bad. The good guys against the bad guys. That didn't bother me before I started stretching. But then after a couple of years of stretching, that didn't make any sense to me anymore because I now knew that I would always take a negative in my body and it would turn into a positive, so the idea of good against bad in a movie, that seemed boring to me and really dated. And then, when I went to movies, it kept happening. I was like, oh, they don't really get this concept that a person is an incredible performer because they can handle anxiety, not because they don't have it. The person that's sober is sober because they can handle their addiction. And then I realized that when I wanted to stretch every morning, I started admitting to myself. I'd be like, get up, Bob. Go in the other room and just start stretching. I had a real inertia or resistance to wanting to do something that I knew it'd make me feel better. And if I just waited, it would never happen. And so, I just really had to say, get up. I don't care what you think or what you feel, just get up and go do it. And after about five minutes, I started feeling better. And then, here I am several hours later, getting fabulous changes that I've always wanted. Besides making mistakes and making additional problems for myself, the next day I would start to figure those out. So it just keeps getting better and better, but I realized, I really had to kind of force myself to do something that was good for me and then after a while, some things that I used to have to force myself to do, that were good for me, I didn't anymore. Just felt like I wanted to do them. So I think there is this side of you that want you to kind of stay in a bad mood. That wants to stay suffering and it's your right to be in a bad mood. It's your right to be suffering and it's your right to be grieving and I don't think there's anything wrong with those except, if you get stuck in those, then you're really... The death force is really taking you. Like, I've met people before when they have a particular illness and they seem to fall in kind of three categories. People that are kind of neutral about it. People that find it totally unacceptable. They except they have the disease or whatever, but they find it unacceptable and they start doing things about it and take responsibility for how they got that into that condition they were in. And there's other people that kind of give in to the disease or the biomechanical. I can't play golf anymore. No, I don't feel well when I eat those. I can't do that anymore. And there seems to be a whole side of a person, which I called the death force that has the same momentum as a life force and you're gonna go one direction or the other. It kind of rarely stay in the middle. And so, I started realizing that when I wasn't doing something that I knew is good for me to be doing, I should just make myself do it. And then I would process those really negative feelings. I don't have the energy. I don't wanna be doing this. I wanna be doing something else. I wanna be eating that pizza, even though I know it's not good for me. And then when you engage in those things that aren't a good idea, they come with consequences and then you accept the fact that you did them and then you try to repair whatever happened to you because of doing those. And then sooner or later, you start imagining how you're gonna feel before you do them and then you're like, that's not gonna make me feel good, so I don't really wanna do that. But you still don't know what to do. So then you have to go through another stage where you finally get an idea. Oh, I don't want that chocolate, I actually need some protein. And you eat some protein, you're like, wow, this really satisfied me and besides that, it's not really that I'm not just hungry, I'm hungry for a romantic relationship. And then when you start acting on that, then you don't crave the chocolate or whatever. So you have to kind of solve these in layers to get out of these different sides. When you do this and you're confronting the damaged part of you and the death force momentum of that, when you're doing that and you start to work on it and take that trauma out of your body through natural stretching again... Then what ends up happening is that, you start to feel like what you're normally conscious of and unconscious of starts flipping and you start feeling like your attention is normally inside all the time and now your attention's outside. You kind of flip upside down and inside out and then you get used to feeling that way because you feel much better. So I watch a lot of people. I know a lot of people that'll do some pretty risky things with their life. And I wonder like, why are they doing something that would risk their life? And the reason why is because they've disconnected to become disconnected from feeling alive. So they have to do something really extreme that risk their life in order to get connected to the feeling about being alive again. That's a pretty high risk as far as I'm concerned. It'd be better to acknowledge the fact that you don't feel alive and that you better go after the parts of you that are stopping you from feeling alive. That might be a better recommendation. But if you don't do that and you take the high risk, you take the consequences and it might kill you or you might realize, wow, that was wild, but maybe I should not be doing it in that way. Maybe there's a safer way to be doing this. So again, I think the main concept is, there isn't good against bad. They're two sides, like on a seesaw. And the question is, are you addressing your problems, so that they turn into something good or are you hoping that you're good enough and that the bad side is gonna be okay? It's gonna take you. That has momentum to it. One of the most common examples of this is when... Say somebody has a disease and I feel terrible for them. And I try to do everything I can to get them to be connected to be well again. But in the process of that, the person's gotta realize, how come they didn't become more well? How come they became diseased? Now, I'm not blaming him for the mercury, the dentist put in their mouth to make them toxic of mercury. I'm saying, what was their part that they picked a dentist that actually got them to be toxic? Oh, I only wanted to pay so much. Oh, so you're a cheap? You didn't go to a better dentist? Oh, no, I went to my family dentist. Oh, you can't bridge past your family? You gotta figure out what your role is. So if somebody has an accident and they hurt their knee, skiing I say to them, oh, there was probably ice or something. They're like, yes, there was and I said, well did other people fall down where you were? Oh, I don't know. Oh, you mean you didn't stand there to find out. Well, I'm sure I knew other people found out a way to avoid not getting on that ice. So the question is, what happened to your instincts that you weren't paying attention to, that because you ignored got you on the ice? I just wanna know what your part was. And this whole concept came from me because I was hit by a car at 70 miles an hour as a pedestrian with my friend. And the question is, the guy that hit me was a drunk driver. I didn't know him. He didn't stalk me. Know that I'd be crossing the street at that time of night. So it's what I would call, an accident. Two things happening together like that, but the question is, I forgave him immediately... At the hospital. The moment I woke up, the insurance agency came over for that man and said to me, can you tell me what happened? And I said, well it was an accident. And he said, oh it was an accident? I'm like, yeah. I mean, I don't know the guy, he doesn't know me. We both were in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong idea. So it was an accident. Oh, would you sign that? And I said, of course I would. I forgave the guy immediately. But what I didn't do and I needed to figure out was how did I get in the middle of the street? And the way I got into the middle of the street was I had distracted myself based on an idea, I thought it was a great idea to be having. I was putting my attention on something other than what I was actually doing. So when we looked down the street and saw the car coming, I looked at it for a minute, but then took my attention off of that and put it on something I thought was a good idea and then before you know it, at 90 miles an hour, that car's getting to us in very few number of blocks, city blocks. So I learned from that experience to not control my attention. And what that turned into was that when I started to learn how to stretch, I would pay attention to whatever my attention went on when I was trying to stretch. And a year and a half, I developed 14 muscle groups, 14 organs, 14 tissues, 14 genetic personality types by not controlling my attention. And I learned this principle idea that when you decide to do something, that idea then tells you what to pay attention to. You don't get to decide. You've decided what you're gonna do. You have a representative mind, once you've decided that idea tells you what to pay attention to. And if you do, you learn at the rate of a child, very quickly. So here you have, you wanna get rid of problems you have, you hit them direct on. There in your body, find the place in your body that's not working. Fix that part, get help to fix that part and then you develop the high side instead. That's how you want to do that. I hope that helped.

The Genius of Flexibility