Tom Barnett | Biodynamic Health Protocols & Balancing Within and Without
Tom Barnett is a master of the flow state, and teaches people to build their optimized self through movement, breathing, nutrition, thinking, feeling, and rest. As simple as these things may be, most of us are doing them wrong in some way or another. In this episode we talk about combining these elements to upgrade our bodies and the consciousness driving them, we discuss male monthly energy cycles and how the moon relates, strategies for balancing work outs with "working in" and give examples of how to do that, we riff on sexual health and the pitfalls of modern times, and a lot more.
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In this episode
Core themes
Start With Where Your Breath Is
Asked where someone with no starting point should begin, Tom says the breath, and offers a question for any moment of overwhelm: where am I right now, and where's my breath? He says that finding it and feeling it lower and lower brings anxiety, anger and fear down a long way. He splits rest into passive rest, like watching TV, and active rest such as meditation, tai chi and qigong, and argues that screens are not restful because light carries coded information that bypasses our rationale. He also cites an old expression: anyone without twenty minutes a day to meditate should meditate for an hour.
The Busyness We Create for Ourselves
Chance describes weeks crunched together like music that never respects the pause between notes, and says closing your eyes puts gaps back into the song of your life. Tom argues that we create our own busyness, often from a sense of unworthiness, and that people driven from a place of unrest never find fulfillment in attainment, whether that means world championships or a billion dollars. Chance admits he once deleted every um and pause from two-hour episodes, which he calls procrastination masquerading as perfectionism. Tom adds that the royalty, CEOs and celebrities he has coached carry the same issues and fears as a mom down the road.
Biodynamics and the Body's Own Cycles
Tom says he came to biodynamics through Paul Chek, one of whose influences was Rudolf Steiner. He describes it as organic farming taken a level further, harmonizing an ecosystem with moon phases, seasons and some astrology, and calls it the cream of the crop for growing food, though he ranks wild food higher still. Chance ties it to the old Farmers' Almanac and to folk knowledge handed over to corporations. Tom times his own heavy training and sexual activity to the sky clock, arguing that men also have libido, energy and emotional cycles tied to the moon, which each person must feel before charting.
Working In to Balance Working Out
Tom recommends charting a month hour by hour, noting sleep, food, work and training, then lining it up against a lunar calendar, but insists on ruling out tangible causes first: staying up until 2am explains a tired day better than Saturn. He argues that strength gains come only with rest and that the body puts every kind of stress into one basket. His answer, learned from Paul Chek, is working in: tai chi, qigong or a starter he calls the lung, syncing breath with movement to cultivate energy rather than spend it. Chance's closing names it his highlight.
Sexual Energy as a Creative Force
Chance raises jing from Chinese medicine, and Tom starts from creativity itself: the force that made us only knows how to create, he says, until childhood scolding about coloring outside the lines teaches the mind to judge, damming that flow and, in his view, building constriction into the body. He calls sexual energy our fundamental creative energy, argues that porn bastardizes something natural and takes connection away, and says celibacy is fine for spiritual reasons as long as you are not running from something. His suggestion is to draw that energy up and express it through a poem, a song or something built by hand.
Quotes
“There's an old expression, actually, that if somebody doesn't have time to meditate for 20 minutes a day, then they should meditate for an hour a day.”
“Even just closing your eyes, spending that time, it's like putting in gaps in the song of your life.”
“A lot of people go along like they're just this passenger, and they're at the whim and they're at the mercy of the elements or society. But we're not.”
“You're never alone. Alone and all one are the same thing because we all are all one.”
“Everyone's always the same. It doesn't matter if they've got some royal role or if they're a CEO or if they're a celebrity or if they're a mom down the road.”
“The deepest part of waking up is coming to terms with your own responsibility for yourself, but also the knowledge that you have the power to be responsible for yourself.”
“The moon has a big effect, don't get me wrong, but too many people blame extraneous circumstances because you don't control the moon, but you do control what you do with your life.”
“That force of creativity that only knows how to create and can only create, we put a dam on it with our thoughts, thinking, judging, and criticizing.”
Tom Barnett is the founder of Global Biodynamics, teaching people to build their optimized self through movement, breathing, nutrition, thinking, feeling, and rest. On InnerVerse he explores flow states and balancing the body and mind from within and without.
See all Tom episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
