The Deviant Yogi

I’ve started my journey towards writing my fitness book.  It has been an eye opening experience, and it is truly my passion.  I love it with every breath.  The upsetting thing that I am noticing are the people around me that want to change, but seem to lack the will to fully engage in their maximum potential.  Recently I say someone retweet a post from T. Thorn Coyle that said, “Workout because you love your body, not because you hate it.”  We are given this temple for a short time.  We have to keep up the grounds, put fresh paint on the walls, and open the windows.

It frustrates me to see so many dedicated individuals that will sacrifice themselves for a cause, for their community, or for their work– but they will not make the same effort to their bodies.  A  lot of the people use the “big is beautiful” or “I love my body the way it is”.  This is fine, but on the same coin you can love that body and be healthy.  It is even more upsetting to see this in the spiritual community.  As leaders and teachers we have to lead by example.   It is great to get projects done, to start new energy, to open people up to the divine but we must give ourselves the same amount of love and devotion.   When a vegan tells me that they are living a healthier lifestyle, one that keeps them away from many chronic dietary diseases, yet they are eating nothing but sugar, starches, and all things bad for you this is a bad example of what the lifestyle should be.  Just because you are vegan does not mean you are immune to diabetes, heart disease, and other life robbing ailments.  What we put in our bodies reflects how we see ourselves.   Stop putting trash on your lawn.   As members of a spiritual community, we must be around to lead.  Being sick, constantly stressed out, and upset with where we are does nothing for moving our cause/group/or community forward.  We have to live the example we want others to follow.

Show the divine how much you appreciate the gift you have been given by connecting to the temple of your body.  Lay down on the altar of your soul and show up.  I hate hearing people complain about not having time, not knowing how, not understanding the whys.  If complaining and procrastinating burned calories most would weigh 5 lbs.

It is going to be hard.  Mowing the lawn and taking out the trash is not always the most fun, and working out is going to be tough.  I’ve watched people pull off amazingly difficult rituals or write detailed blog posts, articles and books– but they cave the moment their arms shake or the first bead of sweat rolls down their face.  Would you stop mid ritual to complain about the difficulty of the ritual, start over or give up completely?  Some of you would chop your own legs off first.  Your dedication to your health and well-being should be the same.

So, its time to take care of the temple.  It is time you took charge and FULL ownership of your path.  If you are sacrificing your health, your body, your nutrition, and your connection to the physical part of you– you are only 1/2 assing this experience.  Do honor to path, your community, but more importantly to yourself.   Be the example that others strive to be.  Be so full of radiance that you set ablaze this deep connection in all you touch.

So stop wasting time.  Show up.

Im posting articles on fitness, nutrition, yoga, and spirituality on my professional blog:  www.soulinteraction.com subscribe, follow along, and get moving!

M. Brazell CFT CSN MAT PAT

www.michaelbrazell.com

michael@michaelbrazell.com

There are times when it feels like everything is conspiring to snap me like a rubber band.  When we are in a hurry it seems like everything around us is moving at the speed of the slowest turtle in the race.  It seems that every weekend the DC Metro System is down, delayed or just not running.  It should not come as a surprise, but for some reason today I did not expect it to be as delayed.  Train after train passed by, but none were going in the direction that I needed to go, and I could feel the zen slowly slipping away, and the anger surging from deep within my core. I took a second to go inside, to shut my eyes to the time, to disconnect from my sense of needing to be anywhere but where I was in that moment, and allowed myself to breath.  Over the years, I have found that the Divine is a trickster of sorts.  We are given these mini tests or quizzes and allowed the opportunity to connect to our divine self.  Most often times we are so worried about the external world, or caught up in life’s dramas that we don’t see the havoc that is being caused internally.  When we allow our external world to manipulate us into a feeling of off balance it causes a rapid downward spiral.  One negative emotion usually inspires another.  Many of us are patterned into this way of feeling and reacting to our external environment.  Many of us do not even breath, it is almost like a waking apnea.  Focusing on the breath, each inhale, and exhale is a way of disconnecting for just a moment.  Sometimes even just a few seconds can give us clarity.  

Energy is constantly moving all around us.  It only takes a peek out of the window to see the changing of the leaves, or the movement of people into action.  As lighworkers many of us are more sensitive to these shifting energies.  We can feel the earth moving, breathing.  We can feel the emotions of those around us, and even in our own lives we are noticing increasing ebbs and flows.  This was a very special month as we received the clarion call to wake up on a deeper level.  Many of us felt and energetic shift on this day. Some of us even took part in opening ourselves to the energy.  Others felt as if they were being run across sandpaper.  For those that felt struggle, it should not be seen as a bad thing.  We we are faced with challenges we are given moments to grow, to move beyond our own limitations.  The beautiful part of this experience is being awake in the struggle, when we are awake, we are able to move.  Movement of thought, action, emotion, or even spirit can help us to find direction.   The one thing that you want to avoid is just sitting in negative energy.  Negative emotions love throwing pity parties and inviting all of their friends: Anger, frustration, sadness, upset, chaos, guilt, and turmoil.  Focus on finding some sort of positive lining to your circumstances regardless of how much mud you might feel you are standing in.

We are all being pinged to wake up.  We can either go with the flow and ride the wave, or we can get caught in the rip current… Either way we are headed out to sea.  Choose to be part of your own experience.  Breathe, Love, Live, and be Joyful.

1) Keep a log of your emotions, where your thoughts are leading you.  This will help you identify patterns, and where your energy is taking you.

2) Find ways to express gratitude, appreciation and love.

3) Live, love and be joyful

4) Make a list of positive things that you want to happen in your life, then take action

Michael Brazell CFT CSN MAT PAT

www.michaelbrazell.com

757-839-3531

I have decided that it is time to shake off the dust and move into a new state of being.  I have been going to the gym pretty consistently for the past few years, but I really have not seem much change.  I find that this also is a reflection of other areas in my life.  The beautiful thing about this kind of realization is that once you recognize it in one area, you can see it in all areas.  Even better is that when you begin to make changes in one area, those changes are felt through your time stream.  Sometimes it might feel as if tho we are sitting in dirty bath water, we have to pull the plug, so that the water can drain.  Getting active is an easy way to move yourself into a new state of being, thinking and living.  I am not reccomending that you rush out and join a gym, it just means you need to be more mindful of where your body is in relation to your spirit.

The soul has unique and interesting ways of grabbing our attention, often times it will speak to us through the physical body.  When we are in need of sleep, our eyes get blurry, when we are holding on to too much of our past or present our hands may hurt, and we might even feel dizzy or off balance when our lives are becoming overwhelming.  The body also follows the mind.  We can choose to be sick, or choose to live in health.  We can choose for the day to be miserable or we can choose for the day to be full of joy.  We create the world we live in.  Embracing the physical body in a way that allows it growth is important.

A few days ago I went to a yoga double header at my gym.  It was a powerful Hatha class followed by an equally powerful and dynamic Vinyasa class.  By the time the 2.5 hours worth of yoga was complete I felt as if tho I had been hit by the yoga bus.  My body ached, I was sweating, but I felt connected to every part of myself.  When I was first learning yoga, I would do at least 3 hours a night, and for me this was meditation.  Each posture brings with it deep connection to energies within the body, each asana moves with the breath, and sometimes just the simple act of breathing is a struggle.  Shaking off the dust and getting our gym shoes on is in itself an affirmation.  You are telling the physical body “I love you dearly, I am connecting and appreciating all parts of you, and today we will connect fully”.

Here are a few tips to get you moving:

1) Keep it simple.  Getting active should not require a lot of thinking or working.  Go for a walk, do push ups, log onto youtube and find some yoga videos to do.  Do jumping jacks.  The more excuses we place between the intention and action, the more likely we will not “Do” the thing we know we need to.

2) Listen to your body.  If it needs rest, give it rest.  If it needs nutrition, give it nutrition.  If it needs a hug, get a hug.

3) Watch your nutrition.  I am going to post a separate post on this, but the basics apply here.  Each foods that are full of things that the body needs.

3) Make a plan and stick to it, but keep it flexible.  If you plan on working out an hour, and arrive to the gym with only 20 min to spare.. make those the best 20 min possible.  Show up to your experience, and jump in.  If you decide to throw the 20 min away simply because it is not an hour, you are robbing yourself of 20 min of connection.

4) Set an intention.  When we workout, it can sometimes feel like torture (I am a realist).  If you dedicate your practice, your workout, your flow, your jog to flow to someone in need, or a cause you will gain greater motivation and drive to show up.  Now its not just about you, and your action becomes one of service.  You are sharing that energy, and that is a beautiful thing.

What are ways that you motivate yourself to work out?  Leave your tips in the comment section below!

I am going to post workout routines, yoga videos, and nutriton informaiton in the next few posts.  Until next time!

Namaste

Mahayogi Das

The Soundtrack of My Life: Finding Inspiration In Music

As a writer, I am constantly on the look out for inspiration.  I feel the world is a canvas and we are the creators of an experience and story worth telling, tho–sometimes this concept is easier in my mind than in reality.  Today I took a few moments to download songs of my past.  I’ll post my “life soundtrack” in another post, but I was surprised at how much raw emotion and memory were still attached to many of these songs.  The next thing I noticed is my current disconnection.  In the times where a lot of these songs were important we did not have as many distractions, life seemed to flow in a different way than it does now.  There was less pressure to be anything other than in the moment.  Today was a really good day for re-membering myself, pulling in all the pieces that have been attached to places I was afraid to go to.  Today I made a pact to be more raw in my work, to go deeper than the surface and to bear my soul more.  These songs inspired tears, joy, anger, and love.  They have also allowed me a snapshot into areas of inspiration for new poetry pieces and essays.

Where do you find your inspiration?  Are there songs that take you on a journey into your past?  What is your life soundtrack?  Are you a writer that is inspired by visual arts?  Are you a visual artist that embraces poetry?

Share your responses below.  The one great thing about the technological monster is that we are now able to share inspirational techniques with one another.

Michael A. Brazell CFT CSN MAT PAT

www.deviantyogi.com

I made my final visit today to Borders  before they finally close their doors.  There is a shift happening in our society on many fronts.  This is another sign of how technology has a grasp on us on levels we have yet to fully understand.  With a mere click you can access countless digital books, audio books, newspapers, and magazines, and you only need to look around to see folks hunkered down with their “electronic books”.

I may be one of the old fashioned few, but there is something to holding a book.  The way an old book smells, the old hi-lighted portions of books rediscovered with a quick flip, the touch and feel of flipping pages, searching through book shops for that elusive book that you’ve been looking for–and the joy of finding it.  Those days are quickly fading, and are being replaced with less tangibility.  We have lost interaction with one another, as you simply need to log on an see any one of your 4000 electronic friends daily play-by-play.  My partner even refers me to his online calender when I ask what is on the agenda for the weekend.  With each new embrace of technology and release of old ways, we lose that tangible aspect of humanity.  When is that last time you sent a handwritten letter to a loved one?

What happens where there are no longer hard copies of books?  What happens when technology fails?

Even this outlet, a blog, reaches many I will never see.. and in many ways technology connects us.  We have to remember not to surrender to it, not to let it take away our tangible connection to one another, to the things we hold dear… like books.

Take time today to write a letter, write a poem on paper, pick up an old book and hold it.  Support your local independent bookstores and used bookstores.

Michael A. Brazell CFT CSN MAT PAT

I’ve been asked a lot of questions recently about addictions and spirituality, so I thought I would devote some time to it in this post.  I am thinking about taking it into book form in the future with some of my thoughts and personal experiences, so perhaps this is the first stepping stone in that journey. For those that have never had an addiction to drugs or alcohol, or have never had an addict in their lives, the mere thought of addiction can carry any number of attachments.

Tho, all of us were the hat of the addict at one point or another.  One of the things I would like to do is to change the energy of the word addict.  When we can view something as an attachment more so than something we cannot escape from, it becomes easier to move beyond that which we’ve given our power to.  These attachments can come in the form of food, caffeine, emotions, faith, people, situations, memories, or even things.  So, remember before you judge someone living a situation that is different than yours, you are not too far off from wearing those shoes. For the purpose of this blog, we will discuss narcotics and alcohol. I’ve had my own personal journey in these realms.  I’ve not only used substances, but I lived for many years with someone that also carried these attachments to the extreme.  We become “addicted” to the “addict”.  There are times when I look back and wonder how I survived, my constant battles and deals with God, my struggle in seeing a beautiful person and soul diminish their light, and the guilt associated with that life.

The first lesson I learned is that despite the energy of the experience it shapes and molds us.  If we allow the experience to forever be negative, they will anchor us into moments that remain heavy.  If we look back and find the gift, to find the appreciation for the experience itself, and for our survival.  Each part of our life’s poem allows us the opportunity to shift, to grow, or to stay where we are.  We have to first find acceptance for that place where we currently are.  It brings us into the now.  We have to have a starting point for our journey, our healing.  Addiction is about power, and loss of that personal power.  It is a place where we have allowed some “thing” or some “one” to come into our lives, and we have given up the steering wheel.  We have to take the wheel back.  How do we do this… Breath. You have to start simple.

Breathing is the easiest, and hardest thing for many of us to do.  We are constantly living on the inhale.  Life catches us off guard, because we are not present in our lives, even more so when we are not driving the car.  Focus on the exhale as deeply as you do the inhale.  Do not focus on quieting your mind, or stopping thoughts from rising, let them.  Suppressing then does not stop them from being there, allowing them the space to transition allows them space to be processed. Our souls spend our entire lifetime looking for God in this dimension.  When we use drugs, or stimulants we transcend this dimension and move into “connection” with divine source.  It “escapes” the user into a place where they think they are connected, where they feel God, divinity, release, and this forms a relationship with not the substance, but the energy of the unification with that “God-sense”.  Now, I am well aware there are those out there that claim to use psychotropic drugs for the purpose of realization.  Even in those instances you are giving away power, you are saying that the drug is more powerful than the divine, and in turn you also build an attachment to that “God-sensation”.  For each of us that has been on this road, we shift from the “God-sensation” to the realization that we have given away our power over our lives.  When we become aware, we can change.  To be aware is easy, but to be conscious can be difficult.  We can be aware of our situation, but to be conscious means that we are completely aware of  how this loss of power is affecting us on all of our subtle and physical levels.  In coming posts I will talk about processes to awaken, to become conscious.

There is another level to this process, and we have to address those that feel responsible for the attachments of others.  Again, this is a loss of power, and just as dangerous.  Sometimes the lives of those living with addictive attachments can be compared to a tornado.  When we step into that whirlwind, we feel that same out of control energy.  The law of attraction is VERY powerful in this place.  That which we focus on we empower, and we call into our experience.  You can try and stop the ocean from moving, but you can’t.  This is the best analogy I can use with trying to stop someone from engaging in these behaviors.   We have to remember that we must live and continue to live.  We must hold onto joy, love, hope.  We have to find those things within because if we look for time outside of us we’ll be without. The next thing that happens is that we often stop seeing that person as our loved one, and we focus on the addiction/attachment.  We forget their true nature, because we’ve also forgotten our true nature.

Again, we start with breathing.  Inhale… and exhale. When we exhale, we let go.  When when inhale we bring in purification.  Breathing is such a simple act, but we so often are not aware of its presence in our experience.

This blog post is just a start, and we will continue to discuss this together, to grow, and to heal.

Namaste

Mahayogi Das

www.deviantyogi.com

I’ve recently found myself immersed in books, articles and documentaries regarding our forward progression into technology.  It is both fascinating and frightening.  We have come leaps and bounds in many areas of information and data transfer, the larger question is how does this play out in the development of our consciousness?  Where does the bridge occur?  Where do the intersections occur? I watched a facinating documentary yesterday called Transcendent Man.  The movie is about Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading futurists, with a twenty-five year track record of accurate predictions. Called the “restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” Inventor of the first CCD flat bed scanner and many other technology firsts, Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and has received the National Medal of Technology, the Lemelson-MIT Prize (the world’s largest for innovation), 19 honorary doctorates and awards from three U.S. presidents.

Here is a synopsis of the movie:

In Transcendent Man, Ptolemy follows Kurzweil around the globe as he presents the daring arguments from his best-selling book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil predicts that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, humanity is fast approaching an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and millions of times more powerful. This will be the dawning of a new civilization enabling us to transcend our biological limitations. In Kurzweil’s post-biological world, boundaries blur between human and machine, real and virtual. Human aging and illness are reversed, world hunger and poverty are solved, and we cure death.

The movie shows us what is possible with the current stream of technology flow.  Many call Kurzweil a lunatic, but we are accelerating at a rate where technology is improving upon itself at a rate that we cannot keep up with.  Children are coming into this experience with the knowledge to use computers, text, and are moving into a new state of consciousnesses.  The terminator movies, AI (artificial intelligence) in the media, and close encounter movies have given us a taste of what is possible, but many of these movies create fear.  The unknown is exactly that.  I feel that we are in a place where changes must happen, changes ARE happening.  We have to embrace boundaries but explore new frontiers.  Where does this leave the growth of our consciousness?  Will technology stop our connection to the deeper elements of our being, or will it enhance our growth?  What are the limitations within that realm of connection?

Do you view technology as a hindrance to our spiritual growth, or an accelerator?

Regardless, changes are coming.

Michael A. Brazell CFT CSN MAT

www.michaelbrazell.com

michael@michaelbrazell.com

Greetings,

We come to you with messages of love and light.  Are you living in your full potential?  Are you holding back from achieving your dreams?  It is our hopes that you release the anchors of your life and set sail.  When is the last time you dreamed, and took that dream into action.  It is time to live in action.  Reality is just a breath away from dreaming.  What are the dreams that you are not realizing? What are you not doing that would bring you complete and utter joy?   Is there a book that you want to write?  Do you want to paint a portrait?  Make a list right now of all the things you want to do before your date of transition?  Many of you call this a “bucket” list.  What is on your list?  What are things that you can do to create a legacy in this 3rd dimension?  Do you know you are eternal beings.  Your actions, your words, and not your “profiles” through technology live on far beyond your physical form?   Take time right now to make a joy list.  Then tomorrow, pick one thing on your list to start doing!

May your light shine always,

May your heart shine always

You are loved.

Jacob

** Jacob is my Personal Guide.  Jacob is a collective of light beings.