 Hello everybody. Happy Monday. Welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. Of course, my name is Bryce. Normally on Mondays we either do a mystery Monday or as most of you know for now we are going through all of the emerald tablets, thoughts, emerald tablets, which is going to take us a while. We're also going through the emerald tablets over on Aquarius Rising Africa and since we are a little bit ahead on this channel, then we are of Aquarius Rising Africa and since this is the first full week of the 60-day Shadow Work Challenge, I thought today would be a good opportunity to just kind of talk a bit again about the Shadow Work Challenge, about what's to come this week, all that kind of stuff. So I am so proud of you guys. We are on day three. As you know, the challenge started on Saturday, which is technically a rest day and I did have you guys journal your knowledge or do your own research since Saturday is steering this challenge our self-study Saturday. I had you research what Shadow Work actually is and so I want to reiterate this. I did leave a voice message in the signal group on Saturday and I will be leaving a lot of daily check-ins with the signal group during the 60 days. However, on YouTube we're only going to be doing videos about it every couple of days. So if you're not in the signal group, go ahead and join that and before we get into it, if you have not joined the 60-day challenge and you would like to, the email address is down in the description box below. It's never too late. It's never too late. You can start at any point. It's just a template that I'm sending you so you can ship the dates or jump in where you want. It's totally your choice. It's never too late to join. But anyway, on Saturday I asked you guys to journal about your understanding of what Shadow Work is, what inner work actually is and I talked about this in the voice message to the signal group and I wanted to kind of bring this up here as well. Sometimes I think we get very distracted by the macro. I do as well. We get distracted by the story that's unfolding in our world. In fact, that's how most of you guys found me is by the ever-shifting timeline that we find ourselves in as our Earth tries to ascend right now. And we get really distracted by the story of this generation, of what's happening, what's going on with the white hats, the black hats, all this kind of stuff that sometimes I think we forget or we get distracted by the fact that the story of what's going on outside of us really is not that important. It's what's actually going on inside of us that's important. It's the macro. So we have the macro and we have the micro. The macro is never going to change. It's never going to heal unless the micro heals because if you've been in this world for a long time, you know that what you see in the world is actually mere reflection of what's going on in you. And the way that spirit works, the way that everything works is the things that you need to work on. Your wounds, your shadow side will keep appearing until you actually take the bull by the horns and you work on it. And that's what shadow work is. And as I said to the group and the voice message, we have to remember that when we decided to come down into our bodies in this very dense planet at this time, we were looking for a soul path, a soul contract that would refine parts of our soul. So if maybe part of your energetic body or soul is lacking in the wisdom of betrayal or jealousy or all sorts of stuff, right? You name it. If your soul is lacking in the wisdom from that experience, maybe you decided to have some experiences that would help you settle into that emotion so that the soul could learn and have and know itself and have that strength and that wisdom. I hope that makes sense. And I think that is one of the most important jobs that you will ever do in this life is actually taking all of those wounds and working through them. With that being said, I want you guys to be very, very, very careful especially when you're new at this about playing the blame game. That's a form of escapism. We like to shift our problems onto something outside of ourselves because it protects the ego, right? And so I want everybody to be very, very careful when they're doing their shadow work challenge and they're leaning into some of these really gross feelings and they're trying to learn from them. They don't take that and then project it out onto their family or their friends or themselves that they go about this in a very healthy way. They don't blame shift, all that kind of stuff, right? Like when I went through my trauma therapy, my trauma therapist was really, really big and I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder, but she was really, really big on the fact that we weren't going to blame even though we worked on issues of things that had happened to me, we weren't going to blame those things that had happened to me. We were going to look at the effect of those things and then work on myself, right? So even though somebody did something to me, that person wasn't important anymore, right? It was about me. It was about my reaction to that something that happened, if that makes sense, okay? And so I want you guys healing yourself does not mean you're going out in the world and yelling at people who you feel have done you wrong. That is not shadow work. That's just creating more karma for you, okay? So you need to really understand that. Now with that being said, if the shadow work gets very overwhelming and you get to a place where you're mentally feeling very, very overwhelmed, I really, really encourage you to reach out to a therapist. I know a lot of people have very skewed views on therapy and I want to remind you guys that black and white thinking is a form of a mental disorder, okay? Just because there are some therapists out there that are no good, that are shady, doesn't mean that they all are. I have had incredible experience. My therapist saved me. My therapist, the therapy I went through with her with EMDR therapy really helped integrate my experiences in my life with what I was learning through my yoga practice, okay? And I will forever be grateful for her because she really helped me. That does not mean that the cause and effect of CPST ever goes away. I still have triggers of CPST and I probably will for the rest of my life, but I know what they are now and I know how to lean into them and I know that they are just a side effect of something that I should look at, right? So if you feel overwhelmed, once again, the point I'm getting to is if you feel ever feel very overwhelmed and you're having a hard time not lashing out at people, I would very much suggest looking up trauma therapists in your areas. If you need to stop the shadow work challenge in order to really focus on the talk therapy, do that. That's totally fine. This is not a competition. It is just an opportunity to really understand your soul and to get you back on track with what your soul came here to do, which was to refine your energetic body, okay? So I really, really want to express that just very, because this is the last shadow work challenge we did was 30 days. This one is 60 days. So it's double the time. And then after we finish the 60 day challenge, we're going to wait a little bit and then we're going to do an intensive 10 day challenge. So you guys can see how different lengths of shadow works challenges work in different ways. The work is not really done, but this is just something to help you help get you in that mode of understanding what it is you're doing. So if you need help, you can always ask for people's help. I am going to be releasing more videos on colts. Be very careful in the spiritual community not to fall. I mean, if you fall victim to a cold, then maybe there's something you need to learn from it, but I am going to be doing a lot more deep dives into colts so that you have, we have more discernment on what that looks like versus a healthy educational system. So all right, Monday, January 23rd today. So exercises, please select the one that's appropriate for you. You have a warm up of hip strap here, a hip stretch here. And then for both beginners and experienced challengers, try to start your exercise program by doing five Surinamaskar A and three Surinamaskar B. If this is too much for you in the beginning, just do the beginner exercises for the first week and then try to add Surinamaskar A and B next week. Here they are. This is also helping you gear up for this. If you want to participate in Shanti Sun Salutation Challenge that is starting on February 27th in this challenge, we use exercise again. We use the body. We use the identity of the body, the fault sense of self, to trigger the GPS of the soul, to trigger the the implant, the imprints of trauma that you need to work through to know your soul. So that's why exercise is hugely important. The body is the Shakti of the soul in order to pull up energetic responses. So for beginners, we have an eight minute bar exercise with Marnie Alton and then more experienced challengers. We have a 45 minute bar exercise with Marnie Alton, which a lot of you have already been doing, or I've introduced another bar teacher as well, named Laurie, with Fit by Laurie. This is a 60 minute bar. She does use hand weights in this video. I use two, when I do weights with my bar, I do two pound weights. That's enough with weights, especially for women and men, but more for women. I think sometimes we have this false information, this false knowledge, where we think if we hold like 10 pound weights that we're burning more calories are going to get stronger. No, no, no, no. That's just going to make you swell up. Okay. So like two pound weights is all that I work with because it allows me the mobility to actually move my arm in different motions while putting that extra resistance on my body. And I only use two pounds. I don't go over two pounds. Okay. So be careful with that. You can also opt to not use weights. You can do the body in a very control. So like you see me here, I'm moving my arm. Like if I had a weight in my hand, it looks no different than if I haven't, because I'm able to engage my muscle. I know how to engage muscle to create body resistance without actually having resistance. So you can also opt to not use weights. You can use water bottles if you don't have weights or can soup. If you want weights, weights are pretty cheap. I don't know what that is. In the United States, we use pounds. I don't know what two pounds is in like kilograms or whatever people use in other countries, but you can just Google that and Google search to figure out how much resistance that means in your mind from what you're used to from how you grew up. All right. Journal from today. If you worked out first thing this morning, how did it affect the rest of your day? What was the experience of the bar class like? Do you feel any emotions come up in the class? If so, what were they? Can you explore these emotions more privately? If this is your second time in the challenge, how are you feeling this time in comparison to the last challenge? If this is your second time, which exercise selection did you pick and why? And so, you know, it could be that you've been exercising for a really, really long time, but this morning you woke up and maybe your body felt heavy or you were tired and so you opted to only do the eight-minute exercise. Or if you've been exercising for a long time, you could have woken up this morning and been like, oh, I have an easier option. I'm going to do that when you probably should have done the 45 or 60 minutes. So that's up for you to explore. You know, I can't answer that question for you. Were you picking the, if you are a beginner, you should have picked the eight-minute video. But if you are more experienced and you picked the eight-minute video, why? And you only, you can answer that question. Was it because you genuinely needed to only do eight minutes today or is it because it was an easy out? So that's something for you to think about and to watch your patterning, especially negative patterning like self-sabotage. All right, before you go to bed tonight, go ahead and lay out your work clothes for tomorrow. This is a well-known secret in the yoga world. Your morning practice or your morning workout, if you're not into yoga, always starts the night before. By getting your clothes ready, you start to prepare your mind. I have laid my clothes out on my dresser for 17 years now. It's just what I do. We had to do that growing up. When I was a kid, we had to pull out our clothes for school the next day and pull them out so that we would have them ready to go. My mother made us do that. And so that was an easy habit for me to get into. All right, turn off all electronics one hour before bed. Instead, read a book or write more in your journal. Go to bed before 10 p.m. Bonus challenge. So this will be the same every night. The bonus challenge is, streak 64 ounces of water today to help you detox from the exercise. Try not to go over 64 ounces of water. Overhydration is way more dangerous than dehydration because it drowns out your organ. So only stick to 64 ounces unless a doctor has told you otherwise, okay? If you're a meat eater, can you try to go without meat today, replacing it with veggies? Take a hot bath with salts before bed. I do that every night. Try to relax in the bath and allow the muscles to unwind, okay? So these are just bonus challenges. Day 4, tomorrow, Tuesday, January 21st, you're going to repeat the same exercise as yesterday. All right, you're going to see that throughout this challenge. And you saw that in the last challenge. There's going to be some days where the same exercise is going to be repeated. And it's going to show you, first of all, when you get more comfortable with an exercise, you start to drop into the exercise more. Also, you're going to see that sometimes you can have the same exercise program five days a week, but every day pulls up different emotions. And so it's going to give you that information, right? Because knowledge is power, knowledge protects, and knowledge is infinite. So it's giving you more of an aha moment about how you react, how your body, how your psyche reacts to certain things. So same exercise selection as Monday. Now, day 4, new challenge, during your morning shower, try to make the water cold for the last five minutes of your shower to help with inflammation and blood flow. So a lot of you are already doing this from the last challenge. But if you're new, and I think I told you guys in the 30 day that this was, everybody feared the cold showers, but it turned out to be one of the things that people enjoyed the most. It's only five minutes. And I thoroughly enjoy cold therapy. I'm a baby when it comes to cold weather, but I take a cold shower every morning. I used to go to cryotherapy once, one to two times a week where I was in a refrigerator for three minutes, below freezing naked. It really changed me and it really helped with inflammation on a very physical level. And there's something very spiritual about it too. So I have some links here, especially if you're new to cold therapy. There's a link I did with Shanti, a video I did with Shanti over on solutions with Aquarius Rising Africa. The link is here where we talked all about cold therapy. We talked about what it does for you, the benefits where it comes from all that kind of stuff. And then we have here a Wynn Hof. He's big into cold therapy. We have one of his links as well here. So you can educate yourself further on what this is. And that's the crux, right? Don't just jump into something because somebody tells you to research it. So I'm giving you links and props here to actually research the things that I'm asking you to do. I don't want you to take a cold shower just because I told you to take a cold shower. I want you to heed the suggestion of taking a cold shower and then do your own research as to why cold therapy is good for you. And also look at the counter indications to cold therapy, right? So that you have that. So you are autonomous, so that you are self-governing, right? So questions to ask yourself or Tuesday, where you saw today, if so, how did the soreness affect your workout? What emotions did the soreness invoke in you today? Did new emotions pop up today different from yesterday? If so, what were they? How did going to bed before 10 p.m. affect your sleep and your energy level the next day? What was the five-minute cold shower life where you were able to breathe through it? Is cold therapy new for you? During the course of this challenge, you notice how your body starts to respond to the cold shower. Does inflammation go down for you? Do you have more energy during the day? How does the cold shower affect your mood, list five things you like about yourself? Okay, that's another thing. If you're new to this, you're going to be sore. And soreness is not an excuse not to exercise. I've been sore for 17 years. It's just a part of it. If people just rested every time they were sore, they would never get anywhere. You would just be on a constant hamster wheel and not get anywhere. So you're going to have to break that pattern of thought. If you, for some reason, have it made up in your mind that if you're super sore, you don't exercise, that's a mental programming that you're going to start to break in this challenge. All right, same thing. Lay your clothes out at night. Same bedtime routine. Wednesday, day five. So we're going to be... Let's hear. Okay, so we're going to be doing yoga today. So you can do the 15-minute sun salutations. I give that as an option. Or you can do the beginner 20 minutes for Ashtanga yoga or guided half primary if you're more experienced. If you are completely new to yoga, I would definitely do the 20 minutes. The half primary series is an advanced class. Okay, so don't be fooled by that. All right, this is a lineage based practice. So if you're new, just do the 20 minutes with Ashtanga nurse. Okay, so again, we're doing a five minute cold shower. Questions to ask yourself, where was your soreness today? How was the yoga different from the bar? Did the yoga pull up different emotions from the bar? How was the five minute cold shower affecting you? How is it going to bed before 10 p.m. affecting you? List five things you like about yourself and list three things you want to work on. Look three people in the eyes today and smile at them. Same bedtime routine. Day six Thursday. So you've got some choices now. All right. So same warm up, hip warm up and you can do the sun salutations if you want to or you do the beginners Ashtanga yoga or for beginners you can do the beginner or you can do the 30 minute bar class with Barney Alton or you can try both of them together. For the experienced, you have guided half primary with Ashtanga nurse or 60 minute bar fit by Lori or if you were experienced again, you can opt to do the 20 minute beginner and 30 minute bar class together or if you're a beginner, you can pick one. Yeah. So you have a ton of options here of how to how to create your your workout for this morning. Okay. Again, five minute cold shower questions to ask yourself after five days of exercise. How are you feeling? Are you sore? What emotions are there? How does your soreness affect your mood? How is going to bed before 10 affected your week? How have cold showers changed you? If you've done the bonus challenges, how have hot baths affected you at night, do you sleep better? List five things you like about yourself? Go into deep detail about the three things you want to work on. How have these things created obstacles in your life? Ask these three things what they want to teach you. All right, do one thing today to help another person. This could be opening the door for someone or buying someone lunch to donating clothes to a charity or simply telling someone how beautiful they look etc. No kind task is too small. Look through people in the eyes saying closing same night time routine. All right, Friday, January 27, day seven. Okay, this is going to be your first potential oil bath as well. So you looks like you have the same selection that you had yesterday. So once again, you can mix and match different workouts or just do one of the videos totally up to you. You have some wiggle room here to start to take some control about how you work out this morning. Five minute cold shower journal as of tomorrow, you're weak into the challenge. How are you feeling? How is the perception of yourself changed? Are you feeling anger, shock, resistance? Please note these feelings are wrong. They just are. Let yourself be with these feelings for a moment and then lead into why you may be feeling this. Is this challenge harder than you expected? What is reality and what is expectation in the past? Has your expectation ruined the reality of an experience? Can you let go of any expectation you've put on yourself for this challenge and just allow the reality of the experience to unfold? Where can you apply this in other areas of your life? Letting go and allowing life to happen type of here is letting go and allowing life to happen. Oh, no, no, no. Sorry, I misread my own writing is letting go and allowing life to happen hard for you or easy for you. This will be discussed deeper tomorrow in your second self study Saturday. So what is expectation? What is reality? All right, again, do one thing today to help another person out. This could be something so simple like smiling at someone or open the door. Someone are just sending someone a text and ask them how they're doing. Look three people in the eyes and smile. Now you can option to do the Friday night oil bath. Once again, this is optional and it is not an actual bath. Okay. So please, please don't jump to that conclusion that you're just dumping a bunch of oil in your bath. That's not what an oil bath is. It's called an oil bath because you're slathering, you're bathing and slathering your body and cast your oil. So I have a description right here. Place towels on the floor of your bathroom. Cover your body and cast your oil. Sit on the towels and slowly self massage the oil into your body. The castor oil is used to pull heat and inflammation out of your body. Sit with the oil on your body for 10 to 60 minutes. If you're new to oil baths, only sit for 10 to 15 minutes. After the time is up, take a hot shower to remove the oil and then get into bed. Your nose may run due to the heat removing toxins. You will sleep pretty hard tonight. Let yourself sleep so your body can heal. That's why we do it the night before a rest day. So I do have a link here to a video that I did on oil bathing so you can watch it if you want to be more better educated on an oil bath. There's also tons of resources out there. You can just Google castor oil baths or are you Vedic oil baths and get more information on that. All right. Saturday. So your second self-study Saturday. You're a weekend. You're a weekend to the challenge by Saturday, January 28th. So this is your rest day from exercise. Sleep and an extra. If you can't sleep in an extra hour or two, go ahead and do so especially with the oil bath. The oil bath will knock you out so you will have a deep sleep. So let your body use that sleep for healing. All right. So you're going to be researching dharma and karma. All right. So that goes back into expectation and reality. So they're all kind of working together here. What is dharma and what is karma? What is your role in both? How is karma your work in this life? How is the law of dharma ruling your life? But understanding these two concepts, you can let go. Can you let go of any expectations you have put on yourself during this challenge during your life? Is it possible to work hard towards a goal but let go of the outcome of that goal? This is the concept. This is a concept we will explore this upcoming week. And this is a huge concept in the Bhagavad Gita and that's really hard especially for Westerners because as Westerners we have been conditioned to work, work, work, work, work hard for something for some reward. Get the corporate job so you have a lot of money. But in the Bhagavad Gita, there's a time where Krishna tells Arjuna, can you do the work for the sake of the work without any expectations of the reward? So without even thinking about the fruits of your labor, can you be in that really hard exercise where your muscles are burning and just be there in that moment and enjoy that moment without knowing that the benefit is going to be a six pack? Can you lean into that experience or let go of the expectation that if you do all this workout, you're going to have a killer body? Can you let go of that expectation and just lean into the reality of what is here now? Okay, same, let your clothes out again, same bedtime routine. We'll go ahead and look at day 9, Sunday, January 29th before we get this video. So again, most Sundays are going to be Sunday fun days with fun exercises. Some of them will not be depending on what big shadow work portion you're in. But I do want you to, on the Sundays where it is a fun day, I do want you to have fun because I know that a lot of people don't think of exercise as fun. They think of it as a punishment and surely it can be a punishment if you have the propensity to try to punish yourself through exercise at the total different topic. But we can also learn to have fun. And so Sundays should be about that for the most part and get it less indicated otherwise on the challenge. So again, for beginners just like last Sunday, there is a 10 minute Zumba class you can take or Jane Fonda is a blast from the past 45 minute low impact aerobics or sun salutations with me just 15 minute sun salutations. For experienced practitioners you can do sweat to the oldies with Richard Simmons or both or for both beginner or experienced challengers take a brisk walk outside for 60 minutes you can either do this alone with your friends or with family just make sure to have fun. You can also take my live class my half primary series live class the link is right here at sacred garden yoga on Sunday mornings at 830 a.m. Eastern time it is advised that you understand how primary series before taking this live class is a live class okay so I am teaching you can you can jump in on zoom and take the class with me I will be teeter will be students in the class with me but if you have never done half primary series before of our strong yoga I highly highly highly recommend that you do our stronger nurses have primary series that's in this challenge or look it up and get familiar with what it is before you take the live class because it is not a beginner class it is a pretty advanced class okay all right so here's the registration right here take a five minute cold shower questions you ask yourself yesterday you explore the concept of dharma and karma after a day's worth of contemplation what other thoughts around this topic come up for you are you a person of faith if so why if not why doesn't matter this is you if you're not a person of faith then that's fine too you just journal as to why you don't believe and it's again nobody's I don't want to see your journals this is your personal journal no one should see it if you even want to get one of those old kids diaries will walk on it go and get one of those locks to put on your journal so nobody reads it right it's just your personal feelings what experiences in your life have left you to feel the way you do about spirituality all right same closing and then we will look deeper into uh next week starting Monday January 30th a little bit later on so I know that's a lot that's a lot of big heavy concepts especially the way I started this videos and I know if you're confused about something um right now it's totally fine um one of my favorite Beatles songs is let it be I know people have a have thoughts about the Beatles but it still doesn't mean their music isn't good and I love the song let it be when I find myself in times of trouble mother mary speaks to me seeking words of saying words of wisdom let it be so if something is confusing to you right now um just let it be let it integrate into your system okay don't you don't have to have all the answers right away none of us have all the answers that's why we decided to come back into a human body okay so you guys are doing amazing this is really really hard work it takes a lot of courage to do this and so I'm very very proud of you once again this is just a template so if there's something on the template that you don't want to do or you don't feel comfortable doing you don't have to do it if the day goes by and you totally fuck up and you don't do anything don't quit tomorrow's a new a new day one of my favorite lines is from Anna Green Gables where her teacher tells her Aunt Shirley tomorrow's a new day with no mistakes in it tomorrow's a new day with no mistakes in it you can always start again tomorrow so you guys are doing great if you have any questions please ask me down in the comment section below um join the signal support group it's in the template if you want to join it's a poppin group we're almost at like 300 members now so it's great group of people who are supporting themselves through this um Emmy and Nicole are running the book club the first book the first month is romp dos polishing the mirror second month is going to be walking each other home another romp dos book and so that book club is a subsection of this challenge so if you want to join that the signal link is in the template all right you guys i will talk to you soon