 Hello everybody. Welcome to day one of our 30 day challenge here in the East Coast. I know that our Australia friends already started yesterday because of the time difference and I've already gotten so many responses, I mean we are basically at 400 people right now across the world doing this, which is incredible. Before we get into the subject at hand, I do want to tell you guys if any of your friends or anybody watching is just now learning about this challenge and you want to start now, it's never too late. It's never too late to start working on yourself and doing this kind of work. In fact, you are always the right time, the right place in the right time. So please don't hesitate to email me at shadowworkchallengeatgmail.com and I will send you the 30-day template. If you want to shift the dates, that's totally fine. This is just a template and it's something I put together that you can use going forward whenever you want to use it. And so if you want that template, just email me. No worries. Again, it's never too late for you to start working on yourself. Never. You know, as long as you're alive and breathing and you have a body, then now is the perfect time to start, right? It doesn't matter. You didn't miss the boat. I promise you you didn't miss the boat. As far as the gifts at the end of the month, it's going to be a raffle anyway. So it's going to be picked at random. So there's no like nothing you have to do to qualify. You just have to send in your name and email. And that's it because the names will be picked at random. There's a couple of things I wanted to talk to you guys about. First of all, I kind of wanted to tell you guys how I discovered Marnie Alton, the bar teacher that you worked with today. I don't know if I've shared this story before. So many people, especially in the support group on Signal, which again, that link will be down in the description box below if you want to join the support group, had never done bar before or had never done bar by Marnie Alton before. I think a lot of people were very shocked by how sore and how sweaty they got during this exercise because, of course, it looks easy. Usually if it looks easy, that means it's probably pretty hard. So how I discovered Marnie Alton. So back in 2016, I broke my sacrum. I actually broke my sacrum in a Mysore room, not here in Atlanta. I was actually in another state completely with a totally different teacher. And I got a bad adjustment and that I had my legs behind my head and my legs got pulled a little too far behind my head and it popped my sacrum. And so I broke it and that's a really hard place to have a break. You can't do a whole whole lot like there's no casting or anything like that. I maintained a practice throughout that whole time. I was a very modified practice, but I still got on my mat. I still moved and after a while, I was just really an emotional wreck over this break. I was having a really hard time regaining some stuff and it was bringing up a lot of frustration and a lot of anger for me towards the person who who broke my sacrum because this particular teacher is not a nice person. And so I think that kind of really like triggered me a lot, which was good, which is I needed that trigger. So I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But throughout this course, I was getting very emotional about not being able to heal my body. My arthritis started to get bad again. And one of my best friends who lives up in Canada, he's been on the show before Mike and Chris, he is a movement expert. He told me that I should try to incorporate some bar classes during the week. He had been he studies all sorts of movement. He's really fast and fascinated with the human body. He's in school to be an osteopath right now. He's also a raking master. I met him in India. So he's an Ashtanga teacher, but he will go and study like flotties. And he had just taken a bar course and he was like, I think you need to incorporate just a couple of classes during the week of bar just to really focus on restabilizing your core and your glutes to help your sacrum. And so I did that, I went to a few classes here in Atlanta and I wasn't really feeling the classes. It frankly was not that challenging. The classes here were not that challenging for me. So I kind of felt like that wasn't what I needed. And so I just kind of left it. And then right before lockdown happened, I was considering that again. And I had tried some Pilates and stuff too. And Marni Alton's YouTube that I shared with you guys this morning popped up on my feed and I thought, you know what? I'm just going to try this on YouTube and see if it's any different. And you know, can't hurt, right? It's 45 minutes, whatever. It can't hurt. And so I tried her bar and it was different than the other bar classes that I had done live in Atlanta. And I really liked it. I really liked her. I really liked her energy. I liked what she had to say. And so for during my healing process, I would do my six days a week of my Ashtanga practice, but a couple, two to three days a week. In the afternoon, I would do this 45 minute bar just to stabilize my core and my glutes. Well, around that time, I had reached out to her on Instagram regarding my sacrum because I just had some questions to see what her perspective was. And she was so kind. She got back to me immediately. We had a full on conversation. She was very generous with her time, very kind, very loving. And at that point, she was teaching out of her studio in Los Angeles. Well, when lockdown happened and I lost my Shala, she also eventually lost her studio as well. Of course, in Los Angeles, it was way more intense. And I remember when she lost her studio, she kind of made a statement about it was very sad. But she moved all of her classes onto an online platform called M, as in Marni, M backslash body, which I'll put a link to that in the description box below. And so what I did was I actually joined her platform. I do it month by month. And I started doing some of her full length classes and for harder classes with the weights and the movement ball. And it really targeted. I realized that it was making me so freaking strong. And my practice, my yoga practice, all of a sudden just jumped forward by leaps and bounds. Like something about the way Marni was teaching transfixed everything that I was working through in my practice. And so ever since then, I've been a huge supporter of hers. And I can tell that when she teaches her bar classes, especially off her own platform, where she has more, where she can talk more, she has Q and A's a lot. She has really, really studied energetic body. I can tell by the things that she says, even though she's coming at this for more of a workout versus a practice, she is very much incorporating the spirituality into the physical, into it. And I can tell by the way that she choreographs her own classes, what type of emotion she's trying to trigger in you. The ball work, it's really into the inner thighs, which you're not going to do the ball work on the YouTube. It's no equipment. But if you do do the workout website, you'll see you can get the ball and squeeze the ball. And it's really going to, that's going to trigger Moabunda. And so there was a lot of healing that took place for me with Marni Alton at that time too, because I lost my shawla. I started speaking out more about my political beliefs on YouTube. And I had other yoga teachers threaten me that they were going to try to get my authorization taken away because of my views. And so I was feeling very down about the community that I had been a part of for so many years. And I felt very uplifted by Marni Alton's community, even though I'm not vocal, like she has a platform, she has a group, all those things where they all know each other. I'm never really vocal, but just seeing how kind she is to her clients or students in the beginning of her life classes, she's always interacting with the people. She's so kind to people's children. In fact, one of a little girl made her a friendship bracelet and mailed it to her and she wears it now. She's just such a kind person and that kindness really, really was important to me at that time. And so not only was my body changing and healing and my practice was getting stronger, but I all of a sudden felt supported again by a community that I didn't even know. And so that's what I say about her. Now she's not the person that knows the intel that we know. She doesn't know about Mr. Teal, that kind of stuff. But in my opinion, she is already very ascended because she's healed a lot of herself. You can tell she has worked hard on herself in order to be able to now help other people. And so I'm a huge, huge, huge support of hers. Her method, what she's created has literally changed my body. It's literally changed me and I will forever, forever be so grateful to her for putting herself out there. And one of the prizes at the end of this month when the raffles is for a gift card to have access to her website for a month. So you too can, for taking all of her classes and all that kind of stuff. I have reached out to her on Instagram again. I wanna get her on the channel and talk with her about the spiritual body, but I don't know if she actually checks. When I talked to her before, I don't think she was as popular as she is now. And so I think she was checking her messages, but I don't think she actually checks her message. I don't check my Instagram messages at this point. And she has far more followers than I do. So I don't blame her if she's not checking me. That's overwhelming when it's just you. And so what I might do, I might give it like a month or so and I might just email her and see if I can get ahold of her through her business to see if she'll come on and talk more about her life. I did post one of her interviews on the community tab. I'll repost it down the description box below where she talks about kind of her come to Jesus moment and the work she's had to do in her life and the certain situations that have come up in her life that have brought her to this place. And so I thought that's really important to share because I think sometimes we do look at people. I mean, Marni Alton is beautiful. She's a beautiful woman. She's very fit. She's in her mid 40s and she looks like she's 25. She's from an interview I listened to of hers a while ago. She's been happily married for like 15 years. She just seems to have everything together. And so I think sometimes when we see people like that we just assume that everything's been easy for them and that life has been easy for them but that's never the case. No one gets out of this world alive. We all have our crosses to bear. She talks about growing up poor and having to like establish herself and figure out how to run a business. She talks about all the struggles that she went through. And so I'm gonna place an interview down in the description box below because those stories I believe are what connect us as humans. You know, as far as the physicality I always say don't compare somebody else's chapter 10 to your chapter one. Yes, Marni Alton is very, very, very fit. But she's been doing it for like 14, 15, 16 years. Same as me. I've been doing this for 16 years. Of course, of course, logically my level of fitness is gonna be higher than someone who is just now starting. Of course it is. That's just science. It doesn't make me better. It doesn't make me a winner. It just means that I'm in more of a place to help the people that have come behind me. And so those who are just starting now 10 years from now you're gonna be able to be in my position where you can put your hand out and help somebody else out. It's to whom much is given, much is expected, right? And so that's why I wanted to share her story is so that you can see someone like her that seems to just have a perfect life has gone through a lot to get where she is. And she's taken those adversities. She's taken those obstacles and she's healed herself through that friction and you can tell that through her interview and that's the opportunity we all have. Whatever obstacle that life gives us, it's not an obstacle, it's a puzzle. Actually, that's something Marnie Alton says. It's not an obstacle, it's a puzzle. It's just a puzzle, right? And you're the Puzzle Master. She said something once in one of her classes that I really, really liked because in our world, in this Truth or Community sometimes I think we think about that being awake means we know facts. And that's not true. Again, that's ito, that's outside knowledge. There is no difference. What I know and what a black cat knows is the exact same thing, we have the same knowledge. It's what we do with it that counts. And she said something in one of her classes, she was like, we don't fully wake up until we fully come into our body. And that is something that we've been talking about. That's something that Mary Magdalene speaks about in her Gospel. We will not ascend until we descend first. All right, which we go into our body and as Marnie Alton says a lot in her classes, we feel things here. We put our place, our bodies in a place to feel things. To feel things. One class she said, I'm paraphrasing. She said, there comes a point where this cage we think we've been in where we realize that cage isn't even locked. We can just push the door right at wide open. But we can't get to that point until we actually feel things. Until we actually come into our body. We descend into the knowing of our body. A lot of times I think that us when we embark on spirituality, we think it's so like ethereal and outside of us, but your body is the most spiritual instrument that you own. Being spiritual doesn't need talking to spirits. That's not what being spiritual means. Being spiritual means coming into your own spirit, which runs through your fascia, which runs down to your toes, which runs through your feet, which runs down up and down your spine. Talking to other spirits is just like talking to another human. There's nothing spiritual about it. Being spiritual is being in touch with you, your soul, your spirit. And we find that through the instrument of the spirit. What is the instrument of the spirit? It's the body. The body is the Shakti of this creation of the soul. It's like that's why I won't go to tarot card readers or any healer that is not working on themselves. That is obviously not working out, but it's obviously not doing their own work because how the hell are you going to be able to help me if you haven't even gotten in touch with your own spirit? How can you channel me if you don't even channel yourself through your own pain, through your own body feeling? Okay, and so that is... Anyway, so what Marnie Alton said was very, very accurate. She also talks a lot about being the watcher, which is a huge yoga theory about just observing yourself, observing yourself. And that's what I really, really, really like about her. And I'm so glad that so many of you guys had such a good experience with her YouTube or 45 minute YouTube. That is the main bar YouTube you're gonna do over the course of this 30 days. There's another 30 minute one. I've put up a first as well from YouTube. Now, tomorrow, November 2nd, you're gonna be doing the exact same workout. And I did this intentionally. Sometimes there's gonna be a repeat of exercises. I do this and I picked everything I did in this, in this challenge I did intentionally. It was not random, but a lot of thought into how I wanted the workout scheduled to look like with my knowledge of energetic body. I did it in a certain pattern, okay? And so tomorrow, when you wake up, especially if you're new to this world, you're probably gonna be sore. That's a good thing. It worked. That means your body responded. It was supposed to respond, right? And so you're gonna have a different experience tomorrow with the exact same workout that you experienced today. And that experience is gonna bring you a new information. For some of you, you're probably gonna feel better doing it again because you know what to expect. And maybe you'll feel more grounded in your body. Maybe the soreness will bring you to a more grounded place into your body, more of a place of honesty and vulnerability in the workout. For some of you, it's gonna trigger more emotions. More anger might come up because you're sore. And so that's why we're just experimenting to see how that affects you. If you shake in the workout, good. That means it's working. If you're sweating profusely in the workout, good, that means it's working, right? These are good things. I'm curious to see again for those who did it early in the morning, how did it affect your day? Do you have a better day today? Do you feel, does your mind feel clearer? Does your body, does your nervous system actually feel more relaxed during the day because you worked out this morning? Is, are you able to handle work better? Are you able to handle your demanding boss better? Are you able to handle traffic better? Because your nervous system is more relaxed. Another thing that came up, and I'm so happy, one of our subscribers is a personal trainer over in the UK, I won't say her name, but she had a question about us and she has been working out a lot replacing some of the workouts I've scheduled with some of the workouts that she normally does. And this is always gonna be your choice, but I noticed the workouts that she was doing were more cardio based. And I explained this in the comment section and we're gonna go deeper into this later in the challenge when most of you guys have gotten more adapted to exercising. Back in like the 80s and the 90s, cardio was like the only way people really thought of when they thought about losing weight because it's a big calorie burner, right? So I think a lot of us, I know this was something that I had ingrained in my head because my mother was a runner, I was addicted to running for a long time, the Jazzercise, the Zumba's, all those kinds of things. And as fun as those are, what we now know scientifically about cardio is that it's not ideal for weight loss, it's also not ideal for emotional body information and this is why. When we go into aerobic activity consistently, so if you're doing like hardcore aerobics for an hour, six days a week, what's gonna happen to your body? This is how amazing our bodies are. So your body isn't necessarily gonna register that you're on the elliptical machine or that you're on the treadmill or that you're in an aerobics class. What it's gonna start to register is that you're in fight or flight and so it's going to start to behave as if you were in a war. Now we are in a war, but we're in an information war but I'm talking about like a physical war and this is because our bodies are designed with the nerves to also protect us, right? We'll talk about that with back bending with the nerve endings in the front of the chest and what tends to happen with back bending a little bit later on in the challenge. So what tends to happen when people get into the habit of doing intense extreme aerobics a lot is for a lot of people, they're gonna have a mad calorie burn but they're also gonna be extremely hungry during the day and start taking in more calories and then their body isn't going to flush the appropriate calories. Their body is actually gonna start to slow down the metabolism because the body thinks you're in a war and so what happens after a war historically is a famine and so your body is gonna start to hold on to the fat and hold on to what it needs to so that when you hit famine, it has something to feed off of, okay? Usually people who do hardcore cardio especially if their disposition is Vata end up with higher anxiety because of that and so it's more of like burning out your muscles versus activating them. Now, when we look at the opposite of that like if we look at the bar classes and the yoga what's really happening is called anaerobic. So all this hardcore cardio is aerobic, the bar, the yoga is anaerobic. Now what happens with Marnie Alton's bar and with yoga, Ashtanga is you start with like five minutes of cardio because that if you do a little bit, the good thing about the cardio is it's gonna get the heart rate up which is gonna cause your blood to flush your system more and wake your body up. That's why Marnie Alton only does it for like five minutes. That's why in Ashtanga we only really get the heart rate up in the beginning of the sun salutations. It's to wake the blood flow up. It's not to put you into an aerobic state but just to wake up your prana, okay? But then when we get into the anaerobic we're building muscle and so when you're doing the yoga poses that you're holding or you're doing the squats and bar or squeezing the ball, you're an anaerobic. And this is why the anaerobic is so much better emotionally and physically for you than the aerobic because the anaerobic is going to pull off of your stored energy, okay? So the aerobic is just gonna grab for any energy it can't where the anaerobic is gonna be, it's not gonna be in a stressed out state. The aerobic is gonna put you in a stressed out state anaerobic is not. And so the body is gonna pull from stored energy. Well, what is stored energy? Physically that looks like fat, right? It looks like cellulite. That's what's gonna pull from to give it energy, okay? But energetically what the stored energy is is stored emotion, it's the stuck emotion. So over here in the aerobic we're not even touching the stuck emotion because we're too busy trying to survive. But in the anaerobic the body can survive and so it's gonna start to pull apart all the stuck stuff. That's why a lot of times dancers and yoga people have very long lean muscles is because of the anaerobic work because the body is pulling from stored energy and not frantically looking for any energy it can find. That's also why you find with bar and yoga the appetite typically doesn't increase. In fact, it might decrease because the body is not in fight or flight. The nervous system is getting a chance to relax itself into the work at hand. That's why in bar and yoga you're gonna be presented with opportunities to actually feel the emotions versus running from the emotions. So sometimes when I have a student that's a big time runner and it's having a hard time getting running away are not doing it as much. I'll say, well, where are you actually running from? What are you running? Because you're literally running. What are you running from? Right? With that being said, the cardio, the kick box cardio is gonna be offered. It is cardio, but I've heard many personal trainers who understand this say, if you're gonna do cardio just do it once a week. Once a week, that's all you need for your heart to get that exercise and everything else should be anaerobic, okay? That's why people lose a lot of weight doing yoga and doing bar too because they're going into the anaerobic. The dance with Richard Simmons is my favorite. I love it. But the aerobics that he offers you isn't as intense as some of the other stuff is. And so the body's gonna be able to relax into and actually have fun, okay? And that's why I picked Richard Simmons for the dance stuff because it's not gonna be putting your body in a stressed out state, yeah? So I just wanted to go ahead and go over that. Sometimes now if you're new to exercise this is not gonna be something that you're gonna be struggling with right now but if you're not new to exercise, with everything positive, there's also a negative. With everything negative, there's also a positive. This is the polarity, right? So with exercise, there's also the propensity people have to use exercises as escapism. And I know what that looks like. So that's like gardening. Like if you say, oh, I garden, no, you're escaping because you're not coming into your body. You're actually looking at something outside of your body, right? Using exercise as an intellectual spiritual modality means that you're allowing yourself to actually feel things in your body. You're not distracting yourself with something outside of your body, yeah? So like gardening is fun and it's good for you to get in the sun and be in nature but it's not, it should not replace your work. It's just something extra, you know? Like playing with your kids in the swimming pool is great exercise but it's not spiritual work, right? It's great exercise. It's good for your health but it's not spiritual work, yeah? And for a lot of people I think especially in the Western world, we've viewed exercise in one category where it's like for our physical health which is a great reason to exercise, don't get me wrong. Being physically healthy and using exercise to keep yourself healthy is amazing. It's a great reason to do it but it shouldn't be the only reason. Are we do it to abuse ourselves? We, there's a form of bulimia where it's over exercise where you binge and then you purge on exercise, right? A way to burn calories to punish ourselves to get into very tight genes and that's another reason why I told you guys at the beginning of this challenge, I don't want you weighing. I really don't want you weighing yourself. I don't, I think weighing ourselves takes us away from our body and it gives us a tool to judge our body from something that's outside of our body. I want you guys to put the scales away because I want you to really feel your body. You know, I haven't weighed myself since I was 27 years old. The only time I've weighed myself as of late is when my weight got really, really low and I got below 100 pounds because there was some health concerns, yeah? So, but beyond that, I let my body go to the weight that it wants to be at. And for me, I'm about five, four, my mom says I'm five, five, whatever. My weight is usually around 110, 115 pounds. That's where my body is comfortable and that's where it's been comfortable for most of my adult life. That's where my body functions the best is in that weight range. Now I am also Vata. So for somebody who's five, four, five, five, who's Kappa, your weight's gonna be a little bit higher because of your body disposition. It doesn't matter. That's just your body disposition. There is not a one size fits all when it comes to this. And so if you, I can tell in my body now, so if I feel like bloated or if I feeling underweight, I can feel it in my body. My body, I've gotten to the point where my body can now tell me when something's not right, okay? And so I want you guys to get into that versus what the scales say, okay? I hope that makes sense. And I want you to, I don't want you, if you're using exercise solely as a way to lose weight then stop exercising, just watch what you eat because that should not, because if you're doing it that, if you're doing it for that reason and that reason alone, then you're gonna end up abusing yourself in the exercise. I want you, regardless of what your weight looks like, I want you to use the exercise as a way to feel things. When you're in the bar and the muscles, and the muscles are burning, hold on my second guys, that was my update with Tamara video downloading. Well, when you're in the bar, when you're in the bar and your muscles are burning, I don't want you to think about calories. I want you to bring your mind's eye into the quadricept, into that area of the body and feel it, be there, lean into that sensation. I want you to think about the fact that you're giving your body the opportunity to burn away old karma, to burn away old patterns. New body is making, that's what my teacher says. New body is making, but old body has to break first. We have to get rid of the old. The opposite of war isn't peace. The opposite of war is creation. So we have to have controlled demolition of the old patterning. The body is the minefield. So the thoughts you've thought in your life has what caused your body to be in the stated sense. And so we have to work with both the mind and the body to reset patterns. And that physical sweat and burn is what's controlled demolition of the old so you can build the new. It's beautiful, it's amazing, it's wonderful. And so I hope that makes sense. Tomorrow you guys start your five-minute cold shower after you do your exercise. I'm really excited. Somebody in the group said, this is the thing I'm most afraid of. And I responded, this will probably be the thing you end up loving the most. And if I can do cold therapy, anybody can, cold therapy has literally changed my life. I struggle with inflammation because I have arthritis because I'm Vata. And I can tell and see it in my body when my joints are inflamed. And the cold therapy has helped me so, so, so much. It also, if you watch when Haas interviews on cold therapy, I placed one of his interviews in the challenge. He talks about how it treats depression. It treats migraine headaches. There's so much that cold therapy treats. And all I'm asking for is just five minutes. So after you do your workout, you get in the shower. You can make the shower warm, shampoo, clean yourself. Last five minutes, turn it to the coldest it can be and just let yourself stand there, get your face. It'll take the swelling out of your face, out of your eyes. Let it feel and just breathe into it and just lean into it and allow it just to feel how it's hitting the cold waters, hitting your skin and going into your skin and allowing the inflammation to kind of calm down. Because at night, one of the bonus challenges is taking a hot bath, a hot therapy at night with the, with the salts, the magnesium salts. And so it's just five minutes. Anybody can do anything for five minutes. And over the course of the month, month, I'm going to be very curious to see how much the cold therapy has actually affected you. Changed your mood, changed your outlook and everything like that. So anyway, guys, leave me your thoughts down in the description box below. Tell me how you're doing, how you like to Marni. And once again, if you have any friends or family or if you're just now watching this, it's never too late to start. Just send me an email at shadowworkchallenge at gmail.com. I'm so proud of you guys. You are the storm. By doing this, as Tamara says, which will be released later. By doing this work, you're going to get more in touch with you, with your gut instinct. And that's the last thing that the controllers wants you to do. The controllers want you to be stuck, like, like controllable, you know. And the more you take your power back by really feeling your body, your body's your information highway, it's the best instrument. It's the one thing you're never going to leave in this life is your body. The minute you leave your body, you're done, you know. So get cozy with it. Ask your beautiful body, what it wants you to know. What do you want me to know, right? And if you don't get an answer right away, just wait. The answer will come. It will come. This is not a one-time thing. This is a lifetime. It's like, but Tabi Joy said, with yoga practice, one year, no good, 10 years, no good, whole life, whole life. And so you're starting off for something that's the rest of your life. Welcome to your new life. All right, guys. And of course, be proud of yourself when you see the muscles start to develop and the stomach gets smaller. I mean, that's the physical sign that the work is actually working. So anyway, I love you guys and I hope you're all doing good and I'm really, really, really proud of you. Please share these videos. I am heavily shadow banned. I don't know if you guys noticed that. Like it is laughable how shadow banned I am. Obviously we're doing something very right on this channel if they shadow banned me this much. So make sure you're sharing these videos out to people so that other people can join the challenge and take their power back too. All right, you guys, love you all and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.