 Hello everybody happy day 14 of the challenge you are virtually halfway through the challenge because tomorrow is day 15 And of course today Monday November 14th. You had quite a big challenge day. So let's go ahead and look at this So for today as we spoke about yesterday Your new challenge now since you passed the 10-day mark is to make your bed up every morning If you don't already do that and your last meal should be between 5 and 7 p.m. No snacking after 7 p.m This allows your digestive system at least 12 hours of rest between dinner and breakfast What this is also doing guys So when you when you go into REM sleep at night like we kind of spoke about that yesterday with the brainwaves From the eye to the brain But what's also happening is your blood is now running out to heal all these organs to heal your skin as You're in that deep deep deep trance of sleep But if you snack at night if you're getting up and you're eating before bed Then your blood isn't having the chance to actually go and do what it needs to do at night because it's too busy working The digestive system to digest the snacks that you ate in the middle of the night This is why if you start Cutting your food between 5 and 7 p.m. And giving yourself that 12 hours before your next meal You're gonna most likely wake up feeling more refreshed You're gonna wake up with more energy You're gonna wake up looking younger looking more rested And so I'm curious to see if you guys are starting to notice that if you were at one point a night time Snacker a midnight snacker and you've now started to cut that habit and observe that habit and not allowing yourself to Indulge in that habit. Are you noticing a difference in the way you feel the next morning? How is making your bed up every morning affecting your day? I can't remember the last time I didn't make my bed up in the morning Because I just don't think I would have a good day if I didn't because it helps get my brain organized For the day at hand now picking from your exercises today You had four Exercises to pick from either doing a 45 minute kickboxing the 60 minutes went into the oldies the 45 minute bar or the half Primary series. I'm curious to know which one of these you picked and why For your meditation you had one of three to pick you could have either done the sound bowl healing the all meditation or the chakra healing Obviously you had your food journal again and of course today in your journal You had to journal about the choices you picked with exercise if it was overwhelming for you how those choices are affecting you are you picking the choices that are right for you like I keep saying with the meditation especially the ones you Want to be picking are the ones that are challenging you the most not the easy stuff The easy stuff is boring the easy stuff is not what you need to be picking and that's gonna be different for every person Okay, so like for some people they're gonna find the bar really easy and not triggering But for other people they're gonna find the bar triggering vice versa with all the other exercises So are you intelligently picking your exercises based on the work at hand? Or are you falling into patterns of laziness by picking the pleasurable exercises that make your mind feel good? Which we spoke about last week. There's a sutra in the yoga sutra that talks about this The mind is gonna go towards pleasure to avoid fit pain But if it keeps going to that pleasure to avoid pain It's eventually going to end up in more pain. And so are you starting to recognize that today? You also need to look at the four upper chakras Looking deep at into that and of course the big one today was writing a hand letter to someone you admire and sending it to Then we spoke in-depth about that yesterday and day 13 And so I'm really curious to see how this particular exercise affected you Let's go ahead and look into tomorrow Tuesday November 15th. This is your halfway mark You've got this halfway point to mantra. You didn't come this far to only come this far. So keep going Once again, you're making your bed up And your mat last meal should be between 5 and 7 p.m. Now you're going to be doing the 45-minute bar today. So now you haven't assigned exercise today Alright, you're gonna be doing the all meditation today So now you have a specific meditation given to you and I'm going back and forth with this guys where days you pick And days you don't pick so that you can start to see your own resistance Like are you excited when I tell you what to do or are you excited when you get to pick? And are you excited when you get to pick because you feel like you have the intelligence to pick now? Are you excited because you get to pick because you fall get to fall back into lazier habits? That is something for you to decide that is I can't give you the answer to that That's something for you to study to self Pratshahara is what we call it in yoga And that is the the practice of self study Pratshahara. So you are studying yourself Halfway mark edge educational contemplation in Hindu tradition Tuesday is Hanuman's day Below is a video from esoteric Atlanta where Bryce speaks to Hanuman of Hanuman and his representation of courage Please watch this video because you will have some questions in your journal entry today to reflect on courage All right, I've spoken about this story from the Ramayana many times But I want you to reflect on that because we're gonna after I go through this We're gonna talk again about the dark night of the soul what that looks like Alright, you're also journaling your food again. So tomorrow you're at the halfway mark. How are you feeling? What is surprised you the most about this experience? What have you learned about yourself? What has shocked you the most about yourself? What is motivation? What is discipline? What is the difference between the two? What where where were you motivated in the beginning? What about now? Is it getting harder to get up and exercise at what point does motivation in and discipline take over? What is devotion? What is Sadhana? So Sadhana is a spiritual devotion a to practice to a devotion of spirituality It's a discipline. It's not motivation is Like we don't need to rely on motivation What we need to rely on is discipline and again, we're gonna talk about that more in a second How is your daily exercise journaling meditation etc return into your daily devotion if you're a person of faith Do you feel the presence of God with you as you work through yourself, especially on the hard days? Do you recognize the power of using your body to burn through all that binds you emotionally so you can be more vulnerable with yourself and God? Again, that goes back to the Ramayana story with Hanuman and Ravana that you're gonna study today How has this experience affected your relationship with those around you? Are you more patient? Do you recognize the courage it takes to embark on shadow work like Hanuman? Returning seat to Dharam by defeating Ravana. How has your court courage brought your soul back to God by going to war with your own ego during the process? When the ego told you it's too hard or you should just give up or you're too tired to do this today When did your courage say no to the ego and do the work anyway? Days you lost to the ego and slept in what did you learn from that experience? If there were days you didn't do the whole challenge assignment of the day Can you forgive yourself and start again tomorrow today? You did the exact same exercise you did on day one the 45-minute bar with money altered Do you notice a difference in your body from day one to today? All right, go back and reread all of your eternal entries up to this point. What has changed? How have you evolved? Okay, so that's for tomorrow Tuesday November 15th. All right So let's once again look at this idea of courage in the dark night of the soul And so I want to remind you guys that if you are under the impression that Spirituality should feel good or should be like seeing unicorns and butterflies and rays of light Then you are sorely misled about what spirituality is all the spiritual scriptures Not just the Gnostic Christian scriptures, but throughout the east all the scriptures that speak about this work of spirituality They speak about going to war against yourself against your own ego What again is the ego the ego is the false sense of self the ego is what is mortal where your soul is not your soul And your ego are not the same thing the soul is what's real the ego is fake. It's just a facade Okay, and so most of us are living through survival of the ego The purpose of the ego is to provide you with that resistance so that your soul know itself And so I want to remind you guys if you're struggling and there is darkness coming up if you are still having a Panic attack with the alarm goes off at four o'clock in the morning That's what's supposed to happen. I was just talking about it in the group text, you know Watch when you say like I'm not a morning person or I don't like getting up early in the morning That's the artful dodger of the ego. That's the mind going towards pleasure and away from pain and I'm gonna remind you No, one's a morning person not one. I've been doing this for 16 years and still in the morning When my alarm clock goes off, I have that immediate thought of oh, just sleep in today 16 years later The difference though is that I've been doing this for so long that I know the benefits I know what discipline is when we look in Christianity. What did Yahshua call his students? He called them disciples. What word does disciple come from it comes from the word? Discipline there's a discipline involved and you cannot Absolutely 100% you cannot evolve spiritually if your body is not involved in the process That is why all these ancient religions had Physical exercise with them. That is why the practice of yoga that predates almost every religion out there Involves physical exercise why because the body is the Shakti. It's the expression of the soul The body is also what's going to offer the soul that resistance because the body has also been the Manifestic man at manufacturer of the ego or the false sense of self And so if you're bypassing the exercise if you're bypassing all of that Then you're not doing spiritual work and the voice you're hearing your head that you think is your intuition is actually your ego okay now for those of you that have physical limitations like a Paraplegic or something's going on. We've spoken about this before what do you do in that case? You sit and you bring your mind through an exercise So you sit there you close your eyes and you see yourself doing a physical exercise because that thought vibration is what's going to Then penetrate into the body Yes, and so when we start to go up really go up against that ego We are going to have a dark night of the soul. It is not going to be fun. It is going to be uncomfortable It is going to be painful so much stuff is going to come up And I want you to know that is completely normal when stuff comes up It is going to look like depression. It is going to look like sadness. It is going to look like body aches It's going to look like a low-grade fever. It's going to look like a headache It's going to look like soreness all of this is 100% normal and if it's happening to you good the practice is working All right, and I think that's been one of the biggest revelations at least I've noticed in a single signal support group is that Times when people would have backed away from an exercise because their back hurt or their knee hurt They're now realizing. Oh, I need to keep going because something is shifting itself Okay, and I will say our support group is popping right now So once again if you want to join us in the support group This is why you need a support group because this shit is hard even though every person is doing it on their own and Going through their own ego their own ego death. It helps to have other people around you saying Me too like I'm feeling it too to help talk you off the ledge, right? So so I would suggest if you really want to join that signal support group go ahead and do so And this is the hardest part for me as a teacher. This is what I have to show tough love and be like I know you're tired. I know you don't want to get up early, but you need to you need to You're not the exception You're part of the process every single person is going through the exact same thing and Sometimes when we know that when we know that every single person is going through the exact same thing It makes us feel better, you know misery loves company so it's like it's nice to know that we're not the only ones that are struggling and And it's never ending like I said 16 years later when my alarm goes off I still kind of do like an eye roll and don't want to get up, right? That's why when women are on their periods we call ladies holiday because you don't really exercise on your period Or you do light exercise to allow your yourself to detox So it's like you're gonna break from doing the hard stuff We also know that the early morning hours are the time of God It's Brahma Martha. So once you get over the hump and you actually like the way that I've learned over this past 16 years basically the alarm goes off The minute I get myself out of bed and like go to the bathroom I start to wake up and the minute I actually get all my mat and I start my practice I'm pretty awake at that point and what tends to happen because the earth is so quiet at that time It is quite a monumentous time to be with God, right? And so you are and the body is the most resistant at that time the mind is the most resistant at that time So you're at a place of full honesty and full vulnerability and so keep going guys You're doing amazing. Like I said, this shit's hard. This is really hard That's why I want you guys to study again the story of Hanuman and Ramana the idea of this the courage the courage It takes to go up against the the ego if we never go up against the ego If we always just leave the ego as it is then our soul will never be in alignment with God Sita will never be returned to wrong Okay, so it's so important to have that courage and it's okay If you don't have courage in this life to do it that just means you're gonna have to come back Next life and do it you'll have to you'll have to keep coming back and back and back and back and back again until you finally go What you know, you know, I actually I need to have courage and I need to actually do this I need to actually defeat my own ego my own Limitations of mind so that I can return my soul back to God And so I am so proud of you guys you guys are absolutely amazing. You're halfway there You're doing it. I know at the end of this challenge I've challenged you guys to create a challenge for December for yourself But we are gonna be doing a 60-day challenge starting in January after after Christmas And I'm gonna start working on that soon. So 60 days after that. I know you guys can do it I know you can and so alright you guys let me know how you're doing down in the description box below What's been your biggest struggle? What's been the most surprising thing that you've learned about yourself? And how are you doing overall? If you want to join the signal group I will put the link again in the description box below and I hope that you're all having a wonderful start to your week. Bye