Episode 56: Thriving In Dangerous Times With Jai Sugrim

To be an authentic spiritual warrior, one needs spirituality every day. That person shouldn’t just talk the talk but they should also walk the walk in every aspect of life. A spiritual warrior needs to have healthy habits every morning. They get to the yoga mat consistently, recite mantras, dive deep into meditation, dedicate their lives to the study of ancient texts, and experience perpetual soul growth by going on spiritual retreats. They have to immerse themselves to partake in diets, fasts, and plant medicine journeys for months at a time. They have to not fear the intake of psychedelics and bad trips. Spiritual warriors take all of those sacred teachings that they’ve learned and share them with their students. All these things combined form a being of integrity, the authentic spiritual warrior. Join Anand as he talks to health and wellness educator for 25 years, Jai Sugrim about why everyone needs spirituality through yoga in their life. Jai is steeped in the Jivamukti and Ashtanga yoga lineages and has a 15-year history of studying shamanism with master curanderos of the Peruvian Amazon. He loves to share health and mindfulness practices that help his students create peace of mind. Start being in the now today by listening to this episode.

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Thriving In Dangerous Times With Jai Sugrim

What does it take to be an authentic spiritual warrior, not only someone who talks the talk or walks the walk in every aspect of life? One who maintains the strict discipline to wake up at 4:30 AM to get on the yoga mat followed by reciting mantras, diving deep into meditation, dedicating one's life to the study of the ancient beta text, and experiencing perpetual soul growth by going to spiritual retreats in India and Nepal. Living in the Amazon jungle, partaking in diet or fast and plant medicine journeys for months at a time, and then take all of those teaching and share that wisdom with students. That is in being integrity and someone I highly respect as a teacher and friend.

I'm honored to host our first three-time guest and my soul brother, Jai Sugrim. He has been a health and wellness educator for several years. He is steeped in the Jivamukti and Ashtanga yoga lineages. He has a several-year history of studying shamanism with master curanderos of the Peruvian Amazon. He has worked professionally with everyone from the New York Yankees, with whom he won a World Series Championship Ring in 2000, to Martin Scorsese and a long list of celebrities, financiers, and professional athletes. He has also been featured in the New York Times, The Huffington Post, Psychology Today, as well as on The Today Show. He loves to share health and mindfulness practices that help his students create peace of mind.

Anand, I’m great to be on your show again. I love talking to you. We are resonant with many different ideas around Veda culture and expressing it in a super hyper-technological modern time where we are becoming a space-faring civilization. The vision of the Vedics of you can explore space with your eyes closed or open. They had precise knowledge of the stars, the relationships of the bodies and the sky to each other, and precise distances.

Somehow, without our technology, they had some advanced knowledge. You and I are getting to experiment through time with these teachings because the teachings stay the same. What's fascinating about ancient civilizations is the nature of the mind has stayed the same. It flows outwards or inwards. The wisdom keepers have figured out techniques for the involution of energy. You asked me to expound on the first yoga Sutra, which is atha yoga-anushasanam, and the word atha means now and beginning now. The exposition verse means, “Now the exposition on yoga begins.”

In this context, we are thinking about identity with our true selves. You and I have a big background in psychedelic therapy and surrendering to people who hold space for us to open up our subtle fields through the ceremony. Looking under the surface of reality, we can do with our eyes closed or our eyes open. We can use telescopes, space probes, and satellites.

Our ancestors closed their eyes and accessed deep states of concentration to also explore space. It begins now. Our enlightenment will begin now. It will not begin later. We don't have to reach eighteen million downloads on our podcast to enjoy this moment that we are sharing. We are in the now and creating magic.

Yoga always begins now. That gives us hope because if we look at religions like Christianity, it begins with the premise that we are all sinners. We are all followed by grace. Even the greatest wisdom teachers and gurus have an ounce of some reason they are here, something to work on, some blemish in their consciousness that gives them the body. No perfected sidha could be here in a body without having some little bit of karma left.

It gives us no matter how much of a struggle yesterday was, atha is now. With one deep breath, you can feel, forgive yourself, and feel your true nature. The universe isn't waiting for me to write a best-selling novel so that I can realize, “Myself or that I am eternal reality. I am the eternal Brahman. I am one.” Some people do that with the toad medicine. They take a high dose of DMT. It concentrates their mind, and they go into that oneness of being. For some people, it's static dance, drumming, and fasting. I've had great experiences with 72-hour water fast and long-distance running.

There are many opportunities to get us out of ordinary state perception into non-ordinary states. That's where yogis are interested. They are interested in changing from one state of consciousness that we use during the day to solve problems to an expanded state of awareness that teaches us that our personalities are a part of who we are.

Yoga always begins now.

Jai is a construct upon something much larger, infinite, and interconnected to the other beings. The more I train my memory by practicing in the now, atha, the more I can deepen my concentration. When I'm not on my mat and I'm moving throughout the day, I can have a memory of who other people are. I treat them as an aspect of myself. Yoga begins now. Our podcast begins now. Moving your mouth and jaw to become resonant with that idea of yoga unfolding now puts us to be a receiver of consciousness and a generator of consciousness.

There are two ways the consciousness flows. It puts us in a receptive state. When you say Limitless One show, you are not encapsulating one way of being. You have a childhood that's unique to you, and some of your core values have been shaped in that childhood. As a limitless one, you do not have to stay with only the ideas and patterns you picked up in the first several years. You can be variable. Where I think the crossover in our work, where we connect, is that we are looking for variable ways of being and exploring possibilities.

The key is to put the mind in a possibility frame. Our species is up against the wall. How did we get this far, given that we've overcome ice ages, slavery, and constant wars? We are at a time where we can also innovate into the next phase shift that is required. I'm trying to keep a happy attitude by living my teaching. I want to share a story in the next few moments about a near-death experience and the power of death. Apply these teachings of yoga to our darkest days, and have the practice carry us through those dark times. Look over our shoulder when we have healed from that experience when we have the healing story, to realize it's those hard moments that make us grow the most.

I remember the toughest, most challenging things that I've gone through, and it's like the good, the beautiful times come in and go out. They are not punctuated by the times when I thought I would never make it but I had faith in the practice and survived. Atha yoga-anushasanam blends into atha yoga-anushasanam, the two A’s combined. That puts you and me vibrationally into the present moment. May you and I, in this conversation, discover something that we cannot discover left to our own devices with our own sequence of thoughts. May we bounce beauty and good questions to each other to realize more of who we are and anchor that deeper into the back of our brains.

Sutra and Sanskrit, there are many tonal languages that help us with that. Hebrews is one of them. There are some African languages that help us vibrate throughout the whole head and immerse ourselves in sound. Sound is the key to changing frequency and altering our perception. The beauty of yoga is when you alter your perception, grab something that was always existing, and download it but it was always there. It opens up the mystery of, “What else can I access?” The yogi is using their consciousness to access fields of information that are useful.

I use sutra and mantra for memory. I believe on a primal level, each being that's in this body, in New York City, on the planet Earth is remembering their divine nature, and each being is trying to anchor that memory deeply. It helps to refine our sense of ethics. If we know our nature like when you drink ayahuasca or smoke DMT, the first thing you realize is, “Holy cow, I experienced the oneness of being.” This must be the same experience of Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Epstein, the kindest people like the Dalai Lama, and the most malevolent people like people who profit off of war. This must also be their experience.

The greatest obstacle yoga tells us is, avidya, ignorance of our true selves. What Buddhists do when they know their true self is they become Bodhisattva. They turn their life over into the service of humankind. When I went to the jungle to study shamanism, I came back realizing something about all spiritual practices are training our memory.

We are healing our memory. When we forget who we are, it's easy. You've done it. I've done it. Everyone reading this blog has acted selfishly. That's okay. That's normal in the world when you don't know your nature. When we have the memory of our nature and slow down to integrate that lesson, compassion, kindness, and listening dawn. We get away from these extreme positions that we are easily triggered into extremism and extreme thinking.

When you have that a-ha moment of, “Wow, this soul is limitless. This is not Anand, and this is not Jai. This is everything happening all at once.” We are all the same. You have a different level of compassion for others but also for yourself because you realize you tried to do the best that you could at every moment with the experience and the knowledge that you had. You have the ability and the opportunity through some of those dark times in life.

I believe that some of the darkest times in my life were the biggest blessings. When you are in it, it doesn't feel like that. Every single time, it's made me grow exponentially. After my dad died, when I was the age of 27, I had to dig in and become a man through some of my hardest breakups. Right at the start of opening up my dream business and ending an engagement, I had to grow as well as a business owner and as an individual seeking to live my life, my bliss, and speak my truth.

These are beautiful moments. When you look at these people in your life, the opportunities, and the experiences, you have to look at it with so much compassion and love because without those experiences, all that “heartbreak,” you don't get to a level of evolution in this life of ours. It's honoring every aspect and part of it. This is why we do the work. It is because we realize, “If I stay where I am, I'm only going to get what I know.”

Every time we step outside of that comfort zone of knowledge, that circle of what we think we know, we step into the beyond. We realize something we didn't know. When you look back, you are like, “There are many things I don't even know.” That circle gets even bigger. It's this never-ending pursuit of knowledge, experience, and understanding of our truest selves. You become the Bodhisattva when you realize it's all you, there's no separation, and it's all happening in one infinite present moment. There's no such thing as time.

You touch on the power of growth that comes from those destabilizing moments like the loss of a loved one. You said you were 27 and 27 is the age when I lost my younger brother, who I was close to. The loss catapults you into the inquiry of your own coming death and the unpredictable nature of death. You hear that no one has tomorrow guaranteed but when you see it viscerally in your own life, it brings the teaching home in a new way.

I want to share something with you, which is a near-death experience. There are two types of near-death experiences. There's a fast one and a slow one. I don't want to expound too much on the fast one because the brain moves on. I fell on a motorcycle sideways in a risky maneuver, three people in a row, riding in India, and a truck was cutting us off. We were 1, 2, and 3 on motorcycles. The first two made it okay but I barely made it. I had touched my brakes on some sand and slid sideways. It was the only day I burned my whole left arm but I didn't have a brain injury. I shook it off. I got up.

Everybody has ups and downs. There's no person out there that has it good all the time.

It was the only day on a 21-day trip that I used a helmet because it was hot. We were trying to leave the monsoon in South India and ride through to the Himalayas in the North. With the trauma and the shock, the brain says, “That was a close call.” You contextualize that you go, “That was 1 of my 9 lives. I got lucky, not now, Jai. You move on. It's a shock. You go on.”

I had a different type of near-death experience where I had to battle a life-threatening illness. I was in silence in the jungle in Peru for 28 days. While I was on retreat drinking ayahuasca for 28 days, I drank 8 times a month, I got bit by an insect on that trip, and nothing showed up on my body, nothing at all. After the retreat was over, several months later, back in New York City, on January 1st, a zit showed up on my shin, and that zit continued to grow in a perfect concentric circle outwards to a rather large several-inch diameter hole in my shin.

I start experiencing tissue necrosis. I had contact with a pathogen called leishmaniasis, which is a protozoan that enters the cells. The blood breaks the cells, replicates, and keeps the process going. It infects three levels. There are three types of infections. One is mucosal. One is cutaneous, and one is visceral. The one that I had was mucosal. It traveled from my shin into the face.

The reason this was a slow near-death experience was, in a lot of Vedic teachings, there are meditations, tantra, and Buddhism on the decaying body. You will hear some people that get into hardcore Vedanta. They try to renounce their body. It's a type of extreme practice that positions you in the one true eternal Brahman mantra. A position that, “I am God. I am the one.” They will say things like the body is a bag of pus, walking to the grave, and each day the body is getting older.

I love Vedantic teachings. They ring true and go home to me. I had been a semi-well-known, recognized teacher traveling around the world four months a year internationally. I would give that teaching, “We are not the body. We are not the mind.” I would lead many meditations for groups of people about not being the body and not being the mind.

I found that this experience of a full year of slowly watching my body decay, it would turn yellow, puss, and leak. I would wear this giant bandage. I continued my Ashtanga yoga practice, which is a set sequence. You don't change the sequence. You repeat the pattern over and over, 6 or 7 days a week. There's a posture called Percival tadasana where your hands are in a secret prayer behind your back, and you are in a forward bend but my nose would be right inside of where that bandage is. I would, on a daily basis, smell my own decaying flesh.

I had to become mentally strong and firm. None of the doctors could figure out the best way to treat it. It's a serious disease. I was going through the process with the CDC, with infectious disease specialists, doing all the testing and being patient but all the while, watching month after month, the hole gets bigger. I was able to stay calm because I had this beautiful karmic unfoldment with the girlfriend I was with. At that time, we each provided deep healing for each other.

I helped her with a serious trauma from her past through my presence, who I was, and my character. That helped her to heal. She helped to take care of me when I became lifeless. There was a point in the treatment when I finally decided to take the drug to heal that I could no longer move around. I became weak from the drug that I was taking.

The point I want to drive home here is that you were watching the decaying body, and your mind is becoming steady. At one point, I walked to the bathroom and made contact with my own eyes. I held that contact and said to myself internally, “This is the time where you must live the teaching. You must look here now and make a commitment to taking these drugs properly and fighting this to the highest ability. The work you did spiritually in the jungle with ayahuasca, was it worth it? Would you trade in that work and turn back the knowledge that it gave you not to have this disease?” The answer for me was a resounding no.

I had made up my mind that the work I did in the jungle was good. I would battle this. If this was my last opportunity at life, that I have lived a full life, I embraced the fact that I could die. It became liberating. The worst type of decision-making for me is making decisions with a lot of inner conflicts. I was able to engage the most powerful energy that we can get to, which is that energy of surrender, even in these times that you and I have talked about with the heated political environment.

For me, to feel freedom through uncertainty, I want to know what's going on. The days when I know that I don't know what's going on and that it's okay are the days when I'm truly free. I'm not bound by my bias and need to control things.

I wasn't sure I was going to beat it but I was ready for the best fight. That slow decaying, knowing the bodies go into graves or bodies are burned, and bodies are returned back to the Earth to see that hole in my leg get bigger, and for it to rot and smell. It was a preview of what I would one day, if I lived long enough, I would still have to turn back this old body over to nature. It brought me in touch with the gift of life and the spiritual practices to look back on that.

I have a huge scar on my leg. It's a perfect circle. There's a beautiful tattoo that Robert Ryan did around it that encapsulates the energy of the jungle but to look at that scar and go, “That happened but I don't identify with it.” I identify with the fact that my discipline and love for yoga helped me to traverse that darkness of like, “You might die at the peak of your life. You are only 38 years old and might have to surrender the body. There are many more experiences you wish to have that you may not have.” The light of the teachings and the invitation to yoga come right up to my face. It put the decaying flesh in my nose and embraced it to continue to do the practice through all of that until the last moment towards the treatment.

I look at that as a great adventure. As I face the possibility of co-infections with Lyme, I'm not jumping to conclusions. I did a 3-and-a-half-mile run. I’m grateful that my body could do the run than I did the ashtanga yoga half primary series. I’m grateful that my body could do what it could do now. I reveled in the beauty of the practice. I'm more careful than ever not to take an iPhone out, record a part of my practice, and put it up on social media to know that that's my practice time. Don't mix those energies with bringing a camera into your practice. have another day where you make content for your message but keep it clean and pure.

Trust comes from the experiments you get in practice.

I'm reveling the fact that I get to live in the country where I want to be. This is where I grew up in high school. I get to be back where the journey started for the salmon. I swam back upstream. I'm integrating the skills. The simple, if you speak to guys who get to the top of Everest, they are at a camp before the peak, and everybody picks the right day, the right weather, and they are like, “We are going to ascend now.” They make a line before they get to the peak to take their picture.

They are in such oxygen debt in that last part of the journey to get to Everest, to the peak, that the next step feels like 30 steps and the same at the end of a marathon. When I ran the Brooklyn marathon in 2022, each step felt it was worth 30 or 40 steps before the last part of the race, where you are out of energy and your brain and body are competing for glycogen.

When you are aware of exactly what your next step is, everything gets simple, crystal, and pure. There is so much choice. We get frazzled by it when all we are trying to do is take that next step to get to the peak of Everest or finish the marathon. The simplicity comes back to atha yoga anushasanam now. I don't have to do anything to realize my true nature. I can be in love. I can forgive myself. I can embrace my true nature because I am not only an ego construct.

These are trying moments all bring us back to how we are practicing on a daily. It's the daily spiritual practice and sadhana that helps us and defines our character. It's the daily sadhana, a daily morning practice that is like the wick in the candle. The wick is the center. It's the central channel. It's the vagus nerve. We must all have one means of coming to the center. Whether that's a morning run, an evening walk, something that you do for yourself that helps you with that one simple thing that can show you everything about your character, can help you become anti-fragile and face the ups and downs.

One thing I am certain about is that everybody has ups and downs. There's no person out there that has it good all the time, no matter what we are seeing on social media or what is being presented. I coach the best of the best, and I'm in four walls and a roof with them. I'm on Zoom with them. I can tell you that everyone out there struggles, and nobody has a great day every single day. It's when we turn ourselves over to our practice on the hard days and the good days that where life is back to limitless one and possibilities.

Usually, when we have a problem, it's because we perceive it in only one way. If we perceive that problem in the light of perspective or different vantage points, we can go, “I have a choice here. I could freak out about my leg rotting. I could freak out about the fact that I'm not able to go to work. I could freak out about not knowing how this drug is going to affect my liver long-term. I could freak out that I don't have too many options. I have to take this drug, and it might damage the health I've created for my whole life.”

When you act in faith to the practice and the higher power that is guiding us, which is nothing but our own self, trust comes from the experiments we get in practice. We learn how to trust ourselves. That slow, agonizing, decaying, rotting flesh on my body and the weirdest part, it's one thing when it's your shin but I was doing pranayama for eight months in. One day in the middle of the afternoon and I had a nose bleed and called my doctor. He said, “Come in immediately to the hospital. We are going to send a biopsy to the CDC.”

The day that thing spread into my face, and I saw lesions taking over my face, and the vision that it would eat my face away was a deep day for me to think that I could go out of this world like that. That was a wake-up call. It was a humbling moment. I got my big boy undershorts that day, knowing that I would take the hardest drug possible to try to knock this thing out.

I would take the risk of damaging my liver permanently but the agonizing slow nature of it helped me. Without a yoga practice, maybe my discipline as an athlete could have helped me but the mantras, the deeper nature of reality, and the fact that I can see that ego and spirit are aspects of one's larger. These metaphysical vocabulary and frameworks help you when you are watching your death slowly.

I wasn't sure I was going to make it. They didn't give me any guarantees. They said, “These are the two drugs. This one is FDA-approved. It might come back. It has come back. This drug is another drug. It's highly experimental. It's dangerous to your liver. It usually kills the pathogen and never comes back but it's not FDA-approved. Which drug do you want?”

When it went to my face, I chose the stronger drug. I also knew that I wanted one strong fight rather than the possibility of doing it twice. It wasn't appealing to me. You don't know if you are going to get in a car accident tomorrow but the flesh is rotting and stinking, and you are smelling it six days a week. It's harrowing. It’s something that's beautiful to look back up on and see how yoga teachings help me cruise through it and recover.

We are all, at some point, whether we have or are going to have to face our own mortality and have a strong foundation in terms of trusting your physical body. You put in the reps. You put in those daily deposits of doing your mantras every day, doing your meditations, getting on the mat, doing your awesomeness every single day, and then going to the jungle, diving deep into the darkest aspects of your psyche.

You've done so much work to give you that foundation of, “Whatever happens, I have full faith in myself and the universe. Whatever is destined to happen, whether I'm supposed to be an inspiration for others or whether I'm supposed to kick my own butt and make it through this thing warrior style.” You had that. You created that.

Not a lot of people have that foundation. When they are going through something tough like that, what can they rely on? A lot of times, they will listen to what other people say without checking in with themselves. A big challenge for people is when they don't have that deep connection to themselves, “I'm looking for the answers outside of myself.” You didn't do that at that moment. You listen to trusted doctors but you also have to make the decision for yourself about what's the right path for you.

Beauty is a good reason to do something.

At this moment in history, ask, “How do we know that something is the right knowledge?” There are different ways of attaining knowledge. One of the weird ways throughout history that we've become accustomed to is the testimony of a wise man or woman, another sage, someone external to us who has top-down dissemination of knowledge. Being in front of the priest, the shaman or the Pope blessing your child a top-down spirituality.

This is going to sound ironic but I believe we are living through a massively, super supremely religious time. There's a religious religiosity in the air to the way we are exempt. Some of the most religious people are atheists. You can see this in the way they share their politics. They have a religious fervor in their expression of themselves. I would argue this is because we have an inherent need for religious experience.

Many of the temples of the past will have rooms. If you look closely at the temples in Turkey, India, and the Indus Valley, you will find rooms for the curation and preparation of plants, seeds, and brews that mitigate altered states of consciousness. This book you got me to read here, Krishna in the Sky with Diamonds, is a look at an old concept of the divine vision. Can we handle the vision of reality when it's given to us? This is why the Kabbalist used to only allow study after age 40. When roles were specialized, that was given more limited to males after age 40 because women were in the tribe helping to raise children.

It was limited, and all of this is being opened up at this time where bottom-down movements are where it's at. When you decentralized technologies like the printing press back in 1900, a guy picking tea leaves in the South of India would know who the queen was because she had a poster of herself put out in the village. He goes, “That's the queen.” Now we have Instagram. We can publish, print, and broadcast our thoughts all over the world in a matter of seconds.

The effort to know if you have yogis get by on their own effort. Yoga says, “I am interested.” It's not only interested in religion. Yoga is giving you the belief in God is optional. If you look deeply into book one of The Yoga Sutras, it's about concentration. In religion, belief in God is useful chanting God's name. Ishvara Pranidhana, the devotion to God, is optional but the effort we make the yogi's concerned with their own effort and religious experience.

That's what's so attractive to me about yoga. I awoke at a young age. By awakening, I didn't go on a massive spiritual quest at age thirteen. I realized that most adults quickly had it wrong. They were incongruent. They would say one thing and do another over and over. They weren't living a life aligned with what they were truly interested in. They were looking to one day break free and truly pursue their interest. I woke to that somehow. Luckily, that was not the way that I wanted to go.

The bottoms-up movement means, how did I have the strength to face that near-death experience with the teachings of yoga? I studied The Yoga Sutras and had a framework for the stages of samadhi. In 2010, I read a book by Daniel Pinchbeck called Breaking Open the Head. There he goes talking about a substance named DMT, and I turn my hands open to the universe. I said, “May I welcome this substance into my life to try this experience.” Someone that I trusted had it at Burning Man. I smoked DMT in the playa, way deep in the desert.

I left my body to experience the highest teaching and highest day possible. When I return to my body, the study of the Sutra, the stages of higher consciousness, will reveal to me. The first thing I thought was, “The text is correct. This is an opportunity I must study deeper and practice with more reverence.” The bottoms up nature, the fact that it's related to my own experiences, why I can give my life to it.

My yoga practice at 35 looked like 5 hours of ashtanga practice a day, meditation and mantra in the mornings and nights, and leg over-the-head handstands. It's going to look different at ages 50, 60, and 70. What I get to retain and keep is the quality of my mind through those different stages of life. The passions I had in my mind as a 32-year-old are different passions as I approach 20 years down the line. I want to express myself with all of that experience in between and sift through better applications of my energy.

Yoga is expressed differently through the different stages but the bottoms up nature, the nature that it's not like, “I don't need the priest to show me yoga. The wisdom teachers have helped me to learn. They've shown me the practice but what do I trust over again is how it flowers in my life and consciousness?” The beauty of this practice for me is reparing for this show and getting in a state. I wanted to run and do yoga. I wanted to align body, mind, and spirit. I give hours to this experience of this alignment.

Beauty is a good reason to do something. The temples are built for beauty. In the valley, they say, “If you can't build it better than nature, don't build it. Don't make a strip mall if you can't make it beautiful like nature and if you can't have it, curve and wind and mimic the forms of nature. Nature is beautiful. The fruits that were meant to eat are beautiful. They could draw our eye to them.

I am astounded that I have a bigger, slower, goofier, neurologically depleted body but yoga is still beautiful. I don't have as many beautiful, awesome as I can do anymore. The practice could bring me to tears. It's poetic and gorgeous internally like what I'm going through on my mat, even though I can do less stuff because I have a 47-year-old body, not a 27-year-old body. Its peak performance. It won't be as fast as possible. It won't recover as quickly as it did before. It doesn't have infinite strength and control as it did before.

The practice of yoga is like what yoga is. Yoga is the community I had built around me in Upstate New York in 2021. It's how all of my neighbors and I are connected. It's how we stand around the fire a few times a month and share stories. It's how a farm gets together and brings all of the local farmers in for donation-based yoga that we are threaded as a community. That's what yoga is becoming. It's becoming for me to create as clear as space that transmits the signal of someone's true nature.

It's not about what I have to achieve next or the next rung on my achievement ladder, my rung of success. I'm intrigued by everything I've studied, “Can it help this woman whose left side is paralyzed? Can I work with all of her doctors and neurologist to bring her body back to life before it's too late?” I'm working with someone who has been misdiagnosed with a stroke, and they waited way too long to treat her properly. Half of her body is shut down.

If you can make a living doing something you love, that's going to have the greatest impact on your long-term happiness.

I'm intrigued to be part of the team of people bringing her back to life or helping to give her a chance to reclaim her life, which she is a shadow of herself. Can these teachings, mantra through sound, a daily walk, manipulation, bodywork, breathwork, and in conjunction with modern science, bring this woman back to life and give her freedom? That's what yoga is becoming. It's starting to express itself to have something that's poetic that you will perceive differently at 28, 38, 48, 58, and 68.

What I feel like I'm discovering is not cornering reality and truth. I look at it as I'm discovering new mental models or relative truths. My hormones have changed. I'm expressing myself in ways that are much more gentle, whereas when I was in my late twenties, I would express myself much more aggressively about a goal, be more linear, didactic, and knocking things down in order, and use more willpower.

Here as someone approaching 50, I would use my capacity to manifest. I would be more receiving what I needed to do next. That is when you have these things like illness. I have been infected with Lyme again. The illness causes you to slow down. It makes you into that guy or gal on the top of Everest, trying to take their next step. It makes everything clear. It gets your life in order again. It's all these what-ifs. Like, “What if I have to be bedridden? What if my nerves get damaged? What if I can't find the right expert?” You surrender to now. You've done the treatment up to this point. You don't know what's next, and take it a moment to moment.

The bottoms-down movement, for people reading, is, wouldn't it be nice to be able to close your eyes, trust and hear the answer in your body on your chakra line and know that your body through the universe is giving you a yes to move forward in this relationship or no, to move back? A yes, should I take this job or no? I can do better in the marketplace. To have a way to also trust yourself, you cannot get that.

Some people are born with it. I believe a few people are but most of us can develop that. From this bottom down, I believe in effort. I love the value of people who get by on their own effort, their discipline, and that learn to trust themselves. I admire people that live in their own world and create a life around their interests. I tend to gravitate to these people. I study and model them because, at a young age, I didn't trust adults. Adults seem to imprison themselves constantly. I awoke to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as a junior in college guy, the grandfather of flow states.

What I discovered while studying flow states was that if you are lucky enough to structure a life around your interests, you should do it. If you can make a living doing something you love, that's going to have the greatest impact on your long-term happiness when you get to your deathbed. If you have been waiting to make money and trade that in to pursue your interest later, that’s a huge risk.

These bottoms-up effort-driven approaches to life where knowledge is experiential knowledge like, “Do you have God's experience?” Someone that has God's experience builds trust for me. Someone could do no yoga asanas but they could be a disciplined marathon runner. I know that person knows their own soul. I trust a marathon runner immediately because I know how dark the last 10K of a marathon can be. You have to push and lead yourself. You have to have faith that you are not going to collapse at the next step.

Only the light of the soul carries you through that darkness. When someone is in a room, and they say, “I've run a marathon.” I turn and go, “I want to talk to that person. I want to see what makes them tick. I want to see what motivates them on days when they are tired or days when they have a difficult life experience. How do they get through that? Bottom-up spiritual movements are what I'm about. Those are trustworthy places. We can all fall prey to a guru who is drunk with power. That's happened over and over again.

Gurus are imperfect beings. They have unresolved karma. Some of which can be heavy to get involved with but trusting your practice on good and bad days is the sauce. That is the most beautiful thing. Trusting a practice through decades of your life, finding something that you love, that you know, you are going to be doing your last day like, “I do think about things like retirement.” Even if I were retired, I would still teach yoga. I would teach senior yoga to fellow 80-year-olds in the rec center. It's beautiful how it's applied at different stages and with more life experience, how it gets increasingly beautiful instead of increasingly boring, it gets more and more beautiful.

It's beautiful the way that you described this bottoms-up movement. In the pursuit of yoga and the attraction of many people from the West connecting with yoga, it's all about that direct experience with connecting deeper within their own body, mind, and soul. Hinduism Vedanta yoga, at its truest essence, is an invitation to delve deep into that experiential aspect of divinity, where you are feeling it yourself rather than having some guru teach you things. Those virtuous aspects of it, and there's the aspect of people only listening to one guru, only following what they say, and they write it down, and that's their limited scope of life. It's unfortunate because that's what it's all about.

Having experience like you did with DMT and being able to peek behind the curtain. It only encouraged you further into your practice of meditation into doing yoga because you know that it speaks to your highest truth. For me, taking ayahuasca at the age of 33 and all the work that I did in self-development, meditation and spirituality, I understand it from a conceptual, intellectual level, maybe a little bit emotional.

Once you are able to experience that on a spiritual level and have a knowing, “This is what divinity is to me. It is me. This is who I am. This is why I came here. I'm going to learn as much as I can, laugh through life and enjoy the moment.” Things are going to happen but realizing, “I'm plugged into something that's way deeper than this experience.”

A lot of times when people have blind faith in whether it's a politician, and I know nowadays, many people are blind. They don't even know who this person is outside of the portrayal of them on the TV screen, yet they are willing to give up friendships, family, employment, and all of these things over what somebody they look up to in their perception of what they are rather than realizing who they truly are. That's why politics, spiritual gurus, and cult leaders always proved to be these scam artists because they are draining human energy from the person that doesn't have that connection that's rooted in their own self. They are finding these impressionable people.

These days, we talk about it on the phone, and we talk about it with a lot of people. Young kids are impressionable. When you completely change their version of reality, and there are only a few people holding all the puppet strings to tell you what reality is, you are going to fall for it if you don't have that deep-rooted practice in yourself and know that you hold your truth, not somebody else.

You can change your patterns by creating healthy habits.

I want to explore a concept with you here. This is a portal into something profound and deep about experiential knowledge, which is the thread we are on. Have you ever thought about why our ancestors discovered the oneness of being the true nature of reality using psychedelics but they heed this warning and say, “The slow and steady path is the way?” Sadhana is the path. Mantra is the path. Japa, uninterrupted meditation, asana, Yama, and Niyama give you a means for disciplining yourself on the slow and steady path they warn against.

Book four of, The Yoga Sutras comes back with a complete acknowledgment that plants can give you full knowledge of enlightenment but you should be cautious about this. I have thought about why because I reflected on my use of psychedelics. I was lucky in hindsight. I know many people who flirted with psychedelics at 13, 14, and 15 awoke and absolutated. They have good meaningful lives but I didn't use psychedelics until I was 26. This had the benefit of something incredible, which I had already established per discipline at that age. My brain was fully formed, and that prefrontal cortex was developed.

I approached psychedelics from a reasoning perspective like, “What are the risks? What are the benefits? How can this be integrated? What is the point?” I was able to view them, “We should also talk about bad trips and the value of bad trips as a rite of passage.” Nobody is going to have a perfect trip every time. Knowing that you have to be prepared for hitting those dark spots.

The psychedelic revolution is here and opened up again in psychedelic research because we are at a point where we are out of time. We need the fast and the slow path. I would like to share with you the idea of yoga and shamanism coming back as not separate arts. They are sister arts and the role of why yoga works with shamanism. I want to break this down.

In every aspect of life, whether it's spiritual growth, there's a pendulum, whether it's love, for instance. One side of the pendulum is rooted in a deep divine connection, and there's an obsession in terms of love. You can go from any spectrum of the pendulum, and there are many layers in between. For instance, in psychedelics, there's the one that can take you to God, and there's the other side where there's the abuse.

We grew up in the ’80s and stuff. We saw all these kids in the ‘90s abusing drugs, whether it's LSD, MDMA, ecstasy or marijuana, and there's an abuse angle to that. Now, I know people who've used marijuana, selectively edibles, and they use it for meditation. It’s the same thing with mushrooms and ayahuasca. I know people that do ceremonies all the time, every couple of weeks but don't take anything out of it.

It's important to note that in any aspect of life, there's always going to be the side that's going to bring you higher to a higher level. There's also an aspect of dependency. We have to navigate that for each aspect of our life. What is good if we work out seven days a week without any breaks, our body is not going to be able to recover, and we are not going to be able to grow muscle. There's always a fine line in whether it's too much or too little but we have to determine what's appropriate for us and the balance aspect of it.

I'm listening to you, and I'm hearing the word ritual come through undertone to what you are talking about in terms of use and abuse of that line. I want to jot back to the habit. When I smoke DMT, I experience the Vedantic notion of non-dual consciousness. I went into the widest, brightest light I had ever seen. I became that light. There was no longer the light and me. There was no separation between myself and the light for a brief period of time, which also felt like infinity. The dissolution of Jai disappeared. I experienced infinite peace and freedom. I had nothing missing and was needed. I was whole and complete all onto myself.

The realization of Jai came back, and the pain of that separation set in. Here's where psychedelics can get dangerous. You have experienced the highest, what takes a yogi, sometimes 30 years of practice to get to. A weekend of darkness sitting in a dark cave or a dark room, or ten days of fasting, or the Lakota Indians will put hooks in their chest and hang in the sun for three days in their vision quest to achieve these states. There are many ways to achieve these states, and you are getting it from sitting down and smoking a substance in one shot.

When you return to your body, if you return back to your house and have an addiction to cigarettes, pornography or the news cycle, all of the memories that trigger off those behaviors start going off. It leads to frustration knowing that you are the infinite consciousness but you are still with these crappy habits. I look at shamanism, which is the DMT, ayahuasca, LSD, and cannabis, as a fast path, and they must be combined with the slow and steady path, which dresses habit. Habit is waking up every morning before the phone turns on and doing your mindfulness practice.

Whatever that mindfulness practice is, cleaning your mind. You need something to address who you are becoming in the arc of a ten-year habitual pattern. What are your patterns? Can you change your patterns by creating healthy habits? Yoga practice gives us a way to take care of our body, clean our mind, and integrate ourselves as a spirit before we go out and negotiate with now. I believe we need the slow and steady path, which helps with habit.

Sometimes we combine that with these visionary experiences like an LSD or a psilocybin journey, where you get to delete the trash in your mind. You get to go way beneath the surface of past trauma. Recontextualize that story and reshape that story in an empowering way it affects your future positively. You get to do work in these altered states that would take several years but with a therapist, you can do them in one evening by the visceral nature, which brings that up to you to look at more directly and intensely.

The slow and steady path is for memory and habit. The direct experience is when combined and punctuated, a few times a year, you may do an ayahuasca journey or an LSD trip. You take time to integrate what you've learned. The bottom-up movement is still characterized by these ceremonies, integrating into habitual patterns that are healthy, and these habitual patterns help to shape us and make our minds flexible. I believe, in yoga, that what we are stretching is our mind.

That's what I see the most from the way I am behaving in 2022 versus 2021, in terms of slowing down and giving myself the space to redefine myself, pivot in my business, pivot in what my interests are, and the culminating effect of all of these modalities I've worked with. The ability to work with this woman who has paralysis to say, “Do I want to take this complicated case on and meditate on it?”

In yoga, what you're really stretching is your mind.

To say, “Yes, it is a big challenge. I will grow working with a medical team. I am open to becoming a divine channel for the miracle to happen from my hands to her body. Let's see if these teachings can work and what the cutting edge of science can apply towards this person's healing to still be in that laboratory where my work in the laboratory and people are in the laboratory.”

I'm studying human nature. I've given myself the space to exit the yoga marketplace as that guy with the leg over his head, instead be an older teacher who is working with the nervous system, habit, and spiritual guidance who can help to explain the Sutra in an enlightening way to someone who's interested in philosophy. The big part of all this is starting to consciously work more in the public space with people who are in the second half of life.

For me, the art of living people, I was inspired by that take on reality to do the art of aging for myself, to feel like, “How do I want to be in my 50s? How do I want to share yoga? What does yoga mean to me now? What are the limits? What is absolutely, totally possible for someone who is 47 years old? I don't have the children that I'm raising, so I can devote more time to my training to see what the edge looks like of maximal fitness at 47.” The opportunity that these practices give us is a chance to reinvent ourselves. You talked about the day you opened the dream business. That business is helping people and bringing the cutting edge and technology.

You are providing the flotation tank, which is cutting out. It's providing a space that would take a lot longer in meditation for a Westerner to get to who is used to externalizing their senses. It involutes your senses. The day you started that business was a day of aligning with a deeper purpose for you. It wasn't to make someone else's dream come true. You were trying to align more with your reason for being here. You and I, that's interesting and inspiring about each other's path, are how lucky we are to have a job that creates space for someone to feel their true nature.

At any point in a yoga class, a mother who has lost a child in an accident could feel peace. A father who can no longer provide for his family because he lost his job can reframe that situation and find patience. People with an illness can find space and give themselves space to discover what may be on the other side of the fear of death. These things can happen in every single yoga class. You never know what people's karma is, what they are bringing in or how this teaching is going to affect them that day.

Yoga has helped me find peace about my brother's death. May these teachings help someone find the peace that they are also looking for, and that vagueness that openness on the fact that it's going to unfold for someone in the way that they need. That's a relief to me. I don't want to internalize and put everyone's experience into a structure that yoga has unfolded for me but to let it unfold for them. The beauty of yoga now is it's such a religious time. It's such a, “Why not get into a religious experience.”

What I think is beautiful about the political scene is there's hope for us in transcendence. If we do not transcend the mind, we are going to be enslaved by a mind that sees the binary nature of reality, this or that, Republican or Democrat, which tribe are you on? The Conservative impulse and the Liberal impulse exist in everyone. It serves us at different points in our life.

There was a Liberal impulse that made me pack up and travel through India for six months on a motorcycle. That's an extreme activity to do. There's going to be a conservative impulse that makes me collect my money and resources to buy land, to make my own small healing retreat center. That's a conservative impulse to life stage.

There is virtue in the highest forms of both ideologies. The people pushing these ideologies don't have those same virtuous things. That's almost like the WWE, professional wrestling. They pretend like they are fighting in a ring. Meanwhile, they are all hanging out at the same parties. You have people that can't balance a country's checkbook, getting us into eternal debt, causing crazy inflation, and making everybody's lives a lot harder than they should be. Yet, their own bank accounts are growing exponentially, and they don't seem to have any problems individually financially.

It's just they keep getting richer, and the people that they are supposed to be serving with their virtues and their laws to help in equality, diversity, and all this rhetoric that they talk about doesn't help the people that they are trying to say, “Vote for us. We will take care of you.” It's an interesting time that we live in, for sure.

There are two forces at play which are a centralizing force that wants to put everything under one government and have more control but what's equally as crazy and loopy is the decentralizing force mitigated primarily by technology. We see things like printing, and new forms of currencies, everyone like you and I have our own shows. This would not be possible several years ago. It would not be easy to put this show together and be creative. We are in a subscriber economy where part of my income comes from Patreon and subscribers to my frequency, my teachings, and the way I'm sharing yoga. They help to sustain me. We see things shift massively.

What each person on the spiritual path realizes is they have an awakening. What is an awakening? Wisdom of another path, another frequency, and another way of being. When we look through history, we can see that unconventional warfare is at least 2000 years old. There are Sanskrit texts on the art of warfare. Sun Tzu wrote about unconventional warfare and The Art of War.

What happens through time is the war gets more sophisticated. It's almost archaic to think the bombs drop first where the sophisticated wars go is in the war of ideas, the attack on meaning. One of the key principles through time is to get the enemy to weaken itself. Some enemy of this State is cause invested in dissent, and the easiest way to program people are on these screens that you and I are all on, and we are getting ideas. It's easier to program dissent your division.

When you become aware of that, I saw myself sucking into that reality in 2021. I became a little radicalized and angry. My line in the sand was mandated. I got radicalized around like I had this intense conspiracy theory that it was the beginning of the end, that if we agreed to the mandates and would never be able to back out of any other drugs that would be put into our bodies for whatever reason. I thought taking people's choices away was intense.

Our leaders are not really interested in equality. But they can hijack that movement if it consolidates their power and wealth.

That caused me to leak a lot of energy. It caused me to reside in anger. It caused me to block being the best yoga teacher I could be. It stopped me from developing and deepening my competence. When those mandates went away, I got back into my own lane. I got back into spending most of my time around yoga pursuits, staying out of the news cycle. For each person, we have a line in the sand that makes us feel stifled. For some people, it's like, if a robber comes into your house into your kitchen, you would respond in a primal way.

That was me with my back up against the wall but I prefer not to be in those places and instead focus my energy on Wednesday night's yoga class. I have a Saturday 10:00 AM, 90-minute yoga class. By planning and executing the best yoga class possible, I'm helping to shift the vibration of the world back to what we said earlier, which is transcendence. If you can get people to transcend the limitations of their mind and ego, that is helping the vibration to shift.

I had a tough call to make like, “I should stay out of politics because whenever I get involved in that, I polarized 50% of the population.” I also did it in a way that didn't compromise my values of hard work. For example, I fat shame men. I don't feel comfortable fat-shaming women. That's a whole other ballgame. A 30-year-old man is way obese and not working out, if shame will get him into action and catalyze a positive shift, and I think it would, I'm comfortable going there. Even though I'm a yoga teacher, I don't think we should support rampant obesity. However, your body is, love that body but being 30 pounds overweight is bad for your heart. It's a breeding ground for viruses that can kill you. Full stop. It's scientific as can be.

Obesity, in no way, is healthy for you.

There's no way I can get behind that. What I'm pointing out is that I don't have to sacrifice my value. I don't have to create content about this but if someone were to ask me about the body positivity movement, that is the way I would approach it. We all need a healthy body composition, and that can vary from person to person. You don't have to fit yourself to be a skinny twig or to be Victoria's Secret supermodel. You don't have to do that.

That's the pendulum. On the other side, it's probably not healthy either to not be able to eat and get the right nutrients. Body positivity is about loving yourself enough to care about your health and do the right things for yourself and not take that excuse of, ‘This is the way I am. This is genetics.” There's the genetic side to this environment, and there are our decisions.

Where I'm heading is that these great ideas can be hijacked by people that have amassed an asymmetry and power that are invested in descent. They are not interested. The people that we call our leaders are not interested in equality. They are not interested in human rights but they can hijack that movement for human rights if it furthers and consolidates their power and wealth. Quite frankly, all that I see going on is the consolidation of power and wealth while we continue to argue about equality.

These ideas are good. We should treat our bodies while we should accept our bodies as they are but in our personal effort, we can't get away from the fact that if I were asked, “How should we educate our children?” We should educate them about their bodies, wellness, prevention, yoga, and the power of a deep breath to process energy, and not accept the unhealthy lifestyles that we are seeing. Some people encourage them as though these are great social movements. It’s a good idea would be hijacked.

Those same corporations are showing all this stuff like McDonald's, and all these bulk corporations are the ones that are creating genetically modified foods that are harming you. They have a certain flag on their business or they go after this movement. It doesn't mean that they have your interest at heart. Going back to what you talked about in 2001, you invested in this mindset of, “They are coming after me.”

A lot of this psychological warfare and art of war begins in mind. These people with asymmetric power understand the power of creation and co-creation. If they can seed a thought into our heads on all sides, the mandates are coming. You are going to be not able to do anything in this world unless you do what we say. How many people decided, “I don't want to lose my rights. I'm going to take something?” The people that push against it, we are putting in that energy to fortify that power of that asymmetrical power structure. It's coming from all different ways but the more we feed it, the more that it grows, and the perception of its power becomes larger on all sides.

In yoga, Vedanta, and all spiritual traditions, what we are trying to do to sum it up, there are three questions. This is of utmost importance to anyone now because there are no longer 5 or 10 news channels. There are hundreds of millions of news channels that you can put your attention on. That level of decentralization leads to new cults and religions. The religious need is the need for religious impulse is inherent. It's inside of us. We will give ourselves, for example, to the woke ideology. Woke has some great concepts that we are all connected and equal. That is a yoga concept.

It's rotten to the core if someone's rights become someone else's responsibilities without the manipulations on language that have been thrust upon me. I don't have to agree with them but if I'm in a public sphere for the sake of better efficiency of energy, I may treat and respect you in the way you want to be treated but I don't have to. For example, here's the line where I could take a knife out and cut myself. One of your ideas I have to pretend, if I don't believe that idea is true but I have to digest and pretend that it's true, I'm going against my innermost core nature of reality. I would like to live in a world. I agree to disagree with you.

Also, respect the fact that I want to live in a certain way. It's that mutual love and admiration that this universe is abundant and diverse and that there could be an infinite way in which people live their lives. When it starts coming on your doorstep and saying, “You need to do this. We are going to teach your kids that this is the right way.” It becomes a situation where it becomes a mob or a cult totalitarian. We are forcing this ideology down your throat.

The questions that the ancient seers of India and the people in Persia were asking in their temples, and the people in Turkey were using plants to explore was, “Who am I? What am I doing here? What is my next move?” These questions move through time. We must each explore this before we give our trust to these leaders. If you look at the leaders, you must look at their actions. Sometimes we are used to abusive relationships. We go back and keep listening to someone who has been busted in a lie many times and over and over. That's on us to believe a repeated liar. That's our fault.

Because something is difficult is no reason not to pursue that thing.

When we are looking for the question of, “Who am I?” Part of that answer is going to come from the testimony of a wise man. A yoga teacher might show you wisdom teaching and might teach you something about a practice that shows you something about who you are. We must answer these questions within so that we can be able to cohere together.

We have been split apart so much that policies that benefit one group might encroach on resources for another group. It's getting to be a bungled time until we use things like yoga, combined with the psychedelic movement, to find ways in which we can cohere. The problem is we don't have a unifying myth anymore. We don't have one unifying myth. We have many arguing tribes. Their salvation is in the religious experience of knowing that we are truly brothers and sisters. We are truly all headed to the same place, and we are capable of more.

When you run a marathon, sit in the jungle and drink ayahuasca, those are difficult things. It is because something is difficult is no reason not to pursue that thing. There is beauty in doing challenging things. We are at a challenging moment where we need to find something that can help us transcend and connect us back together. This is one of the reasons it's archaic.

A society that tells you what plant you can or cannot smoke in the privacy of your own home is an archaic society. We are transcending those movements. It's all bottoms-up movements of direct knowing. Psychedelics are here and coming back because of their potency and what they revealed. These things should never have been made illegal. Maybe you don't want 60% of your youth smoking marijuana. Maybe that's a bad idea but you don't at the same time want those things to be illegal.

It's about respecting. It's not looking at as a recreational thing, “I'm going to get high.” For instance, mushrooms. Every step you take on Earth or at least 50 miles deep, there is the mycelia complex. It's all connected throughout the entire Earth. If a tree is lacking nutrients, another tree or mushrooms are going to send that like a fiber optic system to it.

The mushroom that pops out at the ground growing in cow shit is the most intelligent thing. It's giving you that intelligence of millions of years of growing and formulating. The amanita muscaria or the psilocybin mushrooms, when you take that, you are taking in all this knowledge. It’s a respect and honor for the gift that it's giving us.

That's Gaia. It's Mother Earth. When you take ayahuasca, you are drinking in Mother Earth. Not taking it in a way that's disrespectful to her, doing it with alcohol or hanging out smoking cigarettes while you are doing it but doing it in a ceremonial setting and the proper way. That's where you are going to get the benefit from it. The uninitiated psychedelics are like winning a lottery ticket when you have the worst financial habit.

When you win that lottery, you win $1 million but you are always in debt. Do you think that $1 million is going to get you out of debt? You are going to continue to get into worse debt. The financial thermostat that you are setting is you are in debt. When you give somebody $50 million, they are going to end up in that same way instead of in a deeper hole.

It’s the same thing with psychedelics. If you are not in a good place, mentally, physically, and spiritually, and you take psychedelics, that’s why people have dark trips. They are not honoring the medicine, and they're not doing it in the right setting but also, they are not in the right mind frame to get into that proper setting where it's going to take them to ascension versus into lower frequencies.

A dark psychedelic trip is equivalent to doing a 15-mile run without being prepared. It's disgusting. At a certain point, your body gets acidic. You go, “Why did I do this?” You hear, “I should quit.” You are like, “I'm not going to make it. This is impossible.” At another point, you hear a voice comes in, “The only way out is through, and you will become stronger when you finish this.” When you finish that 15-mile run, you are now capable of something that you weren't before you. You have an adaptive response. You build more blood. You build more capillaries. You have more mental threshold. Your lactic acid threshold is higher than the level of wish. Your fatigue has been staved off.

Dark psychedelic journeys are full of information and are a right of passage. They are the same exact thing as a tough 15-mile run where you are setting a new threshold. Not everything can be perfect. All of my trips have not been beautiful. I've seen intragenerational trauma. I've seen the darkness in the human condition. I've seen sadness. I've seen entities that are not peace-loving beings but all of it has added up to refine and shape my character. You have to take the good with the bad as that right of passage.

When you are on psychedelics, you sometimes explore the collective psyche, the potential of the human mind. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “The capacity for good and evil runs through the heart of each man or woman. We each have that capacity to be good or evil. It's a personal choice.” It's out in the universe but it's at the atomic level in which each being has that choice.

What these teachings of yoga bring me back to is it's about the way we treat ourselves and treat each other. It's about a sense of personal ethics, “Do I clean my body? Do I nourish my body? Does it get the sleep? Does it get what it needs? How do I treat the community around me, these people that come to yoga classes, my neighbors, and my partner?”

All of these relationships are mirrors through which we get to see who we are becoming. The good, the bad, and the ugly are part of the human journey. We should sort and seek more beauty and discipline but all of it is all good. It comes back to what we started with atha. This moment is perfect. All of the darkness you have been through, the mishaps, the beauty, and the good, all of it brought you to now. What do we know now? It's eternal and infinite. Our nature is with that aspect of time that is eternal.

The capacity for good and evil runs through the heart of each man or woman. It's a personal choice.

We are here learning about betrayal. We are learning about being violated. In 2021, when Jai gave his power away to Joe Biden to tell him what to do when Jai got worried about mandates and when Jai listened to the news cycle so much that he became disengaged from his yoga teaching. When he became disengaged from his business because he was caught up in the political game and the tribalism to look at that and to learn and go, “In 2022, I'm going to go back to my lane. There's great power in minding my own business. There's great power in serving. I would not have built the community around me with these farmers, my neighbors or the people at the studios I work with.

I would not be established in Upstate New York if I was a part of the political back and forth, with left and right, the latest argument and listening to Joe Biden as if he's worthy of leading me or he's an ethical good man like, “Why would I give my attention away to that?” I would much rather get a secondhand news cycle. I overhear what people are talking about or someone will say, “Did you hear about what so and so did?” I then tune into it.

After I've tuned into my sadhana, the things I need to do for my health, to prepare for my classes, and the podcast. We are living through a time where it is of utmost importance, where we place our awareness and our attention because that's what's going to bring back the beauty of life to us or we are going to give it away. Someone could rate the mind and take our resources because where we put our attention on, that is what grows. My attention, honestly, since contacting this Lyme has been on gratitude.

I can't tell you I'm an ecstasy. I leave my phone down when I go to the bathroom. I don't eat with a YouTube video anymore. I walk the dog around the stunning sunsets, pink, yellow, and orange sky. I'm able to take it in for myself. This is happening for me and the dog to enjoy. It doesn't need to be in my Instagram story. With my practice, I don't record my practice. I'm appreciative of where I am and that I don't need to accomplish something major tomorrow to feel the bliss of my true self, that I can feel it a moment to moment.

That is the gift of the darkness. That is the gift of you could get sick again. You could go into the microbial-pathogenic world and battle tick-born illness after battling jungle-born mosquito, born illness. You are now faced with the second potential but what am I in? I'm in absolute psychological, biochemical ecstasy. It's stunning that you could be in that state in what is like a trying time where I have to call different doctors and talk to your buddy, Mike. Download the information, and dig for myself. Approach an MD with my homework done so that I can have the right conversation and not get prescribed more drugs that I may or may not need.

The fact that I'm in ecstasy when I could be falling apart is a feature of knowing my next step. My next step is you could die tomorrow. Enjoy the moment, atha yoga anushasanam. Now, yoga begins after I get off on this call with you. Yoga begins when I wake up tomorrow. Yoga begins when I lace up my running shoes. Yoga begins when I arrive twenty minutes before my class to warm up the room, and connect with the room, knowing that someone could become enlightened now.

There's so much magic if we get out of the habitual patterns of our minds and look at life as a chance to co-create. Life is constantly giving us feedback. A wise person does is takes their experience and uses it as a sieve. They will go, “I turned 40. I'm at the halfway point in life. Maybe it's not everybody else's fault. Maybe I should look at myself and see what new traits I want to develop. What traits do I want to let go of?” Life is an opportunity to grow from our experiences.

What a profound and yet, simple concept of being in the now. That's where the creational energy we are in this show. It's about finding the limitless potential within us. Where does that start? It starts in every single fucking second. We have the opportunity to choose where we are directing our energy. It's important for us to decide what we want in life. What world do we want to create? Focus that energy, harness that power that we have, and magic into this particular moment. The more moments you could create like that, that's the direction of your life.

If you are spending five minutes in gratitude and forget about that, go and have a fight with your girlfriend or argue with your family, it doesn't bring you back to the now. It keeps you in the past or keeps us with our triggers. Where are we identifying? It has to be what we want to create. That's how we change our future. It is doing the things now, planting those seeds to create a future of our dreams and our imagination.

That's why this life is beautiful. I'm finding it now that I'm seeing more abundance in my life. It is because of the psychology, the emotional energy, and the charges that I carry. I wake up every single day with so much gratitude. Not just saying gratitude but fucking feeling it. I am almost being driven to tears every single day by how freaking happy I am. That's where it is.

I was in Sedona at the beginning of July 2022. I was having a deep conversation with my older sister. She's an ayurvedic practitioner in Sedona right over there. What she says is, “I don't worry about getting more clients. I have more clients than I would know to deal with. When I'm in my prayer and meditation, I pray that the people that need my help find me.” All that happens in her life is the exact people that can benefit from her services are the ones reaching out to her, coming from all over the world to sit in front of her, where she can embark on her knowledge and skillset towards.

That's a microcosm for life. Pray that the right people come into your life. Pray that the right experiences will come into your life to help you on this beautiful life journey. When you see the synchronicity and the magic in every one of these moments, you look back, and you are like, “Wow, that was a fucking ride right there.”

Prayer as part of your marketing plan is brilliant. As we tie things together, I want to iterate that something interesting is to not get away from the darkness. I learned from the theater when I was younger to honor and feel what you need to feel and to go through but not to be attached to those things. When we have a shadow moment or a dark moment in life, we acknowledge it, experience it, and be a slave to our minds.

Let your mind get the most of you at the moment, knowing that this too shall pass. All things move and change into their opposite if you stay with them long enough. Someone reading should not in any way mistakenly think. My life is light, and I love it all the time. My life is magical from beginning to end because I'm a magician. I play with the energy of magic, mantra, manifestation, speech, and thought becoming things.

Life is an opportunity to grow from your experiences.

I'm a magician but I have many dark moments. I have moments of doubt. I have moments of temptation with my lower drive. I have moments of blindness and selfishness. I have moments where I say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it comes out terribly. I have to forgive myself for those things. I have moments where I acted inappropriately in front of my teachers, and I've had to backpedal and cover my tracks.

Those moments all add up. They are part of the tapestry of life, to come back to your practice with the good, the bad, and the ugly. Through my practice, I've seen stuff in my family lineage that haunts the sins of those that have passed the genome to me. I have suffered and had to clean away some of those tendencies that I have inherited. Those are dark moments, and a deep spiritual practice will take you into the darkness but it's worth traversing that path.

It's what makes me compassionate to share this practice more than ever. It is the darkness that helps us traverse our deepest fears. I acted in fear in 2021. I fear chaos. I fear defunding the police. I don't want to live in a world without police. That freaks me out because I know what bad men and women are capable of without a governing body, a force that creates order. I played into all of my fears but they all led me in 2022 to be a better man. I needed those fears to be triggered by the extreme nature of the political game. I accept that it doesn't have to be perfect. I accept that I'm discovering new relative truths.

Someone reading shouldn't think yoga and meditation are all perfect and can be challenging but therein lies the beauty of making it through the darkness. Those are the students and yogis I'm building. They are strong people, not ones who are pursuing unrealistically, aware that there is only light. There is not only light. There are lots of shadows and edges to our experience.

There can't be only lights. It's impossible. If God is everything, it's the entire gambit of darkness, all the way to light. All the way down from Hitler, Jeffrey Epstein, and that whole circle going back to divinity, it is all within this experience. You have to understand the darkest of the dark to experience the lightest of the light. Walking through our own trials and tribulations. That's part of this soul journey. To embrace it, have so much compassion and love for yourself for all the hard shit that we've had to go through.

We are standing here with smiles on our faces. That doesn't mean that we are walking into the sunset-like in the movie where you think, “The couple is going to live together forever and be happy.” No, every single day, there are challenges that all of us are going to face. Holding that perspective and realizing that we are spiritual beings, having a human experience to embrace every challenge. We are still standing here. None of us checked out already. We are going to continue to keep going until our last breath. That's all we can do.

It's exciting. Once my line in the sand that was crossed went away. Once mandates went away, I went back to the excitement of the time. The time is for all these decentralized technologies. I can monitor my blood, Anand, for $250 and get 41 readings back on my blood. For a $250 test, I can learn how my endocrine system is working. I can learn what condition my prostate is in. I can learn what foods are more appropriate for my body from one test.

The fact that this is in our hands is insane. We are going into outer space. We are colonizing other bodies. We are being able to the materials gain, evolution of farming, and regenerative farming. The potential of the time is what has me inspired. I want to focus on the fact that all of our solutions are simultaneously here with all of our darkness. All of our capacities to recreate concentration camps are coexisting where the technologies for freedom exist side by side.

There has never been a better, more opportune time for us to go. It's up to us. It's what we choose. We can't let a small handful of psychopathic sociopathic people determine the future for all of us while we argue over things that are less relevant and the things that are more relevant. That is what awakening is. Awakening is awakening to our personal divinity, collective divinity, and potential. If our scientists drink ayahuasca, what might they discover in group ceremonies, problem-solving and non-linear thinking? What could the plant teach them about scientific discoveries that they are working on politicians do?

There are only two sides to an argument, and there are not a million things in the middle that unite. It's funny how the hot topics, there's never any compromise or understanding of nuance. There are many different angles or collaborations that can happen within all of that but it's always one side against the other, “You are the worst.” There's never an attempt.

Do you think we are in a phase shift as a species?

I do.

Explain that to me.

What you were talking about is everything is available to us. My belief and the ancient sages have talked about this for a long time. We were entering the age of Kali Yuga, which is the destruction of all Maya, and all illusion. Every single day, the things that are happening are flagrant and are happening on a daily basis. One of those things, several years ago, would have been the story of the entire year, but every single day, corruption, hypocrisy, and all that stuff is in our face. All this beautiful new creation is happening.

It's very important to realize the sense of community and who you are in the community.

When I was in Sedona, I finished a hike. Kate and I were sitting on the top of a mountain, meditating. We are feeling that beautiful vortex energy of Sedona. I felt like I was being pulled into a tornado. I was being shown that time. This particular age of men was created to start going slow. The technology was moving slowly. There had to be quicker things happening for all these technologies to come. Now we are entering a point where it's going fast, right where before like a drain, all that water drips down.

We are at the precipice because it's moving fast, everything all at once. At some point, soon, we are going to hit a boom point where everything from that old system gets destroyed. There will be a new vortex created in the opposite direction. One is going this way, and the other one is starting up quickly. It's going to start slowing down in creating a new world.

We can't discount the power of our own creational energy. You and I talk about it all the time. For us to make a living in wellness, helping people, doing things from our heart space, and look at all the businesses that close down but we get to continue to survive and people who are living their purpose, what a blessing that is. We are living in true integrity in what we want to do. We still have a roof over our heads and food to eat.

We are taking care of the people in our lives, our girlfriends who support us, our family, and our beautiful pets that love us. We are protected in every direction. There's nothing that can harm us in terms of the way we live our life and the mission we are here for. As this new world gets created, the people that are living from their hard space, we are here to show everyone else that it's possible. You don't have to be in a job that you don't love to do. You don't have to do things to please other people because they are on a hierarchy of you.

Everyone, it's a reset. There can be a reset where we go in the direction of what the globalists want, what the Great Reset, where nobody owns anything, and they get all the power or we can create a new world that's artistic, creative, love-based, sharing based and all these things. We live on an abundant planet.

They say we are going to have a water shortage. They are finding oceans underneath the crust of our existing oceans that are even bigger than our current oceans. These are all freshwater. The more resources we think we are lacking, the more that get provided for us. It's understanding we don't live in a world of luck. Every time somebody tries to sell you on scarcity, there's an agenda behind it because it makes the resources that they own and control more valuable.

Going back on this story, it's about this new time of creation. We get to reinvent ourselves in any direction that we want to do. The more integrity you are with yourself and your purpose, people know and see it. They understand the authenticity. When you are living your authentic self, you will find the people that you need in your tribe. If you are not attracting the right people in your life, it always starts, “Let's look in the mirror. What needs to change? How do I need to live more authentically?” The right people will come in. It's an amazing time. There are going to be a lot of changes.

With respect to recreation like you are saying, and reinventing yourself, what's important also is we have, in a short several-year window, become removed from getting our sense of identity through a small group of people that know our character, historically. My friendship with you, which has blossomed during the pandemic, ironically, is that I value your opinion, your way of thinking, and your rationalism.

By engaging with you, I get to see how I am and who I am. It’s because I value your opinion. I might ask you for some insight around something I'm working on, for example. As we are growing and recreating ourselves, those connections are more important than the number of likes that a pitcher gets or the feedback that a post gets. It's important to realize that if we are looking to learn about our character or shape our character to get back into small-knit communities like running clubs, martial arts groups, yoga, sat songs, and philosophy clubs. I teach a morning class that people tune in 2 to 3 times a week.

Little places where you show up with discipline, where you show up lovingly, you get to look in the mirror. Those things should be, first and foremost, revealing about our character and define us not so much. I'm becoming at this time of great simplicity and potential stress when you know your next move. My next move is to not check in on my phone. It's not to see what's going on on my feed. It's not the political cycle. My next move is if they stay wrapped up, maybe I will take the dog for a long walk and watch the sunset. My next move is to cook a meaningful, healthy dinner. My next move is to prepare for the rest that's coming.

The connections that we have to people that know who we are and give us opportunities to be our higher self are more important than what the digital space says about and what our following says about who we are. There's little dissonance there because the algorithm doesn't reward everyone for doing what they should. We could have lower self-esteem in the digital space.

The one that matters most is our relationship at the yoga studio, at the office, at the martial arts club, and at the running club on race day. Who we are and how we behave in human-to-human contact are important for this incarnation of who we are. If we face a shift to become a part silicon being, I don't know how to comment on that or wouldn't know that space.

For an organic human being to be looking for validation in the digital space makes your brain hurt. Whereas if you are looking for people who know who you are, that you interact with in a practical way, that return to healthy tribalism. There's a healthy form to tribalism and feeling part of a community that's healing. We need more community to support who we are becoming. Some of your ideas will be inspiring that those are things that are outside of my scope. I need that reverberation of another mind on my personal development. That's important to realize. It is the sense of community. “Who am I in the community?”

It has been such an honor to walk this path with you for the last couple of years. I never had an older brother but I feel that I can rely on you, and I have the full trust in your heart that I know that you act for that same mission that I have in life. I come to you with a lot of ideas and questions and ask for feedback on stuff because I know that you are my soul brother. We have so much that we connect on. It has been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for coming on, Jai. It's always a great time talking to you. This is the first third time guest we've ever had, and I'm sure we are going to have more conversations. We should tape and have audio recordings of every one of our phone conversations because they pretty much go this long every single time.

Anyone who questions reality has to be asking questions as to what is being given to us to digest. The conversations on or offline are always brilliant. It brings my utmost awareness and attention to the moment, atha. Thank you. I was honored to be on for the third time. It’s a great conversation.

Jai, how can we learn more about you?

I have a website, JaiSugrim.com. I teach online 30-minute classes in the morning. The aim of those classes. They are called Yogic Conditioning. They are to help you age well and to respect your nervous system and endocrine system that is moving through time to start the day in a positive way. I also do retreats. I work one-on-one with clients on their health, their mindfulness, and the development of their practice. People can reach out on my website or social media @JaiSugrim.ArtOfAging.

Let's end on a mantra, Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu. Jai, do you know the translation? I'm sure you do.

I was going to send a course description to SOULFest. I'm teaching SOULFest on October 1st, 2022, in New York City. It's bringing the entire community, all shapes, sizes, colors, creeds, beliefs, and religions, together to practice, and the unifying theme of my class will be the Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu mantra. The bhav is the divine mood. It's what we talked about at the beginning. The mood that I'm connected to everything else.

May my thoughts, words, and actions contribute to the happiness and wellness of everybody else. That interrelated nature of how we connect, how your community at the spa connects to my community within yoga, and how everything threads together is that's the unifying yogis theme. “May my thoughts, words, and actions contribute to everyone else's happiness.” It's a great way to end. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

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About Jai Sugrim

Jai Sugrim has been a health and wellness educator for 25 years. He is steeped in the Jivamukti and Ashtanga yoga lineages, and has a 15 year history of studying shamanism with master curanderos of the Peruvian Amazon.

Jai has worked professionally with everyone from the New York Yankees, with whom he won a World Series Championship Ring in 2000, to Martin Scorsese and a long list of celebrities, financiers, and professional athletes.

He has also been featured in the New York Times, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today as well as on The Today Show. Jai loves to share health & mindfulness practices that help his students create peace of mind.