The Remarkable Personal Quest To Self-Mastery With Kevin Russell – Replay

 

Unlocking one’s full potential through self-mastery is a transformative journey that can lead to profound rewards in life. However, it’s unfortunate that we often overlook the significance of this inner exploration. It’s time we change that. In this episode, Adam Markel engages in a thought-provoking conversation with the esteemed Consciousness Accelerator & Transformation Specialist, Kevin Russell. Kevin shares his inspiring story of rediscovering his energetic core, forging a deep connection with his inner self, and embarking on a remarkable quest towards self-enlightenment. Tune in to this transformative episode, and embark on a journey that transcends personal limitations, paving the way for a more empowered and enlightened existence. The secrets to self-mastery await those who dare to explore the depths of their consciousness. Start your journey now!

 

Show Notes:

• 00:01:59             Resilience, The Unsung Hero
• 00:05:00             Radical Enlightenment
• 00:12:35             The Graduate Level Course On “Me”
• 00:24:19             Leveraging Uncertainty
• 00:35:05             The Tug-Of-War Of Life
• 00:39:25             Resilience, The Unyielding Belief In The Self
• 00:45:50               The Check Engine Light

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How do we leverage continuous uncertainty to thrive in this unprecedented new world? 

The answer is to build the resilience we need to power us through the challenges we face so that we become “Change Proof.” Prepare to tackle the future with confidence by reading Adam’s latest book Change Proof: Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience.

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Watch the episode here

 

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The Remarkable Personal Quest To Self-Mastery With Kevin Russell – Replay

Self-mastery and self-awareness are two things we don’t give a lot of attention to. What we forget is that mastering one’s self often leads to greater rewards in life. In this episode, I sit down for a talk with conscious accelerator and transformational specialist Kevin Russell. He talks about how he learned to reconnect with his energetic core, connected with his inner self, and started his journey to self-enlightenment.

Among the things that I discussed with him are how to tap into the energetic body, self-awareness, releasing the subconscious, starting your journey of self-mastery, harmony in the experience, moving towards fulfillment, purpose and growth, human resiliency, recognizing your reactions, and how it is that we learn to release our emotions. Sit back and enjoy this episode of my conversation with Kevin Russell.

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I’m thrilled to be in this seat. I’m looking forward to a radical conversation with a thought leader that wasn’t on my radar. I was fortunate to have a mutual friend introduce us. This gentleman is also a neighbor of ours. I’m excited about the conversation feeling at this moment. In our pre-game conversation about this show, I shared that many things are changing in all of our lives. We had a lot of different changes and plans that we had made and have now been in need of some tweaking, alteration, or pivoting. I feel blessed that we can do that to make a change.

How great is it to change anything at will or based on an intention? You could change your mind and decide there is something you have felt one particular way about. Maybe you have been digging your heels in. I sometimes do that. I’m a little stubborn at times. I grew up in New York. That rigidness is a superpower or survival skill in my youth.

What a joy and blessing it is to change your mind at the moment and decide maybe you don’t want to hang on to something you have been hanging onto. I want to decide not to carry something I have been carrying, like resentment, anger, mistrust, or distrust. I get to choose to do that and change my mind. We constantly are making up the rules of the game as we go along.

I used to say this often when I was speaking to a lot of audiences for a number of years in the personal growth and human development space. I would say, “Life is the easiest game you could ever imagine.” People are like, “What are you talking about? Life is tough. You only knew my life story. You know what that was like.” I go, “No. Here is why it is easy. Who makes the rules? Who is the jury? Who is the judge? Who decides what things mean?”

Everybody always gets it. You are maybe reading this now and going, “This is a trick question.” If we make all the rules, we are the referee, judge, and jury, and we give everything its meaning, how can you possibly lose this game? That is why it is the easiest game we could ever imagine. We don’t always choose to win it.

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I want to introduce our guest. Kevin Russell is a clairvoyant, intuitive, and energy-change agent who helps people remove the subconscious blockages, programs, and conditioning that keeps us prisoner in life so we can reconnect more strongly with our energetic core, our inner knowing, our inner child, and an innate connection to the energy that is even greater than us, whatever you might call that. His new book, Radical Enlightenment: My Guy on the Ninth Floor, was written after a profound enlightenment experience and is a handbook for leveling up consciousness, fulfillment, and connection to your higher self. It is a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for being here, Kevin.

Thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure to finally connect.

What is something that is not a part of the bio or introduction there that I read? What is one thing you would love for people to know about you?

I appreciate the introduction. This is all fairly new to me. That would be something that the enlightenment experience I had that launched everything was on November 21st, 2019. I have been interested in theology, philosophy, and science my whole life. A question that always followed me through life was, “Yes, and.”

I’m diving deeper into science, quantum theory, and theoretical aspects of what we are calling science. Deeper dives into philosophy and exploring different religions, both Eastern and Western, I was always left with, “Yes, and.” None of them was the complete picture for me. I was doing my diligence and taking things that worked along the way. I’m tossing them in my tool bag, different things internally and interpersonally.

I have always been a thought leader for myself in my own life. Many marketplaces are noisy and packed. My professional background is in design, user experience, and user interface design. Everybody got their two cents and pitched their thing. I was always like, “I want to do the work. I know I do good work, and that is what I enjoy.”

It was that big pivot of getting everything and putting it together in a way that made sense to me of what it is all about, what I am here for, and what it all means standpoint. It was the hardest and the biggest pivot of my life where I couldn’t do anything but what I’m doing now. I’m sharing the information and the perspective to the extent that as soon as I left that session where I did level up, I went straight to my wife’s office and laid it all out. I’m like, “This is the experience I had. This is what information I have got. I’m not sure what is coming next, but I can’t do anything but this now.” I’m still fresh in that regard in a lot of ways, but with depth and breadth of experience at the same time. It is an interesting place to be at.

As a fellow husband, what was your wife’s reaction to that statement?

The journey I outlined in the book and went a little bit deeper into in different areas was both of us on our individual and collective journeys together. Everything with the acceleration I have experienced within the last several years was instigated from our daughter. There was something going on with her.

We took her to the Western Medicine MD, who also happened to practice a form of psychological kinesiology or muscle testing to tap into the energetic body, which was a wonderful combination. Within seven minutes, he and she uncovered that the issue wasn’t anything going on with her. It was anxiety and anxiousness created by being around my wife and I when we would argue or disagree. At the time, we had our blinders on, “We are not fighting. We have semantical disagreements.”

 “It wasn’t my house growing up. It is just a conversation.”

That opened up our path of reconnecting with ourselves and connecting more strongly with each other because we were excavating all of this energetic and subconscious gunk that systemically and programmatically kept us “safe” up until this point, but it started to unravel things primarily within our relationship. My wife was trained in two energetic transformation modalities after coming out of history with Psychology as an undergrad, Marriage and Family Therapy as her Master’s, and several years as a yoga teacher, mindfulness leader, and meditation coach.

You didn’t freak her out when you came because you are a guy coming out of the tech design space, and you say, “This is what happened for me.” She looks at you and gives you like, “Should we make an appointment for the couch and get you a good solid spot?”

The experience I had as the catalyst for me was on her recommendation. She had seen this practitioner. She knew where I was at the time. The analogy I always used is I felt like a toddler in a dark room where I could sense there was furniture and light here. I knew there was something beyond my awareness or my field that I wasn’t tapping into, but I knew it was right there. I got all of that in the experience.

I wasn’t looking for this. It wasn’t expected. I was living what I would consider a fulfilling life. Within the design, I was consulting, contracting, making my own hours, and getting to surf in the morning, which is something I hadn’t been able to do for a long time. I’m doing great. It was like the universe was saying, “I hope you had your fun. Thank you for all the practice you have done and everything you have been interested in. Here is the configuration that is going to put everything together.” Her reaction was a deep breath. She was like, “Let’s go.” It is amazing on the heels of the experience I had.

A few weeks later, the book started flying out of me. I was writing sixteen hours a day for about two and a half weeks straight. The framework, as far as the prescriptive aspects of the book, were all laid out and ready to go after that. I had perfect people at the perfect time coming in with interjections or different perspectives that I didn’t have the purview of that helped to build out and create the book that ended up being published.

That is a journey all of its own. We are right in the middle. We launched a book called The I Love My Life Challenge. We got another book that is taking. We are in the final stages with the publisher, and it will come out in August 2023, called Change Proof. That process is arduous. It is longer than the traditional birthing process of nine months or thereabouts. It could take years to see a book from that kernel of inspiration to it being something you can put in your hand, hold up, and share with the world.

I’m curious about your daughter and what you were being told. What is the sequencing of when you were told, “What your daughter is experiencing is a result of what you guys are dealing with, or how you are showing up in your relationship is what is triggering her,” between that happening and this experience where you had new awareness?

I call that the boot camp or the graduate-level course on me. Everybody’s graduate-level course is going to be different. No two people are the same by any stretch of the imagination except for the universals that connect all of us. That inner energy, and inner light, every single human has that. From that standpoint, we are all the same. There is no differentiation.

The subjective or inconsequential differences are all surface. Whether it is income, skin color, eye color, hair color, or the ways we parse up the world, those are the semantics. Those are the things that aren’t of import. Because we live our lives often from the outside, we give a lot of credence and weight to that.

It was an organic journey. It was my wife’s best friends who instigated everything for us and our awareness into the deeper awareness of the energy space. I have a cursory knowledge of the laws of attraction, a positive mindset, and these types of things. My wife’s friend was in a hiking accident where she hurt her back. She chipped her vertebrae on a hike. It went to the extent of exhausting Western MDs to get back surgery against recommendations from her doctors because they were saying, “We don’t necessarily see anything on the MRIs that would indicate that a surgery would be required.”

She was out of tools. She didn’t see any other way through it. She ended up getting the back surgery, not doing anything, and still having excruciating pain. This is the doctor she saw. That was our entry point. She healed her back with energy and emotional work with the help of this Western MD. We visited her in bed. She was in excruciating pain. She couldn’t get out of bed.

No two people are the same by any stretch of the imagination except for the universals that connect all of us. Share on X

All of it was predicated on issues she had that were underlying and went unaddressed with her husband for several years. Finally, it all built up and took what was a minor physical injury to create a weak point within the bodily system that all of this emotional energy started to find its way to. In that regard, energy can’t work as water. It is always going to find a low point.

If we got a physical thing going on and it turns into, “I can sense the rain is coming. I can feel it in my knee.” It is a physical entry point that gives us more purview into energy that is going on within the body. We were following this journey. The expression with our daughter was that anytime she would get a blemish, she would scratch it or picket it to the extent that she looked like she had chickenpox. We were giving her little tiny Band-Aids on her face, arms, and legs to go to school with. We are like, “Something is going on with her. What could be the problem with her?” That was the recommendation and the impetus that guided us to this doctor.

He didn’t even do anything. He talked to her for about seven minutes. The kids are much closer to our source. They are connected to themselves that she was in the space of being able to pinpoint what it was because she didn’t have the collection of stories or justifications that were keeping her away from getting to the actual truth of what it was. That enabled her to get to that point of, “No, it is when my parents are arguing that I feel anxious.”

Simple answer to a simple question. What is causing you distress? My parents argue.

In some dynamics, it would be challenging for a child of any age to do that with a parent in the room if it was a relationship where many of us have come from these families where we don’t talk about certain things, or we sweep certain things under the rug. There are undercurrents of guilt, and feeling less than that is based on any number of influences.

Keeping things secret, covert, and hidden. We don’t air our family business and every other cliché around that.

We started working for seven minutes with this doctor. He excuses her. He said, “You are good. You are fine.” That was it. Identifying it for her cleared it up immediately. She never went back to that behavior.

She understood the root cause. I don’t want to assume that, but that is what you are saying.

Sometimes, if we are doing this work on our own and we let ourselves get to the root cause, that identification is enough for our subconscious to release the condition or the behavior that we have created. Other times, it takes a little bit more excavating. There are more components in play. That is where we take a little bit deeper dive. For this one, that was it. He turns to my wife and says, “You and your husband are another story.”

That launched our journey into radical honesty with ourselves and each other. It is moving past a lot of the conditioning we brought with us from our life that was now creating dis-ease in our relationship. We were butting heads over the silliest, most inane things, as many couples do. It ends up being death by 1,000 cuts in a lot of ways.

We go back to this protected fight or flight approach to our loved ones because of perceived danger systematically. We dove into the two modalities that accelerated that boot camp or graduate-level work. There was one called Psych-K, which is psychological kinesiology. Another one is called the Emotion Code. A partner of the emotion code is the body code. I went off.

As soon as I started dipping my toe into these areas of exploration, I cranked it to six feet, and I was full throttling. I moved through any fear or resistance I had of looking at anything from my past that could still be resonant within my system. That was a negative experience. It was still rearing its ugly head.

In that regard, I did come to an understanding that every single human on the planet has and is experiencing PTSD in some form. It can be an absentee father or a mother who isn’t emotionally available. The more indelible visible examples are military deployment. Those are the easier ones to see. Anything can affect our energetic and emotional body. Our subconscious is exponentially more powerful from a processing standpoint than our conscious mind. It is also the repository of every experience we have ever had.

Our subconscious is exponentially more powerful from a processing standpoint than our conscious mind. Share on X

We are part of learning from being in the bodies that we are that are going to do everything they can to keep us safe at all costs, even up to the point of having the cost be expressed as debilitating depression, anxiety, or any number of other mental, physical or spiritual expressions of ease that we go through.

It is anything to get your attention, get you to slow down and change short of something more radical. I want to get into that radical word with you. Cancer or heart disease and any number of things are radical interventions in our physical beings for a specific purpose. It is not like it is random. That was a statement, not a question. I want to correct myself. Is it random? I made a statement. It is not random, but there are enough people out there who believe that a lot of these things happen. They happen because of heredity. They were like, “I got heart disease or diabetes because my mom and dad had it. I’m going to get it.” Cancer is the same thing. I want to get your beat on that. Are we victims or tied to those genetic markers and even to our family’s history? Do we have more control over those matters than we might think we do?

My answer would be yes and yes, which is the great part. This is where I was going to jump in there. There is no single point of causation for anything. Everything is subjective in our three-dimensional world. If we are living amongst life and our bodies are pristine vessels, and we are also working in an asbestos factory, there is a greater chance we are going to develop lung cancer or emphysema because of our physical world.

 

Not to downplay any chemicals or any electric power lines. That is our infrastructure. It can impact us, but also our genetic history. This is where we get into genetic mutation and energy transfer. It is not even the problem, but coming at the equation from a more quantum perspective, which was the key to unlocking or putting everything together from that energetic standpoint.

When you say quantum, are you saying molecular? Is that another way to describe what you are saying? At the atomic level or the smallest measure of something measurable, is that what you mean by that?

At that level, there is wave and particle. Both are created from energy. The particle in the field is the visible wave moving through the field. It is the visible excitation in the field. A major thing keeping us as a species at the level we are at is our perspective and the degree to which we can’t pull out of our micro to the macro.

One of the things I have in the book is an analogy looking at it from the perspective of the car and the driver. The reason we are embedded with this perspective of having to fight cancer or give up altogether and say, “It is genetic. I can’t have anything to do with it.” The only issue is the magnitude of scale because we are experiencing everything our car is going through as if we are the car. When a check engine light comes on, we are not seeing that like, “There is a check engine light. I should get the car looked at.”

We are viscerally experiencing the wear and tear in that transmission. The squeaky brakes, the mistimed belt, the broken headlamp, the chips, dings, and bumps we get from all the debris on the road because we are in our experiences. We are entangled and enmeshed with our outer world. Not all of us give ourselves that space and purview to pull back and say, “How am I in the experience? Who am I in the experience outside of my labels and my identifiers?”

That can be a challenging path for a lot of people to walk because it is moving into the unknown. It is moving into that a little bit less clear space of uncertainty because we might not know what we find there or have never given ourselves or been given the space to explore those concepts or ideas. Anything we fear, we are going to clench up on.

I heard from an MD researcher that the only two natural fears humans have are loud noises and falling. Everything else is created or manufactured within life, society, and learning other people’s fears. If a young child sees a mother react to a spider or a snake, that is going to give them a program that that thing is dangerous. We are looking at the balance or differentiation between nurture and nature.

Talk about uncertainty a little bit more. I love to get a sense of how it is that you deal with uncertainty. Is there a way to leverage or create power in uncertainty and use uncertainty as something powerful for us for good?

It has always been an accelerator. It is always something I have toed the line with and not shied away from. The only two things we can ever rely on in life are our breath and change. Our bodies change every 72 hours to 12 years if you talk about stomach lining regeneration versus bone regeneration. We are physically not in the same vessel that we were several years ago.

The only two things we can ever rely on in life are our breath and change. Share on X

Breath is our constant, and change is the only other thing we can rely on because there is no stagnation in life. The earth is a dynamic system that we are part of that is always going to find balance and stasis, even if it is not a kind, nice, or more metaphysical association with balance, because a narcissistic parent and an overly empathetic, emotionally abused child is a form of balance. We are getting into some more challenging areas of thought, but if you look at the energy dynamic at play in these abusive or challenging situations, there is a balance there.

It is like positive and negative poles in magnetism or electricity. We take our judgment right of what it means for those things to be happening or for people to be who they are away. If you take that out of the equation, you can see how those things might be balanced or harmonious in a strange way, to use that word. Being young is a symbol of harmony.

It is harmony in the disharmony of the experience. There is harmony in that. Nothing that we are striving for going towards. Our systems are pre-programmed for safety. The only intention that our bodies have is to keep us safe. It keeps us away from taking a risk on something we are drawn to. I had an expansive conversation with my dad after our daughter was born, where I was working in-house in my design career. I lasted three days in this position. I was almost having a visceral reaction to the job and the little niche I was in.

Credit to my wife, Kelly. She did not bat an eye when I was working two jobs. I was leaving this day job I was starting my burgeoning design career with to go back to work in the restaurant I was working at because we had made the decision that we wanted to divide and conquer and not pay one of our salaries to a daycare. We were committed to having one of us in the home. I was like, “I will work. I have no problem. I can grind. Let’s go.” The last day I was there, I called Kelly. I was like, “I can’t do this.” She said, “Quit. It is not worth it.” Having that support did help with these concepts of uncertainty. I called my dad and told him what was going on.

I had the same support from Randy. I have spoken extensively about that. People are sick of me talking about it. I get wonderful feedback on how honoring and how it is a great model for other men in this instance to hear men speak about their wives in these ways. Point out a vulnerable moment in your life where what you got on the other end was not a reminder of all the things you already know, like, “It might be a little crazy what I’m going through. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.” It is putting us at risk that we don’t need to be at and all that thing to get a deep breath on the other end and go, “We will take one step at a time. We will figure it out as we go. I got your back.” To say it is valuable is a gross understatement.

It was invaluable. We laid that groundwork earlier in our relationship where we had those conversations of where are you with politics, where are you with religion, where are you with having kids? If we are going way back, that was the instigator that created that dynamic between us. We would do, “What is the worst-case scenario? We lose everything. We are homeless on the street. It doesn’t matter. We can do and create anything. We got each other. We got each other’s backs no matter what.”
That was monumental.

The most brilliant contrast I ever got was from my dad. He was from that generation who was the company man. He worked for many years within one company, making different moves within the ranks. He told me, “I don’t know if I can support this. I was miserable during my first five years at my job. Sometimes, you got to put your head down and do it.” I’m like, “No, you don’t. That was your perspective and perception.”

Coming into my adulthood in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, I already saw the writing on the wall with potential writings, social security, and changing dynamics in the workforce, where we are going from, instead of it being supported by 10 to 1, now it is 2 to 1 as far as the workforce versus a retiree. Doing what I was doing, I was not worried about retirement. I was like, “I’m going to design until I’m 90 because I love this. It fulfills me, and it feels good.” Those were major components.

Another big one for me with uncertainty was it was almost this innate connection I had before I deepened and broadened my own connection to myself of being able to feel instead of thinking about situations or whatever is going on. I hadn’t tapped into it to the degree I am now, where it is a fine-tuned mechanism because I have been phoning it and practicing it nonstop for the last several years of tapping into that feeling, cultivating the intuition, and expanding that inner knowing of my own space.

That is my own personal journey. If we are looking to end around and create a shortcut to being more comfortable with uncertainty, that is being comfortable in the present moment. How do we get to that point? It is by breathwork, exercise, getting out of our own way, and allowing ourselves the space to be, which is rare these days.

If we’re looking to create a shortcut to being more comfortable with uncertainty, that’s being comfortable in the present moment. Share on X

In some regards on this specific topic, all of the change and perceived craziness of the last many years is predicated on fear, doubt, and messages of shame or looking at things in the world as the other, separate or different. That is where resistance comes in. That is where reliance on things that are perceived as certain are held onto at all costs. The alternative for many is, “What is there?” I don’t know. Becoming comfortable with the, I don’t know, was another big component. Letting it sit and be in the present moment is an entire practice in and of itself. It requires trust.

Trust in ourselves, but trust in the scheme and the organization of the whole. I don’t mind calling that organization, structure, or scheme. That is the word I use for it. I know that is not everybody’s word for it. Something you said at the beginning is interesting here, which is the concept of yes, and.

I’m not a standup comic. I have had some funny moments on stage, which is always welcome and pleasure, but looking back at improvisation as an example of that, yes, and. If you are a comedian, that is done improvisational. Work before is constantly moving a narrative forward. It is, yes, and. You say, “Yes, I ran into my Aunt Tilia on the street the other day, and she was wearing a yellow hat. I’m passing the baton to you.” You go, “Yes, and I saw her too.”

A bird swooped down, picked it up, and grabbed it right off of her head.

The energy of it is constantly moving it forward. Otherwise, it stops, and the scene is over there. It is done. When it comes to how you are able to leverage uncertainty, in part, it is this improvisation required. It is trusting in your ability to simply improvise.

 

From early on, our confidence or tapping into that ability, in a lot of instances, can get undercut. Everybody’s trauma is subjective. Everybody’s got their own stuff. PTSD, everybody’s got it. Not to say that there weren’t aspects of that, and things I have moved through were challenging, difficult, or traumatizing.

I did have support from my parents in the way I knew in seventh grade I wanted to be a designer. They never hedged against that, as far as, “Are you sure you don’t want to think about a lawyer, doctor, or any professional profession?” The freedom afforded me to not only have the initiation of this is what feeds me, but also the support to explore that was huge.

I wanted to mention a thing that a trainer and mentor told me one time. It was, “Sometimes we need to jump and build our wings on the way down.” It leads right into that concept of trusting the organization or the architecture. I completely agree. Anything that we endeavor is trying to explain our place in the universe.

Science, theology, philosophy, and spirituality are all components of the whole. They all have value and information we can take and incorporate to see how it fits together. It was that instigation and continuation of moving forward because there is no stagnation in life. We are moving forward towards things that fulfill us, enliven us, and make us feel peaceful and joyful, or we are still resonating with our trauma, states of disease, or things that have kept us stagnant or feeling stuck.

That is the big illusion of being stuck. It is not that we are stuck in a place. It is that we have two diametrically opposing energies pulling us in different directions that are keeping us perceptively stagnant. All we need to do is diminish the negative perceptively holding us in place. That is when the acceleration, alignment, and embodiment of concepts like the law of attraction start to gain momentum and speed because there is no weight or the baggage emotionally or energetically tethering it down anymore.

That is a great visual. I appreciate you said this concept of almost like a tug of war happening. We remember from when we were kids. You would be a tug of war. Somebody would say, “Let go of the rope.” The other side would fall. Everybody falls back. The idea of being able to look at things you are holding onto and choosing to let go of them might be the thing that allows that spring action and momentum moving forward to happen.

You mentioned post-traumatic stress. I read something else that is at the root of this, which is that our purpose is to grow. I might say, “What is our purpose? What is the combined purpose of all humanity?” I might say, “It is to love or to be.” That makes sense to me, but it is to grow. I say that because if you look at a plant, what is the purpose of a plant? There are several purposes. They serve a purpose for us.

The function of the plant is growth.

If it is not growing, it is the opposite. It is the tug of war between living and dying. As long as living, the energy of living and growing is winning out. That plant continues to thrive. When it doesn’t, it wilts and eventually withers and dies. It is the same thing for us. We talk about what we use uncertainty for. As you said, “Being more comfortable in the present moment is a way to resolve uncertainty for yourself.” In addition to that, to understand that uncertainty is a catalyst for growth. When we are in that status quo, things tend to get stagnant. In lots of areas in our physical world, we can see what stagnation leads to. It leads to toxicity and death. When we stop moving entirely, we are morte.

Anything that would break the status quo, even if what is breaking the status quo is something at the moment, creates fear, uncertainty, or we don’t like. The bigger picture is that it is a catalyst for our growth. Instead of post-traumatic stress, we have post-traumatic growth. That is where we get into a conversation about resilience, which is a topic on our hearts and minds a lot these days. I love to get your definition of resilience.

Resilience for me would be the undying and unyielding belief in self. We have to cultivate belief in ourselves and confidence in being, not necessarily confidence in knowledge or anything we have gained outside of ourselves. There is no such thing as perfection. I tend to shy away from the term self-mastery.

Resilience is the unyielding belief in the self. It is a crucial component of the journey to self-mastery. Share on X

Resilience is a component of that journey from self-awareness to self-acceptance, self-appreciation towards self-mastery. An assumption that all of us are born into is we are less than by being born into the world, which is a complete fallacy. We are 100% whole, complete, and perfect at inception, before conception, and even before birth. We are born into a world of concepts like sin or your parents know best.

I told my daughter this when she was a couple of years old. I said, “The only thing I have on you is 27 more years on this planet. I can help you change a tire. I can fix stuff around the house. I can change the oil in the car. I can teach you about the structures that exist, but this life is yours to live however you want to do it. You are the captain of your ship. Your mom and I are going to be acting as admirals in the Navy. Anything you need, we are there. If you need support, supplies, or whatever it is, we got you. This is your life to expand, explore, enjoy, and experience the entire spectrum from good to bad.”

Resiliency is part of our energetic core. It is that knowing and the unyielding belief that I am whole and complete. I am, I am. Getting past the labels and fears predicated on things outside of ourselves, they are either learned, conditioned, or programmed within our subconscious. This is where we get into the challenge of the dance between what I term our bio-machine, which is everything in our system except for our conscious mind, prefrontal cortex, and energetic core. Our limbic system and autonomic nervous systems are part of the subconscious mind-body, that bio-machine.

Operationally, the subconscious can process about 20 million bits per second. That is from what I have seen with the research. That is even a conservative estimate. Our conscious mind, when we are critically thinking, having conscious communication, and connecting with others, operates at about 40 bits per second. Right off the bat, we are dealing with a 500,000X disparity between our conscious mind and the system running our lives the majority of the time, which is our subconscious.

In relationships and life, it drops into these patterns that are programmed. It is not that we aren’t all resilient. It is that many of us are identifying with our states of dis-ease. It is perceptive to us that resilience, self-confidence, or intuition isn’t attainable because we have been conditioned and programmed to always look outside of ourselves for answers instead of taking the more challenging path of moving through those fears.

They are veils or gossamer membranes of energy, but because they have been cultivated and reinforced our entire lives, the more we replay them, they grow into these monsters that we feel like we can never get away from or move past. That sprint or the graduate-level course of what my wife and I did for the last several years with energy work and clearing out our junk from our proverbial subconscious trunk was a reconnection with myself. It is a disassociation in a positive way from the programs and conditioned behaviors that have been running within my system for my entire life.

In this journey, I came to the realization that I had been holding my breath for many years. When I was finally taking full and expansive breaths, I understood what a full and expansive breath was and felt like. Moving through these perceptions of the legacy aspects for me were allergies. I was sickly as a child. I have food allergies. I’m talking about genetic mutation or predisposition to the extent that my grandmother would have medicated bandages on because her eczema was bad, and the entire skin on her body was erupting.

This is where energy comes into play. Even with these genetic mutations and perceived lineage aspects of life that we feel like we can’t get away from, there are energetic components that will initiate that in one generation. If nothing is attending to that energy, it is going to be carried through, morph and transform. It is going to look a different way, 2, 3, 4 generations down the path.

We are getting into a little bit of the metaphysical where a lot of the work I did towards the tail end of this boot camp graduate-level course was ancestral work. There was a ton for me that was now accessible because I had been doing the work of clearing this life stuff out of the way. The indicator I was getting was the gastrointestinal dis-ease that I had been experiencing for my whole life was clear.

I could feel whole and solid within my system. It felt like outside of a bubble gut. It is termed leaky gut and IBS. They have all these terms for these different aspects. I said the engine lights were on, but we couldn’t see it. You said about the expressions of cancer. It is our system screaming at us like, “Something is going on in here. There are no good things. There are energy components that aren’t working for you.”

This is a funny moment for some folks who have a check engine light on in their car because there are people who will not drive around with a check engine light on. As soon as it comes on, they go and get it checked out. There are others who will drive around with it on and ignore it. Sometimes, it is not even seeing it. If everybody had that light flashing, it would make it quite easy. There would still be people who would run on empty. They were like, “I still got 10,000 miles before I have to bring it in.” Most people would go, “It is time for me to head to the shop.”

My question to you would be, do you have a way for people to check in at the moment to see whether or not there are check engine lights on or what people call the idiot lights in their car? I didn’t expect the conversation to go to this place, but I’m glad it has because it is tangible for people to consider and think about. If you got any advice, I love to have it. Is there a way to check the system for those idiot lights?

Where many people have come to that are on this self-inquiry and self-mastery journey is there is no end. The analogy I always use is there are climbs and plateaus. Climbs are more challenging aspects. Plateaus are where I can see the clear sky type of thing. It is a practice. The angle I have come at it from in the book, and if anybody is interested, is a blueprint for how to do this. I lay it all out in detail. It starts with giving ourselves, reconnecting, and figuring out who we are outside of fight, flight, or freeze. In this society, we always deal with low grades of it based on all the inputs we get from society, spouses, family, and everybody. We get dropped into our limbic system easily.

Instilling a daily practice of awareness is one of the best ways to get started. If we are looking for a structure, that would be a vigorous diaphragmatic breathing practice in the morning. One of my favorites is Wim Hof. When we are breathing, we are hyper-oxygenating our system. We are expelling CO2. We are shifting from more of an acidic to an alkaline environment, in which no states of dis-ease or disease can survive in an alkaline environment. That would be number one. Incorporating those regularly. It doesn’t have to be every day. If it is not going to be something done every day, compare and contrast the days we did have 5 or 10-minute vigorous diaphragmatic breeding practice and days we didn’t, and see the differences.

Another book I would recommend to folk to check out would be The Presence Process, which is Michael Brown’s book. It is tremendously helpful breathing exercises, among other things.

The next step in our day is tasking ourselves with the challenge of shortening the duration between having a reaction and recognizing it was a reaction. Shortening the distance between reaction and recognition because we are going to get dropped into reaction in the day. Our systems are predefined and predisposed to it because all it is trying to do is keep us safe.

If we get cut off in traffic, we get overcharged at the market, or we have a boss or a client who is dealing with a fire drill, and they are like, “We need this email. We need to respond to this email five minutes ago. Everything is falling apart.” If we get dropped into a reaction, we are not in our right mind. We have defaulted to one of our dominant hemispheres, either analytical or emotional. We are in a reactive state.

Cultivating the awareness practice of having, feeling, and recognizing that was a reaction. We are shortening the duration. We are not letting ourselves get away with ego stroking or whatever that comes along with it of, “That guy, I can’t believe he did that to me.” Predicating things that anybody else is doing in the world has anything to do with us.

It reinforces the reaction as opposed to being present with, “I guess that happened. I reacted again. I’m seventeen years old. Somebody is asking me whether I’m going to be home for dinner.” It is helpful to shorten the distance between your reaction and your recognition because, on some level, to try to stop yourself from reacting, which is the goal that a lot of people have, it is a tough goal to be successful at.

A significant stop on the way is to see, “That happened. I’m witnessing what I did there.” That may lead to you being able to revisit that reaction with the person or, in the situation, might lead to an apology. It led to the idea that next time when I’m faced with something like that, I can take a breath and go, “Hmm.” Instead, I don’t react here. I don’t have to feel bad about it afterward.

There is a posture called hookup or whole brain posture. This is in brain gym activities. It is in a couple of different places. I learned about it through the modalities we learned, but it is breaking the midline of our body. This is where we get into the quantum. The table I’m sitting at, the perceptively solid piece of wood, is not solid. If we are talking about the molecular structure, there is space and energy going on within that. It is latent energy.

A great way to express that is if you throw a wooden table on fire, that energy is going to be released in the form of combustion. Our systems are the same way. We don’t often give ourselves the space to utilize our pressure relief valve, which is our emotions. If we look at it from a gender or a sex standpoint, masculine leading energy in our world is usually met with, “Boys don’t cry. You suck it up. Brush it off.” More feminine leading energy can be met with, “Why are you still emotional all the time?”

 

None of us, in any expression or experience are given the space to ball it out, cry it out, burn through, and work through emotional stuff. It was like, “No, smash it down.” If there isn’t a disruption of the energy, that is going to be the new normal and stasis. This posture is simple. It can be seated or lying down. It is simply crossing our legs at our ankles, crossing our arms at our wrists, turning our thumbs down, clasping our hands, and dropping that clasp either into our lap or folding it up and under and holding it against our chest. I got a PDF about this. I will share it with you. There are some visuals to go along with this.

What we are doing is we are physically breaking the energetic midline of our body because the earth has an electromagnetic field, and each and every one of us. It is called Torus Field. We got two. One is more of a donut shape around the heart, and the bigger one goes top to bottom out of the crown of our head and down to the earth.

What this posture does is it disrupts whatever state we are in. It allows both hemispheres of our brain to come back into being activated. We are not dropped into an overly emotional or analytical response. It enables our prefrontal cortex more space to come back into our conscious or right mind. Anytime I meditate, this is the posture I’m in. This is one of the functions I have experienced that helped me with my connection.

With processing energy, it has been Epsom salt baths. I’m not a bath guy. The last bath I took was when I was five years old. I was resistant to even jump back into it. I was having a re-assimilation or configuration challenge the day after my enlightenment experience. What was the worst hangover I have ever had? Body aches based on my skull were killing me. My head was throbbing. For this specific instance, it was because I had gone through a complete emotional or energetic, expansive overhaul. My system was reconciling that. I got an Epsom salt bath. It was like ET at the end of ET. I became reanimated. I was like, “Back to what this new normal is.”

Giving ourselves that space at the end of the day with that more Thai forest meditation where we are doing that Homer Simpson belly. We are not worried about our beach belly. We are giving our diaphragm room to expand our lungs to expand in our torso. More of a natural, relaxed breathing practice coupled with this whole brain posture is going to separate us from our resistance or reactions to the day. It is going to bring us back into our conscious mind.

With relationships, we get triggered and dropped right back into these reactive states. This is the cause of disease across the board in our world. The daily practice if we are starting on this journey, these three components, breathwork in the morning, mindfulness, awareness of reaction and recognition during the day, and giving ourselves the space to disconnect from those experiences, bringing our whole system back online is a practice. This is not one-and-done. There is no such thing as a silver bullet.

These are rituals. You have to ritualize to habitualize. It starts with making a conscious choice to do some of these things. As we are wrapping up, the show notes will contain links to where you can all find the book. You can go on Amazon. Radical Enlightenment: My Guy on the Ninth Floor by Kevin Russell is a must-read if you enjoyed the conversation and want more. I’m already intuiting that people are going to want to know more about some of these exercises and rituals. All that is in the book. The show notes will have links for that.

If you know someone who would benefit from what this conversation has brought to the surface and people that you think would be interested in diving into this a little bit more, feel free to share this episode with someone else. We love to get your comments. You can go to AdamMarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment for me and Kevin. I want to say what a pleasure and joy to have you on the show and have this conversation. Thank you.

I’m going to hold that mirror back at you. It has been an absolute pleasure. I look forward to connecting further in the future.

Kevin, my last question is, do you love your life?

Exponentially. Not my life, just life. I wrote the book, and I was like, “I have done the thing. That job is done.” It is getting dropped right back into reality as you outlined of, “You need to get editing, figure out publishing and all the terrestrial things to birth it.” It is still living life. It is still being in the experience and expansive spectrum of things we can experience, but that centered presence is the wellspring of life. I’m enjoying being, and I’m more attuned with returning more frequently when I get knocked off my game and get dropped in back in the reactions.

 

In many ways, I think of that tug-of-war analogy and the picture you painted for us earlier between growth, stasis, and status quo, even in the instance of your book and any other thing. Because we have accomplished something or attained some goal, it doesn’t mean that the growth and this tension between the status quo, things staying the same, and growth, which is the way of the universe. Change is a great constant. It is a paradox in and of itself.

That tension between our instinct to want to stay the same and the universe being full of intention and purpose for us, which is to grow, is something that isn’t put on hold. We can’t hit the hold or the pause button on gravity any more than we can hit the pause button on growth. These strategies you have shared with us are phenomenal. I’m looking forward to people not only enjoying the conversation but also getting out there and discovering your book. Kevin, thanks so much. Everybody out there, I hope you love your life. You love it a little bit more, perhaps because of what insights you were able to get from our amazing guest. Thank you. We will see you soon.

 

Important Links

• Kevin Russell
• Radical Enlightenment: My Guy on the Ninth Floor
• The I Love My Life Challenge
• Change Proof
• The Presence Process

 

About Kevin Russell

Kevin Russell is a clairvoyant intuitive and energy change agent who helps people remove the subconscious blockages, programs, and conditioning that keep us prisoner in life so we can reconnect more strongly with our energetic-core, inner-knowing, inner-child, and innate connection to the energy that is “greater than us” (God, Source, Spirit… whatever the preferred label). His new book, Radical Enlightenment: My Guy on the 9th Floor, was written after a profound enlightenment experience and is a handbook for leveling up consciousness, fulfillment, and connection to your higher-self.