The Road To Self-Mastery With Kevin Russell

 

Self-mastery and self-awareness are two things we don’t give a lot of mind to. What we forget is that mastering one’s self often leads to greater rewards in life. In this episode, Adam Markel sits down for a talk with Consciousness Accelerator & Transformation Specialist Kevin Russell. Kevin talks about how he learned to reconnect with his energetic core, connected with his inner self and started his journey to self-enlightenment. Tune in for more great insights on your road to enlightenment.

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Show Notes:

00:00:00    Introduction

00:06:32    Tapping The Energetic Body

00:11:43    Self-Awareness

00:16:42    Releasing The Subconscious

00:23:30    Starting Your Journey Of Self-Mastery

00:27:21    Harmony In The Experience

00:35:33    Moving Towards Fulfillment

00:39:23    Purpose And Growth

00:43:02    Human Resiliency

00:52:20    Recognizing Your Reactions

00:55:35    Emotional Release

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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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The Road To Self-Mastery With Kevin Russell

I am looking forward to a radical conversation with a thought leader who was not on my radar until I was fortunate to have a mutual friend introduce us. This gentleman is also a neighbor of ours. I am excited for the conversation. I am feeling blessed at this moment. In fact, in our pregame conversation about this show, I shared that so many things are changing in our lives. We have had a lot of different changes and plans that we had made have been now in need of some tweaking, alteration, or pivoting.

I feel blessed that we can do that to be able to make a change. How great is it to be able to change anything at will or based on an intention? You can change your mind if you decide there is something you have felt one particular way about or have been digging your heels in. I sometimes do that. I am a little stubborn at times, I am told. I grew up in New York. That rigidness is a superpower or at least a survival skill in my youth. What joy and blessing it is to be able to change your mind at the moment and decide maybe that you do not want to hang onto something that you have been hanging onto.

Maybe I want to decide not to carry something that I have been carrying like resentment, anger, mistrust, or distrust. I get to choose to do that. I just changed 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. Come on. If you only knew my life story, you would 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 got it. Everybody always gets it, just like you are reading this now and going, “This is a trick question, right?” If we make all the rules and we are the referee, the judge, the 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 just do not always choose to win it. With that, 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.

His 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. It is a pleasure to have you on the show, neighbor. Thanks for being here, Kevin.

Adam, 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 that introduction there that I read? What is one thing that you would love for people to know about you?

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

This is all fairly new to me as well. That would be the enlightenment experience that I had that launched everything was on November 21st, 2019. I had been interested in theology, philosophy and science my whole life. A question that always followed me through life was, “Yes, and?” Diving deeper into science, quantum theory, and theoretical aspects of what we call science and then deeper dives in philosophy and exploring different Eastern and Western religions. I was always left with, “Yes, and?” None of them were the complete picture for me. I was doing my diligence and taking things that worked along the way, tossing them in my tool bag, different things, internally and interpersonally.

In that regard, I have always been a thought leader for myself in my own life, but so many marketplaces are noisy and packed. My professional background is in user experience, user interface design. Everybody has got their two cents. Everybody is pitching their thing and I was always like, “I want to do the work because I know I do good work and that is what I enjoy.” For me, it was that big pivot of getting everything and putting it together in a way that made sense for me from a, “What is it all about? What am I here for? What does it all mean?” standpoint.

It was the biggest pivot of my life where I could not do anything, but what I am doing now and in sharing the information in 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 I laid it all out. I am like, “This is the experience I had. This is what information I have got. I am not sure what is coming next, but I can’t do anything about this now.” I am still fresh in that regard in a lot of ways, but depth and breadth of experience at the same time. It is a really interesting place to be at now.

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

The journey was both of us on our individual and collective journeys together. Everything, with the acceleration that I have experienced within the last several years, was instigated from our daughter. There was something going on with her. We took her to a 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 was not anything going on with her. It was anxiety and anxiousness that was created by being around my wife and I when we would argue or disagree. We had our blinders on at the time, and we were, “We are not fighting. We have semantical disagreements.” That opened up our path of reconnecting with ourselves and connecting more strongly with each other because we were excavating all of this nonsense, all of this energetic and subconscious gunk that systemically and programmatically kept us “safe” up until this point.

It started to unravel things primarily within our relationship. My wife was trained up into energetic transformation modalities after coming out of a history with Psychology as undergrad, Marriage and Family Therapy as her Master’s, and then many years as a yoga teacher, mindfulness leader, and meditation coach.

You did not freak her out because you are a guy coming out of the tech design space and then you say, “This is what happened for me.” She did not look at you and give you a, “Should we make an appointment for the couch and get us a good solid spot?”?

 

The experience that I had that was the catalyst for me was on her recommendation. She had seen this practitioner and she knew where I was at, at the time. The analogy I always use is, “I felt like a toddler in a dark room.” I could sense there was furniture. I could sense there was a light here. I knew there was something beyond my awareness or my field that I was not tapping into, but I knew it was there. I got all of that in the experience. I was not looking for this. It was not expected. I was living what I would consider a fulfilling life within design. I was consulting contracting, making my own hours, and getting a surf in the morning. I am doing great, then the universe was saying, “I hope you had your fun. Thank you for all the practice that you have done in everything you have been interested in. Here is now the configuration that is going to put everything together.”

Her reaction, there was definitely a deep breath, but it was like, “Let’s go.” It was absolutely amazing on the heels of the experience that I had. A week and a half 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. I had perfect people at the perfect time coming in with interjections or different perspectives that I did not have the purview to, that helped to build out and create the book that ended up being published.

That is a journey all of its own. We launched a book called The I Love My Life Challenge. We have another book in the final stages with the publisher called Change Proof. That process is arduous. It is longer than the traditional birthing process in nine months. It can 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.

Anything can affect our energetic and emotional body, and our subconscious is exponentially more powerful from a processing standpoint than our conscious mind. Share on X

I am curious about your daughter in 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. That is what is triggering her. Between that happening and this experience, where you have created 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 that inner light, every single human has that. From that standpoint, we are all the same. There is no differentiation. These subjective or inconsequential differences are all surface, whether it is income, skin color, eye color, hair color, or whatever ways we parse up the world. Those are the semantics. Those are the things that are not of import, but because we live our lives so often from the outside in, we give a lot of credence and weight to.

It was an organic journey where one of my wife’s best friends instigated everything for us in our deeper awareness into the energy space. Having cursory knowledge of laws of attraction, positive mindset and these types of things previously, but my wife’s friend was in a hiking accident where she hurt her back. She chipped a vertebra on a hike. It went to the extent of exhausting Western means to getting a back surgery against recommendations from her doctors. They were saying, “We do not necessarily see anything on the MRIs or anything else that would indicate that a surgery would be required.” She was out of tools. At this time, she did not 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 that she saw. That was our entry point. In about six months, she healed her back just with energy and emotional work, but with the help of this Western MD. We have visited her in bed and she was in excruciating pain. She could not get out of bed. All of it was predicated on issues that were underlying and went unaddressed with her husband for 20 or 30 years. Finally, it all built up and it took what was a minor physical injury to create a weak point within the bodily system that then all of this emotional energy started to find its way to.

In that regard, energy can work as water. It is always going to find a low point. If we have got a physical thing going on and it turns into that, “I can sense the rain is coming. I can feel it in my knee,” it is a physical entry point that gives us more purviews into energy that is going on within the body. We were following this journey. The expression with our daughter was anytime she would get a blemish, she would scratch it or pick it to the extent where she looked like she had chickenpox. We were giving her tiny band-aids on her face, arms, and legs to go to school where it is 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 did not even do anything. He just talked to her for about seven minutes. The kids are so much closer to our source and so much more connected to themselves that she was in the space of being able to pinpoint exactly what it was. She did not have the collection of stories or justifications or things keeping her away from getting to the actual truth of what that was. That enabled her to get to that point of, “It is when my parents who are arguing that I feel anxious.”

A 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 that kind of a relationship where so many of us have come from these families where we do not talk about certain things or we sweep certain things under the rug. There are undercurrents of guilt and feeling less than that are based on any number of influences.

Keeping things secret, covert, and hidden. We do not air our family business and every other cliché around that.

There is no stagnation in life. The earth is a dynamic system that we are part of that is always going to find balance. Share on X

Seven minutes with this doctor and then he excuses her. He said, “You are good. You are fine.” That was it. Identifying for her cleared it up immediately. She went back to that behavior. 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 more excavating. There are more components in place then that is where we take 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 with each other, and moving past a lot of the conditioning that 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 so 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 a perceived danger systematically.

We dove into two modalities that accelerated that boot camp or graduate-level work. There was one called Psych-K, which is psychological kinesiology, and another called the Emotion Code. A partner of the Emotion Code is the Body Code as well. I went off. As soon as I started dipping my toe into these areas of exploration, I cranked it to sixth gear and I was full throttling. I have moved through any fear or resistance I had of looking at anything from my past that could still be resonant with my system that was a negative experience still rearing its ugly head. I did come to an understanding that every single human on the planet has and is currently experiencing PTSD in some form.

It can be an absentee father or a mother who is not emotionally available. The more indelible visible examples are obviously like military deployment. Those are the easier ones to see, but 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. We are part of learning, 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 to be expressed as debilitating depression or anxiety or any number of other mental, physical, or spiritual expressions of dis-ease that we go through.

 

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

My answer would be yes and yes, which is the great part. There is no single point of causation for anything. Everything is subjective in our three-dimensional world. If we are living a monk’s life and our bodies are pristine vessels and we are also working in an asbestos factory, there is a greater chance that we are going to develop lung cancer, emphysema, or something because of our physical world. Not to downplay any chemicals or any electric power lines or anything like that, but it is our infrastructure. It can impact us and our genetic history. This is where we get into genetic mutation and an energy transfer coming at the equation from a more quantum perspective which is 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 an atomic level, at the smallest measure of something measurable, is that what you mean by that?

Exactly. At that level, there is wave and there is 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 that we are so embedded with this perspective of having to fight cancer or give up altogether and say, “It is genetic. I do not 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, “There is a check engine light. I should get the car looked at.” We are viscerally experiencing the wear and tear on that transmission, the squeaky brakes, the mistimed belt, the broken headlamp, the chips and dings and bumps that we get from all the debris on the road because we are so in our experiences.

The big illusion of being stuck is not that we're stuck in a place, it's that we've got two diametrically opposing energies pulling us in different directions. Share on X

We are so entangled and enmeshed with our outer world that 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 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 hope we are going to clench up on.

I heard from a researcher that the only two natural fears humans have are loud noises and falling. Everything else is created or manufactured within life, within society, within 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 of, “That thing is dangerous.” We are looking at it as the balance or differentiation between nurture and nature

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

It has always been an accelerator. It is always something that 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 twelve years ago. Breath is our constant. Change is the only other thing that 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 status, even if it is not a kind or nice or more metaphysical association with balance. A narcissist parent and an overly empathetic emotionally abused child is a form of balance. Now we are getting into some more challenging areas of thought, but if you look at the energy dynamic that is 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 of what it means for those things to be happening or for people to be who they are being away. If you take that out of the equation, then you can see how those things might be balanced or even harmonious on some in a strange way. Yin and yang is a symbol for harmony.

It is harmony in the disharmony of the experience. There is harmony in that. Nothing that we are striving for going towards, with that uncertainty, because our systems are pre-programmed for safety, the only intention that our bodies have is to keep us safe, but so often it keeps us away from taking a risk on something we are drawn to. After our daughter was born, I had an expansive conversation with my dad, 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.

To the credit of my wife, Kelly, she did not bat an eye when I was working two jobs. I was leaving this day job that I was starting my burgeoning design career with and going back to work in the restaurant I was working at. We have made a decision that we wanted to divide and conquer and not pay one of our salaries to daycare. We are 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 and 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, then I called my dad and I told him what was going on.

With certainty, when you have support like the support of your beloved, I know I had the exact same support from Randi. I have spoken extensively about that. People are sick of me talking about it, although I get often wonderful feedback on how honoring and how it is a great model for other men to hear men speak about their wives in these ways.

 

Especially to point out a vulnerable moment in your life where what you got on the other end was not reminders of all the things you already know that, “It might be a little crazy what I am going through. It does not make a lot of sense. It is putting us at risk that we do not need to be at.” All those things and yet to get a deep breath on the other end and a, “We will take one step at a time. We will figure it out as we go. I got your back.” To say that is valuable is a gross understatement.

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 does not matter. We can do and create anything.” We have got each other and we have got each other’s backs, no matter what. That was monumental.

The most brilliant contrast I ever got was from my dad who is from that generation who was the company man. He worked for 35 years within one company, making different moves within the ranks. He is like, “I do not 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 am like, “No, you do not. That was your perspective and your perception.”

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

Another big one for me with uncertainty was this innate connection that I had before I deepened and broadened my own connection to myself of being able to feel, instead of think about situations or about whatever is going on. I had not tapped into it to the degree of which I am now where it is a fine-tuned mechanism because I have been honing it and practicing it nonstop of tapping into that feeling, cultivating the intuition, and expanding that inner knowing of my own space. That is my own personal journey, but if we are looking to end around and to create a shortcut to being more comfortable with uncertainty, that is being comfortable in the present moment.

How do we get to that point? Breathwork, exercise, getting out of our own way and allowing ourselves the space to just be are so rare these days. In some regards on this specific topic, all of the change and perceived craziness of the last 2,000 years is predicated on fear, doubt, messages of shame, or looking at things in the world as the other or separate or different. That is where so much resistance comes in. That is where so much reliance on things that are perceived as certain are held onto at all costs because of the alternative for so many is, “What is there? I do not know.” Becoming comfortable with the, “I do not know,” is another big component for me. Letting it be in the present moment is an entire practice in and of itself.

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It requires a tremendous trust in ourselves, but trust in the scheme in the organization of the whole as well. Something you said at the beginning is interesting here too, which is this concept of, “Yes, and?” I am not a stand-up comic. I have had some pretty funny moments on stage, which is always a welcome and pleasure, but looking back at improvisation as an example of that, “Yes, and?”

If you are a comedian who has done improvisational work before, the narrative is constantly moving forward. It is, “Yes, and?” You say, “I ran into my Aunt Tilly on the street the other day and she was wearing a yellow hat.” I am passing the baton to you and you go, “Yes, I saw her too.” The energy of it is constantly moving it forward, otherwise it stops then it is over. The scene is over. When it comes to how you are able to leverage uncertainty in part, it is this improvisation that is required and it is trusting in your ability to simply improvise.

From early on, our confidence or the tapping into that ability in a lot of instances can get undercut. Everybody’s trauma is subjective and everybody’s got their own stuff, PTSD, everybody’s got it. Not to say that there were not aspects of that and things that I have moved through that were challenging or difficult or traumatizing, but I did have the support from my parents. In seventh grade, I wanted to be a designer and they never hedged against that as far as, “Are you sure you do not want to think about a lawyer or a doctor?” These are more professional professions, so to speak.

The freedom of that afforded me to not only have the initiation of this is what feeds me, but then also the support to explore that. That was huge. I wanted to mention it brought up a thing that a trainer and mentor told me something one time and it was, “Sometimes we need to jump and build our wings on the way down,” which leads 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. They are all components of the whole.

They all have value and they all have information that we can take and incorporate to see how it does all fit together. It was that instigation and that continuation of moving forward because there is no stagnation in life. We are either 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 dis-ease, 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. We have got two diametrically opposing energies pulling us in different directions that keep us perceptively stagnant.

 

All we need to do is diminish the negative that is perceptively holding us in place. That is when the acceleration, the alignment, and embodiment of concepts like the Law of Attraction, start to gain momentum and speed because there is not the weight or the baggage, emotionally or energetically, tethering it down anymore.

You said that this concept of like a tug of war that is happening, we remember from when we were kids and we would be a tug of warring, and then somebody would say, “Let go of the rope,” and then the other side would fall. Everybody falls back. The idea of being able to look at things that you are, in fact, holding onto and choosing to let go of them might be the thing that allows that spring action and momentum that is moving forward to happen. You mentioned post-traumatic stress. I read somewhere about something else that is at the root of this. Our purpose is to grow. “What is our purpose? What is the combined purpose of all humanity?” You might say, “To love. To be.” That makes sense to me, but I also feel like 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. In fact, they serve a purpose for us as well. If it is not growing, it is the opposite. It is the tug of war between the living and dying. As long as the energy of living and growing is winning out, then that plant continues to thrive. When it does not, then it wilts and eventually withers and dies. It is the exact same thing for us. We talk about what we use uncertainty for, as you said, more comfortable in the present moment is a way to resolve uncertainty for yourself. In addition to that, it is also to understand that uncertainty is, in many ways, 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. Ultimately it leads to toxicity and death. When we stop moving entirely, we are muerte. Anything would break the status quo, even if what is breaking the status quo is something in the moment that creates fear or uncertainty or we do not like, the bigger picture is a catalyst for our growth. Instead of post-traumatic stress, we have post-traumatic growth. That is possible. That is where we get into a conversation about resilience, which is a topic that is on our hearts and minds a lot these days. I would love to get your definition of resilience.

Resilience for me would be the undying and unyielding belief in self because if we have and cultivate belief in ourselves and confidence in just being, not necessarily confidence in knowledge or anything we have gained outside of ourselves, but taking that harder path of self-inquiry, self-acceptance, self-appreciation towards self-mastery. This almost assumption that all of us are born into is that 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 and supplies, whatever it is, we got you.”

This is your life to expand, explore, enjoy, and experience the entire spectrum of from the good to the bad. Resilience is part of our energetic core because it is that knowing and the unyielding belief that, “I am whole. I am complete. I am, I am.” Getting past the labels and the fears that are so often predicated on things outside of ourselves, they are either learned or conditioned or programmed within our subconscious. This is where we get into the challenge of the dance between bio-machine, which is absolutely everything of our system, except for our conscious mind, our prefrontal cortex and our energetic core.

All of our limbic system and autonomic nervous system, everything is part of the subconscious mind-body bio-machine. Operationally, the subconscious can process about 20 million bits per second. From what I have seen with research and even a conservative estimate, our conscious mind, when we are critically thinking, we are having conscious communication, or we are connecting with others, operates at about 40 bits per second.

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Right off the bat, we are dealing with a 500,000X disparity between our conscious mind and the system running our lives and majority of the time, which is our subconscious. Often in relationships and in life, drop into these patterns that are programmed. It is not that we are not all resilient. It is that so many of us are identifying with our states of disease that it is perceptive to us that resilience, that self-confidence, or intuition is unattainable because we have been conditioned and programmed to always looking outside of ourselves for answers.

Instead of taking the more challenging path of moving through those fears, there are vales or real 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. As I was saying before with that sprint or the graduate-level course of what my wife and I did with energy work and clearing out our own junk from our proverbial subconscious trunk, that was a reconnection with myself and 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 have been holding my breath for many years where I was finally taking full and expansive breaths and I understood what a full and expansive breath was and felt like. Moving through these perceptions, the legacy aspects for me were allergies. I was real sickly as a child. I have got food allergies. I am talking about genetic mutation or predisposition to the extent that my grandmother would have medicated bandages because her eczema was bad. Her 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, they are actually energetic components that will initiate that in one generation. If nothing is attending to that energy, it is going to be carried through. It is going to morph, it is going to transform, and it is going to then look a different way, 2, 3, 4 generations down the path. We are getting into 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 that I was getting was clear about my gastrointestinal disease that I had been experiencing for my whole life. I could feel what feeling whole and solid within my system felt like outside of bubble gut. Now it is termed leaky gut, IBS. They have got all these terms for these different aspects. It is just the engine lights on, but we can’t see it then you said about the expressions of cancer and all these other things. It is our system screaming at us, “Something is going on in here. There are no good things. There are energy components that are not 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 that will drive around with it on and ignore it, and sometimes even, they are not even seeing it. If everybody had that light that was flashing, it would make it quite easy. There would still be people who would run on empty or run the car, “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 in the moment to see whether or not there are check engine lights on or what people call the idiot lights in the car? I did not expect the conversation to go this place, but I am glad it has because it is tangible for people to consider and think about. If you have got any advice, we would love to have it. Is there a way to check the system for those idiot lights?

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

 

Instilling a daily practice of awareness is one of the best ways to get started. If we are looking for structure, that would be a vigorous, diaphragmatic breathing practice in the morning. One of my favorites is Wim Hoff. When we are breathing, we are hyper-oxygenating our system. We are expelling carbon CO2. We are shifting from an acidic to an alkaline environment. No states of disease can survive in an alkaline environment. Incorporating those regularly, it does not have to be every day, compare and contrast the days that we did have a 5- or 10-minute vigorous, diaphragmatic breathing practice in the days that we did not. See the differences.

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

The next step in our day is tasking ourselves with the challenge of shortening the duration between having a reaction and recognizing that it was a reaction. It is 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 or if we get overcharged at the market or if we have a boss or a client who is dealing with a fire drill, and they are like, “We need this email. We need you to respond to the email five minutes ago. Everything is falling apart.”

If we get dropped into reaction, we are not in our 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 a reaction, feeling the reaction, and then recognizing that it was a reaction. We are shortening the duration. We are not letting get away with the ego-stroking or whatever that comes along with it of, “I can’t believe he did that to me.”

Reinforcing the reaction as opposed to being present with, “That happened. I reacted again as though I am seventeen years old.” It is helpful to shorten the distance between your reaction and your recognition because, on some level, 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 am witnessing what I did there.” That may lead to you being able to revisit that reaction with the person or in the situation. It might lead to an apology. It might lead to the idea that, “Next time when I am faced with something like that, I can take a breath instead of reacting, and then I do not have to feel bad about it afterward.”

The evening or end-of-the-day practice is a posture called a hookup or a whole brain posture. This is in Brain Gym activities and it is in a couple of different places. I learned about it through the modalities that we learn. It is breaking the midline of our body. We, like everything else in our world, this is where we get into the quantum as well, the table I am sitting at, the perceptively solid piece of wood, is not solid at its molecular structure. There is space and there is energy going on within that. It is latent energy. A great way to be able 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 do not often give ourselves the space to utilize our pressure relief valves, which are our emotions. If we look at it from gender or a sex standpoint, masculine leaning energy in our world is usually met with, “Boys do not cry. You suck it up. Brush it off.” A more feminine leading energy can be met with, “Why are you so emotional all the time?” None of us in any expression or experience are given the space to be able to bawl it out or cry it out or burn through and work through emotional stuff. It is, “Smush it down.” If there is a disruption of the energy, that is going to be the new normal and your new stasis.

This posture is simple. It can be seated or laying down. It is simply crossing our legs at our ankles, crossing our arms and our wrist, turning our thumbs down, clasping our hands, and then dropping that clasp either into our lap or folding it up and holding it against our chest. I have got a PDF about this that I will share with you, so there are some visuals to go along with this. We are physically breaking the energetic midline of our body. We, just as the Earth, have an electromagnetic field, so does each and every one of us. It is called a tourist field and we got two. One that is more of a donut shape around the heart then the bigger one that goes top to bottom out of the crown of our head 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, so 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 now, this is the posture I am in. One of the functions that I have experienced that has helped me with my connection with processing energy has been Epsom salt baths. I am 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 reassimilation or configuration challenge the day after my enlightenment experience. It was the worst hangover I have ever had, body aches, the base of my skull was killing me, and my head was throbbing.

For this specific instance, it was because I had gone through a complete energetic expansive overhaul. My system was reconciling that. I got an Epsom salt bath. It was like E.T. At the end of E.T., 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 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 and 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 our reactions to the day.

It is going to bring us back into our conscious mind. With relationships and everything like that, we often get triggered and dropped back into these reactive states. This is the cause of so much 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 then giving ourselves the space to disconnect from those experiences and 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, in many ways, ritualize to habitualize. It starts with making a conscious choice to do some of these things. You can all find the book on Amazon. Radical Enlightenment: My Guy on the 9th Floor by Kevin Russell is a must-read, especially if you enjoyed the conversation and want more. I am already intuiting. If you want to know more about some of these exercises and rituals, all is in the book.

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

I am going to hold that mirror right 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 just my life, just life. I wrote the book and I was like, “I have done the thing. Dust off my hands. That is done.” It is getting dropped back into the reality of, “You need to get editing and figure out publishing and all the terrestrial things in order to birth it.” It is still living life. It is still being in the experience and the expansive spectrum of things that we can experience. That centered presence is the wellspring of life. I am enjoying being, and I am more attuned with returning to more frequently when I get knocked off my game and get dropped in back in the reactions.

In so many ways, I think of that tug of war analogy. That picture you painted for us earlier between growth, stasis, and status quo. Even in the instance of your book and any other thing, just because we accomplished something or attained some goal, it does not mean that the growth and in this tug, this tension between the status quo, things staying the same, growth, which is the way of the universe. Change is the great constant. It’s a paradox in and of itself that change is a constant. That tension between our instinct to want to stay the same and the universe’s full-on intention and purpose for us, which is to grow, is something that is not 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 that you have shared with us are phenomenal. I am looking forward to people enjoying the conversation and getting out there and discovering your book. Kevin, thanks so much. Everybody out there, I hope you do. In fact, love your life and that you love it more because of what insights you were able to get in this episode from our amazing guest. Thank you again. We will see soon.

 

Important Links

• Kevin Russell
• Radical Enlightenment: My Guy on the 9th Floor
• The I Love My Life Challenge
• Change Proof
• The Presence Process
• Amazon – Radical Enlightenment: My Guy on the 9th Floor
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/kevin-d-russell/

 

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).