The Rythmia Experience: Opening The Gate To Extensive Self-Discovery

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivotal hey everybody.

Welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markell, and I am feeling very, very lucky and grateful and privileged to be here with you all in this moment, sitting here in front of this microphone and just thinking how odd and different and interesting this is compared to what I was doing 10 years ago or 15 or 20 years ago. I mean, some of you may be listening this, you're not even 20 years old. I don't know. But for me, anyhow, 20 years is a blur. 10 is even more of a blur. But that's just the way time is. And I don't think that that's something to lament or be sort of sad about. Although I have my moments, I definitely have my moments where I think to my, myself, God, it's going so quick, quickly passing by and all that kind of sentimental thoughts and feelings at times. But there's another part of me that really recognizes that time is a fiction. It's a figment of our, of our making. It's not a figment of our imagination, I don't think, because the truth is we've constructed this time thing and we didn't construct it like you didn't construct it. I didn't construct it. Our ancestors did it, they did it a long time ago to make sense of things and to have some form of construct to measure. And maybe, maybe it's some part of our DNA, part of the human makeup, to want to, and have, to measure, to need to have some sort of a craving to measure things. But, but time itself does not exist. It's a thing we've made up. It's a thing that the human beings made up. And it's a fiction. And it's just, it doesn't even exist on some, I mean, well, in that regard, it doesn't exist. And so when I think, well, what do you mean by that? Like, what do I mean by that? I think back 10 years ago, or I think back five years ago or even one year ago, and that time span between then and now is a blink. It's an instant. It's simultaneously then and now. And there's no other than the things that happen in between, which again, you may have a million things that happen in between. I may have been as busy in the last year as I've ever been in my life, and that probably would be at least partially accurate statement. And yet the distance between a year ago and today does not exist anymore. It's the two things just collapse. Time and space merge and become one. And with that realization and the knowledge that we created this thing we call time, it's an interesting fiction, and that's where I'm beginning the podcast today. Just recognizing that there are lots of interesting fictions in our lives. And what's also interesting is the fact that we are guided by those fictions. We are run by those fictions so often. And that means that our lives are occasionally going off in a direction that we haven't really charted, haven't really intended. And that's because we're. We are so directed by these fictions, these fictional beliefs, our fictional thoughts, the thoughts that are programmed and are habitual and come from childhood and come from other people and come from the media and come from so many places where we just pick up the thoughts and the belief systems and the programming of others. They don't necessarily emanate from our heart. They don't necessarily emanate from. From our deepest sense of beingness, which maybe we can call the soul or spirit or God or any number of other things, I suppose. But the idea that there's this operating system on the inside, very much the way in this moment, I'm operating this program through my computer, and that's an operating system that I am totally clueless about as to why it is that the screen operates the way it does and the words show up and this thing happens and that thing. And for me, it's a pure miracle. For a coder, somebody who's a lot more software literate, they may say, no, no, this is the reason happens. Totally logical, and it makes sense. And. But I would imagine even for them, that there's a miracle in it. And the first time that they recognized it or learned we're learning about it and ultimately became able to code things and create things through software, that it was, if nothing short of a miracle. It was, it was purely, purely miraculous at the time. And. And that is, I think, the best analogy for what is happening on the inside for us as well, that there are things that are running us, that there's a system, there's A program that is running our default ways of seeing the world, our default thoughts, our default beliefs, our default reactions to things, our default responses to things. And, and all those default modes are very much the programming and the code, if you will. And so it's, it is definitely a pastime and a professional endeavor for me to be curious about that code, to be curious about those default modes, and then to want to play with them in my own life and my own experience. So then whatever I might discover in that state of inquiry and curiosity that I can also, in the best of my showing up ness, share with other people that may get it and try it and use it and explore it deeper than I've gone and find great things in it, whether it's great understanding of the self, compassion, kindness for the self, kindness for others. I was thinking today very much that as we learn kindness and we learn how to be kind with ourselves, we also learn how to be kind with others. And that's a very important thing for me at this stage in my life. And I had the opportunity recently to explore that at a really interesting level of depth and, and just a very different way to approach the, the exploration because, and this is so much of why I wanted to do this show alone and in the solo cast format was to talk about a recent trip that Randy and I made. We, we've had the real great blessing in the last two months of traveling quite a bit. I don't know about you, but I love travel and I love being home and I love to travel. I love them both. And it's definitely a wonderful thing when you can toggle back and forth between being on the road and not being on the road too long, where you need to write one of those road songs, you know, those old sad songs that I think we all love so much. You know the James Taylor esque On the Road tune, you're a little lonely and a little homesick and, and all that. And then you get home and you're home for some length of time and you want to pull what's left of your hair out. You want to, you want to put your hands around people's necks and mostly you're just going, oh, when's my next trip, man? I, you know, like got to get back on the road again or I'm going to lose my shit. So it's that beautiful harmony. I don't think it's a balance thing. I don't actually believe in balance, personally. I think balance is a fiction. Again, somebody created this idea of balance and we should try to live in balance. And that's like living on a tightrope when you think about balance. I mean, it's like being on the high wire, which is just a lot of work and I don't know, it's a whole lot of fun all the time. But harmony, which is actually the symbol for the Chinese symbol of yin and yang, is a symbol for harmony, not a symbol of balance. Although there's a relationship between them. Sure. So this harmony between being on the road and being home and nesting and just being comfortable in life, in home life and then the road life, the life of exploration, exploring things and curiosity and meeting new people and seeing new things and being on our growth edge, our learning edge is a really profound thing to be creating. And in the last six weeks, Randy and I have been on the road a lot. We were in Singapore for a beautiful week. I was fortunately tapped to do a couple of keynotes there for a large company paid quite handsomely to do it and first class accommodation, travel, all that kind of thing. It's really a blessing to have that chance. So we did that, we went there. I traveled pretty extensively around the United States, east coast and middle of the country, got to see things I hadn't seen before and things I haven't seen in a long time, which was truly great. And then a couple of weeks back we went to Costa Rica, same thing, was hired to go down and deliver a workshop, actually two days of workshops at this incredible retreat center that I'm going to spend a little time chatting about. Because I was so blown away by the quality of what was provided at this retreat center. By way of just background for those of you that don't know, I ran a large company in the personal, pure personal development, personal growth, human potential space for a lot of years. We did retreats, we did pretty deep, deep dive boot camps and things like that. And these were no jokes, they were wonderfully and impeccably delivered events. People had massive breakthroughs doing all kinds of crazy, manner of crazy things. You know, what other people would call crazy things? Everything from rappelling on mountains and bungee jumping and walking very long distances on fire and all that kind of stuff. And those were great and I loved them and I'm a lover of that format for personal breakthroughs. What I was so impressed with, with this, this retreat called Rythmia in Costa Rica was the depth at which they had planned for everything. The, the safety, the impeccability, the, the attention to so many little details, the cleanliness of the place and every aspect of what we did was just so cared for. So for an entire week they fed us this most beautiful, lovingly prepared organic cuisine that was, you know, every, every everything you'd want to not have in the food was not in the food. And everything you'd want to have in the food cared for your spirit, your body and your mind and everything was in the food. And the people there, oh my goodness gracious, they, they have curated the most beautiful souls to help other people to transcend their limitations, to break free of some of the default modes, to identify that inner programming. Maybe for the first time for many, many, many of us, the first time in our lives that we have touched on certain aspects of our inner self that are so profound because they are within us. They're not, they're not something to do with a purchase. It's not something that's outside of us, it's not something in someone else that we're looking to tap or create or model or steal or any of that. This is just every aspect of our divinity and our well being and our abundance is within, within the depth of our own being. And to tap into that is not, is not a usual everyday practice. At least it hasn't been for me. So to be in an environment where so many other people have had that experience and then were called to come back and facilitate and assist and give their time and their love to the support of others in that process is just utterly early beautiful. So what did we do in Costa Rica? You're wondering, what was this thing that, that was able to break through the, the myriad levels and the, and the soil layers and the rock layers and the shit layers and everything that, that's covering up part of, part of our truth. Well, it's called ayahuasca so that we don't, we don't dabble or delay. I should say further. It's a plant medicine and actually it's something that I had done once before several years back and I had done it by myself. I had been asked, not asked. I was, I guess it was recommended that I go on this solo journey and by a dear friend. And interestingly enough, she's in our house today, she's just in the next room. So I'm going to have this conversation with her later too because she introduced me to it. I had a wonderful first experience several years ago with it. And it's just. So we're clear, you can certainly look it up. Ayahuasca is something that has been around for thousands and Thousands of years and is a plant medicine. It's not a synthetic anything, it's not a drug, it's not a man made thing. It's something that's been passed down generation to generation of people, primarily indigenous peoples and people that have been using it in what's called ceremony to help find clarity and depth of awareness. And all of the things that we've been just sort of thinking about or I've been sharing in the last few minutes. This is a gate which when we unlock the gate, when you can unlock the gate to that depth of your being, you find new answers. I found new answers when I was able to go past these gates, go past these levels that formerly I had not been able to get to those places. Climbing mountains. I've had gates, I've gotten through the gate and I've gotten through depth of my understanding of myself in certain processes and things that I've done when I've challenged myself, when I've challenged my fears, when I've been exhilarated through surfing, which I love to do, or, or in doing some other thing like a bungee jump. I mean, you know, there's certain things that just will, will pop you out of your, your default mode and put you in what's technically or what, what is often called in a personal development space, perturbation, to be perturbed, to have the pot stirred and that kind of thing. And, and so that, that, that perturbation is something that the ayahuasca, the medicine, the plant medicine sometimes also referred to as the mother, that this medicine works very interestingly with our bodies and produces just a completely different state of being. So I guess you could say can produce a psychedelic state. I think officially it could be called a psychedelic, though I'm not a researcher on that, so I might be mistaken there. But it's beautiful. And the process that we were led through to have to take the plant medicine and to be cared for was again one of the most remarkable. The thing about rythmia is it's the only places I know in the world because it's in Costa Rica, but it's the only place in the world that is sanctioned by the government and has an actual certificate to do what they do elsewhere. It's not necessarily sanctioned by the government and in some places, including the United States, I think it's even not legal, it's illegal to do it. But what was remarkable there is with supervision of a doctor, medical physician, practitioners in other areas, nurses, etc. People who are very experienced and facilitated by shaman. This medicine is provided. People can take as much or as little as they want, a tincture of it if they like, microdose or larger amounts. I went middle of the road, just went. Went with whatever. Everything was seemingly put out on the table with something I was willing to partake in and see for myself what that would be like. And I tell you flat out, I had some concerns. So one of the concerns I had was the fact that I was there as a facilitator and I was going to wait until after I had facilitated both of the days before I would partake. So there were four ceremonies and the first night, first day, I facilitated a program about relationships. And that evening I didn't partake. I was there with my wife, Randy, and she didn't partake either. We just had dinner and relaxed and just enjoyed this gorgeous environment. You know, it's a retreat center. So they have massages and they have cleanses and they have, you know, pools and hot tubs and mud baths and all these things all going on there, as well as everything else and breath work to boot. So other ways to facilitate transformation other than through the plant medicine. So no requirement that anybody take it. Well, that was the first night. And then the second night, second day, I just had this. This feeling that part of my own growth edge was to remove what I felt was a fear, or at least challenge the fear that if I was to join the rest of the group, which was about 50 people, and go on the journey, participate in the ceremony, that somehow maybe I wouldn't be in control the next day, I wouldn't be at my best the next day when I was going to facilitate part two of the. Of my workshop. And I just didn't like the way that felt. It just felt like fear. I've lived a lot of my life in fear. Was a, you know, kid, grew up in a. In Queens, New York, in the city or suburb of the city of New York. But sorry for everybody from New York borough of the city of New York. Kind of a rough place in some ways. I got mugged once, twice, I remember a couple of times. And bullied at times because I was little and you had to watch yourself. You had to be really alert. I had to be really alert, and otherwise I could get the shit kicked out of me. You walk down the wrong street, walk down the wrong block, say the wrong thing, look at the wrong person the wrong way. I mean, any number of things could get you in a. Get you in a beef, and things could go sideways from There. And I grew up in that environment, so I was alert, I became a lawyer, I was a very alert attorney. And I was mostly the one doing the offense, you know, being, being the aggressor and striking first. And that kind of thing was more my style than waiting. And so that's part of my, the record grooves inside of me. That's part of my programming. And so fear is the root of all that. Just constantly operating from that place because of fear. Fear of being hurt, fear of being rejected, fear of being abandoned, fear of being killed. Anything, you know, all these fears that have been part of my very being for so long just didn't feel good to me. Don't feel good to me. And I had an opportunity to challenge that, so I did. So went in for ceremony on the next night and had just the most wonderful experience that night. I won't get into too, too many of the details of that, but it's a bit of a long evening. It sort of starts in the area of 5:30, 6:00 clock and there's a lot of prep involved and pre framing of things and the shaman shares wisdom and talks about what's going to happen and intentions are set. And then there's this beautiful, comfortable space for people to be there and to lie down, to sleep if they want to sleep, to dance if they want to dance. This music playing, there's live music and then there's recorded music. And it is literally a journey like nothing I've ever experienced before. And at one particular point, not in the first, in the first evening, I had these beautiful, these beautiful awarenesses when I was lying out in this hammock outside under this just ridiculously big sky. And it's so warm in Costa Rica that, you know, it's like you can be out at 2 o' clock in the morning and you know, it's just, it's. You can be in a T shirt and all, all you might be hearing in the, in the distance are the wild dogs and barking and yelping and stuff like that. The sky is gorgeous. The stars are, are beyond infinite. Just like you could feel like you can see to the. Just the entirety of the universe. And I'm lying in this hammock and just feeling this great peace come over me. It's just beautiful peace and thinking, thinking a lot about the process of the butterfly becoming a butterfly and in its various stages and going, moving from this caterpillar on a leaf, this caterpillar that becomes discontented with the idea of continuing forever to be a Caterpillar and ultimately is in this state of metamorphosis, of great transformation and change and ultimately emerging from this cocoon state into, to this state of spreading its wings and this excruciating exit out of that cocoon so that the blood actually fills, fills the wings so that the butterfly can actually take flight. And then six weeks, that's it. We just had a record, record butterfly hatching season here in California because of all the rain we had over the, the winter, which was magnificent. And, and to think that those beautiful butterflies that went through all of what they went through to become who they become end up with six weeks, that's it, six weeks of life. And they, they migrate and they, they propagate again. So there's a new, new hatching that will occur as a result of their having lived. But they get six weeks and this glorious flight and everything that they, that they experience on their journey and what they see over those six weeks is truly, I imagine, truly remarkable. But I had more than just an imagining of it. I had an experience of it, a visceral, felt experience of it in my journey and in what I was feeling as I'm lying in this hammock under this infinite sky, and I'm under the influence of the mother of the plant medicine. And that was just the first night. And it went on and on and on and on and on. I mean, I just had one thing after another. And in the second evening, something else really profound happened for me. I was lying in a different spot and I was tapping. I found my fingers sort of rubbing and tapping on a certain spot in my, in my heart, in my chest cavity. And I could feel that there was a spot right in the middle where, where I guess my knit, my ribs must be knitted together or something. And I could feel that there was this pain there. I'm pressing on it right now in that same spot and I could feel that there was this pain there. And I started to explore the pain and I started to think about the pain and I was asking and what's the pain from? And then the way this, this, this medicine works, it, I can't imagine. It's, it's feels like it would be impossible to ask a question and not receive some form of an answer. So sure enough, I got an answer. And the answer that I received was that it was a pain that was caused when I was 4 years old. And I knew it, I could see it, I could feel it. I could. Had every sense of the fact that when I was about that Age. My dad took ill and was. Had to. Had to leave and go to a hospital and was in that hospital for many months. And I was 4 years old. And I. Of course, my only memories then were visiting him a few times, seeing him in the hospital, wanting to stay and wanting to take care of him and not wanting to leave and the heartbreak of having to leave and being home with my mom. And. The only thing of my dad that was there for me were these drawings that he made. He was a good artist, and he made drew these boats and clowns and airplanes and things. And I just recently talked to my dad about it. My dad's alive and well, and my mom too, knock on wood. They're both doing great. And I started to just think about what that was like for my mom at the time to be in 1969, a single. A mom who was raising a child in that moment and. And what that must have been like for her and the support that she was in need of and what it was like to be just the two of us. Then, from her perspective and thinking about myself and thinking that this was my first. This spot was actually the sort of the scar tissue or the not even scarred tissue of a heartbreak of having had my heart broken in that moment at that time and at 4 years old, and knowing that when I think back on it, on the things I've learned over the years since I got out of practicing law and 10 years of being in the personal development space, in the training space, that many of us, all of us are. Are so impacted in the first seven years of our lives. In fact, it's the state of our emotional development. And then we go into mental development and then physical development. But this is precognitive. This is. We can't put words to it. There's no understanding things when we're six or seven or five or four. And many of us experience trauma in those times. And sometimes that trauma could be very subtle. Could be just seeing people around you do certain things. It could be that they're arguing that they're unhappy, that they're getting divorced, or there's the threat of a divorce. Or it could be that there's not enough of something like food or clothing and there's this air of just insecurity about the future. Or it could be something much more than that, even. There's abuse, mental abuse and verbal abuse and physical abuse and sexual abuse and. And all of these things that are also possible. And there's no comparing, because a trauma is a trauma, is a Trauma. There's no. My trauma is bigger than yours. I mean, there's no differentiating between pain or trauma. It's for each of us its own thing that changes us and in many ways really defines for us what certain things mean. So when we talked at the beginning about recognizing the programming and recognizing the default mode and the code that's embedded inside of us, that code is very much established in those early years of life, including the code tells us what love means, what self love means, and what every form of love looks like. And so for many people, their definition of love is learned in those first few years and will resemble those things for a very long time until they become more. More aware and cognizant of that, that that's what's running them. Their. Their definition of love might include being abused, or it might include being fearful of rejection. It might include not being enough or not feeling worthy. All of those things are embedded as part of the code when we're young, based on those traumatic experiences. And so this was something I didn't expect to find that when I was four years old, I felt abandoned and rejected and just broken, heartbroken that my dad left. And obviously as an adult, I realized he didn't, you know, this wasn't his fault. And, and we're just lucky that he got better and was able to come home after, you know, a period of months. But to go back and to re. Experience that and to see it and understand it and, and have light put on it, love be. Be something that I could look at it from that standpoint of compassion and kindness and made. Made it just changed it so dramatically in the moment that, that the place in my heart and. Or in my chest where I was feeling that discomfort and that physical pain, the manifestation of that pain was right there. And I could put my fingers on it and touch it and tap. It was gone. It disappeared. I had no pain. And I don't have any pain in that spot now. The remnant of that was integrated, I suppose. Something that just was beautiful and unexpected and it went on from there again. That was one piece of a beautiful evening that included thinking about my family, thinking about my brother and thinking about my love for my brother, my baby brother. And being 6 years old and he's showing up and, and it's like, who the heck is he wanting to end him, you know, at some point, just like, get out of here. Like, who are you and why are you taking my love and my attention from my parents and then being able to really sit and be with that and so appreciate how much I've always loved and wanted him. And willing, being willing now even to share, just to be sharing of our parents and sharing of our parents love and attention and support and everything. And these are things that you can't predict. I mean I couldn't and, and I don't think anybody could. And, and obviously there are other experiences and other things that can be shown to you. As I understand it, the mother, the medicine, the plant medicine can be. It interacts with what's going on inside of us. And so sometimes some of those things that it'll show you are very harsh. And you know, they can be visions, they can be, you know what vision being like something that's not there, that you're seeing there. And trips, instantaneous trips to the moon or to the stars or elsewhere in the solar system, trips back in time, forward in time, trips to, to the time in utero or pre, pre birth. I had, I had some moments where before I was conceived, I. I was able to see things and experience things and feel things. And then at that point of conception, I mean just utterly like, whoo, mind blowing stuff and stuff that I would never be able to explain except in this way because it's. Because people would just be like, that's crazy. And that's where that's not true. It's unreal. You didn't. You imagine that it's not that didn't happen really experience that. Well, everything as we said at the beginning, we imagine so many things, we have created fictions of so many sorts. So it's no more a fiction than the fiction of time or space or anything else that we have given meaning to. And so yeah, this was some literally trippy, amazing, beautiful, glorious experience. And it's something that I wanted to talk about, I wanted to share with people and be vulnerable about my journey and journeys because we had even a third night that I was in ceremony and that was even longer ceremony. And there were other things there then and with people around and moments with the shaman and moments in the music where again I just had such incredible clarity and peace. And I've been seeking and searching for inner peace, peace of mind, peace in my body, peace in my spirit, peace in my soul for so long. So to be able to touch on those things and feel that way was just worth any, any amount of time traveling to and from and everything else in between. And I will probably be announcing some, some more, some more specific invitation at some point, but my intention is to, to go back at a certain point to invite some very special family, friends and maybe some colleagues or other people that are part of our community, that have an appetite for what I've been explaining and the experience that I had. The people, as I said, who run it, the gentleman who created it, founded it, gentleman by the name of Gerard Powell. We got introduced to him through his, his beloved Brandy pal. And. The way he and that team have created that retreat is just again, something from a facilitator's perspective. Somebody who ran a lot of events and knows the sanctity of that space and how sacred it has to be, how impeccable the delivery and the process to support people going through all the stuff that they're going to go through. The very much roller coaster ride of it all. I was just so impressed with that. So my literal hat is off to Jerry, to Brandy and to the team, to everybody else that was there, the yoga instructors, the beautiful people that just are giving so much of their time to this and are such loving and committed people that I can't say enough. So at some point, either toward the tail end of this year or at the very beginning of next, we're gonna invite some people to join us in sort of a private journey there same thing, sort of a week, a week in time to explore, be in a. Create a vortex, if you will, of people that we just love to be around, people in our community, people that we want to explore this with and a deeper level. And maybe that'll be something you're interested in. If you are in fact interested in finding out more about that, you can email us@teamdammarkel.com teamammarkel.com of course you can always post questions or comments. You can leave them@adammarkelle.com podcast or you can go on itunes and leave a review there. That's more of a review of the show, however. But questions you can direct to us and to our team. And of course we've got our beautiful Facebook group, StartMyPivot. The StartMyPivot community. And if you've got questions or things, you can always post them in there and our team can answer us, as do I. So I just have loved being able to share vulnerably what that was like for me and my own concerns and fears around it. And having been through it now, I just so ready to do it again and I'll probably have fears again because, you know, it's not our natural or I said normal. Maybe it's not our normal state of being to release, let go of control at least it's not for me. I think it is natural. I think that's the way babies are. Babies are born knowing that. And the rest of our lives are sort of working our way back to being a baby, back to the. To the original factory settings, if you will. Getting. Getting back to those. That initial coding that we were born with and that was downloaded from the divine, to each and every one of us. So I hope you're having a beautiful rest, beautiful day, and the rest of your day is just as beautiful or more beautiful than it's already been. I wish you peace and harmony in your lives and love. Most of all, love for yourself, love for others. I really believe that it's the love that we give ourselves, and the love that we learn to give ourselves is the love that we. We learn to be able to give to others. And that starts for me every morning when I wake up. And I'm wishing that you also have that same morning moment tomorrow when you get to wake up again and you recognize it's special and it's. And it's. It's a thing that's a gift. And in that moment, you can feel grateful for that gift of waking, of breathing, of being, and becoming even more conscious. And that you take 10 seconds to put your feet on the floor or even from your bed to declare out loud, I love my life. I love my life. Say it out loud now, if you will. I love my life. Ciao, everybody. Have a beautiful, beautiful rest of the day or the evening and take that love everywhere you go. Bye.

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