chiropractor and owner of calls like healing arts and yoga center stay right where you are positive energy starts right now so maharishi welcome to positive energy thank you thank you michel it's great to be here thank you for being here so tell us a little bit about yourself your background and what led you to the path that you're on sure i was born there jersey and i was born into a beautiful baptist family and i was  very familiar and very connected with nature so i spent a lot of time on the words and when i graduated high school i decided to take off and then i had checked up to alaska and spent a number of months on the road traveling i went  alaska and down to mexico southern california and so that was a time of really exploring my spirit really breaking out of the traditional molds and everybody was going to college and i decided that college wasn't for me so i got together with a friend we took off and then i eventually came back and then i still had and so my parents i took off up to newfoundland i hitchhiked to newfoundland and you have the edge yeah and so on the journey i heard this amazing statement that you can travel around the world a thousand times and not know yourself a monk can go into the room close the door and see the universe and so when i came back i decided that the journey would be in word one and i came back i transformed my my bedroom i made it i painted it dark brown and the wall ceiling trim everything brown to be like a cave i took the beds and put the vertical on the walls i took my bed spreads and put them on the ceiling make it like a middle and so we said we want to do that so we discovered that there was the house of good around us in princeton new jersey this is in one thousand nine hundred five i drove down with my friend in a v w bus knocked on the door and that day i took my neighborhood and so now it's my wife and i and people come through her for different events so i'm glad that you're here and this is your life work and your passion and your purpose  let's tell people little bit more about yoga and meditation even beyond what they might already know even beyond some of the misconceptions so what are the roots you know god in general the spiritual roots if you know about what was the original purpose well years there's records of it going back five or ten thousand years five or six thousand years but it's said even go back like twenty thirty thousand years and so you know it is a vehicle  practice it's a way of life for us to awaken to relate to our spirit to relate to our higher consciousness to relate to the screener to towelie of existence and life and to have a connection with the vaio with the infinite source of consciousness  so you know i think there's many reasons for practicing yoga and people have come into yoga for many ways and reasons in america and i think though that  what we're seeing in america for the most part is there is a let's say stripped down version of yoga and really fitting it into a fitness mentality whereas yoga really comprises many dimensions of life and being an energy in consciousness yeah i thought sort of gotten away from its roots a little bit and you're saying it yeah i think that yoga in the west has been pretty much caught up in the of it and the physical asana practice is an important aspect of yoga although there's so much more to yoga and yoga as we understand it is really a way for us to unite and to merge with the divine with the sacred with the all pervading infinite consciousness and and so if we're just going to enter it or practice it from a place of the physical then we're missing you know so much of the original intention and the beauty and  offer these teachings they can only need teachings in the past were really good to change good to disciple very secretive and he offered the teachings realizing we're moving into a whole new age of awareness and consciousness where these teachings can be accessible to everyone so his idea was to really open it up to everyone and allow all the sacred wisdom to be available and so he started teaching in the west coast in los angeles where there was i mean there's a great hunger in the west in america for spirituality and a lot of teachers came from asia and came from india because they recognised the hunger amongst the young people for spirituality and an awakening and he saw it as really authentic seeking and as many teachers did and so you know he offered these teachings and very soon after that really steeped in the tradition of yoga and spirituality it was a great view for all of us to really dive into it just being in his presence yeah it was huge and that time with so many great teachers coming to america there w e huge wave of consciousness coming through we're still feeling it now the ripples of that are definitely continue to spread and i like to think that we're part of that yeah i think it's i think it's continuing to expand more and more i think people was as we go into this a greater understanding of yoga and greater understanding of the possibility of our human potential people are going into the other aspects of yoga that relate to more energetically and more to the awareness of it and the spirit of it so give us a couple of the benefits of yoga i guess from a research perspective if you know them and then just from the day to day working with yoga students what are some of the kind of things that you observe or the feedback that you get in terms of the benefit yeah well it's huge i think one of the benefits yoga has offered people on the west is understanding the relationship between mind and body that our thoughts are directly impacting upon our physiology and all the different reactions in our bodies so whatever people's practice is i think they're benefiting you know many see much of the much of the world we don't see everything as arising from the invisible subatomic subconscious subterranean everything's arising from beneath and in so with can really you know go we're really accessing environment for for or our minds our thoughts our consciousness etc and so as people get into your understanding that's affecting their nervous system their glandular system all these different systems of their body the fun it there's a way for them to create much greater relaxation don't necessarily have to go through life feeling stressed and feeling tense and you know feeling the struggle so i think yoga well so you're going to meditation are really hand in hand they're they're part of the same practices but talk a little bit about meditation because a lot of people know it in very simple terms so for you how do you define it and what is your approach to meditation teaching it and for yourself well meditation i think is one of the most important things i do as a daily activity it's one of those things that allows me to reconnect with my inner being with my heart we call our  our spiritual discipline our daily practice where we keep coming back into our our sacredness into our wholeness and meditation is a wonderful vehicle for us to create greater consciousness greater awareness so that we are really much more available to the possibilities of life and so in so doing it it allows us to understand the potential of our choices the potential of our existence and you know on a basic level it's allowing us to transcend our thoughts allowing us to go deeper into the subconscious so much of our subconscious is actually driving our motivations and so through our practice is actually helping to cleanse the subconscious pool which is affecting our actions and behaviors and such so i see meditation as a great way for us to that they keep us from having a direct experience of life and i think most people is very easy to be so consumed by our life story our inner voices our conversations that we're actually missing what's happen moment in my life and i feel like everything after that with new and different and i began on that path as well so there's lots of people coming new to meditation all the time which is wonderful how do you help beginners overcome some of their blocks in meditation have a rewarding experience yeah well i think it's just letting people know that the mind is very consuming and so people are used to being caught in the distractions and caught in to all the different things that are moving us and and just really just disconnected so meditation allows us to make the inner connection as people are to take time to really just go deeper and deeper and you shoot just begin with simple things like the breath you know just this becoming aware of the breath trying to bring our attention back to the present moment you know there's so many things in the mind field that keep people disconnected so we try to remind people to just keep coming back to the breath back to the present moment realizing the mind is generally scatter the min present moment and just to breathe that's really the beginning just for people to be aware of the breath and to be here and then as time goes on we work with new drugs different hand gestures and postures that work energetically through the energy field and also we work with mantra and sound you know to take people deeper as well and i think starting simply yank tip and moving deeper as time goes on letting your practice deepen in that way yeah i think ultimately people need to commit to peace it's not just about sitting down for twenty minutes or thirty minutes or whatever to try to do a meditation i think if people are committing to peace then they're going to create a context for which they're going to approach their practice rather than just doing a practice for a let's say a half hour then jumping up and running around like crazy hopefully we wake up we connect with our hearts we connect with our inner being we connect with our breath and we enter the day from a  more peaceful harmonious space and committing to that to that state and then as people commit to that then it's much easier for them to really find find their practice you know there's fourteen hundred  forty minutes in the day it's a lot of minutes of the day and we give our energies we give our life to a lot of different things and if we can give our life to being present and just being then there's going to be a much greater sense of  with a chant and in america we've pretty much people have disconnected from that but the yoga practice begins with sound you know if we look at traditions yoga or spiritual religious traditions like even in the bible it says in the beginning was the word the word was with god the word was god so from a yoga view the beginning was the word meaning that in the beginning everything is vibration and we're all arising from th secret current and the secret current was creation and the creator and so if we're going to really relate to our deeper being at relate to it a vaster consciousness and also expand beyond our own little self centered orbit of mind and thinking then sound is a great vehicle for that because my in the self is a field of light it's a field of sound the field of space and as we relate to sailing on a universal level we're expanding beyond our own little self centered story and orcs were connecting with the totality was something vast and then we connect with each other connect with very automatic if greed is not something you have to force yourself to do or overthink it so i love that's why i think chant and song and sound are some of the most beautiful practices and so let's let's talk about your your healing practice your center that's in your early pennsylvania tell us a little bit about that what can people find there and what are you up to in the world right now what's on your calendar i know you have a large calendar is a couple of things on your calendar  there with amazing chinese acupuncture as we've massage therapy you know a lot of things dedicated to holistic health as well as peace so we kind of bring it all together as much as we can and a lot of work with hoping people can really relate to their their wellness we try to transform the idea of health from just focusing on symptom and illness and disease to really focus on creating vitality and wellness and happiness and joy so the focus a lot is on cleansing through healing diet biology good nutrition work a lot with brain function since us to really the main control center of our whole body so i work a lot with the central nervous system you  for sure well i hope people will check out your website called healing dot com and see what you have to offer there in your early pennsylvania i know that you've been there for a long time and you're going to share with us today some of the music some chance so i would like to say about that as a way of introducing what you're going to play for us well it's a very simple chant that really relates to the elements of the sun and the moon in the earth and the w simple chant very simple simple as off in the bath i think in that way so good i hope that folks will enjoy that and i really appreciate your coming today and sharing and thank you for the work that you do in the world so you have any final message that you'd like to leave our audience with thank you michel it's a great honor and joy to be here i think with everything happening in our world i think if we can all just come back to our heart and come back to our breas come back to committing to peace within ourselves or within our families i think this is an important value that can hopefully permeate our society or culture at a time of transformation and growth and i'm very optimistic that all that's happening in the world socially politically economically is part of the ripples of change and that we are moving toward a a a profound and beautiful sacred rowing  yeah it could be a part of the growing pains of evolution and that we are moving toward a time of world peace i love that view i share your hopeful and optimistic views so thank you for sharing that with i want to answer thank you for being her we we up i hope this show inspires you to explore yoga and meditation or discover something that calls to you and gauges and nourishes your mind body heart and soul above all else make kindness your spiritual practice thank you for watching and join me again right here on positive