Personal Message from Alex Novaa, co-founder of Yogadelic,
From time to time we are gifted with moments impregnated with potential. The lucky of us recognize these moments for what opportunities they are and take action. I admit, it is not always easy to do this. And I think it is because many of these moments arrive during darkness.
The image to the right is of my father and I. If you read the "about us" above then you know he died from a struggle with depression and substance abuse. His choice substance was alcohol. I've racked my mind for countless hours to understand how this happened. Many of us dabble with booze. Hell, I dabbled with Xanax, cocaine, weed, and alcohol to deal with social anxiety. Till I realized the drugs were blinding and turning me into a shadow of who I truly was. So I dove into yoga and began learning how to self-regulate and how to be aware of the cosmic ecstatic energy that moves within all things. The crazy thing about it, it ain't hard to do. And I've tried to understand how the father of a yoga teacher was unable to figure it out. I've come up with lots of reasons. But really it boils down to one: perception.
Perception is everything. How we perceive our-Self and our place in the Universe will determine the course of our lives. And knowledge shapes perception.
We all know that kids learn easy while adults can be notoriously thick-headed. These differences are both mental and anatomical and are the subject of a Yogadelic article. What if my dad had learned yoga when he was a kid? What if he learned yogic techniques to self-regulate in primary school and refine them in secondary school? What if he knew yogadelic—feeling Oneness with the Universe—for himself?
The United States is rotting from the inside. Millions of people seek prescription meds to self-regulate. Millions more go under the table for the same end. I have run thousands of EMS calls in downtown Myrtle Beach and truth of it is that we are people who routinely fail to self-regulate. And we are a people who truly haven’t felt the infinite love that exists in the yogadelic space. This one two punch means that we limp along through jobs we despise to pay the bills we accumulate from the thousands of ways we distract from our internal misery.
Dramatic, huh? Know that reality is worse than any screenplay.
But reality is also more beautiful than lines on a page can define.
There are millions of people waking themselves up to their divine nature. Millions diving into shamanic wisdom, yoga, meditation, and ecstatic dances. Millions deciding that enough is enough and taking the plunge into the unknown depths of Spirit.
To bring it back home, I may never know for sure why I was able to get my act together while my dad, and his brother, who died a few months before my father did, or my wife’s uncle, were not. But I do know that Yoga has helped me. And I know that psychedelics have helped me. But these tools can only be useful if your perception allows for the possibility. What would happen if millions of people learned the science of yoga before their minds became conditioned against it? What would happen if ceremonial psychedelic therapy was affordable and accessible?
We want to See the answer in real time.
That’s why Yogadelic pledges to spend at least 10% of our profits to teach kids yoga and to support psychedelic research.
Thanks for reading.
With love and gratitude,
Alex Novaa
