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Author Soltis offers spiritual advice and insight, melding with his encounters with earthly struggles and underpinned by a finely tuned introduction to yoga and its realities. His childhood was spent in New Jersey, with an identical twin brother and upright parentage stemming from early-nineteenth-century immigrant backgrounds. His tale is predicated on an experience as a young adult in 2013, when he had a "Kundalini awakening" (KA), became wrapped in pure bliss, felt his former transgressions dissolve, and was charged with an unmistakable, overarching insight that "the divine in me connected with the divine of ALL."
Prior to this absorption in Light, his life had been filled with worldly challenges. Exposed to alcohol at age nine, he later would add marijuana and more potent drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms to his quest for comfort and celebration. As a child, Soltis exhibited musical talent, enthusiastically taking piano lessons and soon graduating to guitar as his preferred instrument. He brought together a group of music pals who would form a band called Shady Groove. In high school, he participated in sports while studying sciences, though music pervaded his educational pursuits, gigging with his band buddies, often traveling extensively to hear and produce compatible sounds. Later, plagued by bouts of depression, Soltis sought psychiatric assistance and even joined AA for a while, though these commonly accepted remedies did not curtail his continued indulgence in alcohol and drugs.
Working in the insurance business, he met a charming woman—"my only real relationship"—but their commitment waned, perhaps partly by her initiative that was provoked by his wild lifestyle, leaving him beset with large debts, low pay, and reliance on his music as a mainstay of mostly positive activity. After his yoga immersion and KA, his self-produced album, "The Eleven," brought widespread recognition to his band, now renamed "enjoy!" In addition to these lively recollections, Soltis offers three dynamic sections: "The Code," examining the many facets of yoga, Buddhism, and their interconnection with all religions; "Journal Entries," proffering pragmatic advice for spiritual seekers; and "Song Parables," a fascinating array of musical lyric possibilities among such notables as The Grateful Dead, Phish, The Police and many more, asserting that listeners should "let the music flow through and feel the vibrations."
Soltis, a music performer, songwriter, and recording artist, has worked as a certified financial planner (CPA) registrant and is now a Vinyasa yoga instructor. He offers this uniquely intimate and inspiring mix of trials, errors, and enlightenment in hopes of providing straightforward direction and encouragement to others, with his own life path as a sterling example. Demonstrating his gifts as a wordsmith, vividly detailing earthly struggles and eternal truths, Soltis also enjoys sports, performing, listening to live music, and reaching out to friends old and new. His assiduous, realistic explorations of yoga and its accompanying blessings will doubtless appeal to those already involved in the etheric realms that yoga engenders, and to those for whom these ideations are new, providing impetus, structure, understanding, and solace for further advancement.
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