Happy Monday to You!
Today, my video blog shares some of my thoughts on the spiritual and mental aspects of “happiness”.
After we get through the meat and potatoes, I share some of what I’ve been up to lately. I finish by sharing a link to Level 4 CHEK Practitioner Andrew Johnston’s site where he shares his experiences competing in the Race Across America.
With that said, lets get started.
Dr. Happiness & You! Pt. 1/3: Spiritual-Mental Happiness
In this vlog miniseries, I look at the concept of “happiness” from three different, but interrelated perspectives:
Pt 1. Spiritual and Mental Happiness
Pt. 2. Emotional Happiness
Pt. 3. Physical Happiness.
Happiness is not really “an emotion” so-to-speak, but a “state of being”. Happiness is a state of being connected to what you are creating in and of yourself first and foremost.
When we refer to an individual’s happiness, we often use the word to imply their emotional state. In actuality, a person is happy when they are in a state of inner well-being or harmony with what they are creating.
In an authentic state of happiness one is capable of experiencing a wide variety of positive or relatively negative emotions without losing their sense of what is both value and meaning making for them in life.
The authentically happy person isn’t likely to be on medical drugs for mental-emotional self-management, for challenges with mental-emotional self-management are incongruent with authentic happiness.
In my experience, people are generally happy when they have inner-confidence in their ability to:
1. Meet their essential survival needs, and
2. Create what they want to create as a means of expressing their love.
In my vlog today, I define the “spiritual person” as one who takes responsibility for what s/he creates moment to moment.”
I then refer to Dr. Daniel Siegel’s definition of mind:
An embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information.
I use this definition as a basis for explaining that what we often think of as mind isn’t just something happening between your ears, but within your whole being.
This is why I’ve broken the series into three parts that include the emotional and physical aspects of happiness.
As you can see in my diagram above, I symbolize “happiness factors” as a 5 pointed star within a circle; the star represents “your North star or your chosen direction in life.”
The five happiness factors I expand on in my vlog today are:
1. Love: What is your one-love, or your overarching dream at this time in your life?
I explain the five steps of the creative process to help you understand why so many are challenged to “create and recreate themselves” as an essential element in their own “happy making”.
2. Core Values: I share the importance of having well established core values to guide your decision-making; without core values, you are never sure when to say “yes” or “no”.
This is akin to being in a boat with no ruder…you are likely to bang into a lot of things!
3. Patience and Perseverance: Many of us today suffer from the perception that we should be instantly gratified as soon as we “change our mind” about something.
It is as though we’ve become confused as to how life actually works after so many decades of fast food, fast money from banks and credit cards, fast education (which rarely ever works), fast transportation, fast internet connection and response times, fast medicine (drugs and surgery)…etc.
To help people better understand the nature of the creative process (that we all go through as we create and recreate ourselves in life), I break down the five steps attributed to the creative process.
I highlight some of the common misconceptions people have about the creative process that lead to:
A. Giving up early.
B. Pursuing poorly thought out ideas…
C. Being shocked at how hard it is to take an idea from conceptual stages to being productive or functional.
4. Self-confidence: Here I explain the importance of cultivating self-confidence. I highlight the essential nature of “awareness” in this ongoing process.
5. Dream Team Relationships: Being clear of who is on our dream-team is critical to success when building any dream. Here I share some important information about dream-teams and cultivating happiness.
I finish with the following four tips:
1. Do what you love to do! Here I read Arnold Patent’s Universal Principle #9: Do What You Love To Do and The Universe Will Support You.
2. Gain clarity: I review the A,B,Cs of effective dream creation, which are expressed in reverse order:
C: Clarity
B: Belief
A: Action
3. Dream or Nightmare? Here I explain the importance of focusing on your biggest challenge or your greatest source of stress as an essential first step to “making peace with where you are now”, and using your mind effectively.
4. The PainTeacher: I explain how to use my concept of the “PainTeacher” favorably as a means of reprogramming your mind so that your thoughts are dream affirmative.
Here, I share Arnold Patent’s Universal Principle #8: Awareness of Purpose.
I hope you find my vlog informative and useful to you at this time in your life:
Suggested Resources:
4. Paint A Circle Around Your Arrow – ebook
5. How To Eat Move and Be Healthy – book
6. The 1-2-3-4 For Overcoming Addiction Obesity and Disease – MP3 Audio + workbook
7. Holistic Lifestyle Coach Level 1 – course
8. CHEK Exercise Coach – course
Andrew Johnston and Race Across America
Andrew Johnston CP4, HLC3 is an amazing triathlete, family man and friend. He is also an author and provides holistic training with athletes at all levels – especially at the elite level.
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Andrew has had Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia for almost a decade now and is a committed cyclist. He recently began his Race Across America – one of the toughest tests of endurance in the world. He is joined by several others on his team to raise funds to find a cure for blood cancers.
I am very proud of Andrew’s accomplishments and his achievements! Will you please join me in his noble pursuit?
To learn more about Andrew’s pursuit see the link for Race Across America or visit his website: www.TriumphTraining.com and read his blog.
What I’ve Been Up To In My Spare Time
I’ve been enjoying myself a lot during my precious weekends and evenings.
This weekend, I got to spend a lot of time with my buddy Rory, who often comes to visit me from Toronto for some rest from professional sports.
Angie Lustrick has been visiting Rory and me this weekend too, which is always fun. Angie’s a very alive, creative, and interesting woman and just happens to enjoy relaxing in the same ways Rory and I do, and she’s a great cook, so we kind of have things all “creatively wrapped up” when she’s around.
This weekend, I painted this picture of me dreaming/meditating. It just popped into my mind as I was unwrapping the canvas so I just let it flow. I had a lovely time creating it while Rory and Angie worked on their very cool creation.
Angie had the idea that she’d paint me (in my role as a shaman/healer). She started the painting while Rory was doing tai-chi in my rock garden.
When he came back, she said, “Rory, see if you can pick up on my theme here” and let go to trusting that Rory could, and would. When we paint with friends, we let go of our individual expectations about what we are creating as a practice of calming the judging (ego) mind.
Well, Rory, intuitive as he usually is, picked it up beautifully. This is what they created to express their views of me as a shaman artistically.
I think they pretty much “got me.” Thanks for the lovely painting Angie and Rory. Vidya hung it just inside the front entrance to the left of the atrium door and it looks great there!
We spent several hours together in the rock garden this weekend.
This is what it looked like when we finished. Angie and Rory created several stacks in the photo. While they were doing that, Angie and I were working on the one below:
Angie and I worked for some time to create a stable base for our creation. This area of the garden is full of golfer holes and rock stacks often fall into the earth because of the instability created by their tunnels under the ground.
I’ve made a series of cool stacks, only to look outside a few hours or days later and find them toppled. Each time I looked, I could see that the ground had caved in.
We created a spiral of stones so we had a large enough footprint to handle the weight of the total stack. Once we got to a point in the creation of our base cone, we began going upward in a vertical column. I stopped before it got too high so stones don’t roll onto the street if it falls over.
This was a fantastic workout, taking us about 3 hours to build in the hot sun. We worked barefooted, and the hot ground and dry foliage certainly made for some “awareness making”.
I eventually watered the ground with the hose before Angie’s pretty little girl feet were chewed to a bloody mess; mine were not far behind hers…
We had a great time with our “creative fitness” and the energy our stack creates if very cool!
Here you can see me enjoying my recently made meditation seat. It is part of my water charger.
I recently rebuilt my water charger because of shifts in the earth. It started to collapse on me while getting water out of it so I knew it was time to get creative and remodel…
My soul guided me to building a meditation seat right into the charger, which is very powerful.
As you sit on my meditation seat, very powerful surges of chi (life-force energy) move through you. You can feel the energy moving through your body as the stones are affected by the charge of sunlight and environmental factors.
It is very easy to get into a “no-mind” state while meditating here. I love it! That was a ball buster of a workout too!
I hope you’ve enjoyed my blog today. I’ve certainly had a great time creating all that I shared today.
Enjoy cultivating your inner-happiness!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
