Happy Tuesday to You!
I hope you are all happy and well.
Today, I’ll share some highlights from the end of my recent trip to Canada and the UK, and a little of what I’ve been up to on my vacation.
Then I’ll share a vlog on how to convert the Swiss ball crunch into a Zone 3 exercise for mental, emotional and physical balancing.
As our UK tour came to an end, Angie Lustrick (www.angiesworld.com) wanted to share something special with Gavin and Gabby Jennings, our CHEK Europe partners.
Gavin and Gabby did an AWESOME job of setting up and managing our UK tour. The venues were great, and our lodging was awesome, particularly considering all the tiny, cramped, antiquated hotel rooms I’ve endured in England over the years.
Gavin and Gabby are an excellent team, and are working diligently at the task of being new parents (meet Sabrina, their daughter in the photo above) while expanding their business. I know all to well how demanding growing a business and being a parent can be from plenty of my own experience in that regard.
Angie and I harmonized and created the mandala you see above as a means of “creating balanced energy” for Gavin and Gabby. We were delighted that Gavin and Gabby enjoyed the mandala.
As soon as I got home, the first urge I had after taking a shower was to draw the mandala below to encapsulate my feelings about the tour to Toronto, and then through the UK.
This trip was as beautiful as it was because I also enjoyed great support from home base. My mandala also carries gratitude for the CHEK Institute staff, headed by Jennifer Baker, COO. They work tirelessly behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly. Even when courses are being run around the world, they are working to create manuals and manage students’ development.
Thank you to our amazing staff at the CHEK Institute from Penny and Paul!
If you are sensitive enough, and relaxed, you can click on the mandala and just look at it with a relaxed gaze and you should be able to feel the experiences of the entire tour in the mandala. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I did!
Penny and I started the tour with our long-time buddy, Rory in Toronto for the Can Fit Pro convention. Rory is always an amazing host and we enjoyed getting to see our many friends in Toronto.
Inspired by the joy of our trip to Toronto, we headed to the CHEK Inspire Conference in Surrey, England. The conference was excellent as I reported in a previous blog.
Angie Lustick came to continue her training to teach HLC 3 and share the rest of our tour with Penny and I. I love having her with us and we always have the greatest time together, so much love and joy was added to my trip and she was a big part of it.
Penny is very busy conducting business when we are on the road, so she really appreciates all the help Angie provides her, which is lovely; Penny likes to say I’m a “high maintenance man”…and I love that too because she always appreciates the help.
I also got to spend some private time with Matthew Wallden, CHEK Faculty. Matthew, Angie and I did an art piece together and had a lot of fun.
Matthew is always a big source of joy for me because he lives so fully. He’s one of the most intelligent, open-minded men in my life and has always been a great supporter of the CHEK Institute and me personally. It was lovely to visit you and have some playtime Matthew! Our love is in this mandala Bud.
One thing I missed a lot while on the road was stones. I can usually find stones I can stack or make rock mandalas out of, but oddly enough, stones were scarce this trip. I looked all over the Burningfold farm in England where I was staying, and there was nothing bigger than my fist to be found.
When I travel, it’s often not easy to find places I can get some intensive exercise safely in bare feet, and I can really feel the difference in my body after a couple weeks.
When I got home, it was quite hot here and the ground can burn your feet. In fact, the last stack I built before leaving Heaven came with blisters all over my feat from the heat of the dirt.
Though I was surely suffering from a case of “pussyfoot” by the time I arrived home after 5 weeks on the road, I was ready to start building come calluses again.
I had left four large stacks in the stone circle before leaving, so I warmed-up by carefully breaking them down. Being out of shape for stone lifting (which requires exquisite balance and core control) and jet-lagged, I took it easy. This was my first workout once I got home and I loved it!
It was nice to get back into my own gym, which is adequately equipped for a farm boy like myself. Here I’m doing a fun twist and catch exercise with my 20-pound clubbell.
Clubbell training is great exercise, very functional, and fun to do. I got my clubbells at www.circularstrength.com several years ago now, just in case you want some for yourself.
One of the important lesson’s I’ve learned in the strength training game is that being too stiff is power-negative. The body-mind is a very complex, organic or biologically contained living system. Tension created by resistance training is not only the cause of many muscle-joint syndromes, it is a common obstruction to subtle energy flow in our body-minds.
When we lift heavy or fast, we recruit the diaphragm constantly as a chief stabilizer of the core, which can lead to restricted movement of the rib cage and diminished breathing function.
I find that my tai-chi and spontaneous unwinding practices help calm and center me, as well as enhancing my breathing functions. The result is a strong, more supple body that breathes well, which is essential if you want to get the most from your mind.
It has been absolutely lovely to be home to do tai-chi in my own space again.
Since I’ve been home I’ve been studying the work of Marie-Louise vonFranz, a famous Jungian analyst. Her works are very comprehensive, lucid, and nicely expand on Carl Jung’s very deep teachings.
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My life of studying human life and human beings has led me deep into exploring the human psyche, which is complex indeed.
I began studying philosophy and world religion when I was a young man because I could see how important it was to understand a patient’s belief system if therapy was to be truly successful.
I looked deeply into these matters because I specialize in medical failures and found out early that it is often much less about how skilled a therapist is, and much more about addressing the etiology (cause) of a person’s pain than the pain itself.
Countless are the patients who’s problems were physical expressions of unresolved emotional and mental challenges in their lives.
I could give people the best therapy I possibly could, get their muscles and joints working correctly, and address problematic diet and lifestyle issues…but many would not change the behaviors that caused their problems.
It may be addiction to exercise, attention getting, or getting stuck in an archetypal expression, such as being a “care giver” that loses themselves in the process…
Over and over again, simple instructions are not followed, even when the patient has clear evidence that the suggested practices do take their pain away.
Behind all “actions” are choices that express an individual’s values consciously or unconsciously. All most all the patients I’ve helped with chronic injury, pain, and diseases were challenged by religious values.
Only when I became able to understand the different value systems expressed in the major world religions was I able to see the underlying schema or gestalt that was unconsciously driving people’s choices, often against their conscious will; they stated with gusto that they were ready for change, but change often eluded them, regardless of how much money they spent with doctors and therapists of all types…
Jung, Steiner, Hazurat Inyat Khan, Yogananda, and many more have expressed concerns on the collective behaviors and psyche of humanity, not to mention more current world teachers such as Deepak Chopra, Ken Wilber, Bruce Lipton, Carolyn Myss, and others.
As I meditated on the deep issues of the collective unconscious of humanity, and the World Soul, this is the vision that came to me. This is my symbolic expression of the World Soul; this symbolizes the collective consciousness or “soul of Humanity”.
I hope you enjoy looking at my picture of the I, WE and ALL of us.
I love to paint and though I brought watercolor pens and an art pad on the road, there’s just no replacing the vibrant color experience of acrylics.
As many of you realize, I love studying mythology as a means of better understanding the human psyche, and life process. I feel archetypes and myths are two sides of the same coin so-to-speak.
Angie Lustrick is a shaman, and student of life too. She and I share a very beautiful partnership and love doing things together, including painting. We created this painting together over the weekend. Our plan was to “have no plan” and just see what emerged. Well, this is what happens when we start dancing in paint together.
I wish I had the time to explain the symbols contained in our painting, but I suspect many of you have enough knowledge and artistic vision to spot them. We hope you enjoy sharing this special experience with us.
ZONE 3 WORK-IN: The Breathing Crunch
In my video blog today, I expand on a zone 3 exercise from page 109 of my book, How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy!
In this video blog, I explain some basics of the chakra system, and how using the Swiss ball crunch with specific modifications and go a long way to balancing subtle energy flow in your body-mind.
For those of you suffering from trapped emotions, judgments, and fears, those with digestive and eliminative disorders, this method can be very helpful. This is a simple, easy to apply method and in this video blog, I share some tips that are not included in my book.
I hope you enjoy it.
I’m on vacation until next Monday, but wanted to take a moment to catch up with you and share a little of what I’ve been up to.
I love to share practical ways we can all get healthy and live our dreams together, so I decided to “share the love today”.
You can rest assured though, I’ll be staying away from any work for the next week so I’m rested and ready to enter my professional life with gusto.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
