Hi There!
I hope your rock stacking and rock play juices are beginning to flow as you are learning more about the gifts from the Stone Buddhas. We will finish our series today and who knows what Spirit will make my fingers dance to next?
I had a very busy day yesterday. We had a great PPS coaching call. Jade Johnson, one of the worlds best long jumpers joined us on the call and it was lovely to have her. She’s joined PPS as part of her training for the Olympics and I’m excited to have her in the program. She’s a lovely woman and an awesome athlete.
We will launch her new web site any moment now (I’ll announce it so you can all have a look when it’s up). Jade, her Chek Practitioner, Warren Williams and I will be blogging to share her experiences, some of her training sessions, and many tips that may be very helpful to you and your loved ones.
Jade is studying my 1-2-3-4 For Overcoming Addiction, Obesity, and Disease as part of her training as well. It will be fun to see and share what she learns and how she intends to apply the teachings in her life as an elite athlete.
We had a great C.H.E.K Institute staff meeting yesterday too. We are all working hard at the institute to move forward with new education technologies and make it easier for people to study the institute’s education programs from anywhere in the world more easily and cost effectively.
I’m working away with every spare moment on the changes to my HTEM&BH! book as well. T
he preparations for the CHEK Conference continue. We are getting a good turnout so far. We’ve sold out all but the last 5 VIP seats and have had a variety of excellent presenters come forth.
Chris Manund, the first person to ever fully complete the CHEK Training and be fully certified, will give two workshops that may interest you. Chris is a highly accomplished athlete and will offer a workshop on developing running technique.
He will also offer a workshop on the use of manual therapy techniques for correcting postural imbalances. He’s an excellent teacher. He and his wife, Janet Alexander were my first two instructors and have a mastery, not only of my teachings, but the teachings of many others they’ve studied as well. They will both offer great presentations for you all. Don’t miss out!
We are running some fantastic specials if you’d like to attend the Conference: Bring a partner and get the second person half off, or register 3 people and 1 comes free. To register for the conference, click here.
I had very little time to exercise yesterday – 12 minutes! I really needed to move my body and do some deep breathing. I took a 16 pound medicine ball out in the parking lot where the sun was nice and warm. I tossed that baby non-stop for 12:00, changing the pattern every 10 reps or so. By the end of it, I was drenched in sweat, panting, hot, and couldn’t wait for a cold shower. I was sweating for about an hour after that, even with a cold shower.
It’s really quite amazing how great a workout you can get in just a few minutes if you are willing to take advantage of what you can pack into each moment!
I’ve got a busy day of meetings and I will be delivering my newest webinar: How to Follow your Dream Line today at noon as well. We’ve got an excellent turn out for this webinar (about 85 people have registered) so it’s apparent that living your dreams is important to you all! Me too!
So, how about we finish our series on stones!
HOW TO STACK ROCKS AND CULTIVATE LIFE-FORCE ENERGY (Part 4. Of 4)
Learning about form and fit
When we work with stones to make things out of them, we quickly learn that we must find an effective male~female match to surfaces if we want a stable structure. You can see the top stone on the stack has a concave (yin) surface, and it fits nicely on the convex (yang) stone below it.
The one it’s sitting on has a double yang or convex shape, which I found to fit the yin surface below it. If you look at the surfaces of rock five and rock six (counting from the top of the stack down), you see concave on concave.
These stones aren’t balancing on their yin-nature, they are standing on each other the way chair legs stand on the floor. This kind of mating is tricky because the stones are hard to stabilize and can shift and slide quite easily if they are made of smooth, hard rocks.
By playing with stones and making things out of them, you learn a tremendous amount about the basic of relationships! You find that some surfaces and/or stones simply just don’t work well together for creating some projects. You also learn which one’s do. Sound applicable to human relationships? The more you practice, the more you learn to bend the rules, which takes more and more skill.
Finding Balance
When stacking rocks, there are all the issues I’ve discussed above to consider, as well as others. For example, the bigger the rock you want to incorporate, and the higher up you want to place it, the stronger you need to be!
The more out of conformity the stacking surfaces are, the more carefully balanced the stones must be or they simply fall over. Therefore, to create structures like the one you see here, you must be strong enough to pick them up, carry them, raise them to the right point in your creation, and!hold them delicately while you balance them!
Trust me when I tell you, this combination of the need for strength, endurance and delicate balance is very tough to maintain for any length of time. The stack you see here only has 4 rocks in it, yet it took me several hours to build. Why, because it kept falling over!
You can’t really appreciate how tricky this stack is from this camera view. The red flat stone is only resting on a surface about the size of a nickel below, and the stone on top weighs about 90 pounds. It is resting on a point not much bigger than a pencil eraser. To move the top stone is very hard because if there’s even a tiny bit too much drag, it will throw off the balance of potentially all the stones below it and fall down.
I got a tremendous amount of joy and knowledge from building and watching this particular stack for a very special reason. If you look up in the sky, you see the moon. I watched carefully day by day for a couple months because I noticed that depending on where the moon was at, it influenced the lean of the top stone.
You can see light coming between the stone surfaces of the top and second stone from the top. From other angles, you can only see a sliver of light. I noticed that the size of that sliver of light changed at different times of the day.
I also noticed that the position of the moon on the horizon changed as the month progressed, which changed the basic lean of the rock as the weeks went by. It was very exciting to have a real-time experience of the moons influence on the mass and balance of the stones and really highlighted how the moon is definitely strong enough to pull on water and create tides.
Exercise!
Here you see me in my garden building the base of what would become a giant meditation seat. The rock I’m lifting here probably weighs about 300+ pounds. This is massively more challenging than lifting that weight in a gym on a barbell. The rocks are hard to hold onto. The ground is ever-changing. There is little room to move if you loose balance or fall.
This kind of lifting requires absolute concentration, focus, awareness, and balance. YOU CAN GET HURT EASILY AND BADLY! I’ve left my share of blood in my garden too! I don’t normally wear shoes or gloves, but I learned the hard way, particularly when lifting granite stones, that protection is preservation.
Once I get past the very heavy work, I strip down to bare feet and hands so I can feel the electromagnetics of the stones and interface more naturally and effectively with nature. Remember, shoe soles are insulators, cutting your out of the natural circuit created by earth, sky and sun.
If you look at the stack behind me, the bottom rock weights a good 400 pounds. Try getting that up the hill from the road and around the many other rock formations in my garden! Eat breakfast first!
The stones going upward range from about 150 pounds (2nd stone), to 200+ (3rd stone up from bottom), and the top stone weights about 80 pounds. Try getting them up, holding them directly over the center of gravity of not only the stone below, but the combined center of gravity of all the stones below, and you will have an entirely new definition of the term “work-out!”
As much as I love sharing this kind of exercise with people, unfortunately, it can be VERY dangerous. Your motor skills have to be highly developed. I’ve lifted rocks with people much bigger and potentially stronger than I am in the gym, yet they were always amazed that I could lift noticeably heavier stones, and hold and balance them than they could.
This often baffles them and they ask me why. The answer is simple: my life and athletic background have given me a very rich bio (life) motor (movement) profile.
Because of being raised on a farm and being involved in a wide variety of industrial environments and conditioning environments, my nervous system has learned a myriad of recruitment patterns. I’m also able to access a larger percentage of available motor units feeding any muscle or combination of muscles.
The result is that with a smaller, lighter body than many men in the gym, I can move heavier loads. Though some can lift heavier than me on a flat surface, like a gym floor, as soon as the environment becomes unpredictable, balance, coordination, and agility become their limiting factors and because I’ve developed those bio-motor abilities, I gain the advantage over them.
This is one reason I do so many single arm lifts with dumbbells, kettle-bells and club-bells as well as using a variety of lifting surfaces, such as BOSU balls, Swiss balls, and a variety of other surfaces.
If you want to enhance your bio-motor profile, I’d recommend you study and practice the many methods I share in my video series titled, “Strong ‘N’ Stable“, which shows how to mix Swiss balls with a variety of other modalities.
Well, I hope you now feel more comfortable. With this basic knowledge, you can really enjoy unbound play with stones and nature. The healing benefits are almost unlimited. That said, you will never know until you try!
I look forward to sharing something new with you tomorrow.
Enjoy your rock-stacking!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
