Happy Monday!
I hope you all had a lovely weekend or rest and rejuvenation.
Though I had Friday scheduled as a day off, I chose to come to work and catch up on filming deadlines. It was gratifying to be able to complete these projects without schedule pressures.
Most of my work is artistic, creative work, be it writing, filming, or planning new courses and course updates or cultivating new ways to help myself and others heal. As some of you will know from your own experience (particularly the artists and musicians), deadlines and schedule pressures are a real dampener to the creative impulse and natural flow.
I often choose to come to my office on weekends when it’s quite and I’ve got no schedule pressures to let my creative juices flow at their natural pace. I did get a massage and have a steam Friday and that helped free my body-mind quite a bit. There’s no replacement for taking care of ourselves once we have a legacy; we realize we are the epicenter of our own creations and contributions and therefore, must value ourselves to the degree that we value our Chief Dream.
UNWINDING
We all have bodies that succumb to our ever thought. Every thought produces thought-action within our body-mind; the body fully believes our thoughts as real to the very degree that we do.
If our thoughts are negative, derogatory, fear-based, they are divisional; they break us up, creating a self and another. When the “other” person, place or thing is believed to be a threat to our own ideas of self, we become focused on what we don’t want.
To the degree that we embody such thoughts, the body armors itself as needed to deal with the perceived threat or enemy. Most people’s minds are so externalized – constantly looking for and defending against their self-perceived threats that they can never relax. This leads to adrenal exhaustion quite quickly.
Most people today try and address such physical maladies with pills, patches, hormone supplements, drugs and the like. But can any such patch-technology authentically address a problem that originates in our own thinking about ourselves and others?
On the weekends, I often spend a fair bit of time honoring my body’s needs for balance. I often lay flat on the ground or the stone floor in my healing room and allow myself to fall into a trance of self-awareness.
From there, I invite my body to show me what it needs. Most often, my body guides me into positions where there is some kind of muscle, connective tissue, joint or organ discomfort. I simply allow my body-mind to guide me.
What emerges is a combination of patient stretching, breathing and moving combined with the emergence of positions that often represent the exact positions in which I’ve caught heavy weights while training in the gym or in my rock garden. The fascia has memory and to the degree that it remembers to hold on to create stability, it continues to hold that pattern in case it is needed in the future.
The more we perform any such movement, be it a posture due to our mental-emotional expression, a position of exertion, or the position of an injury, the more rigid the tissue-memory becomes. If we aren’t careful, these facial windings can capture our inner-light, creating a form of physical, emotional and mental bondage.
If you think of your body as a mirror that reflects the light of Self, once it is distorted, we perceive our perceptions of Self in and as distorted-self. The ego loves to externalize it’s judgments and project them onto others.
If we aren’t careful, without realizing it, we begin making excuses and/or blaming others for our discomfort. Such behavior stems from a lack of self-Awareness.
Our body-mind is the only instrument we truly have 100% responsibility for, and control of. If we don’t accept responsibility for the gift of our life-vehicle, then at one-and-the-same-time, we’ve rejected the gift of life itself.
When we worship life, we create life. When we don’t worship life, we invite death. Is that really a good idea to energize before you are even aware of who you are? Who’s dying? Could you possibly know yourself better after life than you do in life when your mind becomes your body at death?
In the image above, you see me holding a glass bottle of evian water over one of my injuries. Water is extremely yin, and therefore highly effective at absorbing excess yang energy.
I create special water in my stone generator, which increases yin qualities that help me when I’m in need of cooling or rest. When you hold water in a glass bottle over any point of inflammation, the water absorbs the hot, red energy while nourishing your energy field with cooling, yin energy.
If there is any significant emotional pain attached to the site you use the water to help you heal, I suggest you ask the plants in the area if they would like to use that water and chaotic energy to create with.
The plant kingdom has the power to ground any of our chaotic energies and produce life with it. It’s polite to ask before you dump the water though, otherwise, it’s kind of like being a man standing at a urinal and having the guy next to you pee on your foot. We survive the event, but it isn’t something we are likely to sign up for twice ☺. Elicit is the word here.
Here you can see me sitting in my rock garden drawing. Many people have a hard time meditating, but don’t realize they simply haven’t found the meditation style that works for their individual personality or needs.
Typically, the busier the mind, the more active the meditation one needs to create a still-point. I love using art as a meditation because I love feeling what occurs within myself as I explore my visions with shape and color. I can feel myself being balanced or imbalanced with the choice of any color or shape. I hold the vision of the shape or line I’m about to make, then hold the pen I feel is the right color to use for that particular expression.
If my body-mind feels more calm or balance, I know I’m making the right choice and I continue. There are days like Saturday where I’ll sit and draw like you see me doing here for the whole day. I’ll stop now and then to eat, exercise, pee in the garden and share with the plants or take nap.
When I’m drawing, hours and hours can go by in what feels like just a few minutes. I forget about all the issues of the world, of expectations, schedules and all the follies that pull us out of our center. By being centered and present only with exactly what’s in front of me, I learn the truth of mind, which is that your perception is as real is real gets.
When I’m in a state of unbound play, my perception is that that is what life really is, and that it is our ego-mind that keeps the game more complicated than it rally is or needs to be.
This is the drawing I spent my weekend creating. It represents the reality of life and death. The big bird represents the bird Over-Soul. The two little birds (female left, male right) represent the two polarities of mind, of which all creation emerges.
The ZERO point in the lower of the Over-Soul’s abdomen region represents Unconditional Love or Consciousness, which can only be conscious of itself. Zero = 1 (Universe); 1 is expressed as yin or negative 1 and yang or positive 1. 0+ -1 + +1= 3, which makes up the Holy Trinity of Body, Mind and soul, which spirit mediates as transformation.
The birds represent a metaphor for the creative principle behind all creation. The Over-Soul’s red crown represents safety in the Truth of SELF and the bottom chakra represented as the ZERO-Point exemplifies enlightenment. The ability to live without attachment to (people, places and) things; people and places become things to the degree that we try to control them!
Here you can see my garden as it looks today. After all the drawing and body balancing, I needed some good physical exertion to enliven the system and get some androgens flowing. If you look to the left of my meditation seat, which is in the center of the stone circle closest to you, you see two stacks. One is being covered by the tree a little.
My weekend rock art project is the stack connected to the circle. We had more people stopping by to take photos of the rock garden this weekend. It’s so fun to listen to their conversations when they stop and look. People are genuinely moved by expressions of creative love, I assure you.
I’ll be doing some more filming and prep work as I get ready to travel to teach HLC 2 next week and present at Can Fit Pro in Toronto shortly thereafter.
I’m continue writing the updates for my How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! book as well. I suspect I’ll make my way to the gym and sweat it up some too.
I hope you all have a lovely day. I’ve just put up a new video on my youtube account sharing the highlights of the upcoming CHEK Conference 2011. Feel free to watch it right here!
Hope to see you all at the conference and that you all have a lovely day today!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
