HELLO! Happy Monday!
I hope you all had a great weekend!
I spent the day Friday working with Jade Johnson, who many of you got the pleasure of meeting at the CHEK Conference (available now on DVD and audio! Order at: www.chekinstitute.com).
For those of you that don’t know Jade, she is a world class Olympic long jumper from London, England. Jade, and her Chek Practitioner, Warren Williams sought my help to prepare her for the upcoming Olympics in 2012.
Jade has suffered a series of debilitating back, neck, knee and other injuries in her career that were plaguing her ability to train and perform optimally.
After I met with Jade and Warren in Loughbourough, England at the Fit Pro conference earlier this year, I began working with Jade and Warren to help resolve her challenges and get her fit in body and mind for her best ever performance. This will be her third visit to the Olympics, which is impressive in itself.
I quickly identified that much of Jade’s inability to heal and perform optimally stemmed from challenges at the mental-emotional level of her being.
Jade lived through a very challenging childhood and adolescence, resulting in a competitive strategy that was quite draining for her to maintain.
I began her coaching by having her study my program titled, The 1-2-3-4 For Overcoming Addiction, Obesity and Disease (Available at www.ppssuccess.com).
Jade showed me her notes this weekend and I was very impressed to see how diligent she’s been with her studies and her practice of the materials. Great Job Jade!
Jade has made many significant advancements in her overall physical, emotional and mental health working with Warren Williams. I spent the day with her Friday to further the process the three of us have been working on for several months now.
OUR DAY TOGETHER
My intention for Jade was to share a variety of methods she can use in her own life to create as inner-calm. The ability to create stillness within one’s self is critical when there is so much activity around them and in their life that it becomes hard to think and feel clearly.
Those of us that emerged from tumultuous childhoods are most likely to carry potentially intense, externalized rhythms throughout our lives if we don’t become aware of the nature of our programming.
In such situations, we develop what I refer to as a survival strategy. Because we are hyper-sensitized to our childhood surroundings as a necessary means of knowing when to behave in such a way as to minimize pain, or to know when to run, it is common to carry that mode of self protection/expression throughout our lives indefinitely.
If a child’s home environment is also physically abusive, the child grows up constantly on the lookout for physical attacks, as well as emotional-mental abuse.
The result is a constant out-flowing of our internal resources; we become like a ship’s captain, attached to our radar screen, forever perceiving an impending storm. Just as it takes a lot of energy to run a radar, we can easily deplete ourselves to dangerous levels trying to keep our radar system up.
For a professional athlete, the cost of running the radar, when added to the energetic demands of training and competition, can be such that an energetic debt accumulates, leaving one in a state of chronic fatigue and adrenal exhaustion.
Naturally, with chronic fatigue, the power to run the radar diminishes. This typically leaves on feeling inner desperation.
This is particularly so with professional athletes because their identity, and their sense of safety and security in the world is often heavily linked to the athletic performances.
Though it is not uncommon for professional athletes to gain assistance from sports psychologists, the sports psychologists largely deal with the use of the mind as a means of enhancing performance.
Because (In my experience) they tend to focus on the athletes stated objective, and not on the underlying drivers or motives, many athletes only develop additional coping strategies.
Like taking Aspirin for a headache many be seen as a coping strategy for an athlete who must perform, but has a headache, the underlying cause of the headache is generally not addressed.
If the athlete gains more success using such coping strategies, without realizing it, they get further away from addressing the etiology and deeper into a coping strategy.
Jade and I have spent several hours exploring her childhood environment to identify her coping strategies. We found several key strategies she’d learned to employ and took steps to create the awareness she needs to be able to disengage from them.
The function of our visit Friday was to learn simple self-help strategies so she can learn to cultivate more yin, anabolic, healing and restorative energy. As you can imagine, it can be very scary for someone with a challenging childhood upbringing, who’s learned to convert inner-fear and the energy of anger into athletic success to begin developing a more holistic strategy late in their career.
Because Jade has suffered several significant injuries, and the emotional pain and letdown that goes with them (such as losing sponsorships), I feel it is essential that she begin mastering a more yin approach now, in advance of the Olympics.
The yin approach to athletic preparation can be scary for a yang-dominant performer because at their core, it feels as though their radar is shut off!
Morning
Our morning began with fasting. I often use what I call mini-fasts to allow the glands and organs a deeper rest than they get from a nights sleep alone.
We used the Yogi brand of tea called “Fasting” to keep our blood sugar level as we did our work together. This keeps the fast from being something that feels like slow hunger torture and allows the mind to stay focused.
We began our activities by creating a mandala for the day. As a means of teaching Jade how to access her intuition, I asked her to relax and trust that her soul would send messages to her through the images that spontaneously arose in her.
As you can see here, Jade drew a beautiful mandala. Though I can’t give you a full reading on her mandala in the space of a blog, there are some very significant symbols that emerged from her inner-world as messages to her.
The Dragonfly is a special insect that emerges from the water and becomes a master of the light. They are thought to be descendants of actual dragons, which may have inhabited the fairy realm. They often appear around people to signify a period of change emerging.
Ted Andrews (in his book, Animal Speak) suggests that this period of change generally lasts about two years, which is linked to the two year period the dragonfly spends as a water insect before becoming an airborne insect.
[amazon-product align=”left”]0875420281[/amazon-product]
It is very interesting to know Jade’s history and to both learn of her fascination with dragonflies and to see this image show up in her mandala.
When I first met Jade, literally within seconds of meeting her, I saw a very powerful dragon in her energy field and it had a white handled sword in her right hand, and a black handled sword in her right hand that were held across her heart.
When I would talk to her about anything to do with her pain, the dragon would open the swords into a “ready for action stance”. The dragonfly’s message of presence emerged later in the day.
I have lived in my current home in Vista for about eight years now. In that time, I’ve NEVER seen it rain at the same time the sun was out!
There were large, warm drops of rain falling from the sky (like you see in Florida), yet as you can see in the photo I took, the sun was shining brightly.
If you look into the sky between the tree and the roof of my garage, you can see spots of light that look like tiny, bright clouds – those are raindrops being illuminated by the sun. Notice also, that the beautiful light refraction pattern is largely missing in the top left quadrant of the photo.
Now look below at the mandala I drew to signify Jade’s day with me and notice that there is a vortex of energy I saw coming from her right upper quadrant moving down into her heart.
The symbols on her head were on her bandana. Notice the water colored blue vortex within the black vortex; black stands for transformation and water stands for flow, emotion, change, and the flow of life.
Notice that the sun is shining brightly on her at the same time and that there is a dragonfly sitting atop the rock stack I intuited that Jade and I would build together.
Notice the top of the rock stack in the pictures below and you will see the unique formation of the top-rocks Jade chose, which looks much like a dragonfly at the top of her stack!
The fish is an ancient symbol for life. It is also used in Christianity to symbolize Christ (which actually means One with ALL). The tai-chi symbol is often symbolized as a male and a female fish swimming after each other.
Jade’s fish is breathing bubbles of love (air element), while in water; again, the dragonfly is an insect that lives in water and transforms into an air being. J
ade’s flower has black pedals, with water-like blue in them; transformation and flow, going into her yin cycle of life.
The eye in the center is a surprising likeness to the Egyptian symbol of the Left Eye of Horus. The Egyptian priests went through two schools of training, one called the right eye and the other called the right eye.
The seven symbols that look like kites flying, I interpret to be her intuitive expression of her current use of self-energy in accordance with the chakras and their themes.
Jade, being half Jamaican, is naturally a sun-lover, and you can see the whole mandala is within the sun, which has a ring of black inside, representing her equal and opposite powers of yin.
MEDITATION HIKE
After we created our mandalas for the day, I took Jade into the hills for a slow walking meditation hike.
She did very well with that and seemed to really enjoy the experience. I was hoping we’d see some rattle snakes, but it may have been too cool for them yet.
STONEWORK
We spent a couple hours or so learning about relationships through rock stacking. I participated in the creation of Jade’s first stack, but only as a guide. Jade had to learn how to relate to the rocks herself and she learned very well and very fast!
It was so lovely to see the child emerge from her as she began this process.
If you look at the top of the photo of me next to Jade’s first stack, you can see that top stones, which have the impression of wings, like the dragonfly. It looks much more dragonfly-like if seen from the other side of the stack in my front yard; stacks look different from every angle.
MEALTIME!
Vidya left us some lovely wild king salmon and salad for the day. Jade took over in the kitchen when it was time to eat and as you can see, she crafted a couple beautiful plates of top quality organic food, which is all Vidya uses!
We both really appreciated the joy of eating. We ended up having our first meal of the day around 3:00 PM. What a joy it was!
QUEEN OF THE GARDEN!
Here you can see Jade enjoying the afternoon sun in my rock garden. She really loved being there and having fun creating with me.
She’s very fun to work with and really does everything I share with her wholeheartedly! What a joy to work with people that genuinely want to change and follow the teachings! Ah Ho Great Spirit!
CELEBRATING!
Here we are at the end of our day, celebrating the great experiences we shared throughout the day.
Jade stayed with Vidya and I for dinner before heading back to LA. She rekindled her artistic juices (she’s actually done some very amazing art I’ll share with you another time!) and learned simple ways to “get out of her head”, which was my dream for the day.
You are beautiful and amazing Jade!
I spent Saturday relaxing and slept quite a lot. I’ve been very busy for some time now and my body didn’t want to do anything but sleep, so sleep it was!
Yesterday I came to work to create new Monthly Messages and Q&A with Paul videos for www.chekconnect.com.
I’ve got a busy week, business as usual. But for today, I’m right here with you, and soon I’ll go into a series of meetings besides working to create a new exercise program for another client.
I hope you all have a lovely day today! I AM!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
