Happy Tuesday To You!
Yesterday was peaceful and productive for me. The institute was closed, but Penny and I were here doing the many things we need to do to keep the business running effectively.
I spent a fair bit of time writing my blog because I feel that issues of raising children are becoming evermore important as we get further and further from nature and dangerously drunk on technology and instant gratification.
After that, I had a lovely heavy deadlifting session, which was preceded by infant development exercise.
When I lift weights, I prefer to start with infant development exercises. They activate the stabilizer systems of the body and prepare it for work very effectively.
This becomes more important as you acquire injuries and age!I’ve done my share of both ☺.
I spent the afternoon preparing to film my CHEK Connect Monthly Message and Q&A with Paul segments so I could get an early start with filming today while its quiet here.
I enjoyed another lovely morning and evening tai-chi session with the sun as well as some artwork by a nice fire.
I’m always amazed at how therapeutic art is for me after a busy day. I feel like the little boy in me gets to make an appearance. I’ve found it very helpful for reducing stress levels to allow my little boy to play as often as I can.
Otherwise, work becomes “work”!
ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM A “JOY IMBALANCE”?
Today, we are in an “instant gratification” culture. We want food fast, we want success fast, we want money fast, we want health fast, we want most everything fast.
As people’s lives have become more driven by and dependent upon technology, we’ve also become more use to the pace of our work and communications moving at the speed of technology.
Most of our use of advanced technology is either information based, or medically based; high technology is used in many industries as well, but most of us aren’t part of the process of creation – we just use what is created.
When we go from having not even a telephone but a hundred years ago to getting hundreds of communications a day, our tendency is to expect the rest of the world to respond just as quickly as an iPhone does.
The drug and medical industries have also been a big player in our expectations for instant gratification.
Today, a huge percentage of surgical procedures that once required people to stay in the hospital for days can be done as elective procedures that are often completed within a few hours.
For the past hundred years, the (very rich) pharmaceutical corporations have progressively programed world cultures to expect to feel better as quickly as you can take their magic pills.
The irony is, we keep taking them; but the pain keeps coming back because we aren’t looking at what actually caused the pain to begin with.
In my diagram above, the green zone represents a balanced flow of energies in our body-mind construct.
When we live a natural life in accordance with the six foundation principles of nutrition, hydration, sleep, breathing, thinking and movement, we are more likely to have the reserves and energy to manage our stressors effectively.
As we depart from balance (homeostasis/green zone), our body-mind must find ways to compensate. Where our mistakes or misgivings with regard to living naturally emerge, we feel emotional states that reflect the rising and falling of our internal energies.
If you look at my diagram as though you were looking up into the funnel of a tornado, you can imagine that as you move out of the green zone (the peaceful eye of the storm), things become more and more turbulent.
By the time your energy imbalance reaches the red zone, your thoughts, emotions and actions become very much like the outer aspects of the tornado’s funnel; shit is flying everywhere and destruction is the norm.
Each time we depart from the center (green zone), we place additional stressors on ourselves that must be compensated.
If we get into the yellow and red zones more frequently than our diet and lifestyle can compensate for, we begin a journey toward self-destruction!
Paradoxically, as we become more and more imbalanced, we tend to reach for drugs and quick fixes so we can keep living the way that created the problem in the first place.
When we remove the pain artificially, we remove our essential body-mind feedback mechanisms. We become like pilots flying blind in bad weather; imagine if your pilot became stressed in such conditions and medicated with alcohol or drugs!
Our natural state is one of well-being.
Well-being is a word that means we are in a state of natural balance; we are not overly happy, overly sad, overly tired, and we inherently feel good. We are most likely to feel safe and secure within our selves when in a state of well-being.
Well-being is a unique state because it doesn’t actually have an opposite. It is the essence of harmony in self-management, self sufficiency.
The Joy Imbalance
In my diagram above, you see a linear representation of the first diagram shown above.
This shows you the cyclical state of energy flow in our bodies, which is designed to match larger natural cycles, such as day/night, within which many smaller cycles are nested, such as breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Within each of these cycles, you can observe a yang phase of expanding energy coupled with contraction of resources coupled with a yin phase of contracting energy and expansion of resources.
These natural rhythms constitute the authentic flow of time in nature.
When we fail to meet our body-mind needs through the use of the six foundation principles outlined above, we go into energy/resource depletion.
As we pose more and more unnatural expectations upon ourselves, such as working when we are tired, we tend to need progressively longer periods of wind-down time in the evenings.
But if we have over-committed ourselves, or manage ourselves such that we are working against natural law, then we end up seeking false means of gratification.
The tired person that has over-committed themselves replaces rest and play with coffee and sugar, or other drugs and stimulants like five hour energy drinks – what if your five hour energy drink is consumed in the late afternoon, elevating your energy output and expending internal resources well into the yin (cool-down or unwinding) phase?
Then you don’t sleep well. Soon, people like this are taking yet another drug to try and sleep; many alternate between wind-up drugs and (false) wind-down drugs.
By the time awareness emerges as to the authentic source(s) of stress, most people have already journeyed deeply into a process that leads to death.
When we are living an imbalanced life, we first become fatigued and tend to get cranky. Then we begin fighting bouts of illness.
If we keep drugging and ignoring, we create a disease; the disease is usually so strong in it’s depressive tendencies that we are either forced to rest and look honestly at our choices, or we march toward the final stage, death.
In death, we can regain our energy and have time for plenty of self-reflection, but we can’t do anything about it.
Once we die, we can’t simply choose to do a better job and miraculously wake up in bed with love and empathy for ourselves and promise God we will do better if we are just given a second chance!
My message today is a call to “awareness” as to how you are creating joy in your life.
If you find yourself “in heaven” after drinking your coffee, smoking, our using any of a wide variety of drugs, it would be wise to come to the realization that most of the so-called “heaven drugs” are exceedingly “yang”.
Because our authentic state is homeostasis or functional balance, in order to restore balance from our “heaven drug experiences” we naturally have to go into a rebound; notice that your trip to heaven must be counterbalanced by a trip to hell of equal proportions.
But what do people do when they get use to being on heaven drugs, or using heaven toys (such as video games or surfing porn sites all day!) and they find themselves in a hell state (of needed recovery)? Well, they just reach for another heaven pill.
This only magnifies the magnitude of the initial deficit.
I find it interesting to listen to all the people and politicians criticizing each other over the issues of national deficit, yet, those doing the criticizing are frequently living their own lives in a way that mirrors governmental behavior!
Lao Tzu says in his teachings that the government always reflects the people.
But isn’t it funny that people in general keep over-spending, over-eating, under-exercising!and keep using fake methods to pretend to balance their deficit while Uncle Sam keeps printing fake money to do the same!
Creating Authentic Joy
It is essential at this time in human history that we return to a diet and lifestyle that reflects natural law.
The planet runs on natural law and one of those laws was taught to Newton by an apple tree; what goes up must come down with equal and opposite force!
The truth is, all states of imbalance or disease (in general) can be naturally corrected by a process of reverse engineering.
This is what it looks like:
- If you are under-exercising, exercise more and notice how much better you feel. This is the experience of authentic joy, which has or needs no opposite.
- If you are over-eating, eat less; under-eating, eat enough. Notice the authentic joy, the sense of ease and self-sufficiency that emerges. It has no opposite.
- If you are sleeping too little, sleep more. Notice when you wake up after a good nights sleep how much more alive and fresh your body-mind is.
Once you experience that state, it’s not a good idea to keep drinking all the coffee and eating all the sugar you were merely out of habit! If you live a natural sleep-wake cycle, your new joy will have no opposite.
- If your breathing is fast and shallow, you are in a classic stress response. Try dong some yoga and learning how to breath with your diaphragm. Try some tai-chi or qi-gong. There are thousands of videos available and many of them are free on youtube.com! Your breathing reflects your actual energy state, as well as your mental-emotional state.
If it is out of balance, you can often make instant corrections by monitoring your breathing and restoring the full breath to your body. This form of joy has no opposite.
- Thinking drives all our actions, and according to masses of sound research in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, our thinking affects literally every function of our cells, right down to the moment to moment biochemical interactions.
If your head is full of stinkin-thinkin, how can you expect your emotional state to be any different since it is the result of your biochemistry, which is the result of your thinking; your thoughts are exemplified in your choices.
If you want help mastering your thinking, I’d suggest you consider my program titled, The 1-2-3-4 For Overcoming Addiction, Obesity and Disease, or PPS Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 (see products and services section of www.ppssuccess.com).
When you learn to create joy through balanced thinking, you learn to create a joy that needs no opposite.
That’s a very peaceful way to exist. That’s also why I do the things I do to care for myself.
- Nutrition is a word that means “essential resources”. If you aren’t getting the essential resources needed to maintain a balanced state of body-mind, you will know it because you will have symptoms, such as anxiety, fatigue, mood swings, hormonal imbalances, bodily aches and pains, poor sleep quality, poor sexual performance, mental cloudiness and confusion!etc.
If you are eating anything other than an organic, whole-food diet, you are inviting the need for a balancing act that can’t be created by any doctor, nor their drugs.
It can’t be addressed through the use of recreational drugs either.
You will find that when you truly eat well, you become more patient, clear, rational, functional and harmonious in every way.
This form of health has no opposite – this is living in the green.
My book How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! and my audio/workbook program titled, You Are What You Eat! can give you just the educational support you need to begin creating authentic joy in your life.
More importantly, as you follow the principles of natural law, you find that your natural sense of humor, creativity, sexual energy and desire for intimacy all return.
As long as you live the way Mother Nature designed you to live, you will experience no opposites.
If you do, they will just be temporary set backs and won’t be a big deal because you know how to create authentic joy and are willing to do it.
Here’s to a joy with no opposite!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
