Good Wednesday to You!
I was as busy as a beaver yesterday getting all sorts of things done and coaching clients.
I had a nice pushing workout in the gym with Vidya and Rory.
I did a circuit of Swiss ball dumbbell bench presses (90 lbs x 4-7 reps) with clubbbell touch-backs (20 lbs each for 12-16 reps), followed by single leg push-jacks on the Swiss ball.
After a warm-up circuit, I did four rounds of this mini-circuit.
I left the gym feeling great and ready to finish the rest of my workday.
One thing I’d like to share this morning is that it really doesn’t take long in the gym a few times a week to keep your body looking and feeling great!
One of the reasons I share my training sessions with the detail I do is so that people can see that even someone as busy as I am can choose to keep themselves healthy without too much of a time commitment.
I can typically get into the gym, change, train, and get out of the gym in under 45 minutes.
If time is short for schedule reasons, I can create a circuit with higher reps per exercise and couple five exercises back to back followed by a 1:00 rest.
This format allows me to do about 20 sets in 21:00, resulting in a total gym time of a bout 30:00, including a cold shower to cap it all off.
Considering the health and vitality costs of not taking time to care for ourselves this way, this is a very efficient way to contribute to total health!
My tai-chi sessions continue to be very healing and enlightening.
Rory’s been out in the garden with me each evening getting some meditation in as well.
I’ve been slowly creating a new piece of art most evenings too. I often draw while watching a decent cop show in the evenings for the last hour before bed.
I find that drawing calms me for a good sleep better then most things I’ve tried, and it’s fun!
Give it a try!
RELATIONSHIP WITH SOURCE
Seeing and feeling God as unconditionally loving and supportive is the way I experience life – a totally joyful experience. I discard feelings of distrust, resentment, doubt, or anger towards God or Universal Intelligence, and my life works perfectly; I realize my ideal.
Ref: From the Universal Principles teachings of Arnold A. Patent
COMMENTARY:
I have spent a significant proportion of my life working on myself.
I’m very aware of how reading Universal Principles like the one’s I’m sharing here can trigger the ego to fluff about with all sorts of reasons why this isn’t real, true, or practical when one is caught in challenging life situations.
It is completely normal (but not natural) for people to have this reaction to spiritual growth opportunities that actually require that we face up to our creative power.
Certainly it would be lovely if God would simply pay off our bills, heal our challenging relationships, and cover the streets in rose pedals, but would that really help any of us grow into self-realized individuals?
Or would it just turn us into spoiled rotten little children that keep acting like children and expecting our loving parent in the sky to wipe our bottoms every time we mess our pants out of avarice and silliness?
In PPS Success Mastery Lesson 1. How To Find and Live Your Legacy, and in PPS Lesson 2. Self Mastery, I share a variety of techniques for mental-emotional self-management.
These methods have been very helpful for me over the years. I still use them successfully each day.
As I’ve progressively learned to manage my mind and emotions in one aspect of my life, inevitably, I get comfortable, pat myself on the back and the next thing you know, I’m finding myself getting agitated or irritated by someone over something.
I know then and there that I’m being shown where I still have old programming clouding my awareness.
When we find ourselves acting in ways that we know aren’t optimal, or in concert with Universal Principles, we have been given a very valuable gift of awareness.
If I can’t shake the experience, I find that going home at night and drawing what I feel and then meditating on it until I see how I can create beauty with it helps.
Once I see how I can take the image that depicts my own inner-conflict and add the colors and shapes that will transform the artistic expression into something that looks and feels beautiful to me, and do it, I feel a great shift within myself.
I have found that this practice has given me the skills to do this in my mind and make the transition more quickly.
I’ve learned over the years that often, when I’m feeling put-off by some event that it is often because, “I thought someone was saying this or that, but I wasn’t actually listening for their unmet need.”
Once I get past surface appearances and keep in mind that everyone is doing the best they can with the programming they carry, I can begin listening with the intention of truly understanding the need being expressed by the other.
Then, I can give them empathy, give myself empathy if needed, and seek to find a mutual resolution.
The process can be challenging because sometimes we have to admit that we were wrong in holding our often-rigid viewpoint.
But that is exactly what spiritual growth is all about. Becoming more than the sum of your individual, often spontaneous whims.
I can share, for sure, from my heart, that practicing the restructuring of your thoughts to align with Universal Principles is a very liberating practice.
After all, if we look at the things we spend out time doing day in and day out, we find that few of them are as essential as healing our mind!
As our mind heals, we often come to the realization that much of our pain emerges from doing all sorts of things we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe we have to do, yet, when our mind heals, we tend to become brave enough to do the things we need to do.
What we need to do more than anything is to learn to live and love fully.
Anything else is a distraction from what ultimately matters most in life, which is learning how to truly live fully.
Let’s Seize the Day Together!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
