and “MEALS THAT HEAL” by Karen Maidment
Happy Wednesday to You!
I had a beautiful day yesterday. I was busy as usual, but took the day off from weight lifting to do some rock stacking out in nature. It felt AWESOME!
In the photo above, you can see a little Stone Buddha I created right outside Vidya’s office window so she has company when she is working.
I’m excited to share many of the inner-sensing methods and creative exercise methods I use in our next zen In The Garden workshop, March 9 here at my amazing new location! We will have a notice in the next few days on my PPS website so that if you like to join us you can register.
Danny Way and his beautiful girlfriend, Rochelle came to visit Vidya and I and see our new location. It was great to see them both.
Danny is taking lessons to get his helicopter pilot’s license and he figures he can land his helicopter in my turn-around area at the house, so I’m looking forward to that! I doubt there’s ever been a helicopter landing on our property here, so something cool and novel like that would be fun. I’ll be sure to get some photos when he lands!
“MEALS THAT HEAL” by Karen Maidment
Though there are an incredible number of cook books and recipe books available that claim to be healthy in orientation, a great number of them use and promote methods and products that contradict the proposed offering by the book titles or authors marketed intentions.
Karen Maidment is a Chek Holistic Lifestyle Coach from England who recently released her own book titled, Meals That Heal – Anti-inflammatory Healthcare.
The book is beautifully written, laid out, and is full of great color photos. She has done an outstanding job of providing excellent information on what to use, and how to prepare excellent, healthy meals.
I highly recommend this book for anyone with gut sensitivity, gluten intolerance, inflammatory conditions, and particularly for parents wanting a great resource they can use to create wholesome meals for their family.
“Fantastic Job Karen!” Your book is beautiful and I’m proud to know my students are producing such a high caliber of education for the public!
To learn more about Karen’s book or order it, go to her website: www.endibsnaturally.com
USING YOUR CREATIVE ABILITIES FOR EFFECTIVE CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE
I began sharing my knowledge and experience of the change process two blogs ago with a discussion of how to create motive for change. In yesterday’s blog, I share tips for how to create the energy needed for effective change.
Today, I’d like to share some insight into using your creative abilities for effective change in your life.
How well people go through any change process has a lot to do with their living philosophy. Most people today (about 85%) claim some religious affiliation. In my observation, people’s willingness and ability to change is either facilitated, or inhibited by the beliefs they embody.
It is important to be clear moving forward in my dialogue on change today, what your mind is:
MIND: An embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information.
Daniel J. Siegel, MD
In all my years of study in the field referred to as Science Of Mind, Dr. Siegel’s description of mind is the most accurate and complete I’ve ever found.
What’s particularly relevant and valuable is that Dr. Siegel is a psychiatrist with extensive training and a career of research into human behavior, relationships, and the change process.
His integrative work is now being embodied by mainstream medical professionals, and is the tip of the evolutionary sword in integrative medical sciences today; that means there is hope for the medical system after all!
Whenever we interact with ourselves, or others, our internal dialogue and our actions or lack-thereof, reflect our embodied processes that regulate the flow of energy and information within our own body-mind.
Those that have a hard time with change (even when it is seriously needed) are typically driven by conscious or unconscious fear-based ideologies.
Most of the religious programing, and social programming in the world today (and in the past 2-3 thousand years or more) is based on creating control of others by instilling fear (The Wrath Of God!do this or else!) in people.
An observation I’ve made along the way in my development as a person and therapist is that the same people that fear and resist change in their lives, generally have no problem implementing, or inflicting change upon others.
This may be a way they begin learning to change in a way that feels safer to them.
Having counseled and coached an untold number of people from all walks of life through the change process (including myself), I’ve come to see and realize fully that we are all endowed with an incredible amount of untapped creative energy.
Whenever we create anything in relation to ourselves, others, places or things, we are using the creative principle to implement change. We do this most easily when the change process isn’t threatening to who we think we are, or what we think we possess…
I can deface your God, but you can’t deface my God!
I can change your schedule at work, but you shouldn’t try and change mine!
I can have extramarital affairs, but my spouse can’t!I can back into your car, but God bless you should you back into my car!…
I’m guilty of this behavior myself. Countless times, I’ve felt threatened when someone wanted to change something I’ve created, change my job position, take something away I wanted to have, etc.
I’m just happy that I’ve matured in my life to be conscious of my judgments and follow them to their source so I can evaluate the root-ideas driving my judgments.
Today, I’d like to share some of the approaches to the change process that have been helpful to me in hopes that they will be helpful you too, since we are all in this project we call “life” together.
Here you can see me lifting one of my students who is 6’8″, 245 pounds large. I used to do these kind of lifting stunts all over the world, on radio shows, in front of TV cameras, and the likes.
At that time in my personal and professional development, I was still in need of constant inner-reassurance that I was safe, strong, and that I could physically represent my teachings.
It was important to me to demonstrate the benefits of my teachings objectively, in a way that others couldn’t deny. Well, it worked for many years and attracted a wide range of students to my programs.
It wasn’t until late one evening when Penny and I had just landed in England to give a series of lectures and workshops that I got a serious wake-up call from Great Spirit! A few young men came to me as I was entering the hotel we were staying at and pleaded with me to lift one, or all of them over my head so they could get some photos.
I was at the end of a long tour, was badly jet-lagged, very tired, and every fiber of my being told me “NO, don’t do that. Go get some sleep!
My social-ego was talking back to me with words like, “come on Paul. You can do it. Don’t let these young guys down. They may become students if they can see that their prospective teacher is as strong as they want to be!”
So, foolishly, I gave it a try.
I told the young man that stepped up first that he must hold his body rigid, even when overhead, or I won’t have anything to hold onto and may drop him.
Well, sure enough, I threw him up in the air like a hay bail. Just as his weight was coming down toward my head, he got scared and buckled. All his 165 pounds came down on my head with tremendous damaging force. My head was violently forced to the right and my C6/7 disc was exploded!
I ended up with a severe spinal instability, a central disc bulge, and my entire left side was shut down, weak, and went numb!
This day was the beginning of a solid seven-year rehab program I had to design and implement for, and on myself. How, you may wonder, is this relevant to the discussion of change today!
I’ll tell you! In the next eight weeks, I could barely handle the weight of my own left arm. Wearing a watch was enough weight to trigger constant pain. I couldn’t even carry my computer case with me without serious neurological problems.
I couldn’t do much in a gym but look at weights and salivate. I was restricted to Swiss ball training, infant development exercises, and pure rehab exercises and related mobilization and centralization techniques; I watched the muscle fall off my body like leaves in fall.
I lost 24 pounds of muscle in eight weeks. People thought I was either under severe stress, or that I was sick. Some even spread rumor that I may have cancer or something.
I had to face every idea I had of myself as a strong man, an athlete, a leader, and the list went on and on inside me. It was as though I was the most naked I’ve ever been, and at times, it was scary.
I had to go deep within myself to find the resources to maintain my composure. I had to reinvent my self-identity. I also spent thousands of hours mastering infant development exercises and re-mastering all the corrective exercises and rehabilitation sciences I teach, and am very proficient at providing for others.
This scary, painful, debilitating experience opened me up to all sorts of hidden programming I was unaware of within myself. Through the process, I found many ways to teach my course materials better. I found new ways to help people in pain.
I found that I had the ability to reinvent myself to be more congruent with who I needed to be to fulfill my legacy and my spiritual philosophy; I had many conversations with God, so-to-speak; not a religious God, but the GOD that can’t be known as this or that, can’t be described in words, but clearly lives in me (and you).
I learned that in the future, I don’t need to prove what I already know. I learned, more fully than I’d ever have expected to, to follow my own teachings regarding “I” before “WE”, and “WE” before All; meaning we must love and care for ourselves first and foremost because we can’t authentically give to others what we don’t have.
I also learned to let go to the process because as scary as it is, there is always something beautiful tucked inside it if you are willing to look for it!
The key message in this sharing with you is that you never know what beauty is attached to your situation until you stop looking at what you’ve lost or think you “don’t have” and focus on what you are, or may gain.
Once I made peace with myself, the light of love began to shine through what initially looked like a long dark tunnel leading to nowhere I thought I wanted to be.
Tai-chi has been an incredible blessing in my life.
I, and all human beings are endowed with incredible creative energy. I personally have such a creative, inventive mind that it’s like trying to ride six horses at once most days.
I have had many challenges in my life because people that I hire can’t keep up with my creative out-flow and I have often been frustrated because after creating, writing, and filming, my projects would just pile up; today I have at least six or more books I’ve written by hand that are just sitting there due to funding and time constraints!
I have been trained by monks in the meditative arts and practiced them since I was 15, but I found seated meditation more like slow torture than meditation up until I was about 45.
In the early part of my research and development for my book, How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy!, I was studying and practicing medical Qi-going and was really impressed with the inner experiences and changes I was experiencing.
I felt compelled to dig deeper into the soft arts so I could share the healing benefits I was experiencing with people more effectively.
That lead me to study many books on the topic. During my research, I found that a legitimate tai-chi and Qi-gong master (Master Fong Ha. See www.fongha.com) lived in San Francisco.
I contacted him and asked if I could come visit him and learn from him. I flew there to meet him and he first gave me a gong (100 day practice) of zhan zung (Standing Like A Tree), then he introduced me to the tai-chi ruler technique.
I did multiple gongs with that method and gained tremendous inner-healing and calming of my mind. These powerful tools allowed me to deeply explore my own belief system and upgrade it to one that was more congruent with the realities I saw all around me.
Why I’m sharing this with you here is because these methods (which are very easy!), opened the doors to effective change in my life.
These methods gave me the inner-strength and stability to handle the magnitude of the growth pains and challenges I’d created for myself by starting and running an educational institution with my wife, and the many other (sometimes challenging!) people involved.
I learned to use and manage my creative life-force energies much more efficiently and effectively, and I continue to grow in that regard day by day.
For those of you that feel this kind of approach may be useful in your own efforts to become more comfortable with, and capable of changing, I’ve made seven of the methods I use available for the public on my Dr. Quiet audio recording, which is available to you from www.ppssuccess.com
Open Mindedness:
Above, you can see me in a workshop on the Egyptian light-bodies with Rowena Kryder. Rowena Kryder is an extraordinary woman. She is a highly skilled artist, shaman, musician, builder, and has an extensive mastery of physical and metaphysical sciences.
Her work is undeniable and extraordinary in every sense of the word.
It was through Rowena Kryder that I first practiced mandala therapy, which opened me up as much as tai-chi, Qi-gong, meditation, and shamanic healing studies and practices.
Being open-minded is essential as a means of exploring and mastering your creative energies, which are the energies involved in all change processes.
In the photo, you can see me participating in a class exercise. The exercise was to play instruments and/or use your voice to express “your song or tune”.
After we all did this, she used numerology and astrology to identify our musical sequence and she played each of us on her piano.
Everyone in the class expressed amazement that when they heard her play “their song” that they felt something move in them, or felt an inherent harmony with their song.
I seek out people like Rowena Kryder that are living examples of possibility, change, growth, development and spirituality.
An essential part of change is having an open mind, getting out of “your box”. Remember, you can’t untie a box from inside it.
If your life has become painful or challenging, you have created a box for yourself.
If you truly want healing, growth and spiritual growth and development, you must be brave enough to get outside your own box, untie it, and start cleaning house.
It can be scary, but you are likely to be amazed at who you become through the process!
You can learn more about Rowena Kryder at: www.creative-harmonics.org
An exercise I often use for myself and others is to draw your pains and fears. Don’t “think about it”, just draw what you are feeling. Once you’ve done that, stand back and look at your pains and fears on paper.
Then, when you feel you have the insight and/or foresight to create beauty out of what you’ve drawn, begin adding colors, shapes and whatever comes as a means of practicing the conversion from ugly-don’t want to beautiful-do want.
This exercise has helped me heal and grow tremendously in my life and I’ve helped many others with it.
The photo above is the beginning of that process from a healing session I had with a friend of mine. After the experience, he had many insights into his own mind and behaviors and has grown from it; I grew by being part of the process too.
With practice, you will learn that all that looks and feel ugly or painful in your life is but the foundation for change.
Just as you can choose to leave your (life) drawing ugly or create changes that are in harmony with your dream, you can more easily learn and gain confidence in the process on paper.
After all, if you don’t like what you’ve drawn, you can always toss it in the fire and start again! That’s what the Universe does every day!
As OSHO beautifully says, “You can’t be a star unless you are willing to play with fire!”
Physical Change:
Here you can see me assessing and treating the temporomandibular joint of Helen Peach, during CHEK Level 3 in Sydney, Australia. Helen, like many of my students, has had to work through her own physical challenges.
The secret when going through physical challenges is to learn from them.
Each physical ailment we create for ourselves is an opportunity to learn to manage our creative potential more effectively, as I’ve highlighted above with my own story.
When we get injured or suffer illness, we are being guided and directed to the people and places that will open us to new and greater possibilities for ourselves.
When you go for skilled help, the most important thing you can do is keep an open mind and do what your therapist or coach suggests.
The number of people with ailments that see professionals like myself, only to sit there and argue with the therapist, doctor or coach about why they are wrong, and/or who don’t follow the program is very high.
This is the very nature of dogmatic thinking and behavior that keeps people stuck in illness, pain and disease indefinitely, even though they keep going from expert to expert, doctor to doctor!
It is a common sign of closed-mindedness.
When you have a problem like this, you are being given an opportunity to see and feel what you’ve created with “your choices.”
Take advantage of the experience. Ask good questions. Choose therapists and doctors that exemplify the level of health and intelligence you aspire to, not the ones that are the cheapest, or most easily accessible.
Remember, just as David Scharps beautifully highlighted with his movie title, The Cure Is….!
Sorry for the long-winded blog today.
My soul speaks through my fingers and doesn’t seem to care much about time schedules.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
