Happy Tuesday to You!
I hope you are all enjoying your day.
I hope you enjoyed seeing yesterday’s blog, highlighting our recent zen In The Garden Workshop too. We had one of the most enjoyable days in my teaching life I’ve had. The students were all beautiful, intelligent people who came with open minds and hearts.
Vidya and I feel grateful we got to share ourselves and this beautiful land with all of you! We hope to see you (and your friends and family) at our next zen In The Garden Workshop, Saturday, May 25, which we will officially announce soon via PPSSuccess!
I had a busy, but beautiful day yesterday working with my coaching clients and Penny and I had a great business meeting too. It was lovely to have Penny here. She cooked Josh (my guest) and I a great lunch and she enjoyed the beautiful scenery here.
For my workout, I went out to my newly created “Bull Pen”, where I carefully cleaned the grounds of sharp objects so I can lift my biggest stones in bare feet. Being bare footed as often as possible is a very simple, effective way to activate your postural muscles and improve your overall balance; more on that below.
I created a big stack with two horizontal shelves from large stones. It was some great heavy lifting with lots of balancing opportunities. The sun was out, the hawks were demonstrating their aerial acrobatics, and all was beautiful.
Earlier in the morning yesterday, I was looking out the window as I was making my morning tea and saw a pack of 6 coyotes hunting. They were big strong coyotes, about the size of a German Sheppard. They had a little one with them and they were teaching it how to hunt for rabbits.
It was cool to watch them running through the grass with their noses down. All the sudden, they’d dart off in a sharp zig zag chasing the rabbits.
It’s fun to watch nature at work; don’t worry, there’s LOTS of rabbits around here for them to eat without causing any rabbit shortages.
BALANCE YOUR BODY TO BALANCE YOUR MIND
Today, I’d like to share some of my wisdom with regard to the far-reaching benefits of balancing your body.
Your body is a living reflection of your mind – your choices. Those that choose to have a healthy, functional relationship with their bodies have bodies that reflect their choices; they have a functional, healthy body.
Because of the nature of mental programming, people often find it harder to change their thoughts than to change their body. This is largely because the average person’s ego is constructed largely of other people’s ideas.
The “other people” in general are what we call:
1. Our family
2. Our society
3. Our nation, and
4. Our culture.
When we decide we want to change our beliefs and the related behaviors, we often find ourselves facing an onslaught of unexpected resistance from within ourselves, and from others who have judgments of us around such changes.
If our ego has not matured to the point of self-reliance, our innate tendency is to gain our sense of self from others. Naturally, the opinions and judgments of your family tend to weigh the most heavily on our judgment faculty.
That said, there are some who are less concerned about what their parents and siblings think than the people on their sports team(s), in church groups, palls, or at the dance hall they frequent.
Either way, the real challenge to the ego-self arises when you decide to do something that is different than what they (your influences) do.
You may have found out that gluten containing grains cause you to bloat, be gassy, swollen, tired, and cause low back pain and constipation for you.
You may have made a firm decision to exclude them from your diet.
You may be well on your way to looking and feeling much better, only to end up at a family dinner, a friends party, or a church meeting!Someone offers you some Lasagna, homemade chicken noodle soup, a piece of cake, a doughnut, or a beer!all of which contain gluten.
You say, “No thank you, I’m on a gluten free diet.” You’d think that would be enough, but no. Often not!
Now, your mother may be giving you a grilling, saying something like, “I can’t believe there’s anything wrong with grains. We’ve all eaten them for thousands of years. After all, we raised you eating them and you turned out pretty good, don’t you think?”
That is often just the door opener to what can, and often does become a long, protracted “show” whenever you go home. The same scenario can be played out in the bar with your buddies grilling you because now you want to drink Japanese or Korean beers that are made of rice and don’t have gluten in them.
Sooner than you’d like, you are sabotaging your own program to fit in. To avoid the pain of separation that emerges from being different.
When it comes to changing our bodies, we have far less problems due to family or social resistance. We all generally love to look at beautiful bodies. Your parents love to see their genes thriving, so if you look great and they don’t know you aren’t eating gluten any longer, and think it’s all exercise, now you have an easier time with them and others.
When we change our bodies toward balance, we have at once improved the functions of our body-mind construct as a whole. As a metaphor, anything you can do to improve your car’s performance characteristics (body), improves the driving experience (mind).
As you can see from my diagram above (if you click on it, it will expand), there are many formative forces involved with the development of your posture.
Posture is a word that describes the state of a person’s body balance. If you have “good posture,” you are displaying symmetry, which is a sign of harmony and improves survivability through efficiency.
This is important to understand because there are A LOT of people out there who get confused as to why their posture doesn’t improve with all their exercise efforts.
If you are exercising regularly, and correctly, but are not improving your overall body-balance or posture, it could well be one or a combination of the other influencing factors outlined in the diagram above.
Start Where Change Comes Easy For YOU!
In the diagram above (also on p.100 of my book How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! with psychological correlations on p.101), you can see the main issue, nerve plexus (functional groupings) and glands, and related functions for each of the chakras or energy centers in our body-mind construct.
The colors attributed to each chakra and the key sounds are simply expressions of the type and nature of energy that is produced by, and nourishes those body-mind regions.
Just as you may have a pocket tape recorder that plugs into the wall, but has a transformer that steps down the 120 volt wall socket power to 5 volts for the delicate circuitry in your pocket tape player, each region of your body (and the glands, organs and tissues associated with it in my diagram) has it’s unique energy type, charge and frequency.
If you have balanced inward flow of our creative sex energies (yin-yang balance) (cultivation) and outward flow (utilization), your body-mind orientation will reflect itself in your overall posture and body balance; you can have a fat person or skinny person that has good structural alignment, but that doesn’t reflect well-being, or body-mind balance.
Here you can see an example of balanced energetic body-mind relationships. The chakras or energy centers in the front of your body represent “desires”, while the chakras on the back of your body represent your use of will, taking action. This person will be both well grounded within themselves, yet, open-minded.
Here you can see a typical example of body-mind imbalance. This is what many of my patients and clients look like when they come to see me for help.
As a therapist with knowledge of these body-mind energy centers and what they represent, it’s pretty easy for me to assess what’s going on in their life before they even start talking.
Some people with this form of imbalance have worked diligently with exercise, stretching, mobilization, seen doctors and therapists, but aren’t improving any longer. In such cases, it’s most always one of four things that have been overlooked:
1. Self-generated mental-emotional stress; often due to prior programming and habitually acting out their parents or influential programmers ideas, even when it hurts!
2. A lack of understanding of the influences of their diet, hydration, and general lifestyle choices.
3. A fungus or parasite infection. This is common among about 90% of the world population and very poorly understood or addressed by the medical community at large.
I’ve coached many elite athletes that were doing most things well, but couldn’t seem to heal and perform optimally, regardless of what doctors and therapists offered them as help.
Once the fungal and parasite infection is addressed, they make rapid changes and often express frustration that these problems were overlooked by so many of the doctors and therapists they’d seen.
This is such a huge, wide-spread problem, I created a series of 4 DVD’s titled, Healing Fungal and Parasite Infections – The Absolute Essentials. The program is holistic, complete, and has essentials everyone should know, including children.
I developed the program so that it could be understood by the average 12 year-old, yet contains gems that even the most astute clinician can use immediately to help people and themselves. If you want to learn more, click here: www.chekinstitute.com
Most people are relatively unaware of what is inside and around their spinal column and the essential importance the spine has in organizing movement. The spinal column is home to:
1. Your central nervous system via your spinal cord.
2. A vast array of arteries and veins that serve the deep, essential tissues of the spine and nervous system.
3. Lymphatic vessels that help keep the body clean and support the immune system.
4. Essential meridians that conduct chi, or life-force.
5. The nerve roots exiting the spinal column to feed organs, muscles and tissues.
If you think of what happens to the flow through a hose when you kink it, you will have a good idea why martial arts masters, tai-chi, and Qi-gong masters all teach the long-spine posture, also referred to as axial extension.
By looking at my chart of correspondences above, you can see what functions will be affected if anything is disrupting optimal flow of energies and fluids through your spinal column. Anything causing you structural deformation and pain in your spinal column is likely to produce symptoms in your head, face, and extremities, depending on exactly where the challenge lies anatomically.
TO THE POINT:
As I’ve suggested above, it isn’t threatening to most of our social support systems (people) if we exercise, stretch and mobilize our joints.
You can make huge progress on your own for very little expense by simply following the clear instructions for stretching, joint mobilizations, and exercises in my book How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy!
For those wanting more technical support, I suggest starting with my correspondence courses, Scientific Core Conditioning, and Scientific Back Training, which are both loaded with practical assessments and corrective techniques.
With a little postural awareness, and a regular commitment to balancing your body, you can experience far-reaching mental-emotional benefits too. As you improve your body function, you will experience more energy and mental clarity, a better sense of self-esteem.
In time, your newfound confidence and energy will naturally inspire you to make the mental-programming changes needed to fulfill your desires for well-being; you will have more energy to deal with the naggers and criticizers, which paradoxically, give us just the resistance we need to grow authentically into the new person we’ve chosen to represent at this time in our lives.
Soon, the very people that criticized you and were a royal pain in the ass will be emulating you!
Here’s some advice: Start where you are. Conceive of yourself in ideal terms, then, begin with whatever changes you are comfortable, and willing to make.
Each step of the way, you will grow stronger, more willing and able to grow, develop authentic wisdom, become more open-minded, and will attract similar people to you. In no time, you will have a new tribe that loves you as you are and going home will be an act of love and empathy, because you now have evidence of your truth that they can’t deny.
Enjoy your day!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
