Happy Friday to You!
Are you as excited for the weekend as I am?
It’s been a busy week, which is normal for me, but I’ve certainly learned the value of rest as an essential component of long-term productivity.
In my blog today I’ll share a vlog highlighting my own spiritual practice core values.
Then I’ll share Angie Lustrick’s newest family member, a beautiful little baby humming bird!
Core Values – My Spiritual Practice
My life has been a study of GOD, God, gods, and their religions. I have applied the same level of effort and commitment to understanding religious ideology as I have to understanding the body.
I found out long ago as a therapist that it is a person’s values that determine what choices they make (consciously or unconsciously), and that chronic pain suffers often suffer from repeatedly making the same choices, even when it hurts A LOT!
Because it has always been my mission to help people learn to live well and care for themselves, and NOT to “fix them”, I had to investigate people’s belief systems in order to understand them.
After a couple years of such investigations, I saw a very distinct pattern emerge… “all the choices a person makes can be reduced to expressions of their dominant core belief about who they are and what they believe created life.”
If my patient was an atheist, their pains were usually related to the deification of material gain – they were often working themselves to death as a means of expressing their worship.
If a patient was Christian, particularly Catholic, they were most often working themselves to death to help others; I found the root belief was that Jesus gave everything for everyone else and never put himself first.
A very interesting story, and one that I can assure you causes a LOT of pain for those with such beliefs. This very way of relating is common among females with breast cancer (that have been my patients); they give everything they have (and don’t have within) to everyone else to emulate (their concept of) Jesus.
When I have patients with chronic pain that are Buddhists, I have found that they often ignore their 4 Doctor needs because they have convinced themselves that living the way they are is their dharma.
I could go through a long list of belief systems and what I’ve seen as patterns of behavior, but hopefully, you can grasp the concept of needing to understand the root belief system of a patient to help them change…to heal.
My personal religious/spiritual experiences and my professional studies and explorations have all been formative forces in the creation of my own spiritual philosophy.
This has led to a progressive simplification of my own spiritual core value. What I have synthesized as my own spiritual core value, and therefore my spiritual practice is this:
There is no God but God.
I worship every-thing, and everyone.
In my vlog today, I share what the functional difference between a god, God, and GOD is as an aspect of why I hold the spiritual core value that I share with you today.
I hope that exploring my views on the issue of spirituality is helpful to your own exploration in some special way.
For those of you interested in my investigations into religious beliefs and interpretations, I have a series on youtube.com that explores the LOVE model I’ve created from my studies.
I use the LOVE model as the means for exploring the difference between the atheist, Christian, and Native American versions of their 10 commandments. You can view that series here:
Angie’s Humming Bird
Angie Lustrick is an instructor for the CHEK Institute; she teaches HLC1 and HLC2.
Angie is not only a very well educated woman with degrees in biology, energy medicine, and nutrition, she is a well-trained and skilled practicing shaman.
In the years that I’ve known Angie, the number of times I’ve been with her and some amazing thing happens with an animal is incredible. It is as though Mother Nature sends all her wounded, and joyful messengers to her almost constantly.
Yesterday, this little humming bird baby fell out of it’s nest way up high in a tree in Angie’s front yard. She picked it up, gave it lots of love, fed it with a dropper bottle, and is nursing it back to full strength so it can take another shot at flying lessons.
Angie, like most shaman, has a deep interest in the metaphysical, or “spiritual” connotations of coming across animals and insects in your life. The shaman doesn’t see such things as “chance events”, but as Mother Nature communicating to you.
Angie shared the above description of the shamanic interpretation of the presence of a humming bird (or birds) in your life, which I found to be very beautiful. I hope you enjoy it because if you are reading this, the humming bird has just come into your life too!
I hope you’ve enjoyed my blog and vblog today, and I look forward to sharing more on core values with you next week. Have a great weekend!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
