Happy Thursday To You! Happy Friday to those of you in the South Pacific and Friday regions of the world!
I had a productive day of writing and coaching yesterday.
I snuck in a nice pushing workout. I love high intensity training. As I’ve aged, I’ve found lifting heavy weights very therapeutic due to the anabolic hormone stimulation that results from my lifting. I’ve found that as long as I keep acting young with my training, my body seems to forget how old it is, and my mind is more vibrant.
I’m constantly amazed at how little exercise it takes to keep the body fit and healthy. There are many days that my schedule is packed and the best I can do is twenty minutes in the gym. On those days, I often just choose to have fun. I have no plan and just walk up to the cables, dumbbells, kettlebells, clubbells, Swiss balls, or even the rowing machine and just play. No plan. Just play.
EXERCISE: DEAD OR ALIVE?
Someone sent me this little cartoon some time ago and I came across it this morning. I feel it does a good job of stating the obvious, that apparently is an elusive obvious to most people today.
As we’ve become an information and technology based society, we’ve externalized our mind to the degree that most people only know they have a body when they look in the mirror or when their body starts to hurt. Inevitably, they don’t like either experience.
Yet, as their mind begins to worship the written word above and beyond their own authentic experiences of themselves, they fall head-long into the trap of believing what they read; hopefully they will read this cartoon and take it literally!
When the average person hears or reads that such and such a pill will stop your hunger cravings, burn fat, or make you look like the model representing the product, they buy it. If the prescribed dose doesn’t do the trick, they double it.
Soon enough, they find that they are dealing with all sorts of new, unwanted symptoms. Instead of being honest with themselves, they simply keep shopping. Sadly, most such products are extremely stressful to the adrenal glands. Once your adrenals are exhausted, all hell breaks loose!
By the time a person’s adrenals are exhausted, they tend to get to a doctor or therapist that suggest they actually exercise. So, some do. Some do it with the same zest they took pills.
Either group is entering a pit of hell-fire in a gym and most typical group exercise classes. They take their tired body and exhausted adrenals to the gym and do several hundred times the physical work in a session than they’ve done in the past month.
Naturally, they get more tired, have more aches and pains, and often get injured; so, more pills enter their lives again!.I’ve seen people trapped in this cycle for their entire life and they still don’t wake up to a little thing called reality.
The reality is, your body is your temple. It’s the only place you truly worship life. The body itself is life.
To the degree we worship ideas, and those ideas separate us from worshiping within, our experience of life becomes tainted and distorted. Some mix both hard core exercise, and all the quick fix pills and powders.
That is the state of most professional athletes. Thus, humanity has created an entirely new phenomenon, which I call, the “fit sick people”.
When we exercise (work-out), we externalize our resources. As I’ve told more athletes than I can count, “Is it really wise to trade your liver for a nice set of abs and some pretty arms?”
If you took an overweight rat laden with cancer and put it on a treadmill and made it exercise for long periods, it would certainly loose weight and show signs of improved muscle activity. Yet, it will die much sooner than if it was given a balance of exercise, water and nutritious food. But now, you have a much prettier dead rat.
Way back in 1957, one of the few living students of Rudhoph Steiner, Erenfried Pfeiffer, a biochemist shared the results of a very large study he’d conducted on people’s liver function. He stated very clearly that based on the results of his study, most people are dead by age 35 and their corpse just keeps walking around for another 35 years! No, that was in 1957!
If he were alive today, he’d probably have to say that most people are dead by age 20, and their corpses art too lame to even walk around so they surf the internet and watch TV until they die.
What To Do?
If you look at nature, you’ll be hard pressed to find an overweight rattle snake, zebra, lion, giraffe! Why? They live, move and eat in a way that is natural to their body plan. They don’t watch TV or buy scientifically proven pills and formulas. They don’t have to cut time out of their schedule to exercise. They exercise to eat and rest so they have the energy to do it again.
I love to eat! I love great food. I love to exercise because it allows me to enjoy my food.
I love to feel good in myself. Exercise helps me feel good in myself.
I love to see that my body isn’t aging like most people my age. I know that wouldn’t be the case without exercise.
I love good sex too. I can’t enjoy sex and explore my authentic self-expression without a body equipped to do that. Without exercise, I’d be dirty and smelly inside and I couldn’t expect some clean, fit lover to come make love to my cesspool.
I believe you’ve got to give what you’d like to get. I exercise as an offering to my lover. The first of which is “ME”.
I love knowing that I have the fitness and health to survive challenges. The world is in a constant state of change. Buildings fall. Rivers get toxic and/or dry up. Economies crash. Jobs and careers end.
If we don’t have the inner confidence that we can move and adapt, these natural events produce unnatural levels of stress and fear. If all hell broke loose, I’d be more than happy to head into the mountains with my tribe and would create beauty there. I’d adapt and thrive to the best of my ability, which is still very high.
All it takes is a willingness to be grateful for what the Universe gifted you with.
Most people worship their cars, yet ignore a gift a BILLION TRILLION times more magnificent. THEIR BODY AND THEIR MIND, which are married together as two sides of a coin.
A mind without a body of equal functionality is like a one sided coin – it has no currency – no power. It’s not even a collectors item. It’s considered a defaced coin, which is both junk and illegal.
I exercise, love and care for myself because I’m Grateful.
I recognize Grace.
When Grace comes as the present, I receive in the present.
After all, life is movement.
Lets move together.
Lets live together.
Lets love together.
We’ve tried the rest and it isn’t working.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
