Happy Holidays!
I hope you are all excited about the Holiday Season and festivities so that you feel charged for a fantastic New Year.
Today, I will share some tips for minimizing the negative effects so commonly experienced with holiday season partying; you don’t want to spend half a year recovering from two weeks of partying I suspect…
Then I’ll share a little about what I’ve been up to here at the Heaven House.
Holiday Party TIPS From Paul!
Today in my video blog, I share some tips for minimizing stress on your body-mind while partying and eating with family and friends.
In my vlog today, I cover tips for reducing the stresses common with alcohol consumption.
Next, I cover how to minimize stress on your body from eating out at others homes, with family, or at restaurants.
I finish my presentation of about 10:00 today with tips for minimizing the stress of smoking and/or vaporizing (tobacco, marijuana, hash, and other smoking herbs).
I hope you enjoy my tips to enjoy while staying healthy!
Jason’s Rock Stack on Vacation!
This is Jason. Many of you who follow my blog will remember him from past blogs. Jason is an amazing man, who is certainly one of the most accomplished I’ve ever seen at applying my holistic teachings in his own life and sharing those teachings with his whole family very successfully.
He emailed me this photo from his vacation location, and I wanted to share it with you because this is a great example of:
1. Working with nature to express your creativity
2. Combining creative self expression with fitness
3. Taking responsibility for your own joy!
4. Leaving something beautiful in the garden to inspire others to do the same.
Thanks for all your love, support, and commitment to yourself, your family, my teachings, and the Chek Institute Jason!
Happy Holidays to you and your Beautiful family!
What’s Up in Heaven?
Though the coyotes are a fairly permanent element of our environment here, its been several months since we had one come right up to the house like this.
We always love to see them up close, but since Angie Lustrick has moved her office into the Heaven House with Vidya and I, we need to be a bit careful.
Angie’s little pug, Maggie only weighs 22 pounds, and could be easily classified as a “coyote snack” if not watched very carefully. Coyotes are famous in these parts for stealing and eating untended dogs; sometimes they take them right out of people’s yards too.
It is also the time when the bobcats start coming around and they are significantly more powerful and fast than a coyote, and they too aren’t opposed to a little pug-snack…so we have to enjoy the locals with reverence.
Maggie already had a run-in with the local red ants, which are quite large with a very nasty bit (as several of my guests have found out!), so Heaven keeps you in a state of “aware reverence”.
It is a common practice for me to use art on my rest periods as a means of keeping track of my sets; I draw one element of a drawing for each set completed and try to bring it to a conclusion by the last set.
This is the drawing Angie and I created during our last circuit workout of six cycles, which we continued adding to for our following workout.
You can see Don Miguel Ruiz’s 5 Agreements written on the board as well. I leave them up there and read then aloud to myself each time I train in my gym as my reminder to do my best to live these essential principles each day.
They look simple, but, in practice, living any one of them fully, openly and honestly could take you deep into your own enlightenment.
Angie and I both love to paint, as does Vidya and most of our friends, so painting is a form of creative relaxation for us.
Its been great having Angie here with us at the Heaven House and it has given Angie and I more time to create things together, both in our personal and professional lives.
Angie is a very unique woman, with loads of talents that continue to surprise me. I really thought these two pieces were beautiful, unique, and simple.
Angie’s art can range from very complex oil paintings that look like they could be sold in a gallery, to amazing drawings on paper done in a few minutes. We often do art pieces together, and amaze ourselves when we see what comes out.
From years of doing art therapy with my clients, and art for enjoyment with family and friends, I can assure you that if you haven’t tried it, amazing, fun things happen.
I find art a beautiful way to both create, and bond with people in a way that gets us “out of our heads” and “into our natural, child-like joy”. All it takes is some paper, a pen or pencil, and some colors if you have them.
Don’t worry about trying to make things beautiful, or about judging what comes out. It’s all about playful, unbound expression. A great practice for most people raised in a Western culture where left-brain dominance is the norm…
Since I’ve been on vacation, I’ve been really feeling the need to express my inner-self through painting.
The two paintings you can see on the ledge of the black board were the first two I did when my vacation started. I was quite tired from a long period of intensive work with long days and didn’t have the desire to create anything that required “thinking”.
I let my soul choose some colors and then just let my emotions express themselves by dripping and spraying paint dots from the brush-end any what that felt good…and it felt good!
My all time hobby is the study of what GOD really is and how Life occurs; FYI, in my language GOD = CONSCIOUSNESS and ego = conscious of.
I have studied untold numbers of books and resources of all types on the topic. To better understand different viewpoints, I studied all the major world religions, mostly by university courses available on DVD by respected professors on the topics.
It is my practice to take what I study and look for it in my own life, and the lives of all around me.
This leads from awareness to experiences, which I then synthesize down to the most essential, practical elements and incorporate them into my daily practice.
Though I have been selectively studying the collected works of Carl Jung for many years now, my soul directed me back to Volume 12 about six months ago for a comprehensive study of dream symbolism as viewed through the terms and symbolism of Alchemy.
I found this study fascinating, and could see over and over how key elements of key client cases became “highlighted” and clearer to me through these studies, which helps me coach more effectively.
Currently, I am studying the anatomy of the psyche as seen through the eyes of an Alchemist viewpoint.
Though there are various authors I’ve been studying in this regard, without a doubt, the best of them all have one thing in common…Carl Jung either trained them directly, through his school, or they were heavily influenced by his groundbreaking work.
I titled this painting “LIFE” and it symbolically depicts the life process in symbols common to the unconscious of all human beings; and the symbols used are common to both Alchemy and most world religions.
If you have a moment to leave a comment and share what rises in you when looking at it, or what you feel the message in my painting is, Vidya, Angie and I would love to hear it!
I hope you have a lovely Holiday Season and an Abundant New Year!
I’ll be paining my annual New Years mandala to symbolize my upcoming year, and hope you feel inspired to let your soul guide you in your own inspirational expression for 2015.
Now is a great time to remember one of Einstein’s pertinent comments: “Your dreams are a snapshot of your future.”
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
