A Beautiful Wednesday to You!
I hope you are having a nourishing day.
My day was productive yesterday.
I began my day with some tai-chi.
I had a great pushing session in the gym and coupled four sets of Swiss Ball-Olympic bar bench press with four sets of single arm cable push from a moderately high angle, and four sets of Swiss ball Push-Jacks in circuit format.
The gym was cold when I started, and warm when I finished!
After my day at work ended, I went home and instead of doing tai-chi, I began reconstructing my round tower stone project.
After some winds and rain, my little project proved too unstable for Mother Nature’s activities.
I was so excited to finish the project and when I pulled into my driveway, I saw a large pile of stones instead of my beautiful little stone tower!
I love being “in training” with the stone Buddhas. They teach me detachment, and a lot about “relationships”.
So, my evening meditation was removing the pile and starting over.
I’ve got a really cool stone mandala on the ground now and will enjoy watching it “climb vertically” over the next few days.
ORGANIC FITNESS!
Greg and Kerry Gleeson are CHEK and HLC Practitioners living and practicing in Port Macquarie, NSW, Australia.
They recently opened a beautiful little gym and coaching center where they are living their dream and helping others live theirs.
Here’s a little about how they share their love:
This is a young pro cyclist, Lachlan Morton & he loves training with Greg when he returns home to Australia for 3 months each year and the food/drinks we prepare for him.
Trish, a senior lady who loves coming to Greg’s fun circuit “Heartmoves” classes, especially for the stations that involve a little massage.
Greg and Kerry are always inspired by their clients and they try look after them as best they can so that’s where their different talents come into play.
Greg is a skilled teacher/coach and he definitely has an affinity with the water (so he’s attracted some great surfing clients).
This year their goal is to put Greg’s past career as a butcher into practice again, processing grass-fed & organic meats to sell here as another offering to community members.
Kerry’s role as an HLC Coach supports Greg by getting to the root causes & resolving his client’s issues.
Kerry, who is a world class spiritual/healing artist, uses Energy Medicine if they’re clients are open to that.
Kerry is a naturally gifted healer and can create individualized healing art for people. Her art is incredible, to say the least!
I’ll be featuring a piece she created for me in an upcoming blog. (Kerry will be joining us for our AU Tour Art Show, which you can find out more from Place of Chi).
Kerry is also working to achieve her Forensic Healing Diploma in April this year.
Kerry said in her message to me: “Paul, we even have some high school students who want to be better at their chosen sports e.g. Ben, 15, loves your HTEMBH book so much he takes it to read in English instead of a novel-that would be a cool photo to be sprung with that inside one’s desk!”
I love hearing about young people having an interest in my work. This gives me hope for the future generation.
If any of you are in their area, I’m sure you’d be impressed with Greg and Kerry’s work. If you would like to contact either of them, or look at their web site and see a little of Kerry’s art work, feel free to contact them: Greg & Kerry Gleeson: Port Macquarie NSW 2444 0412 383 136 (m) www.gg-chek.com.au
Thanks for sharing your love with others so beautifully Greg and Kerry!
IS YOUR SOUL ADDICTED TO MATTER?
The Greek metaphysician/philosopher Plotinus warned that the soul’s tendency is to become addicted to matter.
Today, we see evidence of this all around us.
Philosopher/sage Paul Brunton writes in, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Vol. 3, Practices for the Quest – Relax and Retreat (p. 22, paragraph 164):
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“We regularly give our thought and strength to negotiating and overcoming the obstacles of earning a livelihood, but we become fantastically defeatist when confronted by the obstacles of deepening spiritual life.”
I can confirm this from 28 years of clinical experience coaching people through a wide variety of body-mind-spirit challenges.
I’ve literally watched so-called “successful people” expend their life-force in the pursuit of money and material gains at the expense of their own health and well-being.
I’ve had to counsel numerous husbands and wives and their children over the deep pain created when mom and/or dad are so overly-focused on “achieving” that their family relations fall apart; most of their children are on drugs for depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder and the likes!
I know this experience from my own life pursuits.
Even though I was raised by a very spiritually grounded mother, and had excellent training from the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda and his monks in my youth, there have been several periods of my life where I too got lost in the pursuit of the American dream!
I grew up in a home where the tension between my parents over issues of money overflowed into a variety of painful experiences for me and my brothers and sisters.
I remember like it was yesterday, the insecurities I had as a kid in junior high school; I came to school in worn blue jeans with cow shit stains on them, a flannel shirt, and worn out, outdated shoes on my feet.
Even then, the kids often looked at me like I was some sort of ditch diver and made off-colored comments.
All the while, most everyone was up-to-date with the coolest Nikes and fashions on the market.
Sadly, at the time, my experiences cultivated resent toward my parents. I felt isolated and alone because I couldn’t seem to “fit in”.
My saving grace was my physical strength, training as a boxer, and indomitable will power.
Once the nay-sayers confronted me on the wrestling mat, in a rope climbing contest, or any such physical/mental challenge, they suddenly didn’t see my clothing any more.
These sorts of experiences created an association in my mind: if I’m stronger, faster and better at achieving than others, my surface appearance and other apparent faults will be overlooked and I will be valued and respected.
This chain of experiences and the challenges in my family over money led me to developing a form of personal mantra; I will work as hard as I have to work to achieve financial independence.
All I wanted at that time in my life was to have the financial freedom to dress how I wanted to, drive what I wanted to, and live where and how I wanted to.
As my life path would have it, I became a father just after turning eighteen, and my son was born to a father who’s inner-desire was to work as hard as he could to protect him from the pains I’d endured.
So, what did I do?
I did exactly what most of my clients do! I worked ceaselessly to create financial safety and security for my wife and son.
So ceaselessly in fact, they got to see me for breakfast, sometimes for dinner, and they got to watch me read and study ceaselessly when I was home.
I had coupled two useful, but dangerous ideas together:
1. If I work hard I can become financially independent.
2. If I work hard I can make someone useful of myself and help others.
These ideas are useful because they are, for the most part, harmonious with the reality of being in our culture.
They are also in harmony with the religious ideals of our culture, which is predominantly Christian in its mythos and logos.
These ideas are dangerous because:
1. If you work so hard to achieve financial independence that you create isolation and independence among your family, all you have are individuals living in the same house spending money to medicate their needs for authentic love, affection and connection.
So, you get a nice house, a nice car, up-to-date clothing, cool shoes, and constant relationship struggles that you can buy or medicate your way out of!
2. We can give ourselves and our efforts away as a gift to others, yet, if we cultivate our sense of value such that we loose site of our own authentic needs for self-love and inner-exploration, we inevitably come to an impossibility wall (I expand on the concept of the impossibility wall in PPS Lesson 2. Self Mastery).
The impossibility wall is created of the idea that “if I’m not making myself useful to others, I’m not useful.”
This conundrum is such that we end up in a trap where we only feel useful and valued based on feedback of appreciation from others.
In that vein of existence, we always need someone else’s approval to feel valued as a person.
This kind of existence can develop into a gestalt (mind-set) that pits us against ourselves. We learn! sooner or later! that no matter how hard you try, you simply can’t please everyone.
If we go too long before we realize this, we actually forget how to love and care for ourselves first.
In my experience, this paradox often results in:
A. Telling yourself you don’t have time to eat because you’ve got to get to work!you have so much to do!
B. Not exercising because!you have too much to do.
C. Taking drugs to medicate the symptoms of excessive outputting because you don’t have time to learn how to address the underlying causes.
Convincing yourself that you are being invaded by “germs, viruses or invasive organisms” plays right into the mindset of avoiding your responsibility for running yourself down to the point of illness and injury.
D. Telling yourself you don’t have time for a vacation.
E. Telling yourself that you don’t have time to be present with your loved ones; and often convincing yourself that you are loving your children by giving them money and objects, or hiring them a nanny instead of giving them what they really want, which is to “be” with you.
F. Over-identifying yourself as what you do instead of who you actually are as a person.
These are all symptoms of a soul that is addicted to material success. Other indicators are:
1. Feeling naked without your make-up on.
2. Being embarrassed to be seen with others that don’t meet your socio-economic standard or persona.
3. Being unwilling to ride in unattractive vehicles.
4. Letting how much money you have in the bank be the primary measure of how safe you feel.
5. Thinking that as long as you have money, you can consume to your hearts content without ever thinking twice about the social and environmental impact of such a lifestyle or mindset.
6. Over-emphasis on creating physical beauty at the expense of taking time to cultivate inner-beauty, wisdom, and self-sufficiency.
7. Identifying yourself with religions that flaunt their wealth by building “monuments to God” as exotic, very expensive churches and temples.
In believing that your prayers can only be heard and answered if you are affiliated with such organizations, “chosen saviors”, or giving (to get).
All such pursuits lead to sectarianism, which is essentially religious and spiritual segregation and fuels “class and rank” elitism.
It has taken me a long time, and a lot of pain to fully embrace my spiritual life.
I’ve had to go through the pain of rejection by those that I was giving my all to, only to find that often, it just wasn’t enough.
I’ve had to witness the pain in my son, who lost his father to a world of being special for other people, instead of being special for him and his beautiful mother.
I suffered through great pains trying to understand how God (of religion) can be so down right mean, rebellious, judgmental and threatening.
My pain was useful because it gave me the motive to look deeper, and deeper, until I resorted to my training by the monks and!did what they told me to do and “look inward”.
I can’t say I’m fully healed of these challenges yet.
I still battle inside with helping myself, healing, and truly meeting my own personal and spiritual needs, while at the same time, trying to be useful and supportive of society.
I feel torn many days.
I feel like I’ve seen the show with all the flashing lights and mirages.
I feel that people need their pain and most of them aren’t any more ready to hear me as a coach and a therapist as I was ready to listen to the monks who I now know were telling me the highest of truths.
But I know that the seeds the monks left in me have become sprouts of self-realization and the lover inside me keeps whispering in my ear when I think of leaving civilization to play their religious, materialistic games (that have plagued man for thousands of years now) so I can find quiet and disengage from the show.
My spiritual path has led me to the realization that “those people are me”!If they are sick, then I too am sick.
I find it hard to be at peace inside while knowing that so many lack sound guidance.
I’ve really come to a beautiful point in my life.
I’ve come to experience, by choice, how beautiful my life is when I balance my activities between creating authentic love and joy for myself, for meeting my needs, and using that nourishment as fuel to help others do the same.
I’ve witnessed the addiction of the soul to matter and in that process, I’ve come to learn what truly maters!
My dream is that you don’t have to get sick, get a disease, go through a divorce, a bankruptcy, or end up with angry, confused, sad, drugged children before you take time to evaluate what ultimately makes life meaningful, worth living.
For those of you willing to take a gentle look inward and learn to cultivate values that serve to nurture your need for inner-balance and spiritual freedom, I created an easy to read, listen and view, multimedia e-Book titled, The Last 4 Doctors You’ll Ever Need – How To Get Healthy Now! and a series of audio companion recordings to expand on the book to help people create and live a balanced rewarding life.
My audio companion titled, Dr. Quiet shares seven methods to help those with busy minds learn how to meditate more easily.
I hope all of you reading my blog today take away a new perspective of what you may be addicted to and what’s driving your behavior.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
