Happiness to You!
I hope 2013 is treating you well so far.
I took the day off from gym training Monday. Instead, Vidya and I walked around the property here at my new location with our friends Jeff Brion and Rosanne Kline (owners of The Float Lounge in Laguna Beach, Ca.), who came to help us with our unpacking jobs.
We all worked away, steadily unpacking boxes. We hoped to finish the job but, once again, found that the job of unpacking is much slower than packing. Thanks to Jeff and Rosanne, we are much closer. They did an amazing job of organizing my library and left the room free of boxes for the first time since we arrived — Very cool. Thanks so much Jeff and Rosanne!
Last night, we got into the gym for some training. I did high volume deadlifts coupled with single arm Olympic bar rows.
JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING EACH DAY
You’re invited! to be the cause of your own living experience.
Each night we go to sleep and agree to forget about our trials and tribulations!our story. And we do.
We go to sleep, forget everything, and don’t even know if we are alive.
We forget about who we owe money. We forget about our perceptions of weather or not we are beautiful enough, or successful enough.
We even forget who loves us, and who to love tomorrow.
We enter into deep, dreamless sleep; a state of desirelessness, peacefulness and blissfulness. We give this to ourselves each night.
What do you need to give yourself today to feel the joy of recreating yourself, your life, your dream? What one little something, if given, would be a step in the direction of becoming a little more of what you desire to be?
Here you can see me in a hotel parking lot early in the morning a few years ago when Penny and I were returning from vacation and pulled off the highway in Las Vegas for the night.
I carried kettle bells with me so I didn’t need to worry about finding a gym to keep myself in shape.
Many times while talking to clients and people after lectures, and in airports and all over the world, people have commented to me about my body. While talking to me while exercising in gyms, it’s not uncommon for people to justify their physical condition by saying things like:
– “It must be easy for you, you have good genes.”
– “You chose the right parents.”
– “You were born with a good body.)
– “I’m not as lucky as you with the body I was given!”
These are all examples of justifications we make when we don’t want to accept responsibility for our life, and/or our condition. But are they helping in the creation and experience of your dream for yourself?
The truth is, I could come up with lots of justifications for reasons I “need”, or “love” to eat gluten containing grains, sugar, milk, etc. I could easily eat and drink all the things that give me instant gratification. I just know from experience that the few minutes or hours of instant gratification often convert into weeks and months of progressive decline in vitality and physical integrity, body-mind harmony.
My body (your body) is a physical reality, and a biological reality. In more ways than not, it is similar to the body of most warm-blooded mammals. Like most bodies, it needs movement to keep it healthy.
It’s not an accident that you don’t see lame, obese, emaciated, depressed, diseased animals in nature. They live in tune with their instincts. Instincts are there to increase your chances of survival.
But like a GPS system, if you don’t listen to the directions, it won’t be of much help. Your instincts are the voices of internal wisdom and are always honest in their expression of authentic needs.
When you instincts encourage you to get outside and move, and breath deeply, you can always do the best exercise in the world. What is the best exercise in the world, you may be wondering?…
!It’s the one you’ll do regularly enough to gain benefits.
We can all do a lot for ourselves by just doing a little something to contribute to our bodies and mind’s needs for movement teach day. It’s not wise to stress yourself over what “the best exercise for this or that is”!that dialogue can echo between your ears until you are in pain, or dead.
If the easiest thing you can do is go for a walk, great. Go walk. That’s actually something real, tangible, effective, objective. Walking is good.
If it’s too cold outside for you to walk, try putting on some good music and doing some high-knee marching on the spot.
Try dancing!
If all you can do is get into and out of a chair. Great!
Each day, see how many times you can get into and out of the seated position. Try to improve by a repetition each time. When you sit to eat breakfast, stand back up and sit down again. When you sit down for lunch, do that again. When you sit down for dinner, do it again.
Tomorrow, go for three times in and out of your seat before you start your meal. If you begin to get muscle soreness, rest until you can improve your last performance by even one repetition.
When you get to the point where you can do squats into and out of a chair for ten minutes without stopping, you will have already become much fitter, probably trimmer, and will have already had multiple comments about your improved health and vitality. You will feel good about yourself and it will only have taken ten minutes a day!
Part of having a body is feeding it the way it needs to be fed. Did you know that Francis Marion Pottenger, MD (of the Price-Pottenger Foundation. See www.ppnf.org) wrote a book summarizing his research on what happens when cats are fed cooked foods (processed) and pasteurized milk? The book is titled, “Pottenger’s Cats.”
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Pottenger showed that compared to cats on their normal diet, the cats eating cooked foods and consuming pasteurized dairy began to show objective signs of degeneration in the first generation. By the third generation, the cats lost much of their athletic ability, had deformed skeletons, and even lost their sexual preference. They died in the fourth generation.
Where it was possible, it took four generations of optimal feeding and rebreeding to restore them to the condition of the original cats used as a baseline for the study.
In just one generation of eating processed foods, Dr. Pottenger showed that humans too, birthed offspring that often have malformation of the teeth, jaw, face, and often had flat feet. He shows pictures correlating the findings of the cat studies and observations of his patients at the back of his book.
Weston A. Price, author of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration showed that natives, often otherwise untouched by the outside world, show very similar patterns of degeneration when eating processed “white man’s food.”
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Just remember these two things as you reach for items you will put in your mouth:
1. If what you are about to eat is more dead than you are, you will have to use your own vitality and resources to digest, assimilate, metabolize and eliminate it.
Eat enough raw food or minimally cooked, whole foods as possible. It takes 50-70% of the calories in any food just to digest, assimilate, metabolize and eliminate it.
If the food delivers the calories as energy content, yet is void of the essential nutrients needed to repair and regulate body systems, you are left with an energy surplus in calories, and are becoming progressively more malnourished.
You can tell when you are getting enough raw food because in general, your poops will float and look beautiful, like the ones I show in my book How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! Until then, they will look like one or more of the variations I show in my book to help you determine what improvements are needed.
2. The longer any foodstuff lasts on the shelf, the worse it generally is for you.
To get foodstuffs to last longer, pasteurization is used to kill all enzyme activity, and bacteria. Enzymes are a catalyst to life in a body and without them, you are dead, but first, you will be very miserable! Bacteria and fungi are on foods to begin the natural degeneration process we call “rotting” when the food no longer generates its own growth forces.
When foods are artificially preserved with chemicals (and lots of them!), we can’t tell when they are rotten or degenerate beyond optimal for eating.
Think of encasing a dead person in colored wax. In a hundred years, you’d look at this wax mummy and would have no idea of the quality of the tissue within it compared to looking at the body itself. The same is true of foods.
Most of the foods people eat sit in cans and plastic wrappers (both sources of carcinogenic food toxins). When you look at the bottle or box, you can’t tell anything about the food. Even when you open them, you can’t tell much because you aren’t looking at food, you are looking at a mummy.
Eating foods in their natural state, free of chemicals is essential to achieving and living your dreams, whatever they may be.
Try increasing the amount of live foods, such as vegetables, beans, and fruits and avoid foods that have chemical colorings and preservatives to extend the shelf life, and in no time at all (with some regular water consumption) you will look and feel noticeably better.
Sometimes, we just need to give ourselves the gift of harmony.
Stress is the most common cause of disease in general, and there’s nothing close comparatively. Sure, there are lots of chemicals in the environment, and yes, many medical drugs are more toxic and dangerous than what they are prescribed for!and do kill lots of people.
But, the truth is!if you waved a magic wand and took people’s primary stressors away, within a month, the need for drug interventions would drop so drastically it could trigger an economic collapse within a year; that would bring everyone’s stress levels back up and the drug companies be in (big) business again!
When we are around stressful people, experienced repeated stressful inner and outer environments, we tend to become chaotic inside. Our feelings and our thoughts tend to get scrambled.
One of the ways I help deal with my stresses is to play with musical instruments. I’m not a musician at all and have no training other than a few piano lessons when I was about 12. I just play with them and make whatever sounds feel good inside me.
Because I have no training, I often invent unique ways of playing instruments. I’ve had several situations where musicians made comments to me like, “Hey, that’s cool. I’ve never seen that instrument played that way.” Then they pick it up, try what I showed them, and it sounds much more beautiful than when I was doing it.
But, I get the joy of invention. Expressing our creativity without judgment is very stress relieving!
Try just playing with sound, tone, rhythm. Find your natural groove on an instrument. Turn a bucket over and see if you can play your own heartbeat?
Every time you act to honestly love and care for yourself, you practice cultivating love. Soon, you loose any fears that you won’t be loved because you know how to love yourself and enjoy doing it.
Once you have enough love and vitality in you to meet your own needs, you begin to radiate your love and vitality. You’ll become a cloud sprinkling drops of lovelight everywhere you go.
Soon enough, you wake up and realize that life, people, everything and everyone have been beautiful the whole time ☺.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
