Happy Thursday to You!
I hope you all had a peaceful, productive day yesterday! I was busy yesterday with CHEK Staff meetings, meeting with clients and continuing to write for CHEK Connect. I did a quick workout in the gym where I coupled squats and lunges, my ass is sure sore today!
Today I meet up with Andrew Johnston once again for some energy healing on his brain. As a triathlete cyclist, he has taken his share of spills. I’ll get in and clear out those knots that are still affecting him.
On Tuesday, Andrew and I did our exploration work at my home in the rock garden, garden, and in the hills behind my house. Andrew had never done any rockwork before yesterday and I was very impressed with the first stack he’s ever made! Check it out!
You can see Andrew’s first stack here. How can we surmise it’s uniqueness, particularly as a “first-ever stack”?
First, notice the base he chose. The base stone is the most important stone in a stack. It is the foundation. Psychologically, the base stone represents one’s core values; how they create stability for themselves in their life. Very rarely will someone ever us multiple stones to create a base to build upward from.
Why?
This would be like building a concrete foundation for your new home, and then cutting it into several sections. Though it may still work fine, it would be more susceptible to cracking and crumbling in an earthquake. Yet, we could also take the view that Andrew’s choice of a multi-stone base offers multiple bases.
Second, we can see that his stack rises 10 levels of stone high. This is quite a high stack for a first timer. Remember, when we stack rocks, each additional level increases the magnitude of complexity, and therefore, instability. The higher we go when stacking rocks, the more patients and inner-balance is required.
If this stack were a bunch of square stones, then we could say the height isn’t increasing complexity too much. Andrew chose stones that are not easy to stack. This shows a love of meeting a challenge and the patients to see it through, even against the odds.
Third, we can see that his top 4 stones are round and irregular. As height and complexity increase, so too does the likelihood of collapse. Round stones are many times more complex to stack with than those with a more rectangular or square form.
The “footprint” of round stones is tiny and their shapes are often irregular, causing the center of gravity to be placed oddly relative to what our eyes would suggest. This means that there may need to be many adjustments to keep such a stone balanced, which requires good posture, balance, presence and patients.
With the top 4 being round and irregular, we see a mind capable of juggling multiple complex topics/relationships, yet holding the vision of all as one.
It was pretty windy Tuesday and Andrew’s stack was still standing tall this morning. This shows that there was durability in his expression of play.
Durability suggests stability. I noticed his patience and presence and asked him what birth sign he is. He said, “Capricorn”. That’s the Mountain Goat. This made sense to me. He has Mountain Goat perseverance.
Learning Balance, Patients, and Use Of Self
This is a shot taken from the steps as you enter my rock garden. I love the feeling of “community” created by the stone sculptures.
As Andrew and I were working, a local pool maintenance guy stopped and chatted with us about the stones. He was very intrigued and told us he enjoys looking at them when he comes to do his work in my area.
I have discovered that people are very moved by stone art. It’s really quite incredible.
When Andrew and I went hiking in the hills behind my house, I showed him a stack my neighbor had created (she’s an older lady) after watching me build stacks. I also showed him several stacks people had built at the top of the trails on the hill, which was not something I’d ever seen until my community caught the rock-stacking bug.
I had built a nice tall stack up there but it had fallen over so we rebuilt it while we were there.
Many that come to my house comment that they see animal and human forms in the stones. They often describe a kind of eerie feeling looking at them but can’t put their finger on what intrigues them.
I simply inform them that matter is the seed-form of all bodies. Our history is written in the stones. Anyone that spends enough time with stones has many revelations as they learn to read the stones.
Here is a picture of my water charger. This took me a day to build. The bottom three levels are made of very heavy stones that require very careful lifting and placement if injury is to be avoided.
My soul guides me in all such creations and shows me how to get the correct combination of stones to generate healing frequencies. This formation is designed to create a male and female spiral of bioelectricity.
The bioelectricity charges the water molecules creating very ordered, well structured water. Since water has an almost infinite capacity to carry information, when we imprint water with essential, base frequencies from stones, the information acts like a software overwrite, giving us clean, coherent base frequencies the cells can use to restore the matrix of body.
The changes it makes to the water are very noticeable. The water feels to be much more wet.
I let Andrew hold a bottle of water from the charger and he was pretty surprised how powerful the energy coming from it was. He noticed right away that it magnified his sense of his own heartbeat as he held it.
This is largely because with the addition of coherent energy fields to our own body, chaos is reduced. When chaos is reduced, it is as though someone has cleaned your windshield and you can all the sudden see and perceive things you didn’t realize were there!
This is the essential nature and basis for holistic healing. If our food and drink are healthy, vital and alive, they are coherent in the light they produce. The light emissions from food and drink we ingest radically influence the body’s capability of restoring itself to the DNA blueprint.
If you think of food as though it were concrete, junk food would be junk concrete. If you build a structure from junk concrete, the chances of major problems when there is any environmental stress goes through the roof!
How The Stone Buddhas Spread Their Love
Below you can see a few photos of John Reilly and his children stacking rocks in their yard. John has been studying with me as a CHEK Practitioner and HLC3 and PPS Practitioner for quite some time and was one of the few who completed the entire PPS Tao-Te-zen series with me. John is very good at applying what he learns very quickly so it becomes practical knowledge.
He informs me that his children love stacking rocks. He also wanted me to see his three-year-old daughters “perfect squat form”, which is unprovoked and totally her natural body mechanics.
I often highlight the fact that I can teach anyone who’s never been instructed in a gym how to move very quickly because they don’t have bad habits. I’ve tested a huge number of people and athletes movement patterns in my career and I’ve found that girls that can dance, who have no weight training experience learn almost immediately how to do any exercise.
When we let children play in a natural environment, the environment influences their movement choices such that the seven Primal Patterns I’ve identified as essential are mastered. This is essential for a functional movement base in life and where not developed, injury is invited.
Thanks for sharing your beautiful family, rocks and garden John!
“ego-mind IS A BUTCHER!”
As I’ve highlighted a number of times in past blog posts, the ego-mind operates on the principle of exclusion; soft “isn’t hard”; hot “isn’t cold”; ugly “isn’t beautiful”; creating a “winner produces a loser”!
Therefore, any so-called “truth” generated by the ego-mind can only be a half-truth at best.
In PPS Lesson 1. How To Find and Live Your Legacy, and Lesson 2. Self-Mastery, I use examples like the one I show here to show how the mind works and how to use it more effectively.
The above image shows a boy at bat in a baseball game; the harmonic relationship of the tai-chi symbols represents total congruency of his mental state.
As you know, the pitch can come very fast, even for a little leaguer. The ball can actually make it from the pitchers hand the catcher’s mitt faster than the nervous system can generate a cognitive response to the pitch and generate a muscular reaction.
Therefore, as the image shows, all mental activity must become single pointed. When the mind becomes focused to a single point, there is no longer an is – isn’t relationship.
There is only “the ball and the response to the ball”, nothing else.
This essentially describes a key attribute of what sports psychologists refer to as the “peak state” – single-mindedness. When someone is in a peak state while running, they are essentially holding the same basic state a baseball player has to maintain to hit the ball well, but they hold it for a much longer period.
This single-mindedness is exactly what a zen master means when a student asks, “What is Buddha?” and the master replies, “have you eaten yet?” “Yes.” “Then wash your bowl and rake the yard”.
When one becomes fully present with washing a bowl or raking the yard (or rowing, or drawing, or sex, or operating machinery, etc.), they enter no-mind; with single-pointed focus, there is no longer an is-isn’t relationship, there is only an “IS”.
For example, this is why when a child is totally absorbed in video game playing, a bomb could go off in the house and they wouldn’t even notice it. They are in no-mind; but do you really want your kid to learn meditation under the programming influences of “Street Fighter II”?…
Here you see the same boy, but this time, notice the red glow coming from his batting helmet. The red glow represents distraction and/or self-doubt. This means that the ego-mind is divided between focused light of mind and divided light via competition between ego and shadow.
It is normal for hecklers to try and throw a batter off their game. If the batter isn’t focused to congruence, s/he will hear, perceive, and react to multiple, potentially conflicting inputs.
This is represented by the chaotic pattern of the tai-chi symbols, which represent the dance of light and shadow. This is sometimes referred to by Buddhist masters (and some psychologists) as the divided mind; a divided mind produces “double messaging”.
The human brain process cognitive thought in series; only one thought can be at the forefront of consciousness at any given moment, never two or more thoughts at once, which is parallel processing.
Whenever our ego (conscious point of awareness or focus) and shadow (self-doubt) start dancing together, the conscious ego-mind must jump back from one thought or belief to the next. This would be essentially what would happen if you tried watching two TV programs at once or if you had two ipods playing different songs in each ear.
This triggers anxiety and in my observation, leads to ADD and ADHD behavior.
When I say, “ego-mind is a Butcher!”, this is EXACTLY what I’m referring to. When we allow our shadow to govern our conscious perceptions of self and other, we are allows in inner-conflict.
As another example, think for a moment how you would feel if someone told you they loved you, hugged you affectionately, and then hauled off and slapped you in the face as hard as they could. You would be very conflicted!
How, may I ask, is that any different than a parent telling a child they love them as long as they do!or!.? Or, I love you when you!clean your room!take out the garbage! Can you see how the child naturally comes into conflict when it realizes that it essentially has to do what it doesn’t want or like to do to “get what it not only wants, but NEEDS” from it’s parents?
How To Stop Butchering Yourself and Others
Any practice that cultivates presence helps train the mind to avoid double-messaging or distractions. I personally find art and movement a much easier form of brining my mind to the state of no-mind than sitting still and staring at the backs of my eyelids.
I’ve certainly learned to use conventional meditation techniques, and with tremendous success. But!it took me about 35 years to get to where it was natural, and when I’m under stress, it’s still unnatural.
Stacking rocks combines art and movement and brings me into no-mind very fast and for long periods. Sometimes ALL DAY! What a great joy too. My God. There’s nothing in the world but me and my Stone Buddha buddies — who never judge me, but sure laugh a lot when my stacks fall down.
(if you don’t understand what I just said, you simply need to spend more time becoming aware of what’s all around you but you aren’t seeing because you are too busy listening to the hecklers in the stands or watching two TV’s at once!)
A Simple Meditation
If you’d like to try a simple meditation I created for my patients, I’ll share one with you.
- Simply take a glass bowl and fill it about 2/3rds full of water. Then drop a couple blue berries or any two objects of about the same size and weight that will float in the water.
- Then, hold the bowl in your hands with one hand on either side of the bowl and try to make the water spin into a gentle vortex (like when a toilet flushes or you pull the plug in a bath tub).
- Once you get the water spinning in the bowl, try to get the two berries or objects to stay right together.
Sounds easy ah!☺. Give it a try. Just relax. Don’t force it. Go at it as foreplay.
Let the water, berries and bowl teach you.
When your mind gets tired or you feel frustration arising, put the bowl down and walk away for a few minutes.
Then, when you are ready, give it another go. In time, you will get them to stay together. Then, work on keeping them together for an extended period of time. You will find that whenever your mind starts double-messaging or wandering out of single-focus, the barriers will not dance together.
Another very powerful method is to witness your thoughts and judgments.
Whenever you judge someone else as “this or that”, pause for a moment and look for the unmet need within yourself. With an honest effort, you will find that there’s usually an unmet need you are trying to nourish by deflating others. It may be the need to feel special, smart, bigger or better.
Either way, the one who needs to demean others to meet their unmet need can never meet their unmet need for a simple reason.
There is only ONE CONSCIOUSNESS manifest as many beings or bodies.
When we use fear as our motive to make ourselves feel special, by definition, we create more beings. This only adds to the illusion of MAYA and enhances the shadow.
If you just extend that game to everyone you know, paradoxically, you will end up being the only loving, capable, beautiful, smart, sexy person you know. Then what?
If that becomes true, just think of how much responsibility to others you’ll have created by making yourself both King and Queen of your shadow-empire?
Meditate on that.
Another very effective means of getting rid of the ego-butcher is to study Byron Katie’s work. If you go to www.thework.com and look for her “work sheet”, you can go from there if you prefer a more mind-based approach to healing your shadow.
Well, that’s enough for today. I’m off with Andrew and will be back in my office early afternoon to meet with a publisher.
Ahh, the joys of work and life!
Make it a great day!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
