Happy Monday to You!
I hope you all had a lovely, restorative weekend!
I came to work Saturday to catch up on paperwork and write a program for a client and this is the view I had out my window as I worked.
This is the sunrise view looking east.
It’s quite an amazing experience to be here perched atop a small mountain about 15 or 20 miles from the ocean. As the desert air meets the ocean air, a tremendous amount of energy is created.
The coolness of the lake meeting the hot desert air creates powerful thermal energies that the hawks love to hover in and do a wide variety of areal acrobatics. I’m hoping to catch them doing their amazing mating ritual on camera so I can show all of you.
The hawks fly way up high, lock their feet together, and spiral wildly like a boomerang toward the earth, then pull out and fly up on the thermal currents to do it again. It’s truly an amazing spectacle.
Saturday, it was about 4:00 PM by the time I took a break from my work to get some exercise. I went out to my bullpen area where I keep my stock of nice big stones for my heavy training days.
I disassembled my last creation and recreated what you see above. It took me just under two hours and was a very good, deep workout as well!
Each of the stacks are in specific positions to maintain a geometrical form, which I measured out so I knew where to place the stones to get the right energy effect. It’s quite powerful when you stand next to it, or inside the circle.
Last Thursday, I recently had Ryan Hughes and one of his students/assistants (Eric) over and they were pretty surprised at how powerful the stone circle formations can be.
Sunday, I had a lovely day relaxing at home with Penny most of the day. I started my day quite early, rising at just before 5:00 AM to get to work and continue my catch-up. I headed home in time to have a lovely breakfast of wild-caught salmon that Penny cooked beautifully, with some nice vegetables that Vidya left on the stove for me.
Then, Penny and I went to the Farmers Market in Encinitas where Vidya met us. It just happened that the parking lot they directed us to is the parking for CHEK Instructor Robert Yang’s business. He was on the last day of CHEK Exercise Coach training with his class so Penny and I dropped in to say hello to everyone.
He had a good group of healthy looking, motivated students and it was nice to meet them, and catch up with Rob. Thanks for doing a great job teaching Rob!
Once Penny and I got back to the house with loads of amazing organic foods and treats from the local farmers and organic food vendors, it was time for me to head out into my yard and rebuild several rock stacks that had been blown over or toppled by animals and birds.
I created this cool little stack, which was no easy feat. Getting that big stone to balance on top of the lower ones wasn’t easy. By the time I’d balanced it, I had on hell of a burn in my postural muscles.
That big stone at the top weighs a good 70 pounds and due to the small base stone, it tended to cause the whole stack to lean as the bottom stone was pushed into the earth. I was quite pleased with it when I finished because it looks like it shouldn’t be standing; notice the one behind it is vertical, which is normal for a stone stack.
Here you can see my front yard after I finished my recreations. The flowers blooming full force right now, both at my home in vista, and my work home in Escondido. The colors and the smells are vivifying to the soul.
The ground squirrels and tree squirrels are now out and active too. While Penny and I were gardening together, a beautiful tree squirrel came out and sat just a few feet from me and Penny.
I spoke to it gently to calm it and let it know it was safe. It stayed for some time just watching Penny and I work. Then, it walked right to Penny and passed her and was within six inches from her feet.
She was so busy working away and listening to her audiobook on her headphones that she didn’t even see it, but it was cute to watch.
They often come and sit with me for hours as I stack stones. I’ve had half a dozen ground and tree squirrels just hanging out with me.
It’s really special to experience how beautiful they are and how they will relate to you once they feel safe. You can see some dirt piles from the ground squirrels in the foreground of my photo above.
Earth Acupuncture
Here you can see some of my favorite rock stacks.
When I originally built the one you see with the stone path leading away from it, it was almost as tall as the tree. I had to stand on top of an eight foot step ladder to get the uppermost stones up and it was pretty damn scary up there!
I have to carry the stones up the ladder one at a time and the terrain isn’t ladder friendly at all. I was in a deep meditative state that day, and somehow, managed to build a stack about 14-15 feet tall that was very solid and stable.
It stayed up for months before the wind blew the top four rocks or so off. When it was at it’s max height, people would constantly stop and take photographs of it and the others. It really freaked people out when I told them there was no cement or bonding agents used at all, not even wedge rocks.
Just balance, balance, balance!
I don’t just build the stacks anywhere. I use my dowsing skills to sense where the energy lines are in the earth. I build stacks where there is either a need to draw energy into the earth, or where there is an abundance of earth energy that I want to broadcast out to the rest of the yard and area.
About seven or eight years ago, before I started creating rock formations in my front yard, the whole area was just dead dirt. Nothing would grow there. Now, as you can see, there is lots of grass and plant life everywhere.
You can literally build a stone formation, such as a circle, cone, or stack in an area that is relatively dead, and sit back and watch as the grass begins to pop up day-by-day, right around the stones. They do an amazing job of holding water and slowly releasing it into the soil.
When I flip stones over after putting them on seemingly dead soils, they are often teaming with insect life underneath. That’s a great sign in any soil. It means it’s coming alive again.
ZERO EFFORT BODY BALANCING FOR EVERYONE!
Over the many years I’ve been a therapist coaching people with all sorts of postural and joint problems, I’ve found that regardless of how much people complain about their pains and problems, they seem to have a very hard time doing even simple corrective exercises.
In my own healing process from a very serious neck injury I had about seven years ago doing a human lifting stunt, I found that laying flat on my back on the stone floor in my house gave me better relief than most of the other methods I was using and testing.
I’ve had people lay on foam rollers for this purpose for as long as foam rollers have been around, but laying on a flat, hard surface (preferably a natural material such as wood, stone, or wool) has a much more therapeutic effect on the body from an energetic perspective.
Stone in particular has an immediate grounding effect, sucking all electromagnetic pollution from your body very quickly, which can have far reaching therapeutic benefits for anyone healing from any ailment.
As you lay flat on your back on a hard floor, gravity loads the apexes of your spinal curvatures the most; they are the high points with the greatest relative load on them. Most people suffer from significant amounts of forward head posture (FHP).
FHP can be very debilitating energetically. As you can see in my diagram above, for every inch the head moves forward, the relative weight of the head multiplies itself.
If your head is in optimal upright posture, the load of the head (8% of body weight) is taken by the spine and surrounding ligaments; it’s balanced like a rock stack.
For each inch the head moves forward, the load increases itself as a multiple. For example, with optimal posture, there is almost no work for the neck extensors to hold your head up.
At one inch forward, a person of 100 pounds body weight will experience a chronic 8-pound load as long as they sit or stand with FHP.
When the head reaches two inches of FHP, the relative load on the neck extensors (and surrounding postural muscles) is doubled; now the 100 pound person has to hold the equivalent of 16 pounds up all day, and at three inches forward, they must hold up 24 pounds of chronic load.
Over time, chronically loading your postural muscles and your joints will lead to chronic muscle pathology, such as the formation of scar tissue and trigger points; painful points that send pain to other locations when pressed upon, signifying hypersensitivity of the nervous system and degenerative changes in the muscle fibers.
If you lay flat on the floor, gravity begins to cause “creep” in the ligaments that have become shortened, such as the very big, strong, anterior longitudinal ligament.
For example, when you have chronic forward head posture, you will be very likely to have an exaggerated thoracic spinal curvature (hunch back like curve).
As a person sits and stands hours and hours a day with this exaggerated curvature, the anterior longitudinal ligament adaptively shortens, holding you in poor orthopedic alignment.
As you lay on the floor, gravity begins to stretch the ligaments, joint capsules and muscles that have become too shortened.
If your FHP is so significant that you can’t comfortably lay flat, then it is a good idea to give yourself just enough support from a bath towel that you don’t feel pain, but can feel a therapeutic stretching sensation.
As you improve, reduce the height of the towel under your head progressively until you can lay flat on the floor. I recommend 15-20 minutes daily to get an effective treatment from gravity this way.
For those of you that like heavy lifting as part of your exercise routine, laying flat on the gym floor between sets and have a very beneficial effect on your alignment, and recovery between sets as well.
It is not uncommon for the body to start to ache as you lay on your back. You should NEVER be in any more discomfort than you feel is therapeutic. There should never be any invasive pain in this process.
Once you feel you need to move to alleviate the stress created as your body adapts under the influence of gravity, you can roll onto your side. Once there, the only thing you need to think of is finding the position that feels best to you.
Again, lay there until the urge naturally arises to change positions.
After decompressing on your back and side(s), you can roll over and lay prone (face down). There are key pressure points on the front of your body and inside your knees, elbows, on the front of the pelvis, and the sides of the head and face where they naturally touch when sleeping.
These pressure points are reflex sensors that trigger the activation of our in-dwelling infant development software programs, helping to integrate all body-mind systems.
My prescription for the clients I give this passive exercise to is to do this daily for 15-20 minutes at a time, or as long as it feels good (longer but generally not shorter or you won’t have enough time for gravity to do its handy-work).
For those with postural problems, doing this at lunch and before bed will give great results, being more and more noticeable as the days go by.
In as little as two weeks of regular use, you can see, and measure significant postural improvements, providing that there is also a committed awareness to maintaining optimal posture throughout the day.
For the rest of you, this method of postural correction should be tried before you run out and spend lots of money on doctors and therapists because of your niggling pains.
You can clear them for free with just a little commitment to self-care, such as this method I’m sharing here.
This technique is very important for children and teenagers who are still growing, but showing FHP due to sitting in desks and looking at computers all day.
If a child’s posture is poor as their bones complete their growth phase, poor posture can literally be “grown into the bones”, making for a very long process to get pain free later in life when all hell breaks loose from having to deal with the chronic stresses of poor posture, which are very far reaching in the body-mind complex.
This is a very real concern considering that Shirley Saharmann, PT shwoed in her research all the way back in 1988 that 98% of high school children had multiple significant postural faults. (Note that was “1988”, before computers were being used in our school systems!)
Well, I hope you enjoy “doing nothing” to get postural improvements and decrease your pains. It sure has done wonders for my clients and I. Give it a try – it’s free and easy!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
