The Music Lesson!
Hello!
Well, I’m now home and settled in my lovely office and have spent time loving all my friends in my garden too! As you probably saw on my previous post, Toronto was a great success! So much love and openness to growth and exploration in Toronto at large. People seem to see the obviousness of my teachings there, which really makes it a fun place for me to teach, as you can imagine.
Today, I wanted to share an incredible gem of a book that I read a while back but have not had time to share with you. The book is titled, The Music Lesson, by Victor L. Wooten, the famous base guitarist.
The book is a beautiful story about life, told through the structure of music. Wooten teaches us many profound truths about life in the Universe based on a deep understanding of music as the inherent nature of the Universe at large. Through this book, you will learn about the spiritual path to development and see how amazing and perfect the life process really is, with all it’s challenges, perils, ups and downs; sounds like music to me.
I give this book a 10 out of 10 rating. It is accessible to any reader from about age 12 onward. Though there are some technical explanations, they are given in story format and even if a person doesn’t understand the deeper meanings conveyed, the truths will work to aid healing in the readers unconscious mind. I love this book and could read it ten more times and not be board by it. I hope it brings you the joy and awareness it brought to me!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
Freedom from Addiction in Toronto
Hi Everyone,
Vidya and I really had fantastic time working with our 1~2~3~4 of Overcoming Addiction, Obesity and Disease! Live Workshop participants. We met lovely new people and many of our local, loyal and practicing PPS Practitioners joined us. This is one of my favorite topics to teach and both of us were pretty impressed with the quality of each student to recognize the contributing factors that drive their individual addictions, their willingness to try something new, their bravery to face their ideas and thoughts about themselves and their lives, and witness love become manifest through acknowledgment of a living philosophy worth living for!
At the conclusion of the workshop, my soul led me to sit and write a poem. Here is my poem and some photos of our time together!
I saw my Soul today
In your eyes
I was your pain
A back that works all day
Without thighs
I saw your chant
“Wo I nee”
I heard your bird
begin to sing
Counting by 3′s
You lost everything
I saw you draw
Your broken heart
You learned to heal
Through the power of art!
You found harmony
Laughing today
Even Rory’s parents
came to play
And Played!
I saw Spirits
Like broken roads
That left as
Lovers ready
to shed
their clothes
May the printing-press stop
When JP’s music
puts the world in shock
I’ve kissed flowers
and loved the world
today
I’ll be back in the morning
Dear Soul
Ready to Play!
Love,
Paul Chek
I’m In Toronto!
Hi Everyone,
Penny and I arrived yesterday and it is great to be back in Toronto! My buddy Rory picked us up from the airport in his new Audio A6 – wow what a smooth car!
I’m really looking forward to delivering some great workshops and lectures at CAN FIT Pro over the next few days – most of my sessions are completely sold out to 200 people! That is exciting. I know I’m going to get to see many of my students and their friends and family, and meet many new friends. If you haven’t checked out my public calendar yet, there is a link to it on the home page here so you can see what I’ll be presenting.
On Monday, Vidya arrives and she and I will be facilitating our Live Workshop: The 1234 of Overcoming Addiction, Obesity and Disease the following weekend: August 20-22. That is a workshop that I am really excited about as it is the summation of my coaching work and now integrated into much of the HLC trainings. You can learn more about my approach by reading my free article on the PPS website under “Food For Thought” Articles by me. If you haven’t registered yet, now’s the time – it is filling quickly!
In the meantime, I am looking forward to sharing my love with everyone in Toronto!
Love and chi,
Paul
Ask Integral Experts
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to share with you a really cool group that I did an interview for last night: Ask Integral Experts – Doc Barham and Michael Richardson are really intelligent, integral thinkers and it was really a joy for me to have interacted with them. We covered a lot of topics and when they upload it to the site I’ll let you know. In the meantime, check out their website and listen to some very good interviews – you’ll be inspired!
Love,
Paul
Holistic Education?
Hello!
As many of you know, I’ve been lecturing about the importance of returning back to a holistic educational system of development for our children for many years. Humanity, for a variety of reasons (well explained in Ken Wilber’s excellent book and/or audio book A Brief History Of Everything), has come to worship ideas above and beyond the essentials that have, and do allow intellectual thought and imagination to emerge as a common mode of thought~action. The result of our current (industrialized) educational system is the accumulation of ideas, commonly excepted as facts that, at large, are degenerative if viewed relative to our survivability.
We have more people per-capita with university degrees of all sorts, yet, we are killing the very fabric of our nature; does that imply intelligence? As a man that spends most of his days helping people with money and advanced degrees heal from the disease of intellectualization of life by bringing them back into concert with their root-nature, I would suggest that idea-accumulation is not a measure of intelligence at all! It is for this very reason that I developed the C.H.E.K Holistic Lifestyle Coaching program, the PPS Success Mastery Program, and more recently, the Tao-Te-zen program.
One school of thought that looks very deeply into the nature of mind is zen. Zen teaching is designed to produce wholeness of mind, which culminates in a state referred to in zen circles as no-mind. The no-mind state is one in which one becomes congruent, or harmonious with their nature, with intellect being useful only as a tool for co-creating beauty in, and with nature. Once one’s inner-nature exists in harmony with their outer-nature, the ego naturally expands it’s awareness beyond meeting survival needs, which produces an open-mind state. The open-mind state is the door to both imagination and intuition. Once fear is removed from the equation, the aperture of the mind begins to open, broadening our perceptual view from self-centered “I-ness”, to “WEness”, and finally to “ALLness”. ALLness culminates in awareness of the interdependence of all ideas, superseding “consciousness of” to become one with Consciousness.
The no-mind state then is one in which one ultimately experiences themselves as one with the Whole; there is no longer the mind of “is~isn’t”. No-mind awareness naturally produces empathy and compassion of all who still need to exclude (black is not white) to include (black and white become expressions of each other, not negations of each other).
Few who have walked the earth have done a better job of explaining this essential process (zen) than Alan Watts. In his excellent little book, What Is Zen?, Alan Watts gives concise, clear explanations of many essential concepts to understand if one is to ever truly achieve the potential offerings of the human mind and life. Though this beautiful book is small, and written with simple language, it is likely to be challenging for those who’s intellectual mind still functions with the crutch of exclusion; angels vs. devils, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, my god vs your god, etc. Yet, as I regularly share with my students, “what good is living a philosophy without challenging it if truth is your genuine motive?” If you are ready to open your mind and learn the value of simplicity as a means of reducing the stresses of complexity (where it is unnecessary), this gem of a book is for you!
If you would like to see how zen looks when realized by a valedictorian high school student, I have put Erica Goldson’s valedictorian speech below for you (Thanks to Corey Jung for forwarding it to me!). If her points resonate with your logical and intuitive faculties, Alan Watts’ beautiful book, What Is Zen? is for you!
Thank you for sharing in life with me and may your present be a present wherever and whenever you are present.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
Coxsackie-Athens Valedictorian Speech 2010
Here I Stand – Erica Goldson
There is a story of a young, but earnest Zen student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, “If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen? The Master thought about this, then replied, “Ten years . .” The student then said, “But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast — How long then?” Replied the Master, “Well, twenty years.” “But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?” asked the student. “Thirty years,” replied the Master. “But, I do not understand,” said the disappointed student. “At each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?” Replied the Master, “When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.” This is the dilemma I’ve faced within the American education system. We are so focused on a goal, whether it be passing a test, or graduating as first in the class. However, in this way, we do not really learn. We do whatever it takes to achieve our original objective.
Some of you may be thinking, “Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn’t you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.
I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I’m scared.
John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher and activist critical of compulsory schooling, asserts, “We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don’t do that.” Between these cinderblock walls, we are all expected to be the same. We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt.
H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States. (Gatto)
To illustrate this idea, doesn’t it perturb you to learn about the idea of “critical thinking.” Is there really such a thing as “uncritically thinking?” To think is to process information in order to form an opinion. But if we are not critical when processing this information, are we really thinking? Or are we mindlessly accepting other opinions as truth? This was happening to me, and if it wasn’t for the rare occurrence of an avant-garde tenth grade English teacher, Donna Bryan, who allowed me to open my mind and ask questions before accepting textbook doctrine, I would have been doomed. I am now enlightened, but my mind still feels disabled. I must retrain myself and constantly remember how insane this ostensibly sane place really is.
And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. We are not enlivened by an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement. We have no choices in life when money is our motivational force. Our motivational force ought to be passion, but this is lost from the moment we step into a system that trains us, rather than inspires us.
We are more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts we were taught in school. We are all very special, every human on this planet is so special, so aren’t we all deserving of something better, of using our minds for innovation, rather than memorization, for creativity, rather than futile activity, for rumination rather than stagnation? We are not here to get a degree, to then get a job, so we can consume industry-approved placation after placation. There is more, and more still.
The saddest part is that the majority of students don’t have the opportunity to reflect as I did. The majority of students are put through the same brainwashing techniques in order to create a complacent labor force working in the interests of large corporations and secretive government, and worst of all, they are completely unaware of it. I will never be able to turn back these 18 years. I can’t run away to another country with an education system meant to enlighten rather than condition. This part of my life is over, and I want to make sure that no other child will have his or her potential suppressed by powers meant to exploit and control. We are human beings. We are thinkers, dreamers, explorers, artists, writers, engineers. We are anything we want to be – but only if we have an educational system that supports us rather than holds us down. A tree can grow, but only if its roots are given a healthy foundation.
For those of you out there that must continue to sit in desks and yield to the authoritarian ideologies of instructors, do not be disheartened. You still have the opportunity to stand up, ask questions, be critical, and create your own perspective. Demand a setting that will provide you with intellectual capabilities that allow you to expand your mind instead of directing it. Demand that you be interested in class. Demand that the excuse, “You have to learn this for the test” is not good enough for you. Education is an excellent tool, if used properly, but focus more on learning rather than getting good grades.
For those of you that work within the system that I am condemning, I do not mean to insult; I intend to motivate. You have the power to change the incompetencies of this system. I know that you did not become a teacher or administrator to see your students bored. You cannot accept the authority of the governing bodies that tell you what to teach, how to teach it, and that you will be punished if you do not comply. Our potential is at stake.
For those of you that are now leaving this establishment, I say, do not forget what went on in these classrooms. Do not abandon those that come after you. We are the new future and we are not going to let tradition stand. We will break down the walls of corruption to let a garden of knowledge grow throughout America. Once educated properly, we will have the power to do anything, and best of all, we will only use that power for good, for we will be cultivated and wise. We will not accept anything at face value. We will ask questions, and we will demand truth.
So, here I stand. I am not standing here as valedictorian by myself. I was molded by my environment, by all of my peers who are sitting here watching me. I couldn’t have accomplished this without all of you. It was all of you who truly made me the person I am today. It was all of you who were my competition, yet my backbone. In that way, we are all valedictorians.
I am now supposed to say farewell to this institution, those who maintain it, and those who stand with me and behind me, but I hope this farewell is more of a “see you later” when we are all working together to rear a pedagogic movement. But first, let’s go get those pieces of paper that tell us that we’re smart enough to do so!
Home from Atlanta! Whew!
Hello!
Whew! I’ve made it home from a successful, yet eventful trip to Atlanta Mania, Georgia. Unfortunately, the ticket agent at the airport here in Carlsbad (where I leave from) was having a gab session with the agent next to her and put someone else’s bag tags on my bag. The result…my bag went to Paris, France and I got a ladies bag with my name on it in Atlanta. After hours of phone calls, emails, attempts to locate my bag and get it sent back, I ended up waiting for three days before it finally arrived at my hotel. Not fun, but I did end up wearing Penny’s pants and the same underwear for long enough that even a Yogi would have considered me as a legitimate recycler!
My presentations and workshops all went very well and overall, people in Atlanta were genuinely interested in my teachings. I taught a pre-conference workshop and gave eight other lectures and workshops. Of course, there were a few who attended my lectures that were upset at me, and my message, but I’m very use to that as you can imagine. It’s very hard for people to truly hear my heart when invested in religious dogma, or when programmed to the degree that critical thinking isn’t possible. I simply have empathy for such people. My personal philosophy is that any philosophy worth living is worth challenging!
The highlight of my trip was getting to connect with several of the local C.H.E.K Practitioners and Holistic Lifestyle Coaches that attended the conference. They are such beautiful people and are so willing to learn and grow. I’m always happy when I see how significantly healthier the C.H.E.K Practitioners (of all types) are relative to others at health and exercise conferences I attend.
While in Atlanta, I visited Andrew Johnston and his wife Diane. You can see Andrew and I here in his beautiful Atlanta studio! Andrew is a C.H.E.K Level 3 and an HLC 3 practitioner, making him the practitioner with the highest training in Atlanta. It’s lovely to have him there so the other practitioners can send him their challenge cases and learn from him.
Andrew is an amazing man. He’s raced the Tour De France and the Iron man, and has many such elite athletic accomplishments to his name. A few years back, Andrew found out he had Leukemia. Though the survival rate from Leukemia is very low, Andrew applied his athletic persistence and everything he could learn from my teachings and others with good advice and has beat the odds! His story is very moving and motivational. You can visit Andrew’s web site at www.triumphtraining.com where you can order his DVD documentary: Living Is Winning – From Cancer To Kona, which is about his road to recovery.
Andrew is a real leader and inspiration to people worldwide. I was very impressed with his studio and am excited to be able to share his presence in Atlanta with any and all of you who may have friends or loved ones that need a skilled C.H.E.K Practitioners help.
You can reach him at:
Andrew Johnston
CHEK 3, HLC 3
USAT 1, CSCS
www.triumphtraining.com
(404) 431-2287
I’ll look forward to sharing some excellent books I’ve read with you in upcoming blogs. Until then, may we all become the lover we desire to have!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
CHEK Level 3
Hi Everyone,
Tomorrow morning I’m heading off to Atlanta very early in the morning so I wanted to make a quick blog post about CHEK Level 3. Suzi Nevell is here from New Zealand and is teaching the course – I am really happy she is – she is such a good physio and the best Faculty to teach this course as it is filled with orthopedic details. I taught my students a section on Why People Don’t Heal (see attached photo) and I answered questions this morning in our Q&A session. I am very proud of my students, so eager to learn and apply the knowledge in their own businesses – this course will leap-frog the practitioners to the next level with their increased skill set!
Congratulations to all of them! They have earned it!
Love and Chi,
Paul Chek
Potato, Apple, Tulip and Marijuana!
Hello!
Today I thought I’d share another excellent DVD: The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye-View of the World, with Michael Pollan is a highly informative DVD based on his book of the same title. If you are like me and find your day so full that reading piles of books is challenging time-wise, then watching this DVD will give you a lovely expose of the materials in Michael Polan’s book.
This DVD takes us on a journey in which we learn about human beings relationship with four plants: the potato, the apple, the tulip, and the marijuana plant. Michael Pollan does an outstanding job of showing how the plants use us to their own end-means! Yes, you understood me correctly – how plants use us to their own end means.
Most people have segregated themselves from nature, and the awareness that nature, in all her amazing aspects, is conscious. People tend to think that we are the ones making all the changes in the world and that nature is simply subject to our impetus and approval. This is a very dangerous idea. First off, we are emergent of nature. She is not our slave! Simply ask this one, simple question: Can nature survive without humans or does human survival depend on nature?
The DVD program gives us great insight into the industrialized farming process. It also gives us a chance to see, in the case of the tulip, apple, marijuana and potato, how our industrialization of these plant crops may well be the reaction to an impetus originating from the plants themselves. Just as the flowers use the bees for their intimate sexual activities, which is essential for our survival, in this program, we get a glimpse at the very real possibility that many plants may be using us to their end. Hopefully, they have a better plan than we do!
I invite you to join me this weekend in meditating on all the experiences you have with plants and food in general. How would your life be different without apples, potatoes, marijuana, or beautiful flowers, like tulips? I know mine wouldn’t be the same.
I personally feel much joy food brings me when I invite it into my being as a co-contributor and creator of my life, which always becomes recycled light, love and energy – “ life” once ingested. As we share in this meditation, please consider that just like we need a safe environment to live, grow and experience life, so too do the plants (insects, animals, etc)!
May we all become aware of our responsibility as stewards and co-creators with the plant (and animal) kingdoms.
May we become as loving, compassionate and responsible for nurturing them as they have been with nurturing us!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
Good vibrations!
Hello!
Today I thought I’d share a book I’ve just read with you. The Cosmic Octave:Origin of Harmony Planets, Tones, Colors, The power of Inherent Vibrations, by Hans Cousto. This is an excellent, methodical book that explains the relationships between vibration and creation.
This book gives a variety of well thought out explanations for those in the healing profession with regard to how vibration-based therapies can be applied to chakras (energy centers) and meridians. There are numerous useful correlations that bring clarity to various ideas emergent of ancient religion, showing how the ancient wise-ones were able to come to conclusions via meditative practices that can now be proven with harmonics and mathematics.
This book will be particularly useful to those people that are left-brain dominant and have a tendency to function from a “show me” or “prove it” perspective instead of accessing their right-brain capabilities and showing or proving it to themselves!
I’ve always been amused by my students with outdated attitudes who resist connecting to my teachings if they don’t perceive them as tangible within their worldview. Yet, inevitably, when their fellow students are getting results they can’t, and they finally get brave enough to read the scientific references I provide, they usually end up experiencing an “Oh shit!” moment. Then and there, many realize how their dogma has produced both blindness, limiting their own growth, and how many of their clients they could have helped should they have been brave enough to maintain an open mind.
My personal approach to life is: 1) before judging a methodology as “right or wrong”, to simply observe and witness. If there are tangible results with any given approach, and if I don’t understand them, then 2) the exploration begins! I’ve had a great time in my life by “not knowing”, which opens the door to 3) “experiencing”. Only through my own experiences of the irrational, have I been able to convert the seemingly unexplainable into the explainable.
This beautiful little book will help anyone truly interested in the science of creation do just that! Let me know what you think?
Enjoy,
Paul Chek
Do you have an intimate relationship with Silence?
Hello!
Well, here I am yet again. Another Beautiful Day!
I began my day, as I do each and every day, with a cold shower at 4:00 AM; cold showers shock the body into sympathetic harmony. A cold shower has the effect a conductor has when he raises his wand – the musicians immediately silence – ready themselves for concert (you may want to look up the definition of that word instead of assuming its meaning). At night, when we fall asleep, we go into parasympathetic harmony. Our whole life can be broken down into the elements of silence and note (vibration); which is more enduring? This is an important meditation – silence vs. note.
I have to say that it is truly amazing to me to experience some of the negative commentary on my teachings regarding “GOD”. For example, when I made the CHEK Mandala public we began getting all sorts of calls from people saying things like, “if Jesus isn’t in Paul’s diagram, I can’t support his teachings”…and we had practitioners calling in saying that they were losing clients because my mandala wasn’t reflecting a Christian orientation.
What most people don’t seem to realize is that the very reason I’ve “consciously” chosen to teach my students about metaphysics is because the most common cause of disease and mental-emotional unrest I find when working with clients is challenging issues with God and religion! The atheists get upset when I mention God because their experience is essentially that there is no God. So, an interesting pattern emerges: Unless a person hearing me is open to exploring another view-point, I’m (my views) in contradiction to their belief, and therefore, they feel it necessary to become combative in order to defend their God. This is all very amusing to me, for the very act of learning is an act of change! As I tell my students:
To learn is to change
To change is to learn
If you can’t change, you can’t learn, and
If you can’t learn, you can’t change!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I propose that “GOD” is that which can exist within, and “without” the Universe. Consider that according to solid scientific research, all things created are composed of vibration, ranging from light to matter. All things created are temporary; they begin to die (radiate) the moment they are born – this is an atomic fact! Therefore, any “thing”, be it your body, your ideas, or your god, are temporary. GOD is Eternal.
SILENCE
IS
ETERNAL
SILENCE is the Well-Spring of Creation.
From silence comes vibration (note), which emerges as frequency (Hz); frequencies can be organized into octaves, tones, overtones, pitch, timbre, amplitude, etc. Yet, all “songs” come to an end – Silence endures eternally – ever present. When we identify ourselves with “a God” that can be differentiated from any other God, we have reduced “GOD – SILENCE” to a thing, or things. No “thing” (vibration) can give birth to silence, it can only return to it so-to-speak. All “things”, including “ideas” (God is an idea if you can speak about it in descriptive words), are temporary. When we worship “things”, we worship the temporary, and, all things depend on other things for their existence. That’s easy to prove; all vibration depends on silence for its existence, therefore, no “thing” can be “GOD”, only a self-ordained “god”, and gods war with each other ceaselessly!
Today I invite you to enter silence. There, you will find the persistent nature of the conditioned mind relentlessly dancing on your silence. When we are unable to merge with silence, we exemplify our inability to control our own minds. When people are unable to control their own minds, they are unable to control “ideas”. When people can’t control ideas, they can’t create a sense of self-esteem, because essentially, they don’t know who they are; the ideas are forever changing in them and they are forever fighting to “keep their ideas constant” the way a baby likes to keep the idea of a breast constant for it’s sense of safety and security.
Until we can all get off the tit of the temporary together, we will all be at loggerheads as to what GOD is. Once we know through our own authentic experience what SILENCE IS intimately, then we at once see the humor in the whole show and can have compassion and empathy for those that fall in love with vibration, yet ignore it’s mother.
May we all be brave enough to get to know SILENCE together in celebration of life!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
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