Time to Relax Before CHEK Inspire! + Beautiful Family Beautiful Flower

Happy Friday!

After getting across the pond to the UK, Penny and I have had some time to relax, train and enjoy ourselves.

Tomorrow the CHEK Inspire Conference begins throughout the weekend. Besides giving presentations of my own, many of the CHEK Faculty will be presenting and inspiring us all. I am very excited to engage with everyone.

Check out the timetable:

Thanks to Gavin Jennings, CHEK Academy Director and his team for organizing all of the details to pull off the event. All of the Academy Mentors will be there and we will be viewing presentations by nominees for the CHEK Business Professional of the Year Contest. Sunday we will announce the winner!

I am getting great workouts in the Surrey Sports Center. It’s very well equipped and it’s about the same basic set up as the NZ Olympic Training Center. This is where the CHEK Conference is being held as well, so I can get a workout in between sessions if I want to.

The gym is very busy though. I had to wait about 20 minutes to get one of the six operating lifting platforms. They have a steam there too!

The property where Penny and I are staying is at a polo ranch/farm where people come to compete with each other (teams), so there are lots of beautiful grassy, well kept fields; just a little less beautifully kept than golf courses would be, but great for tai-chi and sprinting!

To get here, you’ve got to drive many miles on very narrow goat trails of roads. Pretty damn crazy when big trucks pass you…right to the dirt or nearing ditch or you loose your rear view mirror…and they know who’s bigger too…

Our space is in is a barn converted into a large house, so it is spacious. The weather has been a comfortable temp, with windy periods with showers, then sun peaks through a while, and the  over again…very much like Courtenay, in BC Canada, where I grew up on Vancouver Island.

I watched Joseph Campbell’s Mythos last night. Good every time!

Campbell was so honest about God, religion, all of it, and so bang on too! Great Spirits sends messengers to awaken the sleeping and drunk (of matter).

I did a little art yesterday that was inspired by a quote from Novatus:

“The root of the soul is where the outside world and the inside world meet. Love it…”

Many times I’ve told my students and patients that a soul exists wherever there is a being that knows it’s inside is different from it’s outside and can make changes to adjust it’ inner state; anything with an inside and an outside that has “self-consciousness.”

That “self” doesn’t necessarily imply “human self”; there are many kinds of intelligence that we don’t even understand or know about. Consider that people at large don’t believe rocks can speak, think, or process information… and the same for plants.

Quantum Mechanics says that even atoms are “thinking and potentially emotional” (of course there’s lots of difference in people’s opinions even among Quantum Physicists; certainly many of them think Amit Goswami is a crack pot…

Beautiful Family Beautiful Flower

I get the great pleasure of getting lovely art pieces sent to me from my friends and students all over the world. I love knowing that some of them were inspired by my teachings to explore the Art Spirit within.

Just the other day, Jackie, a friend and student of mine sent this beautiful acrylic painting of a lovely flower, with a family motif around it. I asked Jackie if I could share some of her words with her painting and this is what she shared:

“I woke up feeling like painting something that would illustrate the beauty, joy and love of waking up with (my baby) Manola’s smile everyday.  And a bright and happy flower is what came up!”

Jackie has not been painting long, but look how beautiful her inner-expression is.

I’ve been repeatedly amazed to find that creating art is far less about “being correct or trying to meet some preconceived standard”, and far more about expressing the love and creativity that rises when you open your spirit to “what’s possible.”

The real art is in the act of creating, and not in the viewpoints of your shadow, or judging self, or the viewpoints of others.

Most of us fell off our bike a few times before we mastered the two-wheeled affair, but we usually kept going because we knew it was “fun to ride a bike.”

Art is the same. We allow ourselves to “ride the experience of unbound creativity”, and if we see that we could do better mixing our colors, or choosing our shapes, or making our background interrelate with the foreground, etc., we look forward to doing it next time.

Each time, we get a greater and greater sense that we are able to reproduce what comes through our spirit in the medium we’ve chosen, and like the child riding the bike with more and more practice, we begin to feel free!

Thank you for sharing Jacke. Your love is easily felt when I look at your art. Your love for Manola and your family is “in your hands and on the canvas” and it looks like you really enjoying the process.

I’ll share more about my experience of being Inspired from the weekend soon. In the meantime, you can follow the happenings on the CHEK Europe FB page.

Love and chi,

Paul Chek