STONES, FLAMING HEAD, AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS

Hello and Happy Monday!

I forgot to share that I’d received an award from Total Gym at the CHEK Conference dinner party.

Tom and Joy Campanaro presented me with an award for being an Industry Innovator. Though I don’t really put much stock in awards given at conferences, I was touched to receive this award from Tom and Joy.

Tom and Joy have shared a long relationship with me personally, as well as having been very supportive to the Institute for over 20 years. Total Gym has been a major sponsor of many of my past video productions, which was key back in the days when I needed financial support to produce expensive videos.

Because Total Gym has been deeply involved in physical therapy and personal training for so long, they’ve had a real chance to see how my teachings have influenced a variety of professional circles.

I know Tom isn’t the kind of guy to give out awards without authentically feeling that they are deserved. Getting this award from Him and Joy was touching. I really felt as though a major corporation was sharing true recognition for my life’s work.

The award reads:
“Industry Innovator”
Paul Chek
For your dedication and focus

For challenging the
universal mind of fitness

For enhancing the lives of
people around the world

Presented by
TOTAL GYM GLOBAL CORP
September 3, 2011

Thanks Tom, Joy and Total Gym!
Coming from you, the award means a lot to me!

Sharing time with Matt Nichol

As I shared on my last blog, Matt Nichol, a friend and prominent strength and conditioning coach from Toronto came for a visit. It was great to see him and have him over to the house to spend some time with me.

Matt and I started our weekend together by getting a massage and having a nice long steam bath together at the Encinitas Acupuncture and Massage Center.

Matt saw Francine, and as I suspected, he was really impressed with her sports massage. Francine has been massaging professionally for a very long time. She was in the next class behind me all the way back in 1986 when we attended what was then the Sports Massage Training Institute.

My first wife (Sue Chek) and my mother were in Francine’s class as well. Even though we’ve watched each other age over the years, she’s still got the touch and the strength to work on a man as big and strong as Matt! I saw Frankie and she did her usual magic with me too, which was great.

After we finished our massage and steam, we headed home for a lovely home cooked dinner ala Vidya!

Matt hadn’t had a home cooked meal in quite some time so he was really grateful for such a lovely meal. I always get the joy of seeing the look on people’s faces when they eat Vidya’s food.

In fact, it wasn’t until I met Vidya and started eating her food that I realized that if vegetarian food was properly prepared and balanced, I often didn’t even miss meat at all.

Many of the people trying to live vegetarian run into problems due to lack of knowledge of proper food combining and cooking technique so I’m glad to have been able to experience a year of healthy vegetarianism with her at the helm. She’s also got great meat and fish preparation skills, as Matt found out with the tasty ahi and umeboshi plum sauce!

INTO THE HILLS AND THE ROCK GARDEN WE WENT!

Friday, Matt and I started our day with a slow walking meditation hike in the hills behind my home. He really loved it out there. I explained to Matt that Vista is California’s best-kept secret!

Vista has the beauty of California’s hoity-toity suburbs without all the pretentiousness, and is much more affordable. That said, please don’t bother moving here because there is already too much traffic ☺.

Matt has been a friend of mine for many years and even though he’s studied from many of the best strength coaches and therapists in the world, he hadn’t yet tried working with stones as a conditioning method. I had told him about the many benefits of stone work, yet, one can never fully comprehend such things until you actually try it. As you can see here, he got right into it with me.

We did a joint project together; I put one stone on and he put the next on until we reached the point that going higher was too risky because the stack may fall over.

As you can see here, we put up some pretty juicy stones together. This photo gives you a good sense of how stone stacking requires not only strength, but precision control. One wrong move and you better exit with the speed of a scared rabbit or you may be needing an ambulance!

Here you can see Matt standing on a stone step to get the top stones in place. Once you reach a height that doesn’t allow you to see the surface of the top stone, you get into dangerous territory.

The way we do it at my place is to stay primal. Instead of getting out a ladder, we build stone steps, as you see here. Matt picked up the technique very quickly and is strong enough to work with stones overhead, which makes it easier to make big stacks.

I’m shorter than Matt by several inches so once it was my turn, I had to add another stone step; I was being careful not to knock down Matt’s first creation. Working with heavy stones can be like dancing with a Russian shot putter!watch your toes baby!

Well, it took us a few hours, but we created a really cool addition to my garden together. Here you can see Matt with his first stone creation. Great Job Matt!

As you can see, there are some pretty juicy stones in this one. I think Matt now understands what I mean when I say, “there’s nothing you can do in a gym that even comes close to the kind of athletic development you get working with stones.” I gave Matt some simple suggestions for incorporating stones into his routines with athletes.

One of the first professional strength coaches I know of to incorporate stone work in his athletes training routines was Karsten Jensen, previously the strength coach for the Danish Olympic Training Center in Copenhagen.

Karsten is a CHEK and HLC Practitioner and has done several of the CHEK Institute training programs over the years. Karsten has worked with a wide variety of elite athletes and wrote a great book on periodization. Karsten’s book it titled, The Flexible Peridization Method.

Matt took off Saturday morning to visit a friend in LA, so I headed out to the rock garden alone to see how I could entertain myself and create some active art. I really enjoy lifting heavy stones myself so I went for the stones that would give me some deep core and strength work.

The stack on the right is what I created and Vidya created the one on the left. I don’t know how Vidya does some of the things she does?

She’s a little woman of less than 125 pounds and she put this stack up in what felt like a few minutes during our recent zen in the garden event. I thought it looked a little lonely there so I created a mate for her stack. It was great fun and a damn good workout too!

Here is a picture of my zen rock garden taken from the front yard of my house Sunday. Pretty much every time I’m in the garden, I have people from the neighborhood or people passing buy stop to ask questions about my stones and stone sculptures. It always amazes me how stimulated and inspired people become when they see the stone sculptures.

I can’t count the number of people that stop, get out of their cars and take photos. Now I see stone sculptures popping up around the neighborhood. That’s very gratifying for me.

FLAMING HEAD!

Here you can see me using an ear candle. Ear candles are a safe, effective way to get a deep clean of your ears. They are bees wax tubes with healing herbs and oils infused into the wax.

When you place the ear candle in your ear and light it, the fire creates warmth, loosening the wax in your ears. Then, the vacuum created by the burning candle tube draws the garbage from your ears. Because I’m lifting dirty stones over my head so often, I frequently have stuff falling into my ears.

Strangely enough, the last two times Donal Carr and I were laying under a tree together, a bug fell out of the tree right into my left ear!

The first time that happened was during an HLC course at Myall Shores Resort, outside Sydney, Australia a few hours. I went to the hospital to have my ear checked because I was afraid it may have been a tick.

Fortunately, it wasn’t.

This time, I couldn’t feel any movement in there after giving my head a vigorous shake. I thought I’d better do a good cleaning job in the ears this weekend while I had some time.

It’s deeply relaxing to hear the sound of the fire and feel the warmth in your ears as you do this process. I only had time to do the left ear (with the bug in it) before Penny and I went to a movie but I’ll do the right one soon. After I was done, my ear felt soothed and clean. Good, soothing, natural medicine.

THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS

Hazrat Inayat Khan was a Sufi Master who wrote many EXCELLENT books in his lifetime, most (if not all) of which I have.

His book titled The Unity Of Religious Ideas is what I’d call an essential read. He does an excellent job of highlighting the key principles that bind all the great world religions together. Like most true masters, he also is honest about what constitutes religious distractions and/or diversions.

He explains how each religion is a system designed to bring a person into contact with the God ideal. From that place, one can develop a relationship with their own soul, or the God within.

Once we develop a relationship with our soul, we have the awareness needed to get past the “he said, she said” challenges of religion and religious differences (that often lead to wars!), and develop a relationship with GOD, the GOD of ALL.

This book makes a great gift to anyone in your life that suffers from religious dogma. Read with an open mind and an open heart, this book is not only highly educational, it helps each person get clear on what religion really is and what religion is intended to offer. He also shows, in his own special way, what religion isn’t!

If you claim to be “religious” and don’t think you need to read this book, that’s the first symptom of a need for this medicine!

Love and chi,
Paul Chek