Hypothyroidism, Food Choices, and Zen in the Garden!

Hello! Happy Monday to You!

I had a fantastic weekend and I hope you did too!

I took the day off Friday and got a great massage, took a steam bath, and relaxed into some art with a friend. Saturday, I came to work to keep my flow going with a public health project I’m working on. In the afternoon, I got into the gym for a little work tolerance training.

Sunday, I had a couple of visits from friends. CHEK Level 4 Practitioner, Jator Pierre from San Francisco came by for an early morning visit to see my new office; and he was checking to see if I can still make a good espresso!

My buddy Ryan Hughes (professional motocross coach see: https://www.rynoinstitute.com ) came to visit Vidya and I and show us some of his recent rock art.

Ryan had a very painful pinched nerve and wasn’t able to get relief so I did a little PC magic on him and his smile returned. Ryan and I did a lovely long tai-chi session together, and that was my movement commitment for the day.

ZEN IN THE GARDEN is here again!

Zen In The Garden is by far my favorite workshop to teach and share. I created this workshop because my students and patients typically suffer from over-intellectualizing their life and studies; they and all come alive when I work with them outside where they can experience the teachings.

I’ve had many comments from people kinesthetic learners and people with learning disabilities, inform me that during zen In The Garden, they were able to stay present and alert all day, which is rare for them.

In the photo above, you can see me teaching my students how to feel the chi (life-force) field. I share a variety of methods of calming the mind and accessing the inner-self (instinctual and intuitive).

This allows my students to practice unbound play and creativity. By accessing your instinctual intelligence, you learn to utilize the wisdom of your entire body-mind construct through feeling, rather than thinking. This is particularly useful for men, who’s feeling nature is often quite subdued due to socio-cultural influences.

Zen In The Garden is a unique experience where I share the many parallels between what and how we create consciously and unconsciously in our every-day lives, and what we do or don’t create out of a natural love and joy for ourselves in our personal lives.

Most of us have become so conditioned to meet deadlines, pay bills, and participate in the rat race that we often suffer from trapped creative energies.

When I teach my students how to create beauty with nature, and how to feel and communicate with the natural elements, they often feel as if all the sudden, they’ve been given a huge toy chest, only to realize that they have had it all along, but were too caught up in the hum drum to even notice the opportunities in front of them.

Many of my students leave the workshop, become proficient, create beauty all around them, feel great, and start teaching their own workshops. That naturally makes me feel great knowing that I’ve supported them with some very real, very practical life and dream building skills.

Many of us have very busy schedules and often have to choose between going to a gym to get some exercise, or doing something else that is more freeing to the spirit.

Since most of us feel exercise is more important to us than expressing our creativity (usually a big mistake in the long run!), learning to use rocks, earth, wood, plants, water and other environmental resources to both create beauty, and get great exercise is very freeing indeed.

Above you can see me creating a stack on top of a big rock. This kind of creative play is highly athletic! In fact, a pile of rocks properly engaged can be far more powerful a healing and conditioning tool than anything you can do in a gym!

For those that like a real hard workout with their creative self-expression, no worries!I’ve got plenty of big rocks to greet your need for a challenging day of exercise ☺.

It’s been over a year now since my last Zen In The Garden workshop, and I’ve had MANY requests to run another one. That’s why I’m inviting you to my first Zen in the Garden workshop March 9th, 9:00 am – 6:00 pm PT

To join me for this one-of-a-kind workshop, register here www.PPSSuccess.com

This Zen in the Garden will be completely unique too. I’m doing something I’ve never done before in this workshop by teaching and working to a theme: Water~Balance.

We’ll focus on creating a peaceful flow in life to even out our normal, high energy pace and the effects of being on the go and under pressure all the time.

As we immerse ourselves in the practice of balance, I’ll show you how to:
• Feel out exactly where you need balance in your life
• Harmonize your breathing and movement to cultivate healing energy
• Release worries and stresses through unbound play – an incredibly healing practice
• Re-connect yourself with nature and its energies by cultivating a rock garden
• Share great food with amazing, creative, intelligent, beautiful people

At its core, Zen in the Garden is a chance to take off your shoes, experience the earth beneath your feet and integrate your body, mind and spirit with like-minded friends.
The discovery of your personal source of peace and calm – a source that will balance out the heat that your busy life generates – is our singular goal and I know I can guide you to achieving it.

And I promise you, we’ll discover that source in a way that is playful, invigoratingly active, expressive and rooted in nature!

Now the one constant about all of my Zen in the Garden seminars is that they are a highly personal experience. For that reason the workshop is limited to 10 more participants.

So if you’re feeling like you need a little more balance in your life, want to go deeper in your spiritual practice, enjoy nature and aren’t afraid to get dirty, then don’t wait. I’ll be sharing all the wisdom I can share with the people that are ready!are you ready to tap into your creative potential and learn powerful forms of active rest?

FOOD CHOICES!Do I follow your book HTEM&BH! or do I listen to my body as taught in your Primal Pattern Eating audio program?

Today, I was scanning my blog and noticed a comment was left for me. The writer asks:

Hi Paul,

In Primal Pattern Eating (audio) you said that you have to ask your body what it wants and needs. But if I listen to my body I will eat much less than I eat.

In your book, HTEM&BH! you said that we must not cut calories. So if I will listen to my body, I consume less calories than I need. I already have a problem with low metabolism; my morning body temperature is 35.8º C.

This is an important question and I thought I’d share it on the blog instead of just in the comment section because so many people have this problem today. Here’s my response:

Hello anze (I’m assuming that’s your name since you didn’t leave a name under your question),

Your question is a good one and I must answer it in stages for clarity:

1. In my book, HTEM&BH!, I am addressing the issues most common to the greatest number of people. As a general theme, cutting calories (dieting) and/or skipping meals is very disruptive to a person’s physiology, and such imbalances are mirrored in their psychology; MIND: An “embodied process” that regulates the flow of energy and information.

When you consider that the grand majority of what people eat today is commercially raised, nutritionally deficient, toxic, often synthesized and full of chemical additives, skipping meals only furthers the nutritional deficit and typically magnifies deficits.

My book is essentially a basic operators manual for creating baseline health and understanding what it takes to care for a human body. I had to cut out twice as much information as there is in the book just to meet the requirements of the average reader; those requirements extend to the type, density, and dimensionality of the information shared.

For example, my audio/workbook program titled, “You Are What You Eat!” is nine hours of audio information on the essentials of food, food packaging, food storage, food preparation, reading labels, and understanding the games governments play to appease corporations at your expense…

If I had included the information you refer to from my Primal Pattern Eating webinar in my book, sadly, I’d have lost a huge number of readers who have mental blockages about muscle testing and soul connection/communication…

If your body temperature is running low (suggested of exhausted adrenal glands and hypothyroidism), it is likely that when using the more advanced methods I share in Primal Pattern Eating, that indeed, your body-mind will suggest that you eat less. When we eat (as I show in my book HTEM&BH! on p. 210, Figure 2.), 50-70% of calories consumed are utilized “just to maintain basal metabolic rate – to keep the lights on so-to-speak. An additional 5-19% are consumed by the process of digestion and elimination (According to Dr. John Berardi’s published writings).

Therefore, we can now be as high as 89% of daily calories consumed being devoted to baseline survival needs.

If for any reason, your body becomes too toxic, and/or your total stress load results in adrenal exhaustion, your body will begin to get cold as a result of slowing metabolic processes. This is, in my experience working with many such cases, the bodies attempt to slow you down so that it has a chance to clean and repair itself.

Whenever someone is in a state of imbalance or illness like this, the quality of food and water becomes very essential to healing/balancing. It is normal, for example, to desire less food, and eat less food when we are ill.

It is NOT normal for people with your symptoms of low body temperature to continue to eat as much as they did before the condition emerged, yet people keep eating both too much, and the quality of the food and water typically continues to be low, often disastrously low.

This typically implies:

1. Unconsciousness with regard to the person’s relationship with their body; their instincts are no longer intact and they are making choices from their intellectual (programmed) mind alone.

2. Chemical dependence to foods, which often falls under the heading “Food Addiction”

3. Psychological dependence on foods which are consciously or unconsciously associated with pleasure experiences; food becomes a form of freedom and stress relief.

Other concerns in a case like this are fungal and parasite infections (See my new program titled, HEALING FUNGAL AND PARASITE INFECTIONS – THE ABSOLUTE ESSENTIALS, available at www.chekinstitute.com or click the link to the side of this blog page), which cause chemical alterations in our body.

The result is chaos in the hormonal and immune systems, including cravings for foods that should be avoided all together!

Heavy metal poisoning and other environmental toxins can lead to a wide range of physiological riddles emerging.

HOW TO ADDRESS YOUR CHALLENGE:

1. Hire a skilled CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coach (see www.chekconnect.com for our locator system) and have them do a proper assessment on you so you know what you are actually dealing with.

2. Have a 24 hour cortisol rhythm test run so you can see how functional your adrenal glands are; any adrenal dysfunction is mirrored throughout the entire hormonal system as compensatory imbalances and generally won’t clear until the adrenals are healthy. Dr. Cliff Oliver can assist you with that (858) 272-2333.

3. Follow the guidance from your body-mind exactly as I’ve suggested in my audio program, Primal Pattern Eating. Make very sure that you are eating the very best quality food you can get in the process, or it will be a much longer, more expensive journey than I suspect you want to go on…

When you are being guided by inner-wisdom to skip breakfast, for example, it is wise to use a tea like Yogi Fasting Tea to help balance blood sugar and provide concentrated, easy to digest nutrition in low doses.

This allows you to feel safe knowing that your blood sugar balance is being supported, that you are sticking to a regular eating ritual (very important for psychological reasons), and that you are getting inflow of high quality nutrients.

4. Follow the system in my book HTEM&BH! exactly as presented: fill out the questionnaires. Begin addressing your high scores as plotted on the score graph on p.37 by starting your study and changes from the left of the graph, moving right as you have the time, energy, finances, and…willingness…

Over 90% of the people consulting me for help with problems like this get better by simply following my book and not putting their own spin on things…

It always amazes me how people who have health problems contact me, ask me for help, pay a pretty price, and then take my book, program/advice and alter it to suit their ideas (largely based on reading magazines, watching TV, and listening the advice of professional athletes who are commonly “fit sick people”), and then come back complaining that the program isn’t working…What Program?, I ask?

Most of the problems people face today are the symptoms of:

1. Ignorance as to what a body-mind is and how to care for theirs.

2. Trying to do too much in a day, week, month, year…and not giving themselves time to rest, shut their head off, and celebrate life. Most people are so identified with their material possessions, money (or lack of), perceived rank and status, etc, that they loose contact with their inner-self and their core-needs.

The result is progressive burnout personally, professionally, and spiritually, they become dull, flat, aloof, and tend to believe what others read and say because it takes less energy to do so than to actually use their own sense of logical deduction or self-awareness.

A very small number of people (about 5% according to Bruce Lipton) have complicating factors emergent from their genetic heritage. And even when this is the case, all my suggestions apply, but with even more importance for a simple reason.

Genetic weaknesses can best be addressed by creating health and balance as a general theme because all body-mind systems are co-dependent.

For example, if you have a low tire on your car (genetic weakness), how aggressively you accelerate, corner and brake (epi-genetics or environmental influences) greatly influences weather or not you will have a flat tire, or loose control of the car and have any number of problems, all of which may be so great in magnitude that you can forget that the flat tire started it all.

OK, I hope that brings some clarity.

Tomorrow, I’ll share some thoughts and tips on the importance of creating clarity in the process of creating and living your dreams.

Love and chi,
Paul Chek