Breathing and Movement Integration

Happy Tuesday!

Most of you will notice that I’m sharing one blog a week lately, which is largely due to time availability; I too have to carefully manage my time or… “too much work and not enough play makes Paul a dull boy!”

I prefer to offer some form of “real education” as opposed to “fast food education” on my blogs, so they often take a few hours to produce.

That said, if you were to study all my blogs, you’d still find my HLC and CHEK Practitioner programs to provide a level of education and integration that is impossible to gain from blogs.

My Blogs are filled with “health tips” and “awareness training” that is certainly helpful, but they should be seen as “indicators of where more study is ideal based on your personal needs”, which is why I commonly suggest other, more comprehensive resources in my blogs.

In my blog today, I’ll start with my video blog on breathing and movement integration, and then I’ll share some highlights of my life and client work, as well as sharing some of the recently completed CHEK Institute Advanced Training Programs.

All CHEK Institute instructors are highly trained, well tested individuals with legitimate expertise in the fields they teach in, and are great living mentors.

Breathing and Movement Integration

In my video blog today, I share simple tips for optimal breathing and how to more effectively integrate “intellectual concepts” of breathing with you body, or subconscious mind.

This is the only way that studying issues such as breathing lead to actual behavioral or practical changes in our lives.

Many people read about, and think about issues of health, such as breathing, but don’t take their intellectual knowledge below their head into their body; the coffee shops are full of unhealthy health experts telling others “how to get healthy”.

Breathing is the most essential function in a living body, without which, death occurs very rapidly. The average person breathes about 25,900 times daily, and the quality of each breath has a huge impact on an individuals overall body-mind balance and health.

Many health problems, from, poor energy levels, monkey mindedness, headaches, neurological symptoms such as tingling in fingers, energy lows, and poor digestion and elimination are either the cause of, or related to such conditions.

Many of our breathing problems stem from unresolved mental-emotional challenges as well.

My video blog today offers some basic movement and breathing instruction that allows you to turn almost any exercise or movement into an integration exercise.

I hope you enjoy the short lesson today. For those of you wanting more related information on breathing and movement, feel free to order the DVD titled “Heavy Breathing” presented by CHEK Faculty Dan Hellman, PT.

CHEK Advanced Training Program Graduates

Its a busy time of the year for CHEK Courses. I wanted to thank our recent graduates from the following courses with their highly skilled CHEK Instructors:

From downunder in Australia, to HLC1 Instructor Jo Rushton who completed teaching in Perth a couple of weeks ago! Congratulations to our newest CHEK Lifestyle Coaches in Western Australia!

Secondly, to Suzi Nevell who taught Exercise Coach in New Zealand recently. Although a small class these coaches have learned from one of the best! Congratulations!

In Calgary Canada, CHEK Instructor Terrance Thomas completed teaching Exercise Coach. Congratulations new coaches!

And, in the United States, CHEK Faculty Dan Hellman completed CHEK Level 2 at his center, Hellman Holistic Health, in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Looks like they had lots of fun while learning loads about the human body and spinal pathologies! Congratulations!

Dan is in Toronto this week teaching CHEK Level 1; I’m sure he’s going to enliven the students with integration of theory and practice and infant development. Great job Dan!

Soon, Dan is heading to London to teach the Golf Performance Specialist course, October 10-12.

Tomi Toles is in Toronto finishing teaching Exercise Coach in another couple of days. I’ll post some pics from that class next blog.

Upcoming CHEK Courses

Jo Rushton will be teaching CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coaching Level 1 (HLC1) in Melbourne, October 10-12.

Jator Pierre will be teaching Holistic Lifestyle 1 in Portland, October 17-19. Jator is one of our rising stars!

I have been receiving loads of students letting me know how Jator’s knowledge and skill is changing their lives! Way to go Jator! I’m proud of the way you have authentically integrated my teachings and creating a buzz with your teaching.

Later this month, October 21-26 I’ll be teaching HLC3 to a sold out retreat venue in Valley Center. I am really looking forward to working with my students and taking them to their next level of their Holistic Lifestyle Coaching skill set.

Next month, I’m excited to announce that Angie Lustrick and I are going to be co-teaching HLC 1 in Toronto, November 7-9.

Many of you know that I’ve cut my travel and teaching engagements WAY back so I can rest after over 20 years of non-stop traveling and teaching around the world.

That said, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to teach with Angie in Toronto. We both have special friends we love visiting there, and we both love Toronto, which was a “facilitator” for my decision to add another international event to my schedule.

The main reason though, is that I really love working with Angie. She’s a very powerful teacher and can really move people.

I’ll never forget being at her presentation at the first CHEK Conference we held in San Diego several years ago where Angie was awarded as “The Ultimate CHEK Professional”. I was totally blown away by her presentation!

I’ve been working closely with her, first training her to teach HLC 1, then HLC 2, and now HLC 3. She’s developed a significant following of students very quickly.

I was quite impressed in England while teaching HLC 3 when about 1/3rd of the students in class were Angie’s students. They all really love her and I get many comments from students commenting on the fact that “she’s the real deal!”

The good news is that I also get those comments from students when any of my instructors are teaching. Angie is also a practicing shaman/healer who has helped me personally in many instances. I’m totally pumped to teach HLC 1 with her in Toronto.

I will offer a morning tai-chi lesson for about an hour each day before class, and then I’ll share the whole third day with her.

If you can make it, you won’t be disappointed! She’s a powerhouse on stage and I’m sure that between us, people will be on a rapid transit to personal transformation. If you would like to attend this rare, one-of-a-kind HLC 1 event, feel free to register here: www.chekinstitute.com or click the link on the sidebar advertising this event on this site.

Many of our CHEK Instructors and mentors are contributors to the CHEK BLOG, which has a 4 Doctor themed focus. I think that if you read or view any of these excellent posts you will continue to be inspired along your holistic health journey.

A Belated Birthday Gift From Beverly Basila

If I ever forget my own birthday (which is entirely possible ), I know that a fun gift from Beverly from Miami will be my reminder.

This year, she sent me this lovely teddy bear and a jar of great daily motivational quotes. Penny loves teddy bears, so I knew that as soon I took it home, it would be well loved and find a place with all her other ones she loves.

I put the daily quotes in my bathroom and have started taking one out each day while I’m changing into my exercise clothes. Thanks for thinking of me again this year Beverly!

Penny and Angie Take Flight

This past weekend, Angie got to be the first non-pilot to get to fly with Penny. Penny passed all her tests and got her pilots license just before we left on our last trip to Canada and the UK to teach, so she’s been unable to fly much for a couple months.

She was really excited to come home from her trip (which was longer than it was for Angie and I because she went to visit her family in France for a week when we headed home) so she could start practicing her flying again.

Angie was coming to spend time with me and Penny invited her to go flying with her. While I was working with a client, I got a text message saying that they were above the Heaven house and to come have a look.

Sure enough, I grabbed Jason (my client) and we went outside. Above our heads, way up high, we saw a light aircraft circling the Heaven house. We waved to them, but they couldn’t see us. It was fun though.

Here is a fun short video clip Angie took from inside the plane while they were flying around. We are flying Angie to Shaman school in San Francisco this weekend, so that will by my first time in the air with Penny and I’m excited to experience being cargo for my beautiful wife.

The trip will take us about 3.5 hours in each direction, and if the weather changes too much, we could get grounded. At that point, Angie’s shaman school begins with a “shamanic journey to get to school any way we can arrange”, but Angie loves exploring the unknown, so I’m sure it will all work out perfectly either way.

Jason Returns To Heaven

Jason has been featured on my blog several times over the past few years. He is unquestionably, the most devoted, most diligent Zero Force Coaching client/student I’ve ever worked with in my holistic life-coaching career.

Vidya and I always love having Jason here at the Heaven House for coaching because he’s so full of life, and such an inspired, open-minded learner that I can’t help but get excited about coaching him.

He also LOVES Vidya’s food and art; we do a lot of art therapy in our coaching practices because it is very powerful and beautifully exposes the unconscious contents in an individual.

Jason is a very loving, generous man that I love and respect very much; his whole family is incredibly loving and generous in fact. He has given me some very cool, amazing gifts over the years we’ve worked together, often collected from his worldwide travels.

This visit he gave me the beautiful pyramid you see, which is a special EMF converter that collects EMF pollution and converts it to a frequency healthy for the body.

I put this beautiful, big, one-of-a-kind pyramid in my stone water charger for a day and a night to charge it with the natural energy in my stone water charger.

When I took it out to bring it in the house here, it was producing a lovely pulse wave of energy that can be felt throughout the house. Great gift Jason! Thank You!

These products are handcrafted by Michele Hood at www.litethelight.com and produce a beautiful, soothing energy in any environment; tell her Paul Chek sent you!

I have been using smaller ones for some time now, and my students from around the world have been buying them and loving them. Not only are they functional, they are a beautiful work of art and add beauty to any room.

Jason and I love our tai-chi practices, and I include tai-chi training in almost everyone’s coaching that I work with because of its far-reaching body-mind benefits. Since I began coaching Jason a few years ago now, Jason has also studied with various tai-chi masters and masters of other forms, such as the sword.

Now, when we do tai-chi with Jason, I get to giggle inside because he can generate so much chi that I get higher with him present than I typically do on my own.

We spent a good hour in my stone circle in moving silence. When we were done, both of us were way out there and way in there at the same time, and could only share a big hug and smiles that lasted throughout the day.

Jason also shares my love of rock stacking and making rock art in general. He’s a great athlete (Thanks to CHEK Instructor Tomi Toles as well, who works with Jason to implement my programs between personal visits in NYC) and loves a good challenge.

With that in mind, it was time to rebuild the stone sculpture I once had atop this large rock at the entryway to my Heaven House. The wind blew my last one down, and I was just waiting for the right time to rebuild it.

I knew Jason would love the challenge presented by trying to climb a big rock while carrying heavy stones!

Climbing the big stone to stack rocks on it is no easy task either. There is a real, very real balance challenge presented here, but I knew Jason would eat this challenge up like candy…and he did!

If I say, “this is hard to do”, or, “this is dangerous”, Jason simply smiles and says, “When do we get started!” Though many of the athletes I train are also like that, I don’t let them do this kind of work unless I know for sure they are ready or it will just be, well, use your imagination…

The bottom stone of our stack is probably 120 pounds, and that gets quite heavy when trying to scale a huge stone without using your hands. Jason and I were able to fetch the stones and build this stack in 60 minutes, which was perfect for our daily flow plan.

This form of rock stacking isn’t something I’d normally try with people in general. Even athletes that are “bad asses” in the gym often get a real shock when I introduce them to stonework because of the complexities introduced by working with odd objects that are typically unevenly weighted, often sharp, and regularly come with creatures on them that bite!

I normally work with bare hands and feet, but we had to go down into rattlesnake territory to fetch these stones and there’s a lot of very sharp thistles, and loads of creatures like scorpions, tarantulas, and others that don’t always take kindly to having their territory trodden on.

Jason’s birthday was just a couple weeks ago, and I was trying to figure out what to give him. I felt he’d like something I made more than something I’d purchase for him, so I thought I’d do a painting for him this year.

Angie and I love to paint together and Angie is also a good friend of Jason’s, so I invited her to create a painting for Jason’s birthday with me.

Angie’s amazingly crafty with those little shaman hands of hers so she chose the background color, and then painted the outline of the Buddha you see here. From there, I jumped in and started adding what came to me when I attached my heart to Jason’s Spirit.

After Angie got the ball rolling, I took over and got this far. Angie and I will work on finishing it this weekend by adding some vines and flowers to the wooden lattice I painted behind the Buddha.

Who knows but Jason’s Spirit what will come after that, or if we will find a balanced conclusion, but it’s sure fun finding out!

We can’t wait to finish it and send it to Jason. Though he has seen us take it this far, the surprise will be what arrives in the mail as the finished product.

Jason loves Vidya’s art and he commissioned her to paint something special for him the last time he visited.

Here you can see Vidya showing what she created using canvas and acrylic paint. She calls this piece “tai-chi Balance”, which is very appropriate for Jason, based upon our work together with him over the weekend.

Vidya and I have a long history of doing art together, and though she regularly blows my mind with her amazing art, this piece is definitely among the best I’ve seen her create.

Here you can see Jason’s beautiful gift from Vidya close up (click on the image to bring it into full focus). Try standing back and relaxing while you look at it with a receptive, soft gaze and feel what happens within you. Should be fun and interesting.

If you’d like to hire Vidya to create something special for you, you can make a request by contacting her at: [email protected]

My work with Jason this visit centered around an exploration of his personal archetypes, and the creation of his personal myth. This was an intensive three-day inner-exploration.

We finished our inner-exploration by having Jason paint an encapsulation of his life story, his archetypes and his personal myth. This beautiful painting is what Jason created.

I am very impressed with what came out of him. Since I introduced Jason to painting, he’s been practicing and Vidya and I love seeing what he creates from month to month.

We are regularly amazed with the art that our students and clients produce, and Jason is no exception. Jason (and his brother Jared) have produced some amazing art pieces in the past couple years and it’s been fun, fun, fun to see their artistic expression emerge as “the art spirit” seizes their brushes!

Awesome work Jason!

Well, that brings us to the end of my blog today.

I look forward to sharing more with you as I can, or next week for sure.

I hope I get to see as many of you as possible at HLC 1 with Angie Lustrick in Toronto!

Love and chi,
Paul Chek