IS MAKING STRESS YOUR HABIT?

AWESOME CHEK PRACTITIONERS SHARE ON YOUTUBE.COM!

Good Tuesday To You!

I had a very busy day yesterday, yet I managed to get two tai-chi sessions in.

In the evening session, I combined toning with my tai-chi movements to enhance body~mind balancing.

It’s quite funny when I tone in my yard at night because dogs all over the neighborhood start barking and howling.

I suspect the neighbors don’t hear me because they are inside their homes, but the dogs sure like to chime in!

After a great three-day rest last weekend with some fun rock lifting, I was ready to put some juice into a deadlifting workout yesterday.

I was very happy to be able to pull five sets of 3 off the step box with 385 on the bar, which is equal to about 435 off the floor.

Though that’s not as much as I was pulling in the days before my neck injury when I was weighing 189 pounds, I’m pretty happy with those numbers considering that I’m now 50 years old at a body weight of 168 pounds.

I did my deadlifts in circuit with sets of six per arm of Olympic bar single arm rows and reptilian crawling.

While I am training, I am studying a university course by Professor J.R. Searle on Philosophy of Mind from UC Berkley.

Always interesting to get an academic perspective on philosophy of mind. I couldn’t help but think as I listened how different his views would be with a little meditation training and practice ☺.

IS MAKING STRESS YOUR HABIT?

Most of us grew up in home environments where we learned how to experience and create stress from our parents and family members.

Unfortunately, most of us weren’t taught how to differentiate between make believe stressors and legitimate stressors.

With regular exposure to people acting out stress behaviors, it is natural to begin unconsciously emulate those behaviors as a means of fitting in.

Surely you’ve had the experience of feeling fine within yourself, only to end up meeting with people that are wound up over something in their life.

In no time at all, the sense of well-being within you has been converted to an agitating background buzz that begins to influence everything from the way you think and emote, to how fast your write, talk, or drive!

This phenomenon has to do with some elementary principles and realities:

1. We all have a significant population of what are called mirror neurons in our brains. Mirror neurons are a survival mechanism built into us by nature.

Mirror neurons cause creatures to emulate each other. Experts such as Paleontologist Franz de Waal explain that mirror neurons are responsible for our innate capacity to emulate.

For example, you’ve probably seen how a school of small fish emulate each others movements, creating the impression that the school of small fish are actually one very large fish, which reduces their chances of being eaten by other fish that now see a bigger fish than they.

Communications experts and teachers such as Tony Robbins often teach a technique called mirroring and pacing as a means of creating connection to others.

You may have noticed that when talking to someone, if you are sitting with your arms crossed, they often take the same posture; if you talk fast or swear openly, the others may start talking fast and swearing openly.

Once you are aware of your mirror neurons tendency to follow others under stress, you can choose not to follow, but to lead them into harmony.

This is much better for both parties than both ending up emulating stress behaviors, particularly when that way of emoting can become a subconscious habit over time!

2. As you can see in the photo above, Einstein shares a physical, energetic reality when it comes to how we experience, or tune in to energy; remember, “e-motion” means “energy moving”.

Einstein says: “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.”

Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.

CREATING PEACE POINTS

We can never truly know how much of the stress we experience as our unique individual experience is the product of another’s creation until we are brave enough to still ourselves in moments of peace.

I call these moments “peace points”, and as you can see in the photo above of me practicing with my tai-chi ruler before teaching in Sweden, there are many ways to get to a state of peace or “abiding within yourself.”

All of us have had very stressful situations or stressful days where we thought things were disastrously falling apart.

Yet, we wake up the next day, or a few days later and things have changed and we often forget all about that stressful event or day.

So, the question is, how many of the stressful events are you still “replaying in your body-mind” out of habit, or as a means of fitting in with the people that are living in a way that isn’t optimal for your individual needs?

I have found in my life, that by being consistent with my meditations, healing art practice, tai-chi, exercise sessions, and the likes, that I can create “peace points” within myself.

When I’m in a state of inner-peace, I can feel my authentic state in absence of the influences of others or even environmental stressors, such as the news.

I’ve often been amazed to find that if I give the world permission to hold onto and manage it’s own stressors for 5-20 minutes while I offer the world a moment of peace within, that I’m far less stressed than I thought I was.

By creating a peace point and allowing others to take ownership of their stresses and allowing Mother Earth and/or Mother Universe to hold their creations while I balance myself, I’m able to “feel” my authentic state relative to the feelings I had when interacting with others.

I frequently find that I can become more aware when others are winding me up and with the awareness I’ve cultivated by creating peace points, I can choose to center myself.

I can allow them to own their own creations, while at the same time, creating a soothing inner environment that allows them something more wholesome to emulate (with their mirror neurons or “tuning faculty”).

Remember, when you go to sleep at night, you forget about it All! You go into deep, dreamless sleep at night and you don’t even know your own name.

So, if you’ve completely De-stressed yourself at night, it must be true that we turn our (stressful) stories back on when we wake up to enter the play again.

With a little practice creating and maintaining peace points in our life, we can become more aware of how to tune into, and/or create the frequency of energy we’d like to both experience and share with others!

AWESOME CHEK PRACTITIONERS SHARE ON YOUTUBE.COM!

Jeff Brion (CHEK 2) and Wayne Daniels (CHEK 4) are excellent examples of living the Chek lifestyle.

They recently produced a lovely little video clip for youtube.com which I’d love to share with you here:

httpv://youtu.be/2nNlzo1IouA

I hope you enjoy it and if you live in their area or would like some phone coaching, feel free to contact them. The details are there on their youtube.com site.

Great job guys!

Well, that’s my blog message for the day.

I hope you enjoy creating some peace points in your day so you can enjoy being a great, healthy person to mirror!

Love and chi,
Paul Chek