Zen in the Garden Highlights

Happy Monday to You!

I hope you all had a fantastic weekend!

We had an absolutely amazing time this Saturday with all the students at our zen In The Garden workshop.

Water Theme

Our theme for this workshop was water. To help my students make the leap from the “idea” of water to the “experience” of water, Angie, Vidya and myself played the Native American rattles to create the sounds of water in its different expressions.

The students then danced and moved to the sounds of the different flow patterns and then drew them on the ground like you see Ryan Hughes doing here.

These patterns later became a guiding influence on our creations. The key concept being the creation of an opportunity to learn how to take a mental concept and import it into your feeling state of awareness.

Through the feeling of the water at different intensities of flow, we were able to recreate water experiences from the seemingly static structure of stones and other earth elements, as you see in Ryan’s pattern above.

Here you can see Ryan’s finished water-spirit mandala. I really loved watching Ryan’s process from beginning to end. Considering just three weeks ago Ryan was laying in a hospital bed with six fractured thoracic vertebra from a racing accident, and endured a spinal fusion with rods and hardware to boot, it’s amazing to see him out here creating beauty already! Great job Ryan!

Here you can see me teaching my students the basics of how to create a bioelectrical circuit from stones.

By understanding the relative polarity of stones, you can learn to create actual living circuits of energy flow that can be harnessed for beneficial purposes.

As part of my teaching for the workshop, I taught my students the key concepts of how to build their own water charger from stones.

You can see that my students all have a black lava stone (very yin!) on the ground, and I’ve asked them to put a crystal on top of it (very yang). Their task was to empty themselves of any consciously generated thoughts and feelings.

Then, touch the black lava and feel what occurs within. Next, I had them add a crystal to the top after feeling it by itself for comparison.

When they put the crystal on top of the lava, they all felt a significant increase in the energy in their bodies.

This is the beginnings of learning how to feel the effects of the circuits they create with stones.

I did this with them to prepare them for their surprise task of helping me build a new water charger here at my work home so I can have excellent, highly energized, healing, balancing water.

Part of my student’s training was learning how to safely lift stones. Here I’m lifting a stone that weighs about 100 pounds and I’m showing them how to use their whole body to lift and position the stone safely for walking with it.

Later in the day, some of the guys really tested the teaching as they were working with some very large stones.

Before beginning the technical, tricky task of building a legitimate, fully functional water charger (not just a stack of stones), I got my students together for a harmonizing session. When you have 14 people all working with heavy, sharp objects that must be placed with tremendous precision, in a functional circuit, lots can go wrong, as you can imagine.

Well, I’m happy to announce that after chanting AUM_ together for 15-20:00 and coming into harmony together, we worked without a single hitch and built an amazing, powerful, functional water charger!

I was amazed at how well my students did. They knew what stone was the right one for them, at the right time in the sequence. I only had to replace one stone of almost a tone of stones.

Honestly, I couldn’t have done much better myself after years of practice! Great job students!! Impressive!

Here you can se our beautiful water charger. Though this may simply look like a pile of stones to the untrained eye, this is a functional arrangement of stones that creates a vortex of energy created by the influences from the surrounding environment, as well as the energetic inputs from the stars, sun, moon, and energy from weather patterns.

The effects on the water are significant. The water charger can so powerfully influence water (particularly at the full moon!) that the water can feel carbonated and literally bounce off your tongue. Many of my friends had a hard time believing that I didn’t carbonate the water that I gave them from my charger at home.

Another interesting note is that the water tastes differently every day, and with every season.

I’ve been using my water charger at home for about 4-5 years now and I’ve been able to make some very interesting observations that tell me a lot about water that most people (including most water experts) seem to be relatively unaware of as yet.

I’m excited to know that my students now have another tool they can use to create more vitality for themselves and those they love. GREAT JOB everyone! The water from the charger is truly impressive!

Here you can see Brandon Wicklund and I building a stack of big stones.

I knew the boys would have an attraction to some big stones.

A couple weeks before the workshop, Jeff Brion and I worked our asses off going out into the brush and collecting big stones for the students; there is poison oak out there, and other creatures that bite so we wanted to keep the risk of medical emergencies as low as possible.

Well, there was not only plenty of big stones, some of the guys and I hauled another half dozen beauties out of the brush with my guiding the way; it’s rough terrain and it’s very easy to get hurt carrying stones ranging from 1-300 pounds (two person carries).

Here you can see Jeff Brion and his amazing stack. That’s what makes it so fun and exciting. As I was taught as a soldier in the 82nd Airborne Division, “Stay alert and stay alive!” The guys did an excellent job and got a good ass-kicker of a workout too.

This is Rianon (on your right) and Julian (on your left) Mateer from Sydney, Australia. Rianon and Julian are coaching clients of mine and were just here doing a two day private intensive with me.

They decided to stay for the workshop and have even more fun. Here you can see a beautiful stack they created. Notice it has a lovely natural curvature to it, expressing the non-linear behavior of water, our theme for the day.

After they created the stack together they got motiveted to build an arch together. That’s teamwork! Great job Rianon and Julian! I look forward to your next visit here in Heaven!

Here you can see the beautiful Rosanne Kline and her lovely addition to the land. Rosanne got to return to one of the special stone stacking spots she created while we were preparing the property for the workshop.

After the workshop, she said to me that she was kind of surprised that she ended up where she did because she really enjoyed making this special spot for someone else, but was glad she got to continue her relationship with this piece of land. She had cleared all the brush and brought stones for someone to work with!which turned out to be her. Very cool.

Angie was having a ball out in nature with the spirits of the land and stones. Here you can see her expressing her joy of completion. Those are some pretty big stones for such a little woman too! Great job Angie! I love coming to work and seeing everyone’s beautiful expressions around the property.

Here are some more highlights from our amazing zen In The Garden day together:

David came all the way from NY, great to have you join us!

Eric was our youngest student who came from Alberta Canada. When he left he said that he had a great time being with “like-minded” minded people. Great job Eric!

Each student created something beautiful! Another great stack, thanks Jim!

This little beauty is one that Vidya created. I love the beautiful energy it creates in the garden and how beautiful it is with the lake in the background. Vidya can create beauty out of anything. Give her a bag of garbage and come back in an hour and you’ll have art good enough to sell! Thanks for all your love and support on this special day Vidya!

Here is our class photo. As you can see in the photo, we got into some heavy stone lifting and shared the joy of art and working-out together. There’s nothing like the experience of rock conditioning.

The gym is like girlyman training after experiencing what happens to your body when lifting stones. Grabbing a barbell after working with stones is almost sinfully easy, not to mention that gym weights behave like well-behaved soldiers and rocks behave like rock-n-roll teenagers!

Ryan Hughes left a little early because he was tired from so much activity and I encouraged him to go home and get some rest; he’s still in a deep healing phase so we don’t want to push him too hard.

The beautiful stone mandala you see above was created by Ryan Hughes’ son, Evander. Ryan brought this photo to our workshop to show me. I love it when my students share their experiences with their children and the children begin finding their natural talents. Great job Evander!

As you can see in the photo, Ryan likes to paint rocks (as do Vidya and I), and he’s very good at it too.

I have some stunning rocks Ryan’s painted for me here in my office with me now. The one above is one that Ryan gave me. I love them. Thanks Ryan!

Vidya and I had an absolutely lovely time with everyone and we are grateful you came to share yourselves, your love and life experiences with us, and each other. Some great new friendships were made among us, and, we shared some GREAT food!

We all got to share some healing energy with Ryan Hughes too, which I’m sure he appreciates.

Vidya and I had so much fun with our students that we’ve decided to run another zen In The Garden workshop sometime in the next two months or so. If you’d like to be notified of the next workshop so you can get in before it sells out (like this one did!), feel free to email Vidya McNeill at: [email protected]

Love and chi,
Paul Chek