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Join Gabby in a profound conversation with Paul Chek, a pioneer in holistic health, spiritual fitness, and the integration of mind, body, and soul in performance. Paul has worked with some of the highest-level athletes, CEOs, and artists, guiding them toward holistic well-being through his unique approaches.

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Resources Mentioned:

• @PaulChek
• www.chekinstitute.com
• @gabbyreece
• GabrielleReese.com

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Show Sponsors:

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Time Stamps:

[00:00:00 – 00:10:00] The Creation of Well-Being in a Modern World
[00:10:01 – 00:25:00] Blending Spirituality and Physicality
[00:25:01 – 00:40:00] The Four Doctor Model: Happiness, Movement, Nutrition, and Rest
[00:40:01 – 00:55:00] The Crisis of the Unconscious and Midlife Challenges
[00:55:01 – 01:10:00] COVID-19 and the Acceleration of Health Challenges
[01:10:01 – 01:30:00] Confronting Ego and Embracing Self-Awareness
[01:30:01 – 01:50:00] The Role of Play and Creativity in Healing
[01:50:01 – 02:10:00] Parenting with Consciousness and Respect for Development

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Show Transcript:

Paul Chek, I haven’t seen you in, I think we were decided about five years. Yes. Yes. And thank you to see you. Thanks for having Elijah. It was my guest co host on this podcast. Um, I invited Elijah to come. We’re at your house, your, your place. And, um, you know, like Laird said, cause he was, He’s flying, he’s flying in and he goes, Oh, the chance to go see the wizard.

[00:02:19] Paul Chek: Well, if Laird was here, we’d either be in the gym or racing cars or something. We

[00:02:24] Gabby: definitely wouldn’t be getting

[00:02:24] Paul Chek: this

[00:02:25] Gabby: done.

[00:02:25] Paul Chek: Last time Laird was with me, we raced from my heaven house to the highway and both rode the edge of death the whole way. And then I saw him, I think when I saw you, he called me up one day and said, I was just missing you.

He says, I was reminiscing on our race that day and how fun that was. It’s like, that’s what happens when me and Laird get together. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:02:43] Gabby: And I, you know, this conversation is inspired by, uh, I mean, you, you have spent 40 years through your life’s experience, through being self educated, through your work, through working with people, through, you know, working on people and fixing people.

And you’ve landed on, um, your latest project, because I, I feel like someone like you, Will will birth something every when it’s time i’m gonna

[00:03:14] Paul Chek: slow down now I don’t I don’t think that’s that’s my magnum opus, you know The 15 volume book series for spirit gym is it’s it’s around 3 000 pages. So that put me on the mat I’ve been going at it day and night for four and a half years and I was researching it for six years before that And this has been this has stretched me to my limit and you know, i’m ready to just have more time to be with the kids and I’ve put everything I have to say that I think is important.

If I die after this project’s done, I will feel complete. So yes, you’re right. There’s a lot of small books I want to write and little things that are not so stressful. But I took the synthesis of all my life’s work and my own inner spiritual development and said, okay, how do I give this to the world?

Because it needs it. You know, when, when COVID. kicked off. I said to Angie and Penny, I’ve got to get spirit gym out there because when I look out at the world, people are so lost and so dangerously lost. It’s, it’s, it’s like when I wrote how to eat, move and be healthy, I was really concerned for people because I saw how bad their health was.

And even great athletes were sick on the inside, but look good in the mirror. That’s why I coined the term, the fit, sick athlete and um, fit, sick people, I call them. But now it’s. not just an issue of body. It’s, it’s mind and emotions. And, you know, you see the breaking down of sexes and gender and family units and, you know, people that were staunch yogis all of a sudden jumping into the mainstream medical ideology and, you know, aborting everything that their whole life stood for.

And, and I said, okay, I can’t. I have got to make this happen. And so that’s what I focused on because it’s my, I can’t watch a disease grow and just sit there and do nothing about it. I have to participate or I feel I, if I died, I would feel like I copped out on my responsibility. And so I did it.

[00:05:30] Gabby: It feels like COVID has accelerated everything in both, in all directions.

Yes. So, so that That’s the good and the challenging of it. And, you know, I think living in performance. For all this time, uh, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve talked a lot about this. We talk about it in our house is when you start trying to figure out, Oh, how do I move faster? How do I build more muscle? How am I more agile?

How do I work better on one leg? How all these things I always say, it’s almost like I’m at the place in my life where I’ve moved through performance and it’s exactly what you’re talking about in spirit gym. It’s how am I really performing? All of me.

[00:06:15] Paul Chek: Yes, it’s it’s me. That’s really you’re describing the creation of well being and that’s a concept that our culture really can’t get its hands on yet.

And that’s why I created the four doctor model years, you know, 20 plus years ago because I wanted people to see that in order to have a holistic living philosophy that actually cultivates well being. You cannot avoid. Taking responsibility for creating happiness for yourself. You cannot avoid moving your body adequately enough to keep it physically healthy.

You cannot avoid being conscious of what you eat and where that food comes from, and you cannot avoid rest and introspection. The unquestioned life is not worth living. So Dr. Quiet is not only knowing how to rest your body and regenerate it, but how to spend time in yourself, with yourself, being honest with yourself, so you’re not just.

living a life on the outside that’s a veneer and there’s somebody else on the inside, always trying to prop up that personality or persona because that leads to an inner crisis. Eventually you have to say, well, who am I really? You know, are you still hiding your marijuana in the bedroom drawer when your 40?

You know, that’s that’s wearing masks and every time you don a mask, you have to invest life force energy in it. But if you have five or six masks going and you don’t know how to sleep, how to eat and how to do things that are happy making for yourself, then you don’t have enough energy to pump up all those masks.

And eventually you have to start resorting to biohacking and to too much coffee and sugar. And you have to biohacking. drink wine at night to get out of the reality you’ve created for yourself and live on the treadmill. And so that leads to, you know, ultimately what becomes a midlife crisis or a dark night of the soul for people.

And there’s very few people that really know how to navigate those two things. So those are really major tipping points in a person’s life. And because of the environment that we’ve created for children, we now have a crisis of kids going into a midlife crisis as early as 18 years of age. And so my point is just to make a simple point with you.

You can’t produce well being without consciousness of what happiness is for you. What’s happy making and what values do you have to live? I say your yes has no value until you learn to say no. Most people don’t have any values. You offer them beer, they’ll drink it. You offer them gluten pizza, even though they’re reactive to gluten, they’ll eat it.

You offer them donuts, they’ll eat it. World class athletes are otherwise, yet they come to me and pay me a large sum of money to figure out why their got chronic back pain, neck pain, gut pain, and their relationships are falling apart. And I look at their diet log and my analysis and I say, you know, you don’t have a clear sense of direction in your life.

You don’t have a way to say no, you know, and I, as an athlete, Gabby, you’ll know this. Athletes are inherently good. Blessed with willpower, right? You had to have a lot of willpower to be the volleyball player that you were, to push yourself, to train that hard. Laird has to have a lot of willpower to do what he does.

But the problem is, that’s the gas pedal. What athletes have to learn the hard way, is won’t power, which is the brake pedal. And so, I’m often having to do a lot of work to teach athletes that less is more, and it’s quite a hard transition for them. But once they listen, and they let their bodies regenerate, and they have a four doctor life, their relationships are better, their internal health is better, their mind is clearer, they actually are happy about who they are.

And it is It makes the difference between a one hit wonder, someone who, you know, maybe makes a record or is on the cover of a magazine once or twice, and then you never hear from him again.

[00:10:23] Gabby: Right.

[00:10:23] Paul Chek: But like, you, you know, you look at Danny Way, he came to me when he was 19 in very bad shape and here he is like almost 50 and he’s still in awesome physical condition, still great in business and kicking ass.

And you know, Laird’s a great example of a guy that’s like. He knows when to say no and when to say yes, because he’s got a sense of who he is, and he knows four doctors and how to be

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That’s timeline nutrition. com slash Gabby. T I M E L I N E N U T R I T I O N dot com slash Gabby. He has a lot of nose. I can tell you that. In, in a, in a positive way, you have to, sometimes I, you know, you go through this, you live long enough and maybe you have enough. Uh, I always call them external successes, like this concept of success, um, whatever that really means.

It’s probably not the real successes, but at least it’s what the world tells you. It makes you successful. And there, there’s two things that always show up is like, you have this system that has rules. And I think we do need discipline and sometimes Type of structure, but unfortunately, whether it’s education and what we should or shouldn’t do, um, oftentimes bumps up against our internal What we want and then you have the ego constantly hammering you to either You know do what you’re supposed to be this be that and I feel like people are navigating those two things at every moment And how do they break out of that?

You know quiet the ego because the ego has its job But also say I appreciate the system i’ll participate i’ll contribute but I still will do it my way.

[00:15:36] Paul Chek: Yes

[00:15:37] Gabby: That’s part of

[00:15:37] Paul Chek: growing up Um, you know, the ego, unfortunately, is made of everyone else’s ideas. That’s what an ego is. Your ego starts developing the day you’re born, but the child’s ego is identified first when they use the words I or no.

That’s the first time the child is displaying. It knows there’s something different about it than you. So, you know, Prior to the word I don’t know, you can stuff anything in the kid’s mouth, but around the time it says the words I don’t know, it pushes the roast beef away because it knows it doesn’t want it.

It slaps a hand that’s trying to do something it doesn’t like, and it knows what to do. It is in a normal, healthy culture, like a native culture with a proper initiation ceremony and elders to guide you, the ego formed in about 21 years. But now research shows that the ego takes on average in the Western world, especially between 35 and 42 years to form.

If it ever does, uh, Ken Wilber and other experts say that the about 70 percent of the world population is in the child archetype developmentally. And that’s how you destroy a culture. And one of the things about getting too caught in your ego is, one, you’ll never know who you are. I say to my students, if I could take a supercomputer and download your ego into it.

And sift through every idea you think in your mind that you actually think is your own. What percentage of the ideas in your head would actually be your own novel creations? And most of them get it right, about 2%, which is a subjective guess. But the point is, what our ego is, is a construct of mom’s beliefs, dad’s belief, what we learned at school, what churches and temples told us was true about God, and what would happen to you.

And what you see on media, and who your favorite people are, and lines you remember from movies and songs. And so really what you have is an illusory construct, that’s actually a nexus of ideas, that converges to create a sense of self, but it’s actually made of everybody else’s ideas. So, Steiner speaks of the soul in stages of development.

First you have the mineral soul, which makes your bones and your teeth. And it’s the earth itself. Then you have the biological soul, which is what gives you a biological body. Then you have the intellectual soul, which forms the ego. Then you have the birth of the awareness soul. And Steiner says the awareness soul is born when you start asking this question.

Is it really true? Is it really true God will burn you in hell for touching your genitals? Is it really true that the speed of light is 186, 000 miles per second and it never fluctuates? Well, it turns out that it’s not true, actually. But most people don’t have the discipline to look into these things. Is it really true that, um, I’ll never be rich?

Is it really true that nobody loves me? I mean, if you start watching the thoughts that go up from the inner ego because there’s two egos, the one that lives inside of you and the one you project out. If you watch what goes on inside the hamster wheel of the mind and you start asking, honestly, is it really true?

Is it really true? You find that almost everything in your mind that you believed and tend to believe without questioning it is not true at all. And that’s the day you step into your adult shoes and say, I’m going to take responsibility for creating. The person out of myself that feels good to me, that is an honest expression of who I am, and that is your soul, speaking.

And until you come into harmony with your soul, then you have to wear the experience of living everybody else’s ideals. Which, if you look around, aren’t doing them very good. Yeah, and

[00:19:44] Gabby: the more we move away from the natural world, from those teachers, It’s uh, it is it I I really appreciate that you have put this out right now because Again, I I guess for me as a mom as somebody who you know, once you’re a mom I feel like you’re the mom of all children And you go.

Hey, I want all these kids to thrive and be okay Is is Is also keeping my mind focused on all this awakening that is happening because we know all the bad news, right? We have war, we have people are sick, it goes on and on. But the thing I appreciate about Spirit Gym and, and I want to dive into that is this is born out of a reaction to that.

[00:20:30] Paul Chek: Yes, it’s, it’s, it’s reaction, but it’s a responsibility. Yes. You know love always comes with responsibility. That’s what young people don’t get and so just as you as the mother Archetype see the need to mother the lost children in the world I in the father archetype say look if you understand what God is I’m looking at the rest of myself or your conception of God is very confused You know, we can talk about those things later But the reality of it is is I Look at the world and see all these lost, confused people that can’t tell what their gender is anymore, don’t know how to eat, know how to exercise, have their face glued to social media and video games all day taking, you know, 10, 12, 13 medical drugs at once.

And the list is long and I go, my God, the rest of myself is lost, confused, and don’t realize that they’re heading into a very, very dangerous place. I mean, the rates of Teenage suicide and adult suicide and anxiety and depression and the diseases of chronic illness are so far through the roof. It’s mind boggling.

I just saw a study a couple of months ago that Children’s Health Defense published. They analyzed the blood of newborns that just came out of the womb and had a, the average child had 126 toxic chemicals at dangerous levels in their blood and they’re just coming out of the womb. Okay, that’s what you find in 60 year olds when they come to me for functional medicine testing who have never known how to be healthy.

And it takes me a year or more to clean them up so they can actually start living again. And we’ve got children being born with arteriosclerosis, heavy metal toxicity, that they’re scheduled for 72 vaccines within the first two to three years. I’m looking at this going, these children, which are our future, don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming a healthy, viable contributor to society.

So, with my vantage point. We are funding our own destruction, and I can’t watch and not do anything about it because the real issue is most people are Unconscious of what they’re doing and Jung makes it very clear And this is something very profound I hope everyone listening is listening your unconscious will always meet you on the outside in the events of your life Until you meet it on the inside and you will call it fate So we’re seeing the upheaval of the collective unconscious of humanity.

We’re seeing what we’ve turned a blind eye to with what our taxes actually fund. What are we actually paying for with our taxes? We’ll think about the last four years and know you and I paid for that.

[00:23:29] Gabby: We’re,

[00:23:30] Paul Chek: we’re, we’re, um, turning a blind eye. Every time we look in the mirror in the morning and we see a body getting bigger and.

More unhealthy and more tired and keep trying to take pills and biohack our way out of it. We’re taking turning a blind eye when we don’t pay attention to the fact that the reefs all over the ocean all over the world are dying and that the forest is dying and that the soil is toxic and poisonous and That food is poisonous and that the water is poisonous and we’re watching Geoengineering being used in our skies to change the weather and poison us with Aluminum and barium and all sorts of crappy shit.

Meanwhile, parents can’t figure out why, you know, a huge percentage of children have ADHD, ADD, allergies, and a long list of problems. So there’s the unconscious meeting you on the outside until you meet it on the inside and say, Wait a minute, who am I really, right? Who are you without the water you drink, the food you eat, and the air you breathe, and the soil that your food comes from?

Well, you’re dead. You’re dead. And so we, we are more worried about our next iPhone and our next cool car and keeping up with the Joneses than we are about the reality of what we’re all funding together. And so for me, I’m like, if I say the world is my own child, I have to say, I’ve done a very shitty job of parenting. And that kid, Is like, I’m almost 63 and it’s hard for me to find a teenager that is as healthy as I am.

[00:25:10] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:25:10] Paul Chek: That’s a problem.

[00:25:11] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:25:12] Paul Chek: Because that’s our future. And so Spirit Gym for me is, I have to teach people how to get inside of themselves, and how to really understand what an ego is, and how to create one that actually will take you where you want to go.

So you can actually thrive instead of just surviving the world because I don’t want my kids to just survive. And I don’t think anyone with children wants them to just survive.

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[00:29:37] Elijah Allan-Blitz: Well, ego has such a negative connotation, you know, in most spiritual practices, we talk about getting rid of the ego, but you’re talking about, if I understand correctly, it’s developing it in a way that is positive and contributing.

[00:29:48] Paul Chek: Look, your ego is second only to God. I’ll tell you why. If you don’t have an ego, you cannot distinguish yourself from myself.

You’d be like a stone. You’d think you’re just part of everything. A one year old baby shits on the couch because it thinks it is the couch. It doesn’t have any sense of differentiation. It’s in a state of unconscious oneness with everything. It’s only when you have a sense of self that you can actually engage the experience of love.

Because in order for love to exist, there has to be a lover and a beloved. So for you to love me, you have to be aware that it’s you loving me. And for me to love you, I have to be aware that I’m loving you. So it turns out that love is actually the very basis of relationship at every level, from the atom to the, to cosmos.

And you cannot have a mind without love because a mind, by definition, is an embodied and relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information. But a mind sends information and energy between two sentient points. So you see, if I don’t have love a relationship, I have nowhere to send and receive energy or information, which means I have no mind.

You understand what I’m saying? I’m saying love is the foundation of relationships, but love is also the basis of mind. And isn’t it interesting that if you look at how children grow and develop the way their minds turn out to be. Is a reflection of the kind of love they got from their parents and their family and their environment.

Right. Yes. So when you’re, when your model for loving is tablets and video games and sugar drinks, and mom and dad are too busy to parent you. Then you end up having a mind that is completely bought and paid for by corporations and a body that’s sick and has the diseases of a 50 plus year old. And you don’t understand really who you are.

You’re living a life that somebody else is controlling, like you’re a puppet on strings. And that’s why. Social media is so dangerous because they’ve learned how to tap into your nervous system and use very advanced technologies to addict you and commandeer you and control where you spend your money.

So you’re basically a puppet on invisible strings. That’s, that’s not even an ego. That’s still actually a child who doesn’t have a sense of self because anybody has an innate instinctual desire to live and to be healthy. In other words, there’s no body on this planet left to its own devices that’ll eat poisonous food or stay up late at night when it’s exhausted or push itself so hard at a gym it breaks.

That’s why the subconscious mind, which is the wisdom of the body, is the doorway to your unconscious, which is everything that you’re aware of, but you’re not, your ego can’t perceive it. The unconscious mind, according to Bruce Lipton, has a million times the processing power of the ego. But because your unconscious mind is full of everything you’ve been programmed with by everybody else, the first thing you’ve got to do is to really heal and have your own ego, is you’ve got to start filtering through the unconscious mind, which is what shadow work’s all about, and say, okay, what, what’s in there that makes me feel whole and is even true?

How many people look themselves in the mirror and don’t see someone beautiful and worth loving? But because it’s based on somebody else’s measuring stick. Right? And I say, you know, you’re looking at God. Why don’t you fall in love with it right now? Because the whole, it took the entire universe to make you.

And you, there’s, there’s nothing more mysterious, more magical, and more powerful and more complex on this planet than your body. You, you got. About a hundred trillion cells, each made of a hundred trillion atoms, somehow dancing in harmony. And it’s your unconscious mind that’s managing thirty billion billion biochemical reactions a second, that’s making you breathe, eat, sleep, digest, metabolize, assimilate.

Your body’s actually like a living fountain. You turn over every single cell in your body every year, but somehow you hold the same shape, and you have the same look to me, and I see you, hug you, and I think you’re the same guy, but you’re actually a fountain of everything around you. Right? So the reality of it is that you are the world, and you couldn’t be here without the Sun or the Moon, and the Sun or the Moon couldn’t be here without the solar system, which couldn’t be here without the galaxy.

You just follow it all the way to the end. You go, holy shit. It, it takes an entire universe to make every one of us and I’m walking around depressed. That’s what happens when you forget the magic and the mystery that it took to create you. But once you realize that, then you look at the lost, confused people and you say, there’s a piece of me that I’ve got to take care of, which is no different than stubbing your toe and making it bleed and say, shit, I need a bandaid and I got to clean the dirt out of that thing so I don’t get an infection.

The difference is. Our hands and toes are called people and animals and creatures and trees And and people have forgotten that why because they’re too busy Getting caught in in corporately motivated Schemes to capture your money and your energy And and not for your own best interest and there’s part of our shadow, right?

It’s a part of our shadow because we keep funding it We pay for all this stuff, right? We’re buying our own demise And only people that are lost and confused purchase their own demise Would you agree?

[00:35:49] Elijah Allan-Blitz: Absolutely.

[00:35:50] Gabby: Yeah, and and you know the the It seems to that harmony or the notion of even believing a little bit differently but sort of still all working towards the greater good that’s even gotten worked out how we can be distracted enough that we’re at each other’s throat about this and that instead of hey our food our air our education the things that impact all of us so you You have 10 principles that kind of guide you.

Maybe if you’re willing, we can, we can sort of just, uh, journey through them because I, I, uh, I appreciate not only how thoughtful and maybe once you get a little deeper, it’s sort of, maybe there’s fringe principles on either side. So maybe there’s a little more, but this is, um, it’s so, Expansive and yet I love you.

You do this every time. Very simple and very expansive. Exactly. At the same time. Just how, when somebody like you, I’m so simple, uh, believe me, is the, that ability of like somebody who really understands one area that they’re in their complex understanding makes it so that they can say it so simply.

[00:37:10] Paul Chek: Yeah.

Well, the first principle is zero, because everything that we can count or weigh or measure emerges from zero. So, you know, even though the Big Bang Theory is about as wrong as wrong can get, it’s good to make a point. You have to say, well, the Big Bang apparently happened out of nothing. Well, when you have nothing in your bank account, and I say how much money you have, you say zero.

But the paradox of zero is that it From a, from a metaphysical perspective, zero is not nothing. That’s where the materialists are confused because everyone says, how do you get something from nothing? Well, when you’re talking about God, you’re talking about pure potential. So from a scientific perspective, it’s not some old man in the sky.

It’s pure potential. So it’s not nothing. It’s no thing. Every thing takes energy to make, and it takes some kind of guiding intelligence and archetype. A tree is. Part of the tree archetype. So all trees express the tree archetype. All buildings express, express the building archetype. Uh, and so platonic solids, you know, Plato’s, Platon, everything in the universe is made of a combination of those five platonic solids.

So there’s an archetype. So because there’s only three things that make up all of creation, energy, information, and frequency, something has to guide the energy, which is called information, which means to put energy in formation. So an archetype is a formation that has a lot of potential to it. Jung says, if a picture is worth a thousand words, an archetype is worth a million images.

So how many ways can the mother archetype express itself? As many as there are human beings or animals, right? But they’re all mothers. How many ways can the human archetype express itself? There’s no two of us that have the same fingerprints. God’s a novelty generator. So the point is zero is the source because zero is the only symbol that gives us a way to comprehend something that is no thing.

And because it’s no thing, it has no border, no barrier, no definition, therefore it contains everything, which is exactly what Lao Tzu told us, right? He said, all things have their back to the mother. It’s deeper than deep and darker than dark. It’s older than God. Well, how do you describe that? The true Tao cannot be spoken.

Well, if I say, here’s an apple, you can talk about it. But if I hand you emptiness, what do you say about it? So the point that Lao Tzu’s making and that I’m making, the principle of zero is the source of everything, but it cannot be weighed or measured But what you’re seeing is it’s artwork. Every time you look in the mirror, you’re seeing what zero manufactures as a means of experiencing itself.

So the, the principle of zero, which by the way, tarot begins with zero, the fool, which means the beginning of the journey, right? And the tarot archetypes are saying, these are the stages of psychological development, and these are the archetypes that are actually inherent in all human minds. And no matter who you are, these 22 archetypes are actually like, exactly like the keys on a keyboard.

You know, your alphabet, every letter is an archetype. If you put C A T together, you and I know we’re talking about a cat. But there’s information and the information always points to something. You’re reading a story about a cat. The cat’s not really there. It’s a cat that we’re talking about. So there’s an archetype.

Without the archetypes, you cannot make meaning. So to keep, keep it simple. So you understand what I’m saying. Zero expresses itself through dreaming and it’s dreaming function has been identified to be, um, consistently express archetypes. without which we would not have any meaning making function, which means there would be no purpose to life.

So source as zero simply means everything, because if there is a God, it’s the source of everything. And so I say to my students, if God is cookie dough, Doesn’t that mean that everything in the universe is some derivation of cookie dough? Well, they all get it. They’ll say, good, well, then you don’t need to keep looking for God for God’s sakes.

You’re walking in it, you’re eating it, you’re breathing it, you’re making love to it, you’re starting wars with it. You know, that’s one of God’s big jokes, right? You’re looking for God, ha ha. So it’s the everything because there’s no edge to zero. So the Blaise Pascal and Joseph Campbell and others have said.

God is a sphere whose circumference is nowhere and a center whose presence is everywhere. That’s zero. Zero, if you’re broke, you’re broke everywhere you go, aren’t you? But if you’re rich, you’re rich everywhere you go. So if you’re no thing, where are you? Everywhere and nowhere at the same time. If you’re everything, where are you?

Everywhere at the same time. So how do I get your location? I just point any direction. So that’s the nature of God. God is that for which there is no other. So if you, if you have a rational mind, you could just play this little rational game, take anything, the earth, what caused that? And then you have, you’ll have your own explanation.

Then you say, what caused that? And you say, okay, well, the earth came from the sun. Where’d the sun come from? What came from the galaxy? Okay. Where, well, what caused that a universe? Oh, what caused that? I don’t know. Good. Well, you better start meditating because that’s the most important question you ever ask because until you answer that question, you don’t know who you are.

And when you don’t know who you are, guess what? You’re very at grave danger of being what somebody else wants you to be. And that’s how you torture a soul. You just turn it into something that it doesn’t want to be. Do you

[00:43:29] Gabby: think it’s funny when I hear you say that? I, I wonder if someone listening to this would think.

How do you land on Who you really are it gets so Smushed and hit by everything so early. Mm hmm, and I know you have practices and meditation. Do you think? if somebody has really kind of followed the rules and not even dip their toe into this kind of thinking that You know These types of practices that you’d really be able to tap back into

[00:44:06] Paul Chek: you could but remember your The rules are somebody else’s rules Right who who made those rules up?

I know right who said till death do you part when you get married? But somebody wrote pages on a book called the bible Who said god would burn you in hell somebody else did? I’ve never seen god drop a book out of the sky of you.

[00:44:26] Gabby: No,

[00:44:27] Paul Chek: i’ve never had god come say this is how it’s got to be I’ve, I’ve had direct experiences of God saying, be love and you will experience me as my own inner experience, right?

So, you know, the, the journey in is really the journey from your head to your heart, because you’re only, your heart can really tell the head what is true. Think about it. If you had no heart and you’re a male. You would just look for the best hottest looking chick to marry But find out that she could be the most royal pain in the ass to live with and women can go through the same damn thing That’s why I tell all my students that are so excited about sex and want to have multiple partner relationships.

I say look You better remember something. There’s good sex And 23 more hours every day. You got to get along together You know And and this i’d like to share a very powerful myth, if I may, because it’s really about God and what we’re talking about, and it’s quite succinct, as a Daoist can be. It’s the myth of the dragon.

The Chinese don’t use the word God, so for them the dragon is our equivalent. So the myth of origins, it’s one of the Chinese myths of origins, and it goes like this. The dragon has a favorite hobby. Its hobby is to breathe new universes into existence. And every time it breathes a new universe into existence, it is made of two baby dragons, one named Yin and one named Yang.

And the dragon says to its babies, the two of you can rest from managing your universe when you can get along. Now look inside yourself and find the feminine, polarity, and the masculine, and ask yourself what would happen if they got along? Would I be a peaceful person? Absolutely. Would I be confused about who I am or where I’m going?

No I wouldn’t. But as long as somebody else is making up your dragons and telling you what the rules are. then you can never control those dragons because they’re being controlled by other people. So if you want to find yourself, then you have to first penetrate everybody else’s ideas and say, what’s true about me, no matter what anyone else says, even what my mind says.

Well, what’s true about you is that love is what holds you together. And love is what has the most creative power in the universe. And so ultimately it all boils down to love. And if you want to know why you’re here, just bring your consciousness to your heart and say, what is it that if I was to do it in my relationship with my spouse, with my kids, if I was to what, what, what would happen if I did what I truly love to do for my work and use my love to master my craft so that I’m really good at something.

I have mastery. What would my earning potential be? And what would it be like to go to work every day and make love all day instead of going to work to make money? See, if you go to work for money you still haven’t learned how to make love and you gotta go home and medicate yourself so you can handle it for another day or a week or a month.

But if you make love all day, which is you know, what I’ve done for 40 years I’ve always done what I felt in my heart Made me feel good like If I do this and I leave a day of doing this and I’m excited to come back tomorrow Then I can really live but if I’m in a relationship or I’m Working for money But I leave wishing I had lived or I have to go somewhere else to start living like I got to go get stoned So I can face another day.

I’m not actually cultivating love. I’m just caught on the social treadmill of doing what everybody else is caught doing. And so the question is, do you, do you want to really get to know who you are, or do you want to become what everybody else has become, which is what somebody else wants you to be, which always leads to an inner crisis of self.

Because the further you get from the truth of yourself, The more of a sense of isolation you have, the more of a sense of emptiness that you have, the more sense of deep inner confusion you have about why we’re all here and what the fuck is life about.

[00:49:18] Gabby: Yeah.

[00:49:18] Paul Chek: So, but to put it simply, you can do all sorts of fancy practice.

I can put you through all sorts of shadow work and breathing practices and yoga practices. I can do a lot of things, but at the end of the day, If you don’t get clear inside of yourself what it is that you can do that adds life to life. See when I paint, I feel alive. I’m painting something that my heart wants to express.

I get out of the way and say to my soul, take the brush. What is it? I have a vision. And I, time goes by, I forget to eat. I’ve painted eight hours straight and forgot to eat, and I’m a health guy. I’m like, holy shit, I’ve watched the sun go up and down, and I could paint for another hundred friggin days straight if I didn’t have this body to take care of.

That’s adding life to life. When you’re making love with someone that you love, don’t you feel more alive than you ever did? Right. You get out of bed and you, you just like, wow, and you can’t wait to get back in and do it again when you’re watching your kids grow and seeing their minds turn on. And, you know, like for me, seeing my daughter in gymnastics and my son, like my son builds models out of Legos that I can’t even build.

I’m like, I don’t even know how he did that. That’s when love. Shows you who you are, right? Do you understand what I’m saying? You can do all these yogic practices. You can go to all these churches and all these temples, or you can just sit still, bring your consciousness to your heart and say, what is it that I really feel called to do because it makes me feel good.

And that’s who you are. And when you do it, you learn about yourself. And yes, you still have to learn how to be in relationships. Yes, you still have to balance a checkbook and pay your bills. Yes, you still have to be conscious of what you eat. Yes, you still have to exercise. But you know what? When you realize who you are as love and you love being you, then you love taking care of you too.

So the rest of it starts taking care of itself. You know, that’s how I figured it out. So when people come to see me, the first thing I got to do is find out, well, what do you love more than your crisis? You know, Jerry Wesch of psychologists says, if you have a big enough dream, you don’t need a crisis.

Well, as a therapist of 40 plus years experience, I can tell you, you know, The first thing I gotta do is figure out what you love more than your pain and your problems or you’re never going to do the work to heal, you know, you need, you know, your dream is a source of levity and it overcomes if it’s not strong enough to overcome the inertia of society of culture, then you will do exactly what you’ve been doing.

So you fit in and then you think consciously or unconsciously, well, at least I’m like my friends now. But, like, what do you do when I say you’re gluten intolerant and you can’t drink beer anymore and you have to go to your friends and they go, Oh man, come on, drink another one. Oh, what’s wrong with you, you pussy, you coughing out?

If your love’s not stronger than that, in other words, if your love doesn’t lift you above that, then your sense of identity is still caught in the group, which means you’re still a child, archetypally. You still need somebody else’s approval to feel good about yourself. I tell you what. I have lots of people saying, oh, you should do this.

You should do that. You should do not do this, not do that. You know, when I was a kid and I was a boxer, the doctors told me, oh, you got to stop boxing. You’re getting your brain damaged. You’re like, you should stop motocross racing. I’ve let every doctor I’ve been to has told me to stop doing what I love to do.

And I would have, what would I be it by now? I would be a statistic, you know, so do you, do summer, as you see, the point is that how do you find out who you really are, pay close attention to what you love. Because your heart will lead you on a path from relationship to relationship to this kind of work, to that kind of work, to this class, to this school, you know, to this experience, maybe to this drug or that one.

And one day you’ll have an experience, which I’ve had multiple times, and I’ve seen many that I’ve guided have it. But one day you will have an experience where all of a sudden you can look back through your life and see a golden thread and realize, you know, if I hadn’t worked on a fishing boat when I was in my twenties, I wouldn’t have known this and I wouldn’t have been able to do this because I only learned that from working on a fishing boat.

And I’ll give you an example. As a therapist, one of the most common things people say to me. Paul, you can explain things to me that I can understand and no other doctor or therapist ever been able to answer my questions in ways I can understand them. How is it that you can do that? And I say, well, Bob, you’re an electrician and I used to be an electrician.

I was in army military avionics. I used to build race cars. I understand electronics. So I just explain what’s wrong with your nervous system. using an electrical diagram concept. I can talk to a plumber because I’ve worked in hydraulics and plumbing. I can talk to a builder because my father was a construction expert, a builder, and I had to work on a farm and build shit.

I can talk to a mechanic because I am a mechanic. I went to trade school to be a mechanic. I can talk to a hairstylist because I used to have hair and I understand what it’s like to hold your arms up for hours at a time, etc. So the point is, is all I’m doing is taking what they need to hear and putting it into the context of something that they have a framework of reference for.

My point though is when people started saying that to me, Paul, how do you explain things that are so complicated that no one else can explain in a way I can understand it, I realized. If I wouldn’t have been a farmer, if I didn’t learn to weld, if I didn’t go to school to be a mechanic, if I hadn’t have studied electronics, if I hadn’t have rode in the rodeo, if I hadn’t have been a paratrooper in the military and learned about weapons, you see what I’m saying?

I followed what was my heart’s interest. And it gave me every tool I needed to sit in a treatment room all day with a diversity of people to actually speak to them in a way that they could understand. And if you can’t make meaning in somebody’s mind, they don’t have the energy to do it. It doesn’t make any sense to them.

So it kills the flow of our life force energy. Who wants to do something that doesn’t make meaning? And that’s where we’re at in the world. Most people are doing things all day long that do not make meaning for them. In fact, 75 percent of the world population on survey says they hate their job. That’s the formula for never knowing yourself.

But you know what? You’re almost there. Because when you know what you hate, you know to go the other direction. Now you gotta have the balls or the ovaries to do it. And that’s the difference between a child and an adult.

[00:56:46] Gabby: And I think the willingness, I think something that you’re an example of, I mean, I look in this room and I know there’s more books and other places and I look at your physique that didn’t just happen is love doesn’t mean not working.

No, hell no. So it’s responsibility. Yes. And so I think that that’s also the other part of it, which is that those things always that they live together, that is just part of life and, and sort of using that energy to move you towards who you, who you are and who you’re becoming. Yes. And so I think it’s always important for people to not get confused by that.

[00:57:31] Paul Chek: Yes, it’s very important. And, and you know, it’s okay to get confused.

But we have always had elders. If you study the history of humanity and tribal systems, there’s a great book called Metabolic Man 10, 000 Years from Eden by Charles Heiser Worthen, who’s a naturalist. And he spent years studying tribal societies and found they could get all their hunting and gathering done on average in three and a half to four hours a day And they spent the rest of the day playing with their kids, doing arts and crafts, singing, dancing, doing things that were wholesome.

And the punchline is though, is while the moms and dads were out hunting and gathering, the elders, the grandparents of the tribe brought the kids together and they taught them through story, through dance, through Through acting, they learn the myths, they learn their cultural history, they learn to recite them, they learn to act them out.

They, they learned about the mysteries of life. They learned all the things that are necessary to go from the stages of birth, childhood, the warrior stage of adolescence, to adulthood, to old age, to death. And children were taught these by the wisest, oldest, most mature people of all time. Who had the greatest empathy, compassion, and patience for children because they knew they made much better educators than young, aggressive people that didn’t have enough life experience.

So you have to ask yourself, what are the grandparents of the world doing now? Well, they’re riding around on cruise ships, saving up money for a bigger television, spending a lot of time in doctor’s offices and drugstores. Don’t have enough energy to really parent very effectively. A lot of them are caught in dogmatic, religious, rigid ideas that if passed on to children scares the shit out of them instead of making them feel a connection to love life and God.

And so, you know, there you see, um, what happens when you lose your elders and you lose your connection to the reality of myth, which is why myth is first, you have zero in my system. Then you have Om, which is the sound of God singing itself into existence, which I could go, you know, on a long discussion of, but cymatics is a great example of that.

Sound is a formative energy. It puts matter into formation. In the Sufi conception, the word sound does not mean just audible sounds. Sound means all frequencies, every one of them, from X ray to gamma rays. The whole spectrum from zero negative to zero positive. So infinitely small to infinitely large. So sound is actually the principle of how the dreaming nature or what Bohm would call the implicate order of spirit manifests matter, right?

Just, you turn on your television, you cannot see the television waves coming through the internet cable or the antenna. And Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood are not inside your television, but those waves manifest on the screen as an explicate image. So the implicate is the enfolded, invisible spirit. And the explicate is the manifestation of form and matter, which is what our bodies are and the universe is.

The point is, matter cannot organize itself. That’s just a known fact. I ask people all the time. I’ll put you next to that pile of rocks over there. How long do you have to wait for your Porsche Carrera to jump out of there? Or a Rolex? Or a toaster oven? Well, longer than God is going to be waiting for you.

Because matter doesn’t organize itself. So, and you can see this right in tarot number one. Are you familiar with number one, the magician? Well, if you look at tarot number one, it shows a magician standing with one arm pointing up in the air with a wand in his hand, and the other one pointing down, just like Buddha did, and many other masters, which means as above, in your head, so below, be careful what you pray for, because you might just get it, and it shows a table, and on the table is a wand, like a wooden cane, which stands for the fire element, there’s a cup, a chalice, which stands for the water element, There’s a coin, which stands for the earth element, and there’s a sword, which stands for the air element, because the mind has to cut wholeness into pieces to be able to make any meaning out of it.

But a table has four legs, and a table represents a field of action. Okay, Rumi says beyond judgment there’s a field. I’ll meet you there. That’s zero. Beyond judgment. Judgment means you’re cutting something into pieces. Okay. But the point is on the card, half the table’s missing. Most people just aren’t skilled enough or deep enough in tarot to understand what that means.

But the two legs you can see are earth and water. Those are the passive elements. Fire and air are the volatile elements that make those elements move. And the reason half the table’s missing is because fire represents the dreaming nature of God and the force of desire, which is what creates fires have desire.

They eat everything. So God’s emptiness is what creates the desire to dream its fullness into existence. So the fire element and the air element, which represents mind, you can’t see your thoughts. You can see an electroencephalogram, but you’re not seeing the thoughts. You’re seeing the brain’s reaction to them.

They’re invisible. You can’t see the television waves are invisible. You see the television image, right? So the point of the tarot number one is you’re the magician And what he’s pointing to above is the invisible half of the table and what spiritual development is about is saying I better start paying attention to the invisible parts of myself Because they’re certainly making a mess out of the visible stuff

[01:03:42] Gabby: Yeah,

[01:03:42] Paul Chek: so I need to step up and take some responsibility for the power of my own dreaming and my own mind Because until I do, I’m a play toy for everybody else who I am at risk of believing, and believing is very dangerous because as soon as you believe, you stop asking questions, and that’s why belief systems and isms are very dangerous, and Jung, Campbell, and many other experts, Marci, Marci Eliade, experts in myth said whenever a culture’s myth Begins to break down.

It’s very dangerous. And the first sign is the emergence of isms. So during the Second World War, we had Nazism. And look what happened with that. Well, now we have scientific materialism, medicalism, and we’ve got veganism, you know, and there’s a long list of isms, right? But what, what is an ism? An ism is a belief system in which you are conforming to somebody else’s ideas.

And the leader of the belief system becomes the child’s surrogate father figure or God. So an ism is a collection of beliefs that are created by somebody else that gives you a family to be part of because you’re too afraid to be brave enough to go on your own and stand up for your own truth and say, I am.

And live your truth, right? People criticize me for having two wives. I say, yeah, good. Have you tried it yet? No. Then, quit complaining and criticizing and acting like you know what you’re talking about. People have criticized me over and over again because I use plant medicines and help people heal with them.

And they say, that’s dangerous. That’s the work of the devil. Oh, really? How many journeys have you done? None? Okay, then. You’re caught in a belief system. Most of that came from television, right? And I could give you a laundry list of all the stuff people attack me for. But isn’t it amazing that people have so many expert opinions on things they know nothing about?

[01:05:43] Gabby: Yeah,

[01:05:44] Paul Chek: and that’s the problem with the belief system. It always forces your worldview to mirror the belief system Which unfortunately is not of your own making so becoming a whole person Becoming an adult It means I have to get clear on what my dream is, what my values are, who I am, because your yes has no value until you learn to say no, and without a sense of direction and without a sense of values.

You’re a play toy for anybody else that can commandeer your mind. And how do you commandeer someone’s mind? Say, all you got to do is ask for forgiveness for your sins on Sunday, and you can be an asshole for six more days and it’ll all be good. And I could go give you 50 other examples. That’s just one.

[01:06:31] Gabby: I, you said something earlier that I want to just highlight that I think is so interesting. Cause I’m guilty of this. And when you said something that made me realize it was in me, uh, You were talking about working and hunting and gathering, you know, three and a half, four hours a day. And then the rest of the time was, you know, playing, enjoying fun.

What I do find interesting culturally is obviously we use work as an escape, but we will do nothing before we’ll go and have fun before what we’ll go and have fun. Somehow we’ve also, this construct has been set up that, okay, work, work and work. Fun is like something you do on the weekends celebration gathering just because yes, but yet we’ll do nothing We’ll sit we’ll scroll We’ll do this other thing.

So it is an interesting thing that I also It was highlighted in something you said where if we could do more figuring out who we are Do the work that we love do it it needs to happen and then allow ourselves to The, the opportunity to play, we’ve, our culture has created a lot of guilt around like it’s Wednesday at four.

What do you mean you’re doing that with your kids or what have you? And it’s funny because I live with somebody who wants to have more fun and play and I’m, I know that why I think subconsciously, I think that’s part of why I, I am so drawn to Laird because he’s such a good reminder, just a beacon. I’m like, Oh, but it also it’s, I just want to highlight that that we will sit and organize or do nothing before we’ll do something fun.

And I think the fun also goes back to you understanding who you are.

[01:08:23] Paul Chek: That’s how you explore who you are. Yeah. Really? Like I, you saw my rock stack garden and you know, you know, Some of those rocks actually are very big and they’re very, very dangerous to make. And so for me, it’s very fun because I not only get to express my creativity, but I get to push myself to the edges of myself athletically.

And it’s a chance for me to connect to my soul and get guidance because I found that as long as my soul guides, my creative pursuits, they always turn out to be more fulfilling and rewarding than if I tried to do it from my rational ego mind. The point being is, is that I remember when I first started stacking rocks and one would fall over, especially if I liked it, I would get really pissed off and I’m like, God damn it.

What the fuck did I do wrong? You know, I would have this whole internal dialogue. It sounded like my father living in my head and it was right. It was because that’s where that judging faculty came from. And and, and I went, okay, you look at, I’m here with a pile of rocks. And a pile of rocks just fell out.

Who gives a shit? So I had to train myself to disengage from the judging mind that is the, you know, the, the collection of other people’s ideas of what’s right, wrong, beautiful, fun, or not fun. And when I paint, If I make a mistake, I go, Oh, and that’s cool. Let’s see if I can make it look cool. You know, and I’ve actually, I can show you one of my paintings where I made a big mistake and I was really bummed because I’d spent hours getting to where I could actually do this piece of the painting.

And it was quite technical, but my soul said, get back from the painting, stand back. And I put it on the ease and I looked at it and I’m like, Oh my God, that is wild. And here I was thinking about how do I fix that? But my soul showed me that I wasn’t making mistake. I was actually letting my unconscious guide me.

And what was coming out with something even more interesting than I could consciously conjure up and that the judging mind was about to eliminate what turned out to add a whole new dimension to the art. So the point I’m making is that, you know, making love should be play. I have young men coming up to me telling me they want to get better at sex and they’ll pull books out of their Gym bag that they’re reading about sex and they say what do you think about this book that way?

I said I think you should put that in the fucking fireplace in a hurry Or you’re going to be jacking off for the rest of your life Because if you think a woman is something that you can go into with a preconceived plan You know I said, you know why God put hair on a woman’s vagina, don’t you? And they go, no, I said, so you could find the damn thing.

Now that’s where your schooling begins and she’ll teach you the rest. All you got to do is listen, feel, smell, taste, but get rid of that book before it ruins your head. You see my point? You can’t go about play, i. e. sex in this case, with a rational approach because To have something rational. You can be rational with numbers ’cause one is a one for the rest of your life, and a two is a two for the rest of your life.

But there’s no two women that are the same. There’s no two men that are the same. There’s no two rocks that are the same. You know, you, you’d be hard pressed to make two paintings that are the same. So the act of play is actually the act of exploration because what you’re doing is an outward expression of what’s inside of you.

Like how each of your daughters plays with Larry will be unique to that. Relationship, how you play with letters unique to that relationship, you understand? So if you don’t play, then you’re almost always doing something rational to get from point a to point B to get an outcome, to make money, to, you know, to, to, to meet the criteria of a job.

And so you’re never actually exploring who you really are. You’re just doing what you think you’ve got to do to make a living, to fit into an industrialized machine that’s killing itself and everybody else. That’s So one of the first things I have to do with all these burnt out Business executives that come see me and athletes is I gotta say, okay, guess what?

You know, how about if we go out in the rock garden and stack some rocks? I go really? Why would you do that? Come on, you’ll see take off your shoes. Oh, I might get my foot might get sore. Oh for fuck’s sakes You live for two million years in freaking nature before you got a pair of shoes for god’s sakes for don’t forget who you are You And I get them out there and the next thing you know The guys got hard ons and the girls are all wet because they’re in the dirt playing and they finally get to be Actually who they really are and their rocks fall over and I watch their Reactions and some of them get all mad and cuss like I used to and I go.

Oh, that’s pretty cool. I you know, that’s like 13 dollars worth of rocks on the ground there and if you smash them with a sledgehammer Nobody’s gonna give a shit So why are you actually so wound up right now? Have you ever played a game? Paid attention to that. And where’s that showing up in the rest of your life?

Someone cuts you off in traffic and ruins your whole fucking day.

[01:13:47] Gabby: It got me thinking about parenting too. If you had that ability to do that more for yourself, that you would bring that into that relationship.

[01:13:55] Paul Chek: Steiner said that adults in general should not play with children. Because they do not know how to play and they inflict so much judgment on the kids that it destroys the child’s sense of itself.

So he, he, when you go through teaching his training to be a Steiner school teacher, you have to learn how to play and just allow the child the process. The thing for a parent to do is just to try to protect the child from hurting itself, but you’re not supposed to say, Oh, that’s not good enough. Yeah. Or, oh, you shouldn’t do that.

Or, oh, you know, you really should have two wings on your airplane, not five. Right? So, for me, as, cause Angie’s really, and I’ve studied Steiner extensively, there’s 185 Steiner’s books right there. And Angie’s and Penny both are very astute at studying and learning about mothering every day. And Angie’s very dialed in on Steiner’s teachings and goes to all the meetings with the elite Steiner teachers and learns this stuff.

But, you know, when, when I started learning Steiner’s explanation of how the child’s mind grows and develops, And what kind of influences from parents can be very damaging to the child. For example, Steiner says, you should never teach kids math, nor teach them to read until at least about seven, five to seven years of age, because their right brain comes online first.

And as soon as you start using mathematical logical reasoning, you activate the left brain. But if you activate the left brain, which chops everything up into pieces Create meaning out of a small piece and linearizing everything. If a child does not understand wholeness, it doesn’t understand that the frog is from the pond and the pond is part of nature.

So you get someone that grows up chopping frogs into pieces, but hasn’t any idea where a frog came from or what it does and thinks it’s just a piece of meat that you can destroy in a laboratory. You understand the concept. So Steiner’s, Steiner’s whole system is based on how. The child’s mind and soul evolved together and how the body and the nervous system and the brain go through these stages of development and how we evolve in our consciousness.

And so I’m learning all this going, Oh my God, you know, I’ve got to be a lot more careful about what I say to my kids and where I place judgment. And so I actually had to learn how to play and, and I use rock stacking and painting. And making music and games to the best of my ability and I let the kids, you know, guide me on how to be healthy again.

[01:16:50] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:16:51] Paul Chek: And, and my only point is we have to be very, very conscious because, you know, as Osho said, children are born God and the parents beat it out of them. And I think there’s just too much truth to that.

[01:17:03] Gabby: Well, what’s the statistic about the genius? How many kids are born? You sent me that. Remember all the, how many kids are born with our sort of this intellect and then they put them in school and it goes from like 70 percent to 2 percent or something.

It basically gets, you know, this, this potential, um, for,

[01:17:21] Paul Chek: for free. And that’s what the soul is. It’s the genius within us, right? Look, you can cut an acorn open and slice it down to the thinnest possible slice and look at it with the highest power microscope in the world and you will not see an oak tree in there.

Because it’s an entelechy. Every living thing in its reproductive system, our chromosomes, our genes, and our soul is a guiding intelligence. That’s what an entelechy is. Every single person and every creature in nature. Has a guiding intelligence that knows what its role is with regard to the rest of nature or the rest of life.

And each child is actually a dream of the parents and of all the people we relate to and of nature and of God. That is a piece of a puzzle. That if it does what it came here to do, brings the puzzle into more and more clarity so that eventually all of us wake up to the truth of ourselves collectively.

And what’s going on in the world right now is showing us that we’re creating everything, but what we really are, we’re destroying the puzzle instead of trying to see the bigger picture. The point is, is that the child genius is the wisdom that comes through the heart. And Arnold Mendel, you know, a very, very famous psychologist and inventor of process creator process psychology.

I, he was, I can’t remember which president he was that president psychiatrist or psychologist for some time, but he’s written many excellent books. He was a union analyst. He’s a mathematician expert at quantum physics, a shaman, a deep, deep guy. Um, he did research and he showed that 70 percent of children.

When you ask them what their dream was for their life between age five and seven ended up doing exactly that in their life So if the kid was five and mommy said what are you gonna be and you grew up and they said a fireman? 70 percent of them became firemen if they said a nurse 70 percent of them came nurses So what is that telling you at an age of five to seven years of age the souls already?

Telling mom and dad what it came here to do You And one of the most common things mom and dad do is go, Oh, you’re never going to make money as a musician. You need to be a doctor. Oh, that’s, you know, That would be a disgrace. You need to do this. I’ve had so many patients that were railroaded like that.

It’s unbelievable. I’m fortunate my parents had a rule. Because I hated school. I do not like it when I can’t get my questions asked, and when I get ridiculed for answering questions. So as a kid, I always was in trouble in school. But I said to my mom and dad, I was probably 14, I said, I do not like school.

I can’t see how it’s going to help me make a living. I know I’m going to be doing something with engines, or racing cars, or you know, whatever my dream was as a 14 year old. And my my mother and stepfather said that’s fine. Here’s the rule. You can quit school anytime you want. But the day you quit school, you leave the house.

So you don’t have to do anything. You can do whatever you want. You can do any job you want. But if you quit school, you pack your bags and you leave. And so I thought, well, absolutely fucking ideal because I was happy to get the hell out of Dodge and go be Paul check instead of somebody else’s slave on our farm was hard fricking work every day.

And I didn’t, you know, if I didn’t have my work done, I couldn’t go to football or hockey or whatever. So I always had this leverage against me and my father was a hard, um, Frickin working dude that did not know what a child was. So I had to bust my balls. But the point is, is there’s two places I didn’t want to be under my parents control and under the roof of a school where I couldn’t get my questions answered and had to study a bunch of shit that didn’t make any sense to me for my life.

So after the ninth grade, I was 16. I said, that’s it. I’m out of here. And I went out and I never turned fucking around and here I am. Yeah. Long time later, still doing me happily. Do you pray every day? Every breath’s a prayer. Every minute’s a prayer. I pray for my food. I pray for my smoke, but most of my prayers are gratitude.

I don’t pray like dear God, rescue me because I’m an idiot. I’m not paying attention. Dear God, take away my disease because I’m not loving myself enough. My prayers are prayers for things like world harmony. I ask Great Spirit, please,

please fill me with the love, the wisdom, and the guidance to do what I really came here to do so that I know that I’m loving the best that I can and doing the things that I came here with my past life experience and wisdom So I’m, you know, fulfilling my Dharma, you know, why I’m here, why we’re all here.

Um, I, I pray to help people heal. So I do distance healing for people. Whenever people, my friends or anyone I know are sick or dying, I’m doing distance healing work. do

[01:23:06] Gabby: you ever see athletes anymore? I’m just curious. Does anyone ever? Track you down here. They’ve got something that they can’t figure out.

[01:23:14] Paul Chek: Once I started writing spirit gym, I had to cut that out. Uh, I have 34 people on a waiting list. Some of them had been waiting for years to see me. Um, but I made the executive decision with Penny that I can’t see one person at a time anymore because that time and energy needs to be devoted to. Humanity as a whole.

[01:23:46] Gabby: well you can send them I mean, they’re not you but you could send them to some of your yeah practitioners Yeah, there’s

[01:23:51] Paul Chek: 63 000 people that have gone through the Chek institute now So there’s they’re all over the world and i’m always a networker, you know You even when you work with me, I said you got to go see this person for eyes.

You need you know, we have to None of us knows enough to the human body is so complicated I mean, I I know but more than most people do but I don’t know You I don’t know near as much about the hormonal system as an endocrinologist, but I know enough to know when you need one. I know when you need a brain surgeon.

I know when you need an orthopedic surgeon. So, I always look at a person and say, who do I need to put on the team to get you where you need to go to have your freedom back? And, I just feel, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, My inner compass says I’m going in the wrong direction when I’m working, you know, even if someone pays me a hundred grand for, yeah, you know, call it two weeks of work.

I mean, uh, it’s not the money, you know, like I, I look, for example, at how many letters I’ve gotten from around the world, from people that had serious health problems, addictions, were on multiple medical drugs, had diseases, and all they did was follow what was in my book, how to eat, move, and be healthy.

And I’ve got letters saying my, I had three kids on drugs with ADD, ADHD, cancer, whatever. I had this problem. My husband had this problem. And just from doing how to eat, move and be healthy for six months, we have completely gotten off all that. We’re all healthy again. I mean, I get letters like that all the time.

So it’s very hard for me. Imagine if I was too busy working one on one with people to write that book as one example. Um, I would, my heart would be imploding on me. It would be like my compass bearing would be going, you’re going in the wrong direction.

[01:25:40] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:25:40] Paul Chek: And so, um, and I also asked my soul, you know, like, for example, if, if you were layered, called me up and said, Paul, we need your help.

This is what’s going on. And I knew that, Chances are good. You probably really do need my help and you, and there’s not someone I can refer you to that I think is good enough to address that issue. First thing I’d do is connect to my soul and say, do you want me to stop what I’m doing to see Gabby or Laird right now?

And if the answer is yes, then I know God told me to see you and I will do it. But aside from that, remember your soul is God inside of you. It was the, in, in, in Hinduism, in advanted, Uh, uh, uh, va. I’m brain farting. Um, the mystical branch of Hi Hinduism, non-dual Hindu Hinduism. Uh, it says, Ottman is Brahman and Brahman is ottman.

Brahman means God. Ottman means soul. So God is soul. And soul is God. Well, only God can give a soul. Soul is the sentient within you. It’s the consciousness within you. Mm-Hmm, . It’s what’s saying, I am. It’s what’s looking through your eyes at me. That’s soul. That’s God. So, um, my point is, is I ask my soul, my soul knows who everybody else is, because that’s the piece in me.

The ego creates the illusion of separation. I mean, we have no problem talking about our heart or our kidneys or our foot or our hand, but just to give you an example of how deceiving that can be,

You know, we do not have an organ for photosynthesis, do we? Isn’t that interesting? So guess who does it for us? The plant in the tree kingdom. So our organ of photosynthesis is outside of us. You understand that? And you can’t live without that organ. So your solar plexus, solar means sun plexus, which controls your whole digestive system largely, largely.

is the organ that takes the photosynthesis of the plants and the trees and breaks it down to release the energy, which is sunlight into your body. But the point is our organ of photosynthesis is externalized in nature. Well, that’s a metaphor for the fact that no matter who comes to see me, just like I need the plants and trees to photosynthesize so I can be alive, Gabby is the Gabrielle Reese of me.

And I, I can’t be a six foot two beautiful mother, volleyball player, life wife to wear Laird Hamilton. I don’t think I have the right equipment for that. Um, but I can really look and see God in front of me. And so I can say to my soul, please connect to Gabby soul and ask if I need to know if I’m really supposed to stop working for the world right now to work for that part of the world.

And if I get a yes, then I do it because I know that’s what I’m, that’s my soul contract. I’m being guided. And that’s by the way, you know, I teach people how to make contact with their soul and how to work with their soul. Um, and I think that’s, That’s really, really important because as long as you keep looking outside of yourself for God, you’re always susceptible to books and other people’s ideas.

And paradoxically, belief is really the opposite of a religious experience. You understand that? Like you can believe in the Bible and believe that’s what God wants and that’s what God demands of you, but that’s just something that somebody wrote on the paper. But when you actually go and find God inside of yourself and ask that beautiful question, is it really true?

You start having some interesting experiences. Like the number of times people have asked me for help because they were in a real crisis, and I just emptied myself and said to my soul, what’s going on with this person? And I mean, you can verify this easily. People that have worked for me know that this is, and I’m not doing anything that we can’t all do.

I don’t even know a thing about the person. My secretary says, I got so and so on the phone. They, they’re desperate to see you. Do you want to take this client on? And I say, okay, what is this person’s exact name? Write it down on a piece of paper and bring it to me. I connect to it. I empty myself and I say to my soul, are we meant to work with this person?

And the answer either comes back. Yes, you are. Or no, you can refer them to someone who’s capable of handling their case point that I’m making is is when you actually start using your own inner guidance system and the part of you that isn’t divided by an ego that is connected to nature that is connected to the cosmos.

That is God embodying itself in you. You never feel alone again. You don’t need to go to a church. You don’t need to read a book. You just go inside of yourself and you, you don’t need to be told to love or not love, you know, because you feel it inside of yourself. You develop a personal relationship with God that is intimate and you begin to have experiences where you actually feel yourself as the trees breathing and as the stars shining.

And they’re called mystical experiences or luminous experiences. You, you actually encounter spirit and you realize a truth that cannot be conveyed on books, on paper, or even in videos you can, those are fingers pointing to the moon, but you see the point I’m making as long as you’re reading books and memorizing shit and thinking that’s God.

You’re never gonna know God, which is exactly why Rumi said, to get to God you’ve got to become a heretic. What is a heretic? Someone that goes against a dogma.

[01:32:14] Gabby: Mm hmm.

[01:32:14] Paul Chek: Right? And so all my life I’ve gone against dogmas because I saw what they did to people. And I think whether you’re a believer in God or not, it doesn’t matter.

You still have a soul. You still have an inner voice. You still have something that talks to you inside when you quiet your mind and listen. And And you don’t need to use the word God, but you just ultimately find out that whatever is that’s breathing you, whatever is that’s making your heartbeat, has a way of guiding you.

And that’s why I tell people, use your heart to feel what you know. If you listen to your heart, and you give it the respect it deserves, It will take you places where your head will never get you to. And, and that takes a long time to learn. My point is, you don’t need to believe in God as long as you have a heart.

Because your heart will teach you what God is. And there will come a day where whatever God is for you is so undeniably real that it may not be the God that a Catholic believes in or it may not be the God that an Islamic fundamentalist believes in and it may not be the God that some Zen Buddhist runs into, but it’ll be the God that is so real you’ll pay attention, and you’ll listen.

And when you find that God, you will actually become a whole person, and you will know what the responsibility of love is, and you will do it willingly, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it’s a sacrifice, even if it means a sacrifice. Going on a long journey, having to leave your friends and your family, whatever it is, a labor of love is sustainable.

Anything else is not sustainable. And I, uh, I had to learn that the hard way. And I’ve, you know, and, and Gabby, you, you know, you’ve known me a long time. Um, I have had a very long string of, of patients from all over the world of every type from the most elite athletes to broken down workman’s comp funded, um, underprivileged workers that don’t have a United States passport.

Um, the, you know, I’ve spent hours and hours and hours at a treatment table and all I could say was, Piquito dolor, grande dolor. Less pain, more pain. You know, my point is I’ve worked with a diversity of people. I’ve seen what gives them problems. I’ve seen what makes them tick. I’ve seen what’s important to them and what’s not important to them.

And I have learned that everyone here ultimately has an opportunity to develop a relationship with whatever it is that’s breathing them. and living through them. And anybody that actually finds the truth of themselves becomes somebody who has a tremendous power to harmonize other people, stabilize them, and help them find meaning and value in life.

And they’re called wise people. And I have had the joy of Supporting a lot of people in my life of getting to that point. And the Chek instructors are a collection of very wise people.

[01:35:55] Gabby: Yeah. I always, I always say when I meet someone and they go, Oh, I’m a Chek practitioner. I’m like, Oh, you’re like a doctor.

[01:36:04] Paul Chek: Five years of hard work.

[01:36:06] Gabby: So Paul in spirit, Jim, maybe you could pick because 10 principles, but maybe you could pick, um, Another principle.

[01:36:17] Paul Chek: Well, if you’d like, I can just kind of give you a quick summary of those principles. Sure. I would love that.

In sort of a synthetic form. So one, we talked about zero OM, we talked about sound as the creative force. Um, remember God, God is dreaming everything into existence because a mind requires a duality. You have to have a subject and an object to have a mind. So God, God is before duality. God is the principle of zero.

Lao Tzu says from the one comes from the two, from the two comes from the three, and from the three come the 10, 000 things, which just means everything. Okay. But the one comes from the Tao, which can’t be spoken. That’s zero. Okay. So the principle of zero is God. Or source, whatever you want to call it. Pure potential.

Principle of the one is being. There is only one God, therefore all of creation is one being. Right. And that is being itself. So you can’t be, unless there’s something to be, can you? Right. You know, it’s pretty simple, right? So whatever the universe, the multiverse is, or the omniverse, it’s all an expression of the one being, and we’re all part of it.

So the principle of the one means, remember you are part of everything and you cannot be separated from it because you couldn’t exist without it. So you can’t. Unless you’ve been brainwashed into being confused, you, you can never lose your sense of belonging because you are part of the one. You are an inextricable part, just like your finger is a part of your hand.

[01:38:02] Gabby: Why would a teenager, why do you think, what is it in nature, in our chemistry, in hormones, that we go through these cycles that are. pretty predictable, like teenagers, for example, where they have to go through that sort of really, you know, That time of separation.

I understand separation of your parents and that creating a sense of self to do that. But it seems like so much punishment to be separated that then we’re, we go through this whole journey. It’s like they separate from the parents. I want to be like everybody else. And then all I’m trying to do, my whole adult life is find who I really am. Yes. I wonder what these natural patterns and cycles are. These, You know, sort of God’s classrooms for us to understand.

[01:38:50] Paul Chek: Well, that’s what spirit gym means. You see, spirit gym means just like you go to a gym and encounter resistance to get stronger. Life is, you see, I have to step back. If you were God, that for which there is no other, how would you know yourself?

How does something that’s unconditional? No, it’s good to know anything is a condition, right? So one of my deep quests for years was to say, okay, God, if you are unconditional love them, why all these damn conditions? Why all these rules? Etcetera. Why good and evil? You know, I mean, I had a long laundry list of questions and I meditated on this and did shamanic journeys on this for years and I got notebooks to prove it.

And so Ultimately, I asked my soul, I wanted you to connect me directly to God consciousness. I don’t want to talk to a spirit guide or the dead Carl Jung. I mean, I do that too, but I want to connect to God. And so it took me years enough to get quiet enough inside to do that. I did 18 years of Tai Chi every day, sometimes twice a day, uh, to, to kind of get to where I could flatten the mind out and not.

Trick myself into making phenomenon in my head and thinking it was something else. And I said to God that very question, if you’re unconditional love, then why is all this here? And God said back to me, I create conditions so that I can love myself unconditionally. And that was a very powerful answer.

[01:40:43] Gabby: Right.

[01:40:44] Paul Chek: So if you give yourself a body and you, and you say there I am, and now you can do what you want with it, you can make it pretty muscular, slim, become a dancer, a mother, or whatever you want. Right.

And so

the principle of the 10. is really how God creates condition so that it can love itself unconditionally. And that’s the other thing. If God’s unconditional love, then you know, there is no, you’d been a bad girl in your life when you die Judgment day and all this Christian, you know, torture, purgatory and all that.

That’s, that’s a, that’s like, that’s a God of somebody’s making that’s really in a, got a bad attitude, right? Yeah. And, um. So the the point that I’m making here is that God dreams itself into existence because mind requires a duality. So God, all God can do is dream. And the problem is when you, you know, this is another thing about God.

People don’t understand God because it’s hard to wrap a human head around this. And I’ll tell you this. If God is God, God is infinite. So what do you do if you’ve got infinite creativity, infinite energy, Infinite power, infinite intelligence, infinite processing speed, and infinite information. What can you make?

Anything and everything. And when do you do it? Now. How long do you do it? Now. There’s no beginning and end to an infinity, it loops back on itself. Right, so, The point is most people’s conception of God is so limited because it mirrors their own psychological development back at them. So what do you get?

People that were raised by parents that didn’t love them enough, and put them in schools they didn’t like, and tortured them, and you study the history of the religious people beating the shit out of each other, torturing each other, and you see, well no wonder you get a bunch of angry frustrated children that were tortured go off to a monastery to be tortured some more, And of course, they’re going to dream up a God that reflects their own inner experience because that’s their framework of reference.

And God says, yes, that’s exciting too, because you know, I’m, you know, that’s the problem with God. It’s look at people, it says right in the Bible, people don’t want to look at it. Isaiah 45, seven says, clear as a bell. I create the light and the dark, good and evil. I, the Lord do all these things. In fact, the Christians hated that so damn much, they, in the last 30 years, they started rewriting that passage so it doesn’t say that anymore.

While telling you the God, that the Bible is the inspired word of God and it’s never been changed. Oh yeah, really? I’ve got about 30 Bibles right here on the shelf. Let’s lay them out side by side and I’ll show you change after change after change in the Bible. I’ve got entire books on the creation of the Bible.

I can tell you about the councils of Nicaea. I mean, people, my point is, people’s conception of God mirrors their programming. Right. And the reality of it is, is that God says yes to everything because God cannot know itself as only good because there’s no meaning to good without bad or evil, evil upholds the good.

And I’m not condoning evil whatsoever. That’s why I say, go to your heart for guidance, not your head, because your head’s full of both of those things. That’s what makes a mind work. Um, and so in my conversations with, Spirit and God, I’m saying, okay, well, you know, why all the fricking evil in the world?

Does it really need to be that bad? And, and the answer is the evil upholds the good. You wouldn’t know what was good. And Carl Jung made a point that really drives this home. He said, when the church created Jesus Christ, he cast a light so bright they had to create Satan to counterbalance him. Now you’re talking about Probably the most celebrated psychiatrist in the world.

The founder of depth psychology and a man who was incredibly deep, that I’ve been studying for 30 plus years and still have a lot to learn from him. And if you look at the Red Book of Jung’s own inner explorations of himself, you’ll see this is a man with deeply committed to penetrating the unconscious.

Right, that. Comet, if you think of what our whole principles here, we’ve been starting zero. Okay. If God is a zero, if you only created good and you did not have evil, you would be creating an illusion that cannot be true because good and evil counterbalance each other to equal zero plus one and minus one equals zero.

And interestingly enough, if you study cosmology, you’ll see people like Paul Dirac, David Bowman, many of them. did the math to calculate what is the total mass of the universe. So Paul Dirac was one of the first people to do this. If you take electrons and antielectrons or protons and antiprotons, no matter which way you go, there’s lots of ways you can do it.

It always equals zero. So quantum physicists do this process called renormalization because their equations keep bringing up infinities or zeros and they go, well we can’t do anything with that. So they do a mathematical trick called renormalization so that they can make it fit their theories. But the reality of it is we are living in a holographic projection of the dream of God and we are endowed with that same quality, which is why we all want our dreams to come true.

Right? And so the, the, a couple of principles I’m trying to drive at is that zero says yes to everything. And Evil is to remind you that the truth of yourself is love and evil hurts. And ultimately, the only way you can get home, the only thing that satiates the soul is to become what it really is. And it’s a God inside of you, which is unconditional love.

So how many rock stars, movie stars, athletes, And billionaires have we seen commit suicide when they had enough money, enough sex and enough drugs to last anybody a lifetime, but there was still empty inside because they’re ultimately looking for that, which is unconditionally loving and has no expectations of them, no rules and is just pure love.

And, and that’s what God really is. But you see, the problem is is God itself does not know the truth of itself until it comes into the matrix of its own creation. Because God’s either super conscious or unconscious. If you’re super conscious, you know everything well. If you know everything, you don’t know anything,

[01:47:26] Gabby: right?

[01:47:26] Paul Chek: If you know nothing, you don’t know anything. So I not knowing nothing is the unconscious knowing everything. If I, if you know everything. Do you have any questions? No. So paradoxically, we are right in the middle and we don’t know everything. So we ask questions, we don’t know nothing or we wouldn’t know how to take care of ourselves.

So the fact is there’s a horizon that keeps moving away from us. And that’s the quest for spiritual development is to keep learning more because every time you learn more, your questions get bigger and better and they take longer to get answers to. And so the point I’m driving at is God pours itself into this dream and begins as a child and has to go through the whole recapitulation of the recreation of nature.

You can see it right in a child’s body in the womb. It goes all the way through nature. There’s points where it looks like a sea creature, a lizard, I mean, it’s the whole evolutionary sequence is unfolding itself. So, we keep going through these cycles of creation, but ultimately, we get to the point where, well, we get to the point where, as I said, all of a sudden the pieces fit together, and we go, oh my god, I got it.

I can’t be here without you. I can’t be here without relationship. I can’t be here without water. I can’t be here without stars, skies, earth. I can’t be here without, you know, isn’t it interesting that of the approximately a hundred trillion cells that make up your body, only 10 percent of them are human, right?

The, your, your bacteria, viruses, and fungi that are holding you together in this beautiful little suit that you call yourself. But don’t forget that. What you really are is what’s animating it and using it and so you have to say, well, where’d that come from? Well, that’s the half of the table that’s not on the magician’s card And that’s what we’re all trying to get to know.

So you have zero, you have one being, you have two duality. Well, you have to have duality to have mind, you have to have subject object, subject object. Object, you’re listening to me, your subjects are listening to me as the object. Without subject and object you can’t process information, you have no mind.

Three is the holy trinity, which means pure potential becomes spirit, which becomes manifestation. So pure potential has a negative aspect in Tantra that’s called Shakti, the divine feminine. She’s the womb of creation. She dreams Shiva into existence, her consort, her lover, her husband, and her partner to make children, which is all of us.

And she creates her husband. That’s the explicate world of creation. That’s being. So Shiva really is the father god of everybody. Shiva is the closest you can get to the Christian god because she was the god of creation itself, but she’s invisible. Right? So the Holy Trinity is basically, and it’s all in all religions, it says pure potential dreams itself into existence.

The dream is called spirit, and it manifests in physical form, and that’s built inside of you. So pay attention to what you’re dreaming about. Use your mind to create it, and it will manifest. And you got entire books like the Course in Miracles to teach you how to do that.

[01:50:53] Gabby: Right.

[01:50:54] Paul Chek: Now there’s a bunch of other threes, but I won’t, they’re too technical to go in in five seconds, like the primary Homer and Trinity.

So then you go to the four, which is the principle of embodiment. Everything in creation here is made of earth, water, fire, and air. Those are ranges of vibration. They’re not just physical things. The principle of the five is there’s five key things you got to know to create a program for anything, a health program and exercise program.

What level of willingness do you have? If you don’t have at least a seven out of 10 out of willingness, you’re never going to stick to it. How much time do you have? If you do some, if you write a program that takes more time than you have, you’re not going to stick to it. How much energy do you have? If you write a program that takes more energy than you have, the program will break you.

What resources do you have? And does your program match the resources available? See, if I write you a program to go to a gym, but it takes you an hour to get to the gym and an hour to get home and you got kids. Doing that program will cause so much stress between you and your husband and you and your kids.

You will hate the program. And how much finances do you have? So you have to have willingness, time, energy, finances, resource availability, willingness, time, energy, finances, resources. So the principle of the five says, whatever you’re doing in your life, you make sure you’re willing to do it. Don’t. Put a demand on yourself that you don’t have the time to commit to make sure you’ve got the energy to do it Make sure you have the resources and make sure you’re not putting more stress on you financially Then you can heal with your creativity.

In other words if you Say i’m going to do something that costs me so much money that all i’m doing is burning myself out trying to make the money To do it every day like buying a car. You can’t afford you your program just destroyed you

[01:52:44] Gabby: Yeah,

[01:52:44] Paul Chek: so those five things you cannot avoid and i’ve a guy that’s written You Thousands of programs for people and tested this to the limit.

And I don’t care if I write a program good enough for an astronaut, if it doesn’t meet those five factors, you’re not going to do it. Six is the six foundation principles. Nutrition, hydration, sleep are the feminine. Breathing, thinking, and movement are the masculine. To the degree you do not understand nutrition, hydration, or sleep, you’re in trouble.

To the degree you don’t know how to breathe right, can’t think right and create what you want in your life, you’re in trouble. And movement if you don’t know how to move your body effectively to keep it healthy, you’re in trouble So principle the six is nutrition hydration sleep breathing thinking and moving and I teach you All the basic principles in spirit gym on everything we’re talking about.

There’s lessons on how to do it The principle of seven is the seven chakras, which is how the soul the spirit interfaces with the body and becomes manifest reality and so the principle of seven is about spirit, so Soul is What’s having the experience of being Gabby or being you? Spirit is the principle that animates it.

Also spirit is the flow of energy and information consciousness and soul is what’s having the experience. So the way I teach this to my students, they’ll say, look, you’ve all played a shaman’s drum, haven’t you? Most everyone says yes. Okay. So the drum represents soul. You have to hit it to make a sound and have an experience, right?

If you don’t hit it, there’s no experience. Spirit is what’s telling you what rhythm to play to make music or to heal somebody. And the best healers empty themselves and listen to spirit. They don’t think, they don’t guess. So you say to your soul, guide me to helping heal this person, or I connect to that person’s soul and say, what rhythm do I need?

And the message comes and I play it. So spirit is what gives you the energy and information. That creates the experience that your soul is having and your soul includes the memory because without memory you cannot make meaning, you know, the nice thing about being in his Alzheimer’s patients is you get to meet new people every day because you don’t even remember your husband from five minutes ago that you’ve been married to for 35 years.

So do you see soul is the. actual experience of life and the memory of it. Plotinus says there’s three key qualities to the soul. Abiding, which is the zero of God. Non being, that which is not creation but is beyond creation but is paradoxically in creation. So non being is significant because it is aware of being.

That’s how God says I am. Remember when Moses came across the burning bush and he said, who are you? I said, I am that I am. Well, non being, which in Taoism is the dotted circle around the Tai Chi symbol, around the yin yang symbol, you see a dotted circle around it, that’s non being. In quantum physics, that’s non being.

And in metaphysics, that’s non being. So paradoxically, that’s zero, that’s zero as a neutral polarity. It’s unconditional out of which the miracle happens. Conditions are created, which is what the Holy Trinity says. This is how God dreams itself into existence. So non being is significant because it’s aware of being.

Now I’ll show you just how tricky God can be. If your, if the subject of you wasn’t completely empty, Could you ever make meaning of anything you see or hear? Could you listen to me? Wouldn’t you just have something in your head occupying it all the time? I don’t know, maybe not. Okay, well if you had a mirror that was already full of something.

Yes. Could you see yourself in it? No. No, you’d be seeing a picture. Yeah. You get it? Yeah. So God as non being is the empty mirror that unconditionally makes room for anything that stands in front of it. So non being is significant because it’s aware of being. There’s your trinity. Non being, emptiness, feminine, fullness, masculine.

And mind is what’s made of that relationship. And that’s how we create. Once you wake up in the dream, you realize you’re a co creator, so you now use your mind effectively. Okay? So, seven’s really about the soul and the spirit. So you understand what that is. Eight is the principle of self reflection. So that’s being clear to be spend time with yourself each day To be honest with yourself To ask yourself.

Am I really creating what I want? Am I am I being honest in my relationships? Am I doing the best I can do to show up?

Am I believing in stories that aren’t true You have to spend time Yeah going through your own ego structure and your own programming to actually see if you want to keep putting energy into patterns of belief and behavior that aren’t serving you or filling your heart. And if we don’t do that, then all the church time in the world won’t do anything for us.

Um, so eight is really about having a legitimate spiritual practice that’s based on your own time to be with your soul, the God within you. So that you don’t bullshit yourself because you’re going to meet yourself when you die, right? All you can take with you when you leave is what you’ve become. Cars don’t go, money doesn’t go.

That’s why Jesus says in the Bible, a rich man can no sooner get to heaven than a camel can get through the eye of a needle. The only thing that goes with you is the essence of what you’ve become. Um, so the principle of reflection is you’re taking stock of what you’re becoming and saying, is that really what I want to take with me when I go?

Steiner says the first thing that happens when you die, this is funny. You find yourself surrounded by people just like you and you stay with them until you’re absolutely sure of what you will never do again. So I’m saying. I’m going to make sure I like hanging out with me.

[01:59:12] Gabby: Yeah.

[01:59:13] Paul Chek: So that when I die, I think it’s fucking hilarious.

I’m like, okay, dude, let’s build a rock stack and party here. Pass me the bag. You know? So the principle of the nine is a new level of development. So you learn to manage your diet better. You got your body in shape. Stop believing other people’s stories about what God wants you to do or you’re gonna burn in hell.

You you know you Nine means I’ve made it to a new level of awareness. I haven’t mastered it yet But I’m on the way to Getting to the point where I don’t have to think about whether I eat organic food or not. I don’t have to think about whether I go to the gym to take care of myself. I don’t need to think about whether I meditate.

It’s who I am. The principle of the 10 is congratulations, you’ve completed one cycle of development. Now, take some time off, celebrate, meditate, and re dream. Because you’re going to go through endless cycles. Do it again. You’re going to always do it again. And you do it in childhood, you do it in adolescence, you do it in adulthood, you do it in old age.

You do it when you go from one career to another. You used to be a professional volleyball player. And then that became something else. And then it became something else. Right? So, once you understand these nine stages, you know that the next stage is re dreaming. And it all starts again. So the secret of Spirit Gym is get conscious every time you go through a cycle so you get doing, you could do it better and more efficiently, because once you learn how to master something, then it’s much faster to do it, right?

If you have Laird Hamilton teaching you how to surf, you’re going to learn to surf a hell of a lot faster than if Paul Chek’s teaching you, right? If you need to mobilize someone’s C7 T1 vertebra, You’re better to come to Paul than Laird. And that’s why Laird comes to me as a metaphor. He does come to me.

Never used to more, but you know, we, he’s, he’s, he’s a good at managing himself, but you get the point, right? If you, if you, you know, I don’t, I don’t try to do our accounting because my wife’s got a business degree, a master’s degree in business. So I go to penny to say, how much money do we have in the bank?

I don’t go to Paul, you know? So. The point I’m making is every time you get better at something, not only do you become more efficient at getting better at anything, but you get more efficient in teaching other people how to get better at whatever they want to do. Why? Because the principles, the practices and principles of mastery have some consistent themes in them.

And there’s the 10 things that you’ve got to know of to master life and get good at it. And so my Spirit Gym program is, is a large comprehensive set of lessons based on those 10 principles plus God, myth, and Aum. 63 lessons with me guiding you and exercises to do each step of the way so you embody that and it becomes your own, not just a bunch of intellectual blah biddy blah.

And then I mentor you every week. So we have meetings every week. I give a presentation for an hour on some key topic that we all need to be aware of, and then I open the floor for questions, answers, and any problems you have in your life whatsoever, from jock itch to, uh, marriage crisis to, you know, I do exactly what I do for my patients.

My goal is to create a grassroots movement of people that go out into the share their love and share their presence. And inspire people to wake up, clean up, grow up, and show up. Because we don’t have a lot of time if we keep playing this game. And I don’t want my kid to have to live in that world. So, I’m taking it upon myself to clean the playground up.

And say, hey look, we gotta dream better together. And we gotta get rid of all these books that keep telling us that we’re different. And we should fight with each other and war with each other. Like, isn’t it interesting that if there is only one God, You’ve got 12 major world religions, all of which have no agreement about what God is.

[02:03:32] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:03:33] Paul Chek: So either we’re very confused. We have monotheism, which is three religions with drastic differences on rules for what you can do, sexual limitations, food limitations, dress limitations, music limitations. I mean, the list is long. Food limitations. I mean, okay. They call themselves monotheistic.

Mono means one. Theist means God. Yet, every religion is so radically different, and they go to war and kill you. There’s more wars started over religious beliefs than anything that I know of. So what it means is we have a lot of confused people in the world, and the reality of it is anyone that does the work to find God inside of them always becomes a more loving person, always becomes more nurturing, always wants to shepherd and protect life. There’s four things we’ve all got to do for each other, especially a parent. You have to clean, feed, nurture, and protect. Can you escape those as a mother?

[02:04:39] Gabby: Never.

[02:04:40] Paul Chek: Okay. If you don’t clean, feed, nurture, and protect your environment, where do you end up? Right here.

[02:04:48] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:04:48] Paul Chek: Right here. On the edge of our sixth mass extinction.

With oceans dying, animals poisoned, forests poisoned, soil poisoned, airways poisoned, and medical system that’s not saving people, but killing them. A political system that doesn’t work for the people but rips them off. Should I keep going? Okay, so we have a responsibility to each other and our environment.

Clean it, feed it, nurture it and protect it. And if we cannot do those four things, we all get to die together. And I say if you’re gonna die, you better get ready to meet God. And the best way to do it is die before you die. Amen. So Spirit Gym’s about letting the parts of you die that don’t serve you, because they’re not helping you clean, feed, nurture, and protect life.

Or love. And I don’t know anything else I can offer the world except what I’ve learned the hard way. The hard way. There’s your principles. Do you have any last questions?

[02:05:56] Elijah Allan-Blitz: No, this is

[02:05:57] Gabby: So MySpiritGym. com also, Paul, has a podcast. Yes. And, um, what,

[02:06:03] Paul Chek: what’s It’s changing as of episode 300. Okay. By the way, you’ll, if you can get, it’s really good.

It’s 10 life changing books. Okay. Oh, great. And you’ve got over 5, 000 to choose from. And, uh, So the new podcast name is Spirit Gym with Paul Check. Great. So on episode 300, it switches from Living four D with Paul, check to Spirit Gym, Paul, check with Paul Check, and we’re now splitting it so that the first hour to hour and 20 is free, but the spirit, the lowest level of Spirit gym membership is the long version of the podcast.

Great. And have you guys listened to any of my podcasts? I have, yeah, of course, of course. So, you know, I, I’m like pretty detailed. This is not a Fluffy podcast who you. Yeah. And I, we, I, I try to give as much away as I can and really get. So

[02:06:49] Gabby: you can, if you are a member of the spirit gym, you get the next part of the podcast.

[02:06:53] Paul Chek: you are a member of the spirit gym program where you’re in spirit gym as a member, which is a yearly membership, which you can pay for by the month, but it’s a yearly basis that we have access to all the lessons and all the mentoring from me. The podcast is included, but if you’re not a member, you can buy the podcast membership Yep.

And then you get the extended play podcasts where I give you as much as I can through the podcast for 7. 99 a month. And so that’s the easiest way for people that cannot afford the investment for the mentorship. Perfect. And then those that are in the mentorship program, um, can upgrade to a much more expensive, but it includes.

two meetings with me a month every two weeks for probably between 90 minutes and two hours in small groups of no bigger than 10 where you fill out a lot of paperwork just like you would if you were my patient and I personally guide you to healing or growing or doing whatever it is. So it’s a private mentorship group.

And then there’s a three Day meeting with me here at my rainbow house That you get as part of that package where we all come together and I take you through a three day experience and there is a each person in the group gets a pri I think three or four Private calls with me to discuss whatever they want for 90 minutes each Throughout the course of the training.

[02:08:30] Gabby: Are you ready paul?

[02:08:32] Paul Chek: You ready? You ready?

[02:08:33] Gabby: Born ready. You’re born ready. So, uh, I just want to ask you what, what is something through this process? It just dawned on me. Was there anything through this process that you learned that really surprised you?

[02:08:47] Paul Chek: The process of creating Spirit Gym?

[02:08:49] Gabby: Yeah, or just Yeah, you’ve been Doing a lot of internal work.

[02:09:01] Paul Chek: Probably one of the most surprising things that happened to me is when I had a union experience with God and realized that we are all God. It was very shocking, actually. I realized, you I haven’t got a single excuse in the world to complain about anything anymore.

I realize that the power to create is within me. The power to dream is within me. The power to love is within me. The power to destroy is within me. The power to hate is within me. And God says yes to it all and loves every bit of it because without it God would not know itself. So I realized that we are all Ram Das, which means Ram, God, Das, worker.

We are all agents of experience for God. We are how God experiences itself, comes to know itself, and evolves. And people think that God doesn’t evolve, which is very, very wrong. Because I can show, I’ll tell you something shocking. There is no God but the one in you. You see, Gabby, because it doesn’t matter how enlightened I might be, or the Buddha might be, but your experience of God is exactly what it is for you.

[02:10:21] Gabby: Yeah.

[02:10:23] Paul Chek: Uh, it doesn’t matter if I’m a mathematical genius. If you’re not, you’re not going to be doing large algebraic equations and figuring out problems in quantum physics. So the fundamental point I’m making is, Um, only you are having the experience of interpreting. See the two of you are listening to me talking right now.

And even though you’re picking up similar concepts, what it’s triggering off inside of Gabby, which I forgot your first name, Elijah, Elijah, what it’s doing inside of Elijah is uniquely different and there’s no one in the whole world or universe that’s having the Elijah experience. So here’s the punchline.

The only God that exists is the one you come to know. Through honest experience, not by reading, but by experiencing. And there’s no God except Gabby’s God for Gabby. And that’s, that’s one of the God’s amazing little tricks. It’s called absolute individuality in the middle of absolute unity. That’s how you be everything for everyone, yet something different for everyone every time.

And so, I could see that surprising. Yeah. So one of the things I realized is okay, I’ve got to fucking get my tail out from between my legs here and realize if, if, if I really am going to take responsibility for what I have experienced of God, I have got to do my best for everyone. I got to keep growing.

I got to keep learning. I got to keep asking better questions. I got to be spiritually courageous enough to face the fact that what we’re doing in the world Is our own creation and there’s no one coming to rescue us. Jesus is not coming back again I mean, we already stapled the poor guy to a tree once you think he’s going to come back for round two Uh, i’m being metaphorical here, of course, but there is There is no mommy daddy rescue.

[02:12:19] Gabby: Yeah,

[02:12:20] Paul Chek: it’s our job to grow up That’s why I love ken wilbur’s statement. You got to wake up clean up grow up and show up.

[02:12:27] Gabby: Yeah You

[02:12:28] Paul Chek: And until you do, you’re just a child always expecting somebody else to bail you out and wipe your ass and pay your bills. And look where that’s got us. You know, so the, one of the harsh realities about God is you have to come face to face with the truth.

And most people are afraid of the truth. That’s why they get comfortable lying to themselves. And so yeah, you know, real, real spiritual development is, is ball busting. Yeah. You have to be really to. Come stand in the mirror naked. And once you know, God knows everything and God is inside of you, there’s no jerking off in the closet and pretending you’re a Christian anymore.

There’s no shagging your, you know, your, uh, secretary and going home to your wife and pretending you’re in a happy Christian family. I mean, you know, when you look at the statistics, the average marriage today, only the last two and a half years, 51 percent of people are that are married or having affairs.

So. We’re playing a silly game with God, really. We’re just pretending that we’re religious or spiritual, but acting like we’re not. And so, you know, I’m not trying to be a puritanical person at all. I mean, I’ve tried everything in my life, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’ve been in lots of trouble and had to Face the fire and do what I had to do to come home to straighten up.

And we all do, but that’s part of the learning process. Do you fall off bikes? When you learn to ride, you fall off of love affairs. When you learn to ride, you fall off of businesses. You know, I went broke and suffered the consequences of that. That’s really what God’s here to do. But the, my, my kind of closing point is people don’t really want real Religion or spirituality, because the closer you get to the fire, the more the responsibility you have to carry for knowing the truth of God.

And the truth of God is that the answer is always yes. And if you want to create a shithead out of yourself, then you have to suffer the consequences of it. If you want to be a loving person, I mean, look at all the doctors and people that came forth during COVID to tell the truth and the persecution they got.

So yeah, you have to take the consequences Of burying your head in the sand, but you got to take the consequences of telling the truth And you always know who’s telling the truth because they’re willing to face god Yeah, that means they’re willing to die for the truth. I’m willing to die for the truth I will do this till I die And if they come put me in jail, I will do everything I can for the people in jail And I don’t give a shit because the worst thing that’s going to happen to me is i’m going to be home with Myself, yeah The real self and I think that’s what real religion is.

That’s what real spirituality is it teaches you to be conscious of the rest of yourself and get committed to really being honest and loving and doing the best you can and It’s not about being some perfectionist or some, you know, fluffy You know, I do the fake stuff

[02:15:37] Gabby: So, uh, Paul, I’m going to finish this very quickly with a very small story.

So I came to you with Laird. We had the good fortune of you being kind enough to evaluate us. And, um, one of the things you said to me, I mean, this is your people don’t understand you’re, you’re really one of one and, and you’re a person who, um, has, has been a sharp end of a stick in performance and movement, uh, a very, very long time.

And so we were fortunate. It’s like two and a half days. When I say extensive, it’s like how far forward your head is sitting. Like it goes on and on, all the things you measure. One of the things that you told me, and I’ll end this with this, was you said to me, And you should take singing lessons because the opening of your throat is narrow.

And maybe that’s because you’re trying to be smaller because you’re big. That’s what you said to me. And since then, that’s been over 20 years. Um, you know, there’s, I’ve, I, I didn’t take singing lessons, but I have, I’ve been in very large situations where I had to use my voice. Um, it’s kind of funny because I teach a class that I did.

Basically, it was for free. It was a dollar. I did it for probably eight years, three days a week. And I had to be loud. And every time I remember thinking, Oh, Paul has helped me understand or be more aware of that I was oftentimes trying to stay out of the way versus You know, be big and big and not in the physical sense.

[02:17:15] Paul Chek: Yeah, I know but be really step into your full presence

[02:17:17] Gabby: Yes, and so I want to say thank you and I want to say to everyone That spirit gym is available. Yes, and I appreciate You pouring all of your years into this project and um, And just tell you how much I deeply respect and love you. Thank you. I love it, too.

[02:17:40] Paul Chek: And it’s been a long time, you know, what was 97 when you came I think

[02:17:44] Gabby: 97 98 yeah,

[02:17:46] Paul Chek: you know i’ve been interacting and supporting you and laird whenever I could and however I could since then and I’ve always really enjoyed You You guys, because you’re so much an example of what it looks like to go for it.

You know. Well, thank you. And really just be who you are. Um, yeah, you know. And Laird’s That’s a fucking man right there. If you’re confused about what a man is, just search Laird Hamilton on the internet, and your problems will be solved.

[02:18:18] Gabby: Wow. Paul Chek, love you. And everyone, it’s Spirit Gem, and thanks for listening.

[02:18:23] Paul Chek: Spirit. Lots of love to all of you.

[02:18:25] Gabby: So thanks again for joining me and listening to the Gabby Reese show. Make sure to like and subscribe so you never miss a conversation.

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About Paul Chek

Paul Chek is a world-renowned expert in the fields of corrective and high-performance exercise kinesiology, stress management and holistic wellness. For over thirty years, Paul’s unique, integrated approach to treatment and education has changed the lives of many of his clients, his students and their clients. By treating the body as a whole system and finding the root cause of a problem, Paul has been successful where traditional approaches have consistently failed. Paul is the founder of the CHEK (Corrective Holistic Exercise Kinesiology) Institute, based in California, USA and the P~P~S Success Mastery Coaching Program. He is a prolific author of books, articles and blog posts and the host of the popular podcast Living 4D with Paul Chek.