Show notes
If a lifelong quest for health and wellness is at your core, how do you stay committed to it and stay on your path? A man who knows the answers is Paul Chek of CHEK Institute. Paul has devoted his life to health and fitness: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health and true fitness. In today's show, Paul explains what those concepts mean and also tells us the path he took from his childhood farm to becoming a licensed holistic health practitioner and working with a professional sports team to creating the Chek Institute. When Paul began his practice, he had traveled all over the world, studied with many great doctors, therapists, teachers, and had had enough clinical time to master and integrate conditioning practices like the Swiss ball. He had also developed his primal pattern movement system. He was ready to go out on his own and when the opportunity arose he took it and hasn't looked back. Paul Chek, on a lifelong quest for health and wellness Since then he's continued to study, learn, practice, and grow. In fact, his growth includes becoming a licensed medicine man and spirit guide, which means he can legally use plant medicines and facilitate healing ceremonies. He feels passionate about these offerings because plant medicine helped him grow more than any other book, video, training or workshop. He tells us more about those experiences, plus the knowledge and coursework involved in becoming a Chek Institute certified practitioner. We also spend a lot of time talking about deprogramming our belief systems and the important impact this can have on helping us heal our bodies and our lives. We'll get into Native American practices, Celtic spiritual philosophies as well as the zero point field and the concept of "one mind". At the heart of it all is Paul's six foundation principles: nutrition, hydration, sleep, breathing, thinking, and movement. But none of those are available to us without a healthy planet, we all need the Earth in order to survive. When we shift our focus in that direction we can see how much we need each other, and we can radically shift our thoughts and our way of living to a more sustainable and peaceful way of life. Take this deep dive with us as we explore those topics and more on this edition of Awesome Health Podcast with Paul Chek! Resources Paul Chek on YouTube Paul Chek on Facebook Paul Chek on Twitter Paul Chek on Instagram Living 4D with Paul Chek podcast CHEK Institute CHEK Institute on Facebook CHEK Institute on Twitter CHEK Institute on LinkedIn Read the Episode Transcript : Wade Lightheart: Good afternoon. Good morning and good evening wherever you are I'm Wade T Lightheart from the Awesome Health Podcast and I am, I can't tell you how excited I am today. I am interviewing my new found friend and really inspirational mentor. Mr. Paul Chek, he's a living legend. A few months ago we had the opportunity to connect at the Canfitpro in Canada where Paul was receiving a Lifetime Achievement award for the incredible contributions that he's made to our industry. And we had a nice connection. He invited me down to the Heaven house in Southern California, which is the heaven house for sure. I think we spent over 12 hours together the whole day we lifted rocks. We looked at how he charges his water, we shared some native American smoke then which was phenomenal. We broke bread together. We had a beautiful interview together and we had a really deep connection together and in a, in a way that I don't know if a lot of people experience in their lives, and I think it may be a throwback to maybe other times or other things when there wasn't so much internet connection and so much, you know, shallow connections, but it was an opportunity to be welcomed into Paul's incredible life. And you just get immersed in it for a day just to walk through his library to see how he'd come to some of the ideas that he'd come up with. And to hear this incredible history of what I believe is a true living legend in the industry and often times misunderstood, not understand, attacked, and then finally proven true. Wade Lightheart: What a great opportunity. Paul, welcome to the show. Paul Chek: It's my pleasure, man. I, I'm always excited to get a chance to connect to you and share some love. So thank you. Wade Lightheart: So, so let's just, we're gonna I got so many questions. One of the things that we're both, we're kind of free flowers. I'd like to see where things go and what happens. But let's talk about right off the bat, and this is a really loaded question. Who is Paul Chek and what is his mission in the world? Paul Chek: Well, you know, the truth is, the answer for who is Paul Chek is really the answer for all of us. And that is, I'm some kind of a unique marriage of earth, water, fire, air, space, and consciousness. But I think a more kind of direct answer is that, you know, when I think of who I am, I really feel like I'm somebody who has devoted their life to seeking truth and sharing what the process and the synthesis of gathering. You know, the many bits and pieces of scraps that you have to get in this quest for knowledge and truth. Two, test them and synthesize them into what seems to be universal. Principles are consistently reliable ways of perceiving and relating and engaging the world. And as you know, my, my life has been oriented around two things. Health, which includes physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health and what really is true fitness, what's, you know, functional fitness or baseline fitness, functional fitness, and then sport or activity specific fitness. And how do you get somebody from the state that they're at walking in the door to first physiological and structural balance to then build them up to be the person that their dream is requesting of them. So really that sort of an encapsulation of who, you know, I perceived myself to be. Wade Lightheart: Okay. And the mission through the Paul Chek, you have the Paul Chek Institute and I, and that's kind of a branch of expression for you. I think you're much greater than the Institute itself. It's kind of like, but let's talk about the Chek Institute because of all the industry professionals I've met and, and you know, I've, I've met a lot of the big names and all those, you know, been to the seminars and all that sort of stuff. You're probably one of the most, I would say, subtle influencers of movement concepts in the world today. In other words, if you kind of dig down into communities and cities or you go around the world, sooner or later you end up with the Paul Chek practitioner somewhere who figures out the unfit irritable. So tell, tell me how, tell me about the Paul Chek Institute. What that's about and why people seem to, what's interesting is is is so many, when I talk to Chek practitioners, what's fascinating is they kind of go on this journey of health and fitness and study and education and learning and they come from a sport or an activity or whatever it happens to be, or an institution or a profession and somehow they wind your way into the Chek Institute and then they just did. Wade Lightheart: They become Chukies. That's what the world knows. They become Chukies and they dive into into your world what is so powerful, a boat, the Chek Institute, the Chek principles and how that's just just permeated the whole world with some of the best coaches in the entire world. How did that come to being? Because that's an incredible accomplishment that I, that needs to be acknowledged and recognized. How did that happen? Paul Chek: Well, it happened. It happened really right in the beginning of my military career as the trainer of the United States army boxing team. And I didn't really realize how much that I had learned in my childhood. Both on the farm, my mother being a Yogi for, you know, 30 something years, traveling to India to do initiations, multiple times being raised in the self-realization, fellowship temple and teachings of Yogananda. Mmm. You know, being a child, there was a lot of stress in my family. So athletics was how I vented that and I love to win. I just really have as a young man, winning to me was important because I figured if you're going to do it then why not just go for it? And otherwise, why bother? You know, just no go do something that's non competitive. But so I, I was very immersed in sports from the first grade. Paul Chek: I started with wrestling and pretty much just played everything I could play any excuse to get off the farm so I didn't have to work, you know, shoveling piles of cow shit and cleaning pens and you know, all the work, working, working, working stuff. But you know, I was in a small Valley on Vancouver Island called Comox Valley and you know it, it's intense. You know, I have pretty heavy winters there at times. Our first year there we had eight feet of snow. So for a kid from Los Angeles, that was quite a shock. We had 140 acre sheep farm. It was a working farm. Mmm. So between my pursuits as an athlete and because the competition that was, there's just so many great athletes there. It was crazy. I mean, you know, growing up, one of my buddies became, he was my sparring partner for three years in our boxing club. Paul Chek: He became the world champion in kickboxing at the time in 86 I think 80 maybe 89 he became the world champion. Another one of my buddies that I grew up with in town owned pretty much the only gym in town at the time. He was mr Canada and bodybuilding in, in 1880 1989 I think as well. Two of my other buddies were nationally ranked motocross that I did a lot of racing with. Probably six or eight of my best buddies were black belts and multiple level black belts in various forms of martial arts. And we had our own kickboxing club where we could have weekly meetings to destroy each other. Paul Chek: And a lot of my buddies were elite skiers. So it was just like this hot bed of farm boys that all had this need to express their frustration and father's stress. And, and also we're also very motivated to win. And so it created this intense growth pressure. And so I began studying when I was 12, everything I could find on diet, weightlifting, bodybuilding, Mmm. And just apply, learn and apply, learn and apply. And so when I got to the army boxing team the strange thing was as I was also the Army's representative and triathlon and so the boxers and the team management were kind of baffled by the fact that, you know, we often train six hours a day on the army boxing team and I would be getting up early in the morning to do longer, more intense running like you know, 10, 10 K and half marathon type training fairly regularly. Paul Chek: Plus I would go to, when they went to lunch, I would go to the swimming pool and usually put a mile in and just get some food in me as quick as I could. And then after training I would get on my bicycle and go do anywhere from 2260 miles in the evening and I'd do a hundred miles on the weekends and they could not figure for the life of them how I could possibly, and I fought on the boxing team before I became the trainer, so they were watching how I was very good as a fighter, but I was also doing all this intense training. So when my company commander came to me and said, if you want to leave the boxing team and train full time to win the army triathlon, I will support that because I've got a lot of money to bet on you. Paul Chek: I need you to win. And so I went back and told the boxing team I was going to stop fighting and train full time for triathlon. And they said, Oh God, don't do that. We'll give you the job as as trainer because whatever the hell you're doing, it's working. You can fight hard all three rounds the way you eat, the way you train. We've never seen anything like it. How would you like to become the trainer and take over all the conditioning management of the gym and nutrition coaching for the for the boxers. And I said, you know, something inside me just knew that was what I was supposed to do. And fortunately for me, the team physician was an osteopath and he was quite open to discussing things with me. So I got a two year internship and how to care for acute sports injuries. Paul Chek: And we had plenty of them cause the boxing gym was also the headquarters for many army sports, such power lifting, track and field. And I was interacting with wide variety of athletes and there's 80 at that time there was 79,000 soldiers on Fort Bragg. So it's like being in a, you know, I grew up in a town of only like 16,000 people. So there was like being on Fort Bragg was like being in a big city on Vancouver Island. And so I really got to use my creativity, what I've learned about weightlifting, what I'd learned about diet, the first book I ever read in my life, I hated reading. But the first book I ever read, I finished it in the army on a bus on the way home from the Pentagon where we had just done a 10 mile inter military race, army, Navy, air force, Marines. Paul Chek: And it was nutrition and a holistic approach, but Rudolph Ballentine. So I had really gravitated toward these holistic principles because that's how my parents ran our farm. You know, everything we ate pretty much came off the farm. My mother being a Yogi was very oriented toward natural eating, which is heavy in Yogananda's philosophy. We bought, we bought food that we needed when we needed it from a local kind of hippy co-op where people got together and got good food and okay, so plus being raised on a farm, you know, my father was very intense ass kicker, get the job done, no complaints, do it or you won't like the consequences. So I really learned how to push through discomfort. I mean doing things like swinging access for eight hours straight and clearing land and you know, building and digging fence, post holes and, and a long, long string of endless stuff. Paul Chek: So I actually got in an extremely good physical condition. And so when I carried that into sports, it was already, like, I had a lot of preconditioning so I was almost a jump ahead of a lot of people. And so when I got in the army, it was really just, you know, without a depth of knowledge, anything even close to what I have now, it was really, and I'd also been trained by the monks to meditate. And how to con, you know, calm my mind and how to you know, find my center in the middle of a storm and, and how to understand concepts such as what the universe is or what God is or what space and time are. And so when you put all that together and you put me on an army boxing team where I become the trainer, I had the freedom to implement weightlifting and circuit training and I used to be an aerobics instructor before I joined the military. Paul Chek: So I used that knowledge and skill, begin modifying their diets cause they ate like crap and just ate crap and had a lot of problem losing weight and doing a lot of stupid crash dieting and just silly stuff using various too. It's accelerate kidney urine production to drop weight. The stuff that really costs them, you know. So when I put all this together and I, long story made short as a triathlete, I was in so much physical discomfort from the hard training that I needed the experience of my grandmother massaging. As a child I had asthma and none of the drugs or anything did anything like my grandmother's massage. And so when I came to the situation where I was training so hard, I was just really a need a massage. I asked my wife if she would give it a try and so she, I just got some like, you know, baby oil or something. Paul Chek: And even with no skill, the difference it made in my training was phenomenal. I was just blown away at how much it aided my recovery. And so I started reading sports, massage therapy books and everything I could find on sports massage therapy. And I intuitively implemented this on the army boxing team. So I became the first person ever in the entire history of the boxing team to offer massage therapy to all the fighters. And so between the massage, the diet, the designing, the conditioning programs, and I led the fighters through the workouts. I didn't point fingers, I did everything I asked them to do, which they loved and they hated because I was in good enough shape to really, you know, put it on him. And it just grew into this sort of excitement, this passion because the team doctor reported within about the first three months that the rate of injury was going down. Paul Chek: Like he'd never seen it and the athletes were performing far better. They were fighting way harder and longer through the third round where they were having problems with that before. Mmm. Just there was so many positives and my father was a guy that did not have the good job gene. So to be in the military and to be winning so many awards, I set many military records got two records in the obstacle course in different posts. I set the record for the most pushups in two minutes in the 82nd Airborne Division. I got many you know, army achievement medals for various things that I did. And so I was in this sort of like very inspirational hotbed with very highly motivated men that were, you know, really aggressive, get the job done, kick some ass, let's win. And then having that team, Dr. Charles Pitluck there, started opening my technical awareness and then I started reading books on sports medicine to understand the body from a medical doctor's perspective and how they treated inflammatory problems and tendons and Mmm. Paul Chek: And so that kind of triggered me to the point that when I left the army, I, I knew that I wanted to mix sports, massage therapy, postural awareness. I went to the sports massage training institute, which was phenomenal. And I got eventually got my license as a holistic health practitioner, which allows me by the state of California law to do anything holistic with any kind of problem, from psychological problems to health problems, to whatever. I can do, massage, I can do meditation, I can do plants and herbs, anything that's natural. So it was the perfect license for me because there was really like almost no barriers on it, you know. And I just continued to study and travel all over the world and learn from the very best doctors and therapists I could find no matter where they were at. And I put that all together. Paul Chek: And having left the army and starting my own sports massage business, I then got hired by the largest physical therapy clinic in San Diego. They had their own surgical center. So I had 13 orthopedic and neurosurgeons I was working with. I could go to surgery anytime I want. I ultimately did five cadaver dissections, two through the university of Oregon health sciences university, one through giveaway and multiple through the surgeons cause they did regular cadaver dissections to test new surgical techniques and just to review their anatomy. And then working with all these physical therapists and athletic trainers gave me a chance to share concepts with them. And they, the reason I got hired is because the owner of the clinic had had three knee surgeries and was about to have to have a fourth because her knee locked up and she had a frozen knee for the third time. Paul Chek: And the surgeon said, if I have to manipulate this knee, I may never be able to play golf or tennis. Again, both of which she was very active in. So I had rehabilitated a guy named Kevin Macquarie who was on Nike's running team. Then it was as a marathoner and he had bilateral Achilles problems that, you know, pretty much were ending his career and nobody could figure him out. I straightened right out in about a month and so he told the owner of the clinic before you let them operate on you, you got to go see this guy that I know. Long story made short, I got her more range of motion in one session than they'd been able to get for her in months. Then she asked me to come work for them. I was the first massage therapist in San Diego ever to be hired by a physical therapy clinic. Paul Chek: And because the physical therapists always thought of massage therapists like prostitutes. So it was a bit of a shock for them. And then she asked me to condition her cause I had got her range of motion back. But once I started working for her, she asked me to condition her and I, there was a lot of political tension because there was a lot of looking down the nose at me and there was also a lot of jealousy. Like how did this guy with no college degree figure out this woman when we couldn't figure her out? So there was a lot of kind of edginess, you know, and so I said, why don't you let them work with you? And if they give up or you give up, then I'll take it over because then whatever happens will be respected knowing again that they did their best. Paul Chek: And sure enough, after about three months, she wasn't getting better. She was getting worse. So I took her over, rehabilitated her got her strength back, got her where she could play golf and tennis again. And so that triggered off a level of mutual awareness and respect that led to me spending four years being treated pretty much as an equal because they had evidence that I was certainly able to do things they couldn't do with their degrees and their skills. And so that just catapulted me into a deep, deep exploration of everything to do with the body, the mind, the soul, the, the the glandular system, the organ systems. And I basically became famous for the guy to send medical failures too. And I had doctors from all over the world sending me cases. And I ended up working for many professional sports teams that did a lot of consulting for the Chicago Bulls and the Jordan era. Paul Chek: They were the first ones to take on my Swiss ball and my scientific core conditioning approach. And it spread wildly from there to other sports teams. The Lakers were the ones that picked it up next from them. But I've worked for so many professional sports teams all over the world and so many sports Olympic committee limit, Olympic committees, university teams militaries, you name it. And you know, the reason I kept getting results with jobs with these people is because I got results that they could not deny with an IVR. I've taken three elite athletes, famous athletes out of medical retirement that were forced into medical retirement, all of which came to me and I completely rehabbed them and got them in very good shape and they all passed their medical exams, which is extremely rare because if an athlete goes back after being forced into medical retirement, they can actually sue the team for falsely retiring them. Paul Chek: So Gary Roberts, I rehabilitated cause Charles Poliquin came to an impasse with them. He passed his medical exams, which I had to attend because the doctor was very concerned about letting him back with all the problems he'd had. But he ended up making 25 million more dollars before he finally retired. Mmm. Ricky Stuart, at that time, the highest paid rugby player in the world was forced to medical retirement. I brought him back and he played for two or three years after that. Richard Dunwoody, a famous horse jockey, horse racing jockey, was forced into medical retirement after 40 bad falls from horses racing and being trampled and all sorts of stuff. And he had some severe issues. But I rehabbed him and he went back and won the triple crown and wrote about me in his autobiography and, and sent me a beautiful big picture, which you probably saw on my wall and, and, and a copy of the autobiography to say thank you. Paul Chek: So really what kicked off the Chek Institute was, I, I, it was really Charles Poliquin, he was a friend of mine and I helped him get more known in the US he asked me if I could help him get a job with the bowls. So I inspired elver meal to bring them on and consult with them at the bowls. And Charles asked me if I would train his top two strength coaches in the approach I use for assessing core function and optimizing core strength and conditioning. And those two guys who are very, very experienced strength coaches said what I was teaching was just like so far outside of anything they'd ever seen or heard of that they really both felt I should start an Institute. And so at that time I had enough knowledge that also after I left sports and orthopedic physical therapy clinic, me and a partner started our own physical therapy clinic. And prior to that I was working for a chiropractor for two years who was one of the instructors in my massage school. So by the time I actually started the Institute, a two years training with an osteopathic position in the military, sports massage therapy training, holistic, a health practitioner training. I did my neuromuscular therapy training through the st John Institute. Mmm. I had, Mmm. Paul Chek: So then I worked for this chiropractor for two years who specialize in athletic injuries. Then I worked in a physical therapy clinic for four years. Then I owned a physical therapy clinic for three years. So by the time I actually got to where I was training people and starting my own institute, I had quite a lot of experience and, and, and you know, I did a lot of research. I published a lot of articles. I've published hundreds of articles around the world. I was involved in developing research studies. I had, I've got several patents of my own as you know, as, as an inventor and medical and an exercise equipment. And I come from a background of fabrication, building my own race cars and roll cages and building my own engines. And so I have the skill to, to kind of see where there's a hole and fill it. Paul Chek: And so the Institute was really me taking all the knowledge that I had from each of these different areas, be it nutrition lifestyle issues musculoskeletal issues. Mmm. I had to do a lot of work with people's mental, emotional state because a lot of the people that came to see me were in severe pain and had been for many years. And I found over and over again, there's a huge psychological component and chronic pain and they're all my assessments kept pointing to belief systems. Mmm. And so I kept running into issues where people's problems tracked back to beliefs that were related to their beliefs about God. Unfortunately, my mother, having been a Christian scientist and become yoga, gave Paul Chek: Me a chance to really heal a lot of that Christian programming. And be able to spend time. I spent my 15th year in summer camp with the monks where I could ask any question I want. And these guys were so enlightened and so clean and clear and precise in their answers that even as a 15 year old kid, I actually turned 16 in summer camp. I felt safe and I felt like I was getting real honest answers that carried me. It's through the rest of my life. And so the Institute really became the place where I took everything that I had tested for years and years. And I had a very, very busy practice. I mean, I got so busy in the physical therapy clinic, we had hire three other massage therapists to support the load. And I was, I was referring the largest physical therapy clinic in San Diego, 36% of their business just from people trying to come find me from all over the world. Paul Chek: So by the time I started the Institute, I had traveled all over the world, studied with many great doctors, therapists, teachers and had had enough clinical time to integrate, master the Swiss ball, develop the first conditioning videos in the world for Swiss balls, introduced them to the weightlifting industry. I'd develop my primal pattern movement system. Mmm. You know, so I, I had enough that I was getting encouragement from 360 degrees to teach this stuff. And I also read intense level of frustration with the insurance industry because they were ripping us off so bad that we couldn't run our physical therapy clinic and make a decent living because they kept sending us like $16 on $135 a building or 40 bucks. And so when the opportunity came to sell it to a large corporation, I took that money that we made because we made a couple hundred grand. Paul Chek: And I split that with my partner and use that money to start the Chek Institute. And so that really just became the basis from which I launched off in 95. And, and that's what I've been doing is just continuing to study, learn, practice, grow, work with challenging cases. Uyou know, and I've also got my license now as a medicine man and spirit guide. So I, I finally reached the point where when I started doing research on psychedelics and,udid a year of training with a doctor that uses him in his practice. Mmm. Penny felt it was very important for me to get federal protections so that I didn't,u get sued or anything like that. So I went through the native American council and got my medicine men spirit guide license so I can use plant medicines legally and healing ceremonies. And I've conducted over 400 healing ceremonies at this point. Uso, you know, the plant medicines also grew me more than anything. I would honestly say more than any books or libraries and helped heal,u Paul Chek: You know, potentially lifetimes of pain and also reinforce my meditation and Tai Chi practice. And I, I spent time with master Fong Ha learning from one of the top masters in the world, how to do Tai Chi. I took medical type qigong training and applied that. And I did a lot of that as research for my book, how to move and be healthy because I felt that people were so burnt out from working too much and exercising too hard in the gym that I needed to take exercise into its feminine expression. And so I hired master Fong Ha. We'll actually did it for me for free, but I offered to pay and I told them I want to learn the basic principles of Tai Chi so I can develop a system of movement that actually cultivates more energy per unit of time than it costs that allows people to pump, detoxify and vitalize their bodies, but doesn't require the memory of a lot of complex Tai-Chi movements. Paul Chek: Because I've met people that had been in Tai Chi for two or three years and still couldn't get out of their head. They still couldn't meditate. They were so focused on where their hands were, where their body wasn't. So I said, you know, that they've intellectualized Tai Chi too much. So after two years of working with him, I had developed what is in my book has zone exercises and through testing with my patients and students, they got phenomenal results with these very simple mindless techniques because they locked onto the very principles that really all the inner arts are based on, but allowed a person to move dynamically so that heady people could actually be engaged in the movement. So it was just enough for the ego to focus on, to keep it busy. And there was simple enough moments that the ego kind of goes into this half awake, half asleep state where the meditation bridge opens the doors. Paul Chek: And so kind of in a, believe it or not, that is a nutshell, but so that's what really brought the Chek Institute onto the map. And I've had so much success with elite athletes and sports teams that the word just spread. In fact, the New Zealand military sent two of their top guys to study with me for four years to revamp the entire mill, New Zealand militaries conditioning programs. The Navy seals sent three people in. Mmm. Two of which went back to rehab, Navy seal conditioning. You know, I've had all sorts of kind of unique opportunities like that due to the reaches of my articles and my successes. Incredible. So the Chek Institute will guess will be coming up on 25 years next year. Yeah. Which is pretty impressive. One of the things that strikes me is you live your principles and you're in incredible physical condition. Wade Lightheart: Not bad for an old guy. I mean we haven't revealed your age. I don't know if you reveal that or whatever, but you know, we went out and we're lifting rocks on your property. And what's very interesting I think is one of the unique aspects that I've noticed with the Chek Institute and what you provide is, and maybe this cause we kind of shared some stories about our past, which we grew in these environments where you're not sitting in these wonderful linear planes that are familiar in most gyms that people go to or exercise programs. Is this a functional level of strength in a, a functional level of movement that you have? And, and it translates not only into your physical condition, but your capacity to move, particularly as you age. I doubt there's most 20 year olds could do the things that you do now. Paul Chek: So a lot of them try, but they, they soon find out that the old man's got a surprise for them. In fact, one of the most common things I get accused of is using anabolic steroids. And I look at him and say, you obviously know nothing about steroids cause I'm 170 pound guy. I have no indications of steroids and said, you know, the steroids, I use your chicken, carrots, broccoli, real food. And yes. So the, for the listeners, I'm 58 and, and I still regularly put it hard on young professional athletes that seek my coaching and even guys that can lift more than me in the gym when they come out to the stones with me, they can't get things off the ground that I can stack chest high. Yes, they all go, hell, the friggin hell did you just do that? And I say, well, you first got to connect to the stone. And and ask it if it wants to take a ride with you. Wade Lightheart: So one of the things, and there's a promotion a bit of, we'll probably put a link to it as well. I think that was really good. That's kind of summarizes your journey. And I thought something that was pretty unique that you mentioned is that your, when when you coach or train a Chek practitioner, you have like a five and a half years for them or I believe you mentioned on it. Can you kind of, can you talk about what it is to be a Chek practitioner and maybe the levels and what happens when, you know, how does a person become that? How do they move through it and what is the foundational components that being a Chek Institute practitioner is what, what does that mean as opposed to say, getting a degree from university of California or taking an international certification course or provincial course or a state course. What is the difference between what you do and what other people do? Paul Chek: Yeah, well the difference really is a bunch of things. One. Paul Chek: My Institute is multidisciplinary. So we have many medical doctors, nurses, chiropractors, osteopaths, physical therapists, physiotherapists, naturopaths from Scandinavia. We've got housewives, we've got people that, you know, used to be truck drivers who had checked professional, rehabilitated people of all walks of life. And they go, Oh my God, I've got to do this, this works so well, I've got to do this. And so, you know, if it's out there and there's probably there's over 10,000 Chek professionals now. So my only criteria is that you can pass the prerequisite courses. I don't care if you're a truck driver, a lager or a surgeon. And I don't make any ex exceptions. I've had many people say, can I skip this prerequisite cause I studied this and this in school. And every time I've let someone do that, they turned out to be a royal pain in the backside in class because they were way far behind what should be known. Cheers by the way. Some nice tobacco and herb can help. Wade Lightheart: Can you talk about that right now? Cause it's kind of a good segue. We've got to try, I got to experience some of your smoke concoction, we'll call it. What is it that you're doing and why are you doing it if that's okay. Paul Chek: Well, I think it's interesting. This is a bag of vaporized herb, so there's no fire it actually just, it's a copped up food to hut be hydrated. It was invented for medical marijuana delivery, you know, many years ago. And it pushes hot air through a little basket that contains herbs and I, I use clean tobaccos that are not grown with chemicals, so I don't get poisoned by them. The grand majority of which are or certified organic. And then I use a variety of herbs. So any tea that you can drink, you can vaporize and it does the basic same thing. So if you drink a sleepy time tea and you vaporize it, it'll, it'll make you sleepy. If you drink a gin Singh and it warms your body up, well if you smoke it, it'll do the same thing, but a lot faster. Paul Chek: Within three seconds, it'll be superior delivery system right here. It's a rapid delivery system. But you know, what happened is I research all this because I'm very interested in all aspects of holistic health. And so when I went through my midlife crisis when I was 50, I realized I had given so much of myself away that I was dying from a lack of, of pleasuring myself doing things just for me. And so I made a promise to myself, if I couldn't make my work enjoyable to me, then I wasn't going to do it anymore. I was just going to retire and go do something else, like paint a rock gym and but you can use vaporize herbs to modulate your biochemistry just like you can use any kind of supplement. Mmm. And so I typically, because I do a lot of writing and a lot of coaching, I used things mostly that bring me more into a sort of a meditative state where I'm walking the line between cognitive engagement and intuitive reception. Paul Chek: So I'm listening behind the words and I'm connecting to the person's soul while I'm coaching them. And if you're busy or if there's a lot going on, sometimes it's hard to shift into that balance point just like it's hard for people to stop everything and meditate. And I found using the herbs that I can choose the right herbs to create the environment. So I basically, in modern parlance, I'm biohacking in a very natural, organic, holistic way, not using gadgets per se, but using herbs. And because you're using a vaporizer and there's no fire, you're getting IS estimate only about 30% of the nicotine. So I smoke these things all day long as you know, and I can go off of them cold Turkey and I'd basically just feel tired for about a day. Like I'm jet lagged. And then after that, there's no symptoms whatsoever. Whereas if you were smoking tobacco, you could get very addicted to nicotine. Paul Chek: So I also use it as a transition tools for people to come off of various drugs. Cause I work with a lot of addicts from crack cocaine to cocaine to, you know, pain pills to you if you, if there's an addict out there from gambling to sex to exercise to work. I've worked with them. And so I find this approach is, is such a much healthier option and it allows a person to use something to modulate their biochemistry and create states that helped them realize that there's much safer ways to create state shifts. Because what I've found working with thousands of people is most people are actually suffering from a lack of meaning and being caught in the capitalistic you know, money wheel where they're just running all day to make money, overspending on credit cards, trying to pay for kids' colleges, whatever it is, and they don't have any chance to live. Paul Chek: So they, I ended up getting addicted to things that help them cope with that stress. And the deeper, you know, our culture has lost its myth. So everybody's kind of like wondering around in the great abyss of the world without really having a sense of why we're all here, what we're all doing. And what's it's all for. And then you, you know, you have consumerism has taken over as the myths, so people are spending so much money trying to find this connection that we've lost by being too disconnected from nature. So this allows me to take nature and put it right in my bloodstream and celebrate and worship, you know, this is a ancient as you know, a practice of ceremony for native Americans and natives all over the world. And you know, I sort of live my life in a state of worship. I really, each day is sort of a living prayer for me. And, and so I Paul Chek: Use these herbs as, as a vehicle for deep connection, state shift and just to create the sense that I'm not working so hard, I can stop, go smoke a bag, work. Right. it just brings me a lot of joy. Wade Lightheart: Yeah. It's you know, I was my first time to share in that when we were, when I was down there and it, it is remarkable how it is. We say as a state modulator, I think it's pretty fascinating and it feels great. I'm pretty intuitive about myself. It doesn't feel like taking something bad into the body. There's definitely a positive enhancement and a cognitive enhancement for sure and a state enhancement that I experienced. And I think it really translated also in our podcast as well. When we were, we were talking there, I noticed there was differences in my voice and how I sound and it's, it's fascinating to pay attention to these things. Going back though, we, I know we got onto, we got a little sidetracked here on this and cause it's just, that was an interesting segue, but let's talk about these preliminary courses that you have people to go through before they get to maybe the more advanced training and why that's so critical as a foundational piece and the Chek Institute system and philosophy. Paul Chek: Yes. So when I began the Chek Institute, there was four levels of training. I grossly overestimated how much people can handle. So I used to have, you know, veteran physical therapists and chiropractors breaking down in tears in my class and just throwing their hands in the air and walking out or writing me letters, they would just disappear and leave me a letter saying, you know, I'm so embarrassed that I, I just don't feel, I feel like I'm so far off the mark. And I had no idea there was exercise professionals anywhere in the world that had this level of knowledge. And so I realized I had to break the course material up and build prerequisite courses to get them ready for it. And the, you know, there's a fair bit of technicality. There's a lot of goniometric assessment, joint assessment, neurological assessment. I mean it's a full proper orthopedic assessment, cranial nerve assessment. Paul Chek: I mean, I really want to identify what's causing a person's problems, not just do allopathic palliative care cause it just doesn't really work. Obviously we look at the state of the world. And so originally the plan was, would take four years because I designed the system. So you'd take a blog, a training, then you have to go spend at least six months applying it and you have to turn in. I used to require 10 actual case histories with names and phone numbers I could follow up on which I graded myself and I wouldn't let anybody go to the next level if they couldn't meet the criteria to demonstrate that they were applying the practice, the, the assessment techniques, the program Paul Chek: Design techniques and all the factors I was teaching them and I was heavy into the diet stuff. But there was so much to teach in the science of corrective and high-performance exercise that what happened is after a few years I kept having all these students consulting with the cases that they were having a hard time with. And almost always it was some kind of glandular visceral or diet and lifestyle problem that they were overlooking, which I already did but couldn't put into the program cause it was just a massive other field of study. And so ultimately I decided I had to start my, what was then the nutrition and lifestyle coaching program. So I put together a one week intensive course, which you know, sometimes the classes would go 10 hours a day cause there was so much to teach them. But I found that almost everybody that was coming to the classes were very, very unhealthy people that wanted to go out and tell other people how to get healthy. Paul Chek: And then I put together the next level, which is now the third level and they would show up again looking just as bad yet they'd spent months telling everybody else what to do. And that goes completely against my philosophy. So I said, okay, that's enough of that. So I took out the most basic elements, what was in my book, how to move and be healthy plus a few other more practical application concepts. And I built holistic lifestyle coach level one which is specifically designed to teach all interested people how to achieve baseline health. And it's the prerequisite to get into HLC, to holistic lifestyle coach level two which is my holistic lifestyle coaching program to teach you how to do it professionally. And HLC three is the advanced training program where I go into much deeper issues such as infant development, a much more comprehensive approach to glen and organ reflexes. Paul Chek: Medical dowsing. I take them through a system of maps I developed to show them what the life processes and how to identify where a person's at in their stage of life. What are the challenges with each stage of life. I show them how to do a personality profile so they know how to better coach people. So it's a very comprehensive course. But once I started making people do HLC, one I noticed they would show up much healthier. And I mean I've had people lose 90 pounds between taking HLC one and HLC two and I've got loads and loads of, you know, mind-boggling case histories and then they were ready because you can't coach people effectively if you're not actually having visceral knowledge of what it's like to kill parasites or do heavy metal detox or colon cleanses, liver cleanses, kidney cleanses you know, all the things that they were prescribing to other people. Paul Chek: These things can be quite intense and there can be, you know, complications. I remember one time for example, I was, you know, years and years ago I was, I had a guy who was a, a medical drug salesman and he had a bad case of parasites and his intestines were very badly blocked up. And I had put him on a colon cleanse product with anti-parasitics and all of a sudden one day I got a phone call in the clinic, I can't remember his name, but they said, you know, so-and-so needs to speak to you right now. And Oh by the way, he's quite upset. So he's calling me on his mobile phone and this is right back in the very beginning of mobile phones. And he's like, what the hell, man? He says, you didn't tell me what was going to happen to me, but what are you talking about? Paul Chek: He goes, I'm actually sitting in traffic right now and I just shit my pants and I'm on my way. I'm on my way to a very important meeting. And he says like, I've got a whole seat full in my very nice and BMW convertible. I am sitting in a pool of shit. And he says, I thought I was just going to fart and this happened. He says, why didn't you tell me? You know? And I, you know, I had had experiences like that, but I only highlight that because if the practitioners don't realize what they're getting a person into, they don't know how to pace them. And there's a tendency to throw everything in the kitchen sink at people. So you've got people doing this to drug those, herbs that supplement in there, like they don't know what the fuck's going on. And so I really felt it was very important for people to do everything to themselves that they were going to prescribe to other people. Paul Chek: And then I would, you know, I was trained in functional medicine testing and I worked with one of the giants of that in the, in the world who actually invented salivary testing. And so having done a lot of this on myself and realizing, wow, you know, you go too fast with a heavy metal detox, your life will be very shitty for a few days. I can completely sidetrack you. So what happened in a nutshell was I grew that the corrective and the high performance exercise program, and I built a lot of prerequisite courses to make sure whoever walked in that classroom had the anatomy, the physiology, and the basic sciences down and it was graded tests. And then they found that they can digest the information much better. And through constantly seeing all these people failing with diet and lifestyle factors, I realized I had to build that training program. Paul Chek: And then because there was so much mental, emotional factors, right? The diet and lifestyle factors will, when you say, well, why do people keep doing that? Right? You ask people, I ask people in large audiences all over the world, mostly doctors, therapists, and strength professionals. How many of you right now, no, you're either over exercising or under exercising, but keep doing it and almost every hand goes up. How many of you know you need to get to bed earlier than you are, but you keep staying up late at night and it's costing you almost every hand goes up. How many of you know you're eating shit that messes your body up but keep doing it? Almost every hand goes up. How many of you are doing jobs that aren't making you happy, but you're telling yourself you've got to do it for money and it's causing problems in your own sense of self and in your relationships. Paul Chek: Almost every hand goes up. So the point I'm making is, and this basically is based on my four doctor model, Dr happiness, Dr diet, Dr quiet, Dr movement, which is the encapsulation of a living philosophy. If you don't have those four doctors, believe me, you will be spending a lot of time and money on medical health. And so what I showed my students, cause they're the ones too that I would ask these questions, is you all are aware intellectually of what your challenges, but you keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Which means you have to look at the beliefs that are driving your behaviors. All actions are the result of some kind of belief, most of which is unconscious, right? This is this, this is the tricky part. But yes, we'll get caught in this. So yeah, so what happens is, you know, think of how many times you know yourself or myself or anybody reaches for a food but they know it's going to cause them problems. Paul Chek: But do it anyhow. (Sorry, I got a little dry smoke in my lungs.) So then I say, okay, well why do you keep doing that? I look at myself, why do I do that? Well, I can tell you for me, again, it's almost always because I spent so much of my life helping other people. I need something that is gratifying, something that's out of the box. And paradoxically because it's taboo either, even if it's your own taboo. If I eat that, it's gonna make me itch or it's going to give me pimples, or it's gonna make me feel like shit, but I'm going to have real fun eating it, or I'm right. I'm going to drink that, I'm going to get drunk, even though I gotta go to work tomorrow, I'm going to, I'm going to drink and I'm going to drink till I don't fucking care anymore, or I'm going to smoke or I'm going to do this, or drugs or whatever. Paul Chek: And so what you see is that there's an unconscious cage that's been built and that's been built largely out of mom's ideas, dad's ideas, the educational systems, ideas, all of which are built on religious ideas, right? So without going into a long exposition, which I could easily do as you know but the reality of it is 85% of the people in the world claim religious affiliation. That means 85% out of every person you're ever going to see as a therapist, coach, doctor, trainer, whatever, has religious programming. Usually starting right from childhood when the mind is wide open and has no defenses. And so what you see is the so-called commandments turn out to be perfect to pit you against your instincts, your sexual instincts, your instincts for food. Religions have real restrictions on sex restrictions, on food, restrictions, on dance, restrictions, on music, restrictions on clothing. Paul Chek: I mean, the list is long and so everybody's got this idea in their head that they have to follow these rules because this is what God wants. And if you don't do it, you're going to burn in hell or whatever the story might be. And so at the, at the basis of all this and this sacrifice yourself, give everything up. Jesus gave everything away. You know, these kinds of themes, especially in the Abrahamic religions, which is Islam, Christianity and Judaism. So I kept running into all this over and over and over again. So I would ask people questions and I would, each question would lead to another question. Okay, why did you do that? Because of this? Why did you that? Because this, why are you staying in the relationship when you're unhappy? You've been married for 20 years and you just told me you weren't even happy after the first year. Paul Chek: Oh, well, because in my marriage vows, it's till death. Do you part? I don't want to burn in hell. So, okay. So you think God wants you to live in a relationship where you're not capable of sharing love when your own religion says God is love. So what I found over and over again is that the root of all these unconscious beliefs with large, with a small amount of exceptions, are religious ideas. And I get atheist and say, well, that doesn't apply to me. I never, I don't believe in all that. I go, yeah, but you're raised in a school system that's based on Christian ideology, your road names, your holidays. Almost everything that you do in your life is linked to Christianity in this country or in Europe. Wade Lightheart: And I've found with a lot of atheist as well. Many who I think are, are in extremely integrous people in my experience, but their beliefs are actually a reactive response to that programming and they're caught in the trap again because they're still out of tune with them, their essence, essential nature. And not to jump the gun here, but how is it that you've been able to kind of Wade Lightheart: Move through not just a, an an exercise philosophy or a way to live or kind of a way with, you know, 40 Living I believe is what you, you turn that the four doctors strategy. How is it that you've been able to kind of deprogram that spiritual kind of misdirection that people find themselves caught in and synthesize that in their physicality? Because as you know, at the highest levels, when you really get to the end of the story, it breaks down to these subconscious, you know, archetypes and programs and patterns and behaviors. And when you change that, then everything else just seems to me. How did you get to that point? Because it's very rare that people in the exercise game, if you will, or the fitness game or the performance game, you know, in their career actually go out there on a limb and speak so forthright about those and how they fit. And that's, I think one of the key aspects that makes you so unique is that you're not afraid about making these statements. You're not afraid of talking about great spirit. You're not afraid of talking about the psychological components of how you move and how that translates. How did you get to that particular place? Paul Chek: Well, quite frankly, I had to go through it myself. You know when my mother became a Yogi at the time I was 12, but she'd been going to a Christian science church and I found it absolutely confusing and scary because here I am as an eight year old kid be told, being told God loves you, talking about angels and heaven. And the next thing you know, we're singing onward Christian soldiers marching off to war with the cross of Jesus going on before. And I'm like, wait a minute, I'm really confused here. And every time I would try to ask a question, I would just get told to be quiet or you know, treated like a prisoner of war or some damn thing. Wade Lightheart: I'd have to say, I have to say I had the, sorry to interrupt, but it's so interesting cause I had the exact same realization when I went from Sunday school to the big church and in Sunday school it was Jesus loved me and everything was great and I thought this was a great thing. And then I go to the church and the guy said, well if you don't do this, you're going to be thrown into the pit of fire and burn in hell forever. And I was like, what happened to the loving God? I remember having this conflict, like this is crazy. Somebody got this picture wrong. Is he a, is he a psychopath or is he a hell, like why is there a dichotomy? And it drove me crazy and of course the yogananda help resolve that for me. He had a beautiful explanation about that. And of course he influenced your life as well. Continue on though. I just, I just had to make that little segue cause I share that same realization. Paul Chek: I totally appreciate that. And it's a, it's as common as white bread out there, especially for those of us that have enough self esteem to say, wait a minute, I've got to take charge of my own inner life. Because, you know, waiting for somebody to fix me is really dangerous. It's obviously not working for everybody else to do that. You know, the only answer you get is, Oh, you have anxiety or you have depression or you are a bipolar. They come up with all sorts of fancy names to push you into a box and give you a drug. And, and you know, usually it's downhill from there. But you know, really for my own journey and which is like I said, my style is to really penetrate myself and try to find what is it that I've got to heal. And, and once I've healed that, then as I'm sure you know, once you heal something inside of yourself, for example, if you heal your stuff, gluten intolerance, the next shopping mall you walk through, you see everybody's gluten intolerant. Paul Chek: You see it everywhere. If you heal yourself from a sacroiliac joint injury, you know what it looks like, then you see them everywhere. So whatever we heal creates vision. And so as I spent time with amongst and learn these concepts and saw the stark contrast between Christianity and yoga, I'm like, wow, this is like gnarly. How, how lost and confused people in these Abrahamic religions are and how their model of God is really so far from God. It's, it's scary really. And it starts wars. It's, you know, religious differences are the number one cause of wars, which is the number one cause of death on this planet. And so a couple of steps happen. One, I had to work with myself too. After my first marriage of 17 years. We were together from the time I was 16 my son was born when I was 18 he's 40 now. Paul Chek: I realized I could not be in a monogamous relationship because the pain of wanting to cheat, to get laid, and have the ability to share intimate connection and love with females, get being, not able to do that due to religious ideology and preconceived notions of, you know, our, our marriage vows. And she was in the same boat. We discussed it a lot. So after I got a divorce, I said, okay, I can't be in a relationship with a woman that wants me to be monogamous. So I spent a lot of time exploring and being very forthright with women saying I'm not cut out from an origami. I did it for 17 years and it left both of us in a state where we didn't feel whole or complete. And I remember I was a young person, so you know, my son was born when I just turned 18. Paul Chek: We were together since I was 16 so I didn't really have time to go out and kind of so my oats and play the field. So I had that part of my life missing. So when I, long story made sure that when I met Penny, I just said to her, you know, when it was obvious that we were, you know, serious together, I said to her, I can't be in a monogamous marriage. I, I, it doesn't mean I don't love you. It just means that I have to have the freedom because I never want to be dishonest. I, I, it's, my heart hurts too much to tell lies to somebody that I love. She was happy with that and she's European, so, and she doesn't and doesn't have kind of a lot of these shackles on her that a lot of people do. And so we just basically made the agreement that we stayed together and live in love in ways that worked for both of us. Paul Chek: And our marriage agreement was, as long as we're happy together, we stayed together. But the day that we realized we don't want to be together anymore, then we move on. So Penny and I gave each other the freedom to be who we are. And that allowed me to explore intimate friendships. I would call them, cause I really ever never had any intention of leaving my wife. I love her way too much. And and this process allowed me to actually find out then I still had a lot of Christian programming alive in me that I didn't realize. For example, I'd be making love to another woman and all I could think of is, Oh my God, I'm cheating on Penny, you know, and, and all this stuff would come up like, where's this coming from? I'm, I'm being completely honest, I'm not going behind anybody's back this, you know, but I realized I had all this programming in me. Paul Chek: And so I had to really work on that. And then when I began my training in the use of psychedelics in 2006, Oh my God, many injuries just brought all sorts of this childhood programming up and I had to come face to face with it. And so what ultimately this process led me to was one I bought, Carl Jung's collected works maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And I've been studying it ever since. And I studied many of the great minds in psychology, depth psychology, Ken Wilber's works and many of the Sufi masters and Mmm. What I, what I did, I studied Joseph Campbell for for many years and still do. I actually began to understand what an archetype was. I studied Carolyn Myss's survival archetypes. I studied the shadow in psychology and so I also studied attachment syndromes, infant attachment, infant attachment and how we develop a secure bond with our parents and what drives an insecure bond. Paul Chek: I studied Dan Siegel's works and I studied how to use an adult attachment interview and I developed my own adult attachment interview so I could identify when there was attachment problems in the beginning of a person's childhood. So I studied world religion extensively for years and years and years, so I could understand each of the kind of mindsets and ways of relating to the world. I studied Houston Smith extensively and so what synthesized out of that was a system of analysis that I teach Chek professionals where we look at your attachment history, what was your early childhood like? And we have a comprehensive questionnaire that shows us where there's problems. We look at, I created a system called the big eight archetypes. So we look at the Mago day, which is the image of DD, what do you believe God is and how is that helping you or not helping you? We look at the mother. How was your relationship with your mother, the father, how's your relationship with your father? We look at the child. What was your childhood like? Then we look at the Mmm saboteur archetype, the victim archetype, the prostitute archetype, and the eternal child, which means anybody that's avoiding adult responsibilities and taking responsibility for their choices, but they should be because they're in an adult role or at the adult age. Paul Chek: And so using that system, and I also have people fill out their health appraisal questionnaire, which analyzes 29 physiological systems. All the glands, all the organs, and even issues like anxiety and stress. And plus, I have a physical examination that's very comprehensive. So by the time I put this all on the table, I know what archetypes of the survival archetypes, where they're victimizing themselves, where they're prostituting themselves, which is working for money, not for love, doing things that they shouldn't be doing, cause they don't like doing them, but they think they have to do where they're sabotaging themselves and other people, whether avoiding the responsibilities of being an adult, which is most people in Abrahamic religions, as Osho says, Abrahamic religions are religions for children. Eastern religions are religions for adults because in the Eastern religions, there's no big daddy in the sky that's going to rescue you or tell you what to do. But in the Abrahamic religions, you always have to follow the rules. And there's an old man in the sky. So it's basically really what I would say is a breakdown of our, our, of our mythic evolution. We're still stuck in needing this sort of, you know, Zeus like figure to tell us what to do and what's going to happen. And dot, dot, dot. Paul Chek: And so basically what I do is I identify where they're at, what is the response to their body from the contents of their mind and their emotions. I do a complete injury history, so I know every injury they've ever had, physical, emotional and mental. And I created what's called an an injury tree, so I can see the chronological history and which, how their body responded over time. I can see things like their education and how that influenced them and what the religion or lack of religion is. And then basically what I do is I craft a plan and depending on the mindset of the individual, I either start them, if they're very trapped in religious ideologies or isms, then I know I need to connect to them through their body first and get results with simple things. So they learn to trust me because going deep into the psyche like that requires tremendous trust in your guide. Paul Chek: If they're ready for it, I will give them the nutrition and lifestyle coaching. But simultaneously I will take them into, you know, whether it be Chi chi, gong, medical, qigong breathing exercises. Mmm. But typically what I do is I start with the religious blockages by doing a very simple thing. I found that you can find the truth of spirituality and religion in any of the world religions. You just got to get out of the corporate religion and study the mystics of that religion. So as a general rule, if the church wanted them dead, they're good teachers. Wade Lightheart: Yes. That play the play, the highest stakes game. I think that's a really fascinating insight because you know, having such a, a wide dearth of physical experience with people and teaching them all these different components as you have and then Wade Lightheart: Going into the psyche and this, the spiritual psyche or the consciousness realm and actually seeing the correlation between the two items is, I think that's a, that's maybe one of the key elements that makes what you do so comprehensive about how do you not only just know what to do from a, you know, A to B instructional component of, you know, physical or practical components, but understanding why you, why you're not able to do that or why you're having a challenge. Making a shift because isn't that really, I mean, there's no shortage of dietary advice or exercise advice and all this stuff. The problem is adherence and adherence comes because of these patterns of thinking or being or things which are indoctrinated or taken on or trauma traumatically imprinted into the person. And you can do that all the training and help. I mean, how many professionals have you met in your career who are extraordinary, brilliant, but are, are, aren't able to adhere to their own principles, are suffering extensively. Paul Chek: Extraordinary, brilliant and brilliantly fucked up. Uh in fact, you know, having taught, you know, I'm one of the few guys that's taught in medical schools, osteopathic schools, physical therapy, schools, chiropractic schools, dance and movement, education, massage therapy, strength training. You know, and I've, I've been at the highest level, I've been keynote speaker at major musculoskeletal medicine, conferences, golf, you know, all over the world. So I've been inside at the elite levels of all these different fields and seeing how most of the leaders of these organizations are, are highly intellectual people that are actually still suffering from their childhood wounds. And have the kind of religious confusion. So that, that was one of the things that really, you know, reinforced to me that I really had to study the psyche because healing has to begin with coherence. One has to have a genuine, authentic willingness to change. I tell people, if you can't change, you can't learn. And if you can't learn, you can't change. And if you can't learn and change, you can't grow. So, you know, there's a whole other aspect, which is the ego and the whole problem with the ego and false beliefs about the ego and, and, and learning how to understand the ego and how to identify what is authentically the self versus the false self or the program's self, which is what we're talking about all this programming. Paul Chek: But it was a, you know, it's been a very, very interesting quest and I'm still learning a lot. I mean, I still learn the, you know, the more you learn, as you know, the faster you can learn because you've got a bigger database so you can make connections, integrate. Wade Lightheart: Yeah, you can integrate better premium. Paul Chek: Can you just get better at it? You learn how to learn. And so I, I've, I've really Paul Chek: You know, come to realize, for example, that most all addictions that I've worked with, which is a lot of them are genuine attempts to find safe love. That's what everyone's looking for. They're looking for a God that condense as Osho says they're, they're looking for a partner that will love them as they are without trying to control them, which is extremely rare. They're looking for teachers that have, you know, genuine knowledge, wisdom and empathy and compassion for them as a student. They're looking for bosses that won't beat him up. I mean, all of us are really inside. We're just little children trying to figure this grand mystery out and trying to find a safe passage to, to meaning. And it's very, very rare to get the kind of love and support that you can get from, from monks, for example. Because that was like the most healing thing that, I mean, I might've committed suicide if it wasn't for those monks that was so distraught. Paul Chek: You know, my father drown when I was a kid. I, I, you know, my parent, my, my, my father left my mother with three kids by the time she was 18 and she was stuck. My stepfather was highly abusive and scary as hell and dangerous. I was worked like a slave dog and never got much time to do anything but work. I had to take on the adult responsibilities from the time I was about 10 years old or even eight working, driving tractors and you know, things that are, you know, you really got to focus. Cause if you screw up a tractor, you know it's the bad news and correct. You know? So what happened was as I live through all this intensity and ice, I saw and when I studied addiction very extensively, I came across Angeles Arrien's work, who is a phenomenal anthropologist and a real showman. Paul Chek: She traveled all over the world looking to identify what are the actual causes of addiction. She went to 160 different countries. It took her 10 years to do all this research. And when she tabulated her research, she found four things kept popping up over and over again and they were the common things that in every culture led to addiction, intensity being raised or living in an environment that's too intense for us to really engage without it being so stressful. That starts to break us down. Well think of most look at the violence and families, especially religious families. It's shocking, right? Basil vendor clocks work. Just it's shocking when you see how much violence there is in households and sexual abuse and emotional abuse and mental abuse and how many teachers really don't even enjoy their work and and don't connect to their students. So first you have intensity in there and there's no order to them. Paul Chek: They're just the four correlates. Then you have the need to know, well, think of how many of us realize right away the class, the teacher's pet gets a lot of favors, a lot does better in school and is way better off than we are because they can pass tests and a lot of us that are kinesthetically oriented or auditorily oriented art oriented to then you look at the learning system study, Howard Gardner's research on how the mind actually learns. And you find that 98% of all academic systems are set up in the mathematical logical learning style is only appropriate for 8% of the world population, right? So most of us go to school and we might be athletic geniuses or, or we might have great artistic ability or musical ability or have the ability to put things together and be carpenters, mechanics, or you know, dentists or you know, electrical engineers. Paul Chek: But we're not really ideally designed to read and memorize, read and memorize. And so you see tremendous amounts of stress based on this idea that the more you know, the safer you are and the better your life's going to be. And so we have a whole world full of people getting advanced degrees that ultimately don't help them very much at all. Research shows, 50% of people are not even working in the same field. They're retraining in, in a university within five years of leaving the university, which is not a very good statistic for education. So this perpetual need to know. It's one thing to want to know because you want to explore the mystery. It's another thing to need to know because you think your survival depends on it. When you come home from school and you've got, you know, C's or D's and your parents get out the ruler and start whipping you forward and take free time away so you consult. Paul Chek: It's very clear that the need to know becomes a tremendous survival tactic in our culture. And not, you know, a few years ago I did research and the highest rates of teenage suicide were in Japan and New Zealand. They tracked it right back to Scholastic pressures. Japan and New Zealand have to have the highest standards for high school graduation. And when they found out all these kids were killing themselves because they felt inferior to their peers, it became evident that we have a real problem in the education system in these countries and our country is very much the same. So you've got intensity that needs to know focusing on what's wrong. Well, how many of our parents and school teachers and educators spend more time focusing on what's wrong with us then what's right with us. Wade Lightheart: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. That kind of reminds me of one of the things with the coach Belichick of the Patriots when he assesses talent, most of the teams assess talents about you'll get, well the guy can't do this or he can't do that or he can't do this. He has a different way of looking at it. He looks at, well, what can the person do and how can we integrate this into my own offense or to my defense or to my special teams? And he built systems around what people can do as opposed to what they can't. And it's interesting that what you identified here. Wade Lightheart: The difference between being a human knowing and a human being. Right. You know, and we've, we kind of celebrate the human knowings as with degrees and climates and in these types of things. And then, well then there's the human doing, you know, the, the human doing, the person who is so caught up on the hamster wheel they're doing, doing, doing, doing, but they're never being and they might not be knowing. And then there is the human being, which is kind of the master between knowing and, and, and doing, and is integrated into a form of being, you know, spending time with you at the Heaven house. It seems you figured that out in a really beautiful way for you and how you live your life, which is certainly, I think some people would say it would be way outside of the norm. I hope so. Wade Lightheart: Yeah. I say that with all due compliments because I think as a contrarian myself by nature, I was always looking at society and saying, well, you know, if 95% of the people are doing, it's probably the wrong move. If you look at where the end game of where people end up in life, you know. So let's start with the opposite and see if we can go anywhere. I want to touch a little, yeah. So we were kind of talking about, you know, the integration between the knowing the doing and the being and how you've kind of synthesized in that in your life at this point. What role do you think your study into psychology? Mmm. Native American medicine, I don't know what you'd call it, medicine, traditionals, medicinal, traditional traditions. Wade Lightheart: And I would say your psychedelic therapy which you advocate. How did those kind of come into your life and kind of augment what you had been doing in the past? Like, I'm very curious about that because I love the fact that you speak openly about it and thanks to podcasts, there's an expansion of this awareness of these traditions that have been practiced for thousands of years in communities which are, you know, have profound impacts. And you've been able to kind of systematically integrate this into your whole way of being, your whole education and how you help people kind of become clear, if you will. Paul Chek: Yeah. Well it's an interesting question. You know, my father if he saw my biography, you saw pictures of my dad, you could see he's got jet black hair and he actually looks like he could be an Indian. And, and we were told, my father had no brothers or sisters and neither of his parents, we, we didn't have contact his father, which was my grandfather died in the second world war in Pearl Harbor. And so I never got to know my grandfather. And, and his mother gave him up to be raised by a another woman who was pawned off as his grandmother. So long story made short, I had no way to track our family genes. There was no 23andMe or any of that, but my father told us that he was Cherokee Indian. That is that his father was a full blooded Cherokee Indian. And it just turned out when I joined the native American council, Mmm. Conversations with Claude Pilar, the chief, I said this to him cause I didn't know any different. He said, well it's interesting because the, when they used to take all, all Cherokee government had the last name Cherokee. So if you were in the Cherokee government, you were called so-and-so Cherokee. And he said when they put Cherokee Indians in the military, they often shortened that to C H E K, which is my last name. Paul Chek: What that did when my father died is it left me with this burning desire to know more about my heritage. So my brothers and sisters and I spent a lot of time and my mother too, reading books on Cherokee Indians, native Americans. And so I have a whole section in my library, probably a hundred, maybe a hundred books on everything to do with native cultures. I studied numerous documentaries on it. Mmm. I've got countless books on shamanism that I've studied and you know, courses and things that I've done. Mmm. But when 23andMe came out, we found out that we had only like one or 2% Cherokee Indian in us. And I had some Jewish in me. I had okay. My grandfather comes from alsace terrain. And I had a lot of, of the lot of my genes come from the region of alsace terrain between France and Germany. Paul Chek: And so I had a bit of a hodgepodge and we're all like in shock. Like all our life we've been taught that we were Cherokee Indian and now we realize it's wrong. But what happened was kind of interestingly is it made me very interested in these cultures. And when I looked at what was going on in the world and compared it with how they lived, I'm like, well Christ, it's pretty freaking obvious what's going wrong here. We've fallen in love with science and we're not wise enough to look at the ramifications of the application of using oil excessively and dot, dot, dot. Right. So then when I looked into native approaches to healing there, you know, and I had a pretty bad break when I was when I was 15, I was cliff diving. And long story made short, I ended up hitting a ledge. Paul Chek: You have to run real far to clay about a 20 foot granite ledge at this place. But river people come down the river on inner tubes and kayaks and stuff. So you had to have a spotter cause there's a hard 90 degree turn right before this place called the depot where it's deep enough to jump in from 35 feet up. And just so happens I was running full speed and they screamed at me stop. And an inner tube with about six people was coming on tractor, inner tube. And the timing was, I was going to jump right into that inner tube and probably kill somebody cause I'm coming from almost four stories up in the air. So I tried to stop and it was wet red clay and I got to the very edge and I couldn't stop. So I just jumped as hard as I could. Paul Chek: My right leg cleared the ledge, my left leg caught it and it broke my ankle in five, and my tibia and fibula in five places, and they had a massive compound fracture. And so the first thing that happened, because my, my father and mother's business was, was the woolen business. And most of our customers were native Indians in, in on Vancouver Island who bought her wool to make sweaters and gloves for the tourist industry. And so one of my mother's context, she told about what happened to me and she said, get him on comfrey tea right away. We call it bone mitt. And I was on comfrey tea like several times a day. We grew it right in our garden. And after my four week checkup, the doctor took x-rays and he goes, what the hell is going on? He said, I have never seen a fracture of this bad heel that fast. Paul Chek: He said, you, you're pretty much ready to have your cast come off. So already between the way my mother already lived and having an experience like that, I'm like wow, there is a lot of power in nature. And even the doctor himself is blown away. He could have never given me anything to create healing like that. So I had these experiences. I'm being brief cause there's been a lot of them. You know, my mother, my grandmother massaging me can take my asthma away, but nothing else. The inhalers, the pills didn't do near as good as my grandmother's loving touch. My mother being very grounded and, and, and you know, looking, and my mother was a Christian scientist so they didn't believe in medical doctors and standard medicine. So everything was kind of done naturally. And you know, unfortunately sometimes not too wise because one time I broke my wrist doing bicycle stunts, my parents wouldn't take me to the hospital and it ended up being my baseball coach cause I was a star baseball player. Paul Chek: And when I was out I couldn't catch a ball with my left hand cause it hurts so bad and it was all swollen up. He looked at me, he said, you've got a broken wrist. He said, I'm going to take a risk and take you to the hospital. You said I'm not supposed to do this, but you clearly have a real injury here. And sure enough I had a badly broken wrist. So you know, having come from this sort of, this natural roots for better or worse, gave me an exposure. And then when I started studying holistic health and I read Rudolph Ballentine's books and books like Paul Pitchford's healing with whole foods and Bernard Jensen and you know, Paul Bragg and, and studying all the old bond building magazines were completely different than they are today. Okay. The healthiest, wisest people that I could find. We're living close to the earth. Paul Chek: The smart guys with, you know, their fancy cars and white jackets were usually sick people. There's an old saying dead doctors don't lie, right? The average doctor dies 10 years earlier than their average client. And people say, well, it's a stressful job. I said, well, yeah, well that means you should do a better job of taking care of yourself then. But so all these basic principles I kept running into. And so ultimately I learned that I learned through a lot of experience. There's a time and a place for medical drugs, but first do no harm, which is Hippocrates is primary dictum. So I always believe starting with the least invasive approach and then working up from there toward the drugs and the surgery, which are inevitable for certain cases. And I found that most of the people that go the drug route are too lazy or have too much mental emotional blockages or self-denial or self judgment to want to actually participate in taking care of themselves. Paul Chek: So they've been taught by the medical system, which is really a bunch of priests and white jackets to the word treatment means somebody going to do something for you. So we have a treatment model where people have been trained by the American medical association to sell their problems to a doctor or a therapist and they believe if you pay X number of dollars that you should be able to walk out without your problem. And so what I saw as a whole medical model is suffering from the treatment concept. So I built the whole Chek Institute on a coaching model. And my motto is we do not treat diseases that have people, we coach people that have acquired diseases. So I really say, you know, learn what you need to learn about the disease process your client has not cause you're going to address the disease because you just need to know what drugs they're on, what the physiological changes are, how that affects digestion, elimination, metabolism, assimilation. Paul Chek: But ultimately we're going to coach the person that acquired the disease because all cells want to be healthy and there's more technology in a single cell than we have in our entire medical knowledge, and so what I found is if you give the body what it needs to heal while you're addressing the mental emotional issues that are perpetuating high levels of stress beyond what would be there, if they had a more balanced and better understanding of what life's all about and weren't running from a mean God or working in jobs, they didn't want to be interesting and relationships that they weren't happy in. Yeah, that you can, you can do miracles with natural approaches and I studied Hippocrates and he only used 40 different herbs. He had a medicine ball. It was made out of a pig's bladder filled sand and the things that he was doing today would be hard to do. Paul Chek: Then you got Galen, who is, you know, thousands, couple thousand over 2000 years ago, was the doctor for the gladiators and never lost a single gladiator in the two years he was the physician for the gladiators, which today if we took American doctors to work for the gladiators, if we started that same thing up you, there's no way that would happen. So what you found is these guys had enough anchor real things like rest and stretching and breathing and working with the mind because we had a very strong spiritual tradition. I mean we had all the Buddhism member, you, all these things we call Taoism and Buddhism. They were alive and well in those areas. So you know, all the things that we think is really cool, like mindfulness today, that was just normal for these guys. So, you know, we think this is all new stuff. Paul Chek: It's not, it's old stuff. Re-Emerging and you know, you could say it's the spirit of the earth trying to heal us before we destroy ourselves. So in a nutshell, what I'm saying is I found that the most powerful medicines, and in fact, as a side note, if you study the history of medicine, most of the drugs that we use today actually were stolen from shamans and medicine men and native tribes by drug companies who then patented them and never gave the natives a damn dime. And then go trounce the rainforests looking for all the supplies that they can then make their drugs. But most people don't realize that they're actually practicing synthetic shamanism. I say, why not go for the real stuff? Right? So at the end of the day, what I found is if you, if you get clear on what God is so you can get rid of all that silliness, you know, and that's another conversation. Paul Chek: But really in a nutshell, God is unconditional love. I mean, God is a source of everything. Everything that's happening is God experiencing itself. And the answer is always yes. Unconditional love never says no cause that creates a condition. So we all have free will. We all have the opportunity to say yes or no to this food, that food, this job, that job, that partner. It's just whether or not we have the spiritual courage to be true to ourselves. So once you kind of get a person to the point where they can actually understand the majesty, the mystery and duty of life, and really celebrate that and be honest about what really fills their heart. You know, Dr happiness is the doctor of being clear on what is happy making for you and scheduling it into your day or your week. So that it's not a wish. Paul Chek: It's a reality when we eat according to natural principles and we pay attention to what our body's telling us. Cause it's always telling us, you know, most people just ignore it and drug it or, or drowned it with, you know, alcohol or whatever they got. If we rest when we're tired and you know, follow the cycles of nature. Mmm. And we move our bodies when our bodies tell us to, like, people ignore that all the time at great peril or they over move them because they're chasing after, you know, some need of acknowledgement or recognition or like I was trying to get strong enough to take your father out for your fear of your own family, for your own family's protection. But once you heal that stuff, one, you find that you don't need powerful synthetic drugs very often. I mean, I can count the number of times I've used medical drugs on, you know, two hands and that's it. Paul Chek: And I've been through some really, I mean, I've had surgeries and stuff from racing motorcycles and all sorts of bad accidents where I had no choice. I woke up in the hospital, didn't know how I got there, but I haven't missed a day of work in 35 years due to illness because I do Tai Chi. I practice breathing. I meditate on an almost daily basis. I do meditation in the evening and my infrared sauna to close my day. And I do Tai Chi to start my day. I have a spiritual practice. I eat organic whole food, I exercise effectively. Mmm. And I really do what I love to do for a living and I can give my life in service to helping others have the chance of experiencing what I experienced. Because just like when you've gotten over gluten intolerance, you know how terrible it feels to be gassy and bloated and feeling like shit and foggy head all the time. Paul Chek: Well, naturally you want to tell the world you don't have to live that way. So really what's driven me all these years is I kept running into all these athletes and all these people that were broken and sad and confused and a lot of the stuff was stuff that I'd already worked through. So I said, we'll try this. And most of the time at work and so it's sort of like a snowball that just kept rolling. And you know, as you probably know, I was promoting all sorts of stuff way 20 years ahead of it. I was doing food and tolerance testing before anyone even knew what was out there. I was doing, you know, I introduced the concept of the Swiss balls I introduced, I used to, I was one of the first guys in the world lecturing on functional exercise in this era. Everybody was using machines. Paul Chek: I was giving them very scientific research showing them that is not a good idea whatsoever, especially if you're a rehabilitation specialist. I developed the primal pattern movement system. You know, I was teaching people cold showers and ice bath therapies before anybody before Wim Hoff was even a name we'd ever heard of. I mean, there's a very long list of things that I pioneered. Not that I pioneered them or invented them, but I found them in other traditions, tested them and they work very well and they were very nontoxic, mostly free, easy to use. And I built my life around those principles. And I saw when people don't have those principles, what they do have is a lot of medical bills and a lot of stress in their life and they spend a lot money on things that ultimately aren't helping them in fact are usually driving them deeper into the problem. Wade Lightheart: I want to be mindful of the time here. Paul Chek: Good. Let me throw one thing. The fourth cause of addiction is perfectionism. Or we covered an entity. We covered the need to know focusing on what's wrong, but perfectionism and where does that come from? Mostly religious families trying to make sure everybody fits the code the closer, right? The hair's right. You know, puritanism we're still suffering from a puritanical view, which is, you know still medieval religious ideology and all this comparison and you know, needing somebody else's approval. But the problem with a perfectionist is they always need someone else's approval and you can't get everybody's vote. So perfectionism is a trap and the problem is something that's perfect if it doesn't move. So it can't evolve. Right? Wade Lightheart: The, the not the not good enough syndrome at play. So, so, so many people. Yeah. Paul Chek: Yeah. I just wanted to throw that in there cause I can feel people going, what is the fourth column? Wade Lightheart: Ah, it's, it's, it's so true. It's always a timeless kind of experience. And I think that's one of the interesting components of you is, you know, you're visionary, but you're an integrator in a synthesizer, is they're able to synthesize the essence of a lot of things and an integrate them into a collective philosophy that has been broken down in a series of stages that you teach your practitioners and your students how to apply this in a way that makes sense, that, that ever they're trying to do in the world. So what would you comment, because you're generally way ahead of your time and that's been kind of the source of, I think, your expertise, where do you, where do you see the world today and how do you, what do you see happening over the next 10 to 20 to 30 years inside the health industry, inside humanity itself? An insider education systems, or what would you like to see happen? I guess, and what you're kind of represented. I think that's really important to see where, where's the, where do you feel the train going? Paul Chek: Well, I think the Hopi prophecy is really the answer to your question. The Hopi prophecy is basically shows a diagram that they left painted on a rock and they said, based on analysis experts who look into these things and said, the Hopi said we were right now where we're at in their drawing, it shows align going off and then it comes to a dead stop. And there's another line with some words written. And basically the underline keeps going all the way around in the rock. The line of advanced brings the world to a dead stop. We destroy each other and we destroy the planet. The other line is basically, as the Bible says, the meek shall inherit the earth. The other line and the Hopi prophecy says, if we realize that we've got a change and we change fast, and we getting back to supporting the planet and realizing we cannot survive without her survival and therefore nature's healing, cleaning the oceans and cleaning the waterways. Paul Chek: And cleaning up the use of energy and going to free energy technologies is essentially we've got to do because we don't support what supports us, then we're going to run out of everything. Right? Right now, almost every water supply in the world is poisoned badly. The air is badly poisoned that we've lost more topsoil. We've lost millions of years of top soil from commercial farming. The average commercial farming family ruins completely ruined 7,000 acres of top soil in the life of the farming family all the way back in 1961 they said that something like 60% of the US farmable land was destroyed from excessive tractors and chemical use. So without a long expos on that, we're at a point right now where we have the emergence of energy medicine. We have homeopathy, we now have the quantum technology. We can take a medicine and imprint it right into water and it will be just as effective as the medicine, which the medical industry is fighting like hell because it means it'll wipe out chemically based, allopathic medicine and billions and trillions of dollars will go down the tubes if that happens. Paul Chek: So they're trying to stuff all these technologies, but obviously they are coming out because there's too many scientists now breaking out of the mold and saying, we can't do this anymore. There's too many intelligent people warning that we're heading for a, you know, a dangerous situation. And it's pretty obvious. I mean, we're, we're at a real tipping point with many, many systems that are nearing collapse. Just to give you an example, I recently had a research paper forwarded to me by Dave Murphy, the founder of food democracy now, which was one of the first company organizations ever to successfully sue Monsanto. Yeah. And his research that he sent me was from entomology journal. No, excuse me. Not a technology. This science of bugs. Oh I'll, I'll remember this, the name of the science, but it's the science of investigating you know, insects. Paul Chek: And they showed that the scientists all over the world that monitor this stuff were showing there was tremendous reduction in insect traffic all over the world. So a bunch of them worldwide got together and they started doing a long assessment to see what's actually going on. And they showed that we are now 75% reduced in insect traffic and only the last 50 years. And they stated Armageddon may be near right in the title because the sex organs of nature are about to collapse. Steiner warn that human life depends on two things, bees and trees, what we've almost wiped all of them out and there's massive die off with bees everywhere and they've tracked it back largely to the use of pesticides and electromagnetic pollution and irritation to the bees navigation systems and things, things like that. So really, we're at this point right now, we're, one of the things we've got to do is switch to free energy. Paul Chek: We got to go to zero point energy and the technology has been around Tesla developed at others. I've got a library full of inventions and stuff. We have all the technologies, some big corporations that don't want it to happen cause there's, they're going to lose too much money. But if we make the transition to free energy technologies, that'll take a huge burden off the planet. It'll free up all sorts of stuff. Mmm. And if we go to energy medicine and we ride this emerging wave of, of, you know, I hate to use the term, but new age psychology and spiritual development, it's really helping us realize that the battle is on the inside. It's not the outside, you know, looking at your shadow, doing the healing work, getting into a world religion belief system instead of ethnocentric my group against your group. And realizing the unity that we all have. Paul Chek: We're unified by the earth. We all have to have the earth to live. We're unified by the solar system and the galaxy and therefore the universe. There's massive amounts of science on the mind. Like one mind by Larry Dossey showing that there really is only one mind. We're all just agents of conscious process within the one mind. So once we realize that we're really all the universe experiencing itself and that we've got far more to gain by supporting each other and that we can celebrate the beauty of each of the religions. But we can also identify where other religions have, shall we say, an upgrade in software give each person or each group or each culture that space too, practice in a way that it wants to celebrate life, but learn what is it that we can get from the Hindu religion? What can we get from the Jewish people? Paul Chek: What can we get from the native Americans? What can we get from the pagans? What can we get from, you know, the Celts. The Celts have an amazing spiritual philosophy and where that's all happening because the internet is allowing us to talk to each other without distance travel, right? Like we are right now. And so we're at this really powerful, you know, Carl Jung said, no man is truly alive until he has the power to destroy himself. And we do. We've got enough nuclear weapons to destroy this planet. 170 times over, ready to go at any minute, one more world war and we're all dead. So we're at this point where we have enough experience and what doesn't work and we have enough experience that science is a double edged sword that's very dangerous. We have to be careful what we call science and scientists have to become moral. Paul Chek: They've gotta be concerned about the effects of what they're putting into the environment. If we all wake up, which we need to do quickly and start caring for the planet and start practicing for doctors and six foundation principles. My six foundation principles are nutrition, hydration, sleep, breathing, thinking and movement. And we realize that's the basis of life and none of it can happen without the earth. And we all need each other. And we stopped playing all these border games and kind of living like Donald Trump and realize that we're all a world community. And that we need mother nature and all the insects and the birds and the bees. We need the great chain of being to be healthy because it is us. Then I think we can really radically shift. We need to upgrade our education systems. One of the greatest things that I ever did was leave school in the ninth grade. Paul Chek: I never got taught what to think, but I learned how to think and that's what the Chek system is. It's a system of how to solve problems using principles, not what to think. I think if we go to free energy technology, whatever we got to do to do that and starve out these energy giants that are destroying the planet and and realize you can't vote to get changed through the political system is too corrupt. You can only vote with your dollar, only put your money into the companies and any of the products that are our sustainable earth friendly, whether it be hygiene, you know, going to more efficient cars, whatever it is that we can do. I mean, I tell people all the time, look, there's almost 7 billion people on the planet. And imagine if all 7 billion people flush the toilet, one less time a day, that would be the average toilet flushes with four to five gallons of water. Paul Chek: So if we take 7 billion times four gallons, that is a lake. That's enough water to sustain a lot of people in a lot of plants and a lot of farming. And it's only just one minor contribution from each person. So I feel it doesn't have to be that art into us. We each just have to do a little something every day. That's a natural act of love and compassion and empathy for the world and for people. And we need to be more conscious of not buying into technologies that ultimately are part of the problem. And when we need to really get clear on what it means to be alive and worship life and work together to create a mythology that has meaning, that really relates to the time and the era that we're in. Because all these religions are 25 year old, outdated mythologies. So we need to upgrade our software because consumerism is a, a is a myth, mythological crutch that is killing the planet ultimately because we're trying to fulfill an emptiness that can't be fulfilled through anything but warship, an honest realization that we're living a tremendous mystery and look, even science, play stupid games with the mystery standard scientific models all start from the big bang, but none of them answers the question what caused the big bang? Paul Chek: So they, they're so anti-religion anti spirituality, yet they're doing the same damn thing and just pretending they're not. So the point I'm making is there's a grand mystery behind it all and it's probably never going to be solved for a very simple reason. In order to solve that mystery, you have to go beyond duality. You have to go beyond subject object. Whenever you're analyzing something as a scientist or a researcher, it's the object of your investigation. But to figure out what God is, you have to go past object because you can't objectify the absolute. So, in other words, you can't study a mystery with a mystery because there's two subjective realities and you can't make an object out of something that's absolute God. Therefore, you can never really know what God is through any kind of objective assessment. You can only experience what it is and the way we experience it as love. Paul Chek: So if we really just ask the question repeatedly, whenever facing a challenge, what would love do now? And we're honest, we'll turn this whole thing around. I mean it sounds a bit airy, fairy and hippy like, but if you, anyone meditates on that and practices just for one day when someone cuts you off in traffic, what would love do now? If someone treats you poorly, what would love do? Now if you have empathy and compassion and you see what you yourself have done to other people out of your own ignorance and you say, okay, how can I acknowledge this person's acting out? A piece of me that is used to act out as a teenager or whatever. We can all start realizing the importance that we have for each other for the planet. And we can realize that that the most beautiful thing about God is that God cannot be recognized as this or that, that God is something special for everybody. Paul Chek: And that there is no right or wrong. There's a question of is it facilitating connection and meaning in your life and is it producing ways of relating that ultimately are sustainable for the long run? Or is it starting Moore's? I mean, when you look into the hundred most polluting corporations in the world something like 90 of Merle, a Christian, and I've researched this, so what do you see behind this so-called religious ideology is a bunch of people on boards of directors that are really after money and are willing to do whatever they gotta do to get it. Just like the Vatican's, the richest corporation in the world. And they did it by religion and telling you that as long as you put some money in the hat and follow the rules, you'll get to go to heaven. And the business model is so good, they don't have to give you anything because you don't get your reward until you're dead. Paul Chek: Which I think is, you know, and research shows that the Catholic church had brainwashing, mastered by the eighth century. They've been perfecting it every since. So what I'm saying is when we get past all that kind of corporate money driven, control driven manipulation and say, what do we need to do together? Well, one, you have to be healthy enough to participate. So the day you take care of yourself and start loving yourself, you've already changed the world. If that's all you do, you've made the world a better place. But whenever we take care of ourselves and love ourselves, our level of energy rises and our level of awareness arises in the next thing you know, you want to go help people, right? That's why you and I do it when we do. Isn't it so true? Wade Lightheart: Uone of my,uspiritual teachers, Dr. David Hawkins said,uas a daily practice, if you want to get to the highest levels of consciousness or awareness, be kind and loving to everyone and everything, including oneself, no matter what, will take you a long ways. And that's not an easy philosophy to practice. And integrating your life. But it's a good place to start. I want to finish this up and ask, how do people find out more about Paul Chek? Where do they start? How do they, how do they study with you? Uhow do they get, become a Chek practitioner? How do they find out more and get involved with what you're doing and how you're transforming the planet? Paul Chek: Well at chekinstitute.com you can see all the programs, you can see all my online training programs. You know, there's a lot. Easy access is holistic lifestyle coach level one, which is for the public, how to get yourself healthy. It's based on my book, how to eat, move and be healthy with additional information on practical application. That's right in our online training section on the homepage, my podcasts, Living four D with Paul Chek, which is what you are on. And thank you again cause I'm still getting amazing comments from that podcast. There's a tab right on the homepage and you can see many genius people that I've interviewed and continue to interview. Mmm. My PPS success mastery program, which is a series of 12 lessons I put together based on the 12 most common roadblocks to, to feeling good and living a life that was inspiring to you. Ppssuccess.Com and those lessons are online and if you buy a lesson you can, I think you get 90 days to be on my biweekly coaching calls where people can ask me any question they want about any of the lessons or challenges in their life. So it's a cheap way to get access to me for help. And the lessons have helped thousands Paul Chek: Of people. My YouTube channel has over 500 videos. I do a pretty much a weekly video and that's one of my ways of contributing to the world is public service. So that's youtube.com/paulcheklive all stuck together. So the massive amount of information on all sorts of topics from sex to cold showers to how to get over plantar fasciitis to, you know, seven AEs of healing to a, you know, series many series that I've done. Some of them are an hour or more long, you know, none of my stuff's cheesy. Flash in the pan new age fluff. Mmm. My, one of my biggest programs that we're still putting up the first phase is up, which has the information about how to assess your archetypes and things like that is the check for quadrant coaching mastery program. Paul Chek: And that's in the online section of the Institute. So basically Chekinstitute.com is sorta like the hub. We're a worldwide organization. We're all through Europe, South Pacific, United States. Mmm. We have 13 instructors that travel the world teaching pretty much constantly. Mmm. Like I said, there's over 10,000 Chek professionals out there at different levels of their training. So between my YouTube channel, my podcast, holistic lifestyle coach level one, and then entry level for the, the corrective and a holistic exercise approach is the Chek exercise coach program. And that you can do, you can find the prerequisites, all the information for each of the courses is right on the website. So it tells you what prerequisites need to be done, which you can get right through the Institute or do online. Mmm. So today it takes about seven years to complete all my training. There's, you know, probably I would guess 50 people that have done all seven years. Paul Chek: Most of them are instructors now. And it's, it's meant to be on the job training. It's not meant to be an academic rush to get a degree and then forget everything. It's really meant to be practical application. So it's kind of a practice and learn as you go at your own pace. And I encourage people, don't come to the next class till you actually have practiced and can naturally use and teach your previous class without having to think about it. Or you're just going to get yourself in so deep that you'll just confuse yourself. Mmm. So that's kind of it. If you search my name on Google, you'll probably get, you know, like 3 million or 5 million hits. I haven't, don't remember. But it's a lot. I mean, and you can see that, you know, I stirred the pot everywhere I go cause a lot of people just really don't like my holistic approach or whatever. But that's just the nature of making Paul Chek: Change. So I think that's pretty much, you can find me through those resources. But I would say for anyone wanting to know, Cheknstitute.com Is the place to go. And right now in fact, we have a neat feature where doing a re-imagine yourself and my a podcast I did as two solo podcasts right now, the one that's out takes you through all the structure stages of consciousness from the beginning of the evolution of man til now and shows you the stages from archaic to magic, to mythic, to mental to integral. Only 2% of the world populations at Integra, which is the highest level of consciousness. But integral holds the keys to healing our future. Somebody show you how those correlate to different regions of your body, different functions in your body, different functions of consciousness and how that evolved. And then in part two I say, now here's the things you can do based on each structure stage. You can tell, you know, if you have problems with your gut. Yeah. And so the two podcasts actually give you a chance to truly understand holistic. Wade Lightheart: Yeah. We'll put all these points inside the show notes so that people can get access to you. What a treat to have you here today and why, you know, I could go on forever and I know we're going to follow up with another podcast later on. I just wanted to kind of introduce who Paul Chek is to our listeners and to our advocates that, that follow the awesome health formula. And what I believe is you, you've made such an impact in the world. You made such an impact to so many people and you continue to do it and you continue to integrate. And it's really remarkable, especially because, you know, she saw your library and I saw the comprehensive, you're a student scholar. I mean the, the breadth of information that you've been able to synthesize and integrates really unique. And I encourage everybody who's listening, who wants to follow and pursue a in the field of helping others through movement and better eating and understanding how our brains work and how consciousness integrates and manifests in the world. Wade Lightheart: You've come, you've come to the right place. This, this is where you need to go. Go to Paul Chek, get integrated in the program take them on as a mentor, follow this process. And I think when you talk about changes that we need to make in the world to make the world a better place, if you're looking for the pathway, that's the pathway because you've created the tools not as an indoctrination, but as a way of self discovery and expansion into what it is to be a human here. Having a, a spiritual being, having a human experience on the planet. And I'm delighted to have you here today. Thank you for taking so much time. We're going to bring you back to the show at a future date when time allows, as soon as we can. And of course I'm looking forward to connecting as I get that move to Southern California coming up real quick. So it's going to be a lot of fun and a lot of great sharing too. Paul Chek: And I will say I'm a big fan of all your products, man. I'm, I'm more than over the moon with them and everybody I've turned onto them is totally digging it. So you know me and you are birds of a feather and I'm a big fan of all the BiOptimizers offerings and I think they're beautiful. So that's what it's going to take as a bunch of networking with people that really do have an interest in health and wellbeing and supporting people with stuff that really works. And so thank you for everything you give the world and have shared with me too. Wade Lightheart: Thank you very much Paul. There you go folks. Another Awesome Health Podcast with Mr. Paul Chek, check them out chekinstitute.com, get integrated. Find out more and take the deep dive that Paul Chek provides for you. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you want to connect into other podcasts, you can join us on the Awesome Health Podcast. Go to bioptimizers.com it's right on the main screen. You can check out all the great videos that we have there in people, and of course, make sure that you go and stop by Paul Chek because he's a wealth of information that can really make a difference in your life, especially if you're struggling with patterns of behavior and you can't seem to make the change and know what you need. You think you know what you need to do, but can't seem to make the change. Paul Chek is your guy. Thanks so much for joining us. Take care and have yourself an awesome day.