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Katie: Hello and welcome to the “Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com, that’s Wellnesse with an E on the end. And this episode is all about the only four doctors that you will ever, ever need, and about challenging our belief systems. And this may be an interesting, wild ride for some of you guys listening. I’m here with Paul Chek, who is a well-renowned expert in the fields of corrective and high-performance exercise kinesiology, stress management, and holistic wellness. He’s been in this role for over 37 years, and he has a unique integrated approach to treatment education. He’s also incredibly well-read and incredibly well-spoken. He’s the founder of the CHEK Institute and a coaching program by the same name, and he’s the host of the podcast, “Living 4D with Paul Chek.”
And this conversation is very wide-ranging. We talk about the only four doctors that you will ever need, the four categories that no philosophy can be reduced below, mainly happiness, movement, diet, and quiet. And, we go into a lot of aspects of motherhood, of health. And then, more importantly, our mental belief systems and the thoughts that we have internally and how those drastically affect our health. He talks about his, name it, blame it, payment technique, how to address some unconscious beliefs that can have a big impact on our life, and a whole lot more. Extremely, extremely wide-ranging episode. I learned a lot. I think it will be very educational and somewhat challenging for some of you guys listening, and I would encourage you to listen to it with an open mind, and I would be curious to know your opinion. But without further ado, let’s join Paul. Paul, it is such an honor. Welcome, and thanks for being here.
Paul: My pleasure. Thank you. I’m very excited to share with you, and I love your podcast. So, when Penny told me you reached out, I said, “Yes, I’ll do that one for sure.”
Katie: Well, I am so excited and honored to finally get to chat with you. I’ve known of you for so long, and I have in my notes from researching you that you start your day at 3:00 or 3:30 in the morning. Did I read that right?
Paul: Yeah, pretty much consistently. That’s the only way I can…you know, with a family and a business, and lots of people after my time, and coaching people, and writing books and courses and interviews and podcasts, I found the only way that I can create sacred space for myself to do my spiritual practices is to get up before the birds wake up. And so I come in here and ground myself and do my prayers and spiritual practices of various types, and then I do research either for my own personal and spiritual development or for my book or for podcasts. And then usually, the kids show up to say good morning around 7:30…somewhere between 7:30 and 8:00, and then I shift gears to being in the world.
Katie: And being a parent. It’s a busy world for sure. And you have been, speaking of that, in this health and wellness world for a long time and teaching and prominent longer than many of us have been in this world at all. And someone recently that I really respect said that if he could only work with one practitioner ever, you would be the top of his list.
Paul: Cool.
Katie: So I’m very excited to share some of your work today. I hope there will be follow-up episodes at some point in the future. But I think to start broad, for people who aren’t familiar with you, I would love if you could walk us through. You have a saying about the only four doctors you’ll ever need. I would love if we could start there.
Paul: Yes. You know, what happened was many years ago, probably around 2005. You know, I have an institute, and it takes most people about seven years to complete the education I developed. And it’s a multi-disciplinary program. So we have doctors and chiropractors and osteopaths and physical therapists and acupuncture, everything you can imagine because it’s a multi-disciplinary program. But some of my instructors and some of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life in my system started coming to me and saying in their own words the same thing, and what they were saying was, “Paul, you have taught us so much, and we have such a comprehensive system of evaluation. And we often find so many things wrong with people that it’s almost impossible to determine where to start with people that are this, you know, challenged and in trouble and have this many health problems and orthopedic issues all at the same time.”
So, the question they were asking is, “How do you know how to prioritize things?” How do you know how to structure a program so you’re getting the best results and doing the things that are the most important? And so I’d always thought it was obvious I think because it was my own internal process. So, what I did is I went into meditation and asked my soul, “How can I encapsulate our own internal process in a way that other people can easily understand it?” And so what came out of that exploration with my soul was a four-step process, which is defined as the one, two, three, four approach that I teach. So, it encapsulates the four doctors. Do you want me to just go right to the four doctors, or would you like to hear the whole formula?
Katie: I would love to hear the whole formula and then the four doctors.
Paul: Sure. Well, the four doctors is the last part of the formula. So, the one means no matter who comes to you for help, the first thing you gotta do is find out what their one love is that they love enough to change for. So what is a dream bigger than their crisis? Jerry Wesch, a famous psychologist says, “If you have a big enough dream, you don’t need a crisis.” And that really stuck to me because I saw in my life whenever I was working with someone who had passion, whether it be playing golf, or their sport, or a grandmother that really wanted to get over her pain because she likes to play with her grandchildren, those people healed quite efficiently and followed directions and got great results. But when people did not have a dream that was big enough to carry them and create meaning for them that they could build goals around that I could structure goals around, then they just floundered. It was as though seeing a therapist was just something they had to do to continue workman’s compensation or to maintain their sort of victim mentality or have an excuse for not participating in life. So I found because for years I owned a physical therapy clinic. Like you said, I’ve been doing this a long time, 37 years is a long time. And so I’ve spent a lot of time in the professional medical environment. And I found that when people came to me without a specific dream, goal, or objective, that the first thing I had to do was help them find that, or their therapeutic commitment was almost non-existent.
So, first, we identify what is it that you love enough to change for, which we call your dream. What is your dream for your life right now, and how can my help as a therapist or a coach support you in that? Two relates to the two forces behind the universe that create all that exists in the universe, which is yin, the feminine, and yang, the masculine. So with the two, my students are taught how to do a very comprehensive assessment and look at the ratio of yin, anabolic life force energy versus yang catabolic factors and activities in their life. So for someone, for example, that’s an athlete, they may have a lot of yang activity because they’re training very hard, but they may be sleep-deprived, which is our primary source of free yin, feminine anabolic tissue restorative energy. So, even though the assessments they teach are very comprehensive and take several hours to complete, ultimately, what we’re looking for is, what is the ratio between anabolic and catabolic balance?
And from there, we take that information, and we break it down, and we have to then make choices. So, once we know what the dream is, we also know what baseline health is. So we look at the evaluation to say, “How far is this person from just baseline health,” what it takes to just be a healthy human being and live in a field of gravity and meet the basics of daily life. Once we meet that, we can say, “Okay. Now we can get you ready for climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, or winning your CrossFit competition,” whatever it might be. But inevitably, all people with rare exceptions get themselves into trouble because of the choices they’ve made, and choices are the products of beliefs. So what I find is that we have to look at the beliefs or the ignorance. Many people just don’t know how to lift weights properly or how to eat properly that led to the situation. And so what we have to do is make choices.
So the number three in my system…one is one love or your dream. Two is anabolic, catabolic balance. Three is the three choices that you have in relationship to any person, place, or thing, and my research showed there is only three choices. The optimal choice is the one that’s best for you and everybody on your dream team. Your dream team is anybody that’s supporting you and accomplishing your dream goal or objective. So, for example, if someone’s a triathlete, they think they’re doing it all by themselves, but I remind them, who’s cooking your food for you? Who’s watching your kids while you’re spending all these hours training? Your wife. So if you don’t include your wife on your dream team, your relationship with your wife is gonna probably be in trouble because you’re overly oriented toward the eye of yourself and think that you’re the one responsible for making it all happen. I say things like who built your bicycle? Who repairs it when it’s damaged?
So, yeah, the optimal choice being the one best for you and everybody on your dream team. The sub-optimal choice is the one that’s usually giving you instant gratification but causes some kind of problems in your dream team relationship such as staying out training and not letting your wife know you’ll be late for dinner, or taking steroids and not letting your coach know or your family know. Those are the examples of sub-optimal choices that usually create the illusion that it’s somehow gonna contribute to your success but almost always comes back to bite you. The third choice has a positive and negative correlations, and that’s do nothing. So the first choice is the optimal. The second choice is the sub-optimal. The third choice is to do nothing. There’s two positive uses for do nothing. One is to call a timeout when you can’t stay connected at the heart with somebody that you’re having a discussion with or an argument with or some kind of conflict with.
And so I teach people, when you feel that you can’t stay connected at the heart, call a timeout and ask to reconnect when you can stay centered at the heart, or you’re gonna probably damage that relationship if you keep going. The second one is do nothing when you need more information to make an informed choice. So, for example, with the issues we’ve got going on in the world right now, a lot of people are not making an informed choice. They’re just doing what they think they have to do because they’re watching too much television, and they’re not actually looking into the opinions on both sides. So until you look at the opinions and the science on both sides of any issue, you can never make an informed choice, and when you don’t make an informed choice, you usually make mistakes that cost you and can kill you.
So, doing nothing. Take a time out so you can stay connected at the heart. Do nothing when you need more information, and don’t make the choice until you’re well informed. The negative use of do nothing is to be apathetic, which means to not care. And as a parent, being apathetic is more dangerous than even being violent because, if you’re yelling, or screaming, or hitting your children, at least you’re making contact with them, and they know that you’re giving them attention. But research shows that apathetic parents have children that are unhealthier and have a higher rate of criminality and disease because they’re absolutely disconnected from their parents. So, if you look at all the research done even with monkeys showing what happens when you disconnect them from parental love, it leads to tremendous illness. So, that’s the three.
Now, the four is the four doctors. In my system, I found that no living philosophy can be reduced below these four categories that are essential for all of us to live and have health, well-being, harmony in our lives. The first doctor is Dr. Happiness. Dr. Happiness is the chief physician. Dr. Happiness is responsible for choosing the values that you’re going to use to guide your life. I tell my students, “Your yes has no value until you learn to say no.” And if you don’t have core values, you don’t know when to say yes or when to say no. Someone hands you processed garbage food, you eat it. Someone gives you alcoholic beverages that are full of additives, preservatives, colorings, and chemicals, and you drink it. But someone who says, “I only eat organic, free-range foods” will say no to those foods politely but say that’s not the kind of food that works well for me. So they have values to guide them.
So, the other thing Dr. Happiness has got to do is identify what is happy-making for each individual, because if we don’t become conscious of and take responsibility for what is happy-making for us, we quickly find ourselves in a sort of a flatland experience of a mundane world where you get up, eat breakfast, go to work, usually doing a job you’re not happy with, coming home, feeling like you haven’t lived yet, and often having to get into alcohol, drugs, junk television just to pacify you. So, we really need this awareness of what is it that I need to do each day or each week that’s happy-making for me, whether it be singing, dancing, playing, painting, creating. But those things should be what I call unbound play, play without an outcome objective, because if we keep orienting ourselves to an outcome objective, then we actually are always caught in this mode of having to accomplish something. And that leads to fatigue because the more times you have to accomplish something, the more the control factor is involved. And as Chip and Dan Heath showed beautifully in their book, “Switch,” we can develop control fatigue. Mothers suffer a lot from control fatigue because they have to manage so many tasks and activities and schedules, but they don’t take time for themselves to be free of all that responsibility. So if we don’t get clear on what is happy-making for us and choose activities with no objective outcome, we burn out.
So then Dr. Happiness is responsible for the other three doctors. So Dr. Movement says, “What do I need to keep myself physically healthy with regard to movement? And what do I need to be aware of with the movement of my emotions than the movement of my mind so that those don’t get stale or overstimulated to the point that it causes stress, elevates cortisol, and leads to addictive tendencies?”
Dr. Diet says, “What do I need to eat for my individual unique needs?” Dr. Diet does not believe in diets. Dr. Diet believes in an intimate relationship with yourself and having a relationship with your body, and listening to how it responds to any input, be it food, drink, smoke, drug, otherwise. But we always have to be aware that our body is a living dynamic system that changes its needs from meal to meal, literally. So, for example, sometimes I need to eat like a vegetarian. Say when I’m on off days of training, and I don’t have a lot of physical stress, my body can be happy as a vegetarian and may wanna eat that way, but for two days after I had the heavy deadlift session, my body craves animal flesh because it needs those resources for repair, for hormones, etc.
But if a person says, “I’m gonna be a vegan,” and they don’t pay attention to what their body wants, then they walk around telling everybody how great their diet is but can’t explain why they’re tired and feel lousy all the time. If someone’s an overly meat eater, then they can just toxify their body, become too acidic, end up with fungal infections, parasite infections, and again tell everybody how great their diet is, but both of those camps are not listening to their bodies. So Dr. Diet is really all about having an intimate relationship with your body and no diet dogma, but focusing on quality as more important than quantity. Then we have to also remember that the physical body feeds on food, but the emotional body feeds on emotions.
So Dr. Diet is also where you become aware of what kind of relationships are or are not supporting you, be they persons, places, or things. So if your job is causing you emotional stress, and you’re sure you don’t really wanna do it, and I ask you, “Look into a crystal ball and tell me what your life and your body looks like a year from now if you stay in that job,” most people say, “I feel like I’m gonna get sick just thinking about it.” And I say, “Well, how long ago did you feel that way?” And they say, “Well, five years ago.” And I said, “Well, don’t you think if you would have just been brave enough to change your job and deal with that, you wouldn’t have been spending all this money on medical help because you’ve actually poisoned yourself with your own frustration and negative emotions?”
So at the level of emotions, we have an emotional body. It feeds on emotions, and we have to be conscious of what it is that is emotionally nourishing for us. And the mental body feeds on thoughts. So we have to be aware of what it is that stimulates our mind in a positive way, whether that be spiritual intake literature, or technical literature, or gardening, or whatever. If we don’t have an intimate relationship and pay attention to what we do with our mind and how we use our mind, then we get into habit patterns and makes us look like the average person in the society.
And as Carl Jung said, the average man can never be successful because, by definition, they’re average. And most people don’t have any awareness of their mental diet. They just take in junk after junk after junk and watch garbage television and believe what they see on their phone, and kind of just a bad diet of stinking thinkingness, you know. When you look at the research, research shows that the average person thinks 90,000 thoughts a day, and researchers identified that approximately 90% of those thoughts were negative.
And so when you look at the average person, you can see from that research statistic, and Deepak Chopra cited the negativity portion of it. You can see that people aren’t conscious of what they’re feeding their mind, but your mind is the most powerful creative force on your body. Your mind and your emotions are linked. It’s only because of emotions you can feel the ramifications of a thought, and your body is the interface between mind and emotions that allows you to have that experience. So if we’re only conscious of the diet we eat as food, but we’re not conscious of the diet we take in emotionally and mentally, we can be eating great food but confused as to why we don’t feel good or why we’re having illnesses or diseases pop up. And I would say at least 50% of the cases of people that see me come to me with health problems and have a good diet, but they don’t have a good emotional or mental diet.
Dr. Quiet is the chief of rest and introspection. That’s where we make sure we have enough rest to meet our physical demands, so sleep. Active rest is a type of rest for athletes. It means doing your sport at a significantly reduced intensity so that you’re not burning yourself out and disrupting recovery. Passive rest is doing another activity that doesn’t compete with your primary activity. So, for example, a competitive martial artist or runner could use swimming as passive rest because it’s still restorative, still maintains fitness but doesn’t stress their primary systems and therefore the ability to recover. Sleep I talked about.
And then Dr. Quiet is also the domain of introspection, looking into yourself, really looking honestly at your choices, your beliefs, your behaviors. And so Dr. Quiet is the domain of the soul, the relationship with the inner self and anything to do with growing that part of yourself.
So, in a nutshell, it’s impossible to be a healthy three-doctor person. Somebody who’s got a good movement program, a good diet, and gets enough sleep, but does not have any happiness practices in their life will find themselves unhappy. Someone who’s happy and moving and sleeping but not eating well will get sick eventually. No matter which way you go, you cannot reduce well-being to less than those four doctors. So what I taught my students, in a nutshell, is first you have to identify a dream, or they’re not gonna follow the program, and they’re not committed. Then you’ve gotta identify the imbalances looking at them from the perspective of anabolic and catabolic, and we analyze 29 body-mind systems to do that. Then we have to show them where they need to make choices to first achieve baseline health. And the only way they can make healthy choices is to have values for Dr. Happiness, Dr. Movement, Dr. Diet, and Dr. Quiet. And when those things are in place, it’s extremely rare for a person not to achieve their objectives, find health and well-being, and turn the challenges that brought them to the CHEK professional into an opportunity that then becomes the gift for everybody watching.
Katie: I love how beautifully you systematize that, and I think I’ve learned one of these lessons very much firsthand the last couple of years in that I’ve been in the health and wellness world now for 15 years, and for a lot of years was going through Hashimoto’s and struggling with weight loss, especially after kids. In many ways the diet part dialed in and movement and supplements, and I had spreadsheeted everything and talked to every expert, but I didn’t have that mental piece dialed in. And I’ve realized, and I’ve talked about the physical side quite a bit on this podcast and about how, like you said, there’s that personalized aspect, and our bodies are constantly adapting. And we each do have to figure out and dial in for ourselves what that diet looks like, the movement, and the constant change of cycling and adapting, and that is a very important key. But the one that I ignored for a long time was that mental and emotional and spiritual aspect, and I learned firsthand just how profound that was when I finally addressed that side. And without changing the diet or the movement in any drastic way, all of those things started to resolve. In fact, I now eat more food, and I’ve lost almost 100 pounds.
Paul: Wow.
Katie: So it was an extremely profound change. I think also that part is very difficult especially for a lot of moms because of the busyness of motherhood. And I love that you said that poisoned with negative emotions. I think that’s a really important key to dial in on. And I would love to go deeper on how to break that cycle because I think that’s a sticking point for a lot of people, and that especially for the moms listening, those quiet and happiness components can be really difficult to dial in. So if someone maybe is recognizing for the first time that role of the negative mental diet and those emotions, what are some of the ways they can begin to become aware and start to move in a positive direction?
Paul: Well, that begins right with number one, because people that are trapped in that most often do not have a clearly stated dream and values to support it, which means they’re not taking time to do something specifically to nourish themselves. Not only is this one of the traps of motherhood, it’s one of the traps of the Abrahamic religions because they teach you to give yourself away to the other, and that leaves…and Christianity is vile to women. If you study the Bible, women are second-class citizens, and I can give you a long list of how Christianity is dangerous to women. But the point that I’m making is that when a woman or a mother has a clear dream, and if her dream is to raise her children but not lose herself in it and to have some health and vitality, then she must get clear on what is happy-making for her. It might be, “I need to get to an aerobics class three times a week, or I need to have time for yoga,” whatever it might be. It could be just time to meditate or time to read things she wants to read.
And once she identifies that, then she can speak to everybody on her dream team from her mother and her father to the spouse’s mother and father to the family, and either they need to…if they don’t have enough money to hire a nanny, then that should be the objective because, if she doesn’t, she’s gonna spend all the money she would have spent on a nanny on health care professionals for sure. And I’ve worked with thousands of these cases. So, the real secret is remembering the rule, I before we, always. You can’t give love that you don’t have. And if you as a mother burn yourself out and exhaust yourself, you can reach the point where you start resenting the people you love because, in the inside, your inner voice is telling you you’re dying from trying to make everything perfect for everybody else, but you don’t have time to breathe, wipe your ass, or even have a shower.
So, women keep telling themselves, “I don’t have time. I’ve gotta do this. My husband, my dog, my car, the soccer game,” and they end up being unhealthy and unhappy because they gain weight, which is a classic stress reaction. They get malnourished. They start drinking too much coffee. They get addictions. And I watch the spin down. And a lot of this goes right back to Abrahamic religious programming and unconscious belief systems, and as I said, all choices lead to behaviors, but all choices come from belief systems. So whenever a woman’s in a situation like that, I always have to look carefully at the belief system that’s driving the behavior because that’s what’s responsible for the choices. And when you realize the truth of the fact that you cannot give love to somebody else that you don’t have…and physiologically speaking, science validates beyond a shadow of a doubt, once you reach a level of stress or internal depletion at which your own survival is threatened, the psyche orients itself towards itself as a protective mechanism.
So when a woman is orienting herself towards others, yet her own cells knows that she’s on the edge of a disease or is progressively killing herself, it triggers resent, and first comes anxiety then comes depression, because once cortisol levels stay high enough for very long, you go into hypothyroidism as a forced rest. So you see when a person enters phase three, adrenal exhaustion, testing shows that they’re often showing multiple indicators of hypothyroidism, and the body gets cold, and they get lethargic, and they have no energy. And that’s usually when women fall deep into addictions to stimulants like coffee, tea, sugar, and that just feeds fungal infections, parasite infections, and starts breaking them down, and the next thing you know they’re in a hospital with some kind of an illness or a breakdown, all of which is far more arduous and far more expensive than just getting clear on what your real needs are and organizing support from your dream team, your family, your friends.
You know, there’s an old saying, “It takes a tribe to raise a child,” and it’s very true. I have two wives, and many times they’ve discussed how incredibly tough it would be if Angie was alone, who’s the actual mother of the kids, without Penny’s help. And Angie’s a very busy professional woman, a highly skilled shaman, and therapist, and Penny works to support her. We have a nanny. So, when you look at the fact that it really does take a tribe to raise a child without killing the women, and if you study the history of tribal relationships, most tribes were not monogamous because they found it was too dangerous to the women. They needed a woman to have a break for at least three years after a child because they found if a woman had children more than once every three years, it greatly increased her risk of death either during pregnancy or after.
And they told men, “You are not allowed to have sex and get a woman pregnant for at least three years. Therefore you can have sex with any of the other women in the tribe.” So, multiple-partner relationships in a lot of tribes was to protect the women from men that were too needy and couldn’t get support elsewhere. So, if you really start looking at the history of what it takes to raise a child and how we’re living now, and how these social and religious beliefs have really put us in a box that makes us very profitable to the medical system and all sorts of agencies that profit on our imbalances, there’s no way out of realizing that you can’t love somebody else more than you can love yourself. And if you really love your children and your family, then you should put that commitment into really giving yourself what you need and getting the help to do it, or you just become a statistic.
Katie: Yeah. You’re right that there seems to be a lot of cultural programming around that, and I know from talking to a lot of women and experiencing it myself that even as a mom to have a dream or something that you’re pursuing or even just basic self-care can feel very selfish. When you’re raised like that, to learn to love ourselves can be an extremely big step. And I think you’re right, it goes back to some of these unconscious belief systems that I would love to talk a little bit more about of how to unpack those. But, I think, the other key of that is the tribe and the idea of community, which from what I’ve read, this is a thing that is so vital to human survival, like you said, and has existed throughout history, and we have deeply fragmented in the modern world.
And I know I just see the data side, which is that without strong community and strong relationships, that’s such an important factor. It’s more important than not smoking. It’s more important than exercising. It’s more important than any of the foods we put in our body. Yet in modern society, we ignore that so much. And every time I talk about community, I have people push back and say, “Well, how do you even do that in the modern world? How do you find that?” And my answer has always been you have to create it because it does exist naturally in the modern world. I guess two-part question would be, what are some of the ways we can start to build those beneficial community structures and dream teams that are all mutually supportive? And how can we move past that cultural programming that tells us it’s selfish to take care of ourselves?
Paul: Well, good questions. I have a podcast all about tribe and tribe building. It came out a few months ago. It’s a solo podcast where I go about two-plus hours into all the issues of tribe, which I obviously can’t reproduce here in a few minutes. So, it’s “Living 4D with Paul Chek” if people wanna listen to that podcast. I also have a podcast that came out right before or right after it on making effective choices, because that’s what we’re really talking about. So those two are critical for people that really wanna go deeper into these issues. A couple of things I’d like to say in response. First, you talk about, you know, having tribe and support is more important than the drinking or the smoking. Well, if you look at research on tribal societies such as Weston A. Price’s research and many others I have in my library, when Major-General Robert McCarrison was sent by the British military to find out who the healthiest people were in the world, because at the beginning of the Second World War, 51% of all recruits coming into the war effort were rejected for reasons of medical disability or malnutrition.
So the British Government saw it as a national security threat, and they put their head physician, Major-General Robert McCarrison on the project of identifying who were the healthiest people in the world and researching them scientifically to decide, how would we feed soldiers and how do we inform the public so that we’re not in a security threat? One of the tribes that he studied and ultimately determined was the healthiest was the Hunza of Northern India. One of the things he identified was that there was men 110 years of age with multiple wives still faring children, working hard in the fields every day, and many of these people had smoked all their lives and had no indication of disease whatsoever. The point I’m making is if you have four doctors, then your body can absorb cigarettes if they’re not toxic cigarettes. Obviously, these people grew their own tobacco. You can enjoy some alcohol. You can have a fun life without it being a threat.
The other thing is, is that one of the problems in our culture is that we have a lot of corporate religion, but we have very little spiritual awareness. And I define spirituality as connecting to a greater whole. So, a lot of mothers, for example, don’t even have time to go out in their garden and be barefoot because they don’t make time to do it. So if you connect to your garden, you’ve connected to a greater whole. When you connect to your friends, you’ve connected to a greater whole. When you study the mystics of your own religion and realize different viewpoints and get out of the dogma. Rumi said no man can get to God until he becomes a heretic, which means as long as you’re practicing dogma, you’re not really worshiping Spirit or God. You’re just worshiping words written on a paper. But the mystics actually taught us how to get past the dogma into the actual experience of worship and the experience of deep connection to nature and to the stars and to whatever one considers to be the source of creation.
So, for mothers and for anybody, spirituality is critical because, if our sense of belonging gets too narrow, we become isolated. And what we’ve been through is over a year of extreme isolation, which has caused massive increases in suicide, drug use, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence because people didn’t have something greater than themselves to connect to. Those that did, spent a lot of time meditating, doing shadow work, and took advantage of the time, painting, dancing, singing, rattling, chanting, journaling. So they actually used the time. And so you see that when we have a spiritual connection, and we progressively increase the range of our sense of connection, then we feel more and more supported by the world, and we feel more and more whole, and we feel more and more capable of dealing with challenges because the opposite is feeling that you’re in a crisis, and you’re all alone, and your husband’s too busy to help you, and you don’t have enough money. So it’s just a long laundry list of isolationist victim-like excuses.
When it comes to looking at the belief system, I tell people, “You always have to ask yourself, is your belief system worth challenging because it’s worth living. It’s gotta be worth challenging.” Would God really burn you in hell, for example? If God is the source of all that is, that means everything that is comes directly out of source; therefore, burning someone in hell is God burning itself in hell, which makes for a very unintelligent God model. So I say you’ve gotta question these beliefs with your whole heart, and then if it’s not true, then you have to say, “What is true, and how do I find that truth that centers me and supports me so I can live and love fully and not be in fear all the time?”
So one of the approaches that I teach is a technique I learned from studying Stanley Krippner’s work who is a famous depth psychologist and expert in mythology and an expert in psychedelic therapy. He was a very deep man. He died recently, but he gives a technique called name it, blame it, and tame it. So if a person has a thought like, “I’m all alone, or nobody loves me, or I’m never gonna get the help I need from my husband or my family, or we’re always gonna have money problems,” you name it. You say, “Oh, there’s my money demon, or there my, I’m alone demon.” You can call it, you know, whatever you want, demon Bob.
And then you blame it. Whenever demon Bob shows up and starts telling me that my husband’s too busy for me, I start to feel anxious inside and I get sad because I really need more of his love and support and so do the kids. Then you tame it. You say, “Ah, hello, demon Bob. Thank you for reminding me that I have an opportunity to share my feelings with my husband and let him know what my wants, feelings, and needs are, and see if we can find a healthy compromise so that we’re all getting what we need, and we all feel supported. And we can all work together to find a solution.” If you don’t name it, then it stays in your unconscious. You just walk around brooding, and people are depressed.
And how many times have you seen someone that was anxious or depressed and said, “Well, what’s going on?” And the answer is, “I don’t know.” That means they’re being affected by something that’s unconscious. All neurosis is a compensatory illness. It means you’re compensating for something that you haven’t identified, but it may be in your unconscious. It may be coming through your gene line. For example, if you come from a family line of neurotic anxious women or men, you may not know why you’re neurotic and anxious all the time, but until you start doing spiritual investigations and look into your family tree and addressing those feelings and say, “Ah, there’s that demon of anxiety again.” Once you look at it, you’re now changing it because, as soon as you look at it, you put light on it. And now it’s not in the unconscious. It’s now objectified and it’s in the conscious so you can work with it there.
So, once we bring it up into the conscious, and we name it, and we blame it, we do the same thing I teach people that have addictions to food. So you eat the chocolate chip cookies because you love them, but you keep associating them with something sweet and tasty that you really like. But how about if you were honest about what happens when you eat it? And instead of seeing a chocolate chip cookie, you see a swollen abdomen, lots of gas and pimples, and a foggy mind. So once you name it, there’s the gas, the pimples, and the bloating. And you tame it, “Let me find something else that tastes just as good and is just as fun to eat but doesn’t give me gas, pimples, and bloating.” Then you’re learning how to bring the unconscious into the conscious and change the behavior so that you can be dream affirmative and life affirmative. Otherwise, you just excuse yourself right into the jail of addiction, which is loss of freedom.
For anyone to truly have freedom in their life, they have to engage their own unconscious, identify what the limiting beliefs and behaviors are, and work with them in a conscious way, or they will always be a puppet on an invisible string. Carl Jung said to people coming to him with chronic challenges that his primary function as their therapist was to identify what their unmet task is. Almost everyone with a big challenge in their life has an unmet task such as being honest with my husband or being honest with myself or not working so much, or changing my diet but not making excuses about it and doing it. So once we meet the unmet task, we free ourselves of a lot of resistance. Rudolf Steiner said whenever people have chronic challenges of any type, it’s the function of the doctor and the therapist to identify what their secret story is.
So the secret story can be something like, “Nobody loves me. I’m all alone. I have to do this because Jesus sacrificed himself for everybody, so I’ve gotta sacrifice myself,” not realizing that’s a story. It’s a teaching story. So, if we don’t take the time and the effort to really look at the beliefs that are driving the choices that lead to the behaviors, then we spend tons of money externalizing ourself and trying to sell our problems to doctors and therapists who are usually no healthier than we are and just throwing pills and quick fixes, and palliative care not addressing the real issue but addressing the symptoms. And you get enough of that stuff going in you, and you can toxify yourself with vitamins and supplements. I’ve seen that happen many times in drugs that are in the name of medicine. So, that’s sort of an encapsulation. I mean, my approach is much more comprehensive in its global sphere than that. But in a podcast like this, I could say anyone that applies what I’ve just said can change their life radically with that simple approach.
Katie: I’ll make sure those two…your two podcast episodes that you mentioned are linked in the show notes for you guys listening. I’ve listened to one of them and definitely recommend it. But I think the thing that really stood out to me in what you just said is the importance of challenging belief systems, and that was a thing I actively ignored for most of my life. I loved your quote about, “If it’s worth living, it’s worth challenging,” and for me, this became a very tangible thing when I started realizing it. And I sat down and made a list of all the things I thought I would say I believed with certainty, and then I point by point very systematically challenged each one by researching and reading alternative viewpoints, realizing that I had this fear around doing that.
And I realized if this thing I believe is true, then researching the other side will only give me empathy and compassion and understanding for people who believe different. And if I’m wrong and I’m living my life based on this, it’s worth knowing and researching and challenging. It definitely can be an unnerving process if you’ve never done it, but I think it’s one of the most impactful things I’ve ever done in my life, and now is a regular yearly practice for me to actually reevaluate like what are the things that are still on that list, and what does that then mean for my life. But I think this is also a thing that’s not really woven into our society. We’re not ever taught to challenge things. In fact, if anything, through the school system, certainly, we’re taught not to challenge things. So that alone seems like a huge step for most people just the idea of recognizing and then challenging what you hold as core beliefs.
Paul: Our education system teaches us what to think, not how to think. We are not taught how to think constructively and holistically in our education system unless you’re lucky to go to a Waldorf school or a very elite private school run by out-of-the-box thinkers, for which there are very few, and most are very expensive. Our system of education was developed by plantation owners specifically to keep the children busy so they could get more work out of the parents and to teach the kids not to be creative and follow orders, because when you’re running assembly line processes, you don’t want slaves being creative. And we’re still using the exact same education system today that was developed thousands of years ago to condition slaves out of creativity and into conformity, and it’s being used by large corporations to control our minds and to get us to eat and to live in exactly the ways that make their corporations highly profitable.
And you can see that with the level of addiction to video games, to television, to media, and if you watch “Social Dilemma,” the documentary “Social Dilemma” on Netflix, it lets the cat right out of the bag. And even the people that design this technology admit they use the very tactics that they use to hook the brain in and addict people, and they said, “We let a dragon out of the bag, and now we don’t know how to get it back in.” And interestingly, all the key developers of social media will not allow their own children to use it.
Katie: Wow.
Paul: The real issue here is that, if we don’t challenge our beliefs, then we don’t become conscious. Jung spoke at length about why religion and groupthink and isms are so popular because religion and groupthinks and universities almost all enforce a dogma, and once you buy into a dogma, you relinquish the right to think about it and challenge it to priests, to the leaders, or the authority figure. And that allows you to stay unconscious.
Whenever you’re cognitively engaged, research shows 80% of your available blood sugar at any given moment is going directly to your brain because it’s a very inefficient organ. So what happens is people actually subscribe to belief systems even when it hurts to live them because it’s easier than it is to be a constructive thinker. And whenever you become a constructive thinker, you run the risk of being different than the average person, and you’re likely to get attacked. For example, just try going to a Christian church with a Buddhist book in your hand and watch what happens. You will immediately be thought of as the devil, and so you can get ostracized for not following the rules and the dictates of that God or that belief system. So most people aren’t brave enough to stand on their own and share their own beliefs and their own values whether people agree with them or not, therefore they become caught in an unconscious confirmation to a system that is naturally going to produce stress for a soul that came here to grow beyond the limited beliefs of any system.
So, the other issue Steiner and Jung both spoke about, they said that one of the real challenges of consciousness is that it’s the source of most of our diseases. For example, if Katie goes for a routine checkup, and the doctor comes back with a sour look on his face and says, “Katie, I’m sorry to tell you, but I found stage 3 breast cancer in your breasts,” but Katie doesn’t realize she’s been misdiagnosed, Katie is now conscious, and she believes she has breast cancer. And her orientation toward the fact that she has cancer as a belief will probably produce the disease in her body even though she was misdiagnosed because the research shows that you have a 38% to 68% chance of manifesting that through a nocebo effect.
So, if you’re unconscious about religious ideas, in other words, you’ve never heard of Jesus or that you’ll burn in hell for touching your genitals, you’re not gonna have the problem that you have if you think God will burn you in hell for touching your genitals. So once you become conscious of something, if you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand on your own and live it and back it with your own life and your own results, then you’re going to fall back into needing a mommy and a daddy figure or a group to make you feel whole so you can stop thinking and become unconscious.
And that’s what an ism is. It’s a bunch of people relegating their power to an authority figure that often does not have their best interest at heart. So it takes a lot of consciousness, but consciousness comes with a lot of responsibility because, once you’re conscious of something, now you know the ramifications of not acting on it. When you’re conscious, Katie, that some of the ideas you were living weren’t serving you. If you did not do the research and act on it, wouldn’t you still be sick? But it took a lot of responsibility, and you probably had to do a lot of things that a lot of people thought were wrong because they were not in line with the conventional medical system. And many doctors will tell you that you’re wrong, but they’ll also tell you that you shouldn’t breastfeed your kids and you should use Gerber soy-based baby food. And they’re happy to poison your kids and have you eat junk food and never say a thing about it. So there’s a belief system.
So, the key point I’m making is that the paradox of it is, is to stay unconscious is dangerous, but to be conscious and not do something about it is equally dangerous. And spirituality is the practice of becoming conscious and setting your life up so you have the time and the space each day to do something about it.
Katie: Absolutely. And, yeah, in that process for me, I had to learn to get comfortable sitting with the discomfort of that because it is a lot of dissonance in the beginning, and, I think, there’s that dichotomy of the dogma versus what I would say is kind of the antidote, which is the curiosity side, but breaking that desire to have confirmation bias and even in small ways. Like I stopped saying like I have Hashimoto’s because that was a thing that I was creating, and so I started saying, “Oh, my body is recovering.”
Paul: Very good.
Katie: It does shift your mindset so much, but I have moved to a space where one of those things I very firmly hold to is curiosity and constantly nurturing that. And so instead of approaching something with a desire to confirm, it’s a, “What can I learn from this person, this experience, this circumstance?”
And, I think when we start talking about things like this, another really important point is I’ve always maintained that moms have a uniquely powerful way to shift society, and we’re directly impacting the next generation. And, I think, moms, in general, are an incredibly powerful force, hopefully for good. And I think in small ways like touching on some of the things we’ve talked about like we have the power to teach and encourage questioning and curiosity versus how they dampen it in schools. So I tell my kids, “Question everything,” and at age 2, my oldest looked at me and said, “Even you?” And I said, “Even and especially me. Question authority. Question everything.” And the idea of giving our kids a solid foundation of health certainly in all the aspects we’ve talked about in curiosity and in having a mental foundation for navigating these things. But it makes me wonder, you’re a parent as well, any guidance you have on being really present as a parent? And like it’s easy to talk about all these problems that face the world and that we’ve all navigated as adults. I’m curious, any tips you have for instilling kind of the antidote to these early on with our kids so that they have a strong foundation.
Paul: Well, I think, you know, the real rule of parenting is even when you don’t think that you’re parenting, you’re being watched. So, my first tip for parents is remember your very actions from your posture to your gestures to your tone of voice to your beliefs to your actions, particularly how you interact with your spouse is the primary source of influence. Most people don’t realize, but 55% of language does not come by word. It comes from gesture and posture. So, when you realize 50% of what’s being communicated to a child, 55% is not the words you’re using. You know, it’s kind of like a parent telling a kid to stand up straight but not realizing they have terrible posture while they’re telling them to stand up straight.
So, the key thing is really embodying the practices and the principles that you want your kids to emulate, because how you’re living is far more of a mode of instruction to children than what you say. The other thing is, is that if you don’t create time in your day, like I’m a very, very busy guy, and it’s easy for me to just bury myself in work. And that was the biggest mistake I made with my first son. And so what I do is…Angie’s request to me is, “Can you please be home by 7:00 at night so that you can spend time with the kids at least in the last hour that they’re awake, and, you know, be with them?” And so that was when I used to have to drive to work, but now I just walk out the door, and I’m out the house. The house is 50 feet away from my office. So the kids come and visit me every morning. I often get to see them when I’m eating. If I stop to go to the gym, I often invite the kids to come in the gym with me, and if they wanna do that, they can. So sometimes it’s really finding out ways for us as parents to give ourselves what we need like exercise but include the kids in it so that you’re doing two things at once.
I think we also have to be very careful to filter the media streams they’re using, particularly when kids get to be about 7, 8, 9, 10, and they’ve got enough technical savvy to start finding, you know, pornography and violent stuff, because they don’t have enough ego yet, enough intellectual consciousness to differentiate truth from not true. So, you know, young kids can actually think that you can just shoot people, and they’ll pop back up again. They think you can just stuff anything in your mouth like cartoon characters, and you’ll be fine.
And since there’s so much heavy subliminal marketing going on with stuff aimed at children, and a good example of that is when McDonald’s sales started dropping down, they realized that they had to sell the kids, and the kids would sell the parents. So they organized around happy meals, and they started giving toys away, and their sales shot back through the roof because the kids drove the parents crazy trying to get to those happy meals and toys. So, there is just a simple example. And to show you how sick the system is we’ve allowed McDonald’s to become a sponsor of the Olympics, Nestle and the sugar manufacturers and junk manufacturers. So, when people are watching and kids are watching sporting events, they’re getting their minds bombarded with this belief that athletes eat this kind of crap, which is rarely the case unless they’re dangerously trapped in that themselves, and they become patients for people like me.
I think also, one of the things I had to learn that I learned through the mistakes with my first son is that we don’t want to constantly load kids up with objective outcomes. We don’t wanna make school and study and tasks so stressful that the child begins to have to orient itself towards whether or not it’s gonna get punished or whether or not it’s gonna be loved or approved of if it doesn’t get a certain grade. Steiner says you should never expose kids to mathematics or reading until they’re between 7 and 10 years of age because the instant you do that, it orients them toward their left brain. And the child’s brain starts as a right-brain dominant brain system, and that goes on until about 7 years. From 4 to 7, there’s a progressive integration of the left brain, but the right brain is all about wholeness. It’s how all the things fit together.
So what we’ve got now is an education system that produces PhDs that know everything about nothing because they don’t know how a vaccination fits in with the rest of the world or the rest of your life, or how a drug might lower your cortisol, but we don’t look at what raised it in the first place. So, we end up with this very left-brain-oriented approach to parenting, which pushes a kid out of their sense of connection and wholeness and then leads them to this urgency for accomplishing objectives and meeting standards and goals before they’ve had a chance to live and to play. So what’s happened is we now have kids having a midlife crisis as early as 18 years of age, which shouldn’t happen until you’re in, you know, your late 40s, early 50s. What I’m saying is we need to give kids the space to be children and not carry adult responsibilities.
And the other thing that parents do that’s very dangerous is they try to railroad the children into having the belief system that they have. So, if they’re a Christian, their children have to be Christian, and they can’t look at anything else. If they want their children to become doctors, but the child wants to be a musician, then they tell the child you’ll never make it as a musician. And in our family, you have to have a degree, blah, blah, blah. So now the child spends their life doing something for their parents while it’s killing its soul, only to end up being somebody on a lot of psychotropic drugs as a doctor who’s doing what they’re doing to please mommy but hasn’t really lived yet. So they’re caught in the eternal child archetype trying to respond to mommy and daddy because they were brainwashed into thinking that’s what you have to do to be part of the family.
So really, I think, it’s our job as parents to give kids a big menu. If you’re gonna teach them religion, teach them about all the world religions and let them choose what harmonizes with their soul. If you want them to find a profession, then expose them to everything from gardening to chemistry, to science, to art, to social studies, to metalwork, to woodwork, etc. When their heart locks onto something, that will be their soul path, and that’s where their heart is gonna be connected to the process, and it’s going to make meaning for them. Whenever we’re forcing kids to do things that don’t make meaning, it creates a disconnect in the child, and that leads to anxiety and then to depression because the child itself will burn out. Those are some tips that I would give.
Katie: Yeah. I think I got stuck in that eternal child archetype for a while. I learned to read very early and associated that with parental approval and achievement. And I started a long cycle of that through academia, which was its own self-fulfilling cycle, and then I had to break that as an adult. But I love that you brought up the idea of play and not attaching things to expected outcomes. I think that’s another thing we’ve largely forgotten the wisdom of in society, and, I think, it’s important not just for children. It’s important for adults too. You mentioned that a little bit with the four doctors, but that unstructured creative playtime has been taken away from children, and it’s been taken away from adults as well. And I think that at least for me that was a really important key of starting to unpack some of these things was to get back to something that didn’t have an outcome or an achievement or a goal and to learn how to exist in that creative play space again. Do you have any tips? This seems like it might be a key for a lot of people if they’re not actively doing that.
Paul: Tips for getting back to creative play?
Katie: Yeah.
Paul: Yes. I also have something else I wanna share with you that I think is very important to this conversation. So I’ll give you those tips, and then if you can give me a minute to share something that’s quite profound with you. I think it’s helpful for parents, and not only for the parent, but for the child, and it’s important for everybody, and it’ll be obvious why when I tell you about it. The simple way to get into unbound play is to give yourself permission to not grade yourself or to care what the outcome is. So I teach art, and I’m an art therapist. Art is a big part of my healing process. I’ve had grown men sit and cry for four hours because they were so insecure that they could not put a pencil to a piece of paper and sketch out what they’re feeling inside for fear of my judgment of their art. That is a very, very sad state of affairs, and that’s unbelievably common. Okay. Most of the art spirit is ruined in children by parents and school teachers.
So, for example, if somebody likes the sound of a Tibetan bowl, then just spending some time making sounds with it or chanting or toning, or if you like to sing, sing, but don’t give a damn what you sound like. Do some karaoke. Sing along with your favorite singers. Grab a drum and just play for the pure joy of it. I teach rock stacking because stacking rocks not only is athletic and creative, but if it falls over, who cares? It’s just a pile of rocks. So you’d be amazed at the ego and how it gets so frustrated if a stack of rocks isn’t perfect, and if it falls down, they get upset. And I say just watch that, name it. “Ah, there’s my ego. There’s my judging mind.” Blame it. “When I let it judge my rock stacks or my art or my music, I feel stressed, anxious, and I feel little inside.” Tame it. Whenever that judging mind shows up, I say, “Hello, judging mind. Thank you for showing me where I have an addiction to judging myself and binding myself up so I don’t feel good.” And then you just look at your art and say, “That’s absolutely amazing, and I’m so glad I took the time to just let that creative energy move out of me.”
So it’s really about not so much the activity as it is putting no outcome on it, just knit to knit, paint to paint, dance to dance, sing to sing. Read stories just for the joy of it, and give yourself permission to disconnect from having to produce an outcome, or you never stop the judging process, and you’re always going to risk suffering control fatigue. And then what happens is you can become a neurotic in the sense that Joseph Campbell describes it. He says a neurotic is someone who does what’s unimportant when they should be doing what is important. It’s very important to create space in your day to do things you love to do and take care of yourself, and if you don’t, you become a neurotic. But you make excuses about why you don’t have time while you’re going to the doctor and taking toxic drugs and getting parts of your body cut out all of which could have been healed by just being honest with yourself. You know, honesty with yourself is the prerequisite for any healing or spiritual growth.
Now, what I wanted to share with you is a very famous anthropologist and shaman named Angeles Arrien, wanted to find out why there’s so much addiction in the world because we are drowning in addiction in the world right now. I define an addiction as any repeated behavior that does not produce the results you want. That’s an addiction. I drink my coffee, but it gives me headaches, and it makes me feel tired. Why do you keep drinking it? I don’t know. That’s an addiction. Telling yourself you’re too busy to take care of yourself is a repeated behavior that does not produce the results you want, or you wouldn’t be complaining about the way you feel and the way your body looks as an example. Okay.
So Angeles Arrien traveled to over 100 countries over 10 years. She met with natives. She met with tribal leaders. She met with psychologists. She met with doctors. And after 10 years of research, she tabulated and correlated the findings, and she found that addiction was caused by four key things in every culture worldwide. None of them were more important than the other. They were just the four underlying factors that are most likely to lead to addiction.
Number one is perfectionism. Whenever your parents raise you to believe that you have to do something to a certain level of perfection, or you’re not going to be loved or accepted by them or the group, the church, the school, whatever, you’re going to produce a high likelihood of addiction. Focusing on what’s wrong. Whenever kids are raised by parents who are oriented toward what the child is doing wrong more than they’re oriented towards supporting the child and inspiring it and congratulating it for what it does right, you’re going to trigger off a higher likelihood of addiction. Intensity. She found whenever children were raised in environments where parents were too intense with them and weren’t playful, it triggered a higher likelihood of addiction.
And then the fourth one is the need to know. She found that one of the chief things that lead to addiction was whenever we’re raised by parents or in a school system where we get more love, more appreciation, and we feel safer about who we are if we know more than other people do. So if we’re the teacher’s pet, if we get great grades. But a lot of us don’t realize that the education system we’re in is a mathematical logical learning system, which Howard Gardner’s research showed is only applicable for about 5% to 8% of human beings. The most common learning style is visual, the second is auditory, and the third is kinesthetic. So our entire education system worldwide is oriented for 8% of the people, and the kids that get good grades in a mathematical logical system are the ones naturally oriented to it. But if we measured kids on athletic ability, then Kobe Bryant would have got straight A’s and so would most athletes.
So when we focus on what’s wrong instead of saying, “Maybe my child does not learn well in this style of learning.” For example, I was once asked to consult to a family whose son was failing very badly in mathematics. I identified right away by asking him what his hobbies are that he was not a mathematical logical learning style. I said, “What do you love to do?” Well, the first word out of his mouth was “I love to play the drums”. So I said to the parents, watch this, let’s do some math together, and I did everything in rhythm and beat. So, let’s do a one, two, three, four-rhythm and then put a one-second spacing in it. So we’re gonna do a one, two, three, four, one. One, two, three, four, one. I showed them how this child could be taught basic mathematics by tapping the questions on a table and making music out of it, and within two weeks, his mathematical challenges were completely turned around, and he loved his mathematics because he got to practice his drumming while learning math.
Okay. So if we are not careful, and we induce perfectionism, if we focus on what’s wrong, we’re too intense, and we teach people that they’re not safe unless they know more than everybody else, we set them up for addiction. And once a child is in a state of addiction, they’ve lost their freedom, and now they get labeled everywhere they go, and their life begins to collapse day by day, and they become just like the average adult in the world, which doesn’t look good for our future.
Katie: Wow. That was a great explanation and such a succinct explanation of the roots of that. There’s so many directions I would love to still go with you. I hope you’ll do another round one day because I wanna respect your time. I don’t have a hard stop as well.
Paul: Any time I can support you in the world, that’s what I do.
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Katie: In an effort to respect your time, a couple questions I love to ask at the end are if there are a book or a number of books that have had a profound impact on you, and if so, what they are and why. And I’ve heard enough of you to know you might have an unconventional answer to this question, but I’m curious to ask anyway.
Paul: Well, right on the other side of that wall is over a half a million dollars’ worth of books. So I have an extremely comprehensive library. I’ve studied thousands of books. And I think for myself, there’s so many books I could give you. When I ponder that question, the one book that comes up for me because it’s me you’re asking is a book called “Stalking the Wild Pendulum” by Itzhak, I-T-Z-H-A-K, Bentov. When I read that book, I was overjoyed because Itzhak Bentov is the inventor of the pacemaker. He was the first man to scientifically investigate the physiological and psychological effects of meditation. He was a remote viewer. He was a very, very deep spiritual man.
And that book was the first book to scientifically explain spirituality and spiritual practices and how things like meditation affect us, what a spirit is, what a diva is, what God means, and many, many other things, how consciousness functions and what it is from a scientific perspective. It showed the range of human perception and why it is that we can talk to plants and have relationships with angels or the spirits of trees, and it put it in scientific language. So, what I found is whenever I had left brain students that thought me and my shamanic modes were weird and made them insecure, I had them study “Stalking the Wild Pendulum” by Itzhak Bentov, and most of them came back to me going, “I am so sorry that I was so negative in class towards you about some of these things, because now I understand them.” So, I think, for most people that want to have a more scientific understanding of consciousness and spirituality and perceiving the invisible, that book is really special.
Katie: I just read that one recently and would second your recommendation. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well as a lot of your work. I know we’ve touched on a lot of things that you’ve written and podcasted about. So, I’ll include links there as well. Any parting advice you would like to leave top of mind with the audience today?
Paul: I think if I had some parting advice I would just simply say life is for living, and, you know, if you’re not having a good time, then you need to really look carefully at your four doctors and say, “Why am I choosing not to have a good time?” You see, children say, “I have to.” Adults use the words, “I choose to.” We don’t have to stay in a marriage. We don’t have to stay in a job. We don’t have to do anything. We choose to do it. And until we acknowledge our adult responsibility and acknowledge that we’re choosing to do the things we’re doing, and if they’re making us unhealthy or uncomfortable, then we need to go no further than the mirror to meet the person responsible for making those choices.
So, my parting advice is be honest with yourself. Use your mind coupled with your creativity to create freedom in your life regardless of COVID or regardless of world politics. That crap’s been going on forever, and there’s always a plague. There’s always a war. There’s always a gimmick. There’s always a scam. But you don’t have to get swept away by that stuff. You can still use your home as a temple and your yard as a gymnasium and your house as an art studio or a music studio. And it’s natural that as you grow in consciousness and spirituality, that you start looking weird to everybody else, but you should embrace that and know to the degree that being weird for everybody else is producing a happy, healthy person, then that’s what you’re teaching. And ultimately, when they wake up, they’ll realize how instead of criticizing you, they should have been emulating you. And sometimes it takes people years to wake up, but that’s our gift to each other is to live in love, honestly, and fully so that we carry that into the world. And anything else is just a childish excuse.
Katie: I think that’s a perfect place to wrap up for now until a Round two. And I know just how busy you are. I’m so, so grateful for your time today. Thank you so much, Paul.
Paul: It was my pleasure. Thank you for the great questions, and thank you for making the journey you’ve made. I’ve heard you on your podcast. And, you know, when the pain teacher comes, the pain teacher comes to show us what our true potential is, and often our illnesses, our diseases, and our challenges in life are gifts to us because, once we learn to heal them, we authentically can see where other people in our lives are stuck, and we know how to help them, and we can do that out of love. And that is how spirit works. Spirit takes you into your own initiation process so that you can become filled with authentic wisdom, and then out of empathy and compassion for the rest of us, life, humanity, the world, your life becomes a life of meaning because now people like you that go through a crisis and start a podcast, ultimately, chances are good, without that crisis you went through, you wouldn’t be doing this podcast because you wouldn’t really have any impetus to do it nor would you have enough understanding to really share something. So you see how your own crisis led to a vehicle of freedom for other people. And when we realize that our own healing and our own growth is a gift to the world, then it’s great to be different.
Katie: Perfectly said. Thank you so much, and thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your valuable time and energy with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama Podcast.”
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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