Barbell Shrugged - Mental Tactics for Success w/ Paul Chek — The Bledsoe Show #138

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm leaving the Short Collective in two weeks. Now I resigned as CEO a few months ago, but my show is coming off of the network after the next two shows air. So you can still catch all my shows and keep up to date on what's next by going to MikeIsLeaving.com to stay connected as we grow together. That is MikeIsLeaving.com. Go check it out. And for the coaches out there, I recorded an advanced

Starting point is 00:00:26 training last week on how to build your coaching business. If you're subscribed to the email at TheStrongCoach.com, I'm sending that video out to you very soon. And as far as the Strong Coach Summit goes, that's the big retreat we're putting on in August. We're nailing down the dates and we're going to make it happen sometime in mid-August here in San Diego. Whether you've been through the program or not, this program is open to you. So if you've done the Strong Coach program, great. We want you there. And if you've yet to do it, this is open to you as well. I'm bringing in the top business and marketing experts in health and fitness

Starting point is 00:01:00 to teach you the next thing you get to focus on to build your coaching business. And not just any coaching business to build your coaching business. And not just any coaching business, your ideal coaching business. I'm all about building the one that's going to work for you. We're also going to be doing a lot of community building, novel movement sessions, breath work, and a little partying as well. So get your application in today at thestrongcoach.com. Click the Strong Coach Summit button to get registered. And once you do that, you'll get a little application come up.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Fill it out. It's pretty short. We just want to make sure that you're serious about showing up and we'll get you taken care of. Oh, and we got our sponsor, Organifi. They have the best green drink around. Make sure to go to Organifi.com slash shrug to save 20% on your order today. This is one of the few powders I put in my body these days.

Starting point is 00:01:50 Most of what I do is whole foods, and I still do some of the powders. And Organifi Green Drink is one of them. So start your day with this drink and feel the difference. I also finish my days up with the Organifi Gold. It has many ingredients you want to put in your body just before bed to maximize recovery. It's good for digestion and the nervous system so you can wake up rested and ready to attack the day. Make sure to go over to Organifi.com to get your order and save 20%. Now we've got a show with one of my favorite guests, Paul Cech.

Starting point is 00:02:24 He's made another round with us. It's going to be a lot of fun. We did this at Paleo FX. So one of my favorite humans on the whole planet. And I always learn something, and I know you will too. Enjoy the show. All right. We're here at Paleo FX in Austin, Texas.

Starting point is 00:02:44 And I got one of my favorite people to interview on the show yet again, and he's one of your favorites too. There's so many people who I ran into some people just on my way up here. I go, that interview you did with Paul Cech, that one changed my life. I decided to move a different town. They're moving to Austin in three weeks from a small town. People hear your message, and it causes transformation just simply by listening, which is pretty cool. Well, that's beautiful.

Starting point is 00:03:20 I feel inspired just hearing that, so thank you. Yeah. How is Paleo FX so far? Well, you know, you're the first thing I've done. So, so far it's pretty damn good. I've been dealing with all sorts of family juggling going on lately. So unfortunately, my second wife, Angie, got quite sick once we got here. And this morning she had to go to the hospital. And they think she might have a blood clot in her lung or pneumonia. So she's really been fighting hard. And we've used every natural approach under the sun.

Starting point is 00:03:56 And so it's just one of those things. You know, she was quite run down because Mauna was sick for a couple of weeks. He kept picking up stuff from school and so she got no sleep at all then she had to teach an hlc class and finally her voice went out and then it wasn't long after that that we were heading this way so i think as soon as she got here and started resting i think her immune system just kicked in full bore yeah and the travel doesn't help no yeah so it's just been one of those things where you have to kind of find your center and sit there the best you can while the storm goes on.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Let's talk about that because you seem very calm right now, even though she's going through this and your family's going through this, I guess you could say. We were hanging out just the other day. You had me on your show. And up until we were starting the recording, I'm getting hammered with text messages because the wrong materials were showing up for the show.

Starting point is 00:04:57 I've got two booths here, and I've never done the booth thing at Paleo Facts. It seemed like if it could go wrong, it was going wrong. And I pride myself on keeping it pretty cool, but I was getting a little flustered, and you gave me a little bit of advice on it. And then I also heard that nothing has gone, you have your booth here too,

Starting point is 00:05:16 and things were misfiring on that end as well. What's your advice on keeping cool and staying centered? Well, what I do is a method that I developed for myself just dealing with so much stress and managing a big business and loads of people. Got Ben Greenfield. I love it. Ben's coming in. Licking Paul's head. That's good saliva.

Starting point is 00:05:45 I heard that if you lick Paul's head, you'll get high. I'm a toad. I'm a DMT toad. Ben Greenfield just snuck up on and getting after Paul. So, you know, the thing is that I've been through so much trauma and so much challenge in my life and everything from bankruptcy to suicide in the family and death in the family multiple times. And I reached a point where I realized I've got the ability to get through pretty much anything. And so what came to me as a realization is if I can breathe, if I have access to food, water, shelter, warmth, and I'm still able to love myself and love other people, then any crisis is really just an event, but it's not a crisis.

Starting point is 00:06:49 And, you know, being an ex-paratrooper and going through some very intensive training and, you know, being in battlefields that are hot and feeling the buzz of all that and um live what are called live fire exercises and things like that i i just after enough life experience i just realized look you know if you lose your center you usually become part of the storm now you're just a piece of straw blowing it a thousand miles an hour about to be stuck into some oak tree somewhere to forever do nothing. Yeah. But if you realize that your capacity to think and your capacity to create and your capacity to contribute aren't compromised, then staying in the center is really important. And as a medicine man spirit guide,

Starting point is 00:07:47 I've conducted many, many healing ceremonies where people are going through really challenging situations. And everything from being violent and they're in an unconscious state so they can punch you, kick you scratch you i've been shit on vomited on i've had i've yet to be shit on so yeah i've had people you know not realize what they were doing and try to run off into the woods and oh yeah every other thing from screaming and begging the me to make the medicine quit and i'm'm like, well, that's why it's called a journey.

Starting point is 00:08:25 But the point is, I learned as long as a person's safe and they're breathing, then it's just a matter of letting the process unfold. And so I think as I've matured, I've learned that to gain wholeness, I have to tear pages out of the women's playbook. And a woman is a process-oriented being and a man's an outcome-oriented being. And so I found by, you know, noticing how compassionate and how stable a mother can be when her children are

Starting point is 00:09:01 going bananas or sick. And just from, you just from having two wives that a woman's much more engaged in the actual process, but far less focused on the outcome. So when your booth wasn't, you were worried your booth might not get together right. It's because you were really focused on the outcome. And I was saying to you, you know, essentially trust the process. Right. And the worst thing that'll happen is your booth will be the wrong color. Yeah. But it ain't going to stop you from making a living. So it's not that big a deal. And so there's a process that's a mothering orientation. So my work with plant medicines and people with a lot of mental, emotional and physical and sexual trauma and sexual trauma, and things like that,

Starting point is 00:09:46 and realizing, look, as long as a person's breathing, and they got food, water, shelter, warmth, they're safe, and there's love available to them, either from themselves or their family, then there really isn't any kind of an emergency. It's just a process that's unfolding. Yeah. And if you get too caught up in it, then you actually magnify it. Yeah. One of the things I found, you keep talking about breathing. Yeah. Some people get caught up in that story, get caught up in that storm.

Starting point is 00:10:18 Yeah. And what I found is they get short of breath. Yeah. Well, they're hyperventilating because their sympathetic system's turning on, so it's a fight-or-flight reaction. Yeah, and I've worked with a lot of people. I've seen a lot of people. I've seen it in myself where I go,

Starting point is 00:10:33 oh, just breathe, motherfucker. Yeah. Take a deep one into the belly, and then all of a sudden, oh, I've got some space where I can see what's actually happening because I get caught up in it. And I know there's a lot of people that have never taken that deep breath. That's extremely common.

Starting point is 00:10:49 What kind of advice do you give to someone who, you know, they find, oh, I actually don't breathe very well, and I find myself getting caught up in a lot of drama and other people's drama? Well, there's a few things. One, most of those people haven't been breathing well for most of their life. We're very sensitive to physical, emotional, mental trauma or anything that threatens our sense of being able to be loved. So if a kid's reprimanded too much then its sense of connection

Starting point is 00:11:26 to mother and father gets damaged and it's very scared if someone's attacking our identity or individuality you know if someone's like bagging you about the way you look or what you say or criticizing you well then immediately the the sense of self is under attack. So we have a defense reaction against that. And, you know, the thing is that if you are aware that you're not staying centered in yourself, and you can feel your heart rate speeding up, your rate speeding up you feel your muscles getting tight you feel sort of a cat ready to pounce kind of energy but you're not sure which direction to go so it kind of leaves you paralyzed because you don't know whether to jump forward backwards sideways up or what to do you just it's just the intensity of it but then if you bring your consciousness to your breath and just focus on making your belly as big as you can as you breathe in

Starting point is 00:12:29 and letting your lower ribs right above the kidneys expand laterally, which most people don't really have a consciousness of, but if you just put your hands right on top of your kidneys and as you fill your belly try to fill your hands as well so that it's not just going out because that region right there when you fill that lower part of your breath that pulls air into the bottom of your lungs but it also pumps the kidneys where the adrenals are so it's kind of like giving the organs a massage. So if you breathe and shift your consciousness into yourself, and I just talk to myself and say, it's okay, we don't need to get wound up. This is just a process unfolding. It's nothing we haven't been through before.

Starting point is 00:13:19 And then a technique I teach is based on what's called a centering breath in Buddhism. And what I say to people is as you inhale, imagine you're a tree growing toward the sun. And as you exhale, imagine you're growing roots deeper and deeper toward the center of the earth. So you're like a tree that's more and more stable. And just by focusing on inhale and reaching for the sky and exhale and reaching for the center, basically you're connecting the concept of heaven and earth together. So you're actually channeling your energy from the mind into the earth and the stability of the earth into your mind. mind so you actually tie those two polarities together because usually what's happening when a person's breath speeding up and their body's tightening up and their abdominals are tightening up is they're actually bringing their consciousness up into their thoughts and identifying with their thoughts so fully that their body is responding as though the thought is actually real but most

Starting point is 00:14:20 of those thoughts that people have are actually generating more perceived threat than there actually is in the environment because they're conditioned in ways that actually magnify things yeah so just by using centering breaths you can really anchor yourself and by asking yourself do i have breath do i have food water shelter Am I safe? Is there people that love me? If the answer to that is yes, then it's just a process. And the other technique that I developed many years ago is because so many people have what I call an inverted breathing pattern, which means when they inhale, their abdominal wall tightens. I've seen that. When I hold retreats, I take people through some breath work.

Starting point is 00:15:04 And there's some people like belly, chest I teach like go from the bottom up and sometimes we have to make it very I guess you would call it blocky and then amplify one section some people still have a really hard time

Starting point is 00:15:20 connecting those dots that's a classic fear pattern so that's someone who's been exposed to perceived threats that are great enough to put them into a chronic fight or flight state. And they... I see this with athletes all the time. Oh, it's dead common.

Starting point is 00:15:36 They would be considered some of the better athletes, say, in their gym or something like that. I've seen this in the best athletes in the world. I won't name names, but people that are very, very... As a matter of fact, it's more common than... Of all the athletes I've ever evaluated in my career, I've never seen a single normal breathing pattern.

Starting point is 00:15:54 Not one. And if they bring a normal breathing pattern, that would improve their performance. Well, actually, if you go all the way back to 1934, there's a book called Body Mechanics in Health and Disease by Joel E. Goldthwait et al. You've got so many. I got a little giggle because you have these libraries of books. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:16:16 And every time I see you, you reference a few of them. And just the amount of reading that you've done and that you can just recall blows me away well i have worked very hard at my craft yeah you know i've taken my craft seriously because i really have a genuine interest in helping people and improving the health and exercise environment because they're both not not very healthy but anyhow joel E. Goldthwait in his book, Body Mechanics and Health and Disease, actually shows x-ray analysis of people taking a full breath. And they used some kind of radio marker or dye to show where the diaphragm was at. And you can see the lungs. But he showed the average person is one third short of a normal respiratory volume

Starting point is 00:17:07 per breath and and he talked about how when people have shallow breathing like that that they get stagnant areas in the bottom third of the lung which is back then where they were really worried about things like tuberculosis and and viruses and bacteria can get caught down there because that part of the lung's not getting pumped. So it's kind of like, you know, if you've got like a gym bag or something, after a couple of months, there's piles of shit that's falling down to the bottom. And, you know, one day you go like, God, what in the world's in there? This thing's getting, you know, you find the car keys you thought you'd lost. You find your friend's cell phone. You find, you know, condoms or whatever the hell that you'd like oh my god i got a whole freaking life toolkit down

Starting point is 00:17:49 there i didn't even know it so when people don't have a normal healthy breath they don't pump the lung system effectively which means they're not getting enough lymphatic flow and therefore the immune system is not able to effectively protect that lower portion of the lung but he showed just by teaching people how to breathe properly they could easily get a normal diaphragmatic breath so for any athlete that has a breathing pattern dysfunction like that they're usually running around one third uh one third of their respiratory volume short per breath. So if you're in a sport like kettlebell or anything where there's a high lactate production or an aerobic activity.

Starting point is 00:18:32 Crossfit would fall in that category. Yeah, you're going to really suffer. You're going to hit your lactate threshold way sooner than if you had a normal breathing pattern. I was going to say, too, that the technique I developed to help people, you just take a piece of kite string and you tie it around at your waist at the belly button level. Women who have wide hips will have to use a little bit of tape just to stick it so it doesn't slide up above the belly button. But you tie it just so it's touching the surface of the skin, not tight.

Starting point is 00:19:01 It's a technique I use for activating the core, but instead of drawing the belly button in before you apply force, in this case, we're using what's called a negative feedback loop. So I tell people, I want you to make that string as tight as you can when you inhale. Are you standing or laying down? Anything. Okay. Any position. And I have people set their watch to beep every hour,

Starting point is 00:19:22 and I say do 12 centering breaths and go through the process I mentioned earlier. But the string gives them feedback so they can tell when they're actually expanding their belly. And this is really critical for women because a lot of women have been so socially conditioned to keep their abdominals flat for aesthetic reasons. Not just women, men? Well, a lot of women have it much worse.

Starting point is 00:19:44 I was going to say men. Women have it worse for sure. I've had women say, I don't want to belly breathe because I don't want to look fat. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so I've worked with supermodels and all sorts of models in my career. And it's so deeply ingrained. And, you know, they're the ones that taught the rest of the women in the world.

Starting point is 00:20:01 And the men are the ones that set them all up. Because it's usually a lot of these major corporations and people that set clothing standards for companies and want women in high heels and high heels screws a woman's breathing up if a woman has heels more than one centimeter it will immediately begin causing shifts in their breathing pattern and also the recruitment of their postural and stabilized muscles and the higher the heel is the worse it gets can you can you walk us through that i um i any any woman who i end up becoming friends with i am like ditch the if they're wearing heels and you gotta ditch these heels well because it's not just in the beginning i go it's it's fucking up your ankles that was what i and now knowing what i know now i go oh this is the entire chain is being yes so what happens is as the heel gets elevated

Starting point is 00:20:49 because the shoe is the ball of the foot staying on the ground the heels going up so if you imagine here's a simple way to imagine and imagine it if i fused all your joints, if I could magically fuse your joints, if I gave you a heel that was one inch tall, you would be leaning forward about a foot at your head, wouldn't you? Oh, yeah. So by the time you get to a four inch heel, you'd be at about a 40 degree forward angle. Yeah. So now you say, OK, now let's wave a magic one. What have you got to do to balance yourself so you see the as the heels come up the pelvis tips forward and thrust forward and then they have to counterbalance that by bringing their head back so what you see is what's called a lower cross syndrome being generated so the

Starting point is 00:21:36 pelvis tips anterior which lengthens the lower abdominal significantly shortens the lumbar erectors so you have the tip forward pelvis, the trunk leaning back, then the head comes down and forward. So the scalene muscles and the anterior neck muscles adaptively shorten the shoulders round forward, shortening the pec. And then the long extensors of the neck

Starting point is 00:21:56 actually end up getting longer because the head's down and forward, but the short extensors of the neck get short and tight. And so the scapular retractors also get progressively longer and weaker, because whenever you put a sustained stretch on a muscle, it adds sarcomeres, and that begins to happen within 24 hours. So what you actually see is this pattern of short, tight, long, weak, short, tight, long, weak, and then you can't effectively stabilize the joint structure anymore.

Starting point is 00:22:24 So if someone like that, for example, gets up tired one morning, tight long week and then you can't effectively stabilize the joint structure anymore so someone like that for example is gets up tired one morning and they're taking a suitcase to the airport or something and that the rotational torque can be enough that they can't stabilize it so all of a sudden they're on the floor in terrible back pain or their neck comes get subluxed or you know and it also sets up chronic fields of tension that then disrupt the flow of energy through the chakra system and it also disrupts the flow of energy through meridians so this is why i tell people one of the most important things to do to heal emotions and mental challenges is to learn how to mobilize and stretch your body effectively because if your body

Starting point is 00:23:02 can breathe your psyche can breathe right the mind's always mirroring itself in the body like it's a choice to wear high heels so the choice comes with the mirroring of the effects of that choice right and a lot of a lot of times that wow i don't know if i can make assumptions here but this is what i've found is women are like well i look better in heels well that's because they're socially conditioned to look better. But if they were from a Native American Indian tribe and you threw a pair of heels on them, it would take them five minutes to say these things are useless. I can't do anything in these things.

Starting point is 00:23:35 Yeah. All right. So somebody gets, they feel themselves getting off-centered. They take the breaths. Is there a conversation they have with themselves? Well, you know, what I do and what I teach my students to do is just ask yourself, what is my dream right now? What is the optimum outcome that I can imagine happening right now?

Starting point is 00:24:00 And then basically use your intention, right? So spirit is unconditioned until we think a thought. In other words, God is unconditional love, or the zero-point field is basically an open menu of possibilities, which are infinite. So, you know, in your case, we'll use your case. I would say, okay, Mike, what I would like you to do right now is visualize the booth looking exactly like you'd like it and seeing the products that you're missing arriving on time and visualize your staff putting this together and visualize all of you celebrating how exciting it is to have your booth right.

Starting point is 00:24:45 And so what happens is because pure possibility is the background of all things that we experience. Like, you know, you and I are talking right now, but behind all this and behind all the show is pure potential. So, you know, if you look at a sine wave, like when you look at someone's electrocardiogram or electroencephalogram or any device that measures waves, everything rises out of that flat line there's your positive yang potential and it drops down so systolic diastolic for example inhalation would be up because you're filling yourself exhalation would be down you're emptying yourself so there you have those two potentials up is yang or positive down is yin or negative but in the middle of that is pure potential so there's infinite potential coming out of the flat line so the flat lines got that magic energy and quantum physics shows that whatever the bias of the scientist is affects

Starting point is 00:25:39 the outcome of the study yeah and there's you know myriads of studies with random number generators and static generators and you know there's there's uh i've seen studies where they take people and have them flip coins and they'll do thousands of coin flips and then they'll mathematically analyze what was the percentage of heads versus tails and it's almost always 50%, or right about 50%. Then they take the same people and say, now focus your mind on flipping the coin to get heads, and you see a significant number of increase in the number of heads. Why? Because they're tipping the possibility from random to an outcome by changing the probability, because our minds are actually part of an interfacing with everything that exists so if you're unconscious of it it doesn't mean

Starting point is 00:26:31 that it's that you're not connected it just means you're unconscious of your connection right so when we focus our mind on the outcome that we want we're really doing the best that we can do to use our consciousness to put spirit into tension so what was in pure potential is now intention and your intention is the product of your awareness of the outcome that you want so you're actually channeling the flow of spirit into a chosen outcome which is all of our choice to do. Now, that doesn't mean you're always going to get your way because there's many other people's desires, thoughts, and dreams. For example, if there's 150 people that don't like you and they're hoping that your

Starting point is 00:27:17 booth doesn't show up, but they're harmonized and they're all thinking the same thought at once. Well, unless you can find, unless you're a very powerful person who's got enough power to outdo 150 people thinking the same thought, you're going to have to go round up a bunch of your friends and it's going to be a mental tug of war. Then it becomes a probability issue, right? And quantum physics shows that it's all about probability.

Starting point is 00:27:41 So the point I'm making is you, like right now, my wife's at the hospital and yes i i that makes me sad and feels a bit scary and she's pregnant you know she's like six almost seven months pregnant with our little girl and you know they're going to want to jack her up with antibiotics and all sorts of crap right which just you know makes me a little cagey but every time i think that thought i go now is my reminder to open my heart and thank great spirit and i visualize her as whole and i visualize visualize her as healthy and i visualize that that everything works out beautifully and i I just keep saying, she really needed this much rest. She really needed time to get away from having to mother mana

Starting point is 00:28:33 and just to be able to be taken care of by herself. And so I have to be brave enough to trust that Great Spirit has the big plan. You know, there's an old saying, if you want to make God laugh, tell him or her you've got a plan. And so we do our part, but we have to realize we're co-creators with everybody else in the whole universe. And that's where sometimes you have to be brave enough to say, okay, if it didn't work out the way I wanted it, then there must be a process beyond my comprehension going on. And I've learned through a lot of challenging, painful experiences in my life that if I just trust the process, there's always a silver lining in a cloud of gray. You just have to wait for it

Starting point is 00:29:14 and be brave enough to wait for it and keep doing your best and keep using your mind positively so that you can shift the probability to the best of your ability. And in my life experience, everything that was scary, you know, now there's things like, you know, my brother committing suicide. There wasn't a silver lining in that one, because you can't bring your brother back. And people that commit suicide often don't want to come back. So I have to trust that there's a greater plan for his life, and that he fulfilled

Starting point is 00:29:46 the soul commitments he came to fill and that he's in another process that's, you know, an octave out of range of our abilities here. In other words, our perception of our universe is only what we can perceive of, and that depends on how developed you are. But all I'm saying is I can't bring my brother back, but I can trust that the beauty that creates the universe is also managing him with the same level of perfection that the whole universe has managed. Yeah. What are some limitations that people bump up against?

Starting point is 00:30:26 I imagine people hear this conversation and they go, well, that's great. I've tried to put my attention on what I want, but it never happens. Or, you know, I also find if I challenge people to, I'll have some of my clients, I'll ask them to, like, let's visualize a certain period of time into the future. And they basically break down. Yeah. They haven't done it very much. There's been a lot of, what I noticed is a lot of people are overly focused on the past or unconsciously focused on the past. Well, that's what my answer is for you.

Starting point is 00:31:08 If you look at Arnold Patton's universal principles, he says, if you don't like what's happening in your life, look carefully at what you're choosing unconsciously. To give you an example of exactly what you're talking, if you look at, there's research studies on spoon bending, using your mind to bend spoons which a lot of people thinks bullshit but it's absolutely not it's been heavily studied scientifically and one of the research studies i saw was quite telling they found people that teach spoon bending found that

Starting point is 00:31:37 they can teach kids between about five and eight years old very easily with very little resistance and very quickly. But adults often can't do it at all, no matter how hard they try or how many sessions they take of training. But a little girl or a little boy can walk in and in five minutes bend a spoon. And so what the research shows is that we have layers and layers and layers of conditioning of disbelief. And we've been so conditioned to believe that the mind does not control matter or interface with matter and that, you know, it goes against Newtonian laws of physics. So we get all this academic kind of negative filtration. So our perception of what's possible gets narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower. And then if you have a skeptical father or a skeptical mother, or even worse than

Starting point is 00:32:30 skeptical, someone that just sees the dark and everything, or if you're really afraid of your own potential, right? If someone thinks, God, if I could bend a spoon, what else could I do? And then that goes, well, would it be fair if I did that? Because other people don't have this ability. And your mind can just start generating all sorts of insecurities. And a lot of people are as afraid of success as they are of death. So when I work with people like that, it usually takes some time to work through and identify where are their own blocking factors. And the fact that a kid can sit next to you and in five to ten minutes learn what you haven't been able to learn in months tells you

Starting point is 00:33:11 that you're actually the limiting you're the one that's the the resistance yeah what do you uh so a lot of people you know one of one of my practices i've had is I grew up and I went to school and had more of an academic background at a certain point. And then I started seeing the limitations of that world. And being in a world of if it's not something that's being studied inside the United States and if, and, uh, then it's not really valid. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:51 A lot of the things that are happening, things that are older than say a hundred years, you know, if it didn't happen in the last century, if it didn't happen in the United States, the, the research has thrown out and it, what I find to be really,

Starting point is 00:34:06 so there's, there's, I find that people put a lot of importance on that, but those same people who don't want to look outside of that will cite a newspaper article about a single study and call that science. Yeah. So it's a little, and I, there was a point in time where I was super skeptical of everything. And if it wasn't, if it didn't happen recently in research, I didn't really buy into it.

Starting point is 00:34:35 Yeah. And then I go, well, this is really limiting because this is actually, I started, I started having experiences where I go, there is way more than this. And what's happening in science right now is not going to, it's, now is not going to help me get to know what I really want to know.

Starting point is 00:34:50 We're going to take a break. Okay, but the highest level of Scripture, there is something there to inspire you to become the best person you can be, the greatest lover you can be, the greatest teacher you can be, the greatest friend you can be, the greatest father, mother, brother, warrior, you know, but it takes a lot of intelligence to jump up because once you get pat ethical means you're just still doing what someone else tells you to do. Here's the rule book. Allegorical. Now you've got to have a much more powerful mind because you have to say, wait a minute, what is the story pointing to? I would say the majority of Americans are probably in that allegorical range. No, not even close. No. About 65,

Starting point is 00:35:50 based on studies, about 65 to 72% of the U.S. population is at the fundamental level of consciousness, which in Ken Wilber's model is fundamentalism. It would be a blue. It would be blue, yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:06 Okay. Yeah. You still... Man. You know what? I was reading recently. It was still putting most people in blue. Only like 15% in the orange.

Starting point is 00:36:16 Yeah. When you look at spiral dynamics, once you get to the second tier, which is yellow and turquoise, only 2% of the world population crosses from green into uh yellow yeah and research by claire graves showed that any one person when he was testing classes of university students entire classrooms at a time, he found on average one person at yellow or turquoise had 10 times the processing power, the ability to solve challenges of all the other students in the class combined. So one person who reaches the level to interpret

Starting point is 00:37:00 scripture inspirationally actually has ten times the processing power of everybody else in the room and there you have you know a sage a reishi a master a Buddha a Dalai Lama a Yogananda you know dot dot dot an Eckhart Tolle a Deepak Chopra right so a lot of it really just boils down to mental laziness and the problem is the more conditioned you are to a certain belief the scarier it is for you to find out you're wrong because the more conditioned you are usually the more conditioned everybody in your circles are and therefore if you find out truth, now you are coming face to face with the truth and you have to decide what will happen to me if I embody the truth. So it's usually scarier for people to find the truth because now they have to come face to face with the dragon of the truth. And if the dragon of

Starting point is 00:38:01 the truth says, oh, by the way, God won't burn you in hell, but everybody around you wants you to think that or you're not part of the club, now you have to be brave enough to go off on your own and be an adult and find a new tribe that is congruent with the idea that God won't burn you in hell. into their individuality. They haven't become whole as an individual. They're sort of an extension of a group, like a finger on a hand that doesn't know it's actually an individual, right? So they get trapped in groupthink, which is called sheep herd mentality. So you have to be brave enough to be the black sheep in order to really grow yourself physically emotionally mentally or spiritually because you become more different every step you move towards higher levels of intelligence higher levels of fitness higher levels of love higher levels of anything right the center of gravity of the average person if you look at the chakra system the center of gravity of the average person in the Western culture is somewhere between the second and third chakra, which means they're kind of caught between sexual pleasure and meeting those base needs and getting enough energy to make it through their day and establishing their identity as somebody that they feel is valuable enough to be interested in loving and having a relationship with. So you can see that in the marketing because almost everything is how to look cool, how to have the right car,

Starting point is 00:39:31 how to have the right status to be acceptable, the right fashion. You got to have the Air Jordan shoes, you know, and you got to get laid. If you're not sexy, then, you know, so what do you got? You got a bunch of very obese women wearing very expensive perfume hoping to get laid, right? And so there you see the marketing is custom designed to meet people where their mind is at. Because if you market too high of a level, if you market a less heeled world, most of those people couldn't give a shit. They're too busy trying to get laid and look good. Yeah. So there you go.

Starting point is 00:40:09 So somebody is hearing this and they go, oh, shit, I've been – I recognize because I've even run into people today that go, oh, wow, I've been stuck in a way and I'm ready to break out. If somebody wants to break out, they're hearing this and they go, oh, what are some things that they can question first or what are the first steps or recommended books? Well, there's a mountain of books out there. One of the great books that I find very helpful

Starting point is 00:40:40 for this kind of stuff is Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. It's a fantastic book. He was a plastic surgeon, but he was a deeply wise and intelligent man who studied the mind and how it really works and how to use it effectively. So Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza is a great book. Love that one.

Starting point is 00:41:03 Yeah, I read that a couple years ago. I did it every day for six weeks. Did this hour-long guided meditation. Yeah. That was a game changer for me at the time. Yeah. I think one of the books by Deepak Chopra is quite good. I think it's The Seven Laws of Spirituality.

Starting point is 00:41:21 It's been a long time since I read it. But it shows you what the shadow is and and you know how it manifests itself and gives you some working tools but the thing is always first in my system you have to become conscious of what your dream is because if you don't know what you want more than what you've got you're not inspired to go after it so you're just going to keep being the same old thing i i tell i quote a psychologist named jerry wesh who says when you have a big enough dream you don't need a crisis and most people are just in crisis mode because everybody else around them is in crisis mode so they're conditioned to be in crisis mode and when they're not in crisis mode they don't know how to

Starting point is 00:41:57 live they can't handle silence they can't handle uh too much joy or too much success or too much peace because they're conditioned to be in a state of chaos yeah and you know if you look at most households you put up invisible cameras and households you'd be shocked to see what was going on in there so once you identify what your dream goal or objective is then you have to say where am i out of balance and look at that relative to i have my students look at relative to four doctors or four categories. Where are you out of balance with creating happiness for yourself? What's missing?

Starting point is 00:42:31 If you go see a real shaman, they're typically going to ask you four or five questions. When did you stop singing? The date you say you stopped singing, that's probably the day you begin getting your disease. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing, that's probably the day you begin getting your disease. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop enjoying stories? When did you stop enjoying being alone with yourself? And when did you lose your sense for the magic, mystery, and awe of life? And the answers to those questions pin the tail right on the donkey as to the day you started deteriorating and becoming less than your optimal self.

Starting point is 00:43:04 And so how do you heal it? Well, you start singing and you start dancing and you start enjoying stories and you take time to be alone with yourself and really love yourself. So you're not so codependent and needy to get love from other people and to be constantly gratified and propped up like a little child. And then you go stand under the stars at night and you look up and go oh my god here i am eating breathing making love complaining a lot but what a fucking amazing reality it is that there's over a hundred trillion stars out there there's a hundred trillion cells in my body the average of which is made of 100 trillion atoms each.

Starting point is 00:43:46 What's the fucking probability of me and you being here having this conversation when moving at the speed of light, you and I would still be in our galaxy 110 years from now and there is about 100,000 fucking galaxies out there. And every time they build a bigger telescope, they go, oh my God, we were wrong. It's bigger than that. Okay, so you do the math on the magic involved and me and you being here together at Paleo FX.

Starting point is 00:44:15 And if that doesn't inspire you to go, it's a miracle. I'm inspired right now. Then you're already fucking dead. So just go bury yourself. Smoke some better pot. Find a new shaman. And a new doctor. And maybe a new accountant too.

Starting point is 00:44:38 Alright, we're up on our time. Unfortunately. We're going to do this again. I think this is maybe our or what third fourth fifth i don't know who knows we're gonna keep doing this because we have fun uh thanks for hopping on the mic in the midst of uh all this craziness of paleo effects yeah uh where can people find you well my podcast is living 4d with paul check that's c-h-e-k so living 4d with Paul Cech. That's C-H-E-K. So Living 4D with Paul Cech. You can search that on any Google or anywhere.

Starting point is 00:45:08 You'll find it all over the place. Or go to the Cech Institute, c-h-e-k-institute.com, and there's a section for the podcast there. There you can see a myriad of my educational programs, books, audios, you name it. 35 years of work compiled there. My most famous book being How to Eat, Move, and Be Healthy. I think we've sold 180,000 copies of it now.

Starting point is 00:45:29 I have so many coaches. They go, if I could read one book about health, this could make me a better coach. I tell them that one. People have been coaching for years and years and years. When I read that book, I had been in it for a long time and I was like maybe I'll learn a couple things it's the foundation for what you should be doing for your training, your coaching, all that stuff if you haven't read that yet, you have to

Starting point is 00:46:02 you're missing out if you haven't read it. It's got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of five-star comments on Amazon. It's topped the bestsellers list on Amazon a few times for the health and fitness category. And then my YouTube channel has well over 500 videos that I've put up as video blogs, which is my social service to the world. That's my social work. And that's youtube.com forward slash Paul C-H-E-K live. And there's, you know, a mountain there.

Starting point is 00:46:31 And then my PPS Success Mastery Program, where I have my 12 lessons that are the most common roadblocks that stop people from living and loving and creating effectively. That's ppssuccess.com. And it's also housed within the Czech Institute website. So you can find it right inside the Czech Institute website. But there's loads of great stuff like this. In fact, I have an interview coming out with you on Living 4D with Balcek and Mike Bledsoe. It's a long one too. You're going to love it. By the way, I'll note that was the most difficult interview I've ever had

Starting point is 00:47:06 because most people ask me a question, and then I answer it, and they go, okay. And they're like, mind blown. Okay, for you? You're like, okay, and we'll go deeper, and we'll go deeper, and we'll go deeper. I'm like, whoa, I've never been asked these questions. And so it was really cool to you know it was things I had thought about but not and had some conversations with friends about but not come out and be like this is what I have found you know so it was it was a a growth experience for me just

Starting point is 00:47:37 to be interviewed by you so I did a wild one with Aubrey Marcus yesterday for his podcast and his first question is and it was the whole conversation or the whole interview was what's your take on the devil very deeply on the devil I think it'll blow people's minds oh nice yeah so go listen to that one too well thanks for joining me today

Starting point is 00:47:57 thank you very much and blessings to all of you oh we know you love this show if you want to keep seeing the you want to keep seeing the show, want to keep hearing the show, go over to MikeIsLeaving.com so you can stay connected as we grow. That is MikeIsLeaving.com. Go check it out.

Starting point is 00:48:15 For you coaches out there, we got the summit coming up. Go over to TheStrongCoach.com. Click the Strong Coach Summit button and start your process so you can join us. We're going to have a blast. Later.

Barbell Shrugged - Mental Tactics for Success w/ Paul Chek — The Bledsoe Show #138

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.