Ep 525 - Spirit Gym (feat. Paul Chek)
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All right, Paul Cech, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I mean, thanks for coming. I've been really thinking about getting you on here for years. Is that right? I swear to God, you seem like I started watching you probably 10 years ago. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a, cause you're, I guess, what's your title? You're a holistic health practitioner. I'm a holistic health practitioner by license. Yeah. But you're also like the level of like depth you go into and stuff. It's like,

Seems like you're a doctor, although you probably can't say you are. A lot of people think I am. But, you know, holistic health means the whole, right? So I pretty much deal with the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the spiritual aspects of life.

People usually have all those problems at once. Yeah, and deal with maybe one physical maybe. Well, usually the physical problems are unless someone falls off a ladder or gets in a car accident, 85% of all orthopedic injuries are idiopathic, which means the patient doesn't even know how they got them. Really? So when you consider 85 out of 100 people going to doctors because of injuries to necks, backs, muscles, joints, everything,

don't know how it is that they actually got injured. What you come to realize as a therapist, you can either just keep treating symptoms or you've got to figure out why is this thing manifesting in their life. And it's almost always things like diet problems or

lifestyle challenges, relationship problems, beliefs that are disempowering, being scared of God. Yeah, yeah. So what do you think in terms of like, as like a holistic health practitioner, have you ever taken, I'm sure you have, but like what has it been like taking someone who was in like

a pretty bad state physically, emotionally, mentally, all that stuff. And like really transforming them from like the, you know, if they're had like, say they had like indigestion, back pain, anxiety, like how, how it, like what, I guess what I'm trying to ask you is like, what is it like to transform somebody like that? And be like, is there some people that it's just like, there's nothing you can do or like, there's always something you can do, but it just depends on how motivated the person is to heal and to grow, you know? Um,

I created the term the pain teacher. So when the pain teacher shows up in your life, it's a good idea to be a good student. So the first thing I identify is what are you willing to heal for and grow for that you're inspired enough to do the work to heal and grow? Because if I don't identify a dream bigger than your crisis, then you'll become so accustomed to your crisis, then you'll just...

Turn yourself into someone who's taking drugs and seeing doctors for the rest of your life. And that's exactly what they want. Yeah. So you're saying that's kind of the first area you go into is like, what are you, what are you doing? Like, what's your point? Like, what's your purpose? Well, I ask what, what is your dream for yourself? Why, why do you want to heal? What are you going to do with yourself? I have to have something that inspires and motivates them to,

Because it's very, very rare that I can rehabilitate somebody that doesn't have to make changes in their diet and their lifestyle and their beliefs and the behaviors that led to the problem. What percentage of people will you deal with have like zero overarching dream to their life or just kind of going through the motions? I would say probably about 85 to 90% of people really don't know anything.

what they're doing in their life other than making money to try to survive. Yeah. And so that's a real big part of the therapy is helping them get clear on what's meaningful to them and what fills their heart, what gives them a sense of purpose beyond just existing. Yeah. That's, I think that checks out. I really, cause that's, I call it the drift. Whenever I get caught up in just the day to day bullshit of just like, you know, am I selling tickets for standup by this? And I, and I have no overarching purpose of like, what am I doing? Who am I doing it for? Um,

What is the point of my existence? Am I actually helping anybody or am I just fucking pumping resources into myself like unconsciously and thoughtlessly? It's called Flatland. Flatland. Yeah, yeah. I spent a lot of time there myself. And that's how I found you. I was on YouTube just finding like workouts and this and that. And I'd be like, oh, that's kind of a cool workout. Then I'd watch you talk and I was like...

Damn, this guy knows a lot about kind of a lot of shit. So how did you get into that? Because you were a paratrooper? I was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, yeah. And then you got into motocross racing? I was racing motocross when I was a young man before I became a paratrooper. Okay, so that was first. And I was a competitive fighter. I was a boxer and a kickboxer. And I played a lot of sports. But I became...

I fought my way onto the Army boxing team while I was in the 82nd Airborne Division. And then I became the trainer of the Army boxing team. Oh, okay. And the team doctor was an osteopathic physician. So I was put in charge of nutrition. I was put in charge of designing and developing all the training programs for the fighters. And I took them all through them personally. I didn't just write shit on the board. I did everything with them.

I was also in charge of managing the gym and I represented the army in triathlon at the same time. First, I was a fighter on the boxing team, but I was also representing the army in triathlon. And my company commander said, hey, I'm going to bet a lot of money on you to win the army triathlon. So if you want to stop boxing so you can train full time for triathlon, I'll let you do it. You just got to win.

And I knew that I wasn't going to turn pro because my fighting style is too aggressive. And I already had lots of guys on the boxing team that showed a lot of signs of brain injury already as early as, you know, 19 and 20 years of age.

You're saying like from the damage you were inflicted and you're saying just in general, it was getting knocked around so much. No, just, you know, a lot of the guys on the team had 300 plus fights. Oh God. They started boxing. Most of them when they're around eight years old. Jesus. These are like the best fighters in the world. The only teams that ever beat us was Cuba and Russia were the third tank ranked amateur boxing team in the world.

Jesus. So it's very serious. So, okay. So, oh yeah, it wasn't just like palling around like you guys were like doing heavy competitive boxing. No, no, this is hardcore. We trained six, six and a half, seven hours a day. Damn. And traveled all over, you know, we, our teams travel all over the world competing. And it's a big recruitment tool for the military. Okay. Army sports is quite big. That actually makes sense. And so-

My team doctor was an osteopath. So once I left, I told the coaches I was going to leave and train full time for triathlon. They already knew that I knew a lot that they didn't know because they've always been stunned the fact that I could, you know, get up earlier than they did run six to 10 miles a day, go swimming in the pool for an hour while they're eating lunch. And then after work, I'd go ride 25 to 60 miles at night, uh,

And while I'm a fighter on the team, I'm also competing in triathlon. And they're like, how in the hell do you do this? And how did you do that? That's insane. Well, I was raised on a farm, a big farm, 142 acre farm by a very, very intense father who did not know what a child was and worked us like slaves in a concentration camp. Yeah.

And as I said to the guys in the last podcast, if you want to know what real fitness is, let me hand you an ax and let you split firewood for about eight hours straight. And when your hands are covered in blisters and your father doesn't give a shit, you'll know what real fitness is. Jesus Christ. So you had like, this was like nothing to you then to be that active and move around. It wasn't that it was like nothing. I had to train extremely hard. You know, I was competing at a very high level in triathlon. I was in the top 10 overall, even with the pros and six overall.

USTS races, which is, you know, that's the full blown elite triathlon. That's the real triathlon organization. And I was, you know, a ranked fighter and I was, I did very well in motocross. And so it was really just that my father built such a strong work ethic into me and to all of my siblings that it wasn't,

out of character for me to realize how hard I had to work and I don't like losing. So...

I just took the work ethic that was built into me from the farm and just applied that to something I wanted to do instead of something I was being told to do. And that was very freeing. Yeah, it's kind of nice. And I guess the farm gives people like a sun up to sundown mentality. You're not kind of like, well, I'm clocking up. It's like as soon as the sun's up, you got to get out. You're at it. Yeah. My father's rule was you feed and water the animals before you eat. And if I ever catch you eating or drinking anything before those animals are taken care of, you'll never forget it. And he meant it.

I guess he would just dole out some punishment. He could dole it out. So you got out of there. I guess that makes sense. You're doing motocross in the military. So how did you – did you like start absorbing kind of like health and holistic nutrition stuff? My mother was a yogi. She became a yogi when I was 12. She'd been to India three times for advanced initiation. So we –

My mother joined the Self-Realization Fellowship, which is the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, which is already quite holistic. And my mother was already just naturally into holistic everything. You know, we raised our own food. We slaughtered our own animals. We pretty much could live off of our farm. We milked our own cows, made our own butter, our own cheese, our own ice cream, our own bread. So...

I lived a very ground up life. And I also was very aware when I was young competing in athletics that whenever the guys that come from the area where I come from out in the country played city teams, we destroyed them. Yeah. And so it was easy for me to see the difference between the guys that came off of farms, like on football and on hockey, they were just a lot tougher and they could take a lot more beating.

So I already had an early – the handwriting was on the wall that if you eat too many Cheez-Its and drink too much soda pop and sit around, then you don't have the right stuff to be a good athlete. Yeah. So what would you – if someone is going from like that state of like the standard like Cheez-Its, all that stuff –

If like say that starting at zero, like total inactivity, terrible diet, like what would you tell people to do if you had to give them like four? I don't know if this is like an annoying question, but like how do people get started? Like if like you want to give someone like a very basic thing to like start yourself to being actually like healthy and all that. Well, after many, many years as a therapist and a specialist in conditioning and a guy that's worked with countless of the best athletes in the world,

I synthesized what one must understand in order to be successful in any kind of endeavor, whether it be to just be healthy so that you don't have to deal with pain all the time or to play with your grandkids or to, you know, be able to hike to the top of your favorite mountain or to win a gold medal. And

Basically, I broke it down to four key areas that we have to have conscious awareness of, which I call the four doctors. And the reason I call them that is because if you spend time with these four doctors, you don't need the ones that give you drugs and do surgery. The first one, and that's the most important, is doctor happiness. So first, you have to be conscious about what is happy making for you.

Be committed to doing it regularly enough that you don't need to turn to drugs or depend on other people to make you happy because that leads to a lot of relationship problems and health problems and codependencies. And Dr. Happy is also the aspect of your psyche that you must be clear on what your dream goal or objective for your life is at any given time.

And once you're clear on what your dream goal or objective for your life is, then you have to establish clear values so you know when to say yes and when to say no. Because if you have no values, you never know when to say no. And so you'll eat whatever someone sticks in front of you or drink whatever someone sticks in front of you. And next thing you know, you feel like shit and you look just as bad. Yeah. So –

The values you've got to set have to do with the other three doctors. First, you have to establish what am I going to do that's happy making regularly so you know what you're doing. Like some people like to play guitar. Some people like to read books. Some people like to watch movies. Some people like to go hiking. Some people like a mix of all those. But if you don't build that into your schedule, then you wake up one day, five years have gone by and your whole family is addicted. You feel like shit and you go, what happened?

Then you have to be clear on what your movement needs are. So Dr. Movement first says, what do I need to have baseline health? So you don't have to be an athlete, but you need to do at least 30 to 60 minutes of exercise a day depending on the intensity and the type of exercise.

which we could just call movement, right? So even if it's walking, I would tell people if you're just going to walk, I would recommend you build yourself up to an hour a day or you're going to end up being sedentary because you've got to deal with the force of gravity. Gravity is enough to wear a sedentary person out. I've met many people that got winded just walking up a flight of stairs. In fact, I found a research study once saying that 50% of people –

seeing medical doctors hit their lactate threshold walking from the waiting room to the examination room damn so they're getting like a burning pain they're getting they're getting what you would get after a set of heavy squats where you know you can you feel like the last couple of reps are hard to get out yeah they're getting that halfway to the doctor's examination room that's 50 of people damn that's crazy

So first you got to use movement to create baseline health. And there's just a, you know, the list of benefits of movement I could sit here and talk for hours on mentally, emotionally, physically, hormonally, things like enhanced circulation, enhanced digestion, enhanced metabolism, enhanced mood. The benefits of movement are too many to list and there's tons and tons of science on it.

So then once you know what your dream – say your dream is to – let's say you're a park ranger. But you started, like you said, eating garbage and not knowing any better. Once you've got baseline health, then I would say, okay, well, how fit do you need to be to do your work? Climbing mountains, potentially having to rescue people, carrying equipment around, building trails, doing the things a park ranger does. And then I would say, okay, now you've got to build yourself up.

I like to see my goal with all my athletes that I train and all the patients I work with is to build you up to 30% higher of a physical capacity than the demands of your work, sports, or play environment. Gotcha. That way you have enough reserve that if you're tired or if you are having to deal with a crisis or you get a surprise, like say the park ranger is dealing with

extremely heavy snow and someone gets caught out there and they're out on a 24-hour hunt to find someone, you need the reserves. Life always throws you curveballs, you know that. Yeah. So my goal as a therapist is always to identify what level of fitness they need, say a professional hockey player, and say, now I'm going to build you up so you're 30% beyond that. Yeah. Which means you're extremely fit. Yeah, that's pretty crazy, yeah. But that is bulletproofing, right? That way you're safe.

Then you've got to look at doctor diet. You know, the old saying, you are what you eat is very true, but there's another one that's just as true. You are what you don't excrete. So the more toxins you accumulate in your body, the more poison do you get, the more out of balance your physiology is, and the more complications you have, and the more you invite things like fungal infections and parasite infections and a lot of health degenerating things. And first it starts off as fatigue, then it becomes illnesses,

Often minor illnesses, then major ones, then diseases, then death. So you can tell where someone's at by just looking at that stage of progression. First, you get tired. Then you start having colds and flus. Then you start having stuff that a doctor would call a disease like diabetes. Then you die.

Die. Damn. Yeah, so basically just move around, know what you're up to, and eat good food. You got to eat high quality food, which means it's got to be certified organic or it's covered with farming chemicals, which will poison you and kill you slowly. So what do you think about people who have like, I've noticed a certain type of machismo around organic produce where they go, I'm paying.

Same fucking thing. Well, there's a lot of – one, most people don't really have enough knowledge to be even intelligent in making a decision like that, sadly. There is a real problem because a lot of the major corporations such as Pepsi, Coke, Cadbury, Snickers, and many others that you would never expect own organic certifications. Yeah. But they also own large farms that produce commercial food.

So what they do to buck the system is they actually do research. They fund university agricultural programs as well. So what they'll do is they'll take their commercially grown chemical-laden poison. They'll do research on it to analyze nutritional values of it.

Then they'll send in organic food under a different label, never telling you they own that label. And it's grown on the same burnt out soils, but without the chemicals added. And they say, look, there's no nutritional difference. And so they've been trying to wipe out the organic concept for years because they don't want to have to compete in a market that requires them to manage the soils properly because it's slower and it's more expensive. And it actually is respectful of nature. What a concept. Yeah.

So a lot of people have gotten this false conception that organic is no better, or they make excuses like, oh, you know, there's so much toxins in the air or there's overspray from chemicals. And I say, well, you know, there's a scale of toxicity. If you're getting an organic farm, yeah, there might be some overspray or some mild chemtrails hitting your food, but it's still on a scale of toxicity, a lot less stressful on your body.

So the thing is, is that you can't really rely on organic certifications because almost all of these, there's over a hundred of them now and only about two or three of them are actually legitimate. So like what about like Whole Foods produce? Like anything? Whole Foods started off good, but now it's just a corporate whore. Yeah. So there's another example of a place that once had good ideas, as is often the case, just like religions, they start off with good intentions and become brainwashing machines. Yeah. Right? And as the world goes.

And so the thing to do is go to farmer's markets. And the organic – real organic certifications are not only expensive but to get a real organic certification, the organization sends a soil scientist to your property. They analyze your soil to see if there's mineral imbalances in it and if there's any chemicals in it that are dangerous. Then you have to go through a two-year gestation period where they will – as part of the fee, they will help you balance the soils properly.

get the microorganisms healthy and the microorganisms will catabolize the chemicals in the soil. But it usually takes about two years for microorganisms to clean the soil. And only then can you get certified once they retest your soil. So most of these corporations will not go through that process. Yeah. Okay.

So a lot of farmers won't either because they don't have the money. A lot of farmers are barely making it. So if you pay $15,000 a year for an organic certification, but you're only making $20,000 a year after you've met your expenses –

So the point I'm making is if you go to farmer's markets and just ask, do you farm organically? Do you use any chemicals on this food? Most of them will say no. Yeah. The other thing is you can taste the difference. Yeah. You can taste the difference. There's no... If you eat real organic food and compare it to non-organic food, it's the difference between eating a styrofoam cup and real food. It's kind of depressing. My brother grows a lot of food himself. He doesn't have a farm. He just kind of like loves gardening and stuff. And having a potato, like...

From the store versus – or having his potato versus one from the store. It's like depressing. Absolutely. You eat it and you're like, oh, fuck. This is what this tastes like? You're just eating empty shell of a living organism. Yeah, it's terrible. So the two key things – there's three key things. One, you have to be adequately hydrated with high-quality water. In my book, How to Eat, Move, and Be Healthy, you have right there. I tell you what high-quality water is, how to find it, and how to –

assess it from pH to mineral density and things like that. Total dissolved solids is what it's called. But once you're eating high quality food, then you have to eat the right proportions based on what your body's needs are. There's no such thing as a diet that works for any number of people. That's absolute bullshit. Every one of us is as different on the inside as we are on the outside. And just like we all have different fingerprints, we all have different needs. Even within the same family, you can see wildly different needs for food. You can have

In the same family, you can have someone sitting at one end of the table that does fine on almost a vegetarian diet. And on the other end, you've got a total carnivore. Why? One might be an athlete. One might have parasites and fungal infection and have totally different biochemistry. One may have a completely different psychological profile and internalizes all their stress and

and therefore needs different nutrition because they're constantly stressing themselves out with stinking thinking. Yeah. So if I listed all the things that can change what your macronutrient and micronutrient needs are, it would take hours. So it's not like MyFitnessPal, click 2,000, like, yep, that's me. So you got to really kind of get in there. No, you got to pay attention, but your body's always telling you when you're eating right. Yeah. What do you think about is not eating until you're hungry?

Well, there's no sense eating if you're not hungry. I do it all the time though. I get in that little thing where I'm like, it's lunchtime. I have to eat right now and I eat and I'm like, I'm stuffed and I feel like gross. Well, you shouldn't eat if you're not hungry, but generally most people need three meals a day unless they're sedentary. Okay. Or unless they're drinking things like caffeine or smoking cigarettes because those can have an appetite suppressing effect. So, and medical drugs can do that as well.

But if a person's healthy, breakfast should be your biggest meal of the day because the breakfast you eat has the most effect on stimulating your metabolism. That's been shown in research. It's especially important for women. For example, when you diet, research shows like if you start skipping meals, your body increases lipogenic enzymes which store fat.

So the more you diet, the more your body tries to store fat because it thinks you're going into a famine period. So it's trying to protect you. If you eat three meals a day or you eat enough that your body's not hungry and your body's not thinking, oh my God, we're running out of resources, you'll generate lipolytic enzymes, which break fat down more efficiently. Okay. So the general rule of thumb, there's a lady named Deborah Waterhouse that wrote a whole book on this.

General rule of thumb is breakfast should be your biggest meal of the day because it has the greatest effect on stimulating your metabolism. Ideally, most people find they need to eat about every four hours. But the difference is if you're not hungry, well...

Don't eat. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to overload the system. It takes 55%, approximately 55%. It's somewhere between 52 and 55% of all the calories you eat just to run the machinery of digestion to get the food from mouth to anus. So my point is, if you're just eating to eat and you're not hungry, you're spending a ton of energy and resources just to run it from mouth to anus. Yeah. So think of it like the cost of running a factory. Yeah.

So you've got to pay that price before you have nutrition that you can put into reserve, that you can use to play tennis, to chop firewood, to go to work, to run your brain. Yeah. And so when you realize how costly it is, and this is one of the reasons why it's very bad to eat too close to bedtime, because your organs and glands are working all night long, so you actually never get to rest your internal systems. Right.

So you can wake up feeling tired because you never got to rest the inner side of yourself. And there's more on the inside than there is on the outside pretty much, you know. Yeah.

So just real quick, what would you say before bedtime, like four hours before you go to sleep? I would recommend not eating more than two hours, closer than two hours before bedtime. You should not go to bed feeling full at all. You should feel comfortable, but not full. By the time you fall asleep, if you ate, say at 6.30 or 7 and went to bed at 10,

by the time you fall asleep, you're going to be far enough along in the digestive process that probably within about the next three hours, most of the food will have left your stomach come through the small intestine. It won't go all the way through the small intestine, but it'll be far enough along that the body doesn't have to do the hard work of breaking things down. I've experimented with a lot. I personally don't sleep well at all if I eat. Like if I typically go to bed around nine because I get up at 3.30 in the morning,

So if I eat later than about six, I notice I don't get nearly the quality of sleep. Yeah. So I need about three hours myself. But everybody should just...

you know, realize that each of us is so individual. You've got to be your own scientist and say, okay, let me pay attention. What happens if I eat dinner three hours before bed? Oh, let me try two hours. Let me try an hour before bed. And you'll quickly get the feedback. It's not like you need a doctor or a therapist to tell you that. And that's an expensive way to avoid common sense. Here's a question I have. One more thing. We forgot the fourth doctor. Yeah, my bad. Dr. Quiet. Dr. Quiet's all about sleep.

And we all are built in tune with natural cycles. So our hormonal system is regulated by the sun and the moon. Once the sun starts rising up, your cortisol levels, which is your primary stress hormone, elevate. And it's an activating hormone. It stimulates the brainstem called the reticular activating system. It has an alerting effect on you. Research shows that if you're sound asleep,

and a photon hits your skin. I can take a laser pointer when you're sound asleep and point it at your big toe, and you've got cells in your skin called cryptochrome cells that will deliver photons to your hypothalamus and wake you up because your body thinks if there's light, the sun's up. Whoa. So as the sun goes up, our...

major stress hormone which protects us supports us and it's also the major anti-inflammatory hormone and the major alerting hormone right and it's coupled with adrenaline so you have the adrenaline then cortisol in the release cascade they follow the sun as they go up so we're designed to be the most active between about 10 o'clock and about one o'clock during the day and then as it goes down and the sun's going down and the moon starts to go up

melatonin comes up and it's the chief regulating hormone for all your anabolic hormones, which is your growth and repair hormones. So if a person, for example, now before I tell you that, research shows that the first four hours of sleep, our body focuses on physical repair. So we need to be to bed by 10 o'clock p.m. on average,

Otherwise, we delay the release of melatonin. So if we're around flashing lights or these kinds of lights, it keeps telling your brain the sun's up. So as long as cortisol levels are up, melatonin levels stay suppressed, which means the half-life of cortisol is quite long. And you could end up... It can be 400 minutes. It's different depending on how healthy your liver is and how strong your liver is. But...

If you, for example, drink a cup of coffee at dinnertime, you're going to still have tons of cortisol in you four hours later. So by the time you're just about to get up, you're only now is your body ready to release melatonin, but you've missed all your growth and repair time. So athletes burn themselves out and get lots of chronic injuries doing that. So if you just remember the simple rule that

the activation hormones follow the sun and the growth and repair hormones follow the moon. So if you keep pushing your cortisol levels because you're making an extended day, which is like making an extended summer, so to speak, then you repress your growth and repair hormones. And the first four hours of sleep should be the body devotes itself to physical repair. And the second four hours of sleep are devoted to psychogenic repair. So brain and nervous system repair.

And having known this for many, many years, I saw monitoring people's sleep cycles that sure enough, those that went to bed, say at midnight, had chronic physical problems. But those that were shift workers...

Or mothers with new children that were staying up between about 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. had chronic neurological problems like headaches, cognitive disorders, crashed cars a lot. Yeah, Jesus. Cut their fingers a lot with knives because their psychogenic repair is getting shut down. In fact, research on –

New Mothers shows that in the first year, a woman's brain shrinks one centimeter in circumference. It shrinks like a plum becoming a prune due to lack of sleep. Terrible. So the key thing that I'm just to summarize, we need to make sure that we get to bed ideally by about 10 o'clock and we've got to follow the natural cycles.

And we want to make sure we don't eat too much food before bed because our body can't rest. And we don't want to drink coffee or stimulants

any later than about three or four o'clock in the afternoon or it'll completely disrupt our hormonal cycles and we'll end up sleeping but waking up tired. We will sleep but we will not be recovered. And if you're... the more physically demanding your work environment or your sports environment is, the more critical that becomes to your ability to improve, to grow, to recover, and you know to avoid injury and illness.

And Dr. Quiet is also the chief of introspection. So if we don't take time each day to be alone and within ourselves, then we externalize our sense of self. So we only know ourselves by how much money we have or what kind of car we drive or how high our rank is in our work or how our status is. So we actually start identifying ourselves only by what's outside, but we never really get to know who we are on the inside.

And I can tell you from many people that have had a crisis in their life, like losing a job or an athlete getting injured who no longer could perform, they go into a crisis of self because they don't know who they are without their status or without their hockey stick in their hand or without their money coming in. And they go into a serious crisis of self. And it's like having a midlife crisis, but it's really a crisis of self. So if we take time each day,

to do what we classically be called meditation or just simply to reflect on our day and say, you know, how did I do in my relationships today? Could I have been a better listener with my children? Or could I have been more patient with my wife? Or could I have...

done a better job at work instead of taking shortcuts and making excuses, and we actually take responsibility for growing ourselves and looking at ourselves objectively and being honest with ourselves, then we actually grow spiritually and we grow consciously and we learn how to love better.

When you said you get up at 3.30 and you do spiritual practices, what does that look like? A lot of people hear that term and they're just kind of like, they think it just sounds so otherworldly and mystical. Do you have a couple you would describe that are kind of beneficial? Yeah, I did Tai Chi every day for 18 years. I studied with a Tai Chi master for several years. I trained in medical Qigong. I began meditating when I was 12 when my mother joined the Self-Realization Fellowship. I

do various types of exercises. I can teach you one in just a second, which is very simple. Anyone can do it. It's very powerful. I spend a lot of time in prayer. I give thanks for everything I have and all the blessings in my life. And I just sort of take stock of how grateful I am to have the home I have, to have the children I have. I have two wives, so I'm blessed there.

Say what now? Yeah, I have two wives. Okay, that's cool. I'll be mature about it. It's not a religious thing. It's just I was married for 17 years to my first wife. I have a 45-year-old son from that marriage. And I realized I just wasn't cut out for monogamy. It just seemed very unnatural to me. And I really hated the idea that I couldn't express love to women that I felt a loving relationship with because –

I was married and I had this Christian vows, till death do you part, but I did not feel that that was true to who I was. So after I went through my first divorce, I made a promise to myself that I would not ever get married again unless I could have an open relationship with

And my rule was as long as we're getting along together and we want to work through our problems together, then let's stay together. But if we don't want to be together, then we shouldn't be together. We should go out and find the people that are more appropriate for us at that time. And I meditated on that and asked Great Spirit for help and I found exactly the perfect woman. I met her. I knew exactly who she was when I met her.

And because I had seen visions of her in my meditations, four days later we were engaged and I've been married to her for 28 years. And that's who just dropped me off. Damn. And I met, you know, I was able through my open marriage to explore and share love. But then I met a woman who is my second wife, Angie Check, who I have two kids with now and Penny's their mother too.

And Penny's rule from the very beginning was, look, you can have as many wives as you want, but I have these rules. Here's the rules. They have to cook, clean, contribute to the bottom line, and they cannot talk too much because my wife's all about business and the bottom line. She doesn't like a bunch of yackety-yack gossipy women. Man, what a blessing, dude. Yeah. You tell her you're kind of thinking the same thing?

Well, when I was what I call young, dumb and full of cum and I was thinking about the sex all the time, I thought, yeah, I'd like seven wives or something like that. But when you realize each person you're in an intimate relationship adds a very – another complete level of complexity and then you've got to hope they get along with each other. Yeah. But –

After probably 20 years of that type of living, I realized when I met Angie, who's a very powerful shaman, healer. She's got, you know, many, both of my women are extremely smart. I mean, Penny's got a degree in biological anthropology from Cambridge University. She's got a degree in exercise and sports science from Colorado State. She's got a degree in business from Colorado State, and she's a pilot there.

And Angie's got a degree in energy medicine, a degree in biology, a degree in nutrition. And she's done a three-year advanced training program in shamanism. And she's an expert in biogeometry. And she runs my nutrition and lifestyle coaching department. Okay. So between these girls, there's probably, you know, six or seven degrees there. I'm the guy with the ninth grade education. You know, so, you know, I figure if you're going to, if you're going to,

spend time with a woman you might as well find the most powerful capable one you can yeah which a lot of guys do the opposite they want a bimbo that they can control and use as a play toy but i'm like you're never going to get anything done that's meaningful in the world with that kind of relationship yeah no kind of spring you know it's never it sounds cool at first but then eventually there's nothing to sustain a multi-year i used to be a race car driver

And my goal was always to have the most horsepower and the best handling car I could create. And that's how I like women. The most horsepower and the best handling woman I can find. And so I have two very high-powered, very, very capable women. And we run, you know, we're the primary people behind the educational development of the Czech Institute, which I founded in 1995. And we've had over 63,000 students come through our program. I have a five-year program.

academy. You know, it's very serious, comprehensive education. It is. I've looked into it before. It's very, very comprehensive. It's not a fluffy fly by night, you know, post, you know, it's not, it's not a box of pizza. It's the real deal. Yeah. And so I need people around me that are in line with my values. And so, um, once I met Angie,

I realized that this woman was so intelligent and so amazing and so incredible. And, you know, all I could ever imagine sexually, I'm like, okay, I've just met God. And so I just went to Penny and said, you know, I've reached the point now where I feel like it's too complex for me to manage all these women. Because I, you know, I would have a beautiful partner in Sydney. I mean, I lived on the road for 25 years lecturing all over the world. Yeah.

So I had lovers in Sydney. I had lovers in Auckland. I had lovers in London, you know. But every one of them has families and have friends and has needs. And Paul, will you help my dad? He's sick. Can I borrow some money? And I just felt like my life was being spread so thin that after a while, I felt like it was stopping me from really devoting enough time to Penny, who is the Buddha that allowed me to even have this joy. Yeah.

And so Angie was just such a complete and incredible human being. I just went to Penny. I said, you know,

And Penny knew Angie. I mean, Penny knows all these women. I've never kept anything from my wife. That's a great way to ruin your relationship. Women are so much smarter than men on average. Yeah, especially with stuff like relationship stuff. You can't get away with anything. They got eyes. They got radar that we don't even come close to. I tell people, men all the time, if you think you're tricking your wife, you're a dumber than a sack of hammer handles. You're about to lose half your money and all your joy. Yeah.

It's true. You can't, you can't lie. You might be able to pull the wool over once maybe, but dude, they can look at you and they're like, they know, you know, I've had so many professional athletes trying that come to me for help. And I'm like, the first thing you got to do is learn to tell the truth or you're, you know,

You're just going to create – you're digging your own grave every day is what you're doing. Yeah, especially lying is so bad for you. Just like just living – just having a lie in the back of your head destroys you. You've got to disconnect yourself from your own heart to survive that. Yeah. And that's how you end your spiritual growth and development. Yeah. Spiritually they say the longest journey you'll ever take is from your head to your heart.

And for a lot of people, it takes a lot of lifetimes to get there. So my philosophy is don't do anything that disconnects your heart from your head because only your heart can deliver justice to your head. And without your heart, you can easily convince yourself of all sorts of shit and become the devil while blaming everyone else for being the devil. Yeah. So I went to Penny and I said, look, I really love Angie. I think she'll really contribute to the family. She meets your criteria. Yeah.

Of course, Penny knew her because she's been around me for years and been to my training programs and lectures at our institute. And Penny said, if that's what you want to do and you feel comfortable letting go of these other relationships, then I will support you because I believe Angie will be a contributor to our family and to our mission.

And so we did a three-way marriage ceremony. First, we tested each other. We went through psychological testing to see how compatible we were. What testing did you use? Myers-Briggs was one of them. And there's another one we used. I don't remember the name of it. So we tested Angie and Penny and Penny and Angie. So both ways. We tested me and Penny and Penny and me. We already knew that worked. And we tested me and Angie and Angie and me. And every one of them showed highly compatible. Awesome. And interestingly...

The psychological profile for Angie and Penny were identical but inverted. Angie was very high in intuition and low in mathematical logical and Penny's very high in mathematical logical and low in intuition. So they're like mirrors of each other. Whoa. And...

Angie and Penny and I have been in a relationship for 13 years now, and those women have never had a single fight. I've never seen them like have what we would call a fight. Have you ever had a double fight at once, like two on one? I've been outvoted, yes. Oh, fuck, dude. That's why many of my students, especially young men, come to me. I want to have multiple partners like you do. They think it's all about the sex, and I always tell them,

You better learn to ride one horse really well before you try to ride two at once because you will get hurt. Yeah. Oh, my God. I couldn't imagine. If you want rapid spiritual growth and just have two wives because the bullshitting factor is zero. Get ready to be pinned on the carpet. I always say –

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please come. That would be awesome. It's actually a pretty large space and I'd feel foolish if it were empty, but it's got to be empty. So be it. I'd love for you guys to come if you can. That is on 1115 Capitol one hall, Tyson's Virginia. And then also on the next day, I'll be in New York city on 1116 at town hall as part of the New York comedy festival. So come to that too. If you want to go to that also, and that's a big one guys, this is the New York city comedy festival.

And then a few weeks after that, I'll be in Irvine, California at the Irvine Improv. Guys, this is huge. This is going to be right around Thanksgiving. 1129.

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And actually research shows that 65% of all the women spent in the world is spent by money. Yeah. I mean, spent by women. Yeah. I've seen that before and I, I believe it. So even though men may make more, it's the women that are actually moving the money. Oh, big time. So to conclude what I'm saying is, um, we have an amazing family experience. We're very productive. We all have the same mission, vision, and values. Angie and I have had two kids and so they have two mothers, which is amazing. Um,

My son, Mana, bonded very strongly with Penny, interestingly, right from the beginning. He looks like Penny. Angie's Mexican, brown skin. Just imagine a pretty little hot Mexican woman and you got Angie. And Mana's blonde-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed. And Penny's blonde-haired, fair-skinned, and hazel-eyes. But everyone sees Mana and thinks he's Penny's child. And our second one, Zoe, is exactly a carbon copy of Mommy. She's like a hot...

cute little Mexican mini mommy. Yeah. And she bonds very strongly with mama. So I think it was great spirits trick to get Penny inspired to be a mother because Penny never really wanted to be a mother. Oh, okay. So she fell in love with Mona and he fell in love with her. And so imagine being

a kid with two mothers of that level of intelligence. We have a 14-acre farm and we run a big business and we have people from all over the world coming to us. The kids have traveled all over the place because we have to teach all over the world. When Mano was probably only four months old, he was already in England on seminar tours. So these kids are very worldly children.

And we feed them the best food you can buy. We grow most of our food and we buy from, you know, organic farmers and free range meat farmers and, you know, ranchers. And the kids go to a Waldorf school. So they're getting educated based on Steiner system of education, which based on my analysis is hands down the best in the world. And so, you know, I basically spent,

many, many years as a therapist looking at what causes people trouble, what gets them sick, what leads to cancer. And I found the number of people that have been married for a long time but didn't want to be in the marriage but stayed in it because they thought God would burn them in hell if they broke their marriage vows or got a divorce was so high. I learned very early in my now 40-year career that

It's not a wise thing to do to stay married to somebody that you're not in love with and that you don't want to be with because all you do is teach your children how to have a fucked up relationship. And that becomes problems for the rest of your life that you've got to deal with as a parent. And so after my first marriage, I just made a promise to myself, I'm going to live true to my heart. And I know that there's women out there that want to live true to their heart too. And you'd be amazed when you're honest with women, they'll tell you yes or no. And I found...

It was no harder to find women that would agree to that than it was to find women that would go monogamous or that demanded monogamy. Yeah. But we just grew into this relationship and...

Well, we're 13 years in now. And like I said, I've got a 45-year-old son with a grandson from my first marriage. So I became a father for the second time at 54. And then my daughter came along a couple of years later. So here I am 63 with two little ones and a big one and a grandson. But it took me a long time to learn how to be a father. I mean, I realized at 54 that

I'm actually only now ready to be a dad. My first son came when I just turned 18 and I didn't know how to be a father, you know, and I didn't have a good example as a father. So to have reached that level of maturity and that much understanding of life and then to be wise enough to choose really intelligent women. Angie's an amazing mother. They're both amazing mothers. And my kids are damn smart. They're, you know, they're surrounded by very intelligent people all the time.

And so they eat great food and they live on top of a mountain on a beautiful farm. And, you know, my daughter's doing amazing in gymnastics. My son's got the mind of an engineer. And, you know, we're watching kids grow in an environment that is like an organic farm. Yeah. They get a chance to get a lot of love and to really explore themselves. And I...

emulate to my students to live true to your heart and not fall into conventional ideas because you know living in the consensus reality is like being a sheep in a herd but if you actually start interviewing people to ask how many people are actually happy in their marriages i've had patients come to me with serious health problems that have been married for 35 years and i've said to them

When were you not happy in the marriage? I've literally had women crying their eyes out saying, Paul, to be honest with you, I knew I was in trouble the day I got married. Yeah. I said, well, why did you stay and have kids?

Because I'm a Christian and I have marriage vows. And I said, so you think God wants you to live in a torturous relationship and raise kids in an environment where they realize that marriage is a painful and potentially ugly thing? Yeah. You know, and so— Real quick, that's a problem. I can see that. Do you think there is some redemptive—

back to the process of learning to kind of relate to somebody over time where initially it might not feel great. Oh, absolutely. But you're saying if it hits levels of just like soul deadedness and like going through the motions. Well, when you get to the point where you know either you're not compatible with somebody or you're not willing to do the work to grow in relationship with that person, like some people, most people don't actually explore their values with someone else. So when you get confronted by things like,

a woman gets pregnant, but you don't want the child and you don't realize that there's one that's pro-abortion and one that's against abortion. Yeah. That's a barn burner of a problem to have.

When you've got a pandemic that comes and one's pro-vaccine, the other one says, don't do it. It's too dangerous. Yeah. And one wants to vaccinate the children. The other one doesn't. I've seen relationships completely destroyed. So if you don't have a deep enough level of love and commitment to work through the rigors and the challenges that life inevitably brings, you just set yourself up to live in hell. Yeah. So the point I'm making, if it's not dead clear, if you can't walk through hell with your partner and hold their hand,

then you shouldn't be in the relationship. I see what you're saying. If you're just going through the motions and- If you're just going through the motions, you're not living. You're already in flatland and you'll probably need an addiction to get you through it. Yeah. You'll need to drink yourself through it

or drug yourself through it, or bury yourself in work, or become an exercise addict, or something. And I've rehabilitated thousands of these people. I mean, look, I'm not a young guy. I have 40 years of clinical experience. I have seen exactly how this plays out over and over again. And it ain't pretty. And it's often for the wrong reasons. And the worst reason there is is because of what other people will think.

I don't give a shit what other people think. My job is to be true to myself and true to the people I share relationships with because without that, what have I got? If I fit into the crowd but I'm living a life that's completely unappealing and unpleasing, that just takes the wind right out of your sails and you just go half-master your life and you'll never become good at anything. To achieve mastery requires commitment and focus. Yeah.

And if you can't achieve mastery in your relationships, then you're not going to achieve mastery in your professional relationships either. Yeah. So what is the Spirit Gym? I know you started that up. Spirit Gym is a holistic system of spiritual development that I develop based on all my years' experience.

And I saw how much problem religions cause people. I could see the beauty in them, but I could see the traps in them and I could see how it results in a lot of health problems and a lot of belief. I think beliefs are very dangerous because the day you believe something, you stop asking questions and your mind becomes closed. So I think by definition, spirituality is a

progressively expanded sense of connection to a greater and greater whole. But oftentimes when you're in a religion, you immediately identify yourself as this religion or that religion and you

are often taught or threatened that you should not look into or participate in other religions, for example. So you won't find Christians reading Buddhist literature, but there's a ton of great stuff in Buddhism that any Christian can use. And there's stuff in Christianity that a Buddhist can use. And there's stuff in Judaism that they could all use. So once you're in a belief system, it's like being in a cult. And I've watched how it destroys people's lives and it keeps them very narrow-minded and

You know, if you study this, you'll find something quite shocking. The most common cause of wars throughout history has been religious differences. Yeah. And if you look at Ken Wilber's new book, Radical Wholeness, he states right in there at least three times, the number one cause of war is religious differences. Yeah.

I mean, well, if there is a God and God is love, then God's not intended to inspire war, death, and destruction. So right there you see the problem that belief systems are like any ism. They pit you against people and you stop asking bigger questions. And as soon as you stop asking bigger questions, you stop growing mentally. You stop growing emotionally and you halt your spiritual growth. Therefore, you see, it's like being a racist.

If you're a white supremacist, then you never get the joy of knowing the beauty of black people. You might not even eat their food or listen to their music. But if you think, okay, how many of us love food from around the world? I like Chinese food. I like Japanese food. I like Jamaican food, man. I like Brazilian food. And I like all their music too. And I love their beautiful women. So if someone said...

I'm practicing such and such a religion or I have such and such a racial bias. You've just cut two thirds of my heart out. Yeah. You've just turned me into a robot, into somebody else's play toy, into somebody who's got such narrow vision that they will never actually see the beauty of God. They will never see it even though they're walking around in it and wearing it. And that is really to be a blind man. So Spirit Gym is really a system I built myself.

that teaches you how to analyze your own story so that you can ask yourself, is the story that I'm empowering each day fulfilling to me? And if it's not, what is my dream? And how do I create a story for myself that's dream-affirmative and life-affirmative and

And how do I live in such a way that I embrace the truth of good, the truth of beauty, and the truth of life and accept the challenges of life as growth opportunities so I don't just run, drug myself, or put my head in the sand? And so I built a system based on principles. So the first principle is getting clear on what the word God means.

Next is understanding how the universe is created based on metaphysical concepts and on the concepts of science, cosmology, and quantum physics. The next principle is the one which is – well, the next principle is myth, which is the science and history and –

the understanding of what a myth is. Myth means story. So once you understand why myths have been created by tribes throughout antiquity and what the function of a myth is, then you know what your myth or your story has to include or you're running blind, right? I could give you a whole description of myth and what it has to include, but it would take some time. So once we understand what God means by definition, what being is, what is existence itself, why is it here?

Then we go to myth and we understand the importance of being clear on our story. So we're congruent with our dream and we don't create problems for ourselves by living out a story that isn't even our own. Most people don't even know their own story. They're just living out their mother's ideas or church's ideas or their ism without really thinking, is this working for me? And just wondering why they feel like shit. They're tired all the time and they got to drink alcohol to numb themselves from their ism. Um,

So then we deal with the principle of the two, which is duality, which is what it takes to have a mind. You have to have a duality. It has to be a subject, me, you, the object. You're the object of my awareness right now, but it's the subject and me watching. If you're in a loving relationship, one's the lover, one's the beloved. So one's the lover, one's the beloved. So if this is a person, I, the lover, am loving the beloved. Right?

So whenever you have a duality, you have the prerequisites for love. There always has to be a lover and a beloved. Love is the basis of relationship. Love is the code word that holds everything together in the whole universe, even an atom. Love really just means relationship. And so you can't have life without relationship, and you can't have a mind without relationship. To have a mind, you have to have two points of sentience. They exchange energy and information.

A computer is not a mind, it's an information processor, because it doesn't know what you're putting through it. It doesn't care if you build an atomic bomb to kill people or you come up with the most amazing cure for a disease, the computer won't know the difference. So that's an information processor, that's not a mind. A mind is actually sentient and it processes energy and information with the intention of accomplishing an objective that something is sentient of, being you in this case, or me.

So once you get to the principle of two, you're understanding what is the true nature of a duality and why do we have to have a duality and how do you manage dualities? How do you use duality in your favor as opposed to creating opposition, me against you or white against black or this religion against that religion because that's just a low level of consciousness. The principle of three is the Holy Trinity, which explains how God –

or that which is unknowable manifests itself as being or life or existence. And so once we understand that process, we can say, this is the same principles we use to create our dreams. This is how we dream our house into existence, save the money, buy the land. This is how we dream our ideal partner into our life, like I did. I meditated a year and a half ago.

After enough years of girlfriends that drove me crazy and I realized these girls, they don't know how to handle a guy like me that's very mission-oriented. So I got clear what I needed in a partner and I also got clear what I would give her. So I just thanked Great Spirit every day for this amazing woman and read off the qualities that I want, read what I was willing to give, had a vision of her after a year and a half meditating. Five days later, she showed up in one of my classes. As soon as I saw her,

It literally felt like electricity running through my body. I went, oh, my God, there she is. I am stunned and amazed that she's actually here. Four days later, we were engaged, and that was 28 years of marriage ago. Damn. Right. So, I mean, I've done this many, many times. We wanted our dream home and our dream property. It took us five years, but we mapped it all out. I went into meditation with Angie, and we –

channeled the vision of our home drew it when we found the home our map was exactly the map of the property we said the prayer every morning we gave thanks for the home we kept looking and looking until we found it when we found it we knew it wow and there it was and interestingly every year i do a mandala which is a diagram in a circle to symbolize my year so i go into meditation and i ask my soul to give me the vision of what symbolizes my year and that year i

I saw the Native American Indian sun face, which is a circle of feathers with the Indian sun face in the middle, which if you saw the Native American Indian sun face, you know exactly what it looks like. The trippiest thing, the girls were out looking for houses and this one wasn't even on the list to go look at. But as they were getting on the freeway to come home, it said open house closes such and such a date, which was that day.

So they were just closing it and they were going to put it on an auction. And the girls went and when they pulled up to the gate, the gate of the opening of the property is a big metal gate because it's a big estate. On the front of the gate was a six foot circular mandala with exactly what I had painted. And they both stopped and were stunned and took a picture and said, Paul, you're not going to believe what is on the gate to this property. And it turned out to be

I'm a remote viewer as well. So for three months before they found the house in my meditations, I started seeing this property in this land. So I said to my soul, is this our new home? My soul said, yes, it is. I said, my God, it's so damn big. It looks like a hotel. I said, yeah, sure. That's where we're going to live. My soul said, yes, you're going to be running your businesses there. You're going to need plenty of space. You're going to have a lot of people coming in and out of there.

And so I used my skills as a remote viewer. I walked through the house. I looked at the property. So when the girls found it and they were walking the property, they called me and told me about the gate. And they said, you've got to see this property. It's going to blow your mind. It's exactly what we've been looking for. It's everything we wrote down. And I said, when you pulled up to the front of the house, was there a big metal gate? Yeah, that's the one I saw your mandala on. Is there a pond on the right side of the driveway when you pulled in? Yes.

When you walk in the front door, does it have really high ceilings with Mediterranean-style wooden fans up in the top of the ceilings? They said, exactly. I said, if you walk through the house to the back, is the swimming pool back there? Yes. If you go to the edge of the swimming pool, is it really steep, almost like a cliff down into the property? They said, Paul, exactly the same.

I said, if you walk out the back of the house, is there a big building that would hold my gym in our classroom? They said, yes. I said, does it have a guest house? They said, yes. I said, that's the place I've been seeing for three months. What? Yep. And it was on the market two years earlier for $4 million. And when I found out that it was going into auction, my soul said, do not bid.

Because there's very few people that can afford the maintenance on a place like that. Yeah. And they're probably not going to get a bid on it. Wait, and they'll call you. Because we had gone there and we'd fill out the registration. And Angie and Penny were scared to death. They said, Paul, are you sure? If we lose this house, you know, that's it. We got to keep looking. We've been looking for five years. I said, my soul's never misled me.

Sure enough, the next morning, our real estate agent called us at like 8 o'clock in the morning. She said, you were right, Paul. Nobody bid on the house. Now is your chance. Not even two hours later, the real estate agent for the house called us. So I bid 1.8. And they wrote back and counterbid me 1.925. So the land is worth that much. Damn.

They had padded it. I mean, I guess they could sell it for whatever they want, but they were like, yeah, fine. It wasn't that they padded it. If you saw this place, it's worth four million. Yeah, that makes sense. It's just that it's 15,000 square feet of buildings. It's 14 acres of land. Damn. It's pump systems. I mean, it's a lot to manage. I mean, it cost me a lot of money. And there's probably less and less people inclined to do all that. To manage it. I have to have a full-time gardener and handyman. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, no, this is a big place, but it's exactly what, because we wanted to consolidate all of our business into one location. So we didn't have to keep driving all over the place. Angie had her own business that was successful. She owned a nutrition store and ran a personal training business. I had the Institute. I had my, I had a house that I used for all my, seeing all my clients with a big gym in it.

And so we consolidated all of our work into one place. And now our Institute courses are run there. I see my clients there. My office is in the guest house, Penny's office in the guest house. That's awesome. So we basically are spending far less money than we were for all these three places and

Now we only have one gym instead of three. Now we only have one location clients need to come and everybody absolutely loves it there. It's stunningly beautiful. But the point is, this is, you know, using your mind and using your heart to manifest. And the same way I brought Penny into my life through manifestation, I brought my home into my life and I've done this over and over again. That's what I teach. That's what real spiritual development's about is learning to work with

Source energy and consciousness instead of walking around just hoping all the time or... Yeah. So that's the difference was when people hear manifesting, they really do, I think, think of like... Or it comes to my mind that it sounds like bullshit where you're just like, so I'm just going to imagine a house is going to come. But you seem like it's more intentional of like a daily practice of imagining. Yeah, it's not just imagining. As the Quakers say, pray...

And move your feet. Yeah. Everybody prays, but they forget to move their feet. Yeah. Okay. So we looked at houses for five years. Yeah. Right. And, and each time we saw, okay, well, we, we like that feature, but there's a highway right next to the house or, you know, we like this big living room. And so as we were doing it and we're saying, okay, we want to write that on our, our dream. We are, we had a big poster we made on our, we call it the vision board. Yeah.

And every morning we would do a prayer, all three of us, and I would vaporize some tobacco and herbs and I'd blow smoke into it, which is a sacred practice to energize it with our consciousness. And, you know, so we actually poured our intention into it. You know, if you think of God as unconditional love, that's pure potential. There's no condition there. The answer is always yes from source.

God says yes to being an idiot, and God says yes to being a wise man. Obviously, look around. So if God is unconditional love, then you must have an intention to create the movement of potential into actuation, and the flow of that energy and information is what we call spirit. So spirit is the flow of energy and information.

What people don't realize is you're constantly moving energy and information into potential from spirit, but most people are doing it unconsciously, which is almost always based on what they don't want. Most people live by their fears, not by their dreams. And I tell people fear never makes a good seeing eye dog. It's just not because you always see what you're looking for. The ancients had an important saying, you bring forth that which you gaze upon.

So if you walk into a room and you're always looking for something bad, you'll see it. If you walk into the room and you're looking for the beauty or you're looking for the fun, you'll find it. Most people don't have enough training to watch their own mind to see what it's creating all the time. And so that's what Spirit Gym is all about. It's learning how to use tried and tested principles correctly.

from spiritual masters, from experts in the science of mind, from experts in psychology, from quantum physics, from metaphysics. Basically, I spent my whole life studying and looked at everything that I could learn that's relevant to how to live a life that's true to your heart and being honest in your relationships and creating the life you want.

And doing the work that you want to do in life so that you can make money because you're doing something you love to do and achieving mastery. And I put it into an education system and I mentor these people so they get the same kind of coaching that I do with my one-on-one clients.

Except I coach them in a group and there's about 130 hours of online training that I built to take them through all these principles. And each week I meet with them and I give them a one-hour presentation on something that's important for them to know. And then I open the floor for questions on their personal life, their personal challenges or anything they want help with as they're working through the lessons.

And I've watched people just transform right in front of my eyes. I've seen depressed people become inspired and motivated. I've seen sick people get healthy. I've seen sad people get happy. Yeah. You know, and it's not a surprise to me because I've been a therapist for 40 years. I mean, I've studied this inside out and backwards and I've had to deal with my own challenges just like everybody else. And so, you know, I really felt it was time in my career to stop thinking

spending my time working with people one-on-one because the world's in such dangerous state right now that I realized we can't wait for a top-down rescue. I don't think Jesus is coming back. They nailed him to a tree the first time. He's not stupid. I don't think... Well, here's a question for you, and I think, you know, I kind of dig everything you're saying.

I feel like, well, I guess it's a statement and then a question. I feel like God has become a taboo. It's a modern taboo. You can talk about sex. You can talk about, you know, whatever you want. You bring up God. A lot of people get kind of like, where are you going with this? Like, relax, man. Maybe it always was because, like, if you brought up the wrong religion, people would spout. Well, everybody's conception of God is unique to themselves. And because you have all this religious division, if you're a Christian talking about God to a Muslim, then they're going to immediately think you're against them. Yeah, or an atheist. Or an atheist. Yeah. But remember—

Well, here's my question. I want to just give me one second. Go ahead. You use that word atheist. Yeah. Okay. Here's something Carl Jung said that's very important to hear. Something must first be real before it can be rejected. Meditate on that. Yeah. It's pretty wild. It's true.

Yeah. There's no atheists in a foxhole. Yeah. I'm a soldier. Trust me. Yeah. I mean, that's, yeah, I could see that as well. And that's why I think there's something that my question is, how necessary do you think it is for like psychologically to have a spiritually oriented framework to work in if you want to kind of like.

Gain some sort of, you know, self-mastery or peace of mind versus just kind of like the what I feel like might be kind of sanitized. Like, I don't think it's necessary. I mean, I've known people that are very masterful, a lot of things that are atheists, materialists or even my wife, Penny, is agnostic. OK, my my wife's a scientist, you know.

She did a lot of extensive research in university. She's a very scientific, very intelligent. She's a pilot. The woman that just dropped me off is a genius. And I'm a guy that knows intelligent people and worked with some of the most rich and smart people on this planet. My wife is a genius. And she says, I'm happy that you love God, but God is not important to me because I can't prove the existence or non-existence of God.

And she says, I've got important things to handle. Like, how are we going to pay the bills this month? And how do I manage all these employees and take care of these kids and make sure this farm is handled? She says, I will find out if God's real when I die, and that's fine with me. But in the meantime, I'm going to do my best to live a meaningful life and love as fully as I can because that's who I am. I don't need someone to take me to church to do what's inherently right.

natural to me okay so that's interesting so you really don't think it's like as crucial i guess it gets all person to person no i think i think it's individual the difference is religion is typically a set of beliefs that's closed it's an ideology it's a belief system all deaf by definition all belief systems are closed spirituality is an open exploration for the truth so

That's why I say spirituality is a progressive expansion of your sense of wholeness to your connection to what makes you feel whole and what you are. So, for example, spirituality, if you want a simple model, progresses from eye-oriented consciousness. It's all about what I want, what I need, like a child. Gimme, gimme, gimme.

Then you grow up to realize that you can't do anything meaningful in the world without relationships. So your consciousness evolves to we. So instead of being self-centered, now you become we-centered. You say, okay, I can't just think of myself. I got to think about my wife and her needs, my boss, my friends, my coworkers, my teammates. Then all of a sudden you realize you couldn't be here without the food that feeds you, the water that hydrates you, the air you breathe. And you realize...

The car you drive is made by someone on the other side of the world. The computer you're using was made by someone on the other side of the world. And so you finally wake up to the fact that it takes the whole world to support all of us. And so now your sense of self and wholeness grows to embrace the whole world because you realize everybody's meaningful. Everybody's contributing to each other. And so...

You wouldn't buy into a belief system that was my group against your group because you realize none of us can get by without each other. Okay? So then you become world-centric. Well, then you progressively expand your conscious and you say, wait a minute. Could the earth be here without the sun? And could we survive with that? No. What would happen if there was no moon to move the tides of the ocean? We'd all die. So all of a sudden you realize, wow, I –

I was an earth-centered person, but now I've got to be a solar system-centered person. But then you realize, oh my God, the solar system is part of a galaxy and it couldn't be a galaxy. Then all of a sudden you realize you're part of a galactic family. You go, wait a minute, the galaxy is part of the universe. So now you reach what's called cosmic consciousness and you realize that all of it is a dance. All of it is a being that's alive. All of it is something so magical and so mysterious that

that all you can do is stand there and go, oh, my God, it took the entire universe to create me. And I could give you the physics of the fact that

that if we scientifically analyze even the minerals and the elements in your body, I can prove to you scientifically that it took the entire universe to make you. And it's been done many times. How? How do they do that? Simple. You take the elements of the periodic table that are in your body. Yeah. And you say, okay, where did that come from? Well, that came from the sun. That came from Mars. Okay. Well, how do they get into the sun? Well, other stars exploded and

And collapsed into a sun. Damn. Through black hole, whatever model you want to use. And so you keep playing that game. So where'd that come from? And it ended up reaching to the end of the universe. It's crazy. So what you realize, even scientifically, is it takes an entire universe to make each one of us. And that's just scientific fact. I don't care if you believe in God or not. I can sit you down and show you the research on it. And so, okay, if you're a scientist, here's proof.

It took the whole universe to make you. Yeah. So what do you want to worship? Yeah, yeah. Just one book? Yeah. I'm like, I think we can do better than that. Yeah, so that you're saying that you're kind of

I guess, provide a modern roadmap for people trying to gain the benefits of a spiritual system without the pitfalls and the downfalls of organized religion. I'm simply saying let's be honest with each other. Let's be rational. Let's be logical. Let's be scientific. And let's open ourselves to the mystery of the heart and ask honest questions. Who are we? What are we? How did we get here? What does it take to sustain us?

And how many absolute mysteries are involved? I mean, science shows that if the conditions of the initial universe were even a hundredth of 1% different, we would not be alive. That's crazy. Right? When you look at the science behind this thing, there's, you know, you either think everything's an accident and we're just lucky, which would be like standing next to a pile of rocks and hoping a Rolex watch jumped out, which would be a materialist.

Or you say there's some kind of intelligence behind this thing. And the biggest form of intelligence that we can come up with is a thing called God because we don't have another name to give it. It just means something so wild I can't even put a name on it. So we'll just call it God. By definition, God means that for which there is no other.

By definition, God is the only being that can create and sustain itself. None of us can do that, right? It takes a God to create and sustain itself. So when you really understand what the word God means—

That's capital G, capital O, capital D. Capital G, little o, little d in spirit gym means the highest power of any belief system. This is why you've got a Christian God, a Muslim God, or this God or that God. They war like hell with each other. Well, I mean, what do you call someone that's at war with themselves? Crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, the God I'm talking about, that for which there is no other, is not at war with itself. Look up in the stars at night. You see nothing but harmony and duty. Yeah. It's when you're lost and confused down here and you worship a God that'll burn you in hell and has all these rules and regulations, you realize, okay, we need to reevaluate our idea about God. So that's the difference between religion and spirituality. Religion is based on belief systems that are closed and spirituality says, okay,

I'm on an open quest to explore what it is that creates me and how I can have a healthy relationship with it and love and respect the fact that everything that's here was created by the same intelligence and I'm part of it. So why not love and respect it? I love – the Sufis are the mystics of Islam.

If you really want to understand religion, you always got to go to the mystics because they're the ones that broke out of the dogma and had their own religious experience. But the Sufis, the Sufi mystics say there is no God, but God, I worship everything and everyone. That is somebody that understands what God means. I gotta go pee. We'll do like a 10 minute wrap up. And I do have one more question for you. Go for it, baby. Are you Josh recording? All right. So sorry, we had to take a pee break. Um,

My question is, and I think this kind of applies to religion, somehow organic farming, it all kind of ties together, where I feel like the reflex for kind of these like very restrictive religions and all this stuff, and even like kind of this like war with like weeds in the soil through like pesticides. It makes sense from like, if you think about our escape from nature, which was like a nightmare to live in the jungle, be getting mauled alive. Like you're going back way, way, way, way. That's the conception I have. It was terrifying. Yes and no.

I mean, if you go talk to native cultures, it seems terrifying, but that was home for them. You see, if you go back to the point where we're living out in nature, we didn't see the animals out there as our enemies. We saw them as our family. And we had respect for grizzly bears. We had respect for poisonous snakes. We saw everything in nature as...

a being with its own intelligence. And so if you study native cultures, you'll see they studied these animals. They learned things like tool making from crows. I don't know if you know this, but crows have a brain

It's as big as ours for body size, if not bigger. They have a language of over 400 words and they have advanced tool making skills. And most people have no idea. I knew they could crack nuts. I didn't know. Oh, no, they can. I've seen film of crows hand making tools that are very complex. They can make tools more complex than chimpanzees can. And they've got a language of between four and 500 words. Okay. That's pretty impressive. But the point is.

If you were living out there with them, you would learn about how spiders weave things. You would learn about how birds put nests together. You would learn how bears fish. I mean, if you actually were out there in nature, you'd realize that each of these beings has a level of intelligence and is doing something in nature that is important. There is no accidental beings out there. So...

If you live in reverence and you realize that taking more than is necessary is a threat to the existence of another being, then you don't just go rape all the bees for honey and steal all the eggs because then you wipe out your own survival system. So those people did not –

have this us against nature. They were nature. Yeah. And it's only as the industrial age begin to come on that we begun to shift our orientation to man against nature, which is largely we want more space to do what we want to do. Right. And we want to take these people over so we can do what we want to do. So you'll see that as our technology and our tools got more and more advanced and we got more and more scientific, uh,

We started getting more and more disrespectful to what creates harmony in nature and more and more eye-oriented, more what do I want, not how does that affect the rivers? How does that affect the oceans? I mean, so if you take that to now and say, well, look what we got. We got a bunch of germaphobic people that are scared of the dirt, that poison everything they eat, that wash their hands with antibacterial soaps, that have wiped out their microbiomes, that have brains that are collapsing, that have kids that are sick, that

that have constantly got to take pills, who are at war with each other, who have an organization called the CIA that says our work will be done when no one knows what the truth is. Well, when your government has an agency whose mission it is to make sure nobody knows what the truth, you have to ask yourself, well, have you gotten more or less intelligent? Yeah. Have we evolved or are we devolving?

When we don't know the principles of nature and we're seeding the skies with aluminum and barium and trying to control the sun and we're making fake global warming by billionaires to make the rich rich and the poor more poor –

I mean, we've gotten so far from the truth of what life is and what it's all about that it's going to and it is costing us dearly. The United States last year spent $3 trillion to manage diabetes. That's one illness. Damn. One illness.

The United States defense budget, which is the most expensive in the world, is $1.9 trillion. We're spending $3 trillion a year to manage diabetes, which is a problem of eating food that is not high quality, that has no nutrition, and eating too much sugar, which is highly addictive. Sugar has been shown by Candace Pert to be as addictive as morphine and heroin, and it's laced in everything. It's in bacon. It's in meat. We've gotten to a level of trickery.

In business and in politics to the point that we can't trust each other anymore. How much money is being spent to turn our iPhones into spy devices, to turn our televisions into spy devices, to turn refrigerators and vacuums into spy devices? The NSA, Edward Snowden showed us the NSA has been collecting information on every one of us all the time. Like we've actually got an autoimmune disorder.

We've got enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet 179 times over. So we've become so afraid of each other that we're actually spending all our time, energy, and money to defend ourselves against each other while destroying the very support systems that keep us alive. So you have to ask yourself, who had it better, the natives or us? Yeah. Natives thought seven generations ahead. As a general rule of thumb, native societies thought –

If we do this, will it enhance or diminish the next seven generations of our people? Yeah, we don't do that. We've got attention spans of about three minutes and we don't think for two seconds about what's going to happen to our kids or we would actually start paying attention to what we're feeding them and the fact that our education systems are absolute trash and that we're putting pornography in the libraries for kids that are three and third grade. Yeah, they're doing that? All over the world.

The globalists are absolutely dangerous as hell. Yeah, that's the one thing. I never understood why we don't have physical education first thing in the morning at every school. It should be every kid should like run around for like an hour, burn off energy. You realize there's people all over the world that are confused as to what a woman is.

Yeah, true. That's another problem. We have used science to validate every drug that's killed 20, 30, 40, 50,000, 100,000 people only to have it taken off the market, but it was all scientifically validated. So we've turned science into a corporate prostitution ring. Yeah. So all I'm saying is, if you really ask the question, was it that dangerous to live in nature?

When we had respect for nature and we lived in harmony with nature, or is it that dangerous to live today where we're destroying nature and each other and call ourselves scientifically advanced? Well, as Steiner says, for every advance you make in science, you must make three advances in morality or you will destroy yourself.

Well, ask yourself, from the time we were living in nature to the time to where we're at now, how many advances have we made in science and how many advances have we made in morality? I'd say like three morality, probably like a bazillion in science. Yes. And so here we all are. Yeah, fuck, man. Watching each other all over the world destroy each other and calling ourselves Christians. Yeah. Yeah, really. Well, goddammit, dude, that sums it up pretty well. Wow.

I'll have to have you on again. I have like a million more questions. I am in a comedy store. No, that's phenomenal, man. Thank you so much. Do you have anything you want to like? I mean, obviously Spirit Gym. MySpiritGym.com if you're interested in my mentorship program.

C-H-E-K institute.com if you want to see my education and all the online courses I have for various people. My How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy book can be bought on Amazon. It can be bought at the Czech Institute.

Our holistic lifestyle coach level one training program teaches you all the principles on how to eat, move and be healthy, how to apply them in your life. So it's a public access program. And for those that want a career in holistic lifestyle coaching to teach other people how to get healthy and not spend all their money on managing diabetes and things like that, you would go to holistic lifestyle coach level two, which is a professional training program. So it's like a career. And it goes from there.

The Czech Academy can be explored there. That's our five-year academy program, which is a mix of online training and hands-on training. And it's multidisciplinary. So we have medical doctors, chiropractors, osteopaths, nurses, acupuncturists, strength coaches, personal trainers, massage therapists, and people just changing professions. It's a fully complete system of education.

My YouTube channel where I have about 1,200 videos I've done for public service on almost everything, which I think you've seen is... Yeah, that's how I found you, just watching those. Right. So it's youtube.com forward slash Paul, C-H-E-K, live, Paul Cech live. So there's tons I put on. That's where I do my public service work and say, look, if you've got plantar fasciitis here, this will help you. If you want to know how to get yourself healthy, do this.

You know, I've poured thousands of hours into doing that for the public. So those that can't afford me or want to get a taste before they spend money can go to YouTube. And my podcast is Spirit Gym with Paul Cech. Okay. And there's over 300 episodes with the greatest minds I can find all over the world. Scientists, doctors, metaphysical experts, religious experts, health experts, psychologists.

You name it. I go for the brains and the great ones that have good results and I believe are worth listening to. And I interview them and I do comprehensive long-form interviews. And for those that want the extended play, they can be a member of the podcast. So you can go to paulcheck.com. Sign up for the podcast membership. I think it's less than $8 a month.

And so I do the public portion of the podcast is one and a half, usually somewhere between one and two hours, depending on the length of the guest, uh, the length of the topic. And then the second half is, it's for the members where we do what's called the deeper dive. Gotcha. So I've got a lot of stuff out there. I've written, uh,

11 books and I'm just now finishing a series of 15 volumes called Welcome to Spirit Gym, which is about 3,000 pages in total. Damn, that's awesome. Yeah. It's taken me four and a half years of hard work to build this program and

I started developing it 10 years ago because I saw the world was in deep trouble and it needed to understand some of the things we just talked about today. Well, dude, that's awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate what you're doing. Even when I started watching back in the day, I was like, oh, it's nice this guy's out here. Somebody gives a shit about stuff. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for sharing. Great questions, by the way. Thank you, man.