Ronnie Landis: Welcome to the holistic health and human potential podcast. I am your host, Ronnie Landis. I’m an international speaker, author of multiple books, an integrative nutritionist, a transformation and embodiment coach, and simply a man who’s devoted most of my life to the study application and. It is an integration of human potential, and it is my biggest inspiration to bring you weekly episodes that will expand your mind, challenge your paradigm, deepen your heart, and help you to embody the greatest version of yourself, as I believe you are meant to do something incredible with your life, and this podcast exists simply to support you on that journey.

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Holistic Human Optimization Show. I am your host, as always, Ronnie Landis. And wow, do we have an episode lined up for all of you. I have been waiting literally months and months to get this individual onto the show. This is none other than the legendary holistic health teacher, spiritual teacher, metaphysical teacher.

Just so many different things that can be used to describe this man. Um, this is Mr. Paul Cech and um, There’s so much that I can say. I want to kind of lead this conversation by actually sharing a little bit of my journey with your work, Paul, because you and I are just meeting in this moment. We have a lot of mutual friends, a lot of mutual colleagues, but I’m really honored to actually get to meet you in interview format, which is always fun for me.

And it’s a great opportunity for me to pick your brain and um, you know, I became aware of your work I think about 11 or 12 years ago when I really got on to youtube university Yeah, and I really got on to the holistic health path and decided that I wanted to be an orator and I wanted to be A voice for a message And I have an athletic background.

I was raised as a martial artist since the age of four I was a U. S. national hopeful for Taekwondo and I had a series of knee injuries, which is what sidelined me and then that’s when I realized that my body was actually not a junk food vehicle. That actually there was, there was some kind of correlation between what I put in my mouth and the, The regeneration of this physical apparatus that before then, um, I was only in tuned in tune with as, as my athletic requirements dictated, but I didn’t really have a spiritual connection to it.

Long story short, um, a series of knee injuries is what woke me up as you talk about the pain teacher, which is a concept I want to dive deeper into. Um, that was my first real pain teacher that created an opening in my consciousness, which actually. At the time what did not feel like a blessing because my entire identity was wrapped up in being an olympic athlete and And um, that was my whole world and my whole life journey But then it sidelined me into Or it segued me into the work that i’ve been doing now for the last 10 or 12 years and in your work Finding you on youtube Was a major catalyst because finally somebody was actually Talking some sense and not from a dogmatic perspective not from an ideological perspective Although that that served its place and served its time for me to get some kind of footing Into nutrition understand the ideas behind it But you were actually just speaking from a place of common sense and and as you say You know if you can’t teach with your shirt off then You probably shouldn’t be teaching.

And, uh, you know, so anyways, this is just really fun for me and I’m really excited to dive into this conversation with you. And I just want to say thank you for the work that you do. And all these years later, I’ve continued to return to your work because you are such a shining example. And you’ve been through such quite a journey, a spiritual journey, and you’re very transparent about it.

So I don’t want to take over the mic too long. I just wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank you and say, I love you, Paul. I’m so grateful for you. And, um, you know, I’m really excited to dive into this conversation with you.

Paul Chek: Well, thank you for sharing your love. I feel loved and I appreciate.

That you’re passing it on to the world, because as you know, the world, uh, needs some common sense about now before we, uh, get too far down a rabbit hole to see the light. 

Ronnie Landis: 100%. And, um, you know, I think one of the best ways to start this conversation off is really talking about the concept of our dream. One of the ideas that you talk about that I talk about with all my clients, the first thing that I try to get into with my clients, before we get into strategy and tactic and all that, is.

Is what is meaningful to you? Like, what are your values? I learned from John Demartini that we’re all guided by a set of priorities and values, and that guides our behavior. It guides our actions. It guides our thought and emotional processes. And if we’re not in tune with our values or, or in tune with our dream, what is meaningful to us, then all these, these tactics or strategies or diets or lifestyle, fitness, et cetera, they’re more cosmetic in nature.

Uh, Um, and we’re more liable to self sabotage, right? Because maybe we’re acting out of accordance with what’s truly authentic to us. So my question is, how important is it for people to cultivate and foster their dream? And why is not having a dream as a guiding force actually detrimental to our health?

Paul Chek: Well, when it comes to the science of goal setting, there’s an old saying, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. And, um, if you look at the research on goal setting, they, they look into all, all sorts of things. For example, they find 98 percent of people that set new year’s resolutions, never achieve them.

Um, because they’re not in the habit of basically committing to a decision and then doing the work to facilitate the changes necessary to carry that decision out as a, as an actuality. And in the science of, of how the mind works, there’s a technique called, um, Uh, it’s called priming. So if you read the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, for example, they talk about priming.

So they say, for example, if you set a goal to exercise regularly, and that’s a goal for you because you have a hard time exercising regularly, an example of priming would be Go buy a month membership at a gym so that you don’t have to stop and pay on the way in and you just show them your card and walk through the door.

Pack your, your gym equipment and get your shoes out and fill your water bottle and do everything in the morning so that all you got to do is wash your face, throw on your gym clothes and head out the door. Because. What the research on behavioral change shows is that the more options you leave to give yourself an opportunity for your old behaviors to emerge, like, Oh, I need to have a coffee.

Oh, I got to do this. I got to do that. I just want to look at the newspaper. Oh, I wonder what’s going on in the news today. So by by having the clear dream goal or objective and then priming. And knowing where your tendencies are to abort your own dream, goal, or objective, you can prime yourself so that you set things up so that it’s easier to follow that pathway.

But, you know, this is a fairly deep question, so I’m going to try to answer it for you, in ways that can be understandable in a short amount of time. But you see, really what this boils down to, in essence, is do human beings have free will? And many people think we don’t. And many scientists say that we don’t.

And There’s actually truth on both sides. We do and we don’t. We don’t have free will to the degree that we are acting unconsciously. And when you look at how the human mind grows and develops, when a child is born, it has to go through what I call a stage of sex and violence love, which means It doesn’t know what gravity is all about.

It doesn’t know how bad it’ll hurt to fall off of a bed, for example, or a countertop. It doesn’t know how dangerous sharp objects are, or that fire can burn it, or hot pots can burn it, or that glass is sharp. Or, you see children pulling the whiskers on a dog and getting bit, or scratched by a cat, and then they realize, wow, there, there’s a cost to that.

So, what happens is, The child’s ego, until the child develops an ego, it’s basically sees itself as one with everything. So the child pees on itself and poops on the couch or the floor because it thinks that’s its own body. Everything in the child’s consciousness is perceived as an extension of itself, which interestingly is exactly what happens in mystical states of union or Deep meditation or ayahuasca ceremonies or DMT ceremonies, or, you know, any of the shamanic plant medicines, they actually disable the ego’s filtration system and you get deep enough and you become one with, and you feel as though you’re breathing with the rocks and the trees and the sky and everything starts mirroring your mind back to you.

So the child’s really in that state, but. Every day that goes by the child is recording on full download every sound every smell everything that the Sensory system and even the psychic system can record and it doesn’t know how to differentiate A good idea from a bad idea So whatever is going on in the environment of the parents or the siblings whatever it’s exposed to by video games televisions radios anything that enters through its sensory field or Cognitive Perception becomes downloaded and that becomes the basis of the child’s mind, of how the child thinks and processes information.

The ego begins to form when the child either uses the word I or no. If you try to put a fork in a child’s mouth and it pushes it away and says no, it’s now differentiated the fact that it’s not. That whatever you’re putting towards its mouth is not something it wants in its body. So there’s the first indication the child knows it’s not that chunk of roast beef or that applesauce When the child says no it’s now distinguishing that there’s something that it doesn’t want to experience that you wanted or are trying to get It to experience The ego forms progressively and in a healthy environment, like a good tribal environment, the ego takes about 21 years to reach the point where it’s formed, where the person has a healthy sense of self.

The key thing though, is that that healthy sense of self is actually not really a self. It’s a collection of all the ideas and experiences from its environment. And all the ideas in its head about what is achievable or isn’t achievable, what is right or what is wrong or what it should do or shouldn’t do, or what its genitals are for and what you can and cannot do with them and what God is and what God wants from you and how important it is to go to college or not go to college or look a certain way or not look a certain way.

Those ideas, Our program, largely, in the first 12 years of a child’s life, and research shows that most of us, about 90 percent of us, do not evolve past the ideas and concepts programmed into us in the first 12 years of our life. And because that information is largely unconscious, because most of it’s coming through before the person’s ego is formed, which means they don’t have a clearly defined sense of self.

Once you have an ego, if your mom and dad say, you know, you really shouldn’t be having sex before you’re married or you’re going to burden hell. Well, someone who’s got an ego usually reaches the point where they can reject mom and dad’s ideas and say, Well, mom and dad, that may have worked for you, but it’s not the way I want to live.

So then there’s enough sense of self to start determining whether an idea is or isn’t part of the self complex that we call ourselves, or which is also referred to As the ego plex, because really, when you look at what we are, you and I are, and all of us are made of the same thing. We’re made out of earth, water, fire, air, and space.

And within that is a field of consciousness within ourselves called the soul. But the point that I’m driving at, and this is what I do with my students, I say, if I had a computer that I could download every thought or belief in your mind, and we can display this on a computer screen, and you could see every idea that you think of as your own, because it’s in your head.

And we were to then sift through them one at a time and identify which ones are actually of your own origination. Your own creative process, not I’m wearing these clothes because I want to fit in or not. I have this sex life because that’s what the Bible says, or I manage my money this way because mommy and daddy told me I had to have this much money in the bank or I’d be a failure.

Well, what most people would agree is that Probably not more than about 2 percent of every of the ideas of the myriads of ideas in our heads are actually our own. So what does that mean? It means that when we’re setting a goal or have a dream, and we go about doing it, most of the things that we’re trying to get done, that oftentimes do not get done because of this excuse or that excuse, turns out to be unconscious programs that are the habits.

That our parents and our family members and our friends and our social networks and our teachers. Actually passed on to us when we didn’t even realize they were happening. And this is why so many people go, I don’t know why I can’t do this. Or they’re maybe having a relationship, uh, like a discussion with their boyfriend, girlfriend, school teacher, spouse, and all of a sudden.

They feel that they’re about to say something nasty or bite back and part of them says if you do that You’re really gonna get yourself in trouble But then they do it anyhow and later someone says why the hell did you say that and they go? I don’t know So when we look at all the things we do and all the things we say that go against what we say We want to do ie our dream goal or objective We come to realize we don’t have any free will, we only actually gain free will when we become consciously aware enough to say, this is my dream.

These are the values that I’m going to establish for myself. And as I say, if you have no values, you’re in trouble because your yes has no meaning until you learn to say no. So if you say I choose to eat a whole food, organic diet. And that’s my value. Then someone invites you over for a birthday party and they want to stuff your face full of commercially raised garbage.

You now are facing a situation where people might feel offended. They might feel belittled by you. They might say, oh, that organic’s a bunch of bullshit. And put a lot of pressure on you. But if you don’t have enough presence in your own sense of self, you will automatically fall into your prior programming and make an excuse.

So the next thing, you know, got temples, you’re waking up with bags under your eyes, feeling like shit, not getting to the gym, not doing, and so one thing leads to another, and so you see there’s a person with no free will, but to the degree that we actually consciously recognize when part of our mind or our behavioral patterns is pulling us in a direction that we now have enough life experience to know is not serving.

Our dream goal or objective and then we say, okay, there’s a mind virus. There’s something in me that believes it can’t do this or that it shouldn’t do this or is afraid of somebody else’s opinion or public criticism or maybe we’re afraid of the responsibility of success or the notoriety of success.

and many other things. And then we say, thank you, dear pain teacher for showing me where I have a mind virus. And then I teach people to use a technique I developed called the coin drill. So when the negative thought is, oh, I don’t have enough discipline to train that hard. I would rather just watch television.

You see, ah, thank you, dear pain teacher for showing me where I have a mind virus. Now you know what the negative thought is, we assign that to the tails end of the coin. Then I say now state your dream affirmatively. I choose to eat organic food, I choose to get up and go to the gym on schedule, I choose to get to bed on time, and I choose to do things that are happy making for me that are in line with my values.

And if you state that as the positive, because the negative thought cannot exist without the positive potential. So most people are still too undeveloped in their thinking to actually say, wait a minute, if that thought exists. That’s not supporting me then by definition. It’s opposite has to exist Just like you can’t have North without South or East without West or up without down so when we use that opportunity to then Emotionalize that new thought and say ah, yes, I can do this and I will do this and I visualize myself going to the gym and looking beautiful and feeling strong and healthy and Eating well and having more energy and vitality That emotional charge has been shown by research to immediately begin restructuring the neural pathways and then by Visualizing yourself actually doing the activity that you find challenging like getting out of bed in the morning So at night you say I’m gonna visualize myself getting out of bed right when the alarm goes off You’re actually priming the neural pathways, which interestingly, athletes have been doing for as long as we’ve been around.

You see famous athletes practicing the triple jump, or the high jump, or boxers going through shadow boxing, imagining that they’re fighting their opponent. Having watched video footage and knowing what that athlete’s tendencies are and practicing the moves they’ve got to use in order to counterpunch faster than they can consciously process information.

So, the more emotional charge we put on it, the faster the neural networks rewire. And if we visualize ourselves doing it, Then we actually start facilitating all those neural pathways. The law of facilitation says when an impulse passes once through a given set of neurons to the exclusion of others, it tends to do so on a future occasion.

And each time it traverses this path, the resistance will be smaller. So when you consider that the research out there and Deepak Chopra cited this research in a lecture, I heard him give the average person thinks 68, 000 thoughts a day of which researchers found 90 percent to be negative. So there’s social conditioning, there’s fear based thinking.

But the beauty of that is if you just monitor the thoughts going through your head. And you say, great, now I can flip every one of those over, get the positive potential and orient by choosing the positive potential that’s dream goal or objective affirmative, I can energize those pathways. Then you begin building an authentic self, an authentic ego structure that is not programmed.

And that’s the day that you begin to develop legitimate free will because you’re no longer controlled by consensus behavior, normal behavior. And in fact, if you do research on what the shadow is, you’ll find that the biggest source of what creates shadow Is the need to conform to social cultural norms.

So in tarot, the fool is the guy who’s dancing naked in the raid with a lampshade on his head. And everybody looks at that guy and says, what a damn idiot. And that guy’s a nutcase. But what they don’t realize is they’re projecting their own disappointment with the limitations they put on themselves. And the truth is they wish they were brave enough and free enough of other people’s judgments to be able to live honestly and enjoy dancing in the rain.

And only later do they realize the reason they hated that guy is because they’re jealous that they’re not that brave and that free. So there’s the immature fool. The one who is criticizing, but the wise fool is the one who actually has free will. In fact, Osho said free, freedom is the most dangerous thing you’ll ever experience because misery loves company and people can’t stand someone else having a good time when they’re not brave enough to give it to themselves.

So when you look at quantum physics, Richard Feynman was the first one to figure out how it is that a photon decides what slit it’s going to go through in a double slit experiment. And that’s it. Long story made short, after extensive mathematical analysis, he concluded that a photon tries every possible path and ultimately chooses the path of least resistance.

Well, since we are beings of light and our minds operate on quantum principles, basically what’s happening is when we set a dream goal or objective for ourselves, we are using awareness and observation to collapse the probability. The wave function into a probability. And the more we confirm that the more we meditate on that, the more we worship and pray and visualize that the more we are already observing ourself as that person and are directing the photons.

That probability, and that’s the fact. They’ve done extensive research. For example, they’ve taken people that do coin tosses, and they’ve just had them do thousands of coin flips, heads, tails, heads, tails, and monitored how many heads, how many tails, and they found very consistently, it’s about 50 percent heads and 50 percent tails.

Then they said, now we’re going to do the same study again, but this time, we’re going to have you focus on trying to generate the thought of getting heads every time. And they find highly significant changes in the outcomes, statistically, showing that just holding the intention of getting heads.

Radically shifts the probability from random 50 percent to significantly higher percentages that are impossible to produce with random generators. So, without going into the piles of research, and there’s tons of this out there, people like Dean Radin and his book Entangled Minds, or his book Real Magic, or Larry Dossey and One Mind, uh, you know, Uh, uh, Joe Dispenza, Deepak Chopra.

There’s piles of people that are citing relevant research on that out there. I know that just from my own experiencing being an athlete and having to overcome my own laziness and, you know, do the things that we need to do. But in essence, because we live in a field of probability. We have the option to do or not to do, to engage or not to engage, to eat and live in healthy ways or not to live in healthy ways.

The problem is if we get trapped in socially conditioned behaviors, we usually end up looking and feeling just as bad as the people around us. And so we get habituated to believe that’s the only option we have. And a good example of that is You know i’ve been around quite a while now I’ve been in this profession for 35 years and i’ve watched people get fatter and fatter and sicker and sicker throughout my career And now it’s got to the point where if you go into most major cities in the summertime, you will see obese girls in two piece bikinis and you will see obese boys running around and their bellies are so big you can’t even see their genitals or their waistline and they think it’s normal.

So the problem is that the consensus norm is at such a low level of physical, emotional, and mental development. that almost anybody that grows themself is being pulled down by the center of gravity because now the healthy person or the person that uses their mind effectively becomes the weirdo. And strangely enough, if you look into the word weird, it actually comes from the meaning of somebody who has magical powers or someone who’s got more abilities than the average person but today we think a weird person is someone that’s odd or quirky or doesn’t fit in but we don’t realize the word weird actually means somebody powerful like a shaman or a magician Hopefully that answered the question, uh, adequately for you 

Ronnie Landis: to say the least there’s, there’s a lot that I would love to extract and distill out of this.

Obviously the invitation for people is to re listen to this. The beauty of having a podcast recording is that you can do just that. And I encourage you not to let this just pass by one time, but to, to listen over and pick up new things. Um, There was a few things that I personally wanted to distill out of this.

One of the things that you had mentioned was that you had to wrestle or overcome your own lethargy or your own laziness. I want to actually ask you about that. Um, and I know that there’s probably gonna be some interesting things that come out, come out of that. The reason I want to ask you about that is because the other thing that I’ve I picked up and I’ve been exploring when it comes to the field of addictive habits, addictive compulsions, addictions in general and working through my own undercover addictions and noticing that every, every quote unquote addiction, and we can also define that as well, seems to have its own personality.

And so when I look at this whole thing around schizophrenia or personality disorders, and then I kind of take the, the, the magnifying glass and interject it. Within myself, I start to notice that, hey, it seems like there’s different people going on in here. It seems like the identity or self as Ronnie Landis, the construct of Ronnie Landis, there seems to be multiple personalities budding for attention at any given time in the day.

At 12 o’clock, it’s this version, at two o’clock, and then towards the night, it seems like they all seem to integrate and coalesce, and there seems to be the most peace. But during the day, there seems to be kind of, um, Multiple multiple voices trying to trying to trying to get the the the mic so to speak and I noticed that there’s a different compulsive behavior associated with every one of them.

So, um, I’m gonna I’m gonna leave it at that because I know I have a feeling that you know exactly what I’m talking about. And, um, yeah, I don’t want to go on too long because I haven’t properly, um, completed that thought. I just want to hand that to you and, and kind of see if you can, if you can unpack that a little bit for all of us.

Paul Chek: Yes. Well, that’s a deep, deep one right there just with what you’ve shared. Cause to really unpack that is there’s a fair bit of depth to that. So I’ll do my best to. Be efficient about it. I define an addiction as any repeated behavior that does not produce the results you wanted, or does not help you achieve your dream goal or objective.

Angeles Arrien is a famous, uh, shaman and anthropologist who traveled the world. I, she went to over a hundred countries specifically meeting with the elders and the wise people of these countries. And talking to addicted people of all types to identify what the root causes of addiction were after many, many years of research, she calculated out, she tabulated all of her research data and narrowed it down to four primary causes.

The four primary causes of addiction are intensity, being raised in an intense environment with parents or family members that are intense to be around. So what happens is. We can’t maintain that level of intensity without burning ourselves out without being disruptive in relationships. So kids, for example, with attention deficit hyperactivity behavior are very, very hard for school teachers to deal with.

So now what they do is they just drug the hell out of these kids to numb them out. But often these kids are geniuses and people don’t realize that they’re just bored because the environment is too slow for them. So whenever we’re, If we’re raised with too much intensity for a healthy balance within ourselves, as I’ll say with all addictions, then we start looking for coping strategies.

Something to help, in this case, calm us down. Well, intensity in families is extremely high. If you look at the rate of physical, emotional, and mental abuse of children, um, if you look at the book, Your Body Keeps the Score by Basil van der Klook, M. D., he shows you the rates of violence, and it’s very high.

Especially in Catholic families and a lot of religious families and military families where there’s a lot of, you know, Thou shalt to be followed which pits us up against our own instincts and our own freedom And so what you see is with that type of addiction. I mean that type of a stimulus We’re going to have a lot of people that have a hard time calming down in order to be present with anybody because their mind starts looking for threats because the thing that brings the intensity is You better get your homework done.

If you don’t do this, I’m going to whip your ass or I’m going to knock you out. Any number of threats to the child that puts the child on a constant state of alert Where they’re scanning the environment for threats, which means they’re always in a fight or flight reaction which Stops them from effective learning because as soon as you trigger the sympathetic nervous system You shut down the right brain hemisphere, which is the hemisphere of creativity and connecting to the whole and novel thought And spontaneous behavior such as when we’re dancing and free form dancing that’s spontaneous and look how many You know, as the old saying, white man can’t dance, too trapped in their head.

So those people have a tendency towards things that numb them or bring them down. Or if they get used to living that way, then anytime the environment calms down, they feel insecure and nervous, like something bad is going to happen. So they have to keep the environment constantly stimulated. So you see, for example, you get into a relationship, someone you have passionate, intense sex with them.

But you find out soon enough they can’t handle peace and quiet and as soon as the relationship’s going well they have to throw a monkey wrench into it because they can’t handle the comfort of it. It actually is scary for them because they don’t, in their upbringing when it got real quiet it meant the belt was coming out or somebody was about to get whacked.

Um, now look at the massive insurgence of psychedelics and marijuana. And so what you see is that our entire. world culture is drawing mother nature to it, to bring medicine for an overly charged, overly wound populace. That’s so driven by intensity and the pace of media and the ass kickers. You also see this intensity now coming out in the Huge interest in mixed martial arts and boxing and, and all the combat of sports.

So you got boys, girls, teenagers, fat women, skinny people, going and beating the shit out of heavy bags and each other because it’s, it’s the level of intensity that one carries requires that they meet a level of intensity that high to diffuse it. I, the analogy I give is if you If you’re a mechanic and you have to wind a cylinder head bolt down to a hundred and ten foot pounds of torque.

It’s going to take at least 111 to unwind it. So if we’re wound up to the metaphorical 110 pounds of pressure inside, we gravitate towards something that’s that intense to unwind us. So that’s one cause of addiction that leads to all sorts of challenges. The next common, now these are not in any order.

She said that there is no order that all four of these are often at play in one person. The next one is. Perfectionism, constantly trying to meet up to some elusive external standard of how you have to look or behave or the clothes that you have to wear or, you know, how perfect your schoolwork has to be done.

Or you get into the military and your boots have to be perfectly polished and your uniform has to be perfect and your nails and your hair and your toolbox and all that stuff. So the problem with perfectionism is it keeps us completely externalized because our sense of accomplishment is always based on somebody else’s opinion.

And you can never get a consensus of opinion. So you think you look beautiful and your makeup’s perfect and your hair’s perfect and your clothes are perfectly matched and you walk out The door and two minutes later someone says oh that dress looks a little too short I don’t think you should be showing that much leg and then another woman says oh I can see your bra strap That’s terrible.

You should cover up and Then you go to work and some guy says well, I really liked your hairstyle last week better And next thing you know, it’s not even noon and you’re completely deflated You Because your whole sense of self worth is based on somebody else’s opinion. The other thing that’s a death trap with perfectionism is something that’s perfect doesn’t change.

How do you improve it? So paradoxically it brings evolution to a standstill. Anyone that thinks they’re perfect actually thinks there’s nothing they need to do to grow and therefore aren’t interested in growing because they think something’s wrong with everybody else. If the universe was perfect, there would be no time and therefore there would be no experience because there’d be nothing to experience.

So if you look into Buddhist philosophy, they say that they have a principle called dukkha, which means imbalance. And they say that imbalance is built into the universe because that’s what makes it move. And that’s what creates time, life, and experience. And if you look at the three correlates of consciousness, Itzhak Bentov showed that you cannot have consciousness without time, space, and movement.

With, if there was no imbalance, there would be no movement, therefore no time and space wouldn’t really have any meaning. So what I’m saying is if, if the universe itself was perfect, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now because right now we’re talking about perceived imbalances and if everything was perfect, there’d be nothing to talk about.

And there would also be no unique individuality. It turns out that our imperfections are what make us beautiful. So we’ve got. Intensity and perfectionism. The third one is the need to know. So what do we have? We have more PhDs, master’s degrees, uh, bachelor’s degrees, associates, arts degrees per capita, never in the history of the man of man.

And we’re the stupidest sickest people we’ve ever been. So what happens is we’ve created a society and a culture worldwide where children don’t get the love and appreciation they want. That makes them feel safe unless they’re as good as the the teacher’s pet or the person getting straight A’s But we forget that some people are auditory learners.

Some people are visual learners. Some are kinesthetic and unfortunately 95 Between 92 and 95 percent of all education worldwide is imparted through the mathematical logical learning style Which is reading books and using a pencil and using facts and figures But only five to eight percent of the world population learns well that way So you’ve got all the athletic types the kinesthetic learners the audio types, which is the second largest group The visual type, which is the first largest group.

So you’ve got, uh, uh, the, um, mathematical logical is the smallest group. The largest is visual learners. The second is auditory. The third largest is kinesthetic or movement types. And the smallest group of learners Are the mathematical logical and lo and behold those are the ones that get A’s and are on the honor roll all the time and it just so happens.

They’re Structured that way mentally and they’re gifted that way But now all the rest of us are basing our sense of self worth and self value not realizing we’re in the wrong Environment. So look at what you see with the elite athletes. A lot of them can’t even pass high school, but they’re making millions of dollars a year as basketball players, football players, and baseball players.

And so we have the same dumb jock, but their paycheck doesn’t say they’re that dumb. And Howard Gardner’s research showed that these people are highly, highly intelligent. It’s just that they’re not being evaluated within the range of their natural intelligibility. So um, you know, the need to know leads people into a perpetual search for more knowledge, more knowledge, more knowledge.

And that’s why we call a PhD piled higher and deeper. And you’ve got people that have so much intellectual knowledge, but they can’t apply any of it effectively. And all you got to do is go to any conference on nutrition and you’ll see that the nutritionist look like they’re, they’re all obese. It looks like an obesity conference yet.

They’re the nutritionist. You go to a physical therapy conference. And all the physical therapists are more broken down than their patients. You go to a medical conference, and the doctors are sicker than the people they’re being a physician to. So this perpetual need to know actually has brought us into this sort of illusion that what you can remember and regurgitate to somebody is real knowledge, but if it’s not applied and it doesn’t produce practical wisdom, it’s a death trap, and you can spend your whole life for it.

Paying off, uh, your, your university debt, not even practicing what you were taught. In fact, research shows that 50 percent of people with university degrees are not even practicing in the field they were trained in within five years. So then you go to the final of the four causes of addiction based on Angela Zarian’s research, and it’s focusing on what’s wrong.

So think from your own childhood, how much of the time that adults were talking to you was spent. Were they telling you Your homework’s not right. You’re not doing good enough with this. You’re dressed wrong. Don’t say that. Don’t do that Don’t hold it that way. You shouldn’t do this. You shouldn’t do that Unfortunately, we have what’s called a negative bias in our nervous system, which looks for threats in the environment So we’re actually wired to focus on threats because nobody dies of a birthday party Nobody dies of, of, uh, having a good time on the swings at the park, but you can die from a poisonous snake or getting eaten by an animal in the woods.

So our nervous system is actually wired to look for threats, but those are legitimate threats. We’ve gotten to the point now where we create the illusion of threats and because As we’re being raised so many of the people that are influencing are focusing on what’s wrong with us Not what we’re doing well And because we’re put into situations that don’t match our natural learning style and our natural abilities We’re being set up for failure quite often So by the time a person, you know gets to high school by the time I got to the ninth grade I said I can’t take any more of this because i’m tired of being told that there’s something wrong with me Yet, I can go to the farm and outwork adults.

I can weld, I can drive heavy equipment, I can handle adult tasks as good as any adult, and I can go make money skinning animals at a butcher shop, or working on farms, or working in mechanic shops, and here they are telling me that I, I’m a kid that’s never going to make anything of himself. So I had enough of that because the teachers themselves didn’t demonstrate me.

That there was any advantage to all this education because they were unhealthy and weren’t happy either. So when we focus on what’s wrong all the time, you know, whatever you put your awareness to becomes your reality. So what, what I’m pointing out here is that when you look at the primary causes of addiction, a lot of those lead us into the experience of Not loving ourselves because we think that we’re not good enough or that there’s something wrong with us or that we’ll never be able to Be a star or make a lot of money and then what we have to do is We we naturally start trying to find ways To medicate ourselves so that we don’t feel the pain of being singled out or the pain of being diminished and what I’ve identified in my, and I share this in my, um, my course that I, that I have through the check Institute called the one, two, three, four for overcoming addiction, obesity, and disease is that almost all the things that we’re addicted to our attempts to get safe love.

Like when you, when you drink a bottle of alcohol, it never complains that you’re not a good enough kisser. If you smoke a cigarette, it never complains that you’re not a good lover. If you get an addiction to chocolate, the chocolate bar never says you don’t eat me well enough. So what happens is you see that when people fall into the trap of these common causes of addiction, They’re almost always looking for a way to have an intimate relationship with a food or a drug or a substance or, you know, something that allows them to express themselves without fear of criticism or fear of being diminished and without any responsibility attached to it, unfortunately.

So what happens is it really boils down to the fact that the positive of that is, is that we all need some degree of resistance. In order to develop the strength of our mind, we, we, just like we have to grow, meet resistance to grow ourselves physically. We also need resistance to grow our emotional intelligence.

And our mental intelligence. So the the beauty of all this is that when we realize That other human beings are doing the things that we would like to do And if they can do it, we can do it. Then we say ah Now I have a choice I need to think like a champion and act like a champion and live like a champion now So that I can be a champion.

You can’t wait till you’re a champion to start acting like one You can’t wait till you’re rich to start acting like a rich person You got to manage your money and your lifestyle in ways that produce wealth to get the wealth. So Those that are truly ready to grow and become realize the problem is not unique to me You It’s a cultural problem.

It’s a worldwide problem. And it has to do with many such factors as I’ve described from the economic environment, to the political environment, to the religious environment, to the educational environment, all of which are systems designed to control people. And so once we realize our freedom is really our choice and our limitations are usually more perceived than actual.

And then we look at people that have achieved greatness in the areas that we want to achieve greatness. If you want to be a great surfer, study Laird Hamilton. If you want to be a skateboard star, study Danny Way. Uh, if you want to be a business genius, uh, then, you know, study, uh, Elon Musk. If you want to be a great inventor, study Einstein or Alexander Graham Bell.

But you know, when my life, I studied the autobiographies of over 150 of the greatest thinkers in the world. And what I saw is every one of them went through tremendous challenges, very, very serious challenges from family challenges to health challenges. But when a person reaches the point where they’re ready to listen to the spirit inside of them, the genie in the bottle, which is in all of us, all of us are consciousness expressing itself through individuality.

We are all the universe expressing itself as individual opportunities for creativity, expression, love, and, uh, the creation of meaning and the understanding and participation in beauty without which life loses its purpose. Joy. So if we lose our sense of the fact that we are highly creative and highly capable, then we give up.

But if we realize that ultimately what we’ve got to do to be free is to be brave enough to be different. And find something that we love enough to really participate in because then we practice making love every day instead of poor me poor me It’s always you know Someone else’s fault that only carries you so far You can wake up 40 years old and realize you haven’t done shit in your life and go what the hell happened?

And then you can go into a state of depression and a midlife crisis And paradoxically, having studied extensive, uh, research and books on the midlife crisis, it’s now common for people to have a midlife crisis as early as 18 years of age. So really what I’m saying is that there are common causes of addiction.

There are lots of these problems. But at the same time, that becomes the gym in which we enter to grow ourselves. And that’s what makes it meaningful to be successful and to become a champion and to be different and know that you’re exemplifying what’s possible to countless millions of other people.

And the more you do what you love to do. And live your own freedom. The more you inspire others to do the same thing. And I think that’s really what all of us have an opportunity to do for the rest of the world.

Ronnie Landis: Beautifully, beautifully said on multiple dimensions. I think, I think a few things of note here for all of us is that our challenges are not a curse. They’re a blessing, but we can make the We can make it a curse, right? We can make our gifts a curse by not actually engaging with them responsibly, productively, and intelligently and turn something that was there to be alchemized, to be metamorphosized into our greatest gift.

It’s like all the, you know, it’s like The superhero origin stories, you know, like Batman and the story of Bruce Wayne and what an incredible archetypal, um, mythos that was, especially the new Batman movies, when you really take it in and like, look at that, that particular journey or any of these journeys, whatever resonates, there’s always this kind of like enduring component, right?

We have to endure the, um, the resistance, as you said, the resistance, our own unique karma or life journey. Yeah. And to, to get to the Dharma, which is like who we really are, what our authentic path is, and it’s almost like this, this idea that, you know, for me, anyways, it’s like, I have to earn it. There’s something there for me, especially as an athlete, that really speaks to me.

It’s like, I’m not just going to be given. My, my, my mission or my path. It’s like, I have to earn it. I have to go through some experiences in order to develop myself. Um, and so that’s the first thing that comes up for me is that, you know, we, we can decide how we engage with these challenges and it’s actually quite comforting to know that it’s, it’s, it’s a necessary built in.

Component or mechanism into the universal fabric of all of our lives that, you know, these resistances and challenges that we go through. It’s not an isolated incident. I think for a lot of people, especially when we become too narcissistically focused on ourself. That’s how we can go down the depression spiral where we’re so focused on ourself that we think we’re the only one going through.

A particular challenge. I know exactly how that feels, and I also know how it feels to pull myself out of it, so I’m able to actually help other people, um, you know, go through that process. But if I wasn’t able to do that for myself, then I would not be adequately qualified to be able to support somebody or even identify for somebody what their particular challenges are.

So I want to segue. I know we have a certain amount of time left. There’s a few things that I want to discuss with you, but I want to, I want to get a little personal if we can. Um, we don’t have to go really deep into it, but I want to take this idea of the, the pain teacher. Yeah. Which you talk about and which you’ve brought up and that’s kind of in a roundabout way of what I take out of what you just said is that our pain, it’s.

Whether it’s psychosomatic, it’s physical, it’s emotional, it’s spiritual, it’s, it’s all of it, um, that’s associated with the lack of integration, the, the, you know, the addictive tendency, whatever it is. There’s a pain, there’s a potential suffering there, and a lot of times in our culture, as you, as you mentioned, we medicate that and tranquilize it, we sedate it, but we don’t adequately engage with it as a, as a teacher, and I think that philosophy is really, really powerful.

And so, I want to take that idea and relate it to an experience in your life where you went through something that you had to overcome and maybe you were challenged, um, you were, you were in a challenge with it and, um, you were able to, to overcome it by engaging with the lesson in it. 

Paul Chek: There’s many, a long, long string of such things.

I want to just, uh, drop back for two seconds. You know, you mentioned myth. Well, one of the definitions of myth, which is very powerful, is that myth is something that never happened, but is happening all the time. And when you really consider the definition that I’ve just shared with you, watching Superman on television or Batman or any of these characters, We believe that never happened, but when you realize that there are people that have overcome the resistance of parents and society and culture and program beliefs to become the Richard Bransons, to become the Steve Jobses, et cetera, et cetera, the Deepak Chopras, the Mahatma Gandhis, the Martin Luther Kings, uh, except all of these people.

Ronnie Landis: All jacks. 

Paul Chek: Well, you know, to some degree, I do the best that I can do, but the, the, the reality of it is, is that it is happening all the time, right? So the myth is something that never happened. We believe that those are just stories, but we don’t realize if we just look around us, it’s happening all the time in the real world.

And so if we orient ourselves to the never happened, then Superman just becomes a cartoon character. But if we organize ourselves to the happening all the time, then we realize anybody that reaches a handout to support us and give us the wisdom we need or answer questions for us is our Superman or our Batman.

And therefore we can realize that. Myth means our story, and to the degree that our story isn’t serving us, then the first thing one can realize is that I just need to edit my story and update it to a story that has the ending that I want and act that out instead of the poor me story that everybody else is doing.

Dancing around so with the pain teacher. Well, you know, I’ve been a competitive athlete I started wrestling in the first grade and played every sport that I could play and I was a uh a high level motocross racer when I was a kid and There were times where I had Very bad wipeouts one time. I was Knocked unconscious for two days I’ve had wipeouts where I woke up in the ambulance several times, didn’t even know how I got there.

And I’ve had internal bleeding and bad lacerations and concussions. Um, I’ve had so much blood that I’ve literally stuck to the sheets for weeks while my body was healing. And so what I realized is that I could either just give up or I could study what I did that got me in the situation and say, how can I do it better?

You know, one of the things that happens to people is they fall into the trap of thinking that they’re a loser because somebody did something better than them or Uh, they fell off their motorcycle or their horse and they didn’t succeed, so they think they’re a loser. But I’ve always told people, you really want to get rid of the concept of a loser and replace it with learner.

So if we orient ourselves towards winners and learners, then we know that the people that are faster than us on their motorcycle or can stay longer on the back of a bull than we can, can hit the golf ball further and straighter or beat us in a boxing match or outrun us in a race. There are teachers.

And so if we orient ourselves towards the fact that there’s somebody there guiding us to what’s possible, then it helps negate the whole concept of self diminishment and that’s, you know, the pain teacher comes to Make you aware of what you’re creating by buying into the concept and Anytime I’ve hurt myself I’ve often found that doctors and therapists could not give me good advice and many of them told me I would never race again Or I would never lift weights or do martial arts And well that just goes in one ear and out the other for me But what I ended up doing is I had to figure myself out So I had to spend a lot of time with my body.

I would be in pain and I would find okay I can’t do that exercise But if I change the angle of the cable, all of a sudden my shoulder doesn’t hurt. So I developed a technique called surrounding the dragon, the dragon being the problem. And instead of saying, I’m too hurt, or I’m too sad, or I’m too broken, or nobody loves me.

Surrounding the dragon says, well, what can I do? What’s the, all I can do is crawl around in the house. That’s something. If I can’t lift weights, but I can stretch, And I can lay on a foam roller, then maybe that’s what spirit wants me to do, is to become more intimately aware of my body and what I can do at the level that I’m at with the circumstances that I have.

So ultimately I developed the concept of the pain teacher because the pain teacher is actually the feedback loop to show us what we’re creating. Um, Arnold Patton says in his universal principles, if you don’t like what’s happening in your life, look carefully at what you’re choosing unconsciously.

Since the ego is only about 5 percent of our total consciousness, the rest is subconscious, unconscious and super conscious. We tend to fall into the trap of believing what our ego is telling us without realizing that there’s Bruce Bruce Lipton says that the Subconscious mind processes four million times as much information a second as the conscious mind So every time for example, I’ve been injured I’ve taken it as an invitation to go to my body and say, okay Tell me what I need to do and sometimes it might be shaking sometimes You find that you’ve got to shake it off.

You’ve got to let your body unwind. Um, you know, but what happens is if you start using pain medications and drugs more than you absolutely have to, you kill the feedback loop. And so when you look at things like relationships, if you start to see a pattern, well, the last three breakups I had, my partner said that I was, you know, Um, not paying attention or that I was, um, too isolated and didn’t share my emotions or that I work too much.

Well, then you see the pain teachers now emerge in your life three times. And if you’re conscious, you say, okay, I’ve got to listen to this feedback and look for the common denominators in there. So lo and behold, you get fired from three jobs and you see it’s always for showing up late. Or whatever it might be.

So you see the pain teacher actually gives us awareness. Of where we can grow ourselves so that we can become more whole and participate more fully in expressing our creativity Our potential and adding more beauty to the world But if we keep diminishing ourselves and drugging ourselves Then we actually shut off the feedback loop and then we become an average person And as Carl Jung said, the average man can never be successful because by definition, average and success are on different ends of a scale.

So without a long expose, basically the pain teacher is, um, anything that’s happening in your life, that’s seeming to obstruct the flow of your creative energy and diminish possibilities for you living the way you choose to live and meeting your goals and objectives. For whatever aspect of your life you’re working on like one of the most common ways the pain teacher shows up in people’s lives is Financial problems and people don’t realize they’re trying to medicate Emotional and mental emptiness by buying shit, but it never works the soul Only is truly nourished by love So if you keep doing jobs that you don’t like and being in relationships that you think you have to be in because no one else will be will love you and um You know those kinds of things well Yeah, well, you’re never going to be fulfilled and because you’re not making love And most of our pain comes from the fact that we’re too busy doing what everybody else tells us we should be and looking like they want us to look instead of listening to our heart and embracing the novel, uh, the novelty that each of us is, right?

Nobody ever is going to be on this planet with your fingerprints ever again, or even in the universe based on You know, the wisdom of research and, uh, wise people and careful observation. Uh, you know, we’ve never had a single case of two people with the same fingerprint showing up, no matter what generation we’re in, as long as we’ve measured fingerprints.

So the point is, the universe is a novelty generator, and if we realize that being like everybody else, It just goes against the universal principle. And if everybody was a Picasso, then it wouldn’t mean anything to be a great artist. If everybody was an Einstein, then it wouldn’t mean anything to be a great scientist.

But every one of us has the same level of genius within us that all geniuses do. The difference is, are we willing to let it out and are we brave enough to express ourselves? Whether it gets a consensus of good boy or good girl or not, The reality of it is if it’s making you happy and filling you with love, then you’re carrying that wherever you go.

And that’s the hero’s journey is to, um, express yourself fully and add something beautiful to the world. And just know that people with less development have a real hard time with other people being accomplished and, and happy. And, and that’s part of how, why we need to develop what I call, uh, Uh spiritual courage because if we don’t have spiritual courage and we have to follow the lowest common denominator and join the the herd and enter sheep herd mentality to feel safe and then you Well, you just become a sheep on um pain medications.

That’s bad news 

Ronnie Landis: There’s two things coming up for me. One of them I want to share. I just want to be really just, um, transparent for a moment because One of the things that was coming up for me was around and why I brought up kind of the whole multiple personalities perspective around addictive tendencies was this this Ultimately this conversation around integration 

Paul Chek: and I want to answer that for you by the way I think I forgot about that part.

So when you’re ready, let me help you understand the multiple personalities. 

Ronnie Landis: Good. So this is going to lead right into it. Thank you. So I went through a phase in my journey, especially becoming a public figure, a teacher, um, all the different descriptives to describe what I do in the world. And my kind of persona or personality is Ronnie Landis and trying to integrate My personal self with my public self, and I’m still a bit in that process too.

But, um, I started to notice that I went through, I guess, I guess a lot of people go into those, those, what we would call fundamentalism or dogmatic phases. I never considered myself dogmatic. However, I did notice that I would project a lot of my personal beliefs around things like. Coffee or stimulants or, or things that we would call addictive, um, components.

Uh, when I was heavily, like, 100 percent raw vegan, it was cooked food or, or I went through the, you know, meat or whatever, whatever the thing was. The things that I deemed to be, um, Let’s just say not good. I would project those things. But then I noticed along those same times, I would be on a personal level.

I would have a conflict with it and I would explore on and off with those substances in my own personal life. And I started to become aware of this and I realized like, wow, there’s a lack of integration. So I stopped actually showing up publicly to discuss any of these things until I could get a handle.

what, what was not integrated. So, um, I wanted to just share that because I think that’s the thing that a lot of people do go through is the lack of integration between their personal and public self, especially when we’re trying to develop a public or a teacher role, maybe too quick where we haven’t fully developed the personal beliefs or, or, um, Ideas that we’re looking to bring into the fold.

And so I want to just, I wanted to share that. Maybe I had a different thought process around that, but I think, I think that’s leading into basically what you just kind of brought up around answering the multiple personalities and integration piece. 

Paul Chek: Yeah. There’s an important. thing that you’re saying there.

And I’m going to paraphrase Ken Wilber. I’ve modified his statement a little bit to be a little more holistic, but it’s still true and authentic and accurate. Ken Wilber basically says to the degree that the story you tell yourself does not match the story you tell other people. First, you will become tired.

Then you will get sick. Then you will get a disease and then you will die and the reason is is because every time we have to maintain Another personality we actually have to invest so much of our energy Into inflating that personality, but we also have to know when to shut it off and the more of them we get So if we got a personality in front of mom and dad and a personality with our friends and a different personality when we’re around certain women Or when we’re in school or when we’re with Uh people that we think we can get something from or when we’re in the public eye We can be remember every time you open another window on a computer Its processing speed slows down because it’s dividing its processing power by that number of windows So what happens is the more windows we open up with illusions that we’re trying to maintain, which ultimately is trying to get love.

We want to be the perfect vegan because we found that vegans will love us if we behave that way. How is that any different than being a Christian or a Muslim? And really, those are just people that are seeking another social group that seems to be more safe for them than the ones that they found too painful.

It often has nothing to do with health, and I can prove it to you, because anybody that’s eating a vegetarian or a vegan diet, and it’s not working for them, they’re practicing animal cruelty at the very highest level. They are torturing a human being, and a human being can make changes in the world that an animal can’t make.

So to the degree that you eat what your body needs because it gives you the most vitality, energy, and mental clarity and capability to be an active change maker in the world, then you are by definition, reincarnating the plants and the animals as a human being that is working to support all sentient beings from plants to animals.

Et cetera. But what you see is people don’t realize that it’s really not about the meat. It’s about the family network of people with like mind. And how’s that any different than being. Uh, a Nazi or a skinhead or a soldier in the U. S. military or any other social group that identifies itself as different from everybody else.

It’s really, um, looking for family and it’s often a coping mechanism because our families are too painful to be with. So we have to create an extended family, even if it. ruins our health. Now, those things certainly can be health enhancing for a while, but if we’re not having a relationship with our body, then we’re just playing another game because what one man’s medicine is another man’s poison.

So the, the, the first point was, Whenever our story is incongruent from within to without, we’re creating an illusion, and the universe doesn’t maintain illusions. We have to provide the power to do that ourselves, and it takes a lot of energy to be multiple people. If you look into Jungian psychology, Jung really identified what he called complexes.

Complexes are emotionally charged networks of neurons. Neurons. that link to each other by association that ultimately can reach enough neural integration and enough neurons to create artificial intelligence. So an example is if you know you have to behave a certain way or your father might whip you, And he has whipped you well all the right away a child that gets whipped now Their father is the archetype for all men Their mother serves to imprint them with the archetype of all women.

So every young man His relationship with his father actually programmed at the very deepest level, what they can expect from interacting with all men. So if dad had a tendency to wear, um, a black belt and blue jeans and a t shirt, Those things are all associated with the painful experience called getting whipped by dad.

Now what happens is through association the nervous system begins to scan the environment for any male with blue jeans and a black belt and a t shirt on because they are perceived to be a threat. So what happens is When you now realize that the idea of a man is linked into the complex any other time you have trouble with a man It actually extends the reach the neural network of the so I had a hard time with a man in school So now teachers are just like my dad A guy at school beat me up and that just reinforces men are dangerous.

So when you look at all the different ways people get challenged and have painful relationships and painful emotional experiences we’re constantly developing complexes and because there’s so many commonalities such as they involve people or they involve tools or they involve money Or they involve sex, or they involve ideas of, of what God wants based on religion.

We get to the point where we are now loaded with complexes that can be triggered by other people. And the instant that we’re triggered, i. e. a man shows up wearing blue jeans and a black belt. And you don’t even know why but all of a sudden you’re starting to get anxious and you haven’t even met the guy yet or You walk into an elevator and your heart starts to race and you don’t know why and you think what the hell’s going on But you don’t realize The broken child in you is running a complex And each of those complexes is actually like a watchdog that’s looking in the environment, make us aware of any potential threats so that the broken child in us doesn’t get hurt and has a better chance of survival.

And those complexes actually grow to the point where you get diagnosed with a multiple personal disal personality disorder. And if it continues to grow, you become a schizophrenic. And if it continues to grow, you get locked up. Because you now have. So many different personalities that actually can change the entire physiology of the individual, and research shows that people with multiple personality disorders can actually have completely different biomarkers when different complexes or personalities are activated.

Which is quite wild. So really what i’m sharing with you Is most of these complexes come from traumatic experiences most of which emerge from our childhood You correlate that with Over controlling parents you correlate that with statistics on violence and families and then imagine being a kid in sunday school Being told God will burn you in hell if you touch your dentals.

God will burn you in hell if you do this or do that. Now you’re afraid of the one thing that’s supposed to be the source of love, paradoxically. So what do you, what does a kid do? Now you’re afraid to live because Your dick keeps getting hard every time your hormones turn on and every time you see a girl you want a jumper and all the things that are instinctual to us now become threats to our very survival, not only in life, but in death.

So do you see these complexes develop massive amounts of emotional energy and then they become on the defense all the time and we get to the point where we don’t trust anybody, we don’t trust ourselves and the world just becomes a scary place. And that reinforces our own negative bias about. Why we can’t be successful why nobody loves us, but in reality those are complexes And there’s where you get your coin out and there’s where you get clear and that those are the pain teachers showing up to say This complex serves to make you aware of what’s in the environment But the question is is it true is the guy standing in front of you wearing blue jeans with a black belt your father?

Or is he another human being that might be very loving and very supportive? It could be an angel for all you know. So if we don’t understand the process of how we develop all these, um, complexities or, or, you know, uh, subdivisions of our sense of self, then they can take us over and we can even be confused about who we are and get to be afraid of how we’re going to react.

In certain situations. And then we’re afraid to be ourselves. But if we realize that the pain teacher is showing up to say, Hey, time to do some mental emotional work in the gym. And we start rewiring them. And so when that, you say, Thank you dear pain teacher for showing me where I have a false belief that all men are just like my father.

Or where I have this false belief that i’m always going to have money shortages because my parents always had money problems I’m going to evolve the genes of my family and show them that somebody with even a ninth grade education Can make big changes in the educational system big changes in health and exercise and can be financially stable and and Evolve beyond the limitations of family perception and that’s when a dream You Becomes legitimate and that’s when you have a tool That gives you the awareness of how the complex can serve you because it acts like a watchdog But if your watchdog doesn’t know when not to bite It’s a dangerous dog and we have to be the one to train the watchdog So we want to take advantage of the fact that it’s making us alert about the environment But we have to train the dog to know what’s real most people think a rope laying on the ground You In dim lighting as a snake and only later do they find out that their freak outfit was Because it was a rope laying on the ground.

So until we learn whether it’s a rope or a snake, we have to be brave enough to breathe into it, take our time, and stay conscious.

Ronnie Landis: I mean, beautifully said. I, um, I realized, interestingly enough, When I became aware that I had a lot of these projectile judgments, and it wasn’t like I wasn’t out there just bashing people. I’ve always been kind of equanimitous and very much kind and peaceful. And that my, my design is, is about creating peace.

So I’d actually avoid conflict in a lot of situations to, to favor peace. But when I became aware that I did have these judgments, I would go in my own personal life to experiment in private with You know, taking in some grass fed meat periodically, if I felt like I needed to experiment with that, I would take in coffee, I would take in whatever marijuana, whatever the thing is that I had a judgment around being a health educator, I would, I would take that polarity and experiment with it to the point where I no longer was judging other people because I realized underneath that I was actually judging myself.

And until I could come into integration with myself to neutralize the judgment, I would always have this angst. I would always kind of be a little edgy. And I realized like, that’s not really a healthy way to go about teaching health. You know, it’s like the, the angry yoga teacher or something. I didn’t want to become one of those, like, even if I, if I decide to stay vegetarian or vegan, which is a important path for me, I’m not dogmatic about it.

It’s an important life path. And we’ll see where it goes. I’m open to the universe. And my body, but I, but whatever that is, I didn’t want to be an angry vegan. I didn’t want to use this thing as a way to project my own vitriol and my own angst out there in the world because I felt like we had too much of that and I don’t want to create warrants and division.

I actually want to create integration and peace and true healing. And everything that you just said is actually so, I guess, represent, representative of something that I actually haven’t talked about publicly, maybe ever, of this process of having to come to terms with my own, um, my own lack of self acceptance, which is what created all these judgments in the first place.

Paul Chek: Well, what you’re describing is actually called a counter myth. Our myth is our story. It’s the story we tell ourselves inside. A counter myth is a symptom of the myth actually not interfacing with reality. Interesting. Whoa. So, religious wars are counter myths. Um, the fact that we have more doctors and therapists and nutritionists and dieticians Per capita, but we’re the sickest people we’ve ever been shows you that the medical nutritional myth isn’t working It’s not interfacing with reality so what happens is Whenever a story, uh is no longer applicable to the era that it’s Um, in it produces resistance and that brings pain, which triggers consciousness, which brings awareness.

And then we have to modify like for, I’ve had many vegans and vegetarians come to you with cancer and all sorts of health problems. And they were, you know, sitting there telling me how it’s the greatest way to eat and how it produces health. And I said, well, why are you sitting here paying me 750 an hour?

Because you’re sick. It dawns on them that their own story doesn’t even match reality. But then again, I have meat eaters and paleo people that are just as sick because they need to become vegans for a while. So that’s why I say one man’s medicine is another man’s poison. And if you just follow the sheep, then you become a sheep and a sick one.

But what you’re talking about is actually the experience of your own counter myth. Wow. And the counter myth produces pain, which produces conscious awareness, which invites change, which then brings us back to harmony. And as Buddha said, the only universal constant is change. So what, what worked yesterday, the vegan diet ends up turning into a, uh, a mixed diet.

And then after a heavy deadlift session, turns into a, uh, uh, you know, a protein type diet. And then on a two day, uh, fast, because you’re in a shamanic ceremony, you’re now back to fasting and not eating plants, vegetables, animals, or anything. And, and so what, what you see is as we grow up and we mature. Uh, spiritually, we learn to listen to the guidance of our soul, our deepest intuition, and our heart.

And instead of having any dogmatic rules about what should or shouldn’t happen, if we hold our body as the temple that we live in, and we, Honor, the fact that our subconscious mind is 4 million times more powerful than the one we think is so smart. Then all you got to do is listen to your body and it’ll give you its own vote on whether your diet or your exercise program or whatever it is, is, is working.

And to the degree that it’s causing pain and dysfunction, then your counter myth is right there in your cells 

and, or your 

relationships. 

Ronnie Landis: Mm hmm. I, that, that, what you just said, Paul, and this idea of a counter myth, I, I, I’ve heard the term, but it never was reflected to me so, so accurately to describe every single, every single thing in my life, every area of my life that has gone disarray.

Like, I can now use, and hopefully you watching or listening to this can use that idea of a counter myth. To actually identify the perceived confusion because there’s so many situations I’ve had in relationships in my own health journey, my professional career, my life as a whole, where I’ve, I’ve adopted the idea of being confused or I didn’t know what was going on because I couldn’t access the answers.

So I’d go outside of myself like so many of us do to try to. Extract some kind of semblance of sensor or rationale for things that I couldn’t actually figure out. But now I can immediately look at all those things in my life and realize like it boils down to a counter myth that I have a story. I have a narrative going on that’s now being rubbed up against reality.

Yeah, it’s almost like it’s like, you know, when you do a medicine ceremony, um, My most recent one was a 5 MEO DMT ceremony, which was so beautiful. And it put me in the state like so many do where the onset comes in and the dissolving of constructs and that, that discomfort, but you know, settling into it, it actually became the most enjoyable experience.

And it was, it was a sense of freedom and I, and I cut, I guess that would be like the, the, that would be like what I would like to, to conclude our incredible conversation with, because I know that we’re, you know, we’re reaching that point. 

Paul Chek: I just want to make one more point before we conclude. Please. A very good way to see a myth counter myth going on right now is the myth that everybody should be vaccinations vaccinated and that you have to be vaccinated to be safe from.

Things that are common and necessary for the immune system to build itself up, like measles and all these childhood illnesses that are just part of developing an immune system. So if you listen to my interview with Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, which is three hours, where she gives us the entire history of vaccination, when you actually look into what it is and how it’s been manipulated and how we’ve been lied to for corporate profits.

And then you say, okay, well, if everybody needs to be vaccinated, why are so many people that are vaccinated getting the very illnesses they’re vaccinated for constantly around the world? And most any doctor that’s honest will tell you that. And nurses will tell you that. Why are they poisoning people with heavy metals and all sorts of stuff that doesn’t need to be in there?

And why are we having massive increases in autism even though one research paper says it’s not true, which is manufactured research. And then we have to look at the numbers of documentaries with medical doctors themselves whose own kids were damaged by vaccinations and even killed by them. And then took it upon themselves to do their own research and were very upset at the AMA because they felt lied to and manipulated.

And then we have CDC cover ups. So there you see a myth, everyone needs to be vaccinated, and the counter myth, it ain’t working. So we need to find a safe way to vaccinate people, and one that isn’t about, um, population control, as Bill Gates admitted on video, it was all about, but people just don’t even pay attention.

Ronnie Landis: Yeah. 

Paul Chek: So there’s a myth counter myth, 

Ronnie Landis: right? And that’s, 

Paul Chek: you know, if you’re not a good little boy or girl and follow the 10 commandments, your good, God will burn you in hell myth. There’s the myth, the counter myth. Well, if God is love, then God’s and God is the source of all things in God’s burning God in hell, which makes for a very stupid God.

I think we need to reinvent the idea. 

Ronnie Landis: That was, that was brilliant. And, and I, I like, you know, this idea of, like, you know, you just mentioned, like, people just gloss over that one detail that’s been admitted, like so many others, which is, like, this is, this is part of population control. Hey, guess what?

You’re part of the population. This is non, uh, what’s the word? Non denominational. This goes for all of us. But it’s like, so on another level, it’s like, we got to just stop being a sheep, right? We actually have to like adopt the, the, the, the lion or lioness archetype within all of us, which obviously is another, you know, you deal with animal spirits and that kind of thing, which is another topic in of itself.

But, you know, in terms of like, What do you want to be and what do you not want to be? I definitely don’t want to pay. 

Paul Chek: I’m losing him here.

Ronnie Landis: You got me. Can you hear me? 

Paul Chek: Yeah, I was breaking up and I lost you for a couple of seconds right after you said the lion or lioness archetype Which is the warrior? 

Ronnie Landis: exactly Exactly, and that’s really what this comes down to right is like and even the counter myth thing because as long as We are living a myth that doesn’t line up with reality It’s, it’s diminishing our empowerment.

It’s a diminishing our ability to actually be an integrated warrior than to a king or a queen. And, um, you know, I, I just feel like that that’s obviously such a long conversation. There’s so many different directions. I know that you actually, I want to actually take people’s attention to your podcast. Um, and you can tell us a little bit more about it.

Cause I was just listening to one of your episodes. I think it was on developing emotional intelligence where you talked about that. 

Paul Chek: Yeah. So my podcast is Living4D with Paul Cech, which means four doctors or four dimensions. There’s many fours, but Living4D with Paul Cech. And unlike a lot of podcasts, as you found, I, I go pretty deep into things and I don’t try to force it into an hour.

Some of them go up to three hours long. Cause I’m really interested in really, Getting inside of people, getting to the depths of issues, and having meaningful conversations that are not just soundbites, fluffy stuff, and new age, you know, edutainment. 

Ronnie Landis: Edutainment. 

Paul Chek: Yeah, you know, it’s, it’s really like, let’s, let’s get to something meaningful so we can all learn, live, love, and grow together and stop playing silly games about these issues from the beginning.

You know, whatever it is sex to drugs to education to uh exercise to vaccinations to information technology

To the mind to spirituality emotions So I really just try to find people that are interesting and that have demonstrated a lot of integrity And explore topics with them or I do solo podcasts like you’re talking about where I get into key issues You 

Ronnie Landis: Yeah, it’s quite a remarkable podcast. A lot of my friends have been guests on it and, uh, yeah, really just really cool to, to finally have you, I mean, you’ve had your YouTube channel for so many years, that’s how I found you, but for you to, to adopt your own podcast where I can go to the gym and I can be doing my thing, but listening in to a two or three hour talk that you’re giving is like, you know, it’s great for someone like me, I love it, so.

Um, definitely wanna recommend everyone that’s listening or watching this right now. Definitely go to iTunes. Also, what is your website, Paul? 

Paul Chek: I have several of them. The Check Institute website, and the podcast is right on there. Uh, it’s CHEK institute.com. Um, my blog is uh, www.paulcheksblog.com. Um. My PPS Success Mastery site is also housed in the Czech Institute, but you can go to ppssuccessmastery.

com. My YouTube channel is youtube. com forward slash Paul Czech live. And there’s over 500 videos on there that I’ve produced over the last, you know, many years. And again, they’re, as you know, they’re not soundbites. Yeah, we, I get into issues, right? So I really share the kind of teachings I offer through the Czech Institute with, you know, it’s my, that’s my social work.

I call it, that’s where I, that’s my offering to the world to try to make the world a better place, as is my podcast. 

Ronnie Landis: Well, I love that. I’m gonna adopt that, that, that sentiment with the work that I do. Thank you. And, um, Paul, what else can be said? I, I just greatly appreciate you taking the time to dive deep into all the issues that we discussed, and for all of you listening and watching, you kind of get the gist that this is so much more than just about The physicality of health and wellness like so much of the show.

It’s really about the psychological emotional and spiritual integration and that your body being a manifestation of That which you really are which is underneath the tissues Um, yeah, so paul just you know, you have so much so much love and respect for you I hope that we get to connect again and um You know, however that happens.

I look forward to it 

Paul Chek: Yeah, well, you know, we can do it when you come up with something else you want to talk about just touch base with Penny and we’ll make it happen as soon as I can make it happen. 

Ronnie Landis: Okay, well, then we will definitely make it happen because we got a lot more to dive into. Yes, indeed.

Life is very, very rich. Thank you so much for being here, Paul. 

Paul Chek: All right, partner. Thank you very much. Thanks for sharing your love with the world. I appreciate everything you’re doing. 

Ronnie Landis: It’s my pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this fascinating episode of the Holistic Health and Human Potential show. Before you head off, I want to invite you to go to my website for further podcast episodes and tons of free content on holistic health, natural nutrition, and human potential.

Please go to www. ronnielandis. net to find out how to take your health and your life to To the next level. And also I want to encourage you to leave a five star review for this podcast on our iTunes page, which will help me in my mission to get these inspiring messages to millions of people throughout the world.

I thank you so much for your support and I look forward to continuing to provide amazing conversations and content on holistic health and human potential.