Abel James: Hey, folks. This is Abel James, and thanks so much for joining us on the show. Are you tired of the never ending hacks, shortcuts, protocols, and gimmicks that some refer to as biohacking?
19 year olds are juicing up with exogenous hormones and getting implants just to keep up with the Joneses on Instagram.
The materialistic world view pushed by those with something to sell in the world of health can lead to an unhealthy obsession with appearance and status.
But is this really what health looks like? How can we transcend the hype, nonsense, and noise? Today, I'm honored to be here with the one and only, Paul Czech. For over 40 years, Paul has been a pioneer in the world of corrective exercise,
kinesiology,
and holistic health. But Paul's wisdom extends far beyond the physical as today he shares profound insights on the spiritual and existential dimensions of the human experience. This is no ordinary conversation about health and longevity.
It's more like a master class in living an authentic fulfilling life. Now here's a quick word before we get to the interview. If you're looking to get unstuck and maximize your performance in business and life this year, listen up. Whether you're looking to write a best selling book, launch your podcast at the top of the charts, turn your business around, or get in the best shape of your life, we're here to help you get results. We're launching a new high level executive coaching program this year where I'll be working with a few folks like you 1 on 1. You can find the details on my newly redesigned website at abeljames.com.
That's abeljames.com.
So if you're interested, make sure you're signed up for my free newsletter at abeljames.com,
and then you can join one of our future groups, 1 on 1 consults, masterminds, live events, and more. And stay tuned until the end of this podcast to hear one of my original tunes called Swamp Thing. Alright. On this episode with Paul Cech, you're about to hear the dangers of taking shortcuts with your health and joining the biohacking cults, how to build the courage to be yourself in a world that conditions you to fit in,
how our spiritual practice can help optimize our health and longevity,
why instead of eating cake on his birthday,
Paul stacks enormous rocks to create a monument of stone, and much, much more. Let's go hang out with Paul.
Alright, folks. I'm honored to be here today with the legendary
Paul Czec.
Paul is a world renowned expert in the world
of corrective and high performance exercise kinesiology,
stress management, and holistic wellness. With over 40 years of helping others optimize performance as a coach and a practitioner,
Paul is a true pioneer and leader in the world of holistic health. He's the founder of the Czech Institute,
has published a dozen books, and his latest work, Spirit Gym, is for those who have the courage to step outside of the limitations of this world to create more love and freedom in their lives. Paul, thanks so much for joining us here today. My pleasure. Thank you for the introduction.
Absolutely. I've been following your work for many moons now, well over a decade, but obviously, you've been at it for far longer than that. But you've you've been on my list of dream guests
for a long time now, so I'm really glad that the stars have aligned. And I'd love to start by asking you about your birthday cake because there's a lot of talk about longevity these days. There are very few people living it, and I know you have a unique take on all of this. So let's start right there.
Paul Chek: Yeah. Well,
I started doing that, I think, when I was 60.
And the reason I did it
and do it and did it this year as well is just because it's been shocking to me. For example, I've had a number of cases of 18, 19, 20 year olds
reach out to me through the various media channels asking me how to get off of Viagra. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? You know, when we got
elite level athletes that are 18, 19, 20 years old who are using Viagra,
it's a very bad sign. And I've seen just a plethora of young guys, like, in that same age category and all the way
up to 50
and even older, turning to testosterone replacement therapy and
watching all these ads to sell it and all this crap. And it's just
you know,
first of all, when you start
putting exogenous
testosterone in your body, it'll throw the balance of your hormonal system out significantly.
And I've had to work with countless
elite level athletes and amateurs
that used anabolic hormones, testosterone,
growth hormone, and all the various cocktails they use, and it permanently damages them and
causes, you know, lifelong problems.
And it's just not worth it. And in every single case, it's just a lack of understanding of how to take care of your body and how to use weight lifting to stimulate androgens
and other therapies such as cold water therapy and
saunas and and just, you know, common sense
self management.
And there's so many
gurus out there, experts that are talking about everything from
light therapy to you name it that have all this,
you know, mightier than thou. This is the law,
but
I haven't met any of them yet that are very healthy at all. And so,
you know, I tell all my students, if you can't teach in your underwear, then you need to keep working on yourself before you start teaching. And if you go to a doctor that
can't see you in their underwear and show you the results of their own program and their own knowledge, then you shouldn't be going to sick people for health advice.
So, you know, I just felt
I don't think that I'm anybody,
special or unique. Many people have said, oh, you you must have good genes. And I say, well, just look the rest of my family to answer that question,
and you'll see it's evident that it's a management issue, not a genetic issue.
And I think,
you know, honestly, if we give our body the things that it needs based on the, you know, the plan that it is
and inherently a part of nature, then it does very well for us. And, you know, I don't think
even at my age at 63,
I don't think that I'm doing anything magical or mysterious.
I think I'm just using common sense approaches to keeping my body healthy. And and I think one of the things too is that,
you know, I have a little saying,
if you act young,
you will be young.
But if you act old, you will be old. And I've seen, you know,
25 year olds that are 55.
And I've seen
occasionally, I'll meet someone, you know, along my age or or older that's still very vital and and alive. And and
the one thing I see that's common is that the people that are
older yet younger are passionate about
things. They're they're doing what they love to do. They're not
fitting into the consensus norm. They follow their heart, live their dreams, and if it irritates other people, that's up to them.
But I think it's really a matter of, you know, Jerry Wesch psychologist Jerry Wesch says, if you have a big enough dream, you don't need a crisis.
I think most people are just living half mast all the time. You know? They're not really stepping into themselves. They're not
they're not appreciating the magic and the mystery of the human body and just what a miracle it is, and and, you know, they take better care of their
cars and their phones and their toaster ovens than they do their bodies.
And so I think at the end of the day, my message to people is just simply, look. Here I am out in the dirt
lifting rocks. Right? Not not in a gym, not using
steroids or fancy tricks. It's just
time in nature
and doing something creative that challenges me,
you know, artistically
challenges me physically.
It can be very strong mental challenge. You know, some of these things that that I build are very, very hard and very dangerous to build and that
I choose that because it puts me in a situation where I
have a choice. I either stay very present and very alert or I get very hurt.
And I have been hurt badly, but it was always because I was distracted or I was trying to do something in a hurry.
So,
you know, I like working with the stone Buddhas because they're brutally honest. They don't play any favorites. You know? A rock will fall on anybody's head no matter how
enlightened they think they are.
So for me, it's really just my way of saying to the young guys, here, if you want evidence that what I'm teaching you works and that you can do it
at any age,
here it is. Here's my birthday cake.
Abel James: So instead of, you know, gathering around the table with all your friends and eating a bunch of crap that you shouldn't be and blowing out candles, you are getting out in nature in the sunshine,
carrying giant stones, and in some ways, honoring those stones and honoring nature on your special day and building something beautiful, challenging your body to kind of meet these demands that most people half your age or a fraction of your age wouldn't would never be able to attain to attain at their certain at their, you know, current rate anyway. So I I find it very inspiring seeing you going out and,
taking on these challenges like that. But what what is the problem with a lot of the conversation around longevity
these days? It seems like there's a lot of people who are kind of caught up in the short term
gimmickry, the idea that you can follow these these shortcuts and these biohacking
hacks in order to
somehow live longer or have a higher, state of of baseline performance. What is your take on all of that line of thinking?
Paul Chek: Well, I think it's a combination issue.
At its deepest root, it really boils down to a fear of death.
You know, people
by the time people reach about 50,
they're kind
of viscerally aware that, you know, death is going to approach us at some point. And I think
prior to that, you know, when you're what I call young dumb and full of cum, you think you can get away with anything and you just, you know
I mean, I used to do a lot of crazy stuff, race motocross, drag race, stock car race, rode in the rodeo, paratrooper,
And I pushed the red line always and had, you know, too many broken bones
and bad injuries and concussions.
At the time, I never
I I I never even had any fear of dying. I just really wanted to see what could I do. You know? It was really it was really all about me
exploring my own potential. I I though I was a competitive athlete in everything I did,
I wasn't competing against other people.
They were really giving me an opportunity to push myself to see what I could do.
And as long as I was able to improve my performance in whatever sport I was doing,
even if I didn't win, I was satisfied that I was growing.
And when people beat me, I just saw them as my mentors and I thought, okay. What are they doing better than I am? And I would study them and pick up whatever tips
I could. But I I think because we have such a
spiritually inept and broken world culture and and that religion has really
failed us in delivering the goods.
Put simply, religions have
all become belief systems.
And whenever you're in a belief system, you stop asking questions and you simply memorize stuff written on paper by other human beings
and often pretend that it's the word of God, which is silly.
And it keeps you in the child archetype because you're always bowing down to some authority figure outside of yourself, and you're worshiping a god outside of yourself,
and you're following other people's dictates.
And so what happens is there's
no connection to spirit.
You know, the re the religious experience
in authenticity
religion the word religion
comes from the root word religio,
which means to link back or connect to. And that connect to is is the wholeness of life, is the wholeness of creation. It is that which is the mystery behind creation itself.
And interestingly, the word religion means the same thing as the word yoga, which means union, union with God or source.
But when you have
dogma
and you have
programmed beliefs
and you have a belief system and you have a set of concretized
rituals that become so
they they lose their vitality because it's kind of like
imagine if you were had to go to the 3rd grade for 10 years in a row. You know, it wouldn't take long before
you would be
having your phone under your desk playing video games because you're so sick of hearing the same stuff over and over again. You wouldn't be connected.
But religion really was meant to be
a ceremonial ritual in which you were
through music,
through the geometry of of cathedrals and and temples,
and through
the words
and through the act and the participation,
it was ultimately meant to open you up into
an experience of the transcendent.
But as
religion became canonized and ritualized
and people
lost connection with the transcendent, which is what exactly what led Nietzsche to say god is dead because
religions had so concretized
god as this, god as that.
God wants this from you. God demands this from you. God will do this to you if you don't follow these rules.
So what happened is it
it became such that people had all these fixed ideas of what god is, what god wants,
etcetera, that now God is no longer a mystery to them. So,
when you
turn a symbol, which always
connects you to something beyond itself into a sign,
then you lose the transcendent function.
Nobody has a mystical experience at a stop sign because everybody knows it means step on your brake pedal.
Otherwise, if it was a true
symbol,
people might be sitting at the stop sign having, you know, beatific visions and it would cause tremendous problems.
But when you look at religious iconography such as Jesus on the cross,
that's not meant to be something
concrete.
When you turn Jesus into a man
and you
believe the story as fact, you run into the problem that Joseph Campbell spoke about when he said, when the Bible is interpreted as a
dictation instead of a connotation, you're in deep trouble.
And what I'm pointing to is
that 85% of the world population claims religious affiliation. So even people that don't think they're religious
don't realize how much religion
is tucked into them because it's in the legal system.
It's in
the medical system and the sign of the caduceus.
It's in the street names. It's in the holiday names.
It's everywhere. Right? You're you're soaked in it.
And so
when
people
are indoctrinated like that, they enter into what Ken Wilbur refers to as flatland.
So you get people that are doing jobs that they don't really love to do, but they think they've gotta do it for money or they've been convinced by their parents that they won't be respectable
if they don't go to school and become
a a degreed professional at something. But meanwhile, they really wanna be a musician or a gardener or a landscaper
or a pilot or something. So they never really have their heart in things.
And research shows that 75%
of Europeans and 70 about 70 to 73 percent of Americans,
either strongly state they don't like or they hate their jobs.
So if you couple
what I've said about religion
with an industrialized
society that's really just working,
in a on a treadmill
to barely survive, 70% of the US population right now cannot meet its
survival needs with the income it has. And so we have the highest credit card debt in history,
highest suicide rates in history, highest rates of anxiety and chronic disease across all ages in history.
So what you actually see is all the things that lead people to coming face to face with the fact that not only are they unhappy, but they they know they're gonna die.
And so,
you know, this whole longevity thing and and life extension thing, it's been going on since I was young. I remember,
you know, seeing all sorts of books about this. And at the time, I didn't give a shit because I was young. I'm like,
whatever.
I'm not worried about it. But as I've gotten older and looked at and I and I've had many of these people as patients that are, you know, doing everything from plastic surgery to
biohacking out the Yazoo to,
hormone therapies to,
you know, you name it, all sorts of crazy shit.
When I look into what's really going on, it it is ultimately
at the root of fear of death. And the other thing is is that
our culture is so
the the self,
the
authentic sense of oneself,
which I call soul,
is so projected outward
that our culture has so externalized
its sense of itself
into what it sees in the mirror, or
how its body looks or do I have the right car, the right status symbols, the right clothes.
So there's not a a real connection to the spirit within the consciousness within the individual.
So what happens is and and this is
more of an issue for women than men because where men gain their sense of meaning and value by their physical strength and their ability to do things,
you know,
what used to be our ability to hunt is now our ability to make money,
to provide for a family or our wife or
have financial freedom.
So when when women, for example,
hit about 40, you know, their gravity starts to take effect. Skin wrinkles show up, breasts start to fall.
They're not as disciplined about exercise,
but they get this strong sense of insecurity because the way a man has insecurity,
if he loses his physical strength and his mental ability,
a woman has that insecurity when her beauty power isn't so magnetic anymore. And she so she consciously or unconsciously
starts to feel like, oh, I'm aging. I I don't like that. And so, you know, now it's, you know, Botox injections and breasts and and butts and and tucks and snips.
And so that's considered antiaging.
And for men, it's all that. I mean, I remember the first time, it was actually
1988.
At that time, that was the year I introduced the Swiss ball to the exercise industry.
And I was in Gold's Gym in San Diego,
and I remember I just finished a a set of of
some exercise and a great big muscular dude walked by.
And as he walked by,
I noticed his calves were not moving properly.
And I I watched him walk. You know, I'm very skilled in anatomy, and I I like, what in the world is going on?
And I
watched him
walk away from me for, you know, for 20 or 30 feet. It's a huge gym.
I'm like, this guy has some kind of inserts under his skin. Those are not real calves.
And then later, I saw him walk back, and he had fake pec muscles, and he even had fake abdominal muscles. He looked like,
you know, somebody from a cartoon character
with all this stuff. And I'm like, wow. This is unbelievable. And the guy had a little bit of gray hair.
And he, you know, he was probably 50 at the time. I was probably, I don't know, 35.
And I'm like, wow. That is seriously
desperate stuff.
And then I begin seeing women with fake butts and all kinds of weird shit everywhere.
And I I just
felt so sorry for these people because you see,
there is one whose sense of
meaning or value is so utterly dependent on their physical appearance,
which means that
they're
projecting their soul consciousness into what they see in the mirror, which is an externalization
of the self,
which comes hand in hand with
a sense of
insecurity about their ability to to use natural approaches
to keep their body healthy and vital, but it also comes with something else
and that and it's a symptom of
one's inability
to transfer
the
sense of dependence on strength, intelligence,
and beauty
into the
appreciation
that wisdom
and life experience
is ultimately much more valuable and more important than whether your nipples point to the sun or whether your
6 pack is perfect or your 8 pack or your
biceps are big enough. So really what it is, it's it's like
a lack of the ability to engage
in
the essence of life and the ability to
see the beauty of having enough life experience to really have a deeper sense of confidence that who and what you are
transcends the body.
That doesn't mean for for example, I'll never stop taking care of my body because I love my body, but I don't
really identify myself by my body. I identify my body as
an expression of the creative art of my own soul
and something that I can work on every day just like I do a painting or a rock stack
or build the best courses I can build for people.
But as I've aged,
I've really
had no
inhibitions about the fact that I'm not near as strong as I used to be and as fast as I used to be.
But I get a lot of joy of knowing that I I actually finally know how to live, and I know where effort is worth putting and where it's not worth putting. I know,
you know,
where in relationships
it's not worth getting upset about shit because it it isn't gonna matter at the end of the day.
And those are the things that as we reach the middle of our life, we're supposed to really embrace because if we don't have those things and we cannot set a good example for the younger people in the world,
and we can't guide them from a place of inner authenticity.
But what we have now is a lot of people that are lost, confused, and scared,
and plastic,
and sanitized,
and narcissized,
and
unconsciously
or consciously afraid that they're gonna die. And then you see all the,
you know,
crazy shit about, you know, we can upload your soul onto a hard drive and put you into a Ray Kurzweil crap.
It it really goes hand in hand with the breakdown
of
religion
and what it's meant to be, which is a a ritual that connects us to God or that which is transcendent to the material plane.
And something that is a practice that
helps us come to the realization
that
as souls, we're eternal. We we don't die. We put on these bodies to come learn, to grow, and to create,
and to share
the unique experience of
being alive
with source or with God because each one of us is a divine unique
expression of the divine,
and there will never be any 2 people ever on this planet or ever in the future that have exactly the same fingerprints, just like there's never 2 snowflakes the same. There's no 2 grains of sand and even identical twins are not identical.
And so God's a novelty generator. And so if people realize that, wow, you know, who I am
is
a one time expression
of a unique way for the divine to engage life,
and
each one of us has this inherent genius in it. There's things that Abel does
better than anybody,
And there's things that Abel does that can help Paul be better at what he does and vice versa, and that's true of every one of us from children all the way to old people.
And so if we celebrate
our uniqueness
and we
see this as a gift that we get to create with and explore with,
and that when we realize that if God is God, then there can't be anything here but God, because by definition, God means that for which there is no other.
God is the only being that can create and sustain itself, and the universe
is god's body
within which god lives.
And therefore, each one of us as a sentient being
is God embodied
in a unique
mode
of self expression, self creation,
which means
God can't possibly know what it's like to be able
until Abel ables every moment.
And each moment of able abling
is God's own realization
of what it is like for God to be able.
Now when you embrace that,
then you you go through the experience of saying, wow. Well, if I'm if I'm the only expression of the divine in this unique way,
I've got this amazing treasure
in this
face, in this body, in this voice, in this
signature and this
unique way of of seeing the world and and loving and being loved,
then
every step of the way, as you get older, you say, wow. You know, here I am sharing what it's like with God to be this old and to have accomplished this in my life. And here's what I wanna create
as God,
with God,
for God, which is everything.
And so then the concept of getting older is really just part of the process. Right?
You know, we we prize wine for how old it is.
Right?
Be because it matures and it tastes better and it's even gets fermented foods get more nutritious.
And so if we
see the aging process as this
quintessence,
this accumulation
of wisdom, this drawing inward, you know, when we realize we can't take anything with
us when we go except what we become,
then each stage of life is is like a different season.
So, you know, imagine if people
lived in the in winter areas where it snows and they ran around everywhere with huge furnaces trying to get rid of the snow and trying to heat the sky up so they didn't have to deal with winter.
We'd understand that these people are completely and utterly lost and confused about how important seasons are
to the life of the planet and to life itself. And so
it's kind of metaphorically, like, the antiaging movement is running around trying to melt the snow
instead of saying, wow, let me get a jacket on and go skiing, you know.
So I don't know. I think it's a symptom of
our
being trapped in a materialistic
world view
where
physical appearances and physical accumulations
have been deemed more valuable
than
one's capacity to love, to share,
to learn, to grow,
and to become something that ultimately is what the alchemist referred to as gold or the philosopher's stone, which is
it's not something you can take away. The gold is the wisdom, and the philosopher's stone is the accumulation of wisdom.
And it's called the quintessence
which
if you draw a square of the 4 elements, the quintessence in alchemy is the dot in the center
that is the center. And if you circle it, that's the symbol of wholeness. So circling the square means
the
consciousness that emerges out of the marriage of earth, water, fire, and air, and the wholeness
that the soul is
and its capacity to be one with
yet uniquely different in all things.
So I I I think it's a combination of of all those things,
and just a lot of confusion on top of it.
Abel James: Yeah. That's resonating with me deeply, and I heard you say a few things that I really haven't heard other people touch upon. But as, so I had an existential birthday this past summer, turned 40, and a lot of my friends around my age or or especially even younger than than I am have really jumped into the testosterone replacement therapy. A lot of, like, health nuts have as well. And so there's kind of this bifurcation or this line that's being drawn between some people's idea of longevity or antiaging,
which really embraces all of these newfangled things and technologies and stem cells and hormone replacement and synthetics and peptides and whatever it is. And then the other side, which is much more natural. But one of the things that I've noticed is in some of the folks who have embraced the testosterone
replacement therapy young, for example,
as I've aged, I feel different now at 40 than I did when I was 17 or 25 with different levels of testosterone, everything else going on. And I wonder if part of aging is embracing that different feeling as a soul, right, in a 40 year old body. Trying to optimize that as best you can, but not plaster over it with some sort of newfangled technology to make you feel psychologically
like you're 17 again
at 40 or 50 or 60. And so I wonder what this is doing to not just people individually, but also our society
as some of these kind of high performing males
really double down on these artificial ways of bumping up their hormones. What do you think that's doing to our culture or people's psychology?
Paul Chek: Well, I think it's doing what it's a symptom of.
Think of it this way.
It's a concept
of working on
instead of working with.
If you work on your body,
then your body becomes an object like working on your car or working on your computer.
But if you're working with, it's a relationship,
it's not a relationship of dominance and control.
It's a relationship of partnership, which is
inherently an expression of love of and love for and love with.
But when people are
working on themselves, which is really the problem with biohacking, it's all about manipulating and I mean, hacking. I mean, come on, you know, that should alert you. That's no different than the word artificial intelligence. Well, if you think artificial intelligence is a safe way
to run the world, you need to look carefully at what the word artificial means.
And so
if a person's orientation
of their body
is that it's a machine and it's a materialistic
view, well, that reflects their orientation to themselves, which is a materialistic
worldview
because it it essentially
is saying that
I have to work on my body because there are circumstances
that I cannot control, and therefore, I have to
make changes to my body to make it be the way I want it to be.
Now
I work
with my body
and I for example, if I don't lift
weights in the, you know,
ideally,
4 to 6 RM rep range,
at least once every 3 or 4 days. I can feel my testosterone
levels dropping and I can practically watch the muscle start to drip off of me.
So I know in order for me to
work with my body, I have to give it
the stimulus it needs
to produce androgens and say, wow. Okay. He's still lifting heavy stuff. He's still breaking muscle tissue down. We can't stop
testosterone production, growth hormone production, melatonin production because
we won't survive
the environment we're in.
You know,
like, when I go lift heavy stones,
there's a real
intensity and there's a real intensity when you're at, you know, say a 4rm lift. There's no way you can cheat that, right? You have to get that thing off the floor and move it or out of the rack and move it.
And
that puts a lot of tension through the system. It ramps the nervous system up to very, very high levels of electrical output.
And so
whenever you have tension and high levels of electrical output, you have a hormonal response that matches it.
So
because my body is part of my dream,
I want to live
in a way that my body
is congruent with an inherent to the dream
versus
thinking that my body is just a biological machine that I can tinker with.
Because if I think that way, it also reflects my relationship
with myself at a deeper level.
And
because the soul is
not physical,
It's a transcendent
quality or an emergent quality.
If you don't have a relationship
with the mystery of consciousness within yourself,
then your relationship with yourself becomes really
your experience of your body. And so,
the things that people are trying to do to their body is ultimately becoming
the signpost of what their religion is at a core level
and that's materialism.
And
so
that leads you to,
again, to this realization that, hey,
my body's getting older and and everything's falling down and things are hurting and they're not working well. And and wow, you know, I'm I'm really
aware that I'm I'm gonna perish at some point. So I I gotta hop this thing up, man. I gotta put some juice back in there. But the problem is, is that if you do all that stuff
and you keep living
in the way that led to the problem
with
losing the natural elasticity of the skin and not getting enough sunlight and
not breathing well and and
taking diet shortcuts and all the long list of stuff that leads to people to think they need to make these little biohacks,
then
you actually never really
meet the spirit
because your sense of self is in your biceps or your chest or your breasts or your dick or whatever it is.
But you don't meet the spirit inside of you. You don't have the sense of deep connection.
And because your sense of identity is in the physical, the physical is always
subject to the law of impermanence. There is no escaping that.
So, really, what you you do is you fall in love with atoms,
but you don't realize that an atom is 99 to the 9th decimal point empty.
And what's holding the atom together is what's holding your atoms together,
and that is consciousness.
So,
you know, I don't wanna beat the horse to death, but I'm trying to make the point that,
ultimately,
one who has a legitimate, loving, spiritual relationship with themselves
can embrace
impermanence
because they know that the body dies, not them.
And their care for the body is not
a means of reestablishing
egoic
pleasure or egoic confidence.
It's
really
their care for their body is
the same care that a Buddhist monk gives the temple that he worships in because
it symbolizes
a sacred ritual
and
a sacred relationship.
So for me, my body is my temple,
and I relate to it as a symbol
for where the divine worships in me, which is the only place I can know for sure
that the divine worships there
because
I can't enter Abel's
reality, and and it's not my place to do that because that's God's gift to Abel.
And even when we're in deep intimate sexual relationships
with somebody like our spouse,
we can never really know fully what it's like to be that person.
That's always a mystery.
And that's another thing. Because of that, it it allows us to honor the mystery.
And if you look at what happens in relationships, as soon as you think you know someone, you've concretized
them,
then your relationship with them is
it becomes mundane.
But
if your relationship
is
one of a mystery, then every day is something new and exciting, and you never know
what you're gonna
get surprised with and neither do they.
And I think that's what's missing. I think that,
we're in a spiritual crisis, and we though everything you're talking about and asking me about
is really the symptoms
of a legitimate spiritual crisis
coupled with profiteering
and modern technology
and shortcuts for which there are no shortcuts. And it's the it's the inherent nature of children to try to take shortcuts.
Abel James: I love that. And and speaking about and you've done this in many different ways. The the biggest challenge for a soul is being addicted to matter. And and I've seen this play out over and over,
where,
you know, I'll I'll just use the example of a
an entrepreneur or something who is driving forward and,
you know, amasses a small or large fortune and all of a sudden realizes maybe they sacrificed their health a little bit to get there. And so they go hard into this biohackery
and this this world of life extension. And all of a sudden, they're getting
vampire procedures on their faces and taking blood from younger people and and following this road. But it seems to me, based upon a few conversations that I've that I've had with people who are kinda following that road, that they've amassed this fortune. They have this body. They realize that, oh, I have
enough money. I have too much money at this point. I need to focus on my body now. I need to make sure that I can stay here with this fortune as long as I possibly can because I don't get to take that. Maybe there's no afterlife, whatever it is. And so they're just so hyper focused
running away from this fear of death that they're becoming more and more attached to this kind of, like, empty material world. How do you guide someone like that? Because I know you work with so many different people and and have over the years. How do you guide someone who's kind of, like, in that state and hold their hand and hopefully walk toward the sunshine of of the natural way?
Paul Chek: Well,
I begin by asking them what
is ultimately meaningful to them, and then I
ask them
what
is
their concept of a legacy.
Because, really, a legacy is what you leave behind.
Right?
And you could say that we live on
through our legacy.
You know, as an example,
when I leave the world, there will be thousands of videos.
When I finish my 15 volume book set, there will be now 15 plus 12 is
35,
37
books.
You know, god knows how many
education courses,
all my art, but all the people whose lives I've
had
the ability and the joy to be a part of. Like, there's over 63,000
Czech professionals around the world that have,
in my education system. And so every time somebody's
working with someone and teaching them sound diet principles and
helping
them use invent, you know, calipers I've invented for postural assessment and structural alignment,
I actually live
through them. And so
if a person,
for example, has a bunch of money, but now they think, oh my god, I gotta take care of myself. I'm gonna die one day and I, you know, I gotta do something with this money or whatever the orientation
is.
That's a lot different than saying,
well, I made all this money now. What can I do to help people with it?
And
this brings us to a sort of another very important realization,
and it's a critical realization.
And that is that the soul is relationships
from top to bottom.
Like, even though
Abel right now has a sense of himself inside, Abel's listening to me right now.
He can feel his body.
He knows he's breathing.
But there's a sense of I in Abel. Like,
you know,
me speaking for you, I am Abel. Like I say, I am Paul Czak.
But that I does not
give us the sense that it is
a conglomeration.
It has a sense of oneness to it.
But in fact, it is God that dreams us
each into existence. So the paradox is the eye within us
that we have as the backdrop of consciousness,
which acts like an empty mirror that reflects everything.
You see, if our consciousness
had something in it at the root level,
it would be like a mirror that somebody had painted a tree on.
Well, if you stood in front of the tree, you wouldn't see yourself. You would see the tree.
Therefore, you could not have anything but tree ness in your mind metaphorically.
So God
being unconditional
is like an empty mirror
that leaves room for anything Abel would like to perceive
and experience
within Abel's consciousness, which means,
Abe, the subject
of you, which is the perceiver,
is actually God
perceiving in you
because
god's the only one that's empty. Abel's full of all sorts of ideas and
past joys and past traumas and sadnesses and and everything that makes a human being human. But in
behind that, at the level of Abel's I ness,
there is the ultimate emptiness,
which is the source of fullness paradoxically.
And that ultimate emptiness is the subject. It is the perceiver,
and it can never be filled up. And that no matter how many people are talking to Abel at once,
there's no way that the eye can be maxed out. Like, there's no way you can put a limit on how many people can stand in front of a mirror before the mirror just says that's enough. I can't reflect any more
of
you,
you
know.
So
the first relationship
is that that God is actually dreaming each of us up and and people forget that God's infinite.
People have such a limited idea of God. It's they think God's an old man in the sky or whatever they think.
But when in actuality,
God as the absolute or God as the infinite has infinite processing
information, infinite creativity,
infinite energy,
and therefore, can create infinite
unique expressions of itself
infinitely.
So
when you realize
that God can have a parallel process that is infinite,
in other words, there can be an infinite number of ables, each that uniquely feel themselves, each that uniquely
have their own consciousness,
all of which are God. And and the metaphor I give in my spirit gem book series to help kinda point how this happens out
is
I had my artist do a picture
of
a field with endless numbers of of flower pots that were empty except they all had water in them,
and it's a full moon night.
So in the art, you see these pots going forever and every one of them's got a perfect reflection of the moon in it.
And so God is the moon and we are the pots of water
and no matter how many there is,
none of those pots are identical.
But the consciousness
that makes them say I am
is the same in every one of them.
And so that
is the first relationship.
Then we have our relationship with our mother and our
father and our school teachers and and all the people that give us the ideas that actually form the ego.
And the ego is actually a collection of everybody else's ideas.
Right? So
the point that I'm making is is that we are actually relationships
top to bottom.
So
if a person understands
that
who I really am
lives in my relationships
and who my soul see who Abel has come to be at 40 years of age
is very, very unique. Because if I took Abel and raised him
in isolation on a desert island and there was nobody around,
a 40 year old Abel still wouldn't have a clue who he was
and everything would just be a mystery like an Alzheimer's patient every day
waking up because there would be no growth and development. This is well proven in psychology. In fact, there's cases of people
who somehow got separated from family members and were raised by animals,
and they
they only have instinctual animal level of consciousness. They don't have an I am sense. They're more some have been raised by wolves and they behaved like a wolf. So their sense of self was that of a wolf. So there you see the relationship in the environment.
But,
you know,
the degree of wisdom that I carry
is only there because of all the people that I've learned from, that I've that I've studied, that I've read, that I've embodied,
that I've
disliked, and therefore,
they've taught me what not to do,
how not to behave, or
how not to use money, or how not to use drugs.
So even the people that we reject actually have a very strong influence on us and live inside of us as well
because they're shaping us. Right?
Some add and some cut away.
The point I'm making, if it's not clear, is the scenario you've described where someone has a bunch of money, now they just gotta pour it all into themselves because they're afraid they're gonna die or they're, you know, they're not gonna have time or whatever.
There's a big difference between that viewpoint
and saying, wow,
how can I go deeper into my relationship with myself and with my friends and with how can I use all this money to support other people?
And the amount of
life force that enters into somebody and the amount of vitality
and the amount of commitment to caring for oneself
simply to extend the time that one has
to deepen and expand that circle of relationships
is a very, very different approach to taking care of oneself.
Like, I take care of myself because I have a responsibility
to, for sure, everyone younger than me and less wise than me
because I have a deep sense of realization that who I am is who they are.
Because the same thing that gives me I am gives they I I I am. The same moon that's in every pot is in me.
And therefore, because I know what God is and I know God is growing and maturing through a process of self realization in each person
that anybody that I can help inspire
to become more conscious of who and what they really are, which is love embodied,
gives me a reason to live in a way that if
repeated by them enhances
their chance of having
the experience that I have of this ultimate sense of connection.
And,
you know, I actually look forward to death
simply because
I think it's just
gonna be magnificent
to go behind the curtain and see what other mysteries God has to unveil
because I don't have this fear of God that people do from all this religious programming.
And
when I leave my body,
then I will leave the relationships
that I have had with my body and whatever goes into the earth will carry the vibration of a love of the earth.
So whatever eats me will get good food that's full of spiritual nutrition.
But most people's bodies will be like an animal that was killed in a commercial feedlot full of adrenaline and fear
because
now they're coming face to face with a mystery that they never found right in front of them.
Abel James: Well, speaking of that, for folks who are, you know, if they're in that 75%
working the
job that they hate or just kind of in a life position that they feel like maybe was not of their own choosing,
How do you help people embrace
their idea
of what a dream life actually is?
Paul Chek: Well, it's very simple. I just say well, one of the analogies I give people when they come because this is where I start. You know, my system
is based on a 1, 2, 3, 4 approach.
1, what do you love enough to grow and change for?
2, there's 2 forces that create everything in the universe, yin, the feminine, yang, the masculine. So whatever you got going on with you has something to do with an imbalance of those two forces.
3, there's only 3 choices you can make the optimal, the suboptimal, and to do nothing.
And 4,
we all have to pay attention to 4 doctors, doctor happiness, doctor diet, doctor quiet, and doctor movement. And you can't be a healthy 3 doctor person. It's impossible.
So step 1 is, what do you love enough to grow for? What do you love enough to become?
And
the analogy I give is I say, I want you to pretend you've just been
arrested and put in a maximum security prison with a life sentence,
but you've just been
led to the prison warden, me,
your therapist.
And I'm gonna tell you,
you now have a 35 year sentence or a life sentence,
but this is a working prison.
And in this prison, we're profitable.
And every prisoner gets to choose what they will do
to create profit for this prison.
And you can create any job you want. If you wanna be an artist, we're gonna sell your art. If you wanna be a furniture maker, we're gonna sell your furniture. If you wanna be a gardener, we're gonna sell your produce.
If you wanna be a farmer
and raise cows, we're gonna sell your cows or your milk.
If you wanna be a school teacher, then you're gonna be a school teacher, and we're gonna generate income off of that.
So I say,
you now have
24 hours metaphor.
It's not the 24 hours, but, you you know, you have to now tell me what is it that you wanna do to fulfill your life sentence.
And I remind people that if you get it right, you will think it's hilarious that you've been put in this prison.
Because every day you will go, oh my god. I get to paint all day. Oh, I get to teach kids all day. Oh my goodness. I get to build hot rods today.
Fuck. And this is hilarious, man. Why why didn't I get arrested sooner?
Right? And so really what God does, because God is unconditional,
that which is unconditional has no means of self reflection because to self reflect requires to. There has to be an I and a thou. There has to be something to reflect.
So
God,
paradoxically,
mysteriously
creates conditions,
I e, the prison,
so it has a matrix of self reflection and can self realize.
And so the prison is just analogy for the world or the universe. That's why I call my system spirit gym. It means you're in a gym where you're gonna grow spiritually
with the purpose of realizing
who you
are. And when you realize who you are, you'll realize why this is all here because without this, there would be no self realization.
There would be that's why the soul falls in love with matter because the soul ultimately is God
that is unconditional
and as that which is unconditional has no self reference. It has no way to see, feel, or know itself.
So the prison is just a metaphor for the material existence
that is made of the,
you know, basic elements, earth, water, fire, and air, which are not really just
the tangible goods, they're ranges of vibration.
So fire represents spirit, air represents mind,
water represents emotions, feelings, and values,
and Earth
represents that which is body, whether it be a house, a tree,
a planet, a star,
a car,
or you, you know, your own body.
So consciousness
steps it down itself down, which is shown right in the Kabbalistic tree of life. It's if you've understand the Kabbalah, they're showing you how
God steps itself down into the material plane. The Earth sits at the bottom of the Kabbalistic tree where consciousness
condenses itself just like we have dew
that forms in the evening or the morning. It's the condensation
of the atmosphere.
So
our soul condenses itself down into this mere material form
because
souls have to have enough time in a material matrix in order to gain a sense of self awareness
and self realization.
And as we mature, we get to the point where we don't need a physical body because we have enough consciousness
within ourselves to self reflect.
So we can
basically know ourselves through our emotions, our feelings, our desires, and our mind.
And consciousness by definition is a psychic substance produced not blindly, but in living awareness of opposites
as defined by Edward Edinger, MD.
So what Edinger is saying that consciousness is a psychic substance. It's actually tangibly
real. Even though it's invisible,
a photon has no mass, yet an infinite capacity to carry information.
And
we have photosynthesis,
so we take something with no mass and produce food out of it. That's very godly. There's the god trick if there ever was one. Right? And so
here we are, we could say we are the product of photosynthesis
because if there was no photosynthesis, there'd be no plants to eat, there'd be nothing for animals to eat. And our 3rd chakra paradoxically
is an externalized organ because our 3rd chakra, the solar plexus,
is
dependent upon the plant kingdom
to photosynthesize
because we don't have an organ of photosynthesis in us. So every time we eat a plant, we've eaten something that's captured a photon that has no mass and turned it into mass.
So the photon is a symbol for the soul that which is unconditional,
massless,
invisible,
but paradoxically
there,
and it
converts itself into something tangible.
So our 3rd chakra actually is externalized into the environment.
And part of growing up spiritually is to realize that who you are
cannot be separate from your environment. You're breathing 25,900
breaths a day that came from out there.
In fact, you're breathing molecules from the body of Buddha, Jesus, and Lao Tzu with every breath, scientific fact.
You're drinking
water that was drank by
billions and billions of animals and people throughout history, and you're got molecules of all those people's water that was pissed out,
spit out,
whatever,
being recycled.
So
we're actually the whole universe
being brought into a location to create the illusion of of self or individuality.
So
the metaphor that I'm making here is I say to people when they sit down in therapy with me,
what do you wanna do for the next 35 years? And I would recommend you really get quiet and and connect to your heart
and
say, what could I do that would leave me making love every day? Because making love every day is sustainable.
Anything else is not sustainable.
And it leads to flatland, and it leads to anxiety, and to depression, and to narcissism, and to hopping up your body with plastics and drugs because
you think that's all you have.
Right? So
when somebody says I don't know, then then that's my first job as a therapist because I know that
until someone has a reason to love,
they don't have a reason to live bigger than the fact that their body's
not ready to die yet and they're too chicken to kill themselves.
And maybe they think, oh, I've got to live for my kids. But if you really wanted to live for your kids, you wouldn't have let yourself go so bad.
You know?
So step 1 is identifying
what do you love enough to really live for.
And once you're powered by love, then you can make it through the trials and tribulations of life because it's just part of a process.
You know, ask a woman how it feels to give birth and they'll all tell you it hurts like hell.
And you say, why did you do it? And why do you keep doing it? Because I love my children. Right? So you see, love is stronger than the, the, the pain of birth, which can kill a woman.
You know, love is stronger than the challenges of relationships.
Love is stronger than money problems. Love is stronger than a health crisis.
So the first thing that we have to do is we have to be
clear what it is that gives us a sense of meaning and love.
And if you're not sure, then it's time to explore.
And and so that means going out and maybe
taking a pottery class or
thinking of a musical instrument that turns you on. Maybe you wanna learn the piano or
play the drum or maybe you wanna,
make quilts or maybe you want to
be a potter or maybe you wanna be a gardener or maybe you wanna be a pilot,
but you you gotta go out and explore. And this is what happens when people get caught on the treadmill of making money
and doing what they think they have to do. They talk themselves out of doing the things they love to do,
And the next thing you know, they're not alive anymore. They're just corpses walking from one bottle of pills,
or one biohack to another biohack,
and they still haven't figured out who they are, And there's nothing that accelerates
self realization faster than love. There's just no way.
Someone who, for example, meditates or does Tai Chi because they think they have to,
can do it for 30 years and not grow.
But someone does it because they love to, because they have a genuine interest in knowing who they really are and what they really are
can grow very, very fast and reach, you know, a level that we would call enlightened
in, you know, you know, it's like the old saying goes that someone goes to a Zen master and says,
well, I've heard all about you and that you've produced a lot of enlightened
students.
If I work with you, how long will it take to become enlightened? And the Zen master smiles and says, it may take 15 seconds and it may take 30 years. It's up to you.
You know, the Zen master is not the one making you enlightened. The question is, are you there
for the right reasons?
Are you looking for a status
symbol? Are you just trying to outsmart people?
Are you there because you're afraid to die, so you're trying to, you know,
remove the fear?
Or are you there because you have a genuine love of the mystery?
And if you have a genuine love of the mystery, then you will be like Harrison Ford looking in pyramids
forever
thinking it's amazing.
Abel James: And what's the secret there for you? Because you've
climbed so many metaphorical mountains,
but with such a sense of curiosity, I would imagine, because you're kind of jumping from, you know, literally being a an elite paratrooper
to,
triathlons,
boxing,
racing cars,
and, I can't imagine how many other things you've explored, not not just to kind of play with at at a low level or with a low level of commitment, but but actually going on to really compete in a lot of these fields, that takes a whole different line of thinking. So what is driving your exploration
of the universe or these different domains?
Paul Chek: Curiosity.
Yeah.
I think it's freaking
crazy.
I mean,
just if you just think
that we're on one
planet
that somehow
can self regulate itself exactly like a living being, which is James Lovelock's Gaia philosophy, which is very real. And I know the planet's alive because I communicate with the planet like a living being and it talks to me,
and it appears to me as the black Madonna.
And she comes to me and
and she inspires me to teach certain things or do certain things so I I know
that this planet is a living being and all stars are living beings and moons are beings. We're seeing their physical body, but
if people had deepened their spiritual abilities to have clairvoyance and to
astral travel and to remote view, they would realize this universe
is absolutely, utterly, frigging, mind blowingly
wild,
and it's infinite.
And current scientific estimates are that there could be 3,000,000,000
inhabitable planets similar to Earth within the Milky Way Galaxy alone
based on scientific investigations.
So
for me, it's like
somehow
I created this situation
so that I
could realize
truths about myself
that I couldn't realize if I hadn't have done this.
A good analogy would be if you were
the ocean,
but you were so vast you could not know yourself
and you found a way to create a wave,
And all of a sudden, you will rise them up and you look down and you saw the ocean all around. You go, oh my god.
Look at that.
And then you realized
that's me.
You would be so amazed. You'd say, I want to explore more, but once the wave collapsed back into the ocean, you would have lost awareness
that you were the ocean. So you would be unconscious again.
So each of us is like a wave on this ocean of divine consciousness, and,
ultimately,
the religious life is, oh my god.
Look at this.
Wow.
You know? And so
for me, it's,
you know, I'm fortunate to have memory of a lot of my past lives and, and, and to have
done enough deep spiritual work to
have
reached the ability to have complete union and relationship with my spirit and my soul.
And so I've I've I've seen
more past lives than I can count, and I've talked to those parts of me that were alive. And I've become aware that that's where I've gained a lot of the certain wisdom and insights that seem to be so natural to me even when I don't study certain things. I just know things.
And so I've met the parts of me that are channeling that through my soul because they're in the afterlife
living inside of me just like you are. You you you have this sense of yourself, but you don't realize
that your certain urges, like, maybe your your sexual desires
come from
several different lifetimes where you had experiences where you said, oh, I love that so much. I wanna do that again. So that part of you
that's now
in the implicate order to use David Bommes in the spirit dimension is channeling through you, but it shows up in you as the urge to
play
a certain way sexually or to
investigate. You you might have once
maybe,
really had
the joyful experience of riding horses in a past life. And so all of a sudden now you have this real
love of horses, and and you you may not realize that's coming from past experiences,
but it was so fulfilling. You you want more of it because you realize how nourishing it is.
So for me,
I think
we need
the contrast between the visible and the invisible.
Because when we're in life,
we reach a certain point where we realize
that what we love in somebody
is the invisible of them.
I can give you an example of the invisible. I've met
women particularly that were physically unattractive.
But within a few minutes of talking to them
and feeling the spirit in them,
they all of a sudden
became beautiful to me
because I realized that
the beauty of this person was so much deeper than their physical body.
But as I got to know the God inside of them,
and they may have been a great healer or a great musician or something that but they were always women that had
passion about something.
And then
I've I've often marveled at the fact that when I first met that person,
I didn't think they were very attractive, but now they're so attractive to me. I'd love to make love to them.
But a lot of other men would look at them and be very unsexually
attracted to them.
But because
when you come to know the essence of your own soul, it makes it easier to know the essence of another person's soul.
And so what I'm saying is that it is the invisibility
of the essence of every living thing
that requires the visibility of the material form in order for it to have something to relate to
that makes the majesty and, you know, try making love to a ghost. It's not nearly as pleasurable as making love to a body. Right?
So
the ghost of us as metaphor
creates bodies.
Right? And and, you know,
all of us have had the experience of
making love to ourselves, whatever you wanna call that masturbation or self pleasuring.
But if you didn't have a body, how would you get to an orgasm?
So you see there's this the visible and the invisible,
they create a whole.
And if you take half that whole away,
then it kills the possibility for experience.
So what I'm saying, if it's not clear, is that for me,
I've gone deep enough in my
into myself and into
other people and into life
to where I can now see the invisible
acting through the visible.
And so through my own
spiritual evolution,
all of us get the reward when we commit ourselves to legitimate spiritual practice,
to the gift of seeing the invisible.
And when you reach the point in your life where you can see the invisible,
animating the visible,
you actually
realize that everything is an icon
or a symbol
that allows us to have a sense of
what it is that we're really in relationship
with.
So for example,
for a lot of people, Jesus on the cross
is a sign that a man
died for our sins, and that's as far as they take it.
But when you really understand that the cross means
that God
takes on a body and enters into a field of impermanence
and has to deal with the rigors
of consciousness, which requires duality, which requires the marriage of good and evil interacting with each other, light and dark,
inside and outside,
male and female, etcetera,
that in order for life to exist,
it has to eat life.
Therefore, death feeds life,
and life creates death.
So the cross is actually not a symbol of a man.
It's the symbol of all
living beings,
and the vertical dimension of the cross represents the eternal now
with which is all there really ever is. We perceive the past through memory and we perceive the future through our imagination.
So where the horizontal beam intersects with the vertical beam is where God embodies itself.
And one half of the beam represents the past. The other half of the beam represents the future
and right where the heart of the cruise crucified Jesus is represents the love of being present in the now
and dealing with the sacrifices
because we have to ultimately work through the illusion
of the material form
to find what it is that animates that.
And so
for someone who is really spiritually inclined,
the cross is always something that invites you to look deeper into the mystery.
But as soon as you think, oh, that's just Jesus on the cross, you don't go any further.
So now you have concretized
the myth
and
turned it into
something
that does not inspire worship.
So,
I'm just happy to be crucified is what I'm saying. You know?
Abel James: Now what about
shadow work? How do you work on something you can't really perceive or or know? Well, you can.
Paul Chek: You do all the time.
And, you know, the simplest way to do shadow work is simply watch how you judge the rest of God.
That person's an asshole. There's a projection outward of a part of yourself that you're rejecting.
Because if God is God, there's nothing else here but God or there is no God, then we really have a problem because we still haven't figured anything out, which means we're really stupid.
And that would be a disgrace for God.
So,
you know, like Bill Gates winds me up.
So when I feel myself saying that fucking idiot, what's this guy fucking doing? He's killing the goddamn planet. He's ruthless.
There's the shadow being projected out. Mhmm. So,
you know, look, I voted for Donald Trump, not because I don't believe the guy's a goddamn criminal he is.
Just because if I had to choose between two forms of evil, it was the lesser of the 2 and at least he had RFK on his side.
So I thought, well, you know,
I put my stock in RFK
for helping
do a software upgrade to Donald Trump.
So that's the safer of the 2. But the point I'm making is when I start labeling Donald Trump as a criminal and an idiot,
shadow work is saying, okay. Now if if Donald Trump is God and I'm projecting that onto him,
then I have to be honest and say, where's the criminal in me and where's the idiot in me? Where's the womanizer in me? Where's the
whatever? Where's the Bill Gates in me?
Where's the Anthony Fauci in me?
You know?
That's what the ego does not want to do
because the ego does not want to
look at itself. Because whenever the ego looks at itself, it starts to dissolve.
That's why the ego rejects spiritual development. Because the further you go into legitimate spiritual development, the more the ego dies.
Because the ego is actually an illusory construct that allows us to have a sense of self identity.
But the problem with the ego is that it actually creates the illusion of separation.
And spiritual development turns the ego
into a window pane
where it says I enjoy being myself, but I don't wanna be myself at the expense of other people being themselves.
So
the simple way to do shadow work is just look at all the judgments you have against other people
or against yourself
and say, where is that coming from? Is that my mother speaking through me? Is that my dad? Is that my school teacher? Is that my religion
Attacking another religion?
Is that my fears and insecurities?
You know, when when a man walks into a room full of
strong, healthy males,
if he's insecure, he'll,
one of the first things he'll do is say, he's not as good looking as me or he might have more muscles but doesn't make as much money. Oh, there's the shadow right there. So isn't that cute? Look at look at all the dick swinging I'm doing in my head
to make me feel better about myself instead of celebrating.
Look at all these beautiful men. Let me go hug them and, you know,
like, you know, you if you wanna find out if your ego's healthy, just go stand next to Laird Hamilton or Kyle Kingsbury for 5 minutes and see what happens inside of you.
Watch how you wanna protect your wife and keep them away.
Abel James: It's funny how that works. What Yes. Saw,
spiritual entities that may attach.
Paul Chek: Get to know them.
Ask them why they're there.
What what is a spiritual entity? It's another aspect of God.
So, you know, what are you? You're a bunch of spiritual entities. What'd you have for breakfast?
Spiritual entities. You ate their bodies with which is made of their spirit. So they they gave their life so they could become human and you. So congratulations.
You've just upgraded
a bunch of chickens to human. And as long as you're conscious of that, you can really
give gratitude and worship what you ate and say, ah,
here I am because you are.
You are because I am, and I am because you are. Right? That's how I hold my relationship with God. Often at night, I say,
thank you, God.
I am because you are,
and you are
because I am.
I am
because you are means I couldn't be here because I can't create myself and sustain myself.
Only God can do that.
So I am because you are. Without you, I couldn't be here. And you are because I am because if there wasn't for me to worship you, there would be nobody that knew who you were, and you wouldn't exist for all intents and purposes.
So we need each other.
So any spiritual entity is just another aspect of God and there's only 2 kinds of entities, the positive ones and the negative ones. And the negative ones are attracted to you because you're putting out the kind of energy that they feed on and that they're attracted to. So if you're
a liar and a cheat, you attract entities that are attracted to lying and cheating, and they come to inhabit you to use you as a vehicle to fulfill their needs.
But if you're a lover, then entities that are lovers come to fill you up,
and you don't even look at them because you're too busy loving.
So if an entity attaches to me, the first thing I do is say, hello, who are you, and why are you here?
And, you know, and I work on the relationship. And that's how I've cleared many entities including
Josh Trent had, I think, 3 of them, but one real
significant one. But I've worked with countless peoples as why I did an entire
program called Are You Possessed with Kedrich Olsen. And I have a podcast called Are You Possessed, and there's an additional 5 hours on, you know, how you know if you're possessed, what to do about what entities are, what the classes of entities are. I mean, I've seen so damn many entities in my career. I I could fit them in a football stadium.
But really, what are we? We're just a bunch of entities working together. Every single one of your cells is a living being.
Your human body has a 100 trillion cells, 90% of which are not human.
Your mitochondria are parasites that share a symbiotic relationship with you. Those are entities.
Right? So there are what I mean when I say the soul is relationships
top to bottom. We are nothing but a bunch of entities that share a common goal, life.
And if you're not in love with life, you attract entities that are more in love with death
because death makes way for life.
Abel James: And if you find yourself in that position where I've heard you say before, basically, the first thing that you might notice if you're losing your health is fatigue, and then you might succumb to something like parasitic or fungal,
infection.
How can you interrupt that that path
of degrading over time or losing your health in in a subtle way? How do you correct that from following, you know, a a horrible trajectory down the road?
Paul Chek: Well,
how about just fucking paying attention to what you see in the mirror every day and what you feel? I mean, it takes 10 years to become obese and you gotta work at it.
You have to work at getting sick. Your body's constantly telling you, hey, you're tired. Idiot, go to sleep.
People don't listen. They drink coffee and watch TV until 2 in the morning or whatever. They play video games or whatever.
You you know, you you you don't train. Your body starts to ache. Your body's saying, get up. Move. Oh, just a minute. I gotta finish this. I gotta
you know,
the point I'm making is is that we have a 1,000 checks and balances in us.
We have blood sugar symptoms. We have the things that
happen is we lose our vision, we lose our hearing, we lose our smell, we lose our sense of taste, we lose our
motor skills, we lose our strength, we lose our coordination,
we lose our shape,
we stop pooping normally, we pee too much or too little,
We get symptoms of dehydration.
Our skin starts to show symptoms. Our hair shows symptoms. Our nails show symptoms.
Our eyes show symptoms.
We get too much or too little wax in our ears.
Our sex organs stop performing well.
I mean, the list is so fucking long. Your body's talking to you constantly.
And the fact that people don't listen
means you're dangerously
distracted from what it is that's giving you this miracle of life, and you're putting your time and energy into things that are not important.
Because without your body, none of those things matter and all the damn money you're working for will go into the doctor's office and the drugstore so fucking fast it'll make your head spin. And that's exactly what they want.
So,
you know, it's very fucking easy. It's called be honest with yourself.
Because the more you bullshit yourself, the more shadow you develop and the more money you give away to doctors and therapists that you'll never see back.
And you usually give it to doctors and therapists that are just as sick as you.
So I have a series on YouTube on my YouTube channel, which is, youtube.comforward/paul
check live, c h e k, Paul check live.
It's called the fastest way to health. I begin this series by saying the fastest way to health is stop bullshitting yourself.
And that's it. Now and then I give you some information. But But, Paul, it's so easy to bullshit ourselves.
Well, you know, there's an old saying. It's very easy to trick a human being, but it's very hard to convince them that they've tricked themselves, and it's true. Yeah.
And and
and one of the reasons we trick ourselves
having looked into this through
thousands of patients
and watching myself is because we
often don't wanna carry the responsibility
that comes with the relationship
of managing ourself because the body's a living garden.
Most people can't even keep their houseplants watered, let alone take care of their body. And this is why biohacking is so popular
because it's the promise of a get healthy, get fit, good look good quick job.
But it never works.
You know, you can't biohack a tree.
It always needs nutrition. It always needs sunlight. It always needs seasons, etcetera. You there's no biohacking for a tree. You know, the fastest way to biohack a tree is just fucking paint 1 on the wall and be done with it.
Right? That one will last for a while.
The tree on your phone doesn't require love, nurture, and support. It doesn't require birds, sunshine, or air. And and that's another reason people are in love with the digital world because you can create an alternate reality that doesn't require any responsibility.
And, you know, love by definition is responsibility.
Love is relationships and all relationships come with responsibility.
So,
most people
and this goes back to the fact that so many people are were raised in families where they didn't get
enough time to play and really create
and live a childhood before they,
were faced with the rigors of adulthood. Like, this is why in Waldorf school, Steiner won't teach kids to read until at least 7 years of age because it activates their left brain hemisphere prematurely.
For the 1st 4 to 7 years, the right brain hemisphere is dominant. It's coming online.
And then somewhere between 57,
the 2 hemispheres integrate.
But the right brain is the brain of wholeness.
The left brain is the brain that chops it up into little pieces so we can identify. The right brain sees the frog as an expression of the pond and the surroundings,
but the left brain says, oh, the frog is this species. It's here on the taxonomic tree.
It's got this type of muscle fiber. And when we dissect it, it's got these parts.
But when you push kids into left brain too soon, they have no sense of wholeness.
And if you don't have a sense of wholeness, you don't know what it is that your your innate drive to be responsible for is directing you to. That's why the world's falling apart.
We're so busy cutting frogs up. We forgot about the fact that the frog is the pond, and the frog is an expression of all the other creatures in the pond because they all need each other.
So, really, you could say biohacking
is what happens when your right brain is prematurely suppressed,
and you're
seeing yourself as an object, not an expression of the,
beauty of the whole.
Abel James: And I've heard you say as well that working too much on our spirituality can also,
make us resent it in some ways. And I've noticed as well, like, we lived up to,
for 5 years lived up at high altitude in the mountains in a very remote place and met a lot of people. It was a small spiritual community. A lot of them have been meditating up there for decades on and off. Some of them in silent retreats for years on end. And I was expecting for some of them to seem more
enlightened than they actually were, but what I saw was a lot of, in fact, narcissism
kinda selfish behavior. So maybe you can talk about that a little bit as well. Yeah. Well, first of all,
Paul Chek: did you ever listen to my podcast episode 250, loose for Christ Eramond? I think I did come across that one. Yeah. It's a 5 hour special. It was my most listened to podcast in 2023. Yeah. But what you're talking about is the Luciferic impulse. And the Luciferic impulse is to get out of the world. Remember Timothy Leary tune in, turn on, and drop out?
So the Luciferic impulse is to, oh, I'm a yogi. I'm gonna go meditate and cave and get out of Maya because it's all an illusion.
So but you can't grow without relationships. This is why the famous Hindu Muslim saint Kabir
said that hiding in caves and all that is a bunch of bullshit. If you wanna grow spiritually,
get a wife, get a job, have some kids, and then you will get to deal with God every day.
Carl Jung was once asked,
how do you know when you're in the presence of God? He said, when anything irritates me or confronts me.
So what he's saying is,
I have to accept responsibility
for the reality of relationships,
however they come. And some of the things that happen, I don't like, But I have to realize that that's God giving me an opportunity to deal with the parts of myself that need to grow
and and and have more empathy and compassion.
The the issue you were referring to, I I when I say you you gotta be careful about working at your spiritual development too hard
is because we can get, what Chip and Dan Heath referred to in the great book switch
as control fatigue.
So you can see, for example, how tired mothers get managing 3 kids, baseball games, school, this, lunches,
go here, go there, and they burn themselves out.
They get control fatigue, and they start forgetting things, and they they don't have time to take care of themselves. They get overweight. They get out of shape. They end up on drugs and hormone. They they the it all falls apart.
So what I tell my students in Spiritium is, look,
there's gonna be days when you don't wanna manage yourself because you're just tired and someone pisses you off and you just downright tell them to fuck off.
You know? But you don't have to get all up upset at yourself and feel like some great teacher in the skies just giving you some bad boy points on the board.
Just
be in the moment, and and and and when you're ready, just reflect on that and say, yep. That was me being genuine about how I felt in the moment. And at any time, I have the right to apologize.
And I'm aware of what I did.
And
I accept that.
And that was the authentically who I was in the moment.
But if you try to moderate all that and you're constantly holding your authentic self back,
you can get so goddamn tired that you begin to resent
real spiritual development. So then what you do is you start telling your store self a story about why it's bullshit or it's a cult or you come up with some cliche
that fits your
shadow projection to give yourself an excuse to not engage legitimate spiritual development.
It would be like if if I was a personal trainer and you hired me and I worked you too hard,
it wouldn't take but a month before you'd be hurting head to toe and the thought of having to ever see me again would make you sick, and you'd cancel your membership and cancel your appointments.
But if I undulate your training so that there's days where we push harder and there's days where we focus on
stretching and
mobilizing,
and days where we work in and and we spend time
focusing on our inner development and relaxing the mind. And then then by the time it was a hard day, you'd be all excited for it. And after a couple of good hard days, you'd say, oh my god. Tomorrow, I can't wait to meditate. It's gonna be awesome. Or do some Tai Chi.
And so
what I'm showing you is that you would get control fatigue if I pushed you too hard.
If we push too hard,
it almost always means that we are identifying ourselves with some sort of a ranking system
or that we're still in the child archetype and we're trying to please somebody else or we're trying or we're a teenager trying to prove to somebody else. So instead of how big is your dick or your bench press, it's how long can you meditate or,
you know,
what kind of enlightenment
experiences have you had, and are they better than mine? It there's always a measuring stick involved.
But,
you know,
because God is infinite, life is infinite, So there's not really a rush. So so what I try to do in my own life and what I encourage all my
students to do
is
make it an act of genuine love
and interest in your own growth and interest in in learning how to love others and learn how to love life more.
And I you know, Arnold Patent has, a set of universal principles and and metaphor
paraphrase. In one of them, he says, if you feel as though you have to do something out of a sense of duty or obligation,
it's better to lay on the floor and rest
until you can do it out of love.
And I I have
tested that theory.
Like, there's times, you know, I'm tired and maybe I need to go home and
change the water, which just takes about an hour to go to the water charger,
take all the empty bottles,
load the empties in there, fill them all up, get the other one, distribute them amongst the houses. There's time I just like I'm fucking tired. I don't wanna do that.
So I might just lay on my floor and just say, you know, I'm I don't wanna do this out of a sense of duty or obligation.
Wanna lay here, smoke a bag,
look at the beautiful ceiling, stare at my artwork,
listen to some music.
You know, sometimes
my wife, one of the girls wants me to do the dishes, and I don't feel like it. So,
so, you know, I'm gonna sit and watch a
a show on television. And and when I feel like doing the dishes, I'll do it. Because then I can do it out of out of love, not a sense of duty or obligation.
So
the more we create this idea that we have to do it, we're doing out of a sense of duty or obligation, the quicker we get tired of doing it and the more we resent the activity and the people
asking us for help.
So I think it's very important that we take responsibility
for the fact that it's up to us to lay on the floor
and give ourselves what we need. And and then
I'm not saying there's not duty or obligation. I'm saying the way you hold relationship with it determines the effect
that meeting
the obligation and fulfilling the duty
has on you.
And if you don't have a healthy relationship with duty and obligation, you can begin to resent your wife, resent your kids, resent your life, resent your choices, resent yourself,
and that's a fantastic formula for an addiction
because that's what you gotta do to numb the pain.
And that's also what leads to projecting
onto others and putting you in the victim archetype. It's always somebody else's fault.
And it can even be God's fault. A lot of people hate God because they think God made them do all this terrible stuff.
Abel James: Yeah. And we've all probably had the experience of tasting
food made out of a sense of obligation versus food made Absolutely.
Paul Chek: Taste a lot. And there's a big difference.
There's a big difference. Right? And you mentioned, Paul,
Abel James: music and and I've heard you speak about sound healing as well. Yeah. So a lot of people speak about that.
I take it personally because I've been a musician for a long time. A lot of people are just like, oh, yeah. All sound is therapeutic, and this frequency is the best, though, and you have to use this one in this way. And people get kind of carried away with the specifics of the protocols in sound healing. So I'd love to hear you talk about both the pros and the cons and how it actually,
can work to help us heal or or not in some cases.
Paul Chek: Well,
remember there's only 3 things that create everything in the universe including your body which is energy,
information,
and frequency.
Energy without information
cannot create a formation.
Nargadunis'
emptiness is form and form is emptiness.
All form emerges from emptiness. Archetypes are the blueprint from which
form emerges,
But archetypes are not physical things. You can't grab one and say, here it is.
So
God is undifferentiated
energy or pure potential.
Information
is the dream
that brings potential into actuation and frequency is what,
is the heartbeat that moves energy into potential
and it
has a lot to do with what
form the energy is, and this is why we have the elements earth, water, fire, and air. For example, a thought
couldn't exist without the energy to
produce it.
The information
that makes the thought intelligible
And the frequency, if it's a thought about I don't love myself, it's a low vibration. If it's a thought like I love myself, it's a very high vibration.
And that's what your chakra system is. Your chakra is really like a cosmic radio station,
and your 7th chakra connects you to the whole and, to God, and your root chakra grounds
you to the material plane, the tangible physical realities. And without going through the whole chakra system,
each one of those is a psychophysical dimension of reality that has a physical
and emotional
and an astral and a mental
level,
which is a step down frequency.
So
God you could say God steps itself down from the 7th and embodies itself in the first.
So there you see the condensation of consciousness.
So from a sound healing perspective,
if you're, for example,
having chronic low back pain, that's the root chakra typically, l five s one in the sacral distribution.
The the sciatic distribution is all the root chakra that links to your colon,
especially the sigmoid colon.
There's carryover from the bladder,
etcetera. But the point is that
is a frequency range
and any musical instrument or any tone emitted by your voice or a healer's voice or somebody's voice
that goes into resonance
at that level
can add energy at that level.
But because
we can create intelligent energy as healers
by putting intention on the energy, just like we take a carrier wave. See, when you're talking to me over this microphone right now, there's a carrier wave
and my voice
rides the carrier wave. And so you don't hear the carrier wave because
it's not interpreted as sound. It's a carrier wave.
So when we have the intention to heal
and we know this person has low back pain and we visualize that healing process and we identify that this person's deficient
in the energy frequency that would correlate to the musical scale doe or the color
light of red, for example, because there's an there's there's an an octave correlation there,
then we know what type of energy to give. But if somebody, for example, is
very insecure because they have a lot of money and they're afraid they're gonna lose it,
and that energy is trapped in their low back, it can also give them low back pain. So if we actually add more energy to that, it could make them worse
because what we need to do is move that energy out
and transform
it maybe into heart energy.
So
the point that I'm making to answer your question is is too much of a given frequency
would be like too much water in a cup that's already full.
Not enough
means the cup needs to be filled up
and because each of these centers is actually connected. So imagine 7 sinks that are all plumbed together.
If you pour a bunch of water, red water
in the root sink, all the way on the left
and you keep pouring it in, it'll turn every one of those sinks, some variation of the color red because it'll mix with every other chakra.
We have to realize that each of these centers is communicating with each other and they're actually expressions of each other.
The root chakra is not just at the root because the root chakra is also expressed in the second as your sense of safety and security over your sexuality, your sex identity, your use of your sexual interactions
and your use of life force energy.
Your root chakra shows up in your third as your safety and security within your sense of who you are, your safety and security within your capacity to give and receive love, your safety and security within your sense of what can you create and are you expressing yourself effectively,
and are you capable of listening,
your safety and security with what you see or your level of insight, and your safety and security with what you believe will happen to you when you die and what your idea of God is.
So every one of the chakras is actually all the other chakras mixed together. The conventional model is way too childish and and limited because it's not true, but it gives children a place to begin.
So what I'm saying is we give the idea of low back pain, we wanna do sound healing, then the natural thought is, oh, I've gotta use the root chakra frequency.
But I have to say, what is it that you're insecure about?
Or what is it you you know, so this analogy was money, for example.
Then I gotta see, is it fear of what's gonna do to your relationships?
I have to look at what where that problem's coming from because I might actually have to go to the heart chakra to heal a root chakra imbalance.
How I do it can be my voice.
It can be a Tibetan bowl. It can be a guitar. It can be anything that I can use to go into resonance with that center and bring the person's conscious awareness and intention
to
the whatever
information needs to be brought in for healing.
If I don't bring the person's awareness
to what it is that needs to be fulfilled in the healing process
so that it's their own healing,
then I just become a form of energy aspirin. Now every time they have problem, they run to me and say, oh, I need you to get your tuning forks out or do some magic on me. So you can end up just becoming somebody else's crutch, and and that that's really no different than a drug addiction.
So the answer is you can do sound healing with
anything. In fact,
if you really wanna know the truth, you could actually imagine the sound
and project it in your consciousness
to that individual, and it would probably have the same effect as the actual instrument
if you are good enough with the use of your own consciousness.
Abel James: At the same time, you could ring a crystal bowl that's beautiful that costs tens of 1,000 of dollars, and it could do nothing for you or or worse in some Well, it'll do something
Paul Chek: that again, it'll be what is your intention. The fact is if you have healing intention, but you're really shitty at sound healing,
you can still get good results because intention directs the flow of energy.
I look back on on my early days as a therapist, and I was like, how did I get anybody better? Because I you know,
as a 41 year veteran therapist, now I look back and I had like a a microcosm of knowledge, but I was working with complex cases that I don't even know how I got results with. But the one thing that I saw
is I had a real
legitimate love and passion for helping people,
and I was genuinely interested in their problems. And I realized
that the love, the passion, and the genuine interest
brings so much vitality into the relationship
that it always compensates for the ignorance a therapist
has.
So quite frankly,
you could take someone who really has love, passion, and commitment
to people
and put the wrong instrument or the wrong tool or the wrong frequency in their hands, but that frequency will be carrying something more powerful, which is loving intention,
and there's nothing more powerful than that.
Abel James: Beautiful. Before we wrap up, Paul, you've been at the forefront
of the world of health, healing, performance
for, you know, more than half a century, essentially, at this point. Almost
41.
Yeah. What do you see coming in the next 5, 10, 50 years in the world of health? What is is there a next frontier? Does anything change in the future?
Paul Chek: Everything and nothing. Yeah.
You know, we live in an in in a
we live in an archetypal
matrix.
This is where God comes to self reflect and self realize.
So there's inherent
cycles in life
just like we have winter, spring, summer, and fall every year.
They're the same, but they're different every year.
So nothing changes. There's always winter, spring, summer, and fall, but everyone,
everything, and everyone changes. You're not the same guy you were last winter.
And the ski trip you had last winter was a ski trip the same, but it was different than the one you're gonna have this year.
The thing is is that
the goal is for us to become more conscious,
more capable, more loving, and more awake.
But Earth is a school for relatively immature souls. It's like 3rd grade for souls.
And
higher souls that are more evolved reincarnate in earth like school teachers. So you get people like Eckhart Tolle and Paramahansa Yogananda and
people like that, that don't need to be here, but they come out of the love of God's garden
because they realize this is where god's waking up to itself.
And so
what I'm saying is a school is always a school, but every year there's different kids in it, but they're always studying the same things. 3rd grade is always 3rd grade, but nobody's having the same experience.
So the world will always be a school.
What I think is gonna change is
we're going to
collectively
and individually
grow to realize that there are certain things that we cannot ignore anymore. Like, we can't expect
daddy in the sky to rescue us.
We can't expect government
to be an effective parent figure anymore.
We can't expect government agencies to really look out for us, and we have to realize that corporate entities do not have our best interest at heart. They only want our money and to control us.
So
every cycle that we go through,
the themes repeat themselves,
but the emphasis is placed on different levels of self realization
just like
every mother's child
focuses on key things in childhood. But when they go through puberty, they reject their parents because
if they don't reject their parents,
then there's no evolution.
They have to actually
decide what of mom and dad they wanna keep, but what they wanna reject. And because they don't have so much programming, they see the world
a lot through a lot fresher eyes than mom and dad, so they're not so adverse to new styles or new ways of doing things.
So what I see is that we're collectively
growing up to the fact that we have to break out of the childhood,
archetype
and become adults now.
And that's gonna require
that we
do some shadow work and some some healing
and that we
really get clear on
what do we love enough to grow for and change for. So
I teach love as an I, we all model. 1st, you gotta love yourself enough that you have something to bring into any we relationship.
And
once you're clear about who you are and what you bring into the we relationship, it's natural to say, what can we give to the all? Right? I I have to love Paul Cech every day. I have to love my 2 wives and my kids every day,
but that's my gift to the world because I'm giving
intelligent, well educated kids to the world.
I'm growing spiritually with my wives,
and our mission is to provide the best possible education we can. So
my reason for being is to grow myself. My reason to be in relationship is to grow in love, but my reason for being in the world
is to help people
have an easier time of it than I did.
That's my education systems.
Abel James: It's beautiful.
Paul, what is the best place for people to find, Spirit Gym, your podcasts, your books, and all the other work that you do? Paulcek.com's
Paul Chek: kind of a central hub.
You can find my podcast, Spirit Gym with Paul Cech there,
or just search Spirit Gym with Paul Cech on any podcast outlet. The institute is chekinstitute.com,
and there's a lot there.
All sorts of online education and books and things like that.
My YouTube channel where I have, I don't know, something like 1200 videos I've done for public health as as a gift to the world
is youtube.comforward/paulchaklive.
Those are the main website. Oh, Spirit Gem is my spirit gym dot com. So that's my membership training program
where I've developed,
82 lessons and over 75 hours of training in what's called the Spirit Gym University, which you get as a member.
And then I do a weekly Sangha meeting where I provide a new topic or concept,
and I do that typically for
1 and a half to 4 hours depending on the flow.
And so I give them a presentation, and then I take questions on what I presented on, and then I open the floor
to support anyone with any problems or questions they have about their own life or health or
I basically treat them as though they were my private clients.
And so the membership
to be a Spirit Gem member gives you access to all the lessons,
gives you access to the songas. There's a community,
and then they have the podcast as well as part of their membership. They because the podcast has an extended play membership, so they all get that.
And then I bring in occasional guest experts
to, give presentations, like my wife, Angie, who's a highly qualified shaman and expert in biochemistry,
spoke recently while I was on the road in Texas.
And, so that that's what it is. It's really for me to support them with
the education I put together, which is a synthesis of my life's work
developed so that it's palatable to the public,
and it doesn't require the level of advanced
training that higher level Czech Academy professionals get because that's a 5 year training program.
So those are the main things. Paulcheck.com,
my spiritgym.com,
shekinstitute.com,
and then,
my YouTube channel.
That's enough to keep anyone busy.
Abel James: For sure. Thank you, Paul, for being so generous with your time,
your energy, and and your spirit.
Anyone out there listening, please
go read Paul's books, check out Spirit Gym. It's absolutely incredible. And,
Paul Chek: as Paul said, your work is cut out for you. So, Paul, once more, thank you so much for joining us. Hey. Thank you, Abel. So it was great. Good questions, nice dialogue, and, thanks for your passion. It's obvious that you're still passionate about what you do. And I think, you know, there it is. That's
that's the love that grows us. Right? And
I'm sure you've seen podcast with people that aren't aren't really that excited about doing it and it it's obvious and it doesn't inspire us.
And,
your smile is is apparent. Your eyes are full of your passion.
So that's what we do. We create more love and more life together, and that's what really Spirit Gems' all about right there.
Abel James: Thanks for hanging out until the end of this show. As promised, here comes one of my original tunes made with my friend Denny Hemmingsen
called Swamp Thing. I hope you enjoy.
Down in Louisiana,
down where the bullfrogs sang.
Buzzing
by the bayou,
doing that voodoo thing.
And everybody say,
Just outside the core,
steaming all in there.
The dodge and beats and bourbon.
Do you know that small things digs around?
If I let her see my soul,
Paul Chek: she leaned in and whispered.
Abel James: Absence on a red.
Paul Chek: Well, I'm letting proof you gotta live your truth and let the hoodoo do the rest.