Greg: Hello and welcome to the Pacific Center Podcast. My name is Dr. Greg Lane and I will be your host as we explore a variety of interesting topics with many amazing people from a variety of professional backgrounds over the months and years ahead. The focus of this podcast will be the intersection of the traditional healthcare practices of various cultures and the modern scientific research on peak physical and cognitive performance. The show will be delivered in an interview format. A quick disclaimer: while we may be discussing some health related issues and therapies, in no way will this be construed as medical advice. As always, if you are seeking information or treatment for a medical condition, please consult with a licensed healthcare professional. Our guest today is Paul Chek. Paul is the founder of the CHEK Institute, which offers fitness and healthcare professionals a uniquely integrated and holistic approach to health, fitness, and well-being. A CHEK Institute’s approach to functional exercise and optimal health was developed by Paul Chek and is based on his 30 years of clinical practice working with clients from all walks of life, as well as his diverse educational background as a holistic health practitioner, neuromuscular and sports massage therapist. Paul’s methods are truly holistic, viewing the body as a system of systems, a fully integrated unit where physical, hormonal, mental, emotional, and spiritual components must be considered. Paul has produced hundreds of videos in 17 advanced level home study courses. He is an author of 11 books including the popular The Last Four Doctors You’ll Ever Need and How To Eat, Move, And Be Healthy and is a regular contributor to many publications and websites. The CHEK Institute’s four advanced training programs include CHEK Exercise Coach, the four-level CHEK Practitioner Program, the Golf Performance Specialist program, and the three-level CHEK Holistic Lifestyle Coach program. Additionally, we’re very excited to have Paul as a presenter at our Pacific Symposium here in San Diego, October 23rd and 24th, where his focus will be the CHEK Life Process Alchemy For Health And Performance: Getting To The Root Cause Of Your Patients’ Problems. And I, for one, have already registered and right on, you can too. So, welcome, Paul, thanks for joining. I’m really excited to take that class over the course of the day.

Paul: I’m excited to share. I think you’re going to find it fascinating.

Greg: Oh, I for sure will. So, as a doctor and educator, I’m always fascinated by the personal stories of the people that we interview here, and healers, and how they got into the profession of the healing arts. So take us back, Paul, if you would. How did you get involved with health and healing?

Paul: Well, that can be a very long story so I’ll summarize it so we have time to talk about all the other interesting things. But, my mother is a yogi and she followed the principles and teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda and so I was raised in that tradition and got to go to summer camp and be with the monks when I was 15 and learn meditation techniques and many other things. So that created the spiritual foundation but Yogananda was also a very holistic man and so he really believed in exercise, diet, spiritual practices, meditation. A lot of the very same things that are the foundation of the CHEK Institute’s teaching approach, or methodology, or ideology were part of my childhood upbringing. And I found Self-Realization Fellowship really amazing because prior to that, my mother was in the Christian Science religion and I couldn’t get any of my questions answered and found it to be quite chaotic, confusing, and not supportive. So yoga was really quite a blessing, you know, the principles of yoga for the whole family. I grew up on a sheep farm on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and so we raised sheep and had a woolen mill and sold wool to the Indians for the crafts trade. We sold produce, firewood, raised all our own animals, and were almost fully self-contained. We really need to get anything from the store and my father’s, you know, very grounded in agriculture and farming. So I have a pretty solid working knowledge of earth, water, fire, air, and wood. If you want, right in space. And being raised on a farm, you learn, you know, there’s principles in nature that if you don’t pay attention, it costs you. You can’t mess around, really, on a farm. And, you know, we weren’t playing games with drugs and chemicals so it was real farming. And so, having the kind of yoga philosophy connected to farming and then being an athlete. I was a competitive motocross racer, I was a competitive boxer, kickboxer. When I was young, I was sponsored by Honda so I raced at a high level. I rode in the rodeo as a kid, I played pretty much every sport you could play in school. I was a drag racer, a stock car racer, then I became a paratrooper in the 82nd airborne division. Then I left home and moved to the United States and I fought my way onto the army boxing team which at the time, had only been beaten by Cuba and Russia, it was the third ranked amateur boxing team in the world. And I also was the army’s representative in triathlon, I won the army triathlon and then my company commander asked me if I would like to apply to the US national championships in triathlon. He asked me if I’d like to leave the boxing team and focus on triathlon because I was the first aviator, I was in aviation. My job was repairing weapon systems and cobra helicopters so I was the first guy in aviation to really be out there kicking the butts of all the hardcore, you know, army rangers, green berets. And in all the military competitions, I was famous because I’d never gotten beaten by a recon ranger or a navy seal. So the company commander was betting a lot of money on me in boxing competitions, in triathlon. So when I told the boxing team I was going to leave, they offered me the job as the trainer because I was the only fighter that they had that could fight as hard in the third round as I could in the first round. And they knew that I ate and trained very differently and they could never figure out how I could train for triathlon and do all the boxing training at the same time because it would wipe the fighters out. Just the boxing, training. And so they would see me eating, you know, raw vegetables and I had a very careful strategy of losing weight over a period of three months. But a lot of the other fighters kept having to resort to all sorts of tricks from taking drugs that would stimulate the kidneys to make them urinate excessively to skipping weight and exercising in saunas with full body suits, which is one of the reasons they were having such a hard time making it through all three rounds with high performance. And I also had an interest in massage therapy because while I was doing all this training, I was often training so hard that my body would ache like hell. And I had read some books and articles on sports massage and my wife had no training but using Rich Faye’s original book on sports massage therapy. Between the two of us, she would work on me and I was just mind blown at how much it improved my performance. So I offered the team, when I became the trainer, to take on sports massage therapy and I just studied it from books and practiced and it had a huge impact on not only their performance but the team doctor noticed that the injuries were dropping down very quick. And so I became the trainer for two years and I was in charge of nutrition, I was in charge of designing all their exercise programs, I was in charge of managing the gym, and I was in charge of massage therapy for the fighters. And I worked with the osteopathic physician who was our team doctor for two years, basically, getting an on-the-job internship on how to train for acute sports injuries. And then I wanted to come to San Diego because that was sort of the triathlon mecca of the world at the time. And I’m initially from Los Angeles so I’m really a California boy. When my parents moved to Vancouver Island, I was like, “Oh my God, all this rain and snow is just not right for me.” Cold up there. So in ‘86, I left the army and came here, went to sports massage therapy school then got my HHP license and did lots of other training. I spent about 16 to 30,000 a year for the next 16 years traveling all over the world, studying from the best experts I could find. And what I did is what I call situational learning. And I came to San Diego knowing there was tons of massage schools and so I went to doctors and therapists and said, “Send me the worst clients you have. The ones that when you see them on your schedule, you think, ‘Oh my God, not them again.’” And I very quickly became quite successful, got offered a job at the largest physical therapy clinic at the time in San Diego with 22 physical therapists, athletic trainers, and 13 surgeons. And they had their own surgical center and the doctors, some of them were trying to inject trigger points but they were very lousy at finding them and feeling them. And so, they’d often call me into their treatment rooms and ask me to identify where the trigger points were and mark them and even hold them so they could inject them. But they got together and said, “Well, why don’t we just send you to physicians assistant school and get your license to give medical injections, we’ll let you do these things.” And then I got exposed to a medical doctor named Chit Chan Gunn who used acupuncture needles for a technique called dry needling. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it or not?

Greg: Oh, sure. It’s a big conversation in our profession right now.

Paul: Yeah, so I studied Chit Chan Gunn’s work. And because I was allowed to give medical injections by license – and as long as I had a medical doctor’s prescription – I basically started using dry needling because I found that it was a lot more effective than a hypodermic needle. Because even when you inject a lidocaine, a marking or a xylocaine, there’s so much damage done by the needle that oftentimes the post-injection pain is as bad as what they came in with. And I found that by using the dry needling approach, that I could get just as good results without the post because it’s a traumatic needle, there was minimal post-treatment damage. And having studied acupressure in massage therapy and then studying the work of Felix Mann and many others over the years, I developed my institute, which is a multi-disciplinary institute. We have medical doctors – even one of our students that went all the way through to CHEK Level Three was the director of physiatry at the Mayo Clinic – but we have osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, nurses, nutritionists, dietitians, psychologists, podiatrists. I mean, pretty much everything you can imagine. There’s over ten thousand students that are in or have gone through the programs and I developed, I took my knowledge and my studies and I owned a physical therapy clinic for three years with a partner who was a physical therapist. Once I left the physical therapy clinic I was working in, and traveled the world, and basically developed a system that capitalized on what I would call the best techniques that I could gather from everywhere in the world from any profession. I did over 5089 classroom hours of study in workshops alone, including 100 hours of Feldenkrais training with Frank Wildman, who was trained by Feldenkrais himself. I studied with Sandy Burkart, Mariano Rocabado, many of the kind of geniuses. I did an advanced internship with Carol Levitt and Vladimir Janda. Janda was a big fan of my work, I mentioned him in a lot of my videos and used to send all my programs to him when I made them, wherever I referenced him. And he always gave me great feedback and was very appreciative of my referencing of his work. So really, the CHEK system that I teach is a product of everything from my mother’s yoga, my father’s farming wisdom, my experience as an athlete, the integration of holistic health concepts I’ve studied – all the world religions, the science of religion, the philosophy for religion, metaphysics, consciousness studies, quantum physics. Basically, I’ve had to study everything you can possibly imagine because I built a reputation on working with medical failures. And I’ve been hired by way too many sports teams and olympic committees and professional athletes to even remember them all to help them deal with athletes that were either injured, not recovering, or having performance issues that nobody could resolve. And that really kicked off in ‘89 when the Chicago Bulls hired me to teach them my system of core conditioning and core assessment and how to use the Swiss ball. And they triggered off a huge avalanche in the professional sports market because everybody was following these guys all the time and noticed they were doing all these unusual things. And they liked my teaching so much, they gave me an open door policy, I think I did seven consultations. Whenever I wanted to teach them something new, they said come on down. And so, what I created was a multi-disciplinary system because everyone coming in has a different level of licensure. I basically teach everything that I know to everybody and say you’re responsible for deciding which of these techniques you use, based on your license. But you’re learning them so that you understand how the body works, what techniques are useful for what problems, what medical and allied healthcare professionals have what skillsets so you can refer to. For example, when do you use a cranial-sacral therapist versus an Alexander practitioner versus a Rolfer, or a Heller worker versus an acupuncturist, etc. So when they go through their testing, they have to describe how and when to refer to over 18 different health and medical professionals so that I know that they aren’t making the mistake of trying to be, you know, kind of a “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none.” You know, one of the reasons I did that is because I saw over and over again in my practice, that a patient maybe had thoracic outlet syndrome and they would typically get referred to a neurologist and the neurologist couldn’t figure it out. So what would he do? He’d refer them to another neurologist and that guy could then refer them to another neurologist. And I’d see people that had as many as 10 referrals to the same kind of doctors, using the same approaches, with the same mindset. And so, I realized that there was a huge problem in medicine because the medical system, as you know, is so territorial. They’ve divided the body up into zip codes and they think everybody owns those zip codes but still are only now becoming conscious of the interrelationships of the body. So I really spent a huge amount of my career having to look deeply into the interrelationships so I could figure out what system causes problems in that system. And that’s ultimately how I developed the CHEK totem pole system, it’s really a hierarchy of systems that control other systems and that became the basis of CHEK Practitioner Level Three, which is a nine-day course where you learn how to assess all the relevant cranial nerve functions and systems on the totem pole. And so, that’s kind of an introduction. Sorry if it’s long.

Greg: No, it’s really great and very eclectic and so broad and deep. Your training and what you bring to the CHEK system, maybe for our listeners – and Jack, I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you. We have Jack Miller, the president of PCOM here, as well.

Paul: Hey Jack.

Jack: I have my president’s outfit on.

Greg: Yeah, call in from Napa. Anyway, Paul, you know, when I was looking at your programs, it looked like it could take about seven years to get fully trained in your system. But you also have, like you said, a nine-day intro series and you have different levels along the way. So maybe, can you describe what you’re doing in this successive series of trainings, leading up to the seven-year advanced training? When would a practitioner train in one area, as opposed to the whole area? And, sort of, speak to the levels of training. And what are you doing in these course of seven years?

Paul: Yeah. Well, first of all, the training – it’s not like going to school, it’s more like an internship program. So most of the courses are five days long, five days of intensive training. And then if you’re in the CHEK Academy, which we ultimately built because the intensity and the comprehensiveness of the information was so much that even highly seasoned medical professionals had a hard time transitioning and remembering, even with manuals and resources. So we built the CHEK Academy which takes you through all the training over the course of four years. And then, you’re guided by mentors and you have regular meetings and things like that. But originally, we didn’t merge the HLC – Holistic Lifestyle Coaching, which used to be called Nutrition And Lifestyle Coaching but due to the kind of territorialism of the nutrition people, we started getting pressure not to use the name so we changed it to Holistic Lifestyle Coaching. But you could initially take the CHEK Practitioner Training which is exercise coach, which gives you the basic science and principles of how to do a holistic assessment and design an exercise program so that you’re not hurting people and you’re using the principles of exercise program, designed scientifically. And then from there, CHEK Level One starts your training in identifying red flags. So you start learning standard orthopedic assessments, neurological assessments, functional muscle testing, looking for edema and indications of nerve compression, joint range of motion, joint mobilization. Basically, everything that you would need to know to scientifically apply exercise and not actually injure people with it and move them forward. But also, because of my extensive background in rehab and because the system’s open to medical professionals of all types, it’s designed to take you from the most intricate acute approach to exercise such as rotational isolation of the l34 or l45 multifidus and rotatories, i.e. medical grade exercise. And using technologies like the total gym and unweighted exercise for disc patients and people with compromised spinal cords and things like that. And I developed, you know, I pioneered the use of the Swiss ball in the exercise industry prior to my work in 1988. It was only a thing that was used in neurological rehab and sometimes in aerobics classes. So I built a whole system of how to integrate both infant development and Swiss ball exercises so that if people didn’t want to do infant development, you could use the Swiss ball. So once you go from exercise coach to CHEK Level One – you start CHEK Level One, you learn the primal movement pattern system that I developed, also in ‘88, which I showed how all the human movements that we do in general could be broken down to seven key movement patterns, which were essential for survival in nature. And I did that by studying developmental man and my wife, Penny, has a master’s degree in biological anthropology from Cambridge University. So when we met, we were in heavy discussions on these things and she saw a lot of logic and rationale in my system. And so – a side note – the way that came about is when I was working in the physical therapy clinic, the doctors and therapists used to get very freaked out because I’d have people doing things like dead lifts, and squats, and lunges. And oftentimes, they were people that had been told should never do those kinds of things, such as disc patients and spinal instability patients. And though it freaked them out, they had one problem I got extremely good results and rehab people faster than they’d ever seen. So the head physical therapist, Chris Siegel, asked if I would do an in-service to train the doctors and therapists on my system of choosing exercises and how I knew when it was safe and when it wasn’t. So I took all the information out of my head and I mapped it out and showed how you could take almost any exercise that you could think of. And I demonstrated this by having literally boards and boards covered with exercises and showed that the common denominator of all those movement patterns was seven patterns. Squatting and all these primal patterns are done standing on your own two feet which you have to do in nature – squatting, lunging, bending, pushing, pulling, and twisting – those seven movement patterns are coupled. So if you throw a ball, it’s a lunge coupled with a twist and a push. If you bend over to pick up something out of a cupboard and you have to turn your body, it’s a squat with a twist. If you pick up a box off the floor, that’s a bend pattern. So a deadlift is different, for example, than a squat because if you’re doing a squat like in the gym, the weight’s on your back so it brings your center of gravity up. And research shows that the motor recruitment sequences are significantly different from a squat than a deadlift, even though on film it looks like the joints are doing the same thing. But when the center of gravity drops down low, like when in a deadlift, it goes down below the navel. And the heavier the bar, the more down and forward it goes so it requires different recruitment patterns. And I studied motor learning and motor development quite extensively for many years to learn how the system works and put some science behind this. And I was the first guy traveling around the world showing people that all the machines in the gym were ruining people and giving them a scientific explanation of it. So CHEK Level One, you really learned how to assess human movement and how to break those patterns down into simpler patterns for injured people and how to build them to more progressively complex but task or sport specific patterns. And I teach them all the differences between right reflexes, tilting reflexes, how the brain organizes movement, and why you have to select exercises based on the right reflex profile. Or you’ll have an athlete that’s good in the gym but lousy in their sport. CHEK Level Two is when you go into orthopedic testing, mostly focusing in the lumbar region, you know, learning how to master the lumbar spine and in the lower body. CHEK Level Three is where you do a nine-day training on the CHEK totem pole that includes assessing eyes, ears, vestibular, upper cervical, jaw, and shoulders. So those are the functions there. CHEK Level Four is now an integrative system where you learn to integrate all the HLC training all the CHEK training to that point, into one working system. And then we get into what is now the Life Process Alchemy and into the psychological aspects and how the psyche works and how it affects the body. You know, psychosomatic illnesses, program beliefs and behaviors, all the things that actually we have to deal with when we’re suggesting to patients that they remove things from their diet or change their exercise program or start doing it. But they don’t follow the program so once they get to Level Four, we now require that they have done at least HLC 1 and HLC 2, or they can’t come to that level of training because in the old days, we had a lot of people that said they didn’t want to do the nutrition and lifestyle coaching. They only wanted corrective exercise and so we were worried that it might disable the business if we were too strict on that. But it got to the point where the students were dealing with such complex cases and every time I was asked to consult them, either as a private consultation or in classes, over and over again, I had to show them that it’s diet and lifestyle factors that are usually the biggest thing that you have to look at that not only lead to injury – because, as I often say, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken. If you’re eating a garbage diet, you’re going to have lousy ligaments, your tissues are fragile. And so, you know, when I’m working for professional sports teams, you’d be shocked to see the diets of these guys. I mean, they live off of junk food, McDonald’s even. When I was on the army boxing team, these guys ate out of McDonald’s most of the time. And I was trying to teach them, you know, you literally are what you eat. And I even found studies all the way back in the ‘40s showing – for example, one boarding school in New Zealand switched over to organic food and the team, the physician for the sports teams there noticed that they had something like a 95 percent reduction in muscular tendency and ligamentous injuries amongst the rugby teams and contact sports teams, which happened after they switched organic food. And he found that the ligaments were much stronger and healthier. And I actually tell my students all the time, if you want to do a test, just go buy an organic free range chicken, then go to the store and buy a commercial chicken. Cook them both for the same amount of time – like, you’d cook a chicken – and then take the leg off each chicken and see how much force it takes to snap the ligaments. And my students that have done that have been shocked because you don’t need to use any effort at all to snap the knee joint on a commercial chicken but you have to actually force that leg. I mean, I’m a strong guy, you have to not only put a lot of effort but you gotta twist it and really it takes a lot to snap the ligaments of an organic chicken. So I use that kind of demonstration to show my students, if you’re working with athletes and you don’t understand diet and lifestyle factors, you don’t understand sleep and it’s influences on the body, if you don’t understand the psychology of the mind and how to assess breathing, then you’re gonna just be treating orthopedic problems with palliative approaches. So then they go to CHEK Level Five, I think, so I did that. And then, the HLC program starts at Level One because when I started the program, I had tons and tons of people coming that were very unhealthy people from every walk of the medical branch. And I said to them, “You cannot teach holistic health unless you actually practice it because you don’t know what you’re guiding people into, you don’t know how hard it is to get sugar out of your diet, you don’t know what’s involved in cleaning funguses and parasites out of the system. So you’re actually telling people to do things that you’re completely unconscious of how much discipline and guidance and how disruptive some of these healing process can be.” So I built HLC 1 and heavily encouraged everyone not to come to HLC 2 until they’d eat, sleep, breed, and pooped it for at least six months. Because only then can they really be effective therapists. So one is the introduction, helps you master what’s in my book, how to move and be healthy and more. HLC 2 is the professional training course that teaches you how to properly assess and coach and design holistic programs. And HLC 3 takes you very deep into a system of maps I developed for visceral, somatic, and somato-visceral reflex pathways into also including meridian pathways. It teaches you infant development, CHEK practitioners learn infant development in Level One. It teaches medical dowsing and it also teaches a series of maps that I developed to show how the psychology or the consciousness of a human being develops so that you can adjust your coaching strategy to the level of consciousness that the patient is at so you don’t, you know, use the wrong approach and get poor results. So that’s kind of an overview and the CHEK Academy is all that, put together in a four-year staged process.

Jack: Yeah. Greg, one of the things that Paul told me was, well, it’s not seven years of courses. It’s very sensitive to the students’ accomplishment before progressing, right? It’s not just a matter of you learn “a, b, c” and regurgitate it, like so often in many classes, right? You really want to see that you’ve got it and can apply it. So it can take some time.

Greg: Yeah, that makes sense.

Paul: And it does require that they turn in case histories that are graded, mostly by me. And they can’t go past CHEK Level Two without case histories. And they can’t get into CHEK Level Four without case histories that are actual case histories, that I can actually contact the client and follow up on. And generally they require 10 but as I got tired of grading piles and piles of case histories, I saw that anyone that can design one or two really well, there’s no need to have six or eight more. So now it could require up to 10 if you keep making mistakes, but I give you a window. And say if you don’t get this done by this time, you’re just not ready for this training. So it takes seven years because it takes most people that much time to actually integrate and practice the material. In the Academy program, with all the extra support, we found they can get through it in four years.

Jack: Can I jump in with this question? I’ve just been diagnosed, since I’ve met Paul – it really comes from an educator’s perspective – just, you’ve enumerated in a fair bit of detail, a lot of your accomplishments and the things that you know and teach. But one of the things I’m really fascinated with, as an educator, is the fact that despite you’ve mentioned the classes you’ve taken and made some reference to your teachers, I think my observation is that you’re largely self-taught. And not that you’ve created it from thin air but that you’ve independently gone to the library – and I’ve seen your library, it’s impressive – and had the discipline or the motivation to learn so much and to then make it into something applicable. And I think as an educator, and most people – if they reflect, that’s a pretty rare attribute. And I wondered if you’ve reflected at all about that and like what is it that really inspired you to, you know, read more than just a book or two?

Paul: Well, I think that it really started when I was an athlete. I hated reading as a child, I failed reading in the third grade and had to go to summer school to get caught up or I’d fall behind. But when I was in the army, and as an athlete, I was so interested in optimizing my athletic performance that the only things I would read were things that I could see had the capacity to be directly applied to what I was doing. I actually never read a book cover to cover until I was 22. The first book I read cover to cover was Nutrition: A Holistic Approach by Rudolph Valentine. That was the only book that could capture my attention – unless I was repairing, you know, engines on my race cars and stuff and had to read a comprehensive manual on how to rebuild an engine. But what I found is that I got so much joy out of first, it was through improving athletic performance. And I could see that there was a big difference between my performance. For example, I held the record in military obstacle and confidence courses. I also had the record in the 82nd airborne division for the most push-ups in two minutes, I did 144 push-ups in two minutes. And these are graded push-ups, this isn’t a bunch of cylinders, you know? And on the obstacle and confidence courses, I’m competing against all levels of soldiers from the most elite to your standard foot soldiers. And I, in one of these competitions, I set the record by like 40 seconds, which is huge. And I knew it was the way, I was training in the way I was eating and I saw all the responses from the athletes that were following the programs and suggestions I was making so I got so inspired. And when the team doctor was telling me, “Man, what you’re doing is cutting injuries down like crazy,” I really got inspired to study anything that I had to study to help somebody look better, feel better, perform better. And I got my sense of meaning and value from getting good results for people. And because I worked with medical professionals my entire career – to be honest with you, don’t take this the wrong way, but I was absolutely shocked at how they had no problem-solving skills and they would follow prescriptions even when it wasn’t working and they would do the same stuff over and over again. And I would see – for example, I’d studied ligaments, I’d studied extensively, and I would watch physical therapists taking people that had laxity in their knees or post-surgical ACL repairs and ultra-sounding them constantly. When heat causes ligaments to relax and I’m like, “Why are you doing that? That completely goes against the science of how ligaments work. Why would you want to make a loose ligament hot?” And so I found it disheartening because I didn’t see any correlation between the academic degrees that people had and the level of results they were getting. And you got to remember, I’ve worked for a lot of the best sports teams in the world, and top athletes in the world, and movie stars – and these people can afford the best doctors – and I would see the same silliness on professional sports teams and they would be all, you know, degree after degree but they’re making the same mistakes. So I found that if I went into the literature and looked specifically for the information that I was after regarding each client’s challenge, then I noticed – for example, I might be reading a book on the neurological relationships to lumbar spinal pathology but all of a sudden, they would mention something like people that have bladder infections can also have lumbar instability due to a viscero-somatic reflex. And I said, “Well, whose research is that?” And I would look at that and then they would say, “Oh, but this can also be related to inflammation in the gut or diet,” and so I’d look at that. And so I kept following the crumb trail and lo and behold, I got to the point – after about 15 years, I just realized – I got news for you boys and girls, every single part of the body can affect every other part of the body. And everything you think, everything you eat, the way you sleep, the way you live, it all manifests in stress and stress accumulates in the body. So if we don’t look at every component that’s essential, which is why I have the Four Doctors. What is happy for you and how are you using your mind to create what you want? How are you managing your exercise or movement of your body? How are you managing your diet and how are you managing your rest? If you don’t look at those four key categories, every one of them is so massive in its own right, and you could be very good at mobilizing disks. You could be a great acupuncturist, you could be a great medical doctor. But if you’re not looking into sleep, for example, that one thing alone can take the whole house of cards down. And so I studied everything that led me to realizing there was something else connected to it and you saw my library – I’ve probably got, you know, close to a million dollars with the books, DVDs, audios. At one point, I was subscribing to 36 medical journals and paying researchers to scan them and write reports for me and highlight key articles. And so I had a practice of getting up every day and scanning through abstracts to look for the articles that I needed to read and I spent many, many years doing that. And I basically created this catch-net and at the end of the day, I found it’s only now with biopsychosocial medicine and psychoneuroimmunology that medicine is even coming close to what paradoxically I found evidence for, right in their own literature. I mean, I spent countless hours in the UCSD medical library, taught my son how to do research for me and paid him two dollars an article so he could buy skateboards and toys – often go there on the weekend and pull a hundred articles for me. When I’m working on professional sports teams and showing them why so-and-so has this problem and it won’t go away, “So where’d you learn that?” I said, “I learned it right out of your journals, it’s all there.” If it doesn’t fit, sort of, the main stream line of consciousness and then a lot of the great articles don’t get published in the mainstream journals because they get pushed out by, you know, the establishment or people have their own fears and criticisms. So I would study whatever I could find from whoever I could find and to me, all that matters is: does it work in the clinic? And I would use my observational skills so that’s why I did it and that’s how I did it. And I found it so damn fascinating. I’ll never forget, for instance – Jack, I read Clinical Ecology by Lawrence Dickey MD, that book was published in ‘72. When he released that book, the AMA tried to take his medical license away. That is the first solid compilation of research and it looks into food allergy and food intolerance and it has hundreds and hundreds of – it’s like 700 pages of scientific studies showing that almost everything you see in a hospital can be caused by food. And when he tried to publish that book, they tried to take his medical license away and stop it from being published. It took me about a year to read that book, it’s so comprehensive and so big and I carried it everywhere I went, on airplanes. But I studied that thing inside out and backwards and it gave me a solid understanding of the immune system and how important food was. And I mean everything from vertigo, to irritable bowel syndrome, to heart palpitations, to tachycardia, bradycardia, depression, anxiety, you name it – it’s in there. And so, when you start realizing how the body and the mind really work and interact with each other and how much there is to be known but isn’t being taught, you really come to the realization that a lot is being missed in academic circles because of the old guard and because of the habit of doing things the way they’ve always been done and because of people – I have to say it. I used to work in that physical therapy clinic – we were an education center, an internship center for other physical therapy clinics all over the United States. And when the students would get there after four years of training, they had very little hands-on skills or working knowledge. They had a huge amount of academic stuff in their hands but they couldn’t actually apply the knowledge effectively. And so, what I found looking into it is the grand majority of the people that are professors in most of the schools, and almost all the branches of medicine are not clinicians, they don’t have much skill at actually working in the field. And so, we have poor educators teaching people that really have to go out in the battlefield and do the work. That’s what I noticed.

Jack: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. So much of what we deal with in the education arena is prescribed by regulators, yes. And it’s not the expert educators that are totally in charge of creating the curriculum. Well, your response was very impressive and I hope that any of our students listening to this will be inspired by it, I think, by what you’ve achieved. If our students can just take some aspect of our medicine that they’re interested in and follow that trail of crumbs and create something, that would be very rewarding to me as an educator. Can I ask one more?

Paul: I’ll just say – I want to interject real quick, Jack – I’ll just say, fortunately for them, they’re studying Chinese medicine or acupuncture. And it’s already based on a very well integrated system that really operates, as you know, on the principles of nature. So they’re already hitting a home run, yeah? Right off the bat. I mean, I’ve spent countless hours studying acupuncture books and journals and have had many of them in my courses. And a lot of the things that I found out on my own turned out to be kind of common knowledge in Oriental medical doctor training or acupuncture training. So they’ve already got the dragon right by the tail. I think it’s just a matter of sticking with it.

Jack: Right. So one more left-hand turn here, how did you get into doing the golf videos? Because Greg and I are waiting for your surfing series.

Paul: Well, you know, I’ve been a consultant and therapist to Laird Hamilton for –

Jack: Believe me, as soon as I saw there’s a letter and Gabby’s poster on your on your wall there, I was sold.

Greg: He looks like he needs a hip replacement, by the way. I just watched this movie Catching Every Wave, the other night – or Taking Every Wave.

Paul: Yeah, he can’t walk. He’s had, I think he did have a hip replacement recently.

Greg: Oh, hopefully he did.

Paul: Because in that moment, about a year ago, he had a hip replacement. Yeah and many of the top surfers in the world are trained by CHEK professionals. By the way, Jack, what was that last question you asked me?

Jack: Well, you have a series for golfing.

Paul: Oh, right, yes.

Jack: And I just wonder, you know, your general practice, I see, is very eclectic – working with all kinds of athletes – and yet, you have a specialty series on golf. And I was just curious, how you went that direction?

Paul: Okay, that’s a good question. You might be a bit surprised at the answer. What I did years ago is I surveyed all the sports to see where the money was and the highest levels of participation. So the two sports that have the most money in them are golf and tennis and they’re also in the top five for the highest level of participation. You got swimming, golf, tennis, I think bicycle riding. So my interest was – and I found because I had I’d worked with a number of professional golfers and I had a lot of golfers being in San Diego, you know, than anywhere. And I had a lot of injured golfers coming to see me. And what I realized is that the biggest, the most important thing in the CHEK system is – it’s a four-step system: one, what is the client’s dream; two, what’s out of balance; three, what choices do you need to bring yourself back into balance; four, where are the imbalances within the structure of the Four Doctors. And then we establish core values so the client knows how to guide themselves. But what I found with golfers is they would do anything to improve their golf game. I could get a golfer to get sugar out of their diet, they could even get to stop drinking alcohol if I could tell them a few strokes – save a few strokes or increase their drive by 20 yards – and I realized a lot of the golf people that were coming to me were executives in large corporations. And what I saw happening several times is when they went through training with me and they realized how important organic food was and they got rid of all the commercial body care products and cleaned their house up and they started putting their money into organic farms, I realized that if I was going to make an effort to go after any sport and get good results that could have a knock-on effect in society that golf was the number one place to go. I have very little interest in golf, to me it’s very boring. But from a business perspective and from my heart, as an interest in helping the world heal, you’ve got to go after change-makers. And so, I went after the golfers because I knew I could get into the large corporations and affect large numbers of people by helping golfers that had business ties.

Jack: Yeah, makes sense.

Paul: And we also have a tennis biomechanics program now, too.

Greg: Okay, nice. As you’re talking here, I’m thinking about the clients that you see, Paul. And is there some – without, of course, divulging any names – can you give us a sense of an encounter with the patient? I mean, you’ve talked about how you work with choices and, you know, looking for the imbalances and reorganizing how people dream or getting in touch with their dreams and imbalances in the Four Doctors. Is there somebody in mind that really had an impression on you, as a client – you call them clients, not patients?

Paul: I call them patients or clients.

Greg: Is there something profound that you could share with us about an interaction you had recently or throughout your, I mean, you’ve trained so many people.

Paul: Well, there’s been several since Kobe Bryant’s retired, I can tell you that, but I had to sign a secrecy contract when I worked with him. There was a time when Kobe Bryant was having a lot of pain and couldn’t jump off of his left leg and his strength coach, who’s like his private strengthening conditioning specialist, had studied some of my courses and seen me lecture. So he brought him to me and it took me about five minutes to find that he had an upper cervical subluxation. And I referred him to Dr. Kenny Sheppard and he continued to see Dr. Sheppard for his entire career, and still sees him. And so, the profundity there was – Kobe Bryant was absolutely shocked that I figured out what was wrong with him so quick and corrected it so quick because he’d seen a lot of doctors and therapists and nobody had a clue what to do, they kept trying all sorts of stuff with him. Laird Hamilton’s always been interesting to work with because he is a very powerful human being, not just an athlete, he’s spiritually deep, he’s morally grounded – meaning, he cares about the earth and what’s important and he has helped spread the news of my work around the world. Danny Way, this is a guy that came to me in very bad shape, couldn’t move his head or neck at all for six months, could not even ride a skateboard on a flat concrete parking lot. When he came to me – he was also a competitive surfer and motocross racer – and when he was out surfing one day, his head got driven into the bottom of the ocean and it flexed so hard, it tore the ligaments of the spine and pinched the spinal cord and caused a contusion and it turned him into a paraplegic within minutes. And then some of his buddies said, “Go to this guy,” they called him the surfing chiropractor. But unfortunately, the guy did not properly assess him, neurologically, and he manipulated his neck and that tore his spinal cord and caused – you know, it probably tore the arteries more than anything – but it swelled up so bad, it turned him into a quadriplegic for a couple of weeks. And so, he was very depressed and suicidal and when he found me, a bunch of surfer guys that I’d worked with said, “Well, we know a guy you gotta go see.” And so, it took me six months seeing him three to four times a week and he went back and won his first contest, made twenty-five thousand dollars, and has gone on to impact the lives of countless – thousands, not if not millions – of skaters and athletes all over the world. He’s been an X-Game winner many times, he set three Guinness Book of World Records, he jumped the Great Wall of China on a skateboard – which I’ll show a video of at the keynote address that you’re conferencing – he jumped out of a helicopter into a bowl and set the Guinness Book of World Record for the highest air jump. He was a profound person to work with. One of my clients was a professional rally car driver and didn’t realize he was going through a bit of a midlife crisis so I worked with him on the spiritual level and he came to the realization, after taking some of my courses, that he wanted to start a biodynamic farm. And he started and is now running the first biodynamic farm ever in Barbados, the only organic farm in Barbados. And he went from being, you know, a high-end big money rally racing driver to now devoting his life to bringing organic and biodynamic food to an entire country. I’ve had the joy of bringing three famous athletes out of medical retirement when they were told that they could not perform anymore. Gary Roberts, who is the captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Was working with Charles Poliquin for a serious neck injury and neurological complications and Charles Poliquin didn’t know what to do with them so they hired me as a consultant. I assessed him, wrote all his rehab programs, and had to go back with him to the medical evaluation because it’s almost unheard of that once an athlete’s medically retired that they come back. Because if the athlete can prove that this sports team was negligent in retiring them, they can sue them for millions of dollars. So I actually went there and every test the surgeon did on him, he passed. And the surgeon was mind-blown because his neck looks like hell, warmed over. But I rehabbed him and got him back and he made about 25 million more dollars. The most expensive rugby player in the world in 1995 was a guy named Ricky Stuart, who had an L5-S1 disc bulge and an L5 spondylolisthesis at the same time. Nobody knew what to do with them. They flew me in there, I rehabbed him, and he made multiple millions dollars more. Then, a famous horse racer from England, Richard Dunwoody, was forced into medical retirement. He had over 40 falls off of horses and races and a lot of trauma. And his left arm atrophied so bad and got so weak, he couldn’t shift gears in his race car. And that’s when he hit the wall and he snooped around and found out about me from some people at a famous club called The Harbor Club, where Naomi Campbell and Princess Diana and people like that used to train there. And so, he flew out to California and spent about a month with me and I completely rehabbed him and he went back and won the triple crown and wrote about me in his autobiography. So those are a few of many, those are good, just backing up again.

Jack: What did you say, Danny Way did a bowl dive, what?

Paul: No, he jumped out of a helicopter into a bowl, like a swimming pool.

Greg: With a skateboard.

Paul: With a skateboard. And he set the world record for the highest air – you know how when they fly outside the swimming pool? He went 35 feet up out of the pool, that’s almost four stories.

Jack: Okay. So how did he come down from the 35 feet parachute straight?

Greg: Yeah, gravity.

Paul: You want to know the truth? The first time he did that jump, he missed the landing and subluxed his shoulder, right out of the joint. And the doctor put the joint back in and injected him and he did the second one and landed it and set the record. But he did it with us, with a dislocated shoulder 20 minutes earlier. When he jumped the Great Wall of China, his first one, he missed the landing and fractured his ankle and tore the ligaments in his ankle. And the doctor that he brought with him taped him up and injected him and he landed the second jump, which is 110 feet in the air. The ramp he jumped – the Great Wall of China, which is massive, I mean, it’s mind-boggling to do that on a skateboard – he’s probably going like 75-80 miles an hour when he takes off the ramp.

Jack: You know, I heard Charles Poliquin in an interview talking about very highly specialized training for weight lifters, competitive weightlifters. So depending on whether, you know, you’re going for a world record in a dead lift or whatever, you fly to Yugoslavia or whatever to study with this one guy who knows that one move. And when I talk to you, it’s very holistic. What do you think? Is there room for both?

Paul: Yeah. Just so you know, Charles Poliquin died about four or five days ago.

Jack: Oh, really? Sorry to hear that.

Paul: Yeah. All they said is that he died suddenly. But he’d had five heart attacks already and I actually worked with him after his first open heart surgery, but that’s just a side note. Yes, there are a lot of experts out there. And you see, what happens is you get people coming from these Eastern Bloc countries and places where they’re raised in poverty conditions and they’re used to eating nails and glass. And so, but they often, but there’s also a huge amount of drug use in most of these sports. You know, I can’t divulge names but I have inside information. And I know a lot of the Russian athletes – for example, some of the people on the weightlifting team – they used to have to work for the mafia at night to make money to pay for their steroids until they could get on the olympic team. So there is, definitely. You know, the holistic approach is really all about sustainability. You can hop the system up, you can. You know, the whole concept of biohacking is tricking the system. There’s always a cost, you can’t trick the system for any length of time without a rebound effect. So a lot of these experts are very good at skill development. So you might have a guy who’s very good at teaching the clean and jerk or the snatch, for example, or the hammer throw. And so, they’re really working with techniques. Some of them are also kind of good psychologists, as well, they can really get athletes to push the barrier of human performance. But I’m a consultant that works for a lot of these athletes because they also get ruined by a lot of those guys who push them too far for what their body can handle – with regard to their reserves, with regard to adrenal health, nutrient reserves, with things like stress fractures from too much training concentrated into too short of a period of time and bone loss. So the answer is, yes. It’s really, you know, the sports world’s only now waking up. I mean, I’ve been beating this bandwagon. I started lecturing professionally in 1988. Some call me the godfather of functional exercise because I really developed the whole concept of core conditioning. People never even heard of it before me. I brought the Swiss ball in, I brought primal patterns in, I brought the integrated use of health appraisal questionnaires into high performance exercise. And so, these things are only now getting out there. Many CHEK professionals have made it to the very top of elite sports teams. In fact, I think you might have seen on my wall, one of my Level Four practitioners was the strength and conditioning coach for the top three rugby professional leagues’ winning teams. In the same year, there’s three professional rugby leagues and he trained the winning team for each of those leagues. On the same year, he had all three championship trophies in front of him and that’s never been done before.

Greg: Is it the All Blacks?

Paul: The All Blacks, the Auckland Blues, and I can’t remember the other team. And I’ve been a consultant to the All Blacks and many of the other teams over there, as well.

Greg: Well, they’re animals, those guys.

Paul: Well, there’s an old saying, “Rugby players eat, they’re dead, and it’s good.”

Greg: Yeah. So talking about the – I want you to expand on your holistic approach. And specifically, you’ve developed – I think it was in the early 2000s if, I’m not mistaken – the Totem.

Paul: Yeah. The Totem Pole I developed – God, I can’t remember, probably around 2003, I think – I had worked it out, it took me years of clinical observation and study.

Greg: So this is pretty profound and I’ve seen it. I don’t claim to know much about it so I’m really curious. And I know our listeners and know our students will really appreciate this, in terms of a holistic system and an approach. I’ll show you, for those watching, it looks like that – basically, ten symbols there. I’ll go through them but before I go through them, I’ll explain what it is.

Greg: We’ll put this on our website too, by the way, for our listeners. We’ll have a link to it.

Paul: If you need a picture of it, Penny can email you the picture. As I said earlier, I kept finding that – I’ll give you an example – I wrote a chapter called Posture and Craniofacial Pain for a Williams and Wilkins text called A Chiropractic Approach To Head Pain. I wrote it in 1991 and it’s the largest chapter in the book, it’s like 63 pages and it had 149 or more references and I found research. When I was doing my research for the chapter all the way back to 1925, where an orthopedic surgeon and an ophthalmologist had gotten together and they found that a lot of people end up with back pain as a symptom of eye dysfunction, visual dysfunction, or tracking disorders. And so they found that for every three patients with an orthopedic problem, in their lumbar spine, 1.5 of them had it because of an ocular dysfunction – this is all the way back in 1925, I think it was Lomax and Mills. If you’re really interested, I can send you a copy of that chapter, I think it’ll blow your mind.

Greg: That would be great.

Paul: Yeah, and then I studied. Due to an experience that I had with an athlete who was one of the best 10k runners in the world at the time, Tom Hunty, ran 2748 I think in the 10k – this is in the late 80s, early 90s – and he had chronic hamstring problems and I was trying to figure out what it was that was causing this hamstring to keep breaking down. And so while I was treating him, he went and saw a NUCCA chiropractor, a National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Association doctor, that specializes in the atlas-axis. And when he came back for his next session, I hadn’t even known that he’d done this, his body had changed so much. His hamstrings had changed so much, the tone, it was like I was working on a different body. And I said, “Tom, what in the hell have you done since I saw you last? Man, your whole body’s different,” and he said, “I went and saw this NUCCA chiropractor.” So immediately, I checked into what is a NUCCA chiropractor and I then went and booked an appointment with this guy. I’d had some chronic SI joint problem that wouldn’t go away because when I was young, I broke my left leg in five places in a cliff diving accident so my left leg’s actually five millimeters shorter than my right leg but I had never had it professionally measured. So when I went to see the NUCCA chiropractor, he showed me that I actually had five millimeters of bone loss which was causing pelvic torsion. And I had many concussions racing motocross, six major concussions racing motocross, I fought for years. And my atlas was four and a half degrees rotated and laterally translated and when he corrected that, it was like my body went through a major transition, muscles that hadn’t worked in years turned on. It literally felt like I’d been beaten up for a couple of days because I was exercising and it was turning everything on. And so I said, “Okay, that’s interesting, I’ve got to study the upper cervical spine.” So I got a hold of the National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Association, I found that they had a monograph which is their professional journal, I studied every single monograph that was ever produced.I studied books, research papers. And so, what I’m saying here is, I found that in the upper cervical spine was every nerve in your body passes through your atlas and if that thing’s out of place due to ligamentous connections from the denticulate ligaments, it can distort the cord tracks. And because the spinal thalamic tracts, the cord tracks that actually run the lumbar spine attach directly under the ligament. So strangely enough, people with upper cervical problems and neck problems often end up having a lumbar dysfunction as a compensation because the body will do anything to keep the eyes, ears, and teeth level with the horizon for survival reasons. So you get all these people coming with these torsion pelvises and lumbar pathologies but no one was looking at their neck. And then I found out, through my training with rocabado, that the jaw and the atlas are wired right together. And if the bite doesn’t fit well the bite will actually even overpower the jaw. The body will position the head however it has to, to make the teeth fit together. Because if you wear out your adult teeth in nature, you’re dead, you can’t eat. So one thing led to another. And so what I did was I asked this one question, knowing that the human body was designed by the selective pressures of nature, we had to survive in nature. I started looking at all the knowledge I’d gain and all the studies I looked into with this one question: what would be the most important system to have online to survive in nature well? Initially, the Totem Pole didn’t have the psyche at the top but it was breathing. And I studied the philosophy and neuroanatomy and physiology of respiration and lo and behold, the brain centers that control respiration totally control the entire motor system and can regulate the autonomic system and are linked into your neocortex and your whole brain at every level. So I realized, okay, the body is actually organized to protect the respiratory system and make sure no matter what happens, all systems work to support that. So then I thought, well, then I have to look and say what would be the next thing that we would have to have. To make a long story short, it has to be the job because if you can’t eat in nature you can’t survive in nature. Now, as the years advance, some of these systems can float meaning depending on the circumstances and differences in human anatomy from person to person. It’s not a rigid system. Basically, what it says is this is how the body’s organized to make you survive in nature and the nervous system is generally wired this way. So you can say it’s a general flow plan but – for instance, I added the psyche in 2013 because, you know, you can commit suicide and override respiration, you can stop the will to live and we all know psychosomatic illness is very real. And with psychoneuroimmunological research and stuff, I realize the psyche has to go at the top of that thing. And most of us have been in practice for a long time know that getting patients to do the right thing is more of a mental job than anything else. So to make a long story short, I realized to survive in nature, you had to breathe and you had to be able to eat. And that meant that your teeth had to work long enough to support you for your life. And the average person engages their teeth four thousand times a day, based on research. And I looked at Irvin M. Korr’s original studies that he did for the American Osteopathic Association called The Collected Papers of Irvin M. Korr and he did like 16 or 32-channel EMG studies and he showed that with a one millimeter shim, you could stick a one millimeter shim between a person’s molars or between any two teeth and their whole body would go crazy.

Greg: I saw that in that research that you sent over, that was incredibly impressive.

Paul: So, you’d see that the jaw is so calibrated, the trigeminal nerve wired right into your limbic system, and it also connects to your upper four cervical segments. So I saw Korr’s research and I saw that in my practice all the time, I saw many athletes for example that had occlusal problems and when I tested their jaw and identified that I could do what’s called a disclosion test and just have them hold a pencil between their teeth and muscle test them and when I discluded their jaw, they got stronger which should never happen because the jaw is part of the stabilizing mechanism for the flexor chain of the body. So when an athlete’s lifting a heavy weight or pushing or pulling, the jaw is critical for stabilizing the whole head, neck, jaw, shoulder complex, and basically the shoulder girdle hangs from the head, right? So if you study Feldenkrais or Alexander, you realize the body moves under the head, right? And then you have the control of the eyes and all sorts of stuff. So I found that when athlete’s teeth didn’t fit together, it shut their whole body down, it could cause all sorts of chronic neck problems, back problems, shoulder problems, meniscal tears, the list was long. So I started working with dentists that were doing calibrated mouthpieces, correcting orthodontics, biological dentists using a system called myotronics to enhance education for reprogramming. I studied Feldenkrais exercises for the jaw. Well, anyhow, the long story I’m making here is that the jaw is damn powerful. And so then I thought, well, what else do you have to have to survive in nature? Well, you have to have vision but if you lose your eyes and somebody feeds you and you can keep breathing, you can still survive so the vision had to go down below the jaw. And then I said, well, you got to have a vestibular system or your reflex pathways don’t work, you’ll just be an invalid. And you have to be able to hear because lots of things in nature will sneak up on you and eat you. And then your upper cervical spine has all these complex neurological connections. Then we have the viscera and then the next symbol with the one with the face frowning, that’s basically the psychoneuroimmunological system. That’s the effect of the mind on the body, that’s the limbic system, and that’s what I call a floating system. In my original Totem Pole, that limbic center could float anywhere in the system. And so the symbols there, you see a heart with a crack in it that stands for the saying, “You broke my heart.” The lightning bolt in the stomach is the same, “You make me sick to my stomach.” And the lightning bolt through the rectum is, “You’re a pain in the ass.” And I would hear my patients using these words all the time. And I looked at the studies in psychoneuroimmunology and psychology and said, they’re actually reinforcing and creating their own diseases. So I started working years ago to help people be conscious of what they were programming their body because the mind directs all physiological systems and there’s mountains of research to show that. Then in my studies of the – and you know, I did five cadaver dissections as well in my training over the years and studied the nervous system a lot and studied neurological mobilization and things like that – but you learn right away that the atlas connects to the spinal cord at the top but the phylum terminally attaches to the coccyx. So if someone has a trauma to the coccyx, it can just create adverse mechanical tension in the central nervous system. The body will do whatever it has to do to protect the central nervous system. So the second to the bottom system really represents the sacral complex and its connection through the nervous system to everything in the body. But the atlas, which then is connected to the jaw, which is wired into the vestibular system for a variety of different reasons, because the upper cervical spine, eyes, and vestibular system are heavily wired together in an oculocervical system. So I found that if you had problems with the sacrum or the coccyx that weren’t identified, they could be creating adverse mechanical tension in the nervous system which could create any symptom profile you can imagine, practically. And so the bottom – and here’s where the rubber hits the road, this is kind of the sad but true – the bottom system is the slave joints. So the slave joints are the hip, knee, ankle, foot, the shoulder, wrist, hand, and C3 to L5. That’s 98% of the territory seen by doctors and therapists of all types, every day, right? Question I have for you is how many people are assessing the systems above that actually use those to compensate for any functional pathology or trauma in any of those systems above?

Greg: Yeah. As you’re talking, I’m thinking, you know, you could assess somebody based on any of those systems. I’m sure you do. The way in is often through, you know, their chief complaint, right? So I’m coming to you for the knee pain but you’re saying that’s the slave joint. But really, the problem might be in my axis or in the way I’m thinking about, you know, whatever, right?

Paul: Absolutely. I did a demonstration for my students, I’ve done this many times, actually. I had a girl who we use, a bilateral scale system, because if your atlas is out of balance, if you’re normal in your alignment, your weight shift from left to right foot should never be greater than five pounds, based on extensive research. So if a 200-pound man is standing on two scales, there should be a 100 pounds on each scale or no more than a five pound difference. Or it indicates usually – a guy named Glenn Cripe did research and showed that 98% of the time, the atlas was rotated in the direction of the heavy leg. So if you’re five, say, seven or eight pounds heavy on your right leg, there’s a 98% chance your atlas is rotated in that direction because the atlas flies like an airplane. Long explanation, but it takes the body to that side to compensate to get the head to come back this way. Like when you’re driving a car around a corner real fast, it’s a trick to keep the eyes and ears and teeth level with the horizon because that’s the brain’s gyroscope system. Everything you do has to be based on horizontal teeth, horizontal ears, and horizontal eyes or your body has no spatial reference system. So I had this girl come to class one time because I used to bring cases in off the street that people would refer in to demonstrate the techniques to my students on live patients. And I looked at her and she had a very mild atlas subluxation based on my analysis. But she had like a 16 or 17 pound weight shift and she had ovarian cancer. And the cancer – the infected ovary, the metastatic one with the disease in it – was the right side and she was about, like I said, about 14 to 17 pounds heavy, right, and that’s a lot.

Greg: On the side of the cancer?

Paul: Yeah, she was heavy on that side. And I teach my students how to read the body. So the right half of the body relates to the male or the yang influences, the left half is female – I think you guys use probably a similar system. And so immediately, then I looked at the issue – the second chakra which is the developmental influences from age seven to fourteen. It’s about, you know, sex identity, sexuality, the use of your creative life-force energy, and it links into the kidney system and all that, as you know. So I started talking to her and what I said to her is to show my students how powerful the mind was. I had her staying on the scales the whole time and I took her through a kind of a dynamic meditation and said to her, you know, I tracked this down to relationship problems and challenges with men and developmental stress and sexual fears and judgments and religious programming. So I simply said to her, “I want you to imagine that God is unconditional love,” – I’m paraphrasing because it’s been years – “Imagine that God’s unconditional love, that we’re all an expression of the divine and know that everybody’s loving you the best that they can. Some of us were wounded as children and we’re broken as adults and we don’t know how to meet our needs. So a lot of the pain you’ve been having in relationships comes from people that are in pain themselves. You can visualize those people as doing the best they can to love you with the awareness and the skills that they were given as children.” Well, anyhow, as I’m taking her through this, my students are watching the scales and she completely normalized. And I did this two or three times in front of them and I said, “Okay, now go back to thinking about your husband the way you were thinking about him when you walked into the room.” And boom, the scale would shift right in front of your eyes. And I said, “Let’s do that meditation again.” And I would take her right back to zero. And so I showed my students that you can change your mind and literally, objectively, change your body almost in real time. I think I answered your question. But anyhow, so what I’m showing you is that if we don’t assess these hierarchy or hierarchical control systems, we don’t know when we’re treating a symptom. And then I’ve had, you know, I’ve lectured medical conferences all over the world so I’ve had every debate you can imagine and someone will say, “Well, how could you say that’s true? What if someone falls off of a bicycle? How does that have anything to do with those totem pole functions?” I said, “Well, look, all you’ve got to do is assess someone’s upper cervical spine, their eyes, or their vestibular system and you’ll find out right away.” When it’s dawn or dusk and there’s not enough light, your eyes provide 80 percent of your proprioceptive inflow, your upper cervical provides about 70 percent of what’s coming from the body. So 70 percent of your intraceptive inputs come from the upper cervical spine and 80 percent of the information about where you’re at in space is coming through the eyes, approximately. I said, “So if you’ve got an athlete who has a right subluxation, right rotated atlas, and it’s only one or two degrees. When you have that athlete close their eyes and ask them to march on the spot, they will go in circles and they don’t even know they’re doing it.” I said, “If that athlete’s driving, riding his bicycle and reaches down to grab his water bottle, he’ll drive his bicycle right into a parked car.” I’ve seen countless numbers of cases if a person’s driving their car and they look down at the radio and go to adjust it and they have a right rotated atlas, they’ll drive their car in the direction of the atlas subluxation. I said, “So you have no idea how many of these injuries are actually coming from control system dysfunction.” Not to mention the fact, I’ve seen people as high as 56 pounds heavy on one leg, okay, consider this – the average athlete takes 750 foot strikes per mile when they’re running. So if you’re 10 pounds heavy, you will put 7500 pounds worth of extra work through your right leg in one mile. And I used to work with athletes like Ron Tabb and many others that were top marathon runners in the world that were running 120, 100, and 350 miles a week that had these problems and running around to doctors constantly with all sorts of hamstring problems, knee problems, achilles tendon problems, plantar fascia problems. And so, when you go up and say – and I found piles of people with ocular dysfunctions with nasal septum deviations, with teeth problems, undiagnosed cracks in the teeth, abscesses in the teeth, malocclusion, dental hardware that didn’t fit, upper cervical problems – I mean, these things are as common as white bread out there. But everyone keeps treating the symptoms, right? And this is really how I became famous, worldwide, as I would go work for these professional athletes and sports teams and I’d figure out what was going on with these people, show them exactly what it was, straighten them out. In fact – I’ll tell you a funny story – when I got hired by the Canberra Raiders rugby team which is a famous rugby team, you know, it’d be kind of like getting hired by the –

Greg: Not the Chargers?

Paul: Well, maybe, like the Dallas, the 49ers, or the San Francisco 49ers, or the Oakland Raiders, or one of the big teams, right? In Australia, would be the same equivalent. And when I flew there – and they’re sponsored by and part of a gambling casino – so I went to this big gambling casino where all their training facilities were, at this gambling casino and I had to wait for the head coach Mal Meninga, who’s one of the most famous rugby players in the world, to come meet me in the waiting area. And they had pictures of all the teams from every year and there was the picture of the team. Now, the reason they hired me in an emergency is because their top nine players were all injured and they didn’t know how they were going to perform and be able to even compete in the next season because they had nothing but second and third string players at best. Their top nine players were all injured, I didn’t know who they were. I looked at the team photo and after seeing thousands of atlas subluxations, I know exactly what they look like. I wrote down the numbers on the jerseys of every player in the team photo from last year with an atlas subluxation. And when I met Mel Meninga, I said, “Mel, nice to meet you,” I said, “I have a question for you,” I said, “on this piece of paper, I’ve written the jersey numbers of the athletes that I suspect are the ones you’ve called me to come see.” And he looked at the paper and he almost, he said, “How in the hell did you know that?” He said, “These are the exact athletes that I’ve got you here to see,” he said “did someone tell you?” I said, “No, I’ll show you.” So I took him out, showed him exactly how to identify it. I showed him the techniques I teach my students. You can see it in the photo if you know what you’re looking for. And he said, “That’s friggin’ amazing, but that’s exactly who you’re here to see.”

Greg: That’s pretty awesome, yeah. Well, I think we’ve come down the road a pretty fair bit. I could sit here all day, I’m sure you could too. It sounds like you could and do talk forever about and you’re so passionate about what you do.

Paul: Hey, this is good, man, this is life.

Greg: Yeah. I’m just super excited to spend some time with you over the course of the Symposium those two days, it’s going to be very exciting. Again, Paul’s our keynote speaker at the Pacific Symposium, he’s going to be there on October 22nd/23rd, I believe it’s 23rd/24th. I’m going to get you the date.

Paul: I think my workshop, the My Life Alchemy workshop, which I’m very excited about.

Greg: 23rd, 24th.

Jack: Yeah. Paul will be doing the two-day workshop – the 23rd, 24th – and the keynote will be on the 26th.

Greg: Yeah. Definitely not to be missed for those of us who are in town or flying into town for the Symposium. Come on in early, get there and be a part of this very incredible person, healer. Just amazing, has been amazing spending some time with you. I really appreciate the education you’ve given us today, Paul.

Paul: Hey, my pleasure. And I was hoping we’d get time to talk about my Alchemy System. I realized we’ve been at it for a while but I wanted to answer one question for you. You noticed I use a four element system and then we didn’t get to that. So, what I did is I studied a number of systems using elements out there from polarity therapy to various other systems. And it turns out that the correlate in most of the people that show correlation says that metal and Chinese medicine correlates to the air system in the Aristotelian system, and wood correlates to ether in a five-element system which correlates to space. So when we’re using the wood element in my system, it would be the ether which in alchemy, is called quintessence which has other meanings as well. But if you look at consciousness, consciousness according to Itzhak Bentav’s research – it’s like, Bentav’s a genius who was the first one to, he developed what we know of as the pacemaker today, he actually invented that – he wrote the book Stalking The Wild Pendulum which is one of my all-time top recommended books for my students to understand the spiritual realms written by a scientist. And he was the first guy to do scientific research on how meditation affected human beings physiologically. But Bentav showed that consciousness has three correlates: space, time, and movement. So in my Alchemy System, I look at the ether element which would be the correlate of wood. But I look at it always knowing that consciousness is involved in every problem that you have with the body whether it be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. And then when you look at from an elemental model, movement correlates to the fire element in my system – even in Chinese medicine, there’s no fire, there’s no movement, right? And time is actually, it’s also something that correlates to movement, but it correlates to all the elements because all of those elements interact in nature. So the system that I use is extremely dynamic. It’s not a direct transfer to Chinese medicine but everything that you can tell me about in Chinese medicine, I can show you how it fits into this model. It’s just that my model actually deals with many other factors from which quadrants such as the inner realm of the individual, the inner realm of a group of people or a family, the outer world of the external environment, and then the physical body of the individual. It deals with archetypes, it deals with the person’s myth, their counter myth, it deals with Jung’s four functions of consciousness, it deals with values, it deals with choices, it deals with seasonal cycles, it deals with physiological cycles, hormonal cycles, organs, glands, psychological processes, and it also uses the functions of alchemy, the actual functions designed by the alchemist that both had physical correlates and psychological correlates. So I can actually use this system to almost always fairly efficiently get right to actually what’s really causing a person’s problem. So it’s kind of the functional equivalent of the Totem Pole but it deals with how we’re interacting with the elements and interacting in relationships and interacting with the environment.

Jack: So, Paul, I think anybody listening to this podcast is going to probably have experienced it a little bit like drinking from a fire hose. But I want to encourage any of our students and in fact, any of our listeners to take any aspect of what you’ve discussed today and use you as a model and to follow those breadcrumbs and to use it, to apply to their practice or to write a book or an article or do some research. And I wanted to point out, to those who are interested, in coming to the workshop at the Symposium that you will be doing some practice, some case studies. You’ll not only emphasize the knowledge but have them learn it and be able to apply it. So it’ll be, it won’t be quite as much of a fire hose during those two days.

Paul: Well, it will be a fire hose but I actually did what I always do, Jack, and that’s the surprise that I will let out of the bag. Right now, I take each student through the model as though you’re their own patient. So that’s why the model to you, the therapist, the doctor, the professional – because I tell my students all the time, you can’t give what you don’t have. And if you’re going to apply a model to somebody else, you better apply it to yourself first or you’ll never know if it works or not. Each person in the class will go through the alchemical process I developed. And each step of the way say, now, what do you see in your patients when you look at them this way? And what are the names of three patients that might have this problem going on right now, based on what you’ve just learned? So I take them step by step through the model and the elemental part will be easy for the acupuncturists because they have enough connection to that. But when it gets into the deeper systems, and the control systems, and the psyche, that’s when it gets very interesting. That’s when the dragon starts breathing, baby.

Greg: I’m expecting some transformation for yourself.

Paul: Yeah and you guys are live streaming it, right? So a lot of people can come without having to get on an airplane.

Jack: There you go, exactly, the wonders of the modern era.

Paul: Yeah, I’m excited. You know, of all the things I’ve created in my life, it’s as though it took me about 28 years of study and clinical practice and meditation to bring these pieces together. And it came to me actually in a spiritual experience. I know we’re running short on time but I’ll give you a very quick explanation here. Many years ago, my students started coming to me going, “Paul, man, you know I’ve been studying with you for years and I know so much stuff now but I am overwhelmed. I don’t know how to integrate all this stuff. I can assess people for 10 hours straight. I need a way to figure out how do I prioritize all this stuff.” So I started working with my soul and meditating and figuring out how could I systematize all this stuff. And I won’t go through all those steps but it took quite a while. So I started building these systems and then I was doing a shamanic meditation and one thing you guys didn’t mention by the way is I am a medicine man and spirit guide through the Native American Council and I’ve got a federal license to use plant medicines or anything natural. So I’ve done a lot of, shall we say, native healing ceremonies with people as well. So that’s another branch of my skill-set. But I was in a shamanic journey process that was being led by Alex Grey, the famous artist. And we were brought, you know, as part of the journey, was to make contact with up to four of your guides. And while I was doing this journey, it was on my mind to try to figure out the best way to synthesize my teachings. And so in the journey, the first guide that showed up was Carl Jung and he handed me a scroll and when I opened the scroll, it had the outer ring which I had already developed for my HLC 2 students.

Greg: That’s the four elements?

Paul: That’s the four elements. Sorry, no, Rudolph Steiner showed up first, he gave me the outer ring. And then Carl Jung showed up next with a scroll, it had the inner systems in it that all come right out of depth psychology and Jung’s research, and Joseph Campbell, and many of those people. And then they both told me, “Merge the two together and you will now know how to integrate your life’s work.”

Greg: This is the Holistic Life Coaching.

Paul: This is all of my teachings, every bit of it integrated into one piece of paper, there it is. And that’s, I’m going to give you guys a two day rock and roll expose of my entire career’s work and what it synthesized in two days.

Greg: Well, I’m excited about that, for sure. And I can’t wait to meet you in person. Thank you for joining us today, you’re in Escondido, I think?

Paul: Yeah, the institute itself is in Carlsbad, right where the Carlsbad motocross track used to be, right near the airport. And my office is on top of a mountain, one side of my office’s Valley Center and the other side is Escondido.

Greg: Got it. So, north part of San Diego. I live up in this area but, obviously, I’m in PCOM down by the 163 and 8 here. And Jack is calling in from Napa, so thank you technology for connecting us.

Paul: Yeah what a great thing. And Jack, what a pleasure to see you today, thanks for being here and asking questions. And Greg, lovely to meet you and pleasure to meet you. Thank you, guys, for your interest in my work. I feel honored to be able to share with all your students and to help people have a different perspective, that would be totally congruent with what they’re already doing.

Jack: Well, we’re honored and grateful for your time and your contribution to our institution. So, thanks a lot, Paul.

Greg: Yep, high five!

Paul: Yeah, baby!

Greg: Take it easy, see you soon.