Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with Casey Lake.

Casey Lake is a martial arts instructor, spiritual guide, and trainer in practices stemming from a background in transpersonal hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming. With over a decade’s experience in Chinese, Japanese, and Russian martial arts and healing systems, he is an accomplished martial artist and coach, holding ranks and certificates in over 5 styles of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian Martial Arts and holding over 15 black belt ranks and titles. He has taught, operated, and owned martial schools since he was 21 years old and has trained with the masters. He has also received extensive training in Eastern and Western esoteric schools of philosophical and mystical development. He is fascinated with the mind’s ability to generate higher levels of human experience, self-mastery, and enhanced mental programming through core, integrated spiritual wisdom teachings, meditation, martial arts, and hypnosis and trance consciousness.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me ...

• "spirituality is such an intimate thing. We can go to the temples and meditate with everyone, but our own personal ways are of most importance.  Like what Bruce Lee said, a true teacher, you know, can only point you in the right direction and not try to suppress you with his own belief systems and opinions about what he thinks things are."
• One of Casey's goals is "helping people guide themselves to their own right path through training, through martial arts, through practice, through discipline, through exploring their limitations so they can really find what's true for themselves and make the right choices from a strong spirit -- what's truly aligned with people's highest values, and to become aware of those values, and just become aware of wherever your thoughts and who you are is the highest practice to truly know yourself, you know? So we can be compassionate and speak very clearly to other people, so that we're not keep going with some, some program that they're holding onto and being unconscious, but bringing more awareness of choice."
• In times of need and crisis, Casey reassures us that "You always know what you need to know when you need to know it...really taps you into the present moment."  "that's been the highest excitement for me in martial arts. It really taps you into the present moment, and shows you that fear and tension limit your perception to move and operate. But if you can expand your scope and expand your consciousness, to receive, and to allow things to be what they need to be, you'll always be in the right place, at the right time."
• "All martial arts kind of follow this alchemy of ice to water to steam. So ice is like the building blocks where you have to focus on one letter at a time, but then the water starts to get more fluid and you are able to adapt and be able to function more and be more loose, and to flow more. But then the lightest power, the greatest masters become so light, like steam. Where there's no tension and able to move freely and lightly at any place at will, while being fully mastered in understanding density of how to become thick like ice, but become flowing like water and the lightest steam when you need to be."
• "we're all hypnotizing ourselves into a different story every day. So just like the old classic warrior quotes about "the great master others, but the masters master themselves," hypnotherapy gave me a greater pathway into the internal mind, to have a razor-sharp focus about every single word that we say, and how easily the human mind is influenced, and how powerful the mind is to resist positive energy through psychosclerosis, the hardening of the attitude. So I saw a lot of this in martial arts, a lot of people with hardened attitudes, but with high skills. So there were people really on the train of mastering themselves in their physical power. But there's a lot of people that were still very angry. So eventually in the martial arts path, it led me to the greater healing path to see what really people needed."
• "To me, the enemy of life is cynicism and ignorance and arrogance. And that all comes into a jaded nature, which makes life very dense. And I call that psychosclerosis."
• "We are all a composite being of one consciousness at different levels like a Russian doll."
• "Our body is infinite bliss...most people live fending off disease...understand that our body is bliss that 'I am health'."
• Time in nature taught Casey "to mature as a greater tree...with greater wisdom, deeper roots, to share out to the rest of the forest."
• "Everyone has a true divine nature and it is time to respect that."
• "There is only one wisdom that brings everything together: the science of obvious."
• "Your state of being never lies."