Ideas in the Wild: How Former Navy SEAL Christopher Maher is Teaching People’s Bodies to Heal Themselves
Unresolved physical, spiritual, mental and emotional stress, tension, and structural distortion rob people of their ability to do what they truly love. The majority of the available tools designed to help you manage your complex stressors are a distraction from the underlying road blocks that keep your body from healing itself. There’s a much better way to rebalance and restore your health so you can resume doing all the things that bring you joy, peace and happiness.
The intense complex stressors Christopher Maher experienced as a child and as a Navy SEAL inspired him to embody, study and develop powerful systems that create instantaneous, permanent change at a conscious, unconscious and subconscious level. He introduces his remarkable wellness program in Free for Life: A Navy SEAL’s Path to Inner Freedom and Outer Peace. Christopher’s remarkable personal journey led him to this powerful alternative to standardized solutions. I recently caught up with Christopher to learn about his journey to writing this book, his favorite idea from it, and how applying that idea to his life changed everything.
What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
The moment that I decided to write the book was before I knew this information. One day in fifth grade, as I was walking back from our local rec hall, I saw my shadow. Then I heard my shadow speak to me. It said, “You’re going to live a mystical life.” And I thought, “Mystical, what does that mean?” Turns out, I ended up living a very mystical life. I knew in my unconscious from a young age that something very profound was going to happen for me. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I knew it was going to be beyond anything I could conceive at that moment.
In 2001, I remember thinking as I was doing my investigation on how my body and my energy was opening, that it was going to be important for me to put a book together. Yet I knew that I had to complete the journey first. So I put in seven years working on myself, five to six hours a day. Then I took seven years off and I didn’t do any work on myself because I needed to know: did the work I put in actually work? As soon as I knew that the work I did had worked, then it was time. For 14 years, I had collected the data that I needed and now it was only a matter of meeting the right person and being in the right moment — that’s the way things work for me.
I was at a media entertainment and technology conference when I met Zach Obront and learned about the Scribe model for writing books. The way Zach broke it all down, it spoke to me and I thought, “This is the guy.” I actually finished the book 18 months before I released it. I was waiting for the right moment when the universe had caught up. I needed to know the earth was ready for this. And it is — the cumulative stress load on the average human being is higher than it’s ever been. Once you get locked into inappropriate stress state, you continue to separate more from your authentic self and rely on fear based survival strategies. It distorts your filters and makes you perceive threats that aren’t there. My book aims to help people with that.
What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?
Whatever is in your atmospheres — in your mind and in your body — is in your life.
Prime example, turn on any TV show about hoarding. If you want to see how corrupted that person’s brain bank account is, look at how they live in their atmosphere. It’s full of clutter. What’s it telling you? That their mind and their nervous system is full of clutter.
What is in your body is in your life. Wherever you have pain, discomfort, stiffness, or excessive tightness, you’ve got the same thing going on in your life. If you remove it and take out the tension, stress, and distortion, guess what happens? Your life changes immediately relative to the amount of tension, stress, and distortion that you resolved.
For most people, every year, every month, every week, every day — they add a little bit more. It comes in at such small increments that it’s unnoticeable. When I was in Navy SEAL training, I had no idea that every day I was getting tighter, more dense, and was closing in emotionally.
Why? Because it happened a little bit at a time. Before long, I was locked into an inappropriate stress state and I was looking for environments, people, and situations that mirrored the level of stress, tension, and distortion that I was locked into. I had to put heartfelt action into pulling this tension, stress, and distortion out of my body. When I did, my inner core my vibration changed. At that point, everything that was no longer a vibrational match, it fell away effortlessly.
All the things that were in alignment with my new state of being, my new core vibration, came to me through ease and grace. When you transform the tension, stress, and distortion in your body, your life will change. You will shift from struggle and strife into ease and grace
What’s a story of how you’ve applied this lesson in your own life? What has this lesson done for you?
When I was younger, I was stuffing tension, stress, and distortion in my body at a very rapid rate. It was coming in and I had no idea that it was sticking to me like Velcro. I had one speed and it was 110%. It wasn’t 100, or 95, or 90. As I began the process of removing the tension, stress, and distortion from my body, I applied this very simple concept: give no more or no less than what the moment is asking for. Suddenly, I had abundant amounts of energy. I could pick and choose where I wanted to spend my time and my energy. I could choose who wanted to spend it with and how I wanted to spend it. This change gave me access to the full spectrum of experience. When you’re going at 110% all the time, everything is a competition. Even if I’m tying my shoes next to someone, I want to tie them faster than that person.
Living like that kept me locked into an inappropriate stress state. What I realized is that sometimes 25% is the 110%. Sometimes it’s 50 or 90, and sometimes it is 110. The key is that I have the flexibility to meet the moment with no more or no less than what is asking for.
To learn more about finding peace and freedom in your life, you can find Free for Life: A Navy SEAL’s Path to Inner Freedom and Outer Peace on Amazon.
