One of the best ways of growing holistically is to integrate yoga into your regular routines. The yoga form that Dr. W uses is 4 Element Yoga. What makes yoga so useful is that it connects your mind to your body – and for that matter, to your higher spiritual self.
Dr. W likes to say that yoga helps the practitioner to be more “somatically alive”, to feel their body in ever more positive ways. The 4 Element Yoga he devised over 35 years one even more of this somatic, full body awareness capability.
The following is taken from Dr. Walsdorf’s book, "The Human Body as Sacred Architecture: Understand, Empower & Heal the Body by Discovering its Holistic Nature”.
With your free membership to Growing Holistically you can begin your four element somatic adventure with the videos linked from the bottom of this page.
4 Element Yoga – Feeling Life’s Energies
What if there was a way of exercising (and moving) that helped you “translate” the power of each of those four principles into you? And being able to somatically feel it, too? A way of recharging weak areas with a health-building vitality. That’s what 4 Element Yoga will help you to do. It’s called 4 Element Yoga because like yoga, it incorporates three important things:
- Focused Breathing
- Slow, Mindful Movements
- Developing a Spiritual Sensibility
Focused Breathing
There is a power to one’s breathing that is often not appreciated. Many people breathe shallow and relatively fast. Yoga pushes you to breathe in a deep, focused way. Slow, deep breathing will change your blood chemistry, even your consciousness. When you do 4 Element Yoga, it is important to breathe in a focused way, in synch with the slow movements you will generally be doing.
Slow Mindful Movements
If you have ever watched someone do yoga or tai chi you will notice their movements are often done slowly. When movements are done slowly, they enable deeper health-building, body- integrating systems to be turned on. Particularly the body’s deep level of “proprioceptive nerves” which do much to organize the muscles of your body. Further, when you do something slowly, you can mentally engage your body, and feel what you are doing. This is an important component of 4 Element Yoga.
Developing a Spiritual Sensibility
There is a spiritual sensibility – a consciousness to yoga – that pushes each practitioner to feel things on a deeper and “more spiritual level”. This spiritual sensibility goes beyond the religious beliefs we might or might not have. This spiritual sensibility often comes as we sense a cosmic unity. Yoga helps the practitioner feel a correlation between their yoga movements and that deeper spiritual unity reality.
4 Element Yoga goes further. It defines, and helps you feel the connection that specific body motions have with a set of spiritual principles, human values, and a set of important physiological (body-empowering) processes occurring in our bodies.
Read more about 4 Element Yoga - click here
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