What unifies these organs and body issues is their intersection with our intakes of food. Food is what all creatures must have to survive. In both yoga and acupuncture, these abdominal organs are seen to be part of “the solar plexus center”.
In a resonant way, in four element thinking the abdominal organs embody and empower our lower body’s Air center. As such, in Eastern Medicine it noted to be greatly responsible for generating of what is called “chi” in. The generation of chi is built upon channeling the cyclic energies of life into oneself in an upwardly moving way. Upwards is the direction that Nature tells us Air as a principle is eager to move.
This Air Principle with its chi’s vigor pushes life to evolve. Even oxygen – a key molecule that the air of Nature provides was at first something that challenged life. As O2, it rampantly “oxidized”, or combined with much of what it might come in contact with. Eventually life found ways to harness its power.
We see this as life evolved beyond the glycolysis that makes energy for primitive bacteria and yeast – which creates alcohol and the yeast ferments that allow bread to rise.
The Air Principle uses oxygen in the electron transfer chain that follows the Kreb, or citric acid, cycle. With oxygen at the end of a biochemical chain occurring in the mitochondria of our cells, there would be a boosting of life energy. More than 15 times as much “ATP energy currency” is produced per gram of sugar, than when life is more primitively stuck in the glycolysis of the anaerobic state.
There are other cycle and linear chain combos found in the liver as it metabolizes fats and sugars as well as toxins. The pancreas has its own cyclic and linear chains as it releases insulin and glucagon in sequential ways to maintain your blood sugar. The GI tract is a chain that has many cycles that create that movement down through that chain, or tract.
Here’s the elemental, holistic point: empowerment requires both cyclic and linear actions. Stay directed toward your aspirations; still at the same time take notice and appreciate the elemental components that frame the cycles you’re caught within. All of those components can be revved up when they are identified as parts of food’s nutritional spectrum.
And too, in the manner by which muscle-generated motions channel these forces into different regions of our body. This building of chi in local areas – sick areas if you will – is at the core of 4 Element Yoga; and so we move to “Motions”.