Every Human’s Gift A Body Dedicated to Your Life

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I am a body of knowledge, both Divine and human, that can heal itself beyond the holding patterns of its wounds. And I want to offer that gift of healing to you.

I am an antenna for the Divine, and I matter beyond what is yet fully understood.

The mind’s narcissistic compulsion, however, runs deep in my veins.

I understand the silent scream that lives inside you. I feel the isolation of having no protector. I anguish, along with you, to feel relevant in love, limits, and life.

It takes pain and suffering for the mind to stop asking more from me and to listen, and even then it can judge my limitations as weak or disruptive instead of insightful and intelligent. The mind’s need-to-know nature is more like a need-to-be-relevant chase that steamrolls over my basic need—your basic need—to belong and be loved.

There are many reasons I feel irrelevant. I mean, the mind has led me toward artificial light, artificial food, even artificial friends so it can feel in the know and in control. All of this artificial nourishment does nothing for me but make me feel starved, unimportant, and inferior to the mind’s clever antics.

The greatest reason I feel insignificant, the most personal “dis,” is the mind’s constant message to “Get over it!” Whatever it is is less important than the mind’s chase. The implication is that my feelings don’t matter; I, the container of those emotions, don’t matter. As if mind over matter was smarter than the matter of fact!

Fact is, my intelligence is in my structure, my ability to channel what is Divine and true, as well as express unresolved emotional tension. As a physical energy channel, I bring presence and connection into a human experience, felt as a peaceful knowing or guided sight. Through this physical alignment with source energy, I can witness emotions from an expanded state, rather than being consumed by them.

It is time to gain agency of me––your body’s intelligence––and be conscious of the energy download that radiates through me, aligning you with the life you want.

It is time to value me, listen to my cries and messages, and respect what I am experiencing in real time!

It is time to expand into your hopes and dreams from the inside out.

You, as a human being, are an antenna to the Divine––a spiritual-physical being.

My brand-new book––The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind––is a love letter to your body. Its practical guidance will change the way you experience your physicality. You will begin to feel for it, rather than think for it, and to gain greater awareness of the Universal energy source empowering it.

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

Crafting Your Workouts and the Life You Want: Part 3 of The Art of Strength – The Design Phase

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The BodyLogos Philosophy: Now In Book/Video Form!

Whether you’re a visual, aural or verbal learner, you’ll discover how to

release tension and build strength.

Order your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a pioneering book/3D video learning system today!

 

Crafting Your Workouts and the Life You Want:

Part 3 of The Art of Strength – The Design Phase


Typically, your doctor is the one to ask you, “Where does it hurt?” But I believe we should ask ourselves this same question, and take time scanning our body for a detailed answer. Because once we can pinpoint where it does, in fact, hurt—be it in our legs or back, heart, or soul—we can begin to soothe the suffering and find our strength again.

Your life doesn’t have to be characterized by your pain. Your blocks and tensions, insecurities and weaknesses don’t define you, and it’s possible to move through or clear away these obstacles that stand in the way of you freely connecting with your aspirations.

The final pages of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind give you the permission and encouragement to take time for the small things in a world that tells us there isn’t any to spare unless it’s for the big picture. These chapters are a message from me that you deserve to take the time to notice how you stand on your feet, where your shoulder blades rest, and if your core muscles give you the support you need. After all, it is these subtleties that generate the tension in your body, lead to poor posture, and ultimately place you in a life you may not wholly desire.

To design your life is to listen to your body’s wisdom and treat it with compassion; doing so effectively undermines the message that pain is acceptable. It gives you the chance to say goodbye to tension and hello to ease, peace, and, yes, strength.

 

What Does All This Have to Do With Workouts?!

Part 3 shows you how to holistically appraise the condition of your strength. In other words, to discern “where it hurts.” Are you in physical pain? Feeling emotionally drained? Experiencing chaos in your day-to-day routine, or just generally feeling disconnected from your life? This appraisal gets at the root of your holding patterns, or the areas in which you aren’t standing in your strength.

No matter where your tension is rooted, these expressions of misalignment create a consistent and recognizable pattern. By tracking this pattern’s nature, you can establish a general framework for crafting your ideal mind-body strength-training workout.

Part 3 of The Art of Strength helps you design workouts suited to your specific condition, so that you can design the life of your dreams. Find out:

  • The BodyLogos blueprint for workout success in both your psyche and muscular worlds.
  • If your pattern is hyper, hypo, or hyper/hypo, and learn how to manage your energy in your workouts to create alignment and balance.
  • What specific workout approaches and exercises to use to target your specific condition and goals—to correct physical complaints like pain and numbness or emotional imbalances, to then realign with your spirit.
  • Which meditations to use in your workouts and in your life to diffuse reactivity and establish intention, plus instructions for meditating on the active and counter-active pathways of movement.

 

When you work out, each exercise is a unifying tool for your mind, body, and spirit. According to Tao values, the backbone of the BodyLogos philosophy, mind and body are equal but not the same. Where the body’s intelligence is in feeling and expressing emotion, the mind’s intelligence is in collecting information and thinking. From a place of harmony between mind and body, you can access the spirit’s supreme intelligence, and positive change is possible.

Resolving inner conflict—clearing holding patterns—avails you to a meaningful purpose that leads to true happiness; it connects you to your life’s path. Releasing the tension that keeps your body, mind, and spirit separated is what allows you to permanently forgo a reactive pattern with ease.

I hope these summaries have you intrigued about BodyLogos and leave you ready to embark on the BodyLogos practice to influence your posture, workouts, and life. Unlike other strength-training programs, BodyLogos asks you to approach the experience of strength from your deepest vulnerability and desires, because to stand in your strength is to have the courage to stand in your frailty. As I hope you can now see, strength truly is an art, and it is my wish that you’ll allow me to help you paint a new, more powerful portrait of yourself.

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

Strength You Can Stand In

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You workout religiously. You are totally committed to becoming strong!

One day your trainer, or gym mate, notices that you’re getting stronger. With enthusiasm they tell you, so you know that your hard work isn’t in vein. In that moment of celebration, I regularly witness the encouragement combatted with a “not strong enough” retort.

When nudged a bit further, you might feel the fear that acknowledging success will jinx further success. If you feel you’ve arrived, you’re afraid you’ll stop working hard at “it” and lose “it.”

While this may be a very real feeling, it’s a fear-based reaction, and not the whole truth.

What does stepping into your “it”—your strength—actually mean: looking a certain way, feeling unwavering confidence, knowing what you want in life and how to get it? Owning your strength means stepping into a definition of strength that asks you to stretch every aspect of yourself: body, mind and spirit.

Conscious engagement with your strength is necessary to define it. Strength training puts you face to face with everything you resist and on top of that challenges you in the mind-body areas in which you are weakest.

Is strength just the ability to press a loaded barbell, or does it include celebrating the doing? Does strength mean finishing in the top ten of a marathon, or does it include congratulating your opponents? Is strength measured by your commitment to training or your commitment to wellbeing?

Your experience with resistance––dumbbells, barbells, free weights, pulleys or emotions, reactions, beliefs––will be what helps you define the 3-dimensionality of strength.

Use your physical training to holistically define your strength’s end goal or you will forever be chasing “it.”

The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, my book/3D-video learning system guides you toward finding your strength within and without.

BODYLOGOS AT WORK FOR YOU: Getting Clear on What You Need in your Workplace

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BODYLOGOS = The Body’s Divine Wisdom

It is a Practice and a Lifestyle outlined in The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind

BODYLOGOS AT WORK FOR YOU:

Getting Clear on What You Need in your Workplace

by Donia Elizabeth Allen ~ BodyLogos Instructor

Several years ago an exceptional professional opportunity came my way through a friend. The position was in a new field and industry, and I was lucky to get it. I jumped at the chance.

The position itself was also new, and I reported to a member of the senior leadership team. My charge was to manage projects related to preparing this organization for an ambitious change process that included a capital campaign and building project. The unusually talented and hard-working staff was more than capable of handling these projects but even with a brilliant mission and extraordinary team change isn’t easy!

One of the many changes involved a member of the senior leadership moving to a smaller office so that a colleague and I could then move into, and share, her larger office. There was a lot of grumbling: who was going to take the measurements and order the furniture, why did people have to share space, why couldn’t everyone stay put until we all relocated out of the space for renovations?

In the meantime, I was sitting at a tiny work-study desk with no shelves, drawers, or privacy. It was very clear to me that there was no way I was going to be able to manage the projects I’d been tasked with without a more functional workspace. I was the most recent hire, in a new position, in a new industry: I had the most to lose if I didn’t perform well, and a lot to prove.

Fortunately, I had been practicing Bodylogos for a while by this time. I was in the habit, through active meditation, of checking in with myself regularly, asking how I felt about people and situations, and trusting the answers that came to me (abdominal work); with clarifying what I wanted and needed to bring into my life to feel fulfilled and successful (biceps work); and with determining what I needed to practice letting go of (triceps) while maintaining my integrity (shoulder work) and a sense of comfort and safety (buttocks and back muscle work).

“Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind,” Bodylogos’ vision statement, makes clear that it’s a physical practice designed to strengthen muscles, and promote postural integrity. But Bodylogos also encourages us to continually explore our psyche-muscular blueprints, to be curious about the relationship between our physical and emotional needs, and our aspirations. As I became more comfortable doing Bodylogos workouts I got better at identifying my strengths and weaknesses, and developing strategies to meet my goals. Over time, I began to practice Bodylogos in my workplace – identifying strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, and developing strategic ways of addressing situations within the organization and relationships with colleagues, too.

With the Bodylogos approach in mind, I got clear that what I needed most strategically in that situation was a functional workspace, and so I offered to take the lead on this relatively small office move.  As soon as I volunteered, there was more, and louder grumbling: you’re new, this isn’t fair to you, so-and-so ought to be handling this since it was their idea, it should have been done before you even arrived. It was tempting to join in the kvetching: it was a way for me, as the new person, to bond with colleagues who’d been there a while and also to blow off a little steam as I was anxious about the move, too. But I got clear quickly about this too, specifically, that joining in the complaining wasn’t going to get me what I needed (a more functional workspace), and could potentially put me at risk if it involved complaining about senior leaders and it got back to them.

So I engaged facilities to help me take measurements and make decisions about furniture and packing. I engaged the technology manager to determine to move computers, and other electronics. And I communicated with everyone in the suite affected by the move. By the end of the process I had gotten exactly what I needed: a functional workspace, and a supervisor who was delighted by how smoothly things went. And, crucially, I avoided getting caught up in power struggles and a cycle of bonding through complaining with colleagues, and I stayed true to myself and my values.

I went on to have a stellar professional experience that changed the course of my career, and led to several very dynamic collaborations with colleagues that continue to this day. During this time I also realized the extent to which Bodylogos had become an integral part of my life, and decided to become a Bodylogos instructor so that I could encourage others to try the Bodylogos approach to move their lives and energy in new directions.

 

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

Take Command of Your Vitality: Part 2 of The Art of Strength: Bringing the BodyLogos Philosophy Into the Gym

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The BodyLogos Philosophy: Now In Book/Video Form!

Whether you’re a visual, aural or verbal learner, you’ll discover how to

release tension and build strength.

Order your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a pioneering book/3D video learning system today!

Take Command of Your Vitality:

Part 2 of The Art of Strength: Bringing the BodyLogos Philosophy Into the Gym

“Get More Energy Now!”

“Boost Your Energy Levels Instantly!”

There’s no shortage of online articles with headlines that promise to put more pep in your step. I actually share their agenda: I want you to have more energy. But, I want you to have more than just enough energy to get through the work day, or the hustle of kids’ schedules, or the mountain of life’s other demands.

I want to help you restore your Energy System—to recover your energy’s quality—in turn helping you reduce stagnant tension, increase energy flow, center you in your Spirit Self and, of course, develop muscular strength too. Then, you will be able to take on the day and your life, to create the person you want to be in and the world you want to live in.

That’s what Part 2 of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind is all about, and what it offers is well beyond the tips you’ll find in a quick Google search. You see, energy is so much more than the external momentum that powers you from sunup to sundown. It’s more than what powers you physically through workouts and mentally through problem solving. Energy’s subtle force aligns the power within you with the power of this great big universe.


How BodyLogos Differs From Traditional Strength Training

External momentum places your attention on the destination of an effort, rather than in a movement’s energetic and muscular origins. This momentum throws the resistance away from you rather than connecting you to it. Compared to the internal momentum generated by Energy Orbits—which balance muscular contraction and release—external momentum is a more superficial and uneven focus on either muscular contraction or release. This is reckless in strength training.

BodyLogos is mindful strength training that helps you unite with resistance, whereas traditional methods strive to triumph over it. They leave no room to experience equipoise, or stillness in the middle of challenge.


In this way, traditional strength training is disconnected from life’s content and meaning—disconnected from having a tangible impact upon our existence. This kind of sterile effort can become mechanical, done by route and without truly engaging the senses or the intellect. By connecting strength training to our ability to balance relaxation and hard work, we bring strength into the very center of our existence. It becomes what we are, rather than what we are chasing after.

As I see it, strength is a combination of letting-go of and holding on to our connections with life. It’s not about the amount of weight you lift—it’s about how you connect with that weight.

Part 2 of The Art of Strength gets you working out according to the principles of the BodyLogos Philosophy discussed in Chapters 1-6. Discover:
The book gives you exclusive access to videos that help visually guide you through these exercises.

 

  • How to connect with resistance: Learn to meet outside resistance with only the force needed to create connection and move as one with the weight in your workout or challenges in your life. That way, you don’t give your energy away to all that you touch.
  • How to experience Active Meditation: Uncover how to experience the stillness of equipoise within the movement of strength-training exercises; maintain balanced Energy Orbits as the weight of resistance increases.
  • How to put it all together, the BodyLogos Exercise Structure: Bring together what you learned in earlier sections—Essential Alignment and connecting to your Dan Tien Energy Center—with this new information of stabilizing your Energy System and using Active Meditation to listen to and observe your targeted muscle groups.

 

Together, we’ll take a deep look at the Five Energy Patterns (that reflect eight Energy Orbits): Coming Home, Determined Power, Creating Forward, Suspending Judgment, and Universal Connection. Then, we’ll focus on the body’s muscle groups—abdominals, chest, upper-back, shoulders, biceps, triceps, quadriceps, hamstrings, inner thighs, calves and buttocks—exploring the independent character and nature of each muscle group through the 5 Element Theory (the cyclical flow of energy I’ve been writing about!). And, finally, we’ll learn to integrate energy flow into traditional strength-training exercises.

Our power to create the life we dream about, physically and mentally, is in the subtle projection of our Life Force. Remaining conscious of the pattern of energy that exists in all movement, physically and mentally, assures our position on the planet and gives us a sense of belonging. The greater our command is of these forces at work, the greater our command is in creating our life. How we carry ourselves energetically affects how we feel about ourselves and how the world feels about us.

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

The Moment Posture Transformed My Life

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Inspiration creates a oneness with Spirit. You are fully awake and at ease as energy courses through you. I call it relaxed strength, but describe it as grace.

The first time I experienced this phenomenon it was kind of an out-of-body experience. You could call it a trans-state. But truth is, I was literally frightened out of my body’s tension into mind-body alignment. In this aligned trans-state I became a human antenna, a lightening rod that seemed to channel all-that-is through me.

I am reminded of this energy channel when creating art, in love or lost in honest labor. My body connects my know-how and spirit with that of a larger Universal Intelligence.

So now I practice daily, I deliberately surrender tension, to access spiritual intelligence.

As I give up the fight to prove my rightness and relevance I surrender into a relaxed stretch that energizes my body’s natural antenna. The strength that channels through me stretches my bones between earth and sky, dissolving all uncertainty. I feel plugged into a source energy that aligns me with all that could be.

We are led to believe that good posture is something that we do (or should do), but in my experience good, or bad, posture does us. Paying attention to our posture as a guide to feel connected, relaxed and strong is its gift.

Posture expresses what we are carrying inside. It is our story trying to attract or distract our attention.

The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, my book/3D-video learning system guides you toward relaxed strength, introduces you to the energy serge of mind-body alignment, and offers a way to translate your posture’s meaning and byway, transform your life.

Our Bodies’ Plea to Our Minds Align with Us

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There are power struggles in every partnership. Our relationship with you, an arranged partnership for life, is no exception.

When you ask us to participate in your plans, one of three things happens: Either we jump into physical labor (call to action), dispute the request (communicate our resistance), or share an intuitive insight (Divine intervention).

We feel significant when united with you in a call to action, but that quickly flips to insignificance when we communicate our resistance to, or limitation in, a request.

Too often our value decreases with each limiting belief when, really, the truth meter should rise.

When up against new challenges, old experiences can interfere. You rehash  unresolved fears like: I’m not good enough to be loved! or I haven’t done enough to be valued! The emotional condition that initiated these fear-filled beliefs took root deep inside us as physical tension, laying silent but toxically charged. Triggered by a similar real-time event, this flood of toxic emotions explodes out of its firewall of tension. We, the physical antenna to Divine intelligence, become mute in the event. You’re on your own to choose between buying into the negative belief and emotional upsurge or searching for our muted voice.

Rather than searching for what is hard to hear, too often, you act on your misaligned and toxic beliefs. Our plea to you is to search. Search for significance rather than accepting insignificance. Disentangle the firewall of tensions that smother our connection with Divine intelligence.

It’s understandable how beliefs can be so loud, and tension can be so suppressing, that the calm nurturing truth of Spirit is drowned out. Intuitive, Divine, insightful knowing gets lost in the frenzy. Spirit’s authentic voice can be silenced for so long that we lose touch with who we are, and the tension that insists that we should be something else, better, or more significant dominates lives.

From this severed state, people become robotic, rebellious, or ultra-responsible rather than authentic; and without outside affirmations and accolades, they feel invisible.

These tension patterns continue to feed your beliefs well after an initial incident formed them. Your need-to-be-right mental nature would keep this exchange between emotions and beliefs going forever if we allowed it. But our quest-for-the-truth physical nature has the potential to challenge your toxic beliefs.

The Spiritual guidance that constantly flows through us as Divine energy can soften our tension to permit a change in your perspective. The search for this spiritual guidance, and the practice of listening, needs your attention to be neutral. The power of neutral attention allows for us to align peacefully.

The inner power struggle between mental and physical natures could actually be seen as a power outage. We don’t know how to distinguish right from true once in the throws of being triggered.

Divine intelligence is unaffected by the fears and beliefs that destroy the quality of our relationship. The truth discerned by this voice is calm no matter what the outcome is, unlike the turmoil you experience when insisting misaligned beliefs are right.

I am writing for the collective of human bodies, to remind you that what we feel, sense, intuit, accept, and resist is what makes us significant. Align us with gravity and together we will align with Divine energy.

Show your commitment to channel Divine energy into your thinking patterns, and we can begin to lean on each other peacefully––contently.

I need you––I need my life partner––in alignment with me.

Although this poem is a plea from our bodies to our minds, this is also a love letter to your body’s inherent alliance with Universal energy. I want to help you visualize your body aligning with this energy, which is why I’ve created 3D-videos to illustrate this powerful phenomenon in my new learning system The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind.  

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

The Connection and Direction of Purpose: More of What You’ll Find Inside The Art of Strength-A Look at Chapters 5 & 6

by

The BodyLogos Philosophy: Now In Book/Video Form!

Whether you’re a visual, aural or verbal learner, you’ll discover how to

release tension and build strength.

Order your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind, a pioneering book/3D video learning system today!

The Connection and Direction of Purpose:

More of What You’ll Find Inside The Art of Strength-A Look at Chapters 5 & 6

Have you ever looked up to the sky and wondered, What is the meaning of it all? Why am I here; what’s my purpose?

I’m not a fan of labeling the asking of these questions an “existential crisis,” as I don’t believe this kind of curiosity is a crisis at all. In fact, these moments of inquisitiveness and reflection, of recognizing that there’s something bigger than ourselves out there at play, are absolutely necessary and vital to a meaningful existence.

The Universe has a great deal to teach us about our inner selves and outer world. When we deeply connect to our purpose and regularly make the necessary adjustments to continue to move with purpose in our lives, we are actively participating in Universal well-being.

In fact, a fundamental principle of Tao is that every individual is a microcosm of the Universe.

Like the Universe, you are an energy system comprised of energy orbits and connections that keep you alive and in motion. BodyLogos aims to align the inner momentum of our individual energy system with that of the vast Universe. This alignment connects us to a meaningful intersection—the unique purpose of our human journey.

And that’s what these two chapters in my new book The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind are all about: connection and direction.

They help you dig deeper into the newfound understanding of alignment you gained from earlier chapters and discover balance. You learn that bone stillness and muscle movement manage energy flow. You are guided to experience skeletal alignment and muscular balance as two distinct systems that, when managed separately,  allow holding patterns (tension) trapped between them to dissolve. Furthermore, you learn to create a more complementary relationship between them that replenishes vital energy.

Strength lies in efficiently bringing your energy back to its origin point—your Dan Tien—to synchronize your bones and muscles, and create the same restorative momentum observed out there in the solar system. This universal synchronization joins the relationship you have with yourself to your relationship with the world at large. In that connection, you gain a call-to-action. You plan the direction you want to take in life… and train for it in the gym!

Through chapters 5 and 6, discover:
The book gives you exclusive access to videos that help visually guide you through these exercises.

 

  • How to experience equipoise, the “how-to” to peace of mind, the stillness in the middle of motion
  • How to differentiate between tension and strength and distinguish energy movement from physical movement to replenish and reinforce your vitality
  • How the 5-Element Theory can balance your workouts and help you find your focus and achieve your goals

 

Strength training workouts are your opportunity to practice balanced energy. You lay a foundation that cuts through the negative self-talk and regularly relates you with an inner-authority that strengthens your understanding and commitment to create the life you want. You use your workouts to recognize a life goal and stay connected through its fruition!

My wish for you is that as you experience greater depth within your own vital energy, you will experience greater depth in your connection with the world.

The beauty of BodyLogos is that it involves you in an inner exploration of your own  authenticity as it relates to the world around you. It inspires you to connect with a workout challenge to connect better with a life challenge. It builds a relationship with your Spirit Self that recognizes you are an integral part of all of Creation.

Your efforts to enlighten yourself are efforts to enlighten the world.

 

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

Balboa Publishing
with a 5% gift to Safe Horizons

Amazon

Meditation is a Verb

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Meditation may be seen as a do nothing discipline, but non-doing is by no
means doing nothing.

Traditional seated meditation asks you to be deliberate with your attention. You
focus on a single aspect of being: the ebb and flow of your breath, the inner
space of your heart center, or your non-attachment to thoughts and sounds.
You are becoming conscious. And although the end result is to be able to do
nothing extraneous, in and of itself, it is not nothing.

Becoming conscious is digging the foundation for the life you want.

Active meditation incorporates the deliberate thinking of still meditation into
the act of living. Active meditation asks you to be deliberate with your attention
while in motion. Mind and body are in each moment together, experiencing
your breath, your inner heart space or your reaction to thoughts and sounds.
You are practicing intention. And although the end result is to stay connected
with your self, it in turn, keeps you connected with your world.

Practicing intention is building the desired fortress of your life.

Meditation is a discipline and a lifestyle. It is done in stillness and in motion. It
is becoming and practicing.

The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind is a how-to book/video
package for living a meditative life.

The Psyche-Muscular Blueprint: A Cornerstone of Bodylogos

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BODYLOGOS = The Body’s Divine Wisdom

It is a Practice and a Lifestyle outlined in The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind

The Psyche-Muscular Blueprint:

A Cornerstone of Bodylogos

by Donia Elizabeth Allen ~ Bodylogos Instructor

The Bodylogos practice makes simple, intuitive connections between the physiological roles of the major muscle groups, and their emotional significance.

For example, physiologically biceps are the muscles we use to literally bring things toward us: a free weight if we’re doing biceps curls, or a fork if we’re lifting food to our mouths.

In Bodylogos, practitioners use biceps exercises to envision and meditate on aspirational or emotional things we’d like to bring toward us: a new work project, relationship, or healthy habit.

What would I like to bring into my life at this time?

This simple question facilitates the connection between what we’re doing physically, our mental focus and our emotional clarity.

The transparent blend of the physiological and emotional – call it a psyche-muscular blueprint – is a cornerstone of the Bodylogos practice. It is designed to encourage dialogue and build trust between what your body is doing and what your soul wants to create.

A key benefit of the Bodylogos approach is that because it engages our minds and bodies concurrently, we rarely get bored, or stuck in a rut. It is a practice that creates space for us to contemplate, ask questions and to change as our dreams and needs do. For this reason we can return to Bodylogos again and again without risk of burnout, which is so often what happens with more traditional, one-dimensional exercise routines.

What follows are brief descriptions of the major muscle groups’ physiological roles and questions related to their emotional significance to consider as you work these muscle groups.

ABDOMINALS

Physiological function: Abdominals are the central muscles of the body. All movement emanates from them. They provide essential support for the spine and central nervous system.

Questions to consider: How do you feel today? Can you turn your attention to your quiet center or spirit self?

 

QUADRICEPS

Physiological function: These powerful muscles are critical for forward movement including walking, jumping, squatting and running.

Questions to consider: What do you aspire to move toward? What’s your dream, and are you actively moving toward it?

 

HAMSTRINGS

Physiological function: These muscles connect and motor the knees and hips for backward movement.

Questions to consider: What strength and insights can you draw on from your past experiences and use to create your future?

 

BUTTOCKS

Physiological function: Buttock muscles are the most powerful muscle group in the body. Their strength and padding provides security and comfort. The buttocks are responsible for movement of hips and thighs.

Questions to consider: Are you secure with your own power? What makes you feel comfortable in your personal and professional relationships?

 

CALVES

Physiological function: Calf muscles are responsible for flexing the foot at the ankle joint and the leg at the knee joint. They ground and elevate your weight.

Questions to consider:  What are you determined to accomplish in your life? What grounds and supports your efforts?

 

BICEPS

Physiological function: Biceps muscles control flexion of elbow and shoulder joints to lift and bring things inward.

Questions to consider: What would you like to bring into your life or improve upon at this time? What does it look like, sound like, taste like, and feel like?

 

TRICEPS

Physiological function: Triceps muscles control extension of the forearm to push things away.

Questions to consider: What would you like to let go of or say “No Thank You” to? What do you no longer need in your life?

 

SHOULDERS

Physiological function: Shoulder muscles are the widest part of the human skeleton. They offer arms full range of motion, and the integrity of their alignment frames your posture.

Questions to consider: How does integrity feel to you? What do you need to feel a sense of integrity in your life, work, and relationships?

 

CHEST

Physiological function: Chest muscles sit atop the heart, support spinal alignment, and present your body’s smile to the world at large.

Questions to consider: Do you feel connected to your joy? What causes your heart to lift and express itself, or shuts your heart down?

 

BACK

Physiological function: The back muscles are the most protective of the vital organs, and have the the thickest skin on the body. They help support the spine and allow humans to stand upright and pull themselves up off the ground.

Questions to consider: Do you have your own back – emotionally, financially, professionally? What do you need to feel a sense of protection and safety?

 

Align your workouts with meditations on your emotional wishes and dreams and be amazed by how much progress you make!

Get your copy of The Art of Strength: Sculpt the Body ~ Train the Mind today!

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