Tag Archive for: abdominal muscles

A Sneak Peek Into My First Book–Chapter 1 & 2 of The Art of Strength

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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!

Where to start, where to start, where to start:

A Sneak Peek Into My First Book–Chapter 1 & 2 of The Art of Strength

That’s what was looping through my head as I sat down to begin the oh-so-exciting yet equally intimidating task of writing my first book about the BodyLogos philosophy and program.

AVAILABLE NOW!

My approach combines meditation and strength training, joins the best of Eastern and Western fitness, to help create real and lasting strength. It’s about integrating our emotional and spiritual selves into our workouts to become totally aligned. And therein was my answer…

The practice and, thus, my book start with a focus on how our minds and emotions intersect in the body. Its first chapter aims to set you on a path to recognize this intersection and connect you with your Spirit Self.

Tao thought says, your Spirit Self is a “pregnant void” needing only direction.

These pages help you intend a direction to create the life you desire and set you up to live that life from a place of true strength.

You see, a meditation practice properly informs your exercise practice. Perhaps surprisingly, the goal with each is not to focus on the end result, as our culture tells us to do—to see meditation as solely a way to de-stress or exercise as only a way to look good. (aka better than you do as you are.)

Rather, the secret is simply to focus on the journey itself; and meditation is the perfect tool to learn how to do just that. A BodyLogos workout gives both your mind and the emotions that are stored in your body a chance to take a timeout from self-criticism, and instead employ and embrace self-acknowledgment–the act of listening inwardly..

I call this focus on the journey “meditative fitness.”

Meditation is key to ensuring that your strength training does more than align your body, or your human self. When you learn to incorporate meditation into your exercise practice, you create the foundation for being your authentic, integrated, vulnerable, and bright Spirit Self in the world. If that isn’t the definition of strength, I don’t know what is!

In chapters 1 you’ll find:

  • Step-by-step instructions that guide you through a traditional Tao Active Meditation, that reorganizes the body, and BodyLogos Active Meditations, that neutralize your mind.
  • An introduction to the BodyLogos Psyche-Muscular Blueprint. Every muscle group corresponds to an aspect of your Self; when isolated in a strength-training workout, that emotion is stimulated.
  • An overview of posture analysis and ways to help you discern the meaning of your body’s messages.
  • Meditations on the five elements of Tao: fear, anger, joy, reflection, sorrow.
  • And much more, including links to video tutorials for guidance.

For centuries, Taoists have believed that our ability to listen to the body is as valuable as listening to the mind. As this chapter illustrates, they’re inextricably connected.

Using active meditation and the BodyLogos approach to posture, you can pinpoint the root cause of emotional tension in your body. Then, through precise mindful adjustments in skeletal alignment and muscular balance, you challenge your body to integrate those adjustments using strength-training exercises, which the book covers in great detail in later chapters.

BodyLogos helps you stretch away from what you think about yourself and toward what is less familiar in the world—it awakens your innate trust in the Universal Spirit.

Get started on your journey to strength and  well-being!

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

You’ll Never Look at a Pregnant Woman the Same Again

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Losing one’s center of gravity is a lost and found phenomenon.

There she is walking ahead of you, legs slightly spread causing her whole body to waddle side to side. She looks like she’s steadying herself on a sailboat but, even from behind, you know she is pregnant. You can’t help but marvel at the miracle of childbirth and the mystery of the female form, but have you ever considered her instability as Creation’s stability?

Pregnancy is an energetic phenomenon. Her mind body connection must navigate through an interruption of being, what she has come to know as, herself. A foreign state of instability overrides everything; she has no control over what is happening to her! How does this instability serve her as a mother to be? (Yikes, it’s enough to scare the rest of us off!)

When talking to my neighbor, Lorelei, mother of one and soon to be two, she said, “Being pregnant is hard, but it teaches me a lot about myself. I can give more than I realized!” She explains how being pregnant stretches her beyond what she knew of herself in every way!

But she had to lose herself to find herself.

Lorelei’s first experience of feeling lost was impressed acutely in her memory. The moment she couldn’t get out of the car on her own volition she exclaimed, “Oh My God, this is really happening!” When we looked deeper into that moment she said, “It’s a foreign state that is one sided. It affects mom not baby.”

My holistic interpretation of this lost while pregnant is:
•    Her center of gravity–the Dan Tien Energy Center–is engulfed upon.
•    The sense of self that comes from knowing her center is growing increasingly distant.
•   The abdominal muscles have split centrally to permit the fetus to grow, leaving her detached from her core strength.
Up until now, her energy and strength have been devoted to her independent desires. Now they are devoted to keeping an embryonic life incubated and emerging. Her autonomy is gradually disappearing. (This might be a good time to say, I love you mom!)

How does this instability sure up the future for nurturing a new life?

Stripped of independence, completely exposed to the world, overwhelmed with fatigue, empathy turns to sympathy toward herself. She is solely responsible for another life form, afraid of unexpected pregnancy conditions (breech, cerclage, preeclampsia), as well as the common cold. She believes that the baby isn’t fully hers to safeguard until it is born.

I liken this unstable state to jibbing, a sailing maneuver that turns the stern of the boat, so that the wind changes from one side of the sail to the other. There is a moment in the maneuver that the sail is completely disconnected from the wind, directionless, powerless; but to navigate through life changes one must jib, let go of the control, to transform values and align with new circumstances. This applies no matter what you are birthing in life!

In this personal maneuver she transforms. She cries a lot. She is no longer embarrassed to feel; she has no physical shame left! In this loss of autonomy an internal spark chases her into action. The urgency to nest has her spouting demands, and expecting others to jump. Her mind becomes insightful, sensitive to the single life force she is sharing with her baby, knowing (not guessing) what they need.

In this lost state she finds her direction. A direction that can only go forward; there is no turning back. She has jibbed successfully!

All of this to say, once the baby is born she will need to jib back into the wind to re-find her independence. And when she does she will become acutely aware of the split down her body’s center, where her baby once lived. Alone in herself again, she is forever changed. Lorelei remembers from her first pregnancy, “I felt like I was missing a body part. It took me nearly 3-years to actually be able to own my new self. It was a weird identity crisis.” She recalls that trying to go back was the wrong focus. Trying to be healthy and embody a better newfound sexy–mature, accepting, soft woman–is what completed her experience of being a human incubator. To create a stable internal environment her external standards had to weather physical and emotional instability, but as Lorelei says, “Life is more than appearances. I can’t imagine life without children.”

Entitlement isn’t to be judged in new mothers. It is founded in the fact that she is a spirited and devoted incubator for the human race. As fellow human beings we are obliged to help her! Help support the journey back to herself.