A significant problem for many people is the amount of stress they feel each day. Various studies have shown that stress plays a great role in many diseases – it weakens your body and permits your weak links to rise up to the surface. It has a role in heart disease, digestive problems, diabetes and weight gain for example. Obviously as well, stress affects one’s mood and the way we deal with other people. It therefore has both an affect upon on our personal and social lives.
Dr. Walsdorf’s 4 Element Healing Program is possibly the finest way to deal with stress because it tackles it from a variety of angles – four of them to be exact. It represents a leading-edge way of understanding how things can go wrong in the body – and further, how to correct stress and other health problems when they show up. The 4 Element Healing Program works to help you with stress in the following ways.
Removing Stress with life’s Earth Principle
As you might sense, stress is particularly a nervous system issue. The nervous system becomes overly excited, which makes the body irritable. Over time this irritation drains the body of the resources it needs to keep you healthy and positive. According to 4 Element Healing, Fire and Earth help to balance each other out. The nervous system is the Fire element of the body and the bones are the Earth element of the body. When there is too much nervous system stress (Fire) it is often very useful to “ground” ourselves into the Earth element of our lives.
The Earth element is the physicality of one’s life. One antidote to stress, then, is to engage the physical world. Too much fiery nervous system stress can be balanced by drawing upon the stuff of the opposite pole, Earth. This is why walking should be an important part of one’s daily routine. We are meant to walk on a regular basis. Clearly, it has always been an important part of the human condition; we stop doing it at our own peril!
The Earth element of the body is our skeletal system – all those bones, which draw our weight and grounding into our feet. Dr. Walsdorf will teach you how to walk in ways that will help you draw in more of the Earth Principle. In this way, you will be able to better release, or ground your stress, into that solid ground, or Earth, underneath your feet.
Dr. Walsdorf has developed Walking Tall technique that helps each person to improve both posture and their ability to ground themselves while they walk. Both help you to draw in that valuable antidote to stress, the Earth Principle.
Removing Stress with life’s Air Principle
As we move “up” from Earth toward Fire, we now reach the Air Principle of health. 4 Element Healing tells us that this Air Principle has both a yin and a yang part to it. The yin aspect of this important element is our mental capacity to think. The yang aspect of Air is the muscular system of our body, which lets us move through space – through “Air”. As it turns out, much of the stress today comes from an imbalance between the yin and yang parts of the Air Principle.
Generally we are stressed by too much yin Air: we are forced to intellectually think about too many things. We are bombarded by so many things to think about, so many options to deal with each day – whether we are at the supermarket, at work, even at home.
The yang aspect of Air pushes us to involve ourselves with muscular activities. Indeed studies show that there are hormones and other chemistries of stress that get metabolized – burned up – when we are physically active. This is why working out in a gym or running – or just walking – is so good for people today. Part of the 4 Element Healing program involves Dr. Walsdorf testing the body to discover which exercises would be best to alleviate your stress holding pattern. Also part of Dr. Walsdorf’s stress-beating program is to teach his patients about breathing – an important aspect of Air – which is a good segue to the next part of the program.
Healing with the power of the Water Principle
The 4 Element Healing Program helps you to use nutrition to combat stress. Blood – that watery river within our body – nourishes all our body’s cells, including our stressed out nerves. Nutrition has been an important part of Dr. Walsdorf’s life for over 30 years; he breathes and lives nutrition on an everyday basis. He loves to help patients discover what good nutrition can do for them. While there are those “Stress B” vitamin supplements that you can buy everywhere you go, there is so much more that you get when you have a doctor like Dr. Walsdorf helping you. He will, through nutrition, help you with stress – and health issues that go beyond stress.
Often integrated into his stress relieving therapies is Nutrition Response Testing. Through this kind of testing, Dr. Walsdorf can analyze the weak links, or stresses, in your body’s organ systems. He may find that problems with stomach digestion is stressing your body and weakening its resiliency against stress. Intolerances to certain foods may be found that are stressing your body as well.
It is not uncommon for people feeling a lot of stress to have mineral imbalances, or blood sugar issues, or a liver that has been burdened with too much toxic residue. Many of these things come from the way we live in this modern world. Dr. Walsdorf is trained to find these undercurrents of poor health as he helps people burdened with stress to get their life back.
Healing with the power of life’s Fire Principle
We saw earlier that the Fire element of the body is our nervous system. Thinking too much stresses the nervous system. There are things we can do to quiet down the nervous system, which includes focusing upon breathing. What is interesting about our breathing is that while we generally do it unconsciously, we can consciously take control of the way we are breathing.
If we are breathing in short, shallow ways it generally means that our nervous system is in a stressed state. We can change from this stressed state of our nervous system by consciously changing how we are breathing – breathing slower and deeper breaths. Dr. Walsdorf explains that the breath is a bridge between our conscious and our unconscious minds. We can use it to consciously change the stressful undercurrents that are putting us on edge.
Other ways that Dr. Walsdorf helps the Fire portion of your body to work better for you is by working on your spine. The spine is the home of the nervous system. Spinal adjustments to the spine can do much to relieve stress in your body. Oftentimes the neck and skull are particularly involved. That is why Dr. Walsdorf also is trained in Cranial-Facial & Sinus therapies. These are special hands-on treatments that release higher-level stresses that have accumulated in the head.
As you might sense, stress saps your body of its life force. It puts us on edge and keeps us from living life as well as we can. As you work with Dr. Walsdorf you’ll notice that not only does he have nutritional and spinal techniques that help remove the way that stress affects you physically and mentally, but also will teach you how to cope with stress through things like his special exercises, and ways of walking and breathing.
He takes the time to listen long enough to hear what the problem is – then takes time to correct it. I always walk out feeling far better then when I walked in, also I walk much better.
Marie Taylor