Why Dr. W? (continued) 

It’s worth mentioning that during this time I discovered Kundalini Yoga –classes given by those guys with the white turbans. A weekly class turned into a daily routine; even was president of the SU Kundalini Yoga club 😉 I got into yoga’s concept of chakras – conveying what I interpreted as a “sacred architecture” model of our human body. 

After graduating, I found myself moving from the goal of natural environment-based work to one of natural therapies for overcoming life’s illnesses, afflictions, stiffness, and pains. I went to chiropractic college in Lombard, Illinois with that goal in mind and learned a lot on how the body worked, how spinal adjustments are done, how good nutrition affects the biological processes of life. I took extra courses on acupuncture to understand the way the wise of the East understood our body. 

It was there that my four element way of approaching the world (the cosmos, even) was challenged by the five elements of the Chinese. It took me a few years, but I figured how to bring both together, integrate them so they would synergistically add up to something even more. 

And indeed that is my gift: I am an integrator of different knowledge systems. The four elements of the West, the five elements of the East, yoga’s seven chakras, the natural sciences, the musculoskeletal system, nutritional biochemistry, even modern physics. The holistic model I’ve come up with draws them all together.

Beyond my interests as mentioned in the paragraph above, here’s a bit of my quirks and pleasures:I get to walk a mile to work and have done so day after day for over 30 years, winter days, too. My son calls me a flowerholic – I do have a passion each spring for arranging tray loads of colorful annuals around the yard’s perennial backbone. I am content spending hours each day/week digging, planting, maintaining my urban courtyard of sorts. There seems every day, I spend time doing (and developing) the various maneuvers that are part of 4 Element Yoga. I’ll add this for the fun of it: I don’t have a cell phone (to my wife’s consternation). I’m an outlier of sorts. It takes someone like me who seeing things differently to bring what might be missing into our current world – toward the balancing that must be accomplished. 

I’ve been told I’m  earnest. Indeed, I am earnest toward a noble goal – helping people connect to something that we can all agree upon as important and present in our lives, nature’s four elements. I know deep in my heart that only good will come if people today were to rediscover that ancient holistic wisdom which speaks of them.

With that said, I’ve had to be tenacious over these 30+ years. It’s hard for me to understand why it’s taken so long for these four element concepts to gain traction. Perhaps it just hasn’t been the right time yet. But that’s all changing – even you’re now reading a bit about them!  I’m hoping that my newest way of getting this valuable four element knowledge out, Growing Holistically on the Patreon platform, www.patreon.com/growingholistically  will change all that. Please join me and others there as we explore the four elements with the goal of growing holistically as individuals and as a society.