Page 521 - Total War on PTSD

teach guides you to fill the brain and body with energy, light and love. This practice brings spiritual energy and earth energy to the heart, profoundly affects your sense of well-being, calms the nervous system, reduces fear and anger, and trains the mind to bring healing energy to specific affected areas of the body. This practice benefits sleep and reduces stress, anxiety and depression.
Balanced left-right movement balances left-right brain activity:
Fourth, balanced, integrated, left- and right-sided movement, as found in Tai Chi, must be accompanied by balanced brain activity; i.e., accessing the brain's neural circuitry is a direct approach to enhancing function or to healing physical and mental dysfunction resulting from mental trauma, mechanical injury or biochemical imbalance. I often think of Tai Chi as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy) using the whole body. Balance is accomplished by using four major components of Tai Chi training: 1) central equilibrium training, the concept of maintaining a straight spine with an energetic central “plumb line”; 2) the biomechanics of spiraling in the joints, called silk reeling training mentioned above; 3) cultivation of a powerful physical and energetic connection to the ground called ‘root’; and 4) synchronization of right/left or bilateral (opposite sided) and ipsilateral (same sided) movement. Moving left and right sides together becomes linked in the nervous system, requiring tight inter-hemispheric coupling, plus synchronization binds movement into functional synergies: synergies in energy movement, brain and spinal cord rhythms, muscle activation, breathing, heart rate, and so on. Such movement activates the motor and sensory neural circuitry of the whole brain.
To take balanced, rhythmic, left/right movement even further, we can add the movement model presented in Spiral AnatomyTM Training which describes and trains a specific backwards bicycle or reverse cycling rotational movement in all the joints. This
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