MARTIN: Hey, this is Martin Pytela for the Life Enthusiast podcast. And with me today, Dr. Howard Walsdorf, a doctor of chiropractic, if I may say so. And welcome to Life Enthusiast.

HOWARD: Thank you, Martin. I appreciate being with you.

MARTIN: Yeah. I so appreciate people like you who have taken to treating people as individuals as opposed to as their numbers. You know the story, right? The mainstream medical people.

HOWARD: Right, right.

MARTIN: Treat everyone as the lab test. They focus on the illness and not on the person.

HOWARD: Exactly.

MARTIN: I reckon that you take it differently, right?

HOWARD: I would say I do. Every patient of mine, every person that I try to help, I try to see them as a unique balance of, what we'll talk about shortly, I guess, are these principles. The body, our mind, our spirit, makes us whole through and healthy optimally with. So that's my approach to everybody - their unique balance.

MARTIN: I really appreciate that you are actually trying to help people beyond what you can touch in the office. In chiropractic, you usually have to see the person right there and put your hands on them, but you have stepped well beyond that now.

HOWARD: I would say so. Most of my patients I do see here, I do some online type of things as well. And I have things that I can send to people or that even in the office they'll fill out that help me to understand their unique way of balancing these principles. But I do, in my office, a lot of testing with what I call, what's been called applied kinesiology, muscle testing.

MARTIN: Right.

HOWARD: And kind of challenge out the strengths and the weaknesses that people have in these, what I like to call these primal, cardinal, cosmos-spanning principles that each of us have.

MARTIN: Well, here online, we are trying to help people with whatever they can do without having to go into your office. Right?

HOWARD: Fair enough. Yeah. And that's why I encourage people to understand. I wrote a book and I have a YouTube channel, and I encourage people to figure it out. I'm here to kind of give them the code, if you will, to figure out how to take what I give them, knowledge base, what they learn, what I present to them that as their weak spot perhaps, and find ways of giving themselves more resilience through how they walk, what they eat, their normal activities, their routine. All those things build that balance of who they are.

MARTIN: Yeah, well, so people can find you on the website fourelementdoctor.com, right?

HOWARD: Exactly. Yes.

MARTIN: So that's spelled out f-o-u-r element and Dr. D-o-c-t-o-r. So no abbreviations.

HOWARD: I think they could even put in four and they'll get there. There are ways that try to cover all bases. They'll all land into four element Dr.

MARTIN: Okay. Well, I was quite impressed with you essentially teaching people in a quick way how to understand the elements. But I'm surprised that in traditional Chinese we have five elements. You just cut it down to four. What's up with that?

HOWARD: Right. What's up with that? I love the question. And what I'd like to say is to start off with is, four came before five. So, I took acupuncture courses in chiropractic college and learned about the five elements. Before I took that course, I got turned on to the four elements. I went to grad school at New York State College of Environmental Science and Forestry. So I was a natural oriented guy. And when I was at school there, I took a course in astrology, which is very four element based. So, whether you're a skeptical person or whatever, what I discovered was this fire, air, water, and earth.

The astrology really spoke to me. I'm a natural scientist kind of guy. I enjoy nature. And somehow this fire, air, water really got underneath my skin. And I haven't, I'm still 40 years, 50 years later, here I am. I'm still talking about it. I'm still researching, I'm still applying it in my practice. So my point would be I took acupuncture courses and tried to make sense of, they have the five elements and they have wood and metal, as you mentioned there, and they don't have air. So what I've kind of figured out in my frame of reference is, the four elements came first. Fire. And there's an order that I don't know if we're going to get to in any big way,

MARTIN: Yeah, let’s do that.

HOWARD: It's fire, air, water, and earth. The son of nature is the fire element, right? And earth under our feet, terra firma would be earth and air is lighter than water. So it's that I like to say, if you want to remember, I do encourage strongly for people out there who are listening, they kind of remember that word of fire, air, water, and the way to remember it is with somebody from Boston, might say four. So the four elements is fire, air, water. That e of fire is silent. So that's the order to always keep in mind that the four elements. Anyhow, wood, as I see it, is the fifth element.

And so what I came to realize is that when you fracture the oneness into four parts, you get the four elements, and when you fracture it into five parts, you get the five elements. So the Chinese broke that oneness into five parts and they sacrificed air, in my opinion, to bring in wood.

MARTIN: Yes.

HOWARD: And because of that, there's an imbalance of sorts, because there's five and this air is missing. It's kind of partially taken care of by wood, and you throw a kind of this imbalance in it. So I actually believe that metal is actually the sixth principle and that, so you have wood as the fifth principle that kind of takes over air, and then you have metal that kind of counteracts that. So metal actually has more air in it, in my opinion.

MARTIN: Yeah.

HOWARD: And if I can go one more step, what I believe is that wood is fire, primary polarity, combining with water. So fire and water come together and create wood, and air and earth come together and create metal. So, think of metal as this sword, that metal sword that is oftentimes used in that tradition. And so a sword has that earthy physicality, but it's thinned out in space and air. So in my opinion, that's the metal principle.

MARTIN: Well, and in a way, it's nicer to have only four rather than five to mess with. And it's quite logical. Right? Like, I can count to four, I can count to five and try to conceptualize what I'm trying to do. But what I think is what's wonderful about what you're doing is that you're giving people a guideline or concepts that they can actually directly apply in life.

HOWARD: Yes. I like to think of it that way.

MARTIN: Which is what I would like you to at least hint at. Yes. We want people to go ahead and buy your book, but try and explain it. Why do they need to do that?

HOWARD: Well, because in today's world, I see a lot of patients who are stressed out. I see students. I'm in the university community here, so I see a lot of young people and they're anxious. I've been here for 40 years, and I've seen them kind of degrade in a sense, the young people, and they're anxious, they have worse posture because of their texting, and we're all, a lot of people are getting that way. So, I love engaging young people and they're open-minded, more or less. So they've helped me to utilize it with them in ways that older people are not always as eager to change their way.

But that said, all my patients seem to appreciate the way I make it practical by way of, as a chiropractor can you see how the earth of our body are the bones, right? So kind of earthy, bones are solid. Patients usually get that the bones of the earth are bones of the body, of the earth element. That solid part of them. And in the mental frame of reference is that they need to be practical, mundane. So these four elements kind of show up on all levels of our body, mind and spirit, if you will. But let's just stick with the body right now that, patients come in, they've got pain, they're anxious even. So that earth principle kind of gives their sturdiness, stability, that need that many people have in this high-tech world. We're moving fast. All that fire of stimulating stuff into our brains through screens and the like. We lack that earth principle, that thing that balances the fieriness of our modern times, if you will. So for example, that's why walking is such a valuable thing to do.

I'm a very fortunate person, I get to walk to work every day. So it's a mile that I walk every day. And I recommend to people to actually engage the ground a little differently than they might otherwise. So I get right in there with talking about their way of walking, and in this holistic paradigm where, I don't know if your audience knows what holism is all about, but it's about kind of this, the H, holistic with the W is about the whole thing. Whereas holism with an H, in my opinion, is looking at a pattern that repeats, this holistic paradigm is that patterns repeat on all levels. So this whole way of thinking is that this form pattern repeats on all levels of the cosmos, including the universe.

MARTIN: You're talking about the fractal nature of the universe.

HOWARD: Exactly, yes. It's another approach to a way of diving into the holistic. So my point here really could finish up on your maybe would be I'd like to tell them that just as all their bones of their body of the earth, I ask them, can you see how the feet have even more of that earth? That they're the very bottom of the body. There's more density of bones there. And then I say, well, even within your feet, can you see that the heel has even more of that earth? And the earth side of the body is that heel size. So every backside of the body, in a very practical way, is where that earth principle is meant to operate.

What does Earth do? It gives us sturdiness, it gives us alignment. And all that misalignment comes frequently in our days and that forward part of what we do. So it's always a good idea. The practical way is to bring ourselves back. So when you walk, getting back to that, even just a heel strike, focus a little bit more on the heel is a good thing to add that quotient of sturdiness into your life. So even if you're walking, just to have a little bit of a focus on the back half inch of the heel can channel, if you will, this earth principle into your body. And, and here it is, I'm a scientist. I believe that all these things are ultimately mumbo jumbo, spiritual mumbo jumbo I call it in the book, that doesn't have some physicality to it to make it real. That's my MO.

MARTIN: So are you essentially trying to teach people how to walk more consciously?

HOWARD: That's just only one important part as far as earth is considered into the equation. Yeah. And if it's only that, it's a great thing to do. If I could help people just to walk better, I think I've done a good service to people.

MARTIN: Yeah, a favor.

HOWARD: What's that?

MARTIN: A favor to them, yeah. Once you plant your feet differently, then you will interact with the Earth differently. Right?

HOWARD: The environment and the earth and even your physical body will change. Your posture can change if you use that as a portal, if you will, to do other things. Earth is the foundational element. And once you change something in a walk like heel strike, which would include perhaps bringing your shoulders back as you walk. What I say is when you walk, as your right heels engage the ground, that your right shoulder normally goes back a little bit. Bring it back a little bit. Get a little bit extra muscular robustness, I like to call it, and bring your hip back, maybe even on that side a little bit more. And it starts from there. So you can enter that, that circuit of walking and it'll change you bodily. I believe it changed you in a mental, even spiritual way if you do it with a certain mindfulness.

MARTIN: Right on. So what we need to recommend is that people actually listen to it while walking. Right?

HOWARD: Listen to their body. Not so much the podcast or something.

MARTIN: Well, both.

HOWARD: All right. I'm kidding around. I'm somebody who likes to walk without anything in my ears. Whatever gets you outside is always a good thing. But I do say that walking about engaging in something besides nature is a good thing to do.

MARTIN: All right, so that's probably the opposite of the head forward tragedy that we're experiencing these days, right?

HOWARD: Absolutely. Yeah. It's such a, I think it's one of the most underappreciated things that are affecting us these days. I have a theory that Alzheimer's and brain health is more affected by this head posture. Coming from things that we're doing then, we're all searching for this pill that's going to make it all better, Alzheimer's, and all that kind of thing.

MARTIN: So take this back a little.

HOWARD: Yeah, people are told to do. But if you're aware of just how to do it by focusing on the heel, maybe and just bringing yourself back, it can be a good cue as well as just, going like that. But anything that gets you to do that is good.

MARTIN: All right, awesome. So, so this book, what chapters are in there? What all do you cover?

HOWARD: Well, I cover from a practical perspective. I cover nutrition, for example, a four-element way of looking at nutrition. I believe that these four principles show up in, like Earth for example show up as protein. I don't want to get weighed down in the weeds for that much. But can you see how the protein builds the physical structure of your body? Sugar is the fire in the body, like the quick energy of fire. I'm not going to go much deeper than that right now, but what I would say is that, and I'm an herbalist as well in my practice. So I use herbal tradition mostly of Chinese medicine, because I like their energetics, their five elements and the way that they integrate things with herbs. But anyhow, what was my point there? I believe that nature, it doesn’t stop with four and then it doesn’t stop with five or six principles for that matter.

What nature does is fracture the oneness, if you will, into all the diversity of this wonderful planet and this planet we're on, which is such a beautiful thing in this solar system. Maybe our galaxy, for all you know, the best that might be there. We're this unique balance of all these principles, I believe. So my point is that the oneness didn't just stop with four or five or six. Nature has kind of fractured this oneness to create all of life. So the herbalists call it herbal principles. And I believe that food also has these food principles and we call them vitamins, we call them minerals, the phytochemistries of life. I believe they're all principles on some level. So it's always healthy to bring more of these principles, less counterfeit denatured food, as I like to call them, and more wholesome life-positive biochemistries of life that I like to call principles of nutrition of food.

I don't know if that answered your question, but it's a good intro that my book tries to give. Instead of being very specific like take this, or take this for this illness, this problem, be aware of how to eat healthy to begin with and work with a doctor, work with me, whoever’s more naturally oriented to kind of maybe fine-tune what would be good for your particular health issue. But by and large, to be inspired to see things in a more wholesome way I think is a good thing to do nutritionally. So that's one part of my book.

MARTIN: I noticed that one of the chapters, you're focusing on the life force or the chi itself, right? Because I think we humans are dynamic, in dynamic balance with the universe or with the world that we interact. And so it all has to flow.

MARTIN: If it doesn't flow …,

HOWARD: Then things start to fall apart. If it doesn't flow, what happens is your resilience as an individual, that unique way that we're meant to balance these principles in some fashion and these principles are always balanced one way or another within us. They could be precariously balanced or they could be elegantly balanced in a healthy way. When we see beauty in the world on some level, I think that we're seeing them in an elegant, productive, beautiful way, in a balance. When they're not balanced, well, things fall apart, they're precarious. We get injured and we don't recover. We have weak links, genetically, constitutionally, whatever, they fester within us. So we need ways of recalibrating balances.

And I don't think the medical model quite does that. And so chi, and I see chi as this life force that we each have that we're meant to keep strong. And I call chi, you might not see it quite this way, I see chi as the air element of our bodies. It's the elbow room. I like to tell my patients think of elbow room need muscles to give our chi. That's the air element. It’s the muscles of the body that move us through space, which is the air element. But I'm getting a little too complicated maybe.

MARTIN: Well, these are the principles. I would like to see some practical bits that we can share with people just so that they can say, oh, look at that, they taught me this. And I'll go get the book so I can learn the rest of it.

HOWARD: Sure, I love that. So, what I've done in the book is introduce how you can draw these principles. So, as much as I'm into, I've been here for 40 years. I have lots of tools that I've developed in my tool chest, beyond chiropractic, beyond nutrition. I was very much into nutrition. I still am, but I have created what I like to call this holistic anatomy and biomechanics model that I use these four elements to understand the anatomy and the functionality, the somatic nature. I believe that we're all on a somatic journey, a bodily journey with our own particular body.

I've created this four element yoga that I'm quite proud of. One day I took to get it out there a little bit more. But my form yoga works with this concept of drawing in these forces as we move. Not just walking, exercising, doing yoga and things on that or so as far as a practical thing I'd like to just mention is the way you use your muscles are your way that you draw chi into yourself. At least that's what I believe. In a certain way, you can tap into the power of this air element of chi, if you will, by healthy eating and healthy other things. But I believe that how we use our physical body in the musculature that we channel into ourselves through our activities give us that elbow room, that muscular robustness. Each of the regions of the body, so I'm into the chakras, for example, but each of these regions of the body are meant to have these muscles working in that vertical level.

And that increases the chi and the well-being of each of those seven regions of the body. So that's in the book too, to find practical ways of applying it to themselves. So for example, if you had neck issues, you might want to do something where you're going like this (Howard shows a stretching movement, pulling elbows high and back) having your hands, just kind of bring yourself back. You might want to draw that water principle by going back and forth like that, you learn that the x-axis is the axis that water works within. Water is about blood and nourishing tides that work within this x-axis, if you will. Every level of your body needs, depends upon not just the blood 120 over 80 or the local cellular level. We need 10 millimeters of pressure and movement. That's why walking is so healthy.

It pumps vitality and nourishment into the cells, that are right, left, right, left. So when you do a form of yoga and you do something that's right, left, right, left, it kind of stirs up vitality there. That's just an example of people out there may want to start paying attention to just the way they might create rhythms of motion in a weak area of their body. Walk with a little bit more finesse of right, left, right, left, things like that for just tidal forces of nutrition, locally. What I love to say when the sun is shining, feel the power of the fire element. In Syracuse where I am, it's 40 degrees out today, or maybe lower than that. But the sun was shining, the blue skies are there. And there's something about taking in these elemental principles, if you will. When the sun shines and it's cold out, you can feel this fire element stirring up your spirit. Have you ever experienced that?

MARTIN: Absolutely, yes. What I hear you tell is that our urban living and our, especially the students who are essentially pushed toward sticking their heads in screens and sucking in information that way, would do themselves a favor by stepping outside and enjoying the elements. Even if it’s,

HOWARD: Well, a lot of them walk. I tell them one day you're going to remember me telling you 10 years from now, when you were walking as a student to campus and around campus, that was the healthiest part of your life. And I hope you continue walking, because it is probably the healthiest thing you can do, is to walk. And remember this. So I try to make an impression upon them. And I tell my patients who come, before you get into your car, maybe walk around the block once to just kind of recalibrate your body after an adjustment or talking to me about health and all.

MARTIN: Indeed

HOWARD: Process things.

MARTIN: Yeah. Get the flow happening again.

HOWARD: Yeah. Life is movement. Movement is life. I tell them. And in this day and age, it's hard to be motivated to get movement. We've become addicted to being entertained in a sedentary way or working in a sedentary way. There's not a need for us to walk from here or there. And I tell my patients, if you don't have a dog, if you're not walking now, get a dog and don't just chain them up in the backyard, but get out there and walk them every day.

MARTIN: Right on. Yeah. That's a good motivator.

HOWARD: I'd like to think so. Yeah.

MARTIN: All right. So on balance, actually, when I went to your website, the fourelementdoctor.com, it actually popped up an invitation to participate in some testing of an application.

HOWARD: Right. I have a phone app that my team is developing, and one day I hope, it should have been done like two months ago. To be honest with you, Martin. Maybe even six months ago. But everything good takes time, and I'm hoping that it's going to get done. But it's, I like to call it, The Holistic Life Balance plus Cool journal app.

MARTIN: Okay.

HOWARD: So what I've done there is I've divided the four elements into or divided the activities of one's life into seeing how each of these principles have, I've given them eight activities that each of these four elements can be involved in. And so each one is a screen which, four screens, with these eight activities that you kind of say, oh, I did this today, I did that today. They get points for it. They're rewarded with something that we will give them.

MARTIN: All right.

HOWARD: And the goal is to build, I like to say a great life is built upon good routines, good activities, build a good routine. So it's not always easy to build routines and to, there's a whole industry about having good habits and routines and that kind of thing. And it is a struggle, I deal with patients trying to motivate them, and it's not easy.

MARTIN: So this app is a tool to help us remember and tick off the boxes of, oh

HOWARD: yes, get rewarded for it and hopefully to help people to see these four elements the way they play out in their lives. Here I'm being maybe a little bold, but I think the four elements are kind of the antidote. I like to say that in the book. I say that they're the antidote to the imbalance of our time.

And let me just add this if I could. I don't know how much time we have, but you have modernity and you have, I like to say, modernity and nature or technology and nature. And they're like the primitive pole and the modern pole. And the modern pole is technology, and the primitive pole is nature. And we're all intrigued by technology, the newness that technology does and offers us a more exciting, interesting life in a way. But nature is the primitive pole that is slower, it is subtler. It makes us feel things in a deeper way. And the problem with today is that there's a bigger gulf between the modern and the primitive today than there ever was. There’s always will be a larger and larger gulf between the primitive and the modern, between nature and technology as it is in our human life in a generation that we're in. But that span between the two has never grown so exponentially wide. And I believe that's the stress that so many people are feeling.

This imbalance between the modern and the primitive, they know that something's out of balance. They know that something is nice about natural and all that kind of stuff. They don't know quite how to draw into their lives, perhaps. But my point here is at the core of nature, this primitive pole I believe, are those four elements. Fire, air, wood, and earth. And once you understand what these four principles, elements, forces of nature, energies of life are, the more you can create more balance in your life in a practical way even. And that's what this phone app in a long-winded way here is to bring more balance into our lives.

MARTIN: Yeah, well, in a form it's an affordable coach. It's somebody who will be there to remind me, have you done this? Have you done that? All the bits that I should be taking care of. And it's a great reminder because as you started earlier today saying that we find ourselves stuck in the conveniences of doing what we should be doing or staying, watching a movie instead of going out to walk the dog. Right.

HOWARD: Yes. Yeah. It ain't easy being a human being these days, but on some level, it's never been easier.

MARTIN: I think the convenience is what it's killing us.

HOWARD: Yeah, it's true.

MARTIN: I think life was meant to be challenging. I think we were meant to be pushing against resistance because if you stop pushing against resistance, you atrophy, you give up your strength by not exercising them.

HOWARD: Exactly. That's that, you know, that air principle of robustness, that muscular robustness of using our muscles to become more active in the world.

MARTIN: All right, well, there we have it. Introduction to Dr Howard Walsdorf and His world of Four Elements. It's well worth checking out. So go to fourelementdoctor.com and take a look. The book is listed there, the app will probably be presented and all the principles are there. And if you find yourself,

HOWARD: I also, I might have mentioned I have a Patreon platform, and for $5 a month you can join and you'll get access to all my videos. Quite a few of them are on YouTube. I recommend my YouTube channel for the doctor.

MARTIN: Right.

HOWARD: I’m even on TikTok for that matter and Instagram. I've got a little team helping me out here.

MARTIN: All right.

HOWARD: I'm not a high-tech kind of guy, but somebody's got to get out there and do things for the Four Elements. And I've tried to get people around me to help me out. I appreciate you, Martin, helping me get my message, my mission to be more accomplished. So I do appreciate your time as well.

MARTIN: You bet. And if you should find yourself in Syracuse, New York, then you could actually drop in on the office and get yourself straight.

HOWARD: Absolutely.

MARTIN: All right.

HOWARD: Thank you very much for that.

MARTIN: Howard Walsdorf, thank you very much. Thank you for taking your time to help people be more educated.

HOWARD: Thank you, Martin.

MARTIN: This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast. And you can find me at life-enthusiast.com. Thank you.