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The Four Behaviors

Life-changing, practical, self-healing skills in eating, moving, thinking & relating

The Four Behaviors Course We can  become empowered stewards of our bodies, through the cultivation of these Four Behaviors: eating, moving (and rest), thinking, and relating.   Each of these behaviors, when we are present for each, brings about a healing in the body.  We heal self-harming habitual patterns when we show up as a witness to these behaviors.  We become conscious of was once unconscious, sometimes even robotic behavior.   Nourish:  Naturopathic Healing Arts offers a path of liberation for even entrenched chronic illness through the intentional use of these four behaviors and discovering the causation of our illness and our innate power to heal.  This six week course is designed to introduce, assess and educate participants on how to improve  skillfulness in these four behaviors. 

Movement

When we examine our experience of strength, flexibility, Endurance and coordination, we become familiar with our limitations of moving freely. Pay attention to limitations such as pain, weakness, stiffness, and lack of coordination. Give yourself to full body awareness. Dont focus on what kind of work-out you "should" be doing.  We will learn how to do a work out that is best adapted to what each body actually needs. You learn this by engaging compassionately and intelligently with your body. -Charley Cropley, ND

This course transforms your relationship with movement.   We examine your strength, flexibility, and endurance and recommend personalized practices to correct harmful habits and cultivate beneficial skills to benefit your specific health concerns.   The underpinning of this work is learning to inhabiting the body in a way that renders it quiet and comfortable enough to begin clearly speak to patient-students.  

 

Movement when performed mechanically, divorced from our loving intention may harm us more than benefit us.  Our bodies become bent and heavy with unconscious patterns, past traumas, over-eating or not eating at all along with any kind and number of addictions.  By and by, we experience injury or disease or some kind of illness begins to materialize.  But what if we showed up to really see how we move?  What happens when we give our complete attention to our bodies and how it moves?  What if that attention was infused with loving kindness?  

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It is our conscious, caring presence in our body that heals our body.  Whether we work out vigorously, or are bed ridden, what heals us is deliberately using our movements as a way of being deliberately kind to ourselves.   We are creating an atmosphere of comfort so we can really see and experience what is right here with our bodies.

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Nourish teaches a system of movement that builds strength, endurance, flexibility, and grace that benefits all muscles and joints equally and simultaneously.  Healing movement can be applied to any joint or area of the body that is injured, inflamed, or painful.  â€‹It is the essence of yoga and physical therapy.   It is said that yoga is doing exactly the same thing in 1000 different positions and the same applies to Tai Chi, Pilates and other systems of conscious movement.   And we do this by moving and directing our attention into the body.  We learn to rest in the experience of being in the body and how to relate to our bodies--regardless if the parts of the body are uncomfortable or even in pain. 

Eating

Tapas, the fire of purification is taught as an embodied experience in each behavior.   Patient-students learn to intensify and “stand in” the fire of pain and stiffness amid a workout, hunger and craving for food, the fire of anxiety, grief, the fire of feeling inferior and incapable, on and on.   Healing is wielding the fire of purification.  Standing in this fire is only possible when we learn to relate to this fire differently.  -Charley Cropley, ND

This course transforms your relationship with food and eating.  Addiction, lethargy and chronic disease are the inescapable consequences being malnourished and poisoned.  We could go on about the many ways of poisoning but there are others that have said this already and more eloquently. But here we are, sick and moving from one craving to another, temporarily getting relief for a few moments when we give into a craving.  But invariably, the outcome manifests as some sort of sickness.  Some symptoms may be suppressed with pharmaceutical drugs yet without addressing the root and true causes of damage and imbalance in the body.

 

In this course, participants have a direct experience of relationship with their innate power to both cause and heal disease through eating.  This course transforms relationship with food and eating.   While engaged in this course, participants will gain:

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  • a foundational eating regimen

  • identifying food allergies

  • modified fasting

  • being prepared in all circumstances

  • establishing a personalized, long term, sustainable, eating regimen

Thinking

If your actions do not serve your thinking,  your thinking will serve your actions. 

This course transforms your relationship with thinking, or rather, it teaches and supports right use of mind and how to produce fresh, clean thinking.  The root of these teachings are two virtues:  cultivated compassion and willingness to see and speak truth.  Or said another way, learning to not sidestep what we have long thought of ourselves, our illness or situation and what got us here.  There is no end to understanding yourself and loving yourself.   

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Ask yourself these questions:  Does my thinking leave me more empowered?  What are the quality of my thoughts?  What is the predominant theme of my thinking mind?  Complaining mind?  Locked, fixed opinions and judgements of myself of others?  Fearful thinking?  Watch the mind, as it is and instead of hating these thoughts that bring you down, see if you can love them and love yourself for the courage to truly see what is happening with your thinking, with no judgement whatsoever.   This course can help you get here.  

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This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Relating

This course transforms how we relate to ourselves on every level of the mind and body.   It is only when we are able to interact with ourselves with kindness that we are able to offer this authentically to those around us, in particular close partnership and children benefit.  

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 Ask yourself:  How am I relating to body to the experience of being in the body?  How do I relation to emotions that run through me? What does it mean to offer compassion to myself?  

 

This course teaches mirroring the essence of compassionate communication.   Your first relationship is with yourself.   Through compassionate relating--coming from clear thinking--we heal our suffering.  We may still not be cured, we may still have illness, but we will not suffer through it.  

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Nourish creates a comfortable space where complete attention is given to the experience of this body and the truth of how we are treating our bodies, this experience, these emotions.   Conscious relating is intrinsic to mastering health.  These teachings are woven throughout  this guided course.  

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This course makes clear the overwhelming and incomparable power that our behavior has to both cause and heal disease. We will learn to appreciate what skillful eating, movement, thinking and relating actually looks like. We will evaluate our own skillfulness in each behavior and clarify what skills will most benefit our specific health concerns.

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This Course trains patient-students in the following essential skills:

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  • Identifying specific behaviors, making the most impact on health and quality of life

  • Evaluation of skills for each behavior 

  • Relationship with each of the behaviors

  • Learn and practice dialoguing between oneself and the conflicting voices and urges that govern behavior

  • Learn and practice both focused practices and spontaneous practices and the benefits of each

  • The power of breath 

  • How to meditate, self-reflect, vision, pray

  • Study of attitudes, values, beliefs, emotions, self-talk

  • Heal your Relationship to pleasure and pain

  • Cultivation of an attitude of gratitude

  • Formulate a personal code of virtue

  • Examination of unconscious expectations, assumptions

  • Eat meals that are natural, alive, clean, whole and simple 

  • Use the power of fasting

  • Identify your food sensitivities

  • Consciously experience  hunger and craving

  • Develop a healthy relationship with stimulants

  • How to obey the messages from your digestive tract (gas, bloating, heartburn etc.)

  • Learn bowel cleansing and enemas 

  • Study how your eating is affected by your moods, attitudes, relationships, menstrual cycle, sleep, fatigue, times of day, other persons and your schedule.

  • How to seek first to understand; then to be understood

  • Authentic, focussed but relaxed listening

  • The practices of self-loving and self-understanding

  • Compassion, gentleness

  • Identifying honest self-talk vs. critical story making

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Programs included:

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The Four Behaviors

Self Mastery

Karma & Causation

 

Appointment Sessions:

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2 - Clinical Session (25 min)

4 - Clinical Session (40 min)

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Engagement time:  

 

6 week course*

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*These Guided Courses are designed to work with and fit into your present schedule, with your health, work and lives as they exist at the time of booking.  

 

Pro tip:  For this course and many of our courses, it would be most beneficial to partner with a spouse or friend.  Ask someone to embark and this empowering journey!

4 Behavior Course

Booking for The Four Behaviors is below.  If you have any questions or need assistance, please reach out.  Thank you.  

The Four Behaviors
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