YOUR AD HERE »

Body & MindwoRX wellness center opens in Vail Valley

Cassie PenceDaily CorrespondentVail Valley, CO COlorado
Dominique Taylor/Vail DailyMike Christenberry, right, leads his famiily including wife Sara Manwiller, left and two children Max Christenberry, 9, left, center and Grace Christenberry, 6, in meditation Friday at his new meditation and wellness center in Edwards. The new studio offers pilattes, meditation and wellness classes throughout the week.
ALL |

VAIL VALLEY, Colorado -Like a lot of people who lived through the ’70s, Vail Valley resident Mike Christenberry, who owns JointwoRX Physical Therapy in Edwards with his wife, Sara Manwiller, dabbled in transcendental meditation, but it never resonated with him. Enlightenment didn’t present itself, either did a far-out experience, as he expected. So his meditation practice fell to the wayside, like macram and bellbottoms.It wasn’t until a year and a half ago, after his fourth bout with cancer, that Christenberry decided to give meditation another try. Upon his wife’s insistence, he and Manwiller headed to the Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, Calif., for the “Perfect Health Conscience Karma Program” to detox their bodies and cleanse their minds after the stress of Christenberry’s chemotherapy and surgery. It was here that the center’s founder, Deepak Chopra, introduced them to primordial sound meditation.”It was like going to church for the very first time, like that ah-ha moment,” Christenberry says. “From that point on, I began looking at healing myself from within, both body and mind, and maintaining that level of balance. Doctors can give you the medicine and do the surgeries, but the rest really does have to come from within you.”Primordial sound meditation, Christenberry says, doesn’t require you to focus on a concept. The idea is to find the spaces of silence and stillness between your thoughts, a place where you are not living in the past or the presumptions of your future. “We build our life around what we already have done and where we want to take ‘it’ and expand upon ‘it,’ or create a bigger version of ‘it,’ or move away from ‘it,’ whatever ‘it’ is,” Christenberry says. “This is about taking the ‘it’ out of the sentence and about getting back to me, myself, my deepest sense.”Upon returning from the retreat and developing a regular meditation practice, Christenberry noticed a shift in his perspective, which led to changes in his daily rituals and a release from the rut of his usual thoughts and actions.Inspired by the results, Christenberry and Manwiller decided to return and attend the Chopra Center University; Christenberry to become a certified Chopra Center meditation instructor and Manwiller to become a Perfect Health Ayurvedic Lifestyle Consultant. Ayurveda is an ancient Indian healing system based on identifying your mind and body imbalances and then balancing them with meditation, the use of the five senses and diet.”Chopra Center Certified Instructors become experts in teaching friends, family, co-workers, and members of their communities the most nourishing daily routines and other practical tools for balance, natural stress relief, physical health, and emotional freedom,” says davidji, the dean of Chopra Center University and the Center’s lead educator, in a press release. To share what they learned, Christenberry and Manwiller recently opened Body & MindwoRX in the Edwards Commercial Park, a wellness center that will host group meditation classes, private mediation classes, massage, and eventually some fitness classes and Ayurvedic lifestyle consulting.

Participants gather in a circle and take a comfortable seat to prepare for meditation. No one has to take lotus pose. Christenberry offers regular chairs, or you can sit cross-legged on the floor on cushions or supported by floor seats. Christenberry will lead you through simple breathing exercises and then give you a mantra to focus on during meditation. Mantra in Sanskrit means vehicle of the mind. Mantras help drive your mind away from thought into a more peaceful level by giving you words to focus on that have no meaning or attachments for you. It could be something simple, like “so … hum,” or something more complex, like your own personal primordial sound. “The primordial sound meditation is based around your primordial sound, which is the sound the earth was making when you were born. It’s the vibration that’s tuned to you, depending on the time, the day and where you were born,” Christenberry says. “Like Om is the universal sound, the hymn of the universe, your primordial sound is your mantra. There are only 108 of them.”For people who are interested in taking their meditation practice a little deeper, Christenberry, through the help of the Chopra Center, can help people find out their primordial sound. The Chopra Center calculates it following Vedic mathematic formulas.The belief is when you silently repeat a mantra during meditation, it creates a vibration that helps you fall into the gap of stillness that’s lies beneath the noisy internal chatter of your mind, according to the Chopra Center’s Web site.”And the group dynamic for leaving that carousel of chatter is so much better than trying it at home again, again, again and saying I can’t do this,” Christenberry says. “Because when you are sitting next to your friend or your co-worker or someone you don’t know, you try harder and you go a little bit deeper each time.”

One of the common responses among people who are new to meditation is this: “I’m bad at meditating.””The reason people think they’re bad is because they have thoughts when they meditate, and that’s normal,” Manwiller says. “There’s not a single person that cannot have a thought when they meditate. It’s virtually impossible.””We have roughly 80,000 thoughts a day about every 1.25 seconds. They keep coming. But when we can find that space in between, it suddenly seems to be the clarifying moment throughout our day,” Christenberry says.Another common myth is that you will have an “experience” during meditation.”People think lightening, the Dalai Lama is going to be levitating over there, Ganesh will be sitting over here, the elephant boy with his nose pointing up for luck. Nothing happens during meditation other than thoughts, sleep, falling into the gap, falling into that moment of silence and stillness and observing your breath and repeating your mantra, the only focus point that is given to you,” Christenberry says.



Whether or not you believe in the soul, the spirit or the true self that Eastern philosophers believe meditation can link you closer to, the practice has many physiological benefits that are measured by Western standards. Various medical studies and science journals have shown that a regular meditation practice lowers blood pressure, strengthens the immune system and releases stress, which is the biggie.”Stress causes our heart rate to rise, our blood pressure to rise, our respiratory rate to rise, it makes our platelets stickier, which makes us more predisposed to strokes or cardiovascular disease. It reduces our DHEA hormone, which is our human growth hormone that allows our cells to reproduce properly, so stress is a precursor to cancer,” Christenberry says. Meditation as a sleep aid is what Manwiller has noticed most about the benefits of her practice. She had heard that meditation, when practiced 20-30 minutes twice each day, will make you need two hours less sleep per night. For someone who religiously needs 8 to 9 hours to function, she liked the sound of this.”Initially I thought, there’s no way I could add another hour to my day. But it’s true, meditation ultimately helps you sleep better. I can get away with only 7 hours now,” Manwiller says.So who can really benefit from meditation? For starters, Manwiller says, people with chronic pain, headaches and inflammation, ailments that can cause stress. But the truth is, meditation can assist everyone to live fuller lives.”It’s about teaching them to tap into their own intuition and use what they already have inside to be the best person they can be from a mind and body standpoint,” Manwiller says.”We never came with an owner’s manual,” Christenberry says. “Meditation is the beginning of it.” Cassie Pence is a freelance writer based in Vail. She’s recently been inspired to begin her own meditation practice.


Support Local Journalism