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"The place of wood is to grow upward towards the fire element. It's always trying to reach the sun."
How will you grow and move past the obstacles in your way? Leave a comment below and let us know.
[post_title] => Talking Wellness with Dr. Peter Borten: The Wood Element (video)
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What do you like about your anxiety?
This is a question I’ve asked many of my patients. Unsurprisingly, almost everyone’s initial response is “nothing.” But over time (especially in people who are determined to get the most out of their unpleasant experiences) I’ve seen anxiety become a gift that re-orients people in a profound way.
I’ve learned many strategies for managing anxiety directly, some of which I shared in my
last article. They can really help. However, my greatest intention isn’t merely that we can effectively manage anxiety when it arises, but that our basic orientation is to be attuned to what’s good, what’s working, and what we
love about life.
So this time I’m going to share self-care practices to guide you back to the love beneath that fear.
It’s true that fear isn’t usually a
healthy expression of love, but sometimes it is – like when love spurs fear in a parent and they rush into harm’s way to save a child. Most of the time we’re afraid, though, the underlying love is so contorted by the mind that it doesn’t feel like love at all. It just feels nasty and horrible, and we get into a vicious circle whereby the feeling prompts fearful thoughts and the thoughts heighten the feelings, and so on.
But deeper than all of that craziness, we love life, we love ourselves, and we love others. I would like to invite you this week to bring your anxious feelings back to the loving point of their origin.
1) Practice good posture. Having a straight spine automatically helps you to breathe more fully. It also has a subtle effect on your mood. It’s easier to feel threatened, weak, or like a victim when you’re slouching; conversely, when you sit or stand tall, with a straight spine, you’ll naturally feel clearer and more confident.
2) State the facts (in the morning and always). What you do in the morning affects your whole day, so start with a brief and enthusiastic session of truth telling. What is good right now? Are you alive? Are you breathing? Did the sun rise again? Do you have enough to eat? Say it.
Who do you choose to be today? A light-hearted person? A truth-telling person? An emissary of love in the world? A devoted servant to the highest good of the world? Say it.
Pausing, noticing, and stating the facts about what’s good in your life is like hitting the save button. It programs your mind to continue to spot the good stuff. It reconfigures you for peace.
And stating the facts during fearful times is like becoming a warrior with a razor sharp sword. With your loving fierceness, you cut through the collective illusions and emotional fog, reminding yourself and others,
We didn’t jump into the world just so we could cower from life. The truth is bigger (and better) than the story we’re telling each other.
3) Get connected to the elements. Spend time in nature, ideally including some direct contact of skin to earth and natural bodies of water. Some people with anxiety also report that they feel much better with sun exposure. Others feel a benefit from sitting in front of a fire or even several candles. Besides helping to realign you with the rhythm of the natural world, it’s also a nice break from your electronic devices and media.
4) Establish a daily routine and stick to it. Predictability helps stabilize a wayward mind and helps the body get into a consistent rhythm. This means setting a regular bedtime and wake time, having meals at the same time each day, exercising on a regular basis at the same time, meditating at the same time, bathing at the same time, etc. Of course, your routine shouldn’t be strict in a way that generates stress if you stray from it – it’s something you do out of kindness for yourself.
5) Love actively. There’s no use in trying to obliterate fear. That would be like trying to destroy the sound of ‘middle C’ on a piano. Fear is a frequency of energy. No matter how you train yourself to cut it out of your life, you can always call it up again. Instead, focus on the love beneath.
What do you
love that your mind tells you is threatened? Give your attention to loving what you love instead. Love is so much stronger and bigger than fear, and unlike fear, love is a unifying and creative force. If you’re out of practice, find the things that are easiest to love, like kittens and donuts, and feel the love opening your heart. Then practice expanding that love to envelop yourself, your neighbor, your houseplants . . . and your fear. Then go bigger.
All along, keep opening your heart. Just imagine it opening like a golden ring in the center of your chest. Learn to feel when it closes, and patiently open it again and again and again.
Love will prevail. Always.
Dr. Peter Borten
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When I was a teenager, I invested $400 in 20 years of anger and a big, hard, life-changing lesson. I had seen this guy around – a friend of a friend named Justin – carrying the exact model of guitar that I wanted, and there was a rumor that he was looking to sell it. I tracked him down in a parking lot by the beach where high schoolers hung out on summer nights.
He was among a group of kids smoking cigarettes on a Mexican blanket in the back of a van. As I approached them, he nodded at me in recognition, and I asked him about the guitar. He said he had paid $800 for the instrument but was willing to let it go for half of that because he needed money fast. So fast, in fact, that he wanted me to pay him for it on the spot even though he didn’t have the guitar with him. That way, he explained, he would know I was serious about it and he wouldn’t sell it to another guy that he had already promised it to. I went home and returned with my money, which I handed over, and he agreed to meet me at a coffee shop the next morning with the guitar.
Only, as you can probably guess, he didn’t show up.
I found out where he lived and went to his house. He answered the door flanked by a large, red-faced man several years older than us who looked twitchy, and had scabs on his knuckles. I asked for the guitar.
“What guitar?” Justin replied. “Are you talking about my cousin’s guitar?”
“Yeah,” the man asked, “are you talking about my guitar?” and he pointed to the guitar, which lay on a dirty couch behind them.
“Well it’s my guitar actually,” I stated, trying to sound tougher than I felt. “I paid Justin 400 bucks for it yesterday.”
“Why would you make up a story like that?” his cousin challenged, sneering to reveal a mouthful of broken teeth. “He can’t sell my guitar. Can you, Justin?”
“Nope,” said Justin. “I barely know this loser.”
“Did this little boy give you 400 bucks?” Cousin asked.
“Of course not. Cuz then I’d have 400 bucks. But I’m broke, see?” and he pulled out his wallet and opened it to show that it was empty.
“Well then,” said Cousin, turning back to me, “it looks like you just came here to try to cheat us and that’s not very nice.”
“You’re the ones who are cheating me!” I countered, but my instincts were telling me that no good would come out of pushing this.
“Is this little boy threatening us at our own house, Justin?” Cousin asked.
“It kinda sounds like it,” Justin replied. “It kinda sounds like he wants to fight.” The two of them edged toward me.
“I don’t want to fight,” I said, “I just want the guitar that I paid for.”
“If you don’t want trouble,” said Cousin, “then get off our porch and don’t show your face around here again.”
So I left.
At that age, in that time and place, I believed that getting an adult involved – even one with a badge – simply wasn’t an option. Not solving your own problems was looked down upon, and there was no real escape from retribution for squealing in a small town. No, the only way to manage such an issue was to beat someone up. My guy friends said things like, “You need to go back over there and pound the money out of him!” But I was a skinny pacifist and Justin and his cousin were the burly sons of lobstermen. I suggested that maybe a whole gang of us could visit Justin’s house, but my friends sheepishly declined, murmuring things like, “I don’t have any beef with him . . .”
I only encountered Justin once more in person. I ran into him at a restaurant a few months later, where he was sitting at a table with his friends (no Cousin, luckily). I walked over to him and said, “You still owe me 400 bucks.”
“Yeah?” he replied, “Get in line. I owe money to a lot of people.” And at this he shrugged and looked to his friends who all laughed and started yelling out how much he owed them.
I wish I could say that was the end of it, but I had hundreds – no, thousands – of encounters with him in my mind during and after this time. The incident generated many negative conclusions: that I was an idiot, that people are bad and untrustworthy, that I was weak, that Boston is full of thugs, that I wasn’t manly, that I couldn’t count on my friends, and so on. I had daydreams in which I would imagine myself destroying his life, or going back with a gun or a knife and getting my money, or stealing the guitar.
Sometimes I would forget about the whole thing for a month or six months or a year, but whenever I remembered it again I still felt upset.
It was many years before I entertained the idea of forgiveness. I didn’t like him and I didn’t want to give him anything he didn’t deserve, but I was beginning to get a sense of just how much my own resentment had poisoned me. So I tried it. I said to myself, “I forgive Justin for stealing my money,” and I felt a little relieved.
But shortly thereafter, I caught myself replaying the story and feeling angry. I hadn’t let it go. I was frustrated. I forgave him again. And then I caught myself again. And I repeated this cycle a few more times before a deeper understanding began to dawn on me.
First, I decided that it would be worth $400 to really let this go. So I reframed it – I decided I was letting him have the $400 willingly so that I could just be done with this. I hoped that if I could convince myself that I was choosing this, there would be nothing to resent.
Unfortunately, this strategy wasn’t enough to help me get over the whole thing, but there was value in being rational about the various costs and payoffs involved. I was getting nothing but pain for my $400 as long as I held onto my story. And, Briana once reminded me, if I had taken on those guys: “You would have been paying four hundred dollars to get your butt kicked.”
Second, I discovered that forgiveness is almost always a many-layered process and constitutes more work than we tend to expect. In my case, I had some anger about having gotten ripped off, but I was gradually getting to a place where $400 wasn’t that much money. The actual theft wasn’t the biggest thing. More bothersome was the sense that my instincts were wrong, that I was helpless, that I was a wimp, and especially that I should have done something differently.
I looked long and hard at all of this, and it took me on a deeper journey into my psyche that revealed that these thoughts all had deeper roots. There was a certain mistrust for the world that was important to recognize, but more importantly, a mistrust of myself, and lots of self-blame. I systematically unearthed everything I found and forgave it all.
Third, I realized that true forgiveness is not a single act, but a commitment. I’ve written about this idea in several articles and books, but never before told the story that led me to it. Until I had this revelation, I believed that a proper act of forgiveness should last forever and the resentment should never come back. Thus, I had also some self-blame around not having forgiven correctly, since it wasn’t sticking.
Then I learned that the “correct” way to forgive is to make an agreement with myself that I am going to forgive over and over, as many times as it takes. It’s also an agreement to be mindful enough to notice when I’ve picked up my resentment again, to stop indulging in it, and let it go once more.
So, in the end, perhaps $400 was a bargain for the insights I finally got.
What have you invested in (whether with dollars, energy, time, or some other commodity) that has thus far yielded only pain? Is it possible to reframe it such that you offer to willingly give what has already been given – in exchange for growth, insight, and freedom?
Where is forgiveness in order? Besides the most obvious object of forgiveness, what sub-resentments exist? (It’s worth getting a pen and paper for this, since it might be a long list.) Are you willing to make a lifelong commitment to forgive and thus be freed from a story that has kept you enslaved? It’s heroism, truly.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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"The place of wood is to grow upward towards the fire element. It's always trying to reach the sun."
How will you grow and move past the obstacles in your way? Leave a comment below and let us know.
[post_title] => Talking Wellness with Dr. Peter Borten: The Wood Element (video)
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Nice – Thanks, yes exercise, I took a long hike today to help with the pain . Best to you. I have bought your book and I get emails from you. Please don’t add me a second time! Blessings.
This is so true, Peter! Your explanation is very helpful, makes so much sense and validates what I have experience with my own chronic pain. I started going to Barre3 for exercise about 2 years ago and it has reduced my pain tremendously. Prior to this I avoided exercise because of low back pain. Movement actually hurt and I thought it could make the pain worse. One day I decided I am no longer going to let my pain hold me back. I decided that I wanted to break out of the mind set that was keeping my body and my spirit stuck. That was a life-changing moment and decision for me. I started slowly and made lots of modifications at first (and I still do today) but I am so much happier and have much less pain than I did two years ago thanks to making exercise a big part of my self-care routine.
Namaste! The message came when I needed the most!
I’m currently been cutting way back on my pain meds with the intention of completely coming off all meds which I’ve been on for 7 yrs. I want to have a clear mind, body and soul and the only way is to work through my pain naturally instead of masking it. I like what your video said about breathing through your pain, experiencing it, then allowing it to leave. I am determined to live pain free, drug free and be free…. Thank you.