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Last week I wrote about forgiveness as the ultimate psychological cleanse. The emphasis of the article was on forgiving other people, because most of us have plenty of work to do in this area, and it’s pretty easy to identify the resentment we have toward others, whether it’s our parents, ex-lovers, and bosses, or more distant relations, like Dick Cheney and Monsanto. But I believe the massive submerged part of the resentment iceberg is all about ourselves.
In my opinion, whether we’re aware of it or not, we blame ourselves for everything about our life that isn’t the way we think it should be. Like I said, this portion of the iceberg is usually hidden, so I expect many people will disagree with me on this. I didn’t believe it until just a few years ago. Before then, I would have told you, I’m not someone who blames myself when things go wrong.
But through my meditation practice, I gradually discovered a wellspring of self-blame, shame, and guilt within myself. It’s not that these feelings just arose in me; I unearthed them. They’ve been there since childhood. And my sense is that they’re not just my feelings . . . they belong to all of us. The focus of this self-blame is so broad that I believe it’s simply an inevitable product of the way we socialize each other.
Probably, it stems from an early time in our lives when the people around us began to teach us about the world. There were so many words, labels, and behaviors to learn, and the goal of every lesson was to be right. When we named the color, or peed in the right place, or ate all our food, we did it right and got the reward of praise, love, and approval. And when we drew on the wall, or hit someone, or had the wrong answer, we didn’t get this reward. Maybe we even got disapproval or anger.
And since most of this positive and negative feedback came from our parents – the people responsible for our very survival – we naturally made being right one of our highest priorities. We became experts at being – or at least, appearing – right. Two important secondary behaviors developed from this training. First, we taught our subconscious to habitually identify wrong things – in us and in others – because it’s at least as important to know what’s wrong, and to avoid being wrong, as it is to be right. Second, we learned to internally preside over the judgment of our own behavior. By policing ourselves, scolding ourselves, and withholding approval from ourselves, we could get better at presenting only rightnessto the world.
As we moved into the school phase of life, this training became more rigorous. Our teachers and peers joined in on the process of critiquing us, and we began to see that certain things about us could be wrong that we never thought about controlling before – like the size of our body, or the color of our skin, or the way our hair looked. And if we were brought up in a sin-based religion, we were likely taught that, despite being “created in God’s image,” we had messed up really bad. All of this served to strengthen our internal critic.
But our self-criticism has been such a constant thing that many of us barely even notice it. Even in psychologically healthy folks, I’d guess that there are dozens of thoughts each day that go something like: “I’m not working fast enough,” “I should be thinner,” “There’s something wrong with me,” “I shouldn’t have said that,” “I should have done that differently,” “I should be better at . . .,” “I should be more accomplished at this age than I am,” “I’m a mediocre parent,” “Why am I so bad at making money?,” “I’m not doing anything impressive,” “I’m not very pretty,” “I screwed up my life,” and more. Self-blame thoughts like these make us less happy, and they cause us to withhold approval from ourselves, even if they don’t seem so bad. Even if we think, “But it’s true.”
Forgiveness – continual forgiveness, where we just let ourselves and the world BE however we are – is the means to liberation. There’s a line I love from A Course in Miracles: “God does not forgive because he has never condemned.” All the condemnation comes from within our own minds, and forgiveness is the ultimate cleanse.
I believe that a big part of our personal evolution is about letting more and more love into our lives. We can all have as much love as we want, but we restrict it from certain areas of our lives because we don't accept them or we think they should be different. So, there are these dark nooks and crannies in our consciousness where we haven't let the love in. The more of those we have, the less light, free, joyful, and spontaneous we feel. They're like sandbags weighing down our hot air balloon. And when we forgive, it's like cutting the strings.
When we start forgiving habitually, not only do we begin to experience a lightness and freedom that for many of us has been absent for decades, but we also begin to recognize just how powerful we are. Even if we’ve been exploring personal development or spirituality for a while, we’ve probably had an outlook that amounts to looking for and appreciating the goodness in each situation. Perhaps we’ve even come to realize that there’s a certain lightness to be found in every circumstance. But when we start living forgiveness, and we shed mountains of blame, a new understanding may emerge: we don’t need to find the goodness in every situation; we bring the goodness to every situation. You are the light of the world, as soon as you choose it.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => You Are the Light of the World
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Anxiety , like to millions of people worldwide, has affected me in a profound way my whole life. It wasn't until my early teens that I decided to do something about it. While engaging in talk therapy was extremely helpful, I couldn't put my therapist in my pocket, so everyday life was still a struggle.
I was also against western medicine when it came to treating anxiety disorders. I have watched it provide only temporary relief, and in turn cause long term problems. I never believed in putting a huge band aid on something that could be fixed with hard work and dedication. Though I still was doing everything I thought was right ( exercising, eating right, individual and group therapy), I still needed some extra help.
When I was 21 years old, I started working at the Dragontree. I am almost 26 now, and very thankful for the education and healing environment this company has provided for me. I learned different ways to cope with my anxiety. The benefits from getting massage, acupuncture, and the release from stress when you choose to step away and indulge yourself once and awhile are life changing. It has changed my outlook on how to better treat my mind, body, and soul.
Along with that, I have been taking Dr. Peter Borten's Anxiety Formula Tincture for a year now. While I've strayed from western medicine, I still found some herbs and supplements weren't cutting it for me. However this formula, which is concocted of Chinese herbs, has been my solution. It helps calm my mind, without putting me to sleep or altering my mood.
If you have anxiety, I would highly recommend this tincture. There is no magic pill to take stress away, but there are natural and safe ways to help you cope and get about your day, and give the world the best you possible!
-Megan
Front Desk Dragontree Airport
[post_title] => Living with Anxiety
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As a teenager I spent a lot of time in the tunnels of Boston’s subway system. They were brightly tiled in red, blue, green, and orange, and there was a smell that I’ll never forget – not terrible, not pleasant – that poured forth in gusts as a train approached. I sat on benches with my head down, doing homework or reading the liner notes of albums, and generally nobody bothered me.
Except the evangelists, that is. I was often told that I needed to accept Jesus as my lord and savior – or else burn in hell. One guy had a sandwich board that listed all the reasons you could go to hell – rock ’n’ roll, masturbation, homosexuality, fornication, socialism, feminism, atheism, etc. – and he liked to give me the stink eye as I walked by. Sometimes I’d run into the Hare Krishnas, who told me that my whole way of life was wrong and tried to get me to come to their temple. And at home, we were visited weekly by Jehovah’s Witnesses who were determined to win us over despite being told repeatedly that we already had a religion.
Religion felt like a heavy inheritance, and these exchanges made me averse to being told what to believe – so averse that I threw the baby out with the spiritual bathwater and turned my back on it altogether. Eventually I was able to recognize that the spiritual connection – which religion aims to facilitate – doesn’t require a religious structure, and it certainly doesn’t require dogma. But even years later, having studied yoga, qi gong, reiki, acupuncture, Daoism, and other practices that offer a non-dogmatic approach to spiritual enrichment, I still found it difficult to speak openly to students and patients about spirituality because I didn’t want to come across like those evangelists – pushy, judgmental, and condescending.
However, I had seen firsthand the positive impact of a spiritual practice – and it’s supported by scientific research: people with a spiritual practice tend to have less stress, greater resilience during challenging times, more positive engagement with community, better health, and a longer life. So, little by little, I began delicately broaching the subject. I touched on it in some articles, and then Briana and I covered it a bit more explicitly in the book The Well Life.
Meanwhile, I observed more and more cases where the presence of a spiritual practice was instrumental in a patient’s recovery. It would be untrue to say that people can’t be happy or can’t overcome challenges without a spiritual practice, but for those who find it difficult to achieve lasting happiness or who seem beset by one challenge after another, a spiritual practice often makes the difference. The same is often the case for those who feel their achievements are somehow hollow, or who constantly feel that something is missing – that emptiness may be the absence of a spiritual dimension, a means by which one’s individual pursuits are connected to the whole.
Finally, a few years ago, we decided to stop beating around the bush. We wrote a book called Rituals for Transformation – a 108-day process for awakening this dimension of your life. Briana doesn't really have any hang-ups around this topic, but I was a bit nervous about releasing it. Even though it’s not a religious book, I thought it might push some of those buttons. After all, religion has been not only a structure for spiritual connection, but also an instrument for political control, discrimination, and genocide – and these associations aren’t easily erased from our collective consciousness. But part of our aim with this book is to help people see that spirituality is the baby that many of us threw out because we didn’t resonate with the bathwater. Your spiritual life is yours to define, and spirituality is available to everyone – religious and nonreligious, theist and atheist.
When you have an experience of this dimension, whether through prayer or mindfulness or a spontaneous connection with nature that transcends everyday consciousness, it’s funny to consider that we talk about wanting to give a sliver of our lives to it, or that it’s “available” to us if we’d like some, like, “Sprinkles are available for your ice cream,” because the reality is that it’s always here, and it encompasses the whole of your life.
But a little is enough, so we were careful not to make Rituals for Transformation so ambitious as to be difficult to complete. I remember my first qi gong teacher explaining that although we were beginning with exercises that would only take 20 minutes of each day, the change in consciousness they’d produce would begin to spread into the rest of our lives. She was right – it wasn’t long before I started to be aware of my energy and below-the-surface interactions with the world, even when I was just walking down a street or eating or having a conversation.
I’d love to hear about your experience with religion and/or spirituality and how this practice has supported you – or, if you don’t have a spiritual practice, what has gotten in the way.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Ditch the Dogma, Keep the Spirituality
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Last week I wrote about forgiveness as the ultimate psychological cleanse. The emphasis of the article was on forgiving other people, because most of us have plenty of work to do in this area, and it’s pretty easy to identify the resentment we have toward others, whether it’s our parents, ex-lovers, and bosses, or more distant relations, like Dick Cheney and Monsanto. But I believe the massive submerged part of the resentment iceberg is all about ourselves.
In my opinion, whether we’re aware of it or not, we blame ourselves for everything about our life that isn’t the way we think it should be. Like I said, this portion of the iceberg is usually hidden, so I expect many people will disagree with me on this. I didn’t believe it until just a few years ago. Before then, I would have told you, I’m not someone who blames myself when things go wrong.
But through my meditation practice, I gradually discovered a wellspring of self-blame, shame, and guilt within myself. It’s not that these feelings just arose in me; I unearthed them. They’ve been there since childhood. And my sense is that they’re not just my feelings . . . they belong to all of us. The focus of this self-blame is so broad that I believe it’s simply an inevitable product of the way we socialize each other.
Probably, it stems from an early time in our lives when the people around us began to teach us about the world. There were so many words, labels, and behaviors to learn, and the goal of every lesson was to be right. When we named the color, or peed in the right place, or ate all our food, we did it right and got the reward of praise, love, and approval. And when we drew on the wall, or hit someone, or had the wrong answer, we didn’t get this reward. Maybe we even got disapproval or anger.
And since most of this positive and negative feedback came from our parents – the people responsible for our very survival – we naturally made being right one of our highest priorities. We became experts at being – or at least, appearing – right. Two important secondary behaviors developed from this training. First, we taught our subconscious to habitually identify wrong things – in us and in others – because it’s at least as important to know what’s wrong, and to avoid being wrong, as it is to be right. Second, we learned to internally preside over the judgment of our own behavior. By policing ourselves, scolding ourselves, and withholding approval from ourselves, we could get better at presenting only rightnessto the world.
As we moved into the school phase of life, this training became more rigorous. Our teachers and peers joined in on the process of critiquing us, and we began to see that certain things about us could be wrong that we never thought about controlling before – like the size of our body, or the color of our skin, or the way our hair looked. And if we were brought up in a sin-based religion, we were likely taught that, despite being “created in God’s image,” we had messed up really bad. All of this served to strengthen our internal critic.
But our self-criticism has been such a constant thing that many of us barely even notice it. Even in psychologically healthy folks, I’d guess that there are dozens of thoughts each day that go something like: “I’m not working fast enough,” “I should be thinner,” “There’s something wrong with me,” “I shouldn’t have said that,” “I should have done that differently,” “I should be better at . . .,” “I should be more accomplished at this age than I am,” “I’m a mediocre parent,” “Why am I so bad at making money?,” “I’m not doing anything impressive,” “I’m not very pretty,” “I screwed up my life,” and more. Self-blame thoughts like these make us less happy, and they cause us to withhold approval from ourselves, even if they don’t seem so bad. Even if we think, “But it’s true.”
Forgiveness – continual forgiveness, where we just let ourselves and the world BE however we are – is the means to liberation. There’s a line I love from A Course in Miracles: “God does not forgive because he has never condemned.” All the condemnation comes from within our own minds, and forgiveness is the ultimate cleanse.
I believe that a big part of our personal evolution is about letting more and more love into our lives. We can all have as much love as we want, but we restrict it from certain areas of our lives because we don't accept them or we think they should be different. So, there are these dark nooks and crannies in our consciousness where we haven't let the love in. The more of those we have, the less light, free, joyful, and spontaneous we feel. They're like sandbags weighing down our hot air balloon. And when we forgive, it's like cutting the strings.
When we start forgiving habitually, not only do we begin to experience a lightness and freedom that for many of us has been absent for decades, but we also begin to recognize just how powerful we are. Even if we’ve been exploring personal development or spirituality for a while, we’ve probably had an outlook that amounts to looking for and appreciating the goodness in each situation. Perhaps we’ve even come to realize that there’s a certain lightness to be found in every circumstance. But when we start living forgiveness, and we shed mountains of blame, a new understanding may emerge: we don’t need to find the goodness in every situation; we bring the goodness to every situation. You are the light of the world, as soon as you choose it.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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