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Welcome to part three of my series on longevity. I wrote a few articles on this subject ten years ago and felt it was time to revisit it. We’re exposed to way too much doom and gloom media these days. There’s so much GOOD to live for. In fact, my first article focused on the impact of perspective and presence – living for now and loving life make us happier, if not also longer lived. The second article focused on the benefits of working, stretching, and relaxing all parts of ourselves (body and mind). (You can read them on our site.)
Let’s continue.
#3: Dance
I already wrote about exercise, so recommending dance may seem redundant, but I believe dance has unique benefits. Humans have been dancing for fun, for health, for art, and for ceremony since the earliest times. Dance is one of the most basic and primal forms of release and expression.
Formal dance is wonderful, but I specifically mean freeform dance here – giving yourself over to music (or the music in your soul), letting your body move in whatever ways it wants, being unrestrained, uncalculated, and uncensored. Dance is an incredible outlet. It’s also a profound means of inner exploration, healing, and spiritual connection.
As you dance, consider making it a process of inquiry. These are just a few of the questions you might ask:
- What comes up when you let yourself feel without blocking anything out?
- Is there a shape the body wants to make or a form of expression the body is drawn to? Where is it rooted (both in your body and in your past)?
- Is there unfinished business related to it? Where does it take you?
- What does dance give you access to that’s usually hidden?
- In what ways is your movement blocked?
- What old things are stored in your tissues? Can you allow your dance to liberate them or facilitate a conversation with a part of yourself that needs a voice?
- What does the wild part of you want to express through dance?
- What is the force that’s driving this dance? Can you get curious about it, open your connection to it, listen to it, feel it fully?
It’s great when we start scheduling a regular time for dance. It’s even better is when the dance starts spilling out into our life as a whole and we start finding ourselves “dancing through our days.” This may not necessarily look like we’re twirling and leaping from our desk to the copy machine, though it might! Alternatively, it may be more of an internal dance – a new, playful, graceful, fluid way of navigating whatever comes along.
For some people it’s easiest to go deep, to foster self-awareness and healing when dancing alone. For others, a group dynamic is more supportive and inspiring. While I emphasized the personal benefits of dance, it’s also an incredible medium for connecting with others, repairing conflict, learning to listen and be receptive, opening our hearts together, and sharing our light. The challenge with dancing in a group is to not become consumed with what others are doing or how we appear to them. Therefore, I feel the guiding principles for a group dance setting should include freedom, exploration, and non-judgment. If you look into “ecstatic dance” or Gabrielle Roth’s “5Rhythms” format, you can probably find a community that engages in this form of dance in your area.
I have a homework assignment for you: dance in a totally unrestrained way sometime this week. Share with the community: How do you feel about dance? What has it done for you? What’s your favorite music to dance to?
Be well,
Peter
P.S. If you missed part one and part two in this series, they are linked here.
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I got a new sleeping bag for our camping trip this weekend. I didn’t go to REI because I wanted the wide, old-fashioned kind with flannel inside. If the temperature drops below 50, I’ll probably be chilly because it’s not much more than a tube-shaped blanket, but I like it. As I was recycling all the extraneous stuff that came with it, a little slip of paper fluttered into the bin and the words on it caught my eye. It had the name of the small company that made it, and below that: “We appreciate you, dear customer!” I see these things a lot and wouldn’t usually give it a thought, but this one made me pause.
I’m looking forward to the road trip to our camping destination. I love road trips – especially in areas I’ve never explored. As I’m passing through a new town, if there’s one thing that makes me think, “I could live here,” it’s the presence of small businesses. Driving through miles of Walmarts, Home Depots, Targets, and Subways doesn’t do it for me. Seeing “Millie’s Coffee” or “Bud’s Hand-Carved Lawn Animals” or “Aunt Sissie’s Famous Pies” – that’s the stuff that makes me want to pull over.
Small businesses were already at a disadvantage before the pandemic. Now they’re really in peril. But there’s something about the experience of visiting a small business and the customer/purveyor relationship that many people really value. When we shop with a small business, not only are we choosing that “small business experience,” we’re also saying, “I want businesses like this to continue to exist.”
It works in both directions. My wife and I are also choosing the “small business experience” – from the purveyor’s side – and we really understand the sentiment of appreciation on that slip of paper. We feel grateful every time someone purchases something from us (I doubt Mr. Starbucks feels that way) and it goes a lot farther than you might think.
The most obvious reason we appreciate your business is because it allows us to feed and provide for our family. But it also enables us to devote ourselves to this work – it makes it possible for us to spend time writing uplifting articles to counter all the bad news out there. It makes it possible for us to invest ourselves in learning all that we can to be better educators and healthcare practitioners. It supports a team of dozens of others to earn a good living doing their healing and service work for the wellness of our community. It enables us to direct our earnings into the non-profit we started – the Well Life Foundation – to support women in vulnerable populations.
And beyond the monetary aspects, we appreciate that so many of you have touched our hearts, inspired us, and taught us. Every single day we get messages from members of the Dragontree community telling us what you’re passionate about, what you’re creating, and how you’re making the world a better place. I’m sure the makers of my sleeping bag do appreciate my business, but I doubt they get to have this kind of experience through their clients. I know it may be hard to swallow that it’s an honor to serve you, but it really is. We feel so blessed to have this avenue for helping people heal, grow, and connect.
As a business based largely on physical touch, it’s difficult to know what the future will hold for us. More than ever we’re focusing on ways to serve you without being in your six foot bubble. And when the time is right, we’ll reopen our doors (with masks on) and welcome you back into our spas.
Thanks for being in our lives,
Peter, Briana, and Everyone at The Dragontree
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Later this week Briana and I will be hosting the Illuminator Training – part of Dragontree Life Coaching Program – and we’ll spend four days in a very special space. It’s going to be at our house, and while I think our house is a special physical space, the space I’m talking about here is something different. I really mean that we’ll be in a special state of consciousness – one in which people feel safe to really see themselves and others, to be in loving community, to learn and heal.
I am both proud and humbled to co-create such a space. When I write or talk about it, it’s hard not to feel I’m exaggerating; so much positive change occurs in such a short time. For me, it reinforces the value of what we teach in the course – primarily the value of holding space.
The first handful of times I heard the term “hold space” I regarded it as New Age jargon and didn’t give it serious consideration. Once I was 20-something at a big dance event and the movie Baraka was being projected onto the walls. Amidst beautiful, sometimes haunting imagery, we were taken to an egg factory. There were conveyor belts and metal chutes along which were tumbling thousands and thousands of fuzzy yellow chicks. Attendants casually pulled them out by a wing and then tossed half of them (the males) down a giant funnel (into a grinder). The remainder were de-beaked, and in the next scene they were sickly and missing feathers, crammed into stacks upon stacks of wire cages.
There was a sudden collective moan of sorrow through the crowd. Someone shouted, “Breathe! Hold space for them!” And I thought, “What does that even mean?”
Well, now I know what it means and I think it was good advice – not just to hold space for the chicks, but to hold space for everyone involved. I also think that the term “hold space” is perfect for describing this practice. It’s an art, really. It comes naturally to some people but not most, and many gifted healers, teachers, and guides are skilled at it even if they’ve never heard the term.
Holding space has a few meanings for me. First, it means to become a neutral, benevolent container for what’s happening. That is, hold this moment in your awareness – ideally until some resolution or balance has developed. This entails giving your attention to what’s happening right here, right now and supporting its natural unfoldment.
When we’re holding space, we’re not trying to diagnose, fix anything, or come up with the answer. We’re not trying to be impressive or spiritual, and we’re not hoping to get approval. And we’re not departing from the task at hand to meander into the forest of our own thoughts.
Second, holding space means focusing on and protecting the space itself – maintaining an opening. By space here, I mean the formless consciousness that is the Universe – the matrix from which all objects (things, feelings, ideas) arise. You could also call it God or Undifferentiated Awareness or Spirit. It’s the bulk of the iceberg of reality, while the stuff that tends to get 99.9% of our attention is the very tip. Because space is more ethereal than form, it not only surrounds everything, but also exists within everything.
When we happen upon a moment when our consciousness is on the space (rather than engrossed in its contents), it usually feels good – our stories fall away and we expand into that space (because we are the space!). But the ego doesn’t like it. “Hey! Don’t forget about me!” it yells. “Come back! I’ve got some juicy gossip and some intense fears and a long list of grievances with the world!”
It seems crazy to go back to that – a reality marked largely by conflict and resistance – but we all do it. The ego is hooked up our survival mechanisms and it’s able to produce some compelling thoughts and feelings which shrink our consciousness like a turtle pulling into its shell. “It’s smelly and dark and crowded in here,” some part of us registers, “but it’s familiar.”
So, holding space in the second sense means maintaining the space – staying expanded, bringing in and honoring Spirit. We prevent encroachment upon or eclipsing of that space mainly by abstaining from the compulsion to fill it up with our stuff.
In the case of the chicken scene, it would have been a difficult setting in which to hold space for all the layers needing illumination (from the suffering of innocent creatures, to the knowing that we are complicit in this if we buy chicken, eggs, or pet food, and so on). But there are opportunities for space-holding all the time, and I see the magic of it so clearly at these Illuminator trainings – the magic of a whole room of coaches holding space for one individual to see themselves, heal, and blossom.
Holding space isn’t just for a formal coach-client or healer-patient setting, it’s a practice by which the mundane becomes holy, and we can do it all the time. At first (and sometimes later) it can feel like hard work. It takes discipline to stop thinking and to instead hold your attention on the Now. It takes trust to not intervene or analyze. But it’s deeply rewarding.
When you hold space for someone, even if they don’t know what you’re doing, they tend to experience that spaciousness. There’s more space between their thoughts. There’s a broadening of perspective and they access their resources. They begin to open and heal. Your space-holding is like a bridge that helps them connect with their Higher Self.
You can hold space for anything, for any and every moment. Things that are naturally riveting – like a baby being born – can be easier to hold space for because they’re so uncommon and so obviously miraculous. However, there’s much to be learned and experienced through holding space for the “everyday” – for the blowing of a tree in the breeze, for the dripping of a water faucet, for the barking of a dog. One of the most fundamental yet profound meditative practices is to simply hold space for your own breath. Let’s both hold space for whatever is happening right now for the next thirty seconds.
Mmmm. That was good. It reminded me of something I wanted to tell you: thinking is optional. I know we all have times when we can’t seem to turn off our mind, but just as you can stop talking aloud, you can stop talking inside. It’s an expression of reverence for the space to take a break from talking once in a while.
Be well,
Peter
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Welcome to part three of my series on longevity. I wrote a few articles on this subject ten years ago and felt it was time to revisit it. We’re exposed to way too much doom and gloom media these days. There’s so much GOOD to live for. In fact, my first article focused on the impact of perspective and presence – living for now and loving life make us happier, if not also longer lived. The second article focused on the benefits of working, stretching, and relaxing all parts of ourselves (body and mind). (You can read them on our site.)
Let’s continue.
#3: Dance
I already wrote about exercise, so recommending dance may seem redundant, but I believe dance has unique benefits. Humans have been dancing for fun, for health, for art, and for ceremony since the earliest times. Dance is one of the most basic and primal forms of release and expression.
Formal dance is wonderful, but I specifically mean freeform dance here – giving yourself over to music (or the music in your soul), letting your body move in whatever ways it wants, being unrestrained, uncalculated, and uncensored. Dance is an incredible outlet. It’s also a profound means of inner exploration, healing, and spiritual connection.
As you dance, consider making it a process of inquiry. These are just a few of the questions you might ask:
- What comes up when you let yourself feel without blocking anything out?
- Is there a shape the body wants to make or a form of expression the body is drawn to? Where is it rooted (both in your body and in your past)?
- Is there unfinished business related to it? Where does it take you?
- What does dance give you access to that’s usually hidden?
- In what ways is your movement blocked?
- What old things are stored in your tissues? Can you allow your dance to liberate them or facilitate a conversation with a part of yourself that needs a voice?
- What does the wild part of you want to express through dance?
- What is the force that’s driving this dance? Can you get curious about it, open your connection to it, listen to it, feel it fully?
It’s great when we start scheduling a regular time for dance. It’s even better is when the dance starts spilling out into our life as a whole and we start finding ourselves “dancing through our days.” This may not necessarily look like we’re twirling and leaping from our desk to the copy machine, though it might! Alternatively, it may be more of an internal dance – a new, playful, graceful, fluid way of navigating whatever comes along.
For some people it’s easiest to go deep, to foster self-awareness and healing when dancing alone. For others, a group dynamic is more supportive and inspiring. While I emphasized the personal benefits of dance, it’s also an incredible medium for connecting with others, repairing conflict, learning to listen and be receptive, opening our hearts together, and sharing our light. The challenge with dancing in a group is to not become consumed with what others are doing or how we appear to them. Therefore, I feel the guiding principles for a group dance setting should include freedom, exploration, and non-judgment. If you look into “ecstatic dance” or Gabrielle Roth’s “5Rhythms” format, you can probably find a community that engages in this form of dance in your area.
I have a homework assignment for you: dance in a totally unrestrained way sometime this week. Share with the community: How do you feel about dance? What has it done for you? What’s your favorite music to dance to?
Be well,
Peter
P.S. If you missed part one and part two in this series, they are linked here.
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I love this!!! We do the same in our house and our family and friends love it!!
Thanks for the remunder💜. It inspired me to make ghee for my adult kids, something they love, when visiting. 🙏blessings