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Last week I began a series on longevity – the factors that have the biggest impact on our lifespan. I started with what I think is most important – living for now and loving life. If we don’t love life, why try to prolong it? Even if loving life and being present don’t cause us to live longer, they’ll make our quality of life better.
Before we continue, I want to remind us all that these practices can easily become devices that perpetuate a relentless drive to do more, have more, be more, and outrun death. While partaking in these practices, see if you can feel into the underlying energy that’s driving you. Try to approach them as ways to relish life and root more deeply in the present moment rather than treating them as the means to a certain outcome.
#2: Work, Stretch, and Relax All Parts of Yourself
As I see it, each of us is Consciousness itself, wearing and animating a body – not unlike the way we can wear and give “life” to a hand puppet. Imagine how the hand puppet would appear if you partly withdrew your hand from it and got distracted by something else. This is how many of us relate to our bodies. We’re half committed and half withdrawn. In contrast, imagine the experience of fully embodying that puppet/body. It’s making me feel kind of gross to talk about bodies as hand puppets, so let’s move on.
I invite you to explore just how fully your consciousness is living through this body. Have you claimed every cell of this incredible vehicle? Are you all in? 50% in? 25% in? I’m not saying I want you to identify as being a body. I’m asking, how does it feel and what’s possible if you fully enter and awaken this body?
On to practicalities. One thing long-lived people tend to do is move – a lot. Our bodies generally respond well to being worked on a regular basis. The relatively new concept of exercising hard in short, scheduled periods isn’t ideal, especially when we’re sedentary for the rest of our day. Don’t get me wrong – it’s much better than just being sedentary all the time. But even better is the moderate, ongoing work of an active day engaged in the kinds of things most people did to take care of a household in the pre-modern age. Throughout each day, we walked long distances, we squatted, we bent over, lifted, and carried heavy things. This is good for us.
Working our bodies moderately throughout each day generally presents less risk for injury than the combination of office work all week and heroic athletic feats on the weekend. However, when people exercise as a planned event, there’s often more consciousness in the act. We don’t always recognize that the manual tasks of everyday life constitute a workout, so we may fail to treat it as such by observing good form, staying hydrated, stretching before and after, etc. So, beyond staying active, I advise that you stay consciously active.
Ideally, I believe we should routinely work every part of ourselves, stretch every part of ourselves, and relax every part of ourselves. Often we don’t take the relaxation side of the equation seriously, sometimes mistaking disuse for relaxation. To be clear, sitting around all day is not the same as consciously relaxing. In fact, for most people long term sitting constitutes postural stress by overusing certain muscles and holding ourselves in a misaligned way.
The relaxation of all our parts can be facilitated through body work – by getting a massage or engaging in body-awareness work such as Feldenkrais – but ultimately it’s something we do ourselves by systematically bringing our attention to each and every part of our being and letting go of any tension. It’s a wonderful practice.
Finally, when I recommend working, stretching, and relaxing all part of ourselves, I mean not just the body but also the mind. The mind, too, responds well to being worked, stretched, and relaxed. Working the mind could mean doing math in your head instead of using a calculator, memorizing your grocery list, doing difficult puzzles, learning a language or musical instrument, etc. Examples of stretching your mind include challenging your beliefs, actively trying out different perspectives and traditions, leaving your comfort zone, being a humble and innocent student of life, and opening to the spiritual dimension. Relaxing your mind is, in a word, meditation – a deliberate fast from thinking.
Share with the community – how do you work, stretch, and relax all parts of yourself? What do you find most difficult to do? Also, if you missed the first article you can read it here.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => How to Be More Alive
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[post_content] => Do you dread seasonal allergies around this time every year? In this video, Dr. Peter Borten explains why we have these unpleasant physical responses to harmless airborne particles, and shares a wide variety of natural preventatives and remedies. Local bee products, facial acupuncture, dietary adjustments, homeopathic preparations, hydration, neti, oils, hair and bedding hygiene, probiotics, bioflavinoids, herbs, zinc, and other supplements could all have you breathing easier in no time!
Do you have other natural remedies that have helped you get through allergy season?...Share in the comments below!
[post_title] => Talking Wellness with Peter: Natural Treatment for Allergies
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Previously, I wrote about being guided by a teacher to engage with Nature, and how I came to recognize how essential this is for whole health and a deeper understanding of ourselves. My grad school experience until then had been about trying to accumulate as much information as possible, so I started taking smaller bites of life and chewing for longer.
I turned to the poetic Daoist texts of ancient China – Zhuang Zi and Lao Zi (the Dao De Jing or “Tao Te Ching”) – written a few centuries B.C. by sages who spent most of their lives observing and contemplating nature. These books aim not so much to discuss the subtle and majestic dynamics of the natural world, but to illustrate how these dynamics exist in human psychology, behavior, politics, business, and relationships.
Besides noticing all of the many things that happen in Nature, they noticed something unseen yet ever present, which they called Dao. The natural order of the world – the force and character that emanate and unite all of the different expressions, and the manner in which natural phenomena occur – this is Dao. Sort of.
When we speak of it and write about it, we run the risk of reducing it to something much less than it is. Since the Dao De Jing is a collection of writings about Dao, the first few lines of the book are devoted to explaining this innate limitation. It is intended only to point us in the right direction, to plant seeds in our consciousness that we can water by watching, listening, relaxing, and being open.
One of the lines from the Dao De Jing that stuck with me throughout this time of reconnecting with Nature was: “In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Dao, every day something is dropped.” Since there was so much data for my professors to convey, there was little emphasis on the simplicity of Daoism, despite its being a major philosophical foundation of East Asian Medicine.
Simplicity is, in fact, one of the main emphases of Daoism, whereas the human tendency, especially in medicine, has been toward increasingly complex explanations and systems. While it may be useful to have someone tell you that a specific gene that codes for a specific protein in a specific cell is disrupting your health, I find that most of our departures from health originate much more simply with an “anti-Dao” lifestyle.
If you spend enough time in Nature, you get a sense of how things move and change, the rhythm and balance of it all. And what the ancient Daoists were essentially saying is that the more we allow our affairs in the human realm to operate by the same rhythm and balance, the happier and healthier we will be. Only humans try to make life unfold faster than its natural pace. Only humans seek to muscle their way to a destination we would have arrived at effortlessly.
When do we act? When it’s time to act. When do we rest? When it’s time to rest. How do we know? By tuning in.
Have you ever been in the woods, and all the stimuli that usually seem random and disunited - the songs of the birds, the movement of the wind, the swaying of the trees, the cheeping of the frogs, and the ebb and flow of your own breath – suddenly feel connected and synchronized? It’s a magical thing, and I believe that spending time in this space integrates and tunes us. The more we practice falling into this groove (practice is kind of an unfortunate word, but probably necessary for modern humans), the more we naturally stay there, and soon, without even thinking about it, we begin to perceive the groove in our home, and on the highway, and in the office. We slip into it, we do our thing, and before we know it, we have a magical life.
Here’s to your magical life,
Dr. Peter Borten
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[post_content] => Last week I began a series on longevity – the factors that have the biggest impact on our lifespan. I started with what I think is most important – living for now and loving life. If we don’t love life, why try to prolong it? Even if loving life and being present don’t cause us to live longer, they’ll make our quality of life better.
Before we continue, I want to remind us all that these practices can easily become devices that perpetuate a relentless drive to do more, have more, be more, and outrun death. While partaking in these practices, see if you can feel into the underlying energy that’s driving you. Try to approach them as ways to relish life and root more deeply in the present moment rather than treating them as the means to a certain outcome.
#2: Work, Stretch, and Relax All Parts of Yourself
As I see it, each of us is Consciousness itself, wearing and animating a body – not unlike the way we can wear and give “life” to a hand puppet. Imagine how the hand puppet would appear if you partly withdrew your hand from it and got distracted by something else. This is how many of us relate to our bodies. We’re half committed and half withdrawn. In contrast, imagine the experience of fully embodying that puppet/body. It’s making me feel kind of gross to talk about bodies as hand puppets, so let’s move on.
I invite you to explore just how fully your consciousness is living through this body. Have you claimed every cell of this incredible vehicle? Are you all in? 50% in? 25% in? I’m not saying I want you to identify as being a body. I’m asking, how does it feel and what’s possible if you fully enter and awaken this body?
On to practicalities. One thing long-lived people tend to do is move – a lot. Our bodies generally respond well to being worked on a regular basis. The relatively new concept of exercising hard in short, scheduled periods isn’t ideal, especially when we’re sedentary for the rest of our day. Don’t get me wrong – it’s much better than just being sedentary all the time. But even better is the moderate, ongoing work of an active day engaged in the kinds of things most people did to take care of a household in the pre-modern age. Throughout each day, we walked long distances, we squatted, we bent over, lifted, and carried heavy things. This is good for us.
Working our bodies moderately throughout each day generally presents less risk for injury than the combination of office work all week and heroic athletic feats on the weekend. However, when people exercise as a planned event, there’s often more consciousness in the act. We don’t always recognize that the manual tasks of everyday life constitute a workout, so we may fail to treat it as such by observing good form, staying hydrated, stretching before and after, etc. So, beyond staying active, I advise that you stay consciously active.
Ideally, I believe we should routinely work every part of ourselves, stretch every part of ourselves, and relax every part of ourselves. Often we don’t take the relaxation side of the equation seriously, sometimes mistaking disuse for relaxation. To be clear, sitting around all day is not the same as consciously relaxing. In fact, for most people long term sitting constitutes postural stress by overusing certain muscles and holding ourselves in a misaligned way.
The relaxation of all our parts can be facilitated through body work – by getting a massage or engaging in body-awareness work such as Feldenkrais – but ultimately it’s something we do ourselves by systematically bringing our attention to each and every part of our being and letting go of any tension. It’s a wonderful practice.
Finally, when I recommend working, stretching, and relaxing all part of ourselves, I mean not just the body but also the mind. The mind, too, responds well to being worked, stretched, and relaxed. Working the mind could mean doing math in your head instead of using a calculator, memorizing your grocery list, doing difficult puzzles, learning a language or musical instrument, etc. Examples of stretching your mind include challenging your beliefs, actively trying out different perspectives and traditions, leaving your comfort zone, being a humble and innocent student of life, and opening to the spiritual dimension. Relaxing your mind is, in a word, meditation – a deliberate fast from thinking.
Share with the community – how do you work, stretch, and relax all parts of yourself? What do you find most difficult to do? Also, if you missed the first article you can read it here.
Be well,
Peter
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