WP_Query Object
(
[query] => Array
(
[category__in] => Array
(
[0] => 19
[1] => 25
)
[post__not_in] => Array
(
[0] => 3963
)
[posts_per_page] => 50
[ignore_sticky_posts] => 1
[orderby] => desc
[_shuffle_and_pick] => 3
)
[query_vars] => Array
(
[category__in] => Array
(
[0] => 19
[1] => 25
)
[post__not_in] => Array
(
[0] => 3963
)
[posts_per_page] => 50
[ignore_sticky_posts] => 1
[orderby] => desc
[_shuffle_and_pick] => 3
[error] =>
[m] =>
[p] => 0
[post_parent] =>
[subpost] =>
[subpost_id] =>
[attachment] =>
[attachment_id] => 0
[name] =>
[pagename] =>
[page_id] => 0
[second] =>
[minute] =>
[hour] =>
[day] => 0
[monthnum] => 0
[year] => 0
[w] => 0
[category_name] => peter-borten
[tag] =>
[cat] => 19
[tag_id] =>
[author] =>
[author_name] =>
[feed] =>
[tb] =>
[paged] => 0
[meta_key] =>
[meta_value] =>
[preview] =>
[s] =>
[sentence] =>
[title] =>
[fields] =>
[menu_order] =>
[embed] =>
[category__not_in] => Array
(
)
[category__and] => Array
(
)
[post__in] => Array
(
)
[post_name__in] => Array
(
)
[tag__in] => Array
(
)
[tag__not_in] => Array
(
)
[tag__and] => Array
(
)
[tag_slug__in] => Array
(
)
[tag_slug__and] => Array
(
)
[post_parent__in] => Array
(
)
[post_parent__not_in] => Array
(
)
[author__in] => Array
(
)
[author__not_in] => Array
(
)
[search_columns] => Array
(
)
[suppress_filters] =>
[cache_results] => 1
[update_post_term_cache] => 1
[update_menu_item_cache] =>
[lazy_load_term_meta] => 1
[update_post_meta_cache] => 1
[post_type] =>
[nopaging] =>
[comments_per_page] => 50
[no_found_rows] =>
[order] => DESC
)
[tax_query] => WP_Tax_Query Object
(
[queries] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[taxonomy] => category
[terms] => Array
(
[0] => 19
[1] => 25
)
[field] => term_id
[operator] => IN
[include_children] =>
)
)
[relation] => AND
[table_aliases:protected] => Array
(
[0] => wp_term_relationships
)
[queried_terms] => Array
(
[category] => Array
(
[terms] => Array
(
[0] => 19
[1] => 25
)
[field] => term_id
)
)
[primary_table] => wp_posts
[primary_id_column] => ID
)
[meta_query] => WP_Meta_Query Object
(
[queries] => Array
(
)
[relation] =>
[meta_table] =>
[meta_id_column] =>
[primary_table] =>
[primary_id_column] =>
[table_aliases:protected] => Array
(
)
[clauses:protected] => Array
(
)
[has_or_relation:protected] =>
)
[date_query] =>
[request] =>
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.ID
FROM wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships ON (wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id)
WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.ID NOT IN (3963) AND (
wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id IN (19,25)
) AND ((wp_posts.post_type = 'post' AND (wp_posts.post_status = 'publish' OR wp_posts.post_status = 'acf-disabled')))
AND ID NOT IN
(SELECT `post_id` FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE `meta_key` = '_pilotpress_level'
AND `meta_value` IN ('','employee')
AND `post_id` NOT IN
(SELECT `post_id` FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE `meta_key` = '_pilotpress_level'
AND `meta_value` IN ('' )))
GROUP BY wp_posts.ID
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 0, 50
[posts] => Array
(
[0] => WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 7255
[post_author] => 3
[post_date] => 2019-02-06 17:58:40
[post_date_gmt] => 2019-02-06 17:58:40
[post_content] => IF WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO EAT ANIMALS, HOW COME THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT?
I saw that line on a bumper sticker when I was about 16, shortly after becoming a vegetarian. I laughed heartily at it; it was a good reminder not to take myself too seriously.
I stopped eating meat mostly because I just didn’t like it. But in the early 1990s I encountered John Robbins’s Diet for a New America, and my reasons for not eating flesh became more numerous. If you aren’t familiar with him, Robbins is the vegan son of the cofounder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, and he left the ice cream business in part because of his opposition to the mistreatment of cows and his emerging belief that humans shouldn’t consume animal products. In Diet for a New America he explores the ethics of factory farms, the environmental impacts of animal production, and the health effects of consuming dairy and meat. It made sense to me and I felt empowered in my position.
But when I began grad school in Chinese Medicine some years later, my Asian professors were perplexed by the high rate of vegetarianism among the students. They asked us, “Why wouldn’t you eat meat if you can afford it?” To them, vegetarianism was an involuntary choice necessitated by poverty. They pointed to our sharp canine teeth and the place of meat in the history of human diets. They weren’t familiar with any of the issues or fads around meat eating and vegetarianism; they only cared about what’s best for human health. So I decided to set aside my biases and earnestly seek the truth.
When I began my clinical internship, I met numerous vegetarian patients – and even more vegans – who were weak and had insufficient immune function. Their pulses, which should have felt something like a jumping piece of spaghetti at the wrist, were often more like a faintly twitching thread. Often, they were under the impression that not eating meat in itself would make them healthy – even if they never gave much thought to what they did eat instead.
In my practice, ethics and preferences began to take a back seat to biological necessity. When these patients began to eat meat – often because I advised them to experiment with it – nearly all of them felt stronger and healthier. I even met some people who thrived on meat, whose bodies seemed to crave meat over anything else and whose only intolerances were to certain plant-based foods. Eventually I started eating a little meat now and then. (I can’t say I noticed much difference in my health from doing so, but I was already eating plenty of animal protein in the form of eggs and yogurt.)
Coincidentally, meat was making a big comeback. When I first moved to Portland, it had a large selection of vegetarian restaurants. Fifteen years later, many of these had been replaced with restaurants that were unapologetically meat-based with barely a flesh-free dish on the menu. Elk burgers, pork bellies, and lard were so hot. With the advent of Paleo diets, people were flocking back to meat as if it they’d been deprived their whole lives.
Meanwhile, I became a father, I became more connected to the earth, I realized I had never really forgotten all those points that Robbins made 30 years ago, and I found it increasingly difficult to be willfully ignorant of the impacts of my choices of consumption. One of those impacts is that meat production – in the prevailing manner and scale – is devastating to the planet.
Thus, I found myself in the middle of the complex intersection of nutrition, industry, environment, ethics, and politics – and I’ve never again had an easy answer to the question of whether people should or shouldn’t eat meat.
We’ll look more closely at the pros and cons of meat consumption next week. I’d love to hear about your experience with – or without – meat in the comments below.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => To Meat or Not to Meat?
[post_excerpt] =>
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => open
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => meat-not-meat
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2020-07-28 21:38:23
[post_modified_gmt] => 2020-07-28 21:38:23
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => http://thedragontree.com/?p=7255
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 19
[filter] => raw
[webinar_id] => 0
)
[1] => WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 6766
[post_author] => 3
[post_date] => 2017-09-26 18:26:41
[post_date_gmt] => 2017-09-26 18:26:41
[post_content] => If we hear a saying enough – especially at an impressionable time and/or spoken by someone we respect – we may accept it without applying critical thinking to determine if it’s actually true. For me, one such saying was, “People don’t change.”
As a young adult I heard it said by a guy I looked up to, and I remember thinking he must be wise. He stated it with triumph and bitterness – as a keen insight that would allow him to never be hurt again.
In writing this article, I googled “people don’t change” and “people can’t change” and got about 4 million hits for each phrase. Clearly this is a prevalent idea. But is it true?
When psychologists Dan Gilbert, Jordi Quoidbach, and Timothy Wilson set out to investigate perceptions of personal change, they discovered something surprising: most people believe that they have gotten all of their changing over with. Interviews with 19,000 participants revealed that young people, middle aged people, and old people all saw themselves as having changed a lot in the past, but believed they had more or less “arrived” at who they would be from now on. The scientists called this the “end of history illusion.” They used the word “illusion” because . . . we’re almost always wrong.
Perhaps this widespread view of ourselves as unlikely to change spills over onto what we expect of others – i.e., that they won’t change either. But we might ask, when someone believes that people don’t change, did it originate as a rational assessment of the likelihood of change? Or did it begin as a way of saving face, as in, “It may look like I got blindsided, but I actually saw this coming – because people don’t change.” Or as ammo for self-punishment, as in, “I’m a fool. I should have seen this coming – because people don’t change.” Or as the basis for blaming others for our pain, as in, “I was relying on you to become different so that I could be happy, but I’m not happy – because people don’t change.”
I happen to be in the business of tracking change. A few folks come to me for health maintenance, but I like to empower people to do most of their maintenance themselves, so the majority of my patient visits are from humans wanting the same thing: change. They want their body to change or their mind to change or their life circumstances to change. Because my task is to help facilitate this change, a significant part of my job is to be a change tracker. As a change tracker, I can assure you, people change all the time, often dramatically. If they didn’t, I’d feel like a charlatan.
But of course, we all have recurring patterns. In Vedic philosophy, these are considered to be expressions of our samskaras – the imprints of past experiences. Samskara literally means “impression” – like a footprint in the sand or a groove cut in the earth – and we tend to fall into them over and over, just as water naturally follows ruts in the land. Likewise, as experiences “flow” through our consciousness, they are manipulated by these contours of our psyche. Our capacity for discernment, called the buddhi, is said to be impaired by the presence of samskaras because they cause us to see things differently than they really are.
Scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology discovered that there’s a biological basis for this behavior. The repetition of the same thoughts, feelings, or behaviors strengthens a particular neurological pathway. These neurons “wire together” making a more efficient channel for nerve impulses to flow through, much like a groove in the sand. This increases the likelihood of our continuing to repeat the thought / feeling / behavior and thus to further strengthen the pathway and increase the potential to revisit it.
What can we do about this? There are many useful strategies, most of which amount to the cultivation of clear vision and perspective. Traditionally, this is one of the central purposes of yoga – meditation, specifically – which is said to be like polishing the dirty mirror of the buddhi so that it provides accurate reflections.
Meditation is like walking to the top of a mountain, where we can see the big picture (something impossible to do when we’re stuck in a rut in the ground). Here we can determine our most efficient course of action. Here we see the grooves of samskaras and “fill them in” through forgiveness, love, and acceptance. Here we can see the ways we have changed, and, indeed, see that big change is inevitable for ourselves and everyone else.
Take a few minutes today for a mental fast. Close your eyes and allow yourself to rise above the chattering and judgements, the push and pull of emotions, and perceive what kind of change would bring you into closer alignment with your inner being. Then set an intention to allow this change to happen. Perhaps even ask your highest self to reconfigure you to experience peace more readily. A change is gonna come.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => Can You Change?
[post_excerpt] =>
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => open
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => change-is-coming
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2017-09-26 20:12:22
[post_modified_gmt] => 2017-09-26 20:12:22
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => http://www.thedragontree.com/?p=6766
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 28
[filter] => raw
[webinar_id] => 0
)
[2] => WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 6801
[post_author] => 3
[post_date] => 2017-11-07 19:01:47
[post_date_gmt] => 2017-11-07 19:01:47
[post_content] => 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
[post_title] => I Got My Butt Kicked for Only $400
[post_excerpt] =>
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => open
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => forgiveness
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2020-08-03 17:34:12
[post_modified_gmt] => 2020-08-03 17:34:12
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => http://www.thedragontree.com/?p=6801
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 21
[filter] => raw
[webinar_id] => 0
)
)
[post_count] => 3
[current_post] => -1
[before_loop] => 1
[in_the_loop] =>
[post] => WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 7255
[post_author] => 3
[post_date] => 2019-02-06 17:58:40
[post_date_gmt] => 2019-02-06 17:58:40
[post_content] => IF WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO EAT ANIMALS, HOW COME THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT?
I saw that line on a bumper sticker when I was about 16, shortly after becoming a vegetarian. I laughed heartily at it; it was a good reminder not to take myself too seriously.
I stopped eating meat mostly because I just didn’t like it. But in the early 1990s I encountered John Robbins’s Diet for a New America, and my reasons for not eating flesh became more numerous. If you aren’t familiar with him, Robbins is the vegan son of the cofounder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, and he left the ice cream business in part because of his opposition to the mistreatment of cows and his emerging belief that humans shouldn’t consume animal products. In Diet for a New America he explores the ethics of factory farms, the environmental impacts of animal production, and the health effects of consuming dairy and meat. It made sense to me and I felt empowered in my position.
But when I began grad school in Chinese Medicine some years later, my Asian professors were perplexed by the high rate of vegetarianism among the students. They asked us, “Why wouldn’t you eat meat if you can afford it?” To them, vegetarianism was an involuntary choice necessitated by poverty. They pointed to our sharp canine teeth and the place of meat in the history of human diets. They weren’t familiar with any of the issues or fads around meat eating and vegetarianism; they only cared about what’s best for human health. So I decided to set aside my biases and earnestly seek the truth.
When I began my clinical internship, I met numerous vegetarian patients – and even more vegans – who were weak and had insufficient immune function. Their pulses, which should have felt something like a jumping piece of spaghetti at the wrist, were often more like a faintly twitching thread. Often, they were under the impression that not eating meat in itself would make them healthy – even if they never gave much thought to what they did eat instead.
In my practice, ethics and preferences began to take a back seat to biological necessity. When these patients began to eat meat – often because I advised them to experiment with it – nearly all of them felt stronger and healthier. I even met some people who thrived on meat, whose bodies seemed to crave meat over anything else and whose only intolerances were to certain plant-based foods. Eventually I started eating a little meat now and then. (I can’t say I noticed much difference in my health from doing so, but I was already eating plenty of animal protein in the form of eggs and yogurt.)
Coincidentally, meat was making a big comeback. When I first moved to Portland, it had a large selection of vegetarian restaurants. Fifteen years later, many of these had been replaced with restaurants that were unapologetically meat-based with barely a flesh-free dish on the menu. Elk burgers, pork bellies, and lard were so hot. With the advent of Paleo diets, people were flocking back to meat as if it they’d been deprived their whole lives.
Meanwhile, I became a father, I became more connected to the earth, I realized I had never really forgotten all those points that Robbins made 30 years ago, and I found it increasingly difficult to be willfully ignorant of the impacts of my choices of consumption. One of those impacts is that meat production – in the prevailing manner and scale – is devastating to the planet.
Thus, I found myself in the middle of the complex intersection of nutrition, industry, environment, ethics, and politics – and I’ve never again had an easy answer to the question of whether people should or shouldn’t eat meat.
We’ll look more closely at the pros and cons of meat consumption next week. I’d love to hear about your experience with – or without – meat in the comments below.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => To Meat or Not to Meat?
[post_excerpt] =>
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => open
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => meat-not-meat
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2020-07-28 21:38:23
[post_modified_gmt] => 2020-07-28 21:38:23
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => http://thedragontree.com/?p=7255
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 19
[filter] => raw
[webinar_id] => 0
)
[comment_count] => 0
[current_comment] => -1
[found_posts] => 206
[max_num_pages] => 5
[max_num_comment_pages] => 0
[is_single] =>
[is_preview] =>
[is_page] =>
[is_archive] => 1
[is_date] =>
[is_year] =>
[is_month] =>
[is_day] =>
[is_time] =>
[is_author] =>
[is_category] => 1
[is_tag] =>
[is_tax] =>
[is_search] =>
[is_feed] =>
[is_comment_feed] =>
[is_trackback] =>
[is_home] =>
[is_privacy_policy] =>
[is_404] =>
[is_embed] =>
[is_paged] =>
[is_admin] =>
[is_attachment] =>
[is_singular] =>
[is_robots] =>
[is_favicon] =>
[is_posts_page] =>
[is_post_type_archive] =>
[query_vars_hash:WP_Query:private] => 8447d170cc7f2ec691c066136ce9288d
[query_vars_changed:WP_Query:private] =>
[thumbnails_cached] =>
[allow_query_attachment_by_filename:protected] =>
[stopwords:WP_Query:private] =>
[compat_fields:WP_Query:private] => Array
(
[0] => query_vars_hash
[1] => query_vars_changed
)
[compat_methods:WP_Query:private] => Array
(
[0] => init_query_flags
[1] => parse_tax_query
)
)
You may also be interested in: