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It’s safe to assume everyone’s heard of the coronavirus at this point and may even have some feelings around it. I read and posted a beneficial article I found on NPR and would love to share a few main points here as well.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is telling Americans they should prepare for the possibility of a Coronavirus outbreak. Prepare... not panic...
Here are some common-sense things you and your family can do to prepare.
1) Stock up on particular products such as daily medications (if you take them), any non-perishable foods that may carry you through for a couple of weeks, as well as your go-to sick foods such as soup and broth as well as crackers. Stocking up is essential because if you do get sick, you want to be able to ride it out from home. I love the idea of making extra bone broth and homemade soup to freeze!
Remember 80% of cases have been mild.
2) Stock up on household cleaning supplies. Products like Bleach wipes or alcohol kills it. Even soap and water will do the trick! If you have someone sick at home or in your community, plan on cleaning surfaces that get touched frequently several times a day. Cleaning products significantly reduce the amount of virus that is on a hard surface.
3) Communicate with your work about your ability to telecommute from home if Corona starts spreading locally.
4) Make a plan for your kids and older relatives. Consider what you would do if your family's daycare center or school close because of an outbreak. Do you have a backup plan? It would be wise to reach out to friends, relatives, neighbors now that may be able to help in this kind of situation.
5) Start creating healthy habits now to support you and your family’s health. Wash your hands when you come home, use hand sanitizer as needed, cough into your elbow, and promptly dispose of old tissues. Remember to wash your hands long enough! A proper hand washing is at least 20 seconds.
We are all connected. When there is a collective stress response, it's common to feel it in your nervous system as heightened stress or anxiety.
I created the Dragontree Anxiety Relief for support during stressful and anxious times.
The Anxiety-Relief formula contains a variety of western and Chinese herbs. Three herbs, of many, are Bai He, which clears the heart and calms the spirit. Chai Hu, which harmonizes the interior and exterior and resolves depression. Also, Dan Shen, which relieves pain, clears the heart and eliminates vexation.
Get Anxiety-Relief
I also highly recommend reading the “A Guide: How to Prepare Your Home for Coronavirus” article by NPR for more in-depth info! Share it with your friends and family so they can prepare adequately as well.
Allowing ourselves to be at peace in adversity provides that best opportunity to be present to real solutions. Internal peace is always an option, no matter what turbulence we face.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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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
[post_title] => The Antidote for Fear that May Surprise You
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Last week I introduced the Chinese Clock – a principle from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that states that each organ has a two hour period in the day when it has an abundance of energy and does its best work. I also explained that the roles of the organs in TCM include psychological and spiritual capacities as well as physiological ones. Besides helping us to understand how to best utilize each time period, this system can sometimes be diagnostic. For instance, if you always feel tired at a certain time of day, or always wake up in the night at a particular time, there may be an imbalance in the organ that presides over that time. Now, let's continue our discussion.
11:00 AM to 1:00 PM – Heart Time
In TCM, our heart is the core representative of the fire element in us. Fire’s qualities include lightness (meaning both luminous and weightless), warmth, expansiveness, animation, and inclusiveness – all virtues of a healthy heart. The heart is the portal through which consciousness enters our body. Naturally, the time of the heart is when that giant fireball we call the Sun is highest in the sky.
Among the community of our organs, the heart is referred to as the Emperor (or Empress), and it presides over the kingdom of You through its vast network of vessels. By the power of its love, it endeavors to spread warmth to every facet of your life, to have all parts of you feel included within its benevolent reign, to illuminate and enlighten the darkest folds of your mind. Beating out every moment for us, it aims to keep us always in the present.
The heart and its vessels work best when they’re open. Yet one of our most common reactions to uncomfortable experiences is to “close” the heart and its vascular network in an attempt to avoid feeling or accepting. Vascular disease – the hardening, blockage, and failure of the vessels (especially those that serve the heart muscle itself and the brain) – is the biggest cause of death in the U.S., and I have long wondered if there’s a connection between our psychological “closing” and this physical expression of closing.
During Heart Time, I invite you to do something good for your heart. You could engage in exercise that elevates your heart rate. This encourages the heart muscle and its vessels to remain strong and elastic and it helps facilitate a lightening of our mood. You could consciously extend love to someone or to a neglected part of yourself. You could practice choosing light-heartedness. You could practice staying in the present, repeatedly choosing not to depart into the past or future.
1:00 to 3:00 PM – Small Intestine Time
These twelve organs are grouped into six pairs. Sometimes the pairings are obvious (like the stomach and the pi which I described last week); other times not so much. The small intestine is the heart’s partner, and here’s how it works.
The digestive tract is like a tube of the outside world running from the mouth to the anus. Although it’s not a straight line, it makes the body something of a cylinder, and you can throw all manner of nourishment or garbage in there. The bulk of this tube is the small intestine, which is where most absorption takes place – not just absorption of food, but also of life experience.
In TCM, the small intestine has the task of “sorting the pure from the impure.” As it samples the heart’s kingdom firsthand, it must discern what is “pure” and worth incorporating into oneself versus what’s “impure” and worth letting go (sending along to the large intestine for elimination).
Besides being a good time to absorb your midday meal, Small Intestine Time is good for practicing discernment. What expressions of “purity” – of truth, love, and awareness – would you like to partake in to feed your heart? What expressions of “impurity” exist in your life that serve mainly to cloud your consciousness, or keep you engaged in conflict? What long-held grievances are impeding your heart’s work? (Let them go.)
3:00 to 5:00 PM – Bladder Time
To understand the bladder in TCM, we have to understand its partner, the kidneys. The kidneys are thought of primarily as a reservoir of energy – of our life’s potential, in fact. And the bladder (besides storing urine) presides over the utilization of this potential and its transmission into the world through our works. The TCM bladder also has some overlap with the functions of our nervous system and our primal drive for security and survival.
Fear is the factor that most disrupts the bladder’s work. In the presence of fear, we often default to our animal brain and the fight-flight-freeze mechanism. If we fight, we tend to throw all our reserves at the issue at hand (perhaps drinking coffee and working ourselves to the bone). If we freeze, it’s like there’s a hold on our bank account – rather than risk using up our life, we withdraw. If we flee, it’s like being in a relentless marathon to some idealized future.
Many people feel tired during this time of day because of the habitual engagement of these survival mechanisms. Instead of pushing through, be respectful of your limits. Slow down. Reflect on how much energy you spend versus what you do to replenish yourself. Be with the stillness – it’s not going to kill you; just the opposite – it stands to save your life.
5:00 to 7:00 PM – Kidney Time
The kidneys and bladder are the two organs of the water element. As I said, the kidneys represent the storage of our life’s potential (jing), like the water in a deep well. Life ends when the well is dry. When treated in a healthy way, we only draw up enough water to feed the seeds we have planted in the world (and we’re conscious about the seeds we plant). By this, I mean we don’t take on obligations thoughtlessly, we don’t give away our energy unconsciously, we “go with the flow,” and let life unfold at its own pace. Meanwhile, the replenishing things we do – getting good sleep, eating good food, loving interactions – act like rain that falls into the well to restore it.
When fear comes in, like a cold wind, it can alter our relationship to this well. Sometimes it makes the surface of the water choppy. When we look at our reflection, we see a distorted picture and we act from this distorted sense of reality. The choppy surface also makes it impossible to peer down into the darkness and get an accurate sense of our potential. Maybe we’re in mortal danger and we should start bringing it up by the bucketful to try to overwhelm the odds! Other times, fear freezes the well entirely, making it inaccessible to us. Fear has thus diminished many a life.
What’s the counter to fear’s cold irrationality? The warmth and radiance of the heart. This is the balance of fire and water within us. The heart’s love melts our fear and its light of consciousness illuminates the truth that fear has obscured. The heart’s ability to pull us back to the present gives us a chance to regard our fear in a rational way. It’s not realistic to wish for fear to go away forever, but it’s entirely possible to feel it without being controlled by it.
During Kidney Time, consider replenishing your well with a small, nourishing meal. Ask yourself how you can get things done with less investment of personal energy. Reflect on the fears that may be running you from “below the radar,” and use the light of your consciousness to see them clearly – to see how insubstantial they are. Look into the well of your potential and ask yourself how you can more effectively bring this gift into the world. Meanwhile, for your anatomical kidneys, protect against dehydration. A good general guideline is to divide the number of pounds you weigh in half and aim to consume this many ounces of water over the course of each day (e.g., 150 pounds body weight means 75 ounces of water).
Thanks for reading. Once again, I chose not to give you everything at once so that you’ll have time to consider these concepts at a pace that better supports your ability to integrate them. Check back next week for more.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
P.S. Again, in case you missed last week’s article, you can read it here.
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It’s safe to assume everyone’s heard of the coronavirus at this point and may even have some feelings around it. I read and posted a beneficial article I found on NPR and would love to share a few main points here as well.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is telling Americans they should prepare for the possibility of a Coronavirus outbreak. Prepare... not panic...
Here are some common-sense things you and your family can do to prepare.
1) Stock up on particular products such as daily medications (if you take them), any non-perishable foods that may carry you through for a couple of weeks, as well as your go-to sick foods such as soup and broth as well as crackers. Stocking up is essential because if you do get sick, you want to be able to ride it out from home. I love the idea of making extra bone broth and homemade soup to freeze!
Remember 80% of cases have been mild.
2) Stock up on household cleaning supplies. Products like Bleach wipes or alcohol kills it. Even soap and water will do the trick! If you have someone sick at home or in your community, plan on cleaning surfaces that get touched frequently several times a day. Cleaning products significantly reduce the amount of virus that is on a hard surface.
3) Communicate with your work about your ability to telecommute from home if Corona starts spreading locally.
4) Make a plan for your kids and older relatives. Consider what you would do if your family's daycare center or school close because of an outbreak. Do you have a backup plan? It would be wise to reach out to friends, relatives, neighbors now that may be able to help in this kind of situation.
5) Start creating healthy habits now to support you and your family’s health. Wash your hands when you come home, use hand sanitizer as needed, cough into your elbow, and promptly dispose of old tissues. Remember to wash your hands long enough! A proper hand washing is at least 20 seconds.
We are all connected. When there is a collective stress response, it's common to feel it in your nervous system as heightened stress or anxiety.
I created the Dragontree Anxiety Relief for support during stressful and anxious times.
The Anxiety-Relief formula contains a variety of western and Chinese herbs. Three herbs, of many, are Bai He, which clears the heart and calms the spirit. Chai Hu, which harmonizes the interior and exterior and resolves depression. Also, Dan Shen, which relieves pain, clears the heart and eliminates vexation.
Get Anxiety-Relief
I also highly recommend reading the “A Guide: How to Prepare Your Home for Coronavirus” article by NPR for more in-depth info! Share it with your friends and family so they can prepare adequately as well.
Allowing ourselves to be at peace in adversity provides that best opportunity to be present to real solutions. Internal peace is always an option, no matter what turbulence we face.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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