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[post_content] => In last week’s article on the origins of Mother’s Day, I mentioned connecting with the earth as a means of feeling supported in a motherly way. This week I’ll explain more about that earth/mother connection.
The earth is a mother to all lifeforms who live upon her. She births them and sustains them. In animistic traditions, the plane above us – sometimes known as Father Sky – tends to have a rather ethereal influence on our lives. But Mother Earth’s role is decidedly tangible. She gives physical form to a soul and feeds her young from her own body.
In Five Element philosophy, the Earth Element governs nourishment and growth. The internal organs corresponding with Earth relate to food intake, digestion, and distribution of nutrients to all parts of us, like our inner mother. Earth also presides over our ability to give and receive nurturing, support, comfort, and understanding – to others and ourselves. Compared to Fire, Water, or Air, Earth is very slow to change, and such is the quality of a mother’s presence – like the solid ground beneath our feet, her support is constant, enduring, unconditional.
The Earth season is late summer – the time of harvest – and the Earth phase of any process is when we reap the fruits of our labors. It offers us an experience of abundance, of fullness, of having all our needs met. It’s the role a mother serves for a baby. And a woman’s pregnant body – round and full in the belly and breasts – parallels this phase beautifully.
Just as the Earth has a powerful gravitational pull that keeps us rooted, our mother, too, has a certain gravity. We are drawn to her through a bond that began nine months before our emergence. We run to her as children for comfort and nurturing. And after leaving home to strike out on our own, we are drawn back to visit her and recharge this link. Like the earth, she provides us a sense of home. Throughout our lives, our mother is often the one around which all the children and grandchildren gather, for as the Earth, she is our center.
Speaking of the center, our navel marks our personal center of gravity, and it’s a permanent reminder of our oneness with our mother – the closest connection two humans can share. It’s also a vestige of the most perfect nourishment we have ever had. As such, it is a very important point in acupuncture, Qigong, and other systems of traditional healing.
A woman once came to me for help with incessant vomiting and diarrhea. It was as if the Earth Element within her was in utter turmoil. She had tried a wide range of drugs, but nothing made a difference. She was emaciated and lethargic – at five feet eight inches, she weighed only seventy-eight pounds. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were sunken. The acupuncture and herbs I gave her barely helped. Eventually, I decided to try a somewhat obscure treatment: centering the umbilical pulse.
If you press the fingertips of one hand into your navel, you’ll probably feel the pulsation of your abdominal aorta. And if you feel more closely, you may notice that the pulsation is strongest above or below, or to one side of the navel. The goal of this treatment is to use physical manipulation to move the pulse so that it’s most powerful right in the middle. I succeeded in moving her pulse, but to be totally honest, I had little belief that it would do anything.
So, I was astonished when she reported the next week that her digestion had improved dramatically. Over the coming months, her episodes of diarrhea and vomiting diminished almost to zero, and she began gaining weight. When I last saw her, she was strong and muscular and weighed 135 pounds. Such is the power of restoring our center – our Earth, our inner mother.
Each of the Five Elements is expressed as a virtue when we embody it in a healthy way. The virtue of Earth is integrity – meaning a quality of being whole, entire, and undiminished. When the earthen banks of a river have integrity, water rushes through them but they remain stable without eroding. When an earthen building has integrity, it can be battered by wind and rain for centuries without crumbling or washing away.
The initial shock to our sense of wholeness occurs through separation from our mother in the act of birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord. Our mother’s womb is our homeland, and we will never return to it. After the fundamental separation that occurs through birth, we are usually cared for and held closely, but gradually this connection becomes more distant. Can you remember the feeling of being always held, enveloped in your mother’s arms, cradled, protected, understood, comforted, and safe? Can you imagine how it would feel to let yourself be held again by someone big enough to carry you easily and take care of all your needs? Even though this separation is completely natural and, as children, we play a role in the distancing process, there’s no guarantee that it will leave us feeling capable of recognizing and meeting our own needs, or able to ground and center ourselves.
When Earth is out of balance in us, we may experience it as a feeling of neediness or hunger. We may have an erratic routine, erratic energy, or erratic digestion. We may feel insecure and become excessively clingy. We may feel a need to mother everyone – every injured worm in the garden, every guy whose mother never taught him to cook – and we may do so at the expense of nourishing ourselves. We may use consumption of all kinds (food, clothes, data, etc.) to ground ourselves. We may try to elicit sympathy from others, feeling a need to always tell our story, yet never being fully understood. Underlying all these feelings and behaviors is a belief that we’re not quite whole, and as it drives us to search for something outside ourselves to fix us, it greatly undermines our freedom.
But it’s not true. What you are is undiminishable. The hole you feel is an illusion created by a misunderstanding about what you are and how you’re nourished. Perhaps you’ve closed your eyes to your resources and given away your power by buying into the idea that you need approval (maybe your biological mother’s, maybe your own) to be complete. Perhaps you’ve hardened your spiritual “stomach” or locked your spiritual “teeth” – refusing to accept nourishment and even creating something that looks like a hole in yourself. But there’s really nothing missing.
It’s fully possible to restore your integrity, to feel whole again. As I wrote last week, an important step is to recognize that your ability to access the qualities of Earth (wholeness, nourishment, groundedness, stability, sufficiency, belonging, being understood and at home, etc.) doesn’t depend on anyone else. If that seems like a giant philosophical leap, you can begin by opening yourself to the idea that at least it doesn’t depend on any single person. You can be supported in these ways by any good friend or family member, and by your own Higher Self. You can nurture yourself and get your own needs met. Observe a practice of gratitude. Notice all the ways in which you are held and provided for. Notice all the ways in which you have enough and are enough. And open yourself to receiving all that’s coming to you. You are worth it.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => There Isn’t Really a Hole Inside You: The Earth Element and Your Inner Mother
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[post_content] => When our four-year-old daughter came home from her first day at a Montessori preschool, she handed me a swatch of cloth with several buttons sewn neatly onto it. “Where did you get this, sweetie?” I asked.
“I made it!” she exclaimed proudly. She also informed me that she had chopped apples with a “grownup knife” and cut flowers with pruning shears.
I couldn’t believe it. This girl had barely used scissors and never played with a needle before. We weren’t excessively protective parents, but we had no idea that she was capable of doing tasks like these (without hurting herself even). Part of the secret, we learned, was the mixed-age class. In a group of kids ranging from three to six, the older ones were instrumental in inspiring and instructing the younger ones. The teacher explained that when a child sees an adult perform a complex task, she won’t assume she’s capable of doing it herself. But if she sees another kid do it, she naturally thinks, “I’m going to do that, too!” This is one of the many ways I’ve been inspired and instructed by children – and it has informed how I work with adults.
When my wife founded The Dragontree, we wanted to provide a space for people to relax and heal. It wasn’t until some years later that we recognized a shared ambition to support people in whole-life wellness, which includes helping people to discover and actualize their potential. But while a young child may assume she can do what another child can, this isn’t always true for adults. We see other adults doing great things and often think, “I don’t have what they have.”
Most adults have old, fixed ideas about their capacities, largely influenced by teachers and parents. The best research on this subject comes from Carol Dweck, who studies childhood learning and self-esteem, and coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. A fixed mindset refers to a belief that one’s ability in a given area, whether strong or weak, isn’t going to change. Thoughts such as “I’m not good with numbers,” or “I can’t sing,” or “I’m not an organized person” all indicate underlying fixed mindsets.
In contrast, a growth mindset entails the belief that, whatever your current ability, you can work at it and get better. Dweck found that kids with growth mindsets enjoy a challenge, are more confident, and have a stronger work ethic. It probably seems obvious that knowing you can improve your lot would be more empowering than believing you’re stuck with it, but we rarely take the time to investigate and question our deepest beliefs.
Indeed, one of the tricky things about changing a fixed mindset about, say, your skill at math, is that you may also have a fixed mindset about your inability to change your mindset! (“It’s just the kind of person I am!”) Thus, there’s a something of a catch-22 here: in order to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset you must have a growth mindset around changing your mindset. However, I find it useful to remember that these two configurations – fixed and growth – aren’t equally valid. It’s not a case of “different but equal.” A fixed mindset is inherently incorrect. Though we may fiercely insist that it’s true, it’s not. We can change. We can grow. We can improve. Always.
In his 2014 TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, psychologist Dan Gilbert teaches that people usually believe they’re unlikely to change much in the future – but they’re wrong. “All of us are walking around with an illusion,” he says. “An illusion that our personal history has just come to an end. That we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” It’s true, his studies show, that our rate of change slows down somewhat as we get older, but it doesn’t slow down nearly as much as we believe it will. “At every age from 18 to 68 in our data set,” Gilbert continues, “people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience [in values, personality, friends, and preferences] over the next ten years.” He suggests that it’s easier for us to see how we’ve changed in the past than it is for us to imagine how we’ll change in the future. “Human beings,” he states, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
So, if the science shows that you’re bound to change whether you believe it or not, why not believe it? A willingness to believe (i.e., hold a growth mindset) moves you from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. If you believe you’re capable of change and growth, you can be a conscious creator of the life you desire.
A critical factor in making productive change is the recognition and acceptance of your current status. Many of us have a hard time giving ourselves an honest self-appraisal because of our upbringing. If you or your parents were raised during wartime there may have been a “stiff upper lip” policy of denying weaknesses and carrying on stoically.
Later generations faced a different obstacle – the self-esteem movement. In retrospective studies of the movement that picked up speed in the 1980s, Dweck and others found that kids who were always told they were great tended to grow into young adults with fixed mindsets that didn’t serve them. They saw themselves as awesome regardless of the facts or their quality of participation. And the inevitable dissonance that resulted when they underperformed often provoked disillusionment or depression. The fixed aspect of a fixed mindset implies a kind of rigidity, and thus a painful reckoning when disproven.
I believe it’s important to love and accept oneself completely (what you truly are is awesome) but what happened here might be seen as a form of “bypass.” Rather than help kids to face their deficiencies, we decided it was favorable to pretend they didn’t have any. The self-esteem movement, at least when understood and applied shallowly, aimed to help kids believe in themselves by giving them a gold star no matter what. The “participation trophy” is a good example. How can we grow (or track that growth) if we aren’t honest and accepting of our actual starting point?
Now, let’s get back to that disparity between adults and young children. In our work through the Dragontree to facilitate the emergence of people’s greatness we’ve encountered so many folks who see themselves as fundamentally different from (i.e., inferior to) those they see as great. I’d like to challenge this belief.
While Dweck’s research deals mostly with intelligence and success, we feel the growth mindset also applies to things like our capacity for healing, happiness, power, spiritual connection, and love. For instance, beliefs such as, “There’s no soul mate out there for me,” “I don’t have a connection to a higher power,” “I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life,” “I don’t have what it takes to change the world,” and “I’m just not an optimistic, light-hearted type of person” all reveal fixed mindsets and are therefore untrue – except perhaps in this moment.
If you feel an urge to emerge – to come into your power and make a positive difference – but something is holding you back, I encourage you to first unearth the fixed mindsets that are undermining you and challenge them. If it feels like too much of a stretch to completely reverse a negative belief, start by “trying on” a minor shift in a positive direction, coupled with an openness for things to get better. For example, if you’re mired in “I’m going to be sick forever,” trying to replace it with something like “I feel like a million bucks” may produce some cognitive dissonance; your mind may simply not buy it. But beginning with a statement like, “I allow myself to heal,” is harder for your mind to argue with. And even if a negative belief about yourself is factual right now, holding a growth mindset entails admitting that you don’t know what will happen in the future. Thus, a very small nudge in the direction of growth might look like replacing “I’ll never meet my soul mate” with “I haven’t met my soul mate yet.”
If you don’t believe you have what it takes to be great, answer me this: what do think is the actual, measurable difference between you and, say, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or Rosa Parks? Were they smarter than you? You can learn. Were they more spiritual than you? You can open yourself to that realm of experience. Were they more dedicated than you? You can begin a consistent devotion to your dreams right now.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In order to be a conscious creator, you need to be able to hold a vision of the change you wish to see. That is, you need to hold it consistently until it’s actualized (and then update it as needed and continue the practice). For many who are mystified as to why they’re unable to bring about the changes they desire, the answer is as simple as this: they keep changing their mind and/or getting distracted. If you notice you’ve been doing this, don’t punish yourself for it (we live in incredibly distractible times); just recognize it and get back on track.
Finally, if you have trouble believing you’re capable of greatness, it may be worthwhile to journal about “What is greatness?” Greatness isn’t the same as fame and it doesn’t require breaking world records. (I’m not trying to convince you that even if you spend your life doing bong hits and playing Nintendo, you can still be great in your own way. Let’s be real here.) Human greatness may not have a universal definition, but I believe it’s much more common than we recognize. There’s greatness in storytelling, greatness in healing, greatness in communication, greatness in teaching, and greatness in feeding the poor. There’s greatness in the smallest of places.
I’d love to hear your feelings about greatness and living to your potential. What have your challenges been? How have you overcome fixed mindsets?
Be well,
Peter
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[post_content] => A few days ago I was out in the sun in a beekeeping suit for hours, lifting frames of comb that were heavy and dripping with honey. We had to damage the bees’ work because they had “cross-combed” some of their frames together (built comb that bridged multiple “drawers” of their hive), so they were buzzing around us angrily and dive-bombing my face. It was getting very toasty in my suit, and then I started feeling my heartbeat in my head. I turned to Briana and I said, “I think I might pass out.”
I remembered a cooling technique one of my first yoga teachers taught me: you curl your tongue and inhale slowly through it like a straw, then exhale through your nose, and repeat. I don’t know if that’s what did it or if it was the Great Bee Spirit yelling into my mind, “Get it together, man! Do NOT drop that box full of thousands of bees!” I am happy to report that I didn’t faint and we finished our work without incident.
That convergence of tremendous heat and the beating of my heart reminded me that it’s a good time to revisit the lessons of the Fire Element. Fire presides over summer, when the Sun – the quintessence of Fire – is closest to us. In the human body, each element is represented by an internal organ. Can you guess what the main Fire organ is?
I’ll give you a hint. It’s red, it’s constantly pulsating, and it radiates its influence over the whole body. It’s the heart, of course – the sun of the human being. Over the past couple centuries, the brain has largely displaced the heart as the organ people think of as most important – but it would be worthless without constant, uninterrupted blood flow from the heart.
In traditional Chinese medical philosophy, each organ has a position in the community of the body-mind, and the heart is considered to be the Emperor/Empress. The ancient Daoists had a lot of wise things to say about leadership (see the classic, Dao De Jing by Lao Zi), and I think these insights are especially valuable at this time – particularly in the U.S. where recent years have brought intense sociopolitical division.
The role of the superior leader, Lao Zi wrote, is to integrate, to allow all parts of the kingdom to feel included. Before the throne of the superior leader, everyone is heard; no one is stifled or invalidated. As the Fire organ, we could say it’s like allowing the light and warmth of the sun to spread to and encompass the farthest reaches of the solar system. Even a planet as distant as Pluto is still held in the Sun’s grasp.
The role of the heart as an organ is the same – it wants to circulate its blood to all parts of the body. If there’s something sick or objectionable, like a sore on the foot, it doesn’t exclude the foot from its circulation. While that might kill the foot and eliminate the sore, it wouldn’t be real healing.
The heart is considered to be the portal by which Awareness (Shen) enters this body and mind. I consider the term Awareness here to be synonymous with Light of Consciousness, Holy Spirit, God, Love, or whatever word feels best to you. Let’s use Love for the moment, since it doesn’t push as many buttons as “God” and it shares a lot of qualities with Fire.
Until about 100 years ago, Fire (as the sun, campfires, candles, etc.) was the sole source of light and warmth in our world. When we open our hearts to Love, we feel a similar inner light and warmth. Love could be considered the heart’s greatest power. Love, like Fire, is a unifying force. People of all kinds and in all places look up to the same one light and are sustained by it. And though all manner of things can be fed into a fire, they become one homogeneous pile of ash – all differences rendered indistinguishable. The same is the case for Love.
The heart works best when it’s open. An open heart lets love and awareness through. An open heart is inclusive. But we’ve all closed our hearts many times. We do it as a reactive defense mechanism in order to not feel pain or other undesirable feelings. We do it whenever we refuse to accept some aspect of reality (like white supremacists or human trafficking, to name two of the hardest). Sometimes we believe it’s best not to feel at all – because that will make life easier or will make us strong and manly. So the heart remains mostly or entirely closed. Is it any wonder that the main cause of death is, essentially, closure of the heart and its vessels (we call this stroke, heart attack, and other forms of cardiovascular disease)?
The physical implications of closed hearts are relatively minor, though. The psychospiritual implications are where this habit hits us hardest. What are we left with when we exclude Love, Light, and Spirit from our lives? It’s like restricting ourselves to seeing just one color (it’s called Pantone 448 C, by the way). It makes us think of the world in terms of “us and them.” It causes us to focus on what’s wrong instead of what’s right. And it enables us to be willfully ignorant of the impacts of our choices on other humans and the planet (though not entirely ignorant – there's always a part of us that knows).
I believe the work of the heart (through the power of love) is absolute inclusion. Feel everything. Accept everything – even the things you’re working to change. Accept everyone – even those you condemn (they have something to teach you about your shadow). This is not an invitation to bypass the work before you. It’s a call to step into that work with an open heart.
If there’s something you don’t like about the world, or a person you find difficult, consider the likely outcome of rejecting or excluding them. How would you respond to being condemned? Like the sick foot, does this person heal through exclusion?
Find the parts of your kingdom (within and without) that you have excluded, and let your love rush into them. If there’s something you don’t like, begin with inclusion. Say, “I completely love, forgive, and accept myself – even though I have this {issue that I find objectionable}” or “I completely love, forgive, and accept you – even though I disagree with your views {or even condemn your actions}.” You may even find your heart saying, “Even though I must stop you from harming others, I completely love, forgive, and accept the essential being that you are, and I welcome the healing of your mind and the re-emergence of that essence.”
Saturate and envelop, and draw into your heart, the orphaned and rejected elements of yourself and the world. I believe this is our soul work; this is how we heal the world.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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[post_content] => In last week’s article on the origins of Mother’s Day, I mentioned connecting with the earth as a means of feeling supported in a motherly way. This week I’ll explain more about that earth/mother connection.
The earth is a mother to all lifeforms who live upon her. She births them and sustains them. In animistic traditions, the plane above us – sometimes known as Father Sky – tends to have a rather ethereal influence on our lives. But Mother Earth’s role is decidedly tangible. She gives physical form to a soul and feeds her young from her own body.
In Five Element philosophy, the Earth Element governs nourishment and growth. The internal organs corresponding with Earth relate to food intake, digestion, and distribution of nutrients to all parts of us, like our inner mother. Earth also presides over our ability to give and receive nurturing, support, comfort, and understanding – to others and ourselves. Compared to Fire, Water, or Air, Earth is very slow to change, and such is the quality of a mother’s presence – like the solid ground beneath our feet, her support is constant, enduring, unconditional.
The Earth season is late summer – the time of harvest – and the Earth phase of any process is when we reap the fruits of our labors. It offers us an experience of abundance, of fullness, of having all our needs met. It’s the role a mother serves for a baby. And a woman’s pregnant body – round and full in the belly and breasts – parallels this phase beautifully.
Just as the Earth has a powerful gravitational pull that keeps us rooted, our mother, too, has a certain gravity. We are drawn to her through a bond that began nine months before our emergence. We run to her as children for comfort and nurturing. And after leaving home to strike out on our own, we are drawn back to visit her and recharge this link. Like the earth, she provides us a sense of home. Throughout our lives, our mother is often the one around which all the children and grandchildren gather, for as the Earth, she is our center.
Speaking of the center, our navel marks our personal center of gravity, and it’s a permanent reminder of our oneness with our mother – the closest connection two humans can share. It’s also a vestige of the most perfect nourishment we have ever had. As such, it is a very important point in acupuncture, Qigong, and other systems of traditional healing.
A woman once came to me for help with incessant vomiting and diarrhea. It was as if the Earth Element within her was in utter turmoil. She had tried a wide range of drugs, but nothing made a difference. She was emaciated and lethargic – at five feet eight inches, she weighed only seventy-eight pounds. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were sunken. The acupuncture and herbs I gave her barely helped. Eventually, I decided to try a somewhat obscure treatment: centering the umbilical pulse.
If you press the fingertips of one hand into your navel, you’ll probably feel the pulsation of your abdominal aorta. And if you feel more closely, you may notice that the pulsation is strongest above or below, or to one side of the navel. The goal of this treatment is to use physical manipulation to move the pulse so that it’s most powerful right in the middle. I succeeded in moving her pulse, but to be totally honest, I had little belief that it would do anything.
So, I was astonished when she reported the next week that her digestion had improved dramatically. Over the coming months, her episodes of diarrhea and vomiting diminished almost to zero, and she began gaining weight. When I last saw her, she was strong and muscular and weighed 135 pounds. Such is the power of restoring our center – our Earth, our inner mother.
Each of the Five Elements is expressed as a virtue when we embody it in a healthy way. The virtue of Earth is integrity – meaning a quality of being whole, entire, and undiminished. When the earthen banks of a river have integrity, water rushes through them but they remain stable without eroding. When an earthen building has integrity, it can be battered by wind and rain for centuries without crumbling or washing away.
The initial shock to our sense of wholeness occurs through separation from our mother in the act of birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord. Our mother’s womb is our homeland, and we will never return to it. After the fundamental separation that occurs through birth, we are usually cared for and held closely, but gradually this connection becomes more distant. Can you remember the feeling of being always held, enveloped in your mother’s arms, cradled, protected, understood, comforted, and safe? Can you imagine how it would feel to let yourself be held again by someone big enough to carry you easily and take care of all your needs? Even though this separation is completely natural and, as children, we play a role in the distancing process, there’s no guarantee that it will leave us feeling capable of recognizing and meeting our own needs, or able to ground and center ourselves.
When Earth is out of balance in us, we may experience it as a feeling of neediness or hunger. We may have an erratic routine, erratic energy, or erratic digestion. We may feel insecure and become excessively clingy. We may feel a need to mother everyone – every injured worm in the garden, every guy whose mother never taught him to cook – and we may do so at the expense of nourishing ourselves. We may use consumption of all kinds (food, clothes, data, etc.) to ground ourselves. We may try to elicit sympathy from others, feeling a need to always tell our story, yet never being fully understood. Underlying all these feelings and behaviors is a belief that we’re not quite whole, and as it drives us to search for something outside ourselves to fix us, it greatly undermines our freedom.
But it’s not true. What you are is undiminishable. The hole you feel is an illusion created by a misunderstanding about what you are and how you’re nourished. Perhaps you’ve closed your eyes to your resources and given away your power by buying into the idea that you need approval (maybe your biological mother’s, maybe your own) to be complete. Perhaps you’ve hardened your spiritual “stomach” or locked your spiritual “teeth” – refusing to accept nourishment and even creating something that looks like a hole in yourself. But there’s really nothing missing.
It’s fully possible to restore your integrity, to feel whole again. As I wrote last week, an important step is to recognize that your ability to access the qualities of Earth (wholeness, nourishment, groundedness, stability, sufficiency, belonging, being understood and at home, etc.) doesn’t depend on anyone else. If that seems like a giant philosophical leap, you can begin by opening yourself to the idea that at least it doesn’t depend on any single person. You can be supported in these ways by any good friend or family member, and by your own Higher Self. You can nurture yourself and get your own needs met. Observe a practice of gratitude. Notice all the ways in which you are held and provided for. Notice all the ways in which you have enough and are enough. And open yourself to receiving all that’s coming to you. You are worth it.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => There Isn’t Really a Hole Inside You: The Earth Element and Your Inner Mother
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