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When I was 13, I learned that it was a good idea to start carrying a mini pack of Kleenexes in my backpack. You know, just in case. As I entered young adulthood, I began to bring a sweatshirt, water bottle, pens, notebook, and snack with me. And if you had asked me if I was a good planner, I would have proudly said, “Yes!”
Meanwhile, if you asked me what courses I would be taking the following semester, where I’d be living in a year, or how much money I wanted to be making, I would have drawn a blank. (My wife probably had all of these things written down by age 12.)
I mistook a little short-term preparedness for real planning. When it came to actual planning – as in, crafting a plan for how I intended my life to proceed – I was pretty resistant. But I eventually learned that a lack of planning often led to suffering. It could mean disappointing other people, feeling scattered and disorganized, and being limited in what I could achieve.
So I began to plan out of necessity. Making plans allowed me to have working relationships and a functional medical practice. Yet, I still hadn’t expanded into planning out of creativity. That didn’t dawn on me until years later.
Then it hit me that planning is the pivotal act in accepting one’s role as a creator of one’s life. From this perspective, planning becomes like playing. It combines imagination and intention, and when we really open ourselves to this form of play, it’s truly magical.
We created The Dreambook to help people approach planning this way – as a means of creation. It’s so much like playing that when we’re immersed in imaginative play, we may sometimes set new creations into motion. Briana started doing this spontaneously as a child.
A few years ago, she found a diary from her tweens that she had completely forgotten about. In the diary she had written about what her adulthood would be like. It wasn’t quite the deliberate process we teach; rather, it was more of a free, self-trusting expression of what she expected to create. And even though she forgot about it, we were amazed to discover how accurately her future turned out to match her diary – right down to the dates when certain achievements would occur!
I believe it’s an especially important time for all of us to begin to approach life-creation in this way. When bad news can so easily color our experience of the world, it’s vital that we stoke our inner creative fire. I’m proud of how well the Dreambook has helped people recognize this fire and feed it.
I hope to get more people using the Dreambook and being part of the big, loving, supportive community that has formed around it on Facebook, so that we can all consciously co-create a better world. Currently, all Dreambooks and Dreambook accessories are 50% off, so if you've been wondering if/when to dive into this process, now is the time!
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Planning from Creativity Rather than Necessity
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I believe that anyone can find ways to evolve and do their personal development work through whatever career they have. Whether you’re a custodian, a farmer, or the CEO of a lollipop company, you’ll inevitably encounter challenges that will push you to stretch and grow. And you will encounter opportunity after opportunity to demonstrate the kind of person you choose to be.
I often tell this to clients who are stuck in jobs they despise. I’m not glib about it; I know it’s not usually an easy shift of perspective to make. But sometimes it’s only when the suffering becomes insufferable that we avail ourselves of heroic powers and resources that were seemingly hidden before.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend deliberately putting yourself in a toxic environment just to facilitate your evolution. If you can find work you enjoy that pays your bills while in the company of decent folks, I say take it. Although there may not be a dire need to tap into your latent sainthood in order to survive there, pain isn’t the only thing that stimulates growth.
I’ve often said that one of the things I love most about being a healer and teacher is that my professional work and my personal (internal) work are so often unified. If I want to be a more effective healer and a better teacher, sure I could learn more techniques, but the highest outcome for everyone involved would result from my routinely “cleaning house” and actively choosing to be my best self. I ask myself questions like, Am I being present or departing to go elsewhere in my mind? Am I listening to the person in front of me, or just my own mental interpretations? Am I communicating in a way that’s true, kind, and necessary?
These are questions we can ask ourselves in any environment, but some settings lend themselves to this kind of inquiry. For me, while I was driven to do personal inquiry before I got into medicine, it waxed and waned, and I’ve found my career to be a great catalyst.
If you find it appealing to have a career that directly asks you to work on yourself, consider being a life coach through our training program. Even if you’re not in the market for a career change, we’ve had numerous participants who have done the training to bring a new perspective and skill set to their current workplace. And if being a coach doesn’t sound appealing, but the personal work does, then check out Sacred Expansion. It’s the preliminary portion of the Dragontree Life Coach training, and can be done independently. It’s an eight-week course for finding your authentic self and clearing the stuff that gets in the way of living as this divine being.
So much love,
Peter
[post_title] => Let Your Outer Work Be Your Inner Work
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* * This is a re-share of one of our favorite Mothers Day articles from 2019. Enjoy! **
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
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When I was 13, I learned that it was a good idea to start carrying a mini pack of Kleenexes in my backpack. You know, just in case. As I entered young adulthood, I began to bring a sweatshirt, water bottle, pens, notebook, and snack with me. And if you had asked me if I was a good planner, I would have proudly said, “Yes!”
Meanwhile, if you asked me what courses I would be taking the following semester, where I’d be living in a year, or how much money I wanted to be making, I would have drawn a blank. (My wife probably had all of these things written down by age 12.)
I mistook a little short-term preparedness for real planning. When it came to actual planning – as in, crafting a plan for how I intended my life to proceed – I was pretty resistant. But I eventually learned that a lack of planning often led to suffering. It could mean disappointing other people, feeling scattered and disorganized, and being limited in what I could achieve.
So I began to plan out of necessity. Making plans allowed me to have working relationships and a functional medical practice. Yet, I still hadn’t expanded into planning out of creativity. That didn’t dawn on me until years later.
Then it hit me that planning is the pivotal act in accepting one’s role as a creator of one’s life. From this perspective, planning becomes like playing. It combines imagination and intention, and when we really open ourselves to this form of play, it’s truly magical.
We created The Dreambook to help people approach planning this way – as a means of creation. It’s so much like playing that when we’re immersed in imaginative play, we may sometimes set new creations into motion. Briana started doing this spontaneously as a child.
A few years ago, she found a diary from her tweens that she had completely forgotten about. In the diary she had written about what her adulthood would be like. It wasn’t quite the deliberate process we teach; rather, it was more of a free, self-trusting expression of what she expected to create. And even though she forgot about it, we were amazed to discover how accurately her future turned out to match her diary – right down to the dates when certain achievements would occur!
I believe it’s an especially important time for all of us to begin to approach life-creation in this way. When bad news can so easily color our experience of the world, it’s vital that we stoke our inner creative fire. I’m proud of how well the Dreambook has helped people recognize this fire and feed it.
I hope to get more people using the Dreambook and being part of the big, loving, supportive community that has formed around it on Facebook, so that we can all consciously co-create a better world. Currently, all Dreambooks and Dreambook accessories are 50% off, so if you've been wondering if/when to dive into this process, now is the time!
Be well,
Peter
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