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Last week I saw a show by a troop of comedians at a tiny theater in Montana. Though they were talented, I didn’t find myself laughing much at the recurring “battle of the sexes” theme. The men accused the women of being frigid and overly emotional. The women complained that the men need to be mothered and only care about sex. And back and forth it went. Sure, there’s comic relief in sharing about our common issues, but as I sat there seeing men and women cast somewhat bitterly in these one-dimensional ways, I couldn’t help thinking, “Are we really still doing this?”
In my previous article, we looked at the role that attitude plays in the health and sustainability of a relationship. Of course, you can’t make your partner change their attitude, but it’s worth fully exploiting the potential of your own attitude before concluding that the relationship isn’t going to work. One way to be responsible for your attitude is by abstaining from relating your partner as a stereotype.
I believe almost everyone does this to an extent. It’s difficult to banish from our minds the ideas we have about men, women, and humans in general. Even if your partner isn’t a typical male or female, your conditioning can cause you to relate to them based on ideas and experiences from the past. And even when you relate to someone simply based on your ideas about that specific person – rather than whoever they are in this very moment – this may still serve as an impediment to authentic connection.
Practice presence with them. It’s good to start with a relatively casual conversation. Let both parties be innocent – try to enter the conversation without judgment, expectations, or lenses. Who knows what might happen and how you might see the other person if you were to enter the exchange with absolute freshness.
See if you can internally choose when to talk and when to listen. When it’s your turn to listen, don’t think about what you’re going to say next. Just listen. Listen with your ears and eyes and heart. Breathe slowly and fully.
What else is involved in “your work”? Here are some examples:
To the extent that you actively work to resolve past experiences (especially traumatic ones) that infringe on your current ability to show up “cleanly” with your partner, you will benefit.
To the extent that you work to deactivate your “buttons” which cause you to make you react disproportionately to relatively benign behaviors by your partner, you will benefit.
To the extent that you choose to show up in your relationship with as much presence and enthusiasm as you can muster, you will benefit.
To the extent that you take responsibility for your baggage, attitude, communication, and interpretations, you will benefit.
To the extent that you choose to remember and honor your commitment (assuming, of course, that neither party is getting hurt by remaining together), you will benefit.
All these benefits are yours whether or not the relationship survives, and the chances of its survival are so much greater when you’re an active and responsible participant in the above ways. Further, if you’re not in a relationship but want to be, doing your work will make for a healthier relationship when the time comes, and it will also support you to make better choices of who to invite into your life. If you’re not in a romantic relationship and don’t care to be, this work will serve you in all your other relationships, including the one with yourself.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Relationship Repair Part Two: Do Your Own Work
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For the holidays we gave our eight-year-old daughter a set of indoor monkey bars. That meant I spent a day with my arms above my head, screwing eye bolts into her bedroom ceiling. She can now get from the doorway to her bed without setting foot on the floor, which is useful because she tells me it’s made out of molten lava.
At bedtime I reached out to turn on a faucet and suddenly my mid-back locked up. It was incredibly painful and I felt unable to move without worsening it. I made the mistake of bending down to touch my toes, thinking it would help, but was then frozen in that position.
I’ve treated this same condition in countless patients. Often this type of back spasm is crippling for at least a few days – meaning missed work or travel – followed by a lingering stiffness and pain for a week or more. Frequently the locked area, even as it begins to release, is prone to getting retriggered if we move or sleep the wrong way.
Luckily, I knew what to do. I started locating and massaging effective acupuncture points on my hands and arms that began to release the locked up muscles. Meanwhile, I used certain visualizations and breathing techniques that facilitated the loosening of my back. Eventually I could move enough to lie on a small ball to put pressure on the muscle spasm while continuing with the breathing, visualization, and self-acupressure. I went to bed about an hour later than I intended, but with my back feeling 80% better. The next day I released the rest of the tension.
Several times throughout the process I thought, “This would be so much worse if I didn’t know how to do this.” I would have to find a practitioner and wait for an appointment. But what kind of practitioner, and which one? What if they weren’t available during the holidays? Would I have to be immobile during our holiday party? Would I be reliant on pharmaceutical painkillers? Would I be in a daze? Would I find it hard to get off them?
This conundrum is why I created an online course called Live Pain Free. It started with the advice I found myself giving hundreds of pain patients in my office over the years – and the realization that I didn’t have time to explain everything I wanted to teach them. Little by little, the course grew to include virtually all of the techniques and lifestyle modifications I have found useful for self-treatment of pain. It’s more comprehensive than anything else I’ve found.
Are there other things like it? Yes, of course. There are plenty of books and courses that teach pain relief techniques, some of them very useful. But most feature a single approach to pain, and I’ve never found a single method that works for all – or even most – pain. Even for a given individual, some things work one day and not the next. This is because there are many “ingredients” in pain, especially long-term pain – our history, psychology, lifestyle, body mechanics, etc. – so we need a blend of multiple approaches.
During the years I spent crafting this course, I discovered that beyond helping people to make their pain go away, much of what I wish to share deals with releasing ways of thinking that are restrictive and keep us trapped in discomfort. Although pain management is the issue that often leads people to look deeper, the ultimate resolution may be something so much more than mere physical relief: liberation from our resistance to life, the opportunity to accept and live in the present moment, the recognition of patterns that have held us back, and more.
The feeling of gratitude I had the other night – I want that for everyone. If you deal with frequent pain, if you would like to help a loved one with their pain, or you just like the idea of being prepared and knowing a wide range of strategies – some based in modern science others in Eastern medicine – check out Live Pain Free.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => The Gift of Knowing How to Manage Your Own Pain
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As a young adult I often stayed at the beautiful Marin Headlands hostel just north of San Francisco. I was there one weekend while a large group of missionaries was passing through. We were all sharing the same kitchen space and I was chopping some broccoli when a cute young woman around my age approached me. We started talking and I thought it was going well. I have always enjoyed conversing about spirituality and religion, even with people of different beliefs than my own.
At the time I was immersed in learning about Advaita – nondualism – which was blowing my mind. Nondual philosophy asserts that, although we perceive many things that may feel separate, in reality everything is an expression of a single Oneness experiencing itself in infinite ways.
Some people call this Oneness God or Goddess or Source or Divine or Dao. What’s important isn’t the name but the experience of this connection, and how it redefines how we see reality.
I had in my suitcase a book called Aghora in which an eccentric spiritual teacher explains that since everything is God, both sex and eating are simply acts of “putting God into God.” So, when this missionary woman asked me what I was doing, I guess I thought I was being clever by replying, “Oh, just chopping up some God.”
She was clearly taken aback, so I explained that if the whole universe is an expression of one God, then broccoli was of course included, and therefore I was chopping up some God to put into God (myself). She was speechless for a moment, then said – a bit louder than was called for, I thought – “God is not broccoli!” and walked away.
There were several lessons for me in this story, starting with (1) nobody likes a smug person pushing their buttons, and (2) if you truly want to make a difference in the world you need to meet people where they are. But aside from my social failure, maybe the most important lesson was that there’s often a huge difference between the description of an experience and the experience itself. In other words, to understand something intellectually tells us nothing of how we’d be affected by experiencing it.
In lectures, I used to explain how physics seems to “prove” nondualism, hoping that even the nonspiritual types in the class would be won over. I’d point out that while each of us feels we’re separate from everyone else in the classroom, we and the world around us are all just different configurations of the same fundamental stuff – subatomic particles or even more fundamental fluctuations of energy. It’s a powerful idea, but I doubt it’s caused many people to conduct themselves differently towards their neighbors.
For me and most people I know, life changes have come through direct experiences of this Oneness in non-ordinary states of consciousness facilitated mainly by meditation, yoga, ritual, self-inquiry, immersion in nature, music, acupuncture, art, pain, dance, conscious breathing, interpersonal connection, and entheogenic substances. Ordinary reality (even with impressive-yet-unactualized spiritual concepts) appears random and soulless by comparison.
I didn’t have the chance to ask, “If God is not broccoli, what is broccoli?” We tend to draw vague, subjective lines around life and then deem one side worthy of our reverence and the other unworthy, but the abolition of such lines isn’t automatically liberating. I’ve seen people, myself included, latch onto the idea that everything is Divine and then fall into nihilism. Because, if it’s all God, why try? Why care? Why choose one path over any other?
This kind of thinking is a sure sign that we’re operating from a mental concept and not actually experiencing what it represents. It would be similar to take a psychedelic mushroom and hold it between your teeth, telling yourself, “So this is what psychedelic mushrooms are all about. Meh.”
Your homework is to determine whether or not broccoli is God. Since “God” is a spiritual concept, it can’t really be assessed in ordinary reality. Everyday thinking needs to fall away. You can get there using any of the approaches I mentioned above.
Be well,
Peter
P.S. I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes on nondualism from Tantra scholar Christopher Wallis in Tantra Illuminated (slightly abridged for space):
“Since reality is One, and everything is equally an expression of the one divine Light of Consciousness, every experience by definition is an experience of God… If we propose that some things are more God than others, like concentrated orange juice versus watered-down orange juice, then we must propose the existence of something that is not God that waters down divinity. But no such thing can be found, at least in this philosophy, because 1) the definition of God here is the unbounded Light of Consciousness, 2) everything that is known to exist is an object of experience, and 3) every experience is by definition pervaded by consciousness. Therefore, this – whatever is happening right now – is as God as it gets. Now, if you are in a miserable or banal life situation, you may be disappointed by this announcement. But notice I said, ‘This is as God as it gets,’ not, ‘This is as free as it gets.’ Freedom means actually experiencing the divinity in each moment.”
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Last week I saw a show by a troop of comedians at a tiny theater in Montana. Though they were talented, I didn’t find myself laughing much at the recurring “battle of the sexes” theme. The men accused the women of being frigid and overly emotional. The women complained that the men need to be mothered and only care about sex. And back and forth it went. Sure, there’s comic relief in sharing about our common issues, but as I sat there seeing men and women cast somewhat bitterly in these one-dimensional ways, I couldn’t help thinking, “Are we really still doing this?”
In my previous article, we looked at the role that attitude plays in the health and sustainability of a relationship. Of course, you can’t make your partner change their attitude, but it’s worth fully exploiting the potential of your own attitude before concluding that the relationship isn’t going to work. One way to be responsible for your attitude is by abstaining from relating your partner as a stereotype.
I believe almost everyone does this to an extent. It’s difficult to banish from our minds the ideas we have about men, women, and humans in general. Even if your partner isn’t a typical male or female, your conditioning can cause you to relate to them based on ideas and experiences from the past. And even when you relate to someone simply based on your ideas about that specific person – rather than whoever they are in this very moment – this may still serve as an impediment to authentic connection.
Practice presence with them. It’s good to start with a relatively casual conversation. Let both parties be innocent – try to enter the conversation without judgment, expectations, or lenses. Who knows what might happen and how you might see the other person if you were to enter the exchange with absolute freshness.
See if you can internally choose when to talk and when to listen. When it’s your turn to listen, don’t think about what you’re going to say next. Just listen. Listen with your ears and eyes and heart. Breathe slowly and fully.
What else is involved in “your work”? Here are some examples:
To the extent that you actively work to resolve past experiences (especially traumatic ones) that infringe on your current ability to show up “cleanly” with your partner, you will benefit.
To the extent that you work to deactivate your “buttons” which cause you to make you react disproportionately to relatively benign behaviors by your partner, you will benefit.
To the extent that you choose to show up in your relationship with as much presence and enthusiasm as you can muster, you will benefit.
To the extent that you take responsibility for your baggage, attitude, communication, and interpretations, you will benefit.
To the extent that you choose to remember and honor your commitment (assuming, of course, that neither party is getting hurt by remaining together), you will benefit.
All these benefits are yours whether or not the relationship survives, and the chances of its survival are so much greater when you’re an active and responsible participant in the above ways. Further, if you’re not in a relationship but want to be, doing your work will make for a healthier relationship when the time comes, and it will also support you to make better choices of who to invite into your life. If you’re not in a romantic relationship and don’t care to be, this work will serve you in all your other relationships, including the one with yourself.
Be well,
Peter
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