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Rarely have I met anyone who is as clear about what they want to do as my wife. I met her while working at another spa where she was a massage therapist. At 22 she had an air of incredible capability and ambition.
Ambition and capability are mighty gifts, though we all know they can be used for mere wealth and power if not informed by love and vision. Luckily, she has those gifts too. In the past 20 years I’ve seen her accomplish so much to bring peace, equity, and wellness to the community.
During our time together I’ve managed to do a lot as a teacher, writer, and practitioner, and Briana deserves some of the credit for this also, as she’s always been at side, encouraging and inspiring me. I’ve also learned a lot about beauty because she has a way of seeing the beauty in mundane things and beautifying every space she enters.
Point is, Tuesday was her birthday! I want to celebrate this woman and her great positive influence on me, our family, our amazing staff, our mission, and all of you who’ve received some kind of product or service from us.
Happy birthday, Briana Rye Borten!
From Peter and Everyone at the Dragontree
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I had been hearing about an impressive tai chi teacher named Gregory Fong since moving to Portland in 1997. It was about five years later that I convinced Briana to join me one evening and we drove to Chinatown to check out his class. Sifu (“master”) Fong, as everyone called him, was probably not more than about five feet tall, but there was something intimidating about him. He welcomed us warmly, then said, “I have two questions for you. First, do you like pain?”
Do I like pain? What is the appropriate answer here? I mumbled something like, “Maybe if there is a good reason.”
He smiled. “Question two. Do you like to work hard?”
Oh boy. I thought about asking him to define the word “like,” but instead responded with, “I guess?”
He chuckled. “Alright, you don’t know if you like pain or hard work. Just sit down on that chair then.” He pointed to a wooden folding chair against a wall covered with framed portraits of Chinese men. “Rest your hands on your thighs. Don’t lean back. Lift your feet off the floor just high enough for one sheet of paper to fit under them. See you later.” And he walked away for a long time. You can try that right now if you’re sitting.
Years later, having done a lot of hard work and endured much pain in his classes, I reflected that I did in fact like to work hard. I still didn’t like pain, but I had learned the difference between avoiding it versus using it and finding a way through it. And I decided that those two questions are useful preliminaries before almost any endeavor.
They came to mind as I was thinking about the upcoming launch of our Sacred Expansion course. It’s a required program for all of our life coaches, and worthwhile for anyone interested in growing beyond their self-imposed limitations and releasing blocks to having an exceptional life.
In the context of Sacred Expansion, if I were to ask, “Do you like pain?” what I mean is, are you willing to voluntarily experience discomfort as part of discovering what’s holding you back? Are you willing to experience the tension of psycho-spiritual growing pains? Are you willing to be uncomfortable in the short term in order to release the long term discomfort you’ve gotten used to? Are you willing to use your pain to initiate a breakthrough?
As for the question “Do you like to work hard?” what I mean is, are you willing to stick with the work of unraveling your inner knots even when it’s difficult? Are you willing to choose a higher purpose – for instance: freedom, peace, spiritual connection, joy, service to your species and planet – over and over and over? Are you willing to break some habits? Are you willing to challenge your own thoughts? Are you willing to explore parts of yourself you aren’t comfortable with? All of these tasks represent a certain form of work.
By liking hard work, I don’t mean that you get points for having a hard life or that there’s merit in making things unnecessarily difficult. In fact, a core principle Sifu taught was that hard work and peace aren’t mutually exclusive. We can be at ease while simultaneously working our hardest. Regardless of the form that our work takes, there’s no getting around the importance of consistent effort in the direction of our dreams if we want them to come to fruition.
If you’ve even thought, “I know I have greater potential than this” or, “I feel like I’m missing out on my superpowers” or, “If I could release all this baggage, I could finally feel free!” read more about Sacred Expansion. We’d love to have you join us.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => My Favorite Kind of Pain
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It’s hard to quantify just how much humans have changed – how we relate to ourselves and our thoughts, how we get help, how we act in relationships, how we communicate, how we parent, how we educate, how we shop – because of the emergence of the modern field of psychology. Even if you don’t think much about psychology, you’ve been affected by it.
Common terms and concepts like ego, subconscious, projection, inferiority or superiority complex, anxiety, depression, in denial, being repressed, defense mechanism, introvert and extrovert, stress, antisocial, phobia, bipolar, sociopath, psychosomatic, and narcissist are woven into our vocabulary and culture because of psychology.
Did you notice that most of those terms describe pathological conditions? Like the field of medicine, psychology has focused mainly on disorders and how to treat them. Only in the past few decades has the subfield of positive psychology – the study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive – gained widespread attention and respect. Thanks to psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Martin Seligman, Dan Gilbert and many others, we’re setting our sights beyond treating pathology – to the ways we can support happiness, resilience, fulfillment, and higher purpose.
When it comes to adversity, positive psychology asks, “Can we do more than simply minimize the negative impact of this stress or trauma?” According to Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, research suggests that even after a major trauma, within three months most people are about as happy as they were beforehand. But is it possible for a person to come out better through their response to adversity? The answer is yes.
After a negative event three possibilities can follow: (1) things can stay the same as the were (2) things can get worse (3) things can get better. As author Shawn Achor explains in The Happiness Advantage, most people only consider options 1 and 2. At best, they hope to simply “bounce back” from adversity. But some manage to bounce forward, regardless of the severity of the tragedy. They use the unexpected obstacle to catalyze a needed change, to gain insight, to firm their resolve, to clarify what’s most important to them, or to initiate a breakthrough.
When I meditated on the idea of turning a downward fall into an uprising, two images came to mind. In the first one, a person was falling like Alice down the rabbit hole. Suddenly the entire scene was rotated 180 degrees, and from this new perspective the person was falling up. What initiated the flip? A perspective change.
In the second image, the person was a ball that had been flung rapidly downward. Then the floor appeared, they bounced off it, and soared upward. What was the “floor” that made the bounce possible? Resolve. A choice to change direction.
Achor says, “The people who do the best with adversity define themselves not by what has happened to them but by what they have made from what has happened to them…. It's not that everything happens for the best, but that we can make the best of everything that happens.”
Every obstacle (especially the big ones) carries a certain energetic potential. If we see them as bitter injustices, our meetings with them are like hitting a brick wall at high speed. They wreck us.
If we see them as portals, the combination of our own momentum and the energy inherent in the “obstacle” combine to make our interaction something like crossing a trans-dimensional wormhole. Resolve and/or a change of perspective is often the key. We all have the ability to do this.
Furthermore, the faculties we access in order to turn obstacles into opportunities inform us deeply about our potential. Every time we do this we get a little more awake, and it becomes easier to recognize that our Highest Self is simply presenting us with the most potent ways to leap forward.
I’d love to hear about the times you’ve turned adversity into a positive experience.
Be well,
Peter
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Rarely have I met anyone who is as clear about what they want to do as my wife. I met her while working at another spa where she was a massage therapist. At 22 she had an air of incredible capability and ambition.
Ambition and capability are mighty gifts, though we all know they can be used for mere wealth and power if not informed by love and vision. Luckily, she has those gifts too. In the past 20 years I’ve seen her accomplish so much to bring peace, equity, and wellness to the community.
During our time together I’ve managed to do a lot as a teacher, writer, and practitioner, and Briana deserves some of the credit for this also, as she’s always been at side, encouraging and inspiring me. I’ve also learned a lot about beauty because she has a way of seeing the beauty in mundane things and beautifying every space she enters.
Point is, Tuesday was her birthday! I want to celebrate this woman and her great positive influence on me, our family, our amazing staff, our mission, and all of you who’ve received some kind of product or service from us.
Happy birthday, Briana Rye Borten!
From Peter and Everyone at the Dragontree
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