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DIY: Get what you REALLY want for Christmas

When a physical gift is given, we see that the person who gives it technically loses something and the recipient gains it. So it’s natural that from witnessing the dynamic… Read More

Once More with Feeling

If you’ve ever done something reactionary, without thinking it through, there was a certain element that spurred you to act even though you might not have been aware of it…. Read More

What are you longing for most in life?
At the end of life what do you want to have accomplished?
If you knew you had one year left to live would there be anything you’d want to fix or clean up?
What are you ready to let go of – habits, attitudes, obligations, beliefs, outdated goals, etc. – that aren’t serving you?
What do you want to explore more deeply?
What would make life feel ridiculously fun?
What feels really nourishing in your life?
Of all the things you’ve done or accomplished in your life, what has given you the deepest sense of fulfillment? When have you been most proud of yourself?
Where do you find yourself not being fully “present” in your life, or not participating fully?

I hope your answers to these questions help you know yourself better and give you some insights into your true needs and drives. In the Dreambook these questions are followed by a section on each of the following areas of life:

Livelihood, career, and influence
Relationship and family
Community connection
Physical wellness
Creation, exploration, and play
Psychological and spiritual health

For each of these arenas, you visualize a best case scenario three years into the future and answer a series of questions that guide you to define exactly how your life will feel, look, and taste. It’s such a powerful process. So many users have written us to say that just doing this – being prompted to clearly define what they want and intend to create – launched the manifestation of their dreamlife into reality. Much of the rest of the book deals with choosing clear goals related to these insights and forming plans to achieve them – and, importantly, nourishing yourself and staying balanced along the way. I hope you’ll join us for the 2020 version of the book. If ever there were a year to see clearly the path ahead (20-20, get it?), it’s this one! Be well, Peter [post_title] => See 20/20 [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => dream-it-plan-it-do-it [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-09-18 21:41:21 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-09-18 21:41:21 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://thedragontree.com/?p=7638 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 4 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7623 [post_author] => 3 [post_date] => 2019-08-27 18:47:08 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-08-27 18:47:08 [post_content] => Early in my career, I found it gratifying to treat pain and I was pretty good at it. The art of choosing the right acupuncture points is fascinating, creative, and even fun. But then I attended a seminar on marketing where the instructor advised, “Choose a specialty and focus on just treating that one thing,” and a friend suggested I should become a pain specialist. At the time, it felt like someone suggesting to a painter, “You should limit yourself to painting only in yellow from now on.” I was resistant to the idea partly because, like most people, I enjoy variety, and partly because the treatment of pain seemed like superficial work. Fixing sore elbows day in and day out would have been the equivalent of painting only in yellow, so I decided I couldn’t be a fixer of body parts. The only way I could be satisfied – and simultaneously facilitate a deeper level of healing – was to treat whole people. Over the years since, I’ve come to understand that pain encompasses a huge range of health concerns and it’s often broader than we think. Chronic pain is frequently part of a complex pattern where it may be intertwined with depression, anxiety, anger, grief, psychological trauma, and also with digestive disorders, sleep disturbances, and more. So there’s plenty of opportunity for variety and depth, and there’s also a great need for pain treatments that are more intelligent than pills. I’ve felt called to educate people on different ways of understanding pain. It helps more than you might think. In 2014, Lancet published a study on the impact of education on people with neck pain. Participants were divided into two groups: half of them got 20 sessions of physical therapy, lasting an hour each. The other half got 30 minutes of education and two follow up phone calls about pain. Throughout the 12-month study, both groups had equal rates of improvement. Spending a short time learning about pain was as effective as twenty hours of physical therapy! I created an online course to teach people productive ways of understanding pain along with instruction in a wide range of do-it-yourself methods for stopping pain. We also unravel the broader psychological, social, and physiological context that the pain is wrapped up in. I know everybody isn’t going to take this course, though, and there are a few concepts I teach in it that I want to share with the whole world. So I’ll be explaining them in the next couple articles. Even if you’re not in pain now, chances are you’ll experience some in the future, or someone close to you will struggle with it. Knowing what’s going on inside can really help. And as you’ll see, the possible expressions of pain go way beyond our usual definition. I want the world to understand this because it’s simple, it makes sense, and it gives us an intuitive sense of what to do about it. Here it is: all pain is due to some form of stagnation. When things (blood, food, lymph, energy, feelings, etc.) move freely through us we generally feel good, and when they don’t we feel bad. Here are some examples. When we have a traumatic injury, there is damaged skin and nerves, crushed or severed blood vessels, torn muscle and other connective tissue, and perhaps broken bone. The damage means that free flow through the area is impeded. Thus, there is stagnation and it hurts. If we overeat and food is so crammed into our digestive tract that it’s barely moving, this is a form of stagnation and it feels bad. If we have a blood clot that’s blocking the flow, this is stagnation and it’s painful. If blood stops moving through the vessels that serve the heart itself, this is dire stagnation, and it’s intensely painful. If we sleep in a cramped position, are dehydrated, or don’t move much, our muscles can become locked up and irritated – i.e., stagnant – and they hurt. In the same way, if we lose someone we love and we cling to them even though they’re not physically here anymore, this is mental and emotional stagnation, and it makes the process more painful. If we harbor any negative feeling (rather than allowing it to be felt and to move through us freely) this is a form of emotional stagnation, and so we suffer. Aside: all negative emotions are qualitatively different from positive ones in that they have a restrictive or contractive effect on the body-mind. Positive emotions have an opening or expansive effect. I’m not implying that if you’re grieving a loss or have been stuck in a state of anger, you should feel bad or wrong for doing this. In fact, if you do so – i.e., if you resist what’s happening or tell yourself, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way,” – you only compound the stagnation, which makes the pain worse and impedes the healing process. Resistance is a major cause of stagnation. So, looking at this mechanism in the broadest way, when we resist reality – meaning, we don’t accept any aspect of life (either in the outside world or within our own inner experience) – we contract ourselves, we tighten up, and we limit our own freedom. This causes stagnation and stagnation hurts – physically, mentally, and emotionally. Resistance causes stagnation and stagnation causes pain and suffering. If we resist the pain and suffering, we get caught in a vicious circle. Although I learned about the connection between stagnation and pain when I was studying acupuncture, it was only through years of treating people and self-exploration that I came to understand the staggering implications of this mechanism and the role that resistance plays. When I began to see pain in this way – all the different forms and how profoundly it affects the course of our lives – it no longer felt like a limited career path! Before I get into how to use this model to get out of pain, I want to add a few sub-principles. First, all parts of us are interconnected, so stagnation on one level can readily lead to stagnation on another level. For example, if we’re chronically angry, tense, or sad (emotional stagnation) this can eventually show up as, say, a tension headache or lower back pain (physical stagnation). Vice versa, living in a tight and inflexible body (physical stagnation) can contribute to a lack of mental flexibility – rigid thinking, frustration, depression, etc. Second, because of this interconnection, clearing stagnation on any level tends to promote healthy flow on all levels. For instance, physical exercise is beneficial for depression, because moving the body moves the mind. Likewise, using the mind to imagine energy and blood coursing freely through a painful area of the body can often be as effective as painkillers. For the same reason, if we’re in physical pain, it is always worthwhile to look inward and see if there’s some story or emotional pattern we need to let go of. Third, while resistance leads to stagnation, acceptance (feeling willingly, not arguing with reality, surrendering) restores flow. Thus, there is often immediate relief from suffering when we stop resisting it. So, to summarize:

Where there is pain there is stagnation
Resistance promotes stagnation
All levels of our being are interconnected, so
- Stagnation can spread between levels
- Movement on one level can alleviate stagnation on multiple levels
Relinquishing resistance restores the flow

Take some time to think about this and feel into it. And tell me about your experience with it in the comments section below. I’ll explain some ways to utilize this model next week and we’ll also look at an updated Western model of pain. Be well, Peter

Learn more about the Live Pain Free course

[post_title] => The Basic Mechanism of Pain and Suffering that Every Human Should Know [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-basic-mechanism-of-pain-and-suffering-that-every-human-should-know [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-08-28 22:07:35 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-08-28 22:07:35 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://thedragontree.com/?p=7623 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 2 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7183 [post_author] => 5 [post_date] => 2018-11-20 18:00:19 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-11-20 18:00:19 [post_content] =>

When my wife was a teenager, her stepmother one day advised her that if she didn’t have anything nice to say to someone, she could instead try saying, thank you. Not long thereafter, my wife directed some teenage angst at her stepmom, who got red in the face and responded, “Thank you!” before exiting the room.

At Thanksgiving, I’m reminded of the many flavors of gratitude and the interesting power of the words thank you. These words come up with kind of an unusual frequency in our household, and it’s not because we don’t have anything nice to say to each other.

A major contributor to the rise of thank yous in our home is the fact that my wife and I have been trying for the past few years to teach them to our four year old daughter. She’s at an age when saying thank you is not yet natural. It’s a behavior to be memorized and executed habitually so that your parents don’t get fussy. On Halloween I had to keep reminding her, “There are just two things you need to remember to say – ‘trick or treat’ and ‘thank you.’”

I catch myself sometimes flashing a sheepish look at generous adults as I prompt her with, “What do you say, Sailor?” Later I might tell her, “I don’t want to have to keep reminding you to say thank you.” But that’s not really the way I want to teach her the specialness of these words. I don’t want her to say thank you out of guilt. I don’t want her to say it just because it’s polite. I don’t want her to learn that a steady stream of thank yous is the way to avoid any disruption to the process of gift unwrapping or trick-or-treating.

I want her to say it because she feels it.

When thank you issues from your heart because you feel gratitude, the last thing on your mind is what effect it might have on the other person. It seems a misuse of these words to hope to get something – even better rapport – in return for saying them. On the other hand, it seems silly to reserve them just for special occasions, unless you recognize that your day is full of them.

Sometimes a more calculated use of thank you can still feel earnest, such as when you encounter difficulties. Maybe it doesn’t arise spontaneously when things don’t go the way you want them to. Perhaps thank you is the last sentiment on your mind when, for instance, you find out you’re going to miss a day of your vacation because of a booking error. Instead, maybe you’re thinking, this sucks.

But, the smooth flow of life proceeds by some fairly binary rules. There’s acceptance and resistance, yes and no. Whether we think, this sucks, or, this isn’t what I wanted, or, this isn’t fair, or simply, no, we resist the reality of things, we generate struggle, friction, and conflict. I’m not saying we shouldn’t allow ourselves to think and feel these things (because, of course, that would be saying no on another level). But, this attitude is the equivalent of paddling against the current. What if we just get back into the flow and utilize the trajectory of life, but gently steer toward a happy outcome?

When, on the other hand, we think, yes, or, I’m game, or, let’s see where this leads me, or, I’m open, or… thank you, something very different happens. Not just in our internal experience; the world actually responds differently to us. If you look an obstacle in the face and say, thank you, you deflate its power to bully you. You state your anticipation of an outcome you’ll be grateful for. This Thanksgiving, why not try saying thank you not just for the good stuff, but for the challenges, too.

Thank you – for everything,

Peter and Briana Borten and everyone at The Dragontree

[post_title] => Thank You [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => thank-you [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-05-29 19:37:21 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-05-29 19:37:21 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://thedragontree.com/?p=7183 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 13 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) ) [post_count] => 3 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7638 [post_author] => 3 [post_date] => 2019-09-18 20:22:20 [post_date_gmt] => 2019-09-18 20:22:20 [post_content] => A few years ago, Briana and I set out to create the ultimate system for planning, goal making, and life-sweetness-maximization. The result was The Dreambook. We launched it as a crowd-funded Kickstarter project and greatly exceeded our funding goals. In the years since then it’s been popular and successful beyond our wildest dreams. When we were crafting the Dreambook, we knew that users would need to do some preliminary work to get aligned. So the first part is about discovering what your core values are, identifying your gifts, defining your life purpose, and learning what you really want. It might seem a simple thing to know what you really want, but over the past few years of publishing this book, we’ve probably gotten more comments about this section than any other part. It turns out that our days are filled with thoughts of what we want, they’re even more filled with thoughts of what we don’t want. And they’re also filled with thoughts of things we used to want or were told we should want. Rarely do we go through a deep, introspective process for learning what really gives us satisfaction, what makes us feel most alive, what naturally energizes us, what inspires us bring our best self to the table. So there’s a whole section for that, and people often tell us it’s incredibly illuminating. I want to share with you an excerpt from that section so you can see what I’m getting at and try it out. I invite you to do this for yourself, even if you only have a few minutes. Just answer these questions honestly, as if no one will ever see the answers, and as if you’ll have the approval of your friends, your family, and yourself – regardless of how you respond.

What are you longing for most in life?
At the end of life what do you want to have accomplished?
If you knew you had one year left to live would there be anything you’d want to fix or clean up?
What are you ready to let go of – habits, attitudes, obligations, beliefs, outdated goals, etc. – that aren’t serving you?
What do you want to explore more deeply?
What would make life feel ridiculously fun?
What feels really nourishing in your life?
Of all the things you’ve done or accomplished in your life, what has given you the deepest sense of fulfillment? When have you been most proud of yourself?
Where do you find yourself not being fully “present” in your life, or not participating fully?

Livelihood, career, and influence
Relationship and family
Community connection
Physical wellness
Creation, exploration, and play
Psychological and spiritual health

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The Basic Mechanism of Pain and Suffering that Every Human Should Know

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