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I’ve depicted the basic format in this graphic. Take one duality, which I refer to as yin and yang here, and cross it with the duality of desire/fear to produce four states. Here I refer to the states as desire for yin, desire for yang, fear of yin, and fear of yang. This will all make more sense when we plug in an example to replace yin and yang here:

We all contain the four aspects shown in this square. Typically there are two that are easy to relate to, while the others may be trickier to access. In this example we’re looking at the qualities of the self that we consider acceptable and openly express (our light) and those we keep hidden (our shadow). When crossed with the duality of attraction/aversion, we get four states. The first two are attraction to our light (upper right) and aversion to our shadow (lower left). These are easy enough to recognize since that’s exactly the dynamic that sets up the light/shadow split in the first place. Finding the other two qualities in ourselves may require looking a little deeper. At the upper left is attraction to our shadow. This can happen inadvertently as a result of the pressure buildup caused by suppressing it. Our shadow may seem dangerous and forbidden, and we may unleash it to defuse the inner charge of disapproval and rebellion. We may find ourselves expressing it in ways that are painful to us or others, and our regret about doing so may reinforce the urge to suppress it. It’s important to point out, however, that the parts of ourselves we keep sequestered in the shadows aren’t necessarily socially unacceptable. They may in fact be virtuous qualities that we’re simply uncomfortable with. Attraction to our shadow may also occur in a healthy way as we endeavor to be integrated and self-realized beings, in which case we want to know all that we are and to consciously choose which aspects to express. The last quadrant, aversion to our light, is what Marianne Williamson is speaking to in her famous quote: “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” Why do we fear our own light? Perhaps we’re afraid of everyone noticing us. Maybe we believe that if we shine, we’ll then do something to let everyone down. If we embrace our light, maybe we believe we’d outshine others. Possibly we don’t believe our light is even real. How can we employ this exercise in a useful way? Start by taking a quality you seem to have an obvious desire for or aversion to. For example: desire to be powerful, desire to be happy, desire to be wealthy, fear of being alone, aversion to being sick, aversion to exercise. This quality and its opposite will form the two ends of the horizontal x-axis. Then the vertical y-axis will have desire, attraction, or wanting at the top and aversion, rejection, fear, or repulsion at the bottom. Fill in the four quadrants so that each of the x-axis qualities gets paired with each of the y-axis dynamics. Then spend some time feeling into each of the four resulting states. Journal about how each state is within you and/or use our book, Freedom, to do a body-centered releasing process on each one. It doesn’t need to take very long, but ideally should be done until you feel a sense of acceptance and a dissipation of the charge associated with the issue. Afterwards, feel into your relationship with the object of this process. What has changed? I hope this method of inquiry is beneficial to you. Feel free to share about your experience with it in the comments section. Be well, Peter [post_title] => Get Through Your Blocks By Seeing All Four Sides of the Coin [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => get-through-your-blocks-by-seeing-all-four-sides-of-the-coin [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-02-24 00:02:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-02-24 00:02:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://thedragontree.com/?p=8548 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 4 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8081 [post_author] => 5 [post_date] => 2020-10-16 21:10:48 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-10-16 21:10:48 [post_content] => Welcome to part three of my series on longevity. I wrote a few articles on this subject ten years ago and felt it was time to revisit it. We’re exposed to way too much doom and gloom media these days. There’s so much GOOD to live for. In fact, my first article focused on the impact of perspective and presence – living for now and loving life make us happier, if not also longer lived. The second article focused on the benefits of working, stretching, and relaxing all parts of ourselves (body and mind). (You can read them on our site.) Let’s continue. #3: Dance I already wrote about exercise, so recommending dance may seem redundant, but I believe dance has unique benefits. Humans have been dancing for fun, for health, for art, and for ceremony since the earliest times. Dance is one of the most basic and primal forms of release and expression. Formal dance is wonderful, but I specifically mean freeform dance here – giving yourself over to music (or the music in your soul), letting your body move in whatever ways it wants, being unrestrained, uncalculated, and uncensored. Dance is an incredible outlet. It’s also a profound means of inner exploration, healing, and spiritual connection. As you dance, consider making it a process of inquiry. These are just a few of the questions you might ask:

What comes up when you let yourself feel without blocking anything out?
Is there a shape the body wants to make or a form of expression the body is drawn to? Where is it rooted (both in your body and in your past)?
Is there unfinished business related to it? Where does it take you?
What does dance give you access to that’s usually hidden?
In what ways is your movement blocked?
What old things are stored in your tissues? Can you allow your dance to liberate them or facilitate a conversation with a part of yourself that needs a voice?
What does the wild part of you want to express through dance?
What is the force that’s driving this dance? Can you get curious about it, open your connection to it, listen to it, feel it fully?

It’s great when we start scheduling a regular time for dance. It’s even better is when the dance starts spilling out into our life as a whole and we start finding ourselves “dancing through our days.” This may not necessarily look like we’re twirling and leaping from our desk to the copy machine, though it might! Alternatively, it may be more of an internal dance – a new, playful, graceful, fluid way of navigating whatever comes along. For some people it’s easiest to go deep, to foster self-awareness and healing when dancing alone. For others, a group dynamic is more supportive and inspiring. While I emphasized the personal benefits of dance, it’s also an incredible medium for connecting with others, repairing conflict, learning to listen and be receptive, opening our hearts together, and sharing our light. The challenge with dancing in a group is to not become consumed with what others are doing or how we appear to them. Therefore, I feel the guiding principles for a group dance setting should include freedom, exploration, and non-judgment. If you look into “ecstatic dance” or Gabrielle Roth’s “5Rhythms” format, you can probably find a community that engages in this form of dance in your area. I have a homework assignment for you: dance in a totally unrestrained way sometime this week. Share with the community: How do you feel about dance? What has it done for you? What’s your favorite music to dance to? Be well, Peter P.S. If you missed part one and part two in this series, they are linked here. [post_title] => Dance Through Your Day [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => dance-through-your-day [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-10-16 21:10:48 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-10-16 21:10:48 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://thedragontree.com/?p=8081 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 2 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8102 [post_author] => 1 [post_date] => 2020-11-06 21:52:35 [post_date_gmt] => 2020-11-06 21:52:35 [post_content] => Welcome to part six in my series on longevity. If you missed the first five parts, you can read them on our site. In a nutshell, they were: (1) Live for now and love life (2) Work, stretch, and relax every part of yourself (body and mind) on a regular basis (3) Dance (4) Reduce media consumption (5) Pay attention to your breathing. Let’s continue. #6: Eat Less I probably fooled some of you when I entitled the fourth newsletter “Fasting for Longevity” and then writing about media fasting. Less food consumption – including occasional fasting – is also a good idea. There are two main reasons to eat less: (1) to avoid the negative health impacts of overeating (2) to attain the unique benefits of undereating. First, overeating. Overeating is bad for us. It stretches out the stomach, requiring us to continue to overeat in order to feel full. It hinders good digestion. It can cause heartburn / acid reflux, nausea, hiccups, bloating, and fatigue. It promotes weight gain (there are not many obese centenarians). It may cause our cells to wear out faster. It’s taxing to the digestive organs. It may disrupt the hormones involved in reward and hunger signaling, leading to compulsive eating. It necessarily entails “tuning out” and ignoring the body. Second, undereating. By undereating, I actually mean various practices that might better be called “measured eating.” Undereating appears to make cells live longer. It promotes enhanced regeneration of our tissues. We feel lighter and more energetic, and are likely to be physically lighter. It supports normalization of reward hormones, mood, and appetite. We get less cancer and tumors may grow more slowly. We’re less likely to experience heartburn / acid reflux, fatigue, bloating, and nausea. Numerous rodent studies have shown that when animals are routinely underfed, they live much longer than normal. Now let’s look at the specifics of undereating. First there are various forms of fasting. Fasting can mean the total absence of food, reduced food intake, the specific avoidance of certain foods (such as no sugars, no flour, no processed foods, no alcohol, no cooked food, etc.), or the consumption of a specific meal replacement (such as juice, kitchari, rice, or broth). Fasting is often done for a set period of time (1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 10 days, etc.), usually with a simultaneous “fast” from work and regular daily activities, and sometimes for a spiritual purpose. Many of these options have their merits, but it’s beyond the scope of this article to get into the nuances of all of them. The simplification of one’s food intake – whether as a water fast, broth fast, or whole-clean-food fast – gives the body a break and tends to enhance detoxification and regenerative processes while promoting certain epigenetic benefits (“turning off” certain genes that code for disease or others associated with longevity).^1,² Fasting increases production of human growth hormone (HGH), which has numerous anti-aging effects.^3,⁴ Recent research indicates that intermittent fasting provides many of the benefits that total fasts offer, but in a format that’s less daunting for most people. Intermittent fasting means cycling between restricted and unrestricted food intake. There are numerous ways to do this. The most common format is fasting (water only) for 16 hours of every day – meaning, all of one’s calories are consumed in an 8 hour window (10 AM to 6 PM for instance). I know people who have achieved their optimal weight through this method after struggling with diets for decades. Another form of intermittent fasting entails fasting for 24 hours on 1 or 2 non-consecutive days out of every week. A third common form involves reduced caloric intake (typically 25% of normal, or 500-600 calories) every other day or on 2 non-consecutive days of each week. Besides promoting longevity, these methods reduce incidence of type 2 diabetes. Even if you aren’t interested in any sort of fasting, you can help yourself quite a bit in four simple ways. (1) Never overeat. Don’t let a feeling of being full be your indicator to stop eating. Instead just eat enough food to not feel hungry. In Okinawa (one of the longest-lived cultures in the world) there’s a tradition of eating to what feels like 80% of one’s stomach capacity. (2) Let your upper digestive tract empty completely between meals. That is, don’t snack. (3) Let yourself feel hungry. Many of us eat so incessantly that we barely know whether we’re hungry or not. We eat because it’s meal time, or because we like the taste, but not always because we actually feel hunger. (4) Stay conscious during the act of eating. Don’t eat mindlessly or while engaged in other things. Enjoy your food and give your attention and reverence to the act of nourishing yourself. Be well, Peter ^{1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3946160/} ^{2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24048020/} ^{3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC329619/} ^{4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1548337/} [post_title] => Eat Less, Live More [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => eat-less-live-more [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-11-06 21:57:53 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-11-06 21:57:53 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://thedragontree.com/?p=8102 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 1 [filter] => raw [webinar_id] => 0 ) ) [post_count] => 3 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 8548 [post_author] => 3 [post_date] => 2022-03-06 06:00:06 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-06 06:00:06 [post_content] => One of the main ways that we get stuck or fail to reach our potential is through persistent psychological patterns. Some would say they’re not just psychological, but psycho-spiritual, or even karmic. Perhaps they’re an expression of what are called samskaras in Vedic thought – ruts or imprints that we’re prone to fall into over and over. The tendency to think and act in a certain way can be difficult to break, even if we know it’s not serving us. Often these patterns are founded in stories and beliefs in which we have a one-sided view, and the single-sidedness gives them a stronger charge that tends to make them more enduring. Here are some examples: I am a victim. I mess everything up. I never have enough money. People are selfish. I’m not disciplined enough to live to my potential. Happiness doesn’t last. Life is scary. Part of why these stories won’t die is because of our inability to see more than one perspective. Often we put ourselves in a certain role, with the opposing role played (usually in our mind) by some adversary, which could be a parent, partner, enemy, God, the whole world, some imagined “lucky person,” or even another aspect of ourselves. We can get invested in playing the bad guy, the hero, the spiritual one, the rebel, the starving artist, or the martyr. This may cause us to suppress aspects of ourselves that don’t align with this role, which serves to perpetuate the one-sidedness of our position. The exaggerated dynamic it sets up is like sitting at the outermost point on a seesaw; we’re bound to get carried way up and down by our emotions. Coming from a Chinese Medicine background, I’m inclined to see this condition as an imbalance of yin and yang. It’s a denial of our wholeness and a limitation on our health and power. Recognizing that we contain both sides of each coin is important and useful work, and it’s a primary theme in many healing modalities. It’s part of the integration of our shadow aspect (a term coined by Carl Jung to describe the parts of ourselves we deny, suppress, or are unconscious of). It’s an essential part of The Work developed by Byron Katie for challenging our thoughts. This process consists of asking questions to determine whether a given thought is true and how you’re affected by believing it, after which you “turn it around” to see how opposing viewpoints are equally true. For users of our body-centered releasing workbook, Freedom, we recommend taking a charged issue or scenario and, after working on it with your usual position, see what comes up when you “try on” the opposing position. Releasing the pattern from both sides promotes a more complete resolution. Similarly, Leslie Temple Thurston teaches that when we identify the polarized aspects of our stories and then figure out what their opposites are, we discover that both sides are within us (and our adversaries). This recognition shifts our position from the outermost edge of the seesaw to the center fulcrum – what Temple Thurston calls the neutral witness state – and the story falls apart. To take this deeper, we can examine the interaction of two sets of opposing charges, which creates four perspectives. Temple Thurston calls this working with “squares.” The mind is rarely in the throes of just one duality. Beyond the charge of the two sides of a story, there is an additional dimension of polarization which is the basic push-pull of attraction and repulsion, also experienced as like/dislike, desire/fear, or attachment/rejection. By examining a pattern through all four sides of these interacting charges, we can achieve an even more complete neutralization.

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